Hell's Bay

by James W. Hall

  Dillard fingered some of the fine gold threads of his remaining hair into place. His pale scalp glowed beneath.

  “Let’s put the science aside for a second,” Sugar said. “How’s the community’s anger misdirected? What do you know that they don’t know?”

  Dillard shook his head and firmed his lips so not even a peep could escape. Sugar stepped closer to the man, inside his comfort zone. DiUard took a step backward, bumped into the trunk of a scrawny tree. Sugarman took another step, closing into body-odor range. Dillard’s was as moldy and rank as mushrooms left too long in the fridge.

  Sugarman whispered the words: “Who should the citizens be mad at?”

  Dillard swallowed.

  Another whisper: “Unburden yourself, Doctor. Let it out.”

  “I want immunity.”

  Sugarman had just been poking for rotten places, weak spots in the story line. He hadn’t held out much hope for Dillard and the whole “misdirected” thing, but after the sticky trail of sweat appeared on the doctor’s cheek and he blurted out the magic word immunity, Sugarman felt the decayed place give way, as if he were about to plunge his hand down into the moist underbelly of this whole rotten mess.

  Sugar made a gun of his right hand, then brought his pointing finger slowly into Dillard’s sight and touched the muzzle to the underside of the doctor’s jaw, the soft bristly flesh yielding.

  “This is just between you and me, Doc. No immunity. No need.”

  Dillard swallowed again and drew a breath.

  “What do I get out of it?”

  “Out of telling the truth?” Sugar said. “You get to go back in your workshop and play with your train. I walk away. You never see me again.”

  “You promise me that?”

  “Cross my heart.”

  He took a long breath as if it might be his last.

  “It’s in the building materials,” he said. “The cement, the wallboard, the plaster.”

  “What is?” Sugarman dug his finger in a little deeper.

  “Phosphogypsum.”

  “The radioactive stuff that’s dumped inside the gyp stack?”

  “Exactly. The building contractor was cutting corners.”

  “Using phosphate mining waste for cement and drywall?”

  “The practice wasn’t illegal when the school was built.”

  Sugarman withdrew his finger and stepped back. Dillard was panting.

  “And you learned this how?”

  Dillard shot a look back at his workshop, his perfect world.

  “I did some scrapings at the school, bored a few holes and analyzed them. I was curious. A big ruckus is going on in town. Scientists from all over the country are coming into my backyard to present position papers. No one thought to ask me to be involved. So I took it on myself. I did some sampling at the school, and, yes, that’s what happened. The contractor used mining waste to build the structure.”

  “So it’s not the gyp stack causing all the cancer?”

  “Oh, no. That’s a ridiculous claim. C.C. Olsen was grasping for straws. Of course that’s the obvious target to attack. That giant mountain of waste so close by, but it’s not the stack. The science doesn’t support that.”

  “Did you tell anybody about this?”

  The doctor hesitated.

  “Who’d you tell, Dillard?”

  Dillard’s eyes flitted to Sugarman’s and dodged away. “I told the parties responsible.”

  “Who, the contractor?”

  Dillard stared out at nothing.

  “Why’d you do that?” But as soon as he spoke the words Sugarman knew the answer.

  “That’s all I’m saying.” Dillard tried to move forward, but Sugar put a hand on his bony chest and held him in place.

  “Bates International, or some subsidiary thereof. That’s who built the school. In the long long ago. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  Dillard thought about it for a moment, then nodded faintly.

  “So you went and told John Milligan, Abigail Bates, Carter Mosley. Look what I found. Look at the bad thing you did. If this goes public it’s going to cost you millions. Liability suits, health costs, penalties, not to mention tearing down the school, building a new one. This is going to be huge. This could destroy you. At least put a big dent in your bottom line.”

  “I thought they should know,” Dillard said with a burst of huffiness.

  But even he could see how pathetic it sounded, for he closed his eyes and bent his head down as if offering a plea of forgiveness to whatever god held sway in his puny universe.

  “I bet they were thrilled to find out,” Sugar said. “I bet they were so happy you passed this on, they wrote you a check. Maybe a couple of checks. And you went out and bought yourself a brand-new miniature New England village. A little world where you could toot-toot your horn every day. God smiling down on his creations.”

  “You’re twisting things.”

  “So all those meetings, focusing on that mountain out back of the school, that’s diversionary.”

  He nodded.

  “They must have loved C.C. Olsen. He kept the spotlight on the gyp stack. Nothing they did was illegal. But once the cancer deaths started cropping up, they started lying. Down that slippery slope, like the tobacco companies did, the asbestos people, and that cost them hundreds of millions in fines.”

  “Yes, that worried them.”

  “Why isn’t the state involved? Why don’t they send their own researchers in?”

  “Out of respect for Bates International.”

  “Respect? No, you mean political pressure. Stay out of my business, or else.”

  “Well, those are the realities in Florida. Phosphate is king.”

  “Sooner or later,” Sugar said, “somebody’s bound to do what you did, right? It’s so obvious. Take some samples, figure out the real cause. Look up the building records.”

  “Every day it goes undiscovered is a good day for Bates.”

  “But not for the kids going to school inside that building. You ever think about them when you’re counting your blood money?”

  “Look, you don’t know what it’s like,” Dillard said. “Living in a place like this. After all my years of training and education, being treated like some hack, some illiterate file clerk. The lack of respect. You don’t know.”

  Sugarman had to chuckle.

  “Oh, I think by now I’ve got a pretty good idea.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Mona was on the rooftop deck reclining in a plastic chair that was propped against a stanchion. I staggered along the canted deck using the rail partly as banister, partly as crutch, like negotiating the lopsided floor of a fun house.

  I stood beside her for a moment and together we watched the busy sky.

  The scattered droves of terns and snowy egrets, herons and gallinules, were taking hasty shortcuts back to the safety of their roosts before the next wave of weather set in. A single great blue heron cranked by, as gawky and improbable as some wired-together grade-school project.

  In the west the sun was a silver halo muffled behind gloomy clouds. Maybe two hours left before twilight.

  Mona registered my presence with a sigh.

  “We’re a little exposed up here, don’t you think?” I said.

  “Who cares? We’re sunk anyway.” She flashed a mock smile at the sky.

  “Oh, I think there’s still hope.”

  “None,” she said. “Any way you look at it. We’re sunk.”

  “That’s pretty dark for a mitigation person. I thought you guys were famous for finding the middle way.”

  “Doesn’t always work that way,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Plenty of times the parties get crazy, harden their position. Then it’s win or lose. One side gets the trophy, the other gets screwed.”

  I fingered the torn cotton of my shirt.

  “Tell me something, Mona. How long have you known what was going on?”

  “I sti
ll don’t.”

  “Give me some reason to believe that.”

  “Don’t believe it. I don’t care. You’re not the sheriff.”

  She watched a single roseate spoonbill flaunt its pink across the sky.

  “Sasha Olsen,” I said. “She a friend of yours?”

  “Never met her.”

  “But you’ve seen her around Summerland. You know who she is.”

  “Her husband was an activist. Pretty hard to miss, especially in my line of work. I never sat down with him one-on-one, but I went to some of his rallies at Pine Tree School. He was good. Had an appealing manner, very understated, smart. I wouldn’t call him charismatic, but for a backwater town, he was impressive.”

  “He died, the son’s sick. The Olsen woman blames it on phosphate mining. Now she’s killing off the Bates family as revenge? That’s what this is?”

  “Apparently.”

  “You knew who it was from the start, Mona. I saw it in your eyes the first time you heard her voice on the walkietalkie.”

  “My cousin the clairvoyant.”

  “You’re lying, Mona. You’re in this up to your chin. That’s why you can sit up here on the roof, exposed. You know she won’t shoot you.”

  I wasn’t sure of that. Wasn’t sure of anything. I was only trying to provoke her, see if she’d stumble.

  She turned her head just enough to rake me with a look. In the breeze her auburn hair looped and twisted and I remembered my first impression—hair whipping like a warning flag, a warning I’d ignored. Swayed instead by the scent of her, the sulky way she moved, her shape, her smart-ass cutting tone.

  “Jesus, Thorn, how does anybody put up with your shit?”

  “Not many do.”

  My polygraph was registering nothing. I couldn’t tell if Mona was for real or if I just wanted her to be.

  While she continued to admire the sky, I shaped the words to tell her about her dad.

  “So, I take it you didn’t get through on the cell phone?”

  “It went overboard before I got the chance.”

  “I’m surrounded by fuck-ups,” she said. “Total, complete fuck-ups.”

  She tipped forward and stood up. The plastic chair tumbled over and the wind took it for a ride up the railing.

  “And Dad? Any sign of him?”

  I was silent, staring out at the choppy bay.

  “You hear me, Thorn? Dad, any sign of him?”

  “Tell me something, Mona.”

  I could feel her eyes on my face.

  “Do you have an image in your head, someplace you go back to over and over? When you’re feeling shitty I mean, need something to balance you out. Something from your past.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “You’ve been back a hundred times to that same place, and squeezed more and more juice out of the moment, but it’s still ripe, still has the power.”

  “They’re called memories, I believe.”

  “Okay, memories then. But special ones.”

  “I have a few of those. A few that hold their heat.”

  “Are there any of those that include your dad?”

  “Sure,” she said faintly. “One or two.”

  “Good. You’re going to need them.”

  I turned to her. The wind kicked her hair across her face. She drew the straggling strands out of her eyes and changed her angle, bearing down on me.

  “He’s dead. That’s what you’re saying. Dad’s dead?”

  She read the answer in my eyes.

  “You’re guessing. You didn’t actually see his body.”

  “I’m not guessing.”

  She looked up at the sky and inhaled through gritted teeth. “Goddammit. Goddamn this whole twisted fucked-up mess.”

  She looked me in the eye and drew back a fist and punched my chest, knocked enough breath from my lungs to make the light waver.

  She squeezed her eyes tight and was about to let go of a wail when Rusty called out from below a single “No!” that lasted longer than a word ever should.

  From my angle I couldn’t see the span of bay, so I pitched headlong up the sharply inclined deck, scaling the pebbled surface on all fours like a chimp up the side of a pyramid. I made it to the top, took hold of the rail, and pulled upright.

  About forty yards north the yellow bass boat was idling toward us. The tall black-haired woman was at the wheel. Thirty feet or so behind her boat, at the end of a taut red line, my wooden skiff was bouncing along in tow. Someone was hunched behind the wheel. A boy, a teenage boy.

  Mona struggled up beside me.

  “Oh fucking Jesus,” she said. “He’s on fire.”

  Her eyes were better than mine, for it took me several seconds to catch the blue waffling flame on the boy’s clothes.

  “That’s the son,” Mona said. “Sasha’s kid.”

  As the procession closed in on us, I saw the boy’s hands were lashed to the wheel, and his body was bound by ropes to the seat. His jeans and shirt were aflame, and his bare arms were black and blistered, his face becoming a charred ruin.

  Then I noticed a shiny object thumping against the starboard hull, close to the waterline. I craned forward and squinted until I made out the aluminum gas cap bouncing on the end of its safety chain.

  The fuel spout where the cap belonged was plugged instead with a white fluttering length of cloth. Its tip end was scorched, the bluish yellow flame snaking up that makeshift fuse.

  I turned and dropped to my butt and slid down the slope of deck. Got to the spiral stairway, thudded to the main deck. Rusty was there.

  “She’s some kind of fucking lunatic,” she said. “That’s a Norse funeral. Lighting the dead on fire, setting them adrift.”

  “Our funeral,” I said and pushed past her and jumped down to the loading dock. “She’s towing a goddamn bomb.”

  I unlashed the kayak, got the paddle out, and pushed off.

  “Thorn? What’re you doing?”

  “Fuck if I know.”

  And I didn’t. But I dug the paddle in and drove forward, floundering in the rough water. The one crude idea forming in my head was to lure her away from the Mothership, offer her the next dance.

  I swung around the stern of the houseboat and sliced the paddle in as deep as I could go, then dug it in on the other side. The clotted gouges on my palms came open and the blood formed an oily slick on the grip.

  Sasha Olsen had closed to a few hundred feet, the wind muscling her along and whipping at the flames.

  I knew the tank on my skiff was at least half full, maybe twenty gallons left, and the rag could ignite the fumes at any second and the bloom of fire would turn everything inside its span to brimstone.

  She eyed me with disinterest as I paddled toward her. She put her engine in reverse and turned the wheel to hold her position against the wind. The helpless skiff swung out around her.

  Moving dreamily, she went to her stern cleat and unfastened the knot and flicked the tow line off. She watched the boy’s death barge separate from her boat, drifting past her on the open water.

  My old fishing craft was gripped by the wind and turned, then driven toward me at such a clip that I had only a handful of seconds to cut the kayak left, then swing back to the skiff as it bore down. The wind pushed the stench ahead of it, a gagging cocktail of charred flesh and gasoline.

  Back on the Mothership voices were shouting. I kept my focus on that T-shirt, the raveling flame. I made two hard digs of the paddle forward, then swung my boat parallel to the skiff as it came surfing closer. Paddling one-handed to hold position, I managed a single snatch at the white cloth, but the wind whipped it past me a foot beyond my reach.

  As it scooted by, I saw she’d knotted the cloth at intervals to keep the fuse from burning too fast. Only two knots left before a quick spurt to the finish.

  More voices came from the houseboat: Rusty’s commanding shout, and a bleat from Holland that sounded like some cheap threat.

  I churned hard, chasing
the skiff into the shadow of the Mothership. Three hard pulls brought me alongside. I was putting myself in the eye of the fireball, but not out of any selfless valor. I was pissed off to my core, blind with cold fury to have lost so much so quickly and for nothing that mattered.

  I drove on, eyes fixed on the burnt tail of the T-shirt flirting close to the sloppy bay, the final knot turning black, flakes of crisp cloth sailing past me. I could never recall being suicidal, but I suppose at that moment I was close. Not seeking death, but not trying to duck it.

  Pulling alongside, I set my butt at a hard angle to the seat, took aim, then pitched toward the white cotton. It grazed my fingertips, but at that instant I was thumped by a roller, tossed up and out of the kayak, taken under, then instantly spit back out.

  From the left another wave battered me. I lifted over it, coughed out a slug of the bay, and swung left and right till I located the skiff.

  Chin above the water, I began to crawl toward the boat, but a sloggy weight dragged my arm to a stop. Wrapped around my right hand I found the tattered remains of the white cloth, a half-burnt T-shirt. I’d hooked it somehow in my flailing, disarming the bomb with blind luck.

  I shook it off and let it sink. I treaded water and rode up one side of a swell and down its back and when the next one lifted me, I shot a glance back to where the yellow bass boat hovered. So close I could read the lifeless look on Sasha Olsen’s face. Her eyes were aimed above me and behind.

  Nestled deep beneath the Mothership, my wooden skiff banged against her uplifted hull, jarred by every gust. The ropes holding the corpse in place had burned through and as I watched, the body spilled onto the deck. Smoldering, it sent its foul whorls of smoke spinning off. The boy’s face was a black and shriveled mess, his mouth open wide like some raving ghoul.

  Above me on the Mothership, the clamor of voices rose. Working my way toward the kayak, staying low and keeping the green boat between me and Sasha, I got hold of its stern, swung it alongside, and heaved myself aboard.

  On the lower deck of the Mothership, Holland aimed the 12-gauge flare pistol out to sea. A few feet away Rusty barked at him to drop it, but Annette blocked her passage down the narrow walkway.