Hell's Bay

by James W. Hall

  Sugarman fast-forwarded. Listening to Mosley’s patronizing twaddle was giving him a headache. It was a typical gimmick, letting some corporate-sponsored lackeys handle the scientific investigation. Fox and the henhouse. Amazing that citizens still fell for it.

  He rolled past a couple of minutes, then froze another frame. Worked it forward till he had another focused image. And there it was again, that smile that was not a smile, but a smug grimace, faintly predatory.

  It was an expression Sugar associated with grown men who’d once been victimized by school yard bullies and never got over it. Such men rarely openly confronted their adult antagonists. They were wilier than that, using their smarts and fake charm to gain advantage. But the anger and hurt and vengefulness born of long-ago humiliations were still burning hot, just below the surface. He knew that was a lot to pin on a half-second facial expression, but somehow Sugarman knew this guy. He was sure of it. A mean-spirited little shit.

  He zipped to Mosley’s exit line.

  As to the radon monitors C.C. was asking Bates to purchase, well, that sounded like a reasonable request, so Carter Mosley promised, right then and there, to take the appeal directly to Abigail herself and report back to the assembly promptly.

  Most of the folks in the audience knew a dodge when they heard it. The rustling grew to a growl and somebody started stomping on the gymnasium floor, and soon the stomping spread to the bleachers and grew in volume until Mosley had no choice but to step away from the microphone. As the noise increased, he waved a stiff good-bye and ambled away.

  The next two videos were more of Olsen’s unhurried, commonsense science, including a list of readings from the radon monitors newly installed in the classrooms, and a progress report on the ventilation system the county had grudgingly agreed to install. Then more of Mosley’s pie charts and mealy-mouthed arguments, the preliminary results of the various scientific studies that Bates International was funding.

  Abigail Bates made an appearance at the end of the third meeting. She was booed for a full minute before she began to speak. During the razzing, she stood impassively, scanning the audience row by row as though taking names.

  When the heckles finally died away, she cleared her throat and gripped the edges of the podium and spoke in a voice that brooked no contradiction.

  “I’m older than dirt. Older than anybody in this room. Eighty-five, about to be eighty-six. And nearly every one of those years I lived within two spits of phosphate mines and gypsum stacks. So if you folks want to see what radon does to someone, take a good long gander at me.

  “I’ve already spent more money on your complaints than I consider reasonable. That’s money I worked hard for. Money I earned from my own sweat, and the backbreaking labor of my daddy and his daddy. I’m nearing the end of what I’m willing to pay. So right here and now, you’ve got fair warning. If these attacks on Bates International continue, I’ll just have to start looking elsewhere for employees.

  “I’ll fight this nonsense till my last breath. And that’s a long way off.”

  She proceeded to suck down a huge lungful of air, then puckered her lips and let it go like a dope smoker treasuring the last of her joint. She meant it as a taunt, of course, but watching this old dame who would soon die of drowning, Sugarman couldn’t shake a creepy sense of foreboding. With that public display of scorn, it was very possible Abigail Bates, Thorn’s feisty grandmother, had just sealed her death sentence.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  When I emerged from the sheltered creek mouth into the open bay, I wasn’t ready for the north wind. It slammed me from the starboard and tipped the kayak halfway over. I wind-milled for a second, fought the wild dip and rise of swells until I finally found my balance, and thought for half a moment I was under control, then got jostled sideways by another wave and almost capsized a second time.

  There was no yielding to such wind, no answer for it but to quarter into it, paddle hard, stay low, cut into the belly of the waves, make my way forward with a zigzag tack, and hold on tight to the paddle’s rubber handgrips.

  I hunched down and dug my way toward the Mothership, a mile of open water that looked like a hundred leagues of wind-ripped sea.

  My sixty-horse skiff would have skimmed that sloppy bay easily, maybe slamming now and then in a trough and taking some dousing spray, though nothing it couldn’t handle. But settled low in the kayak’s seat, riding with only the thin plastic skin separating my butt from the bay, that chop felt like the mother of all tempests. Before I’d gone twenty feet, my arms and back and shoulders were aching and my nicked and bleeding hands were sending jolts to the base of my skull.

  The slate sky started to spit rain as the fringes of the front collided with the warm, moist atmosphere we’d been enjoying. I’d been neglecting my first mate’s duties and hadn’t monitored the weather channel, so I had no idea of the strength or duration of the system that was slamming us. It could be an all-night event, or might be only a small cell and last a few intense minutes.

  In my defense, I’d been somewhat distracted.

  Half blind from spray, I ducked my head and tried to find a rhythm. But that proved nearly impossible. All I could manage was to react to each new thump, moving ahead in spurts of a foot or two, then pitched sideways, clipped from behind by another breaker, hammered by two more. Soaked and dripping, I recovered and corrected my heading as best I could. Two strokes forward, then one slam cockeyed.

  I kept my bearings by focusing on the rooftop of the Mothership, which was the only section of her I could make out above the whitecaps and spray. Even that was blurry, and no amount of blinking could clear my vision. The Mother-ship seemed to be riding badly in the seas, pitching more than I would have expected.

  At least the squall was providing me cover as I passed into the section of bay that left me most exposed to the inlet where the shooter was. Mona had called the woman Sasha. Even through the radio’s distortion, Mona’s tone was chilling, one accomplice speaking to another.

  For the moment, I had to put that aside. This next mile was about focus, endurance, and balance, about tipping points and reaction time, about staying loose but not too loose, and it was about digging one stroke after another into water that was pitching and bucking like some hell-bent rodeo ride.

  By the time I’d progressed several hundred yards closer to the Mothership’s stern, the wind had dropped by half. Though the bay was still choppy, it had smoothed enough for me to take a breather without fear of tipping over. It was entirely possible that the black squall that brushed by was an outer band of something larger still on its way, so I couldn’t dally long.

  I took two deep strokes and drew my paddle out and lay it across my lap to shake the cramps out of my arms. My legs were numb, and my spine felt like it might be locked into a permanent hunch.

  After a minute’s stretching, I picked up the paddle to get going again and it was then I noticed at my right elbow that part of the plastic kayak was missing, a ragged chunk roughly matching the bull shark’s bite print. I checked my sleeve on that side and found a five-inch rip. Beneath the ragged tear my skin was untouched. No blood, not even a scrape.

  Which suggested that in some shadowy corner of the bull shark’s brain, she’d mistaken the kayak for my flesh and found that first swallow too dry and bloodless for her taste. I felt my pulse throb in my throat and a fist opened and shut in my bowels. If the shark had taken slightly better aim, or had one more inch of thrust in the swish of her tail, my body would still be back in that lagoon, reduced to morsels only minnows would find appealing.

  I straightened up and peered across the sloppy bay. The Mothership was no longer rocking, but she didn’t look right. Worse than that, she looked stricken. Maybe I was delusional. Circuits overloaded by surge after surge of adrenaline. Buddhists claim the world springs from the mind and sinks again into the mind. Perhaps that’s all it was, a topsy-turvy hallucination I was projecting outward.

  It took me several seconds t
o absorb the situation, put it into an orderly sequence my mind would agree to. What I was seeing was impossible, yet it was happening. The Mothership had sunk.

  Or more precisely, she had half sunk. All that tonnage, all that splendid engineering and design, intricate mesh of aluminum and fiberglass and oak veneer, custom cabinetry and high-tech instrumentation, all of it was slanted to port by around forty-five degrees. The starboard pontoon was cocked ten feet in the air; the other side was submerged. Which could mean only one thing: The entire port pontoon had filled with water and was resting on the bay floor.

  Our pontoon hulls had eleven airtight sections, each one about six feet long. A total of thirty-three separate airtight compartments for the whole vessel. The sections overlapped and had been ferruled and welded for strength, designed and built so no single puncture could bring her down.

  I dug the paddle in and found a rush of energy I thought was beyond me. The kayak sliced ahead, no tacking this time, plowing straight on.

  As I muscled ahead, I replayed those gunshots I’d heard when racing back to answer Teeter’s Mayday. Fifteen, sixteen, maybe as many as twenty. They’d nagged at me at the time, but I let it go. Now I understood it was very likely the woman named Sasha hadn’t been firing at Teeter at all.

  In fact, she’d proved herself to be more disciplined than that. Not one to spray lead indiscriminately. Instead, it was likely she’d been blasting methodical holes in the port pontoon below the waterline. Creating a set of slow, persistent leaks that hour by hour had brought the Mothership to her knees.

  Even at high tide our anchorage was only six feet deep, so the houseboat wasn’t going to be disappearing to the bottom of the deep blue sea. But it was cocked so severely, life aboard the ship was going to be very messy from this point on. The generators were now underwater, so there’d be no power, no air-conditioning, no lights, and what food and other essentials survived would depend on what Rusty and the others managed to rescue from the lower deck when they first realized the water was rising. Then there was the challenge of simply moving around on a ship tipping at such an angle.

  Rusty, Mona, and our guests would be flushed out of their staterooms and the salon by the flood, and more than likely would be huddled on the second deck, in the cramped crew quarters and the wheelhouse. All the furniture would have shifted, glasses and wine and whiskey bottles tumbled from shelves, the television, the paintings, the gewgaws, the pots, pans, charts, anything not battened down.

  But worse than that, much worse, was the fact that hotwiring the engines was no longer an option. The Mothership was not going anywhere for a good long while.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The final video had a time stamp running in the lower right corner. October of last year, three months after Abigail Bates went canoeing and drowned.

  This one only ran ten minutes. Same gymnasium, same camera angle, capturing the first dozen rows of folding chairs, an edge of the bleachers, and the small raised platform used as a stage.

  Only this time the podium and backdrop were draped with black banners and cluttering the stage were hundreds of flowers. Flowers in vases, flowers still in their plastic wraps, clusters of wildflowers, armloads of roses and daisies and gladiolus.

  At the microphone a teenage boy stood shakily and peered into the glare. He was sweating and his face was gaunt, his scalp gleaming white, eyes full of fever. A few feet to his right, a lanky woman kept an eye on the boy. She wore black slacks and a dark long-sleeved blouse and was tilted ever-so-slightly in the boy’s direction as though poised to catch him if he toppled.

  He looked like he might. There was such a wobble in his stance, such a rattle and rasp in his throat as he brought his mouth close to the microphone, it sounded like his next breath could easily be his last. Sugarman winced and had to force himself to keep watching.

  The resemblance was clear. The boy split the difference almost exactly between C.C. Olsen and the rawboned woman standing nearby. He’d inherited her cheekbones, strong mouth, swan’s neck, and milky skin, along with C.C.’s wide shoulders, sunken eyes, and hawk-bill nose.

  “I’m Griffin Olsen, in case there’s anybody doesn’t know. Son of Sasha”—he nodded at the woman hovering nearby— “and the late C.C. Olsen.”

  A smattering of applause, then shushing, and the gym grew still.

  “The air in the school is poisoned,” Griffin said, “and we damn well know whose fault it is.”

  He swallowed a couple of times, then dragged a red handkerchief from his back pocket and hacked into it. He closed his eyes and seemed to be concentrating on getting his breath. His mother took a step his way, but the boy turned and waved her off, then tucked the kerchief away.

  “We’ve heard the science say one thing when it comes out of Mr. Mosley’s mouth and another thing when it came out of my dad’s. What’s clear to me is that science can be made to lie.”

  He got some more applause.

  “But everybody in this room knows in their gut what’s happening. Whether science agrees or not, you know, I know, everyone knows.”

  He waited till the next clamor died away to a murmur.

  “I’m a goner.” With that, the quiet room got even quieter. “They say I’m down to weeks. Which is no big deal. I’m tired out, sick of being sick. I’m just plain ready. Except I got one last thing I want to say.”

  Sasha had bowed her head and was staring down at her feet.

  “If the Bates family were storm troopers goose-stepping down Main Street, you all wouldn’t think twice. You wouldn’t let them spew mustard gas over this town. You’d risk your lives, do anything to protect your families. Pick up your shotguns, your pistols, you’d fight back.” Griffin worked his focus around the big room. ’You wouldn’t let them murder your children. You wouldn’t let them steal your water, poison your air.

  “Just because they’re Americans, just because they’re running a business, paying piss-poor wages to a few people around these parts, that doesn’t change a thing. These people are goose-stepping down Main Street and nobody’s doing a damn thing. Look at you. You’re hiding in the back room, hoping they won’t come for you or your little girl or little boy. You’re cowering in the dark, hoping it’ll all go away.”

  Griffin’s voice was thickening. Each breath sounded like the rasping gasps of a gut-shot dog, as though more blood than air was filling his lungs.

  “Well, it isn’t going away. Not till you people stand up and fight.”

  He looked out at the silent crowd and could not bring himself to say more. Nearly half a minute went by with him simply standing there, then his mother came over and put her arm around the boy’s frail shoulder and turned him from the podium. But Griffin leaned back to the microphone.

  “Somebody worked up the guts to cut off the head of the snake. But a few months later, look what happened. That snake grew a new head. This time somebody needs to chop up the whole damn thing and be done with it for good.”

  The TV screen turned to white static. Sugarman stood watching it.

  After a while he walked over and had another look at the radon detector. It said 27.4 in red LED lights.

  He glanced around at the bare walls, listened to the squeal of a few schoolkids still in the parking lot, a car starting its engine.

  The hallways were empty as Sugarman walked out of Pine Tree School. The last bus kicked up a white cloud of dust as it rolled down the narrow lane.

  Sugarman opened his car and let it air out a couple of minutes before sitting behind the wheel. The harsh odor that gagged him an hour earlier was no longer apparent. Maybe the wind had shifted, or maybe his body was adjusting. Neither possibility particularly cheered him.

  He replayed what he’d just witnessed in the video, then went over it a second time. If Timmy Whalen had steered him to the video to bewilder him with an abundance of suspects, it hadn’t worked. He’d seen only one. A woman with a dead husband and a failing son.

  Door open, sitting behind the wheel, Sugar
waited for the sheriff to return. Half hour, forty minutes. The last of the parents left, the final straggling teachers pulled away for the weekend.

  It was closing in on happy hour, and still no sheriff, when Sugar slammed the door and cranked up the Honda. He’d have to find a motel for the night, track down a decent restaurant. He was just making a U-turn to head out the gravel road when his cell phone chirped. He pulled over into the shade of a loblolly pine.

  Rachel Pike’s name appeared in the glowing box.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey,” she said.

  While he waited for her to speak, he watched a hawk catch the updrafts above the gypsum stack. Beautiful bird riding the radon.

  “Look, I want to apologize,” she said. “That crack about Thorn, that wasn’t fair. You were right to be peeved. Truth is, it’s one of many things I admire about you, Sugar. Your loyalty.”

  “Thanks, Rachel. Apology accepted.”

  “Whew, I was afraid I’d lost your friendship for good,” she said.

  “You didn’t.”

  She was quiet for a moment, then said, “So anyway, I pulled Mosley’s phone records.”

  “You did? Jesus, well, thanks.”

  “I got a source at AT&T. He owes me a couple.”

  “Add me to that list.”

  “You probably thought you’d never hear from me again.”

  “That seemed like a possibility,” he said. “So did anything pop out?”

  “Not much. Maybe it will for you. For that date, between nine and noon there was considerable traffic from the law office. I made you a printout. Mostly calls back and forth to other law firms, a couple overseas, one to a restaurant in Sarasota, an airline, somebody paying an electric bill. That kind of thing.”