by Allen Kent
“Can you swim?” I asked, realizing it was a little late to be raising the question.
Joseph moved to the edge of the bank. “I can. But how do we pull ourselves up out of the water to get up that bluff? And by the way, this looks a whole lot more like a river than a creek.”
I chuckled. “Everything down here’s a creek, no matter how wide. And we don’t pull ourselves up the bank. When I asked about swimming, I was just thinking about what would happen if you slipped back into that pool. It’ll be head-deep on you.”
“Slip from where?” She glanced across at the thirty-foot rock face that rose directly out of the stream.
“The water’s only knee-deep here. I used to float this creek six or eight times a year when I was a kid. This part hasn’t changed much. Over there along the bluff, there’s a narrow rock shelf about two feet under the water. We’ll wade across here, then slide along that shelf.” I pointed at another ledge chest-high above the water and fifty feet to our left. “I think that must be the place Ezra Suskey’s letter talked about.”
Joseph look down along our side of the pool. “It would be good if we could get across from it and take a better look.”
The clay bank on our side rose steeply into a thick tangle of brambles. “I don’t think you want to go through that stuff. It will scratch you to pieces and cover you with chiggers. Just follow me across and we’ll edge our way over to the ledge. It’s going to be slippery as hell from algae, but if we slide our feet along, I think we can scrape a foothold as we go.”
She shrugged. “You’re the creek guide. Lead on.”
Algae had also turned the pebbled bottom into a skateland, and we slipped and splashed our way through leg-numbing water to where the ledge left the gravel as the bottom plunged into the deeper pool. I pressed against the rock face and scraped my left sole along the surface, clearing a foothold as I went. Joseph clung tightly to the sleeve of my T-shirt, gripping what she could of the rock with her other hand. As we reached Ezra Suskey’s ledge, the narrow shelf met me right at chest-high and provided extra leverage as I steadied myself in front of the flat cover stone the letter had described. Joseph’s eyes fell midway up the slab.
“Can you brace yourself well enough to slide that thing?” she asked. “It looks heavy.”
I splashed water up onto the ledge and gripped the lip of the ledge with my left hand. “I’ll pull and you push,” I suggested. “On three.”
On the three-count, we both heaved against the rock plate, moving it a good foot along the ledge.
“How did that little lady move this thing?” Joseph wondered aloud. “It must weight forty or fifty pounds.”
I scraped again at the ledge under our feet. “My guess is that she came when the creek’s low enough that this shelf we’re on is above water and dry. If we could brace our feet, this wouldn’t be so hard. Now, once more.” The second surge slid the rock far enough that the crevice behind it was partially exposed. I was able to get my right hand up against the edge of the slab and force it another six inches. Joseph gazed into the notch.
“I see it,” she whispered, as if other ears might be listening. “It looks like a canvas bag, about as big as a lunch sack.”
“Can you reach it?”
“Not without letting go of what’s holding me up here. Namely, you.”
“I’ll give it try.” Tightening my grip on the rock shelf, I released the edge of the stone cover and thrust my right hand into the opening. The cloth of the bag was surprisingly firm. I wrapped a hand around the neck and pulled outward. The motion shifted Joseph’s grip on my arm and I felt her let go, grasp wildly for another handhold, and tumble backward toward the pool. Before I could release the sack to reach for her, the stone where her head had been shattered into fragments, followed instantly by the sharp crack of a rifle report.
With bag in hand, I threw myself backward after Joseph into the pool, feeling the sting of shrapnel against the side of my head and neck. Twisting onto my stomach as I entered the water, I thrust my feet downward, searching for the bottom as I peered through the churning water for my partner.
My feet told me the pool was shallow enough that if I stood, my face would be above water. The shot, I was certain, had come from the ridgeline on the other side of the hollow. The shooter would have been able to see us on the ledge, but not down on the surface where the overgrown bank gave us cover. A hand grabbed my shirt, pulling me under.
I pushed into the gravel with my feet and stood, chin barely clearing the surface. Joseph thrashed beside me, trying to tread water and haul me toward the bank. I wrapped my free arm about her waist and pulled her against me, whispering into her ear.
“I’m standing. Just relax. I’ll get us against the bank. Were you hit?”
“Was I hit?” she gasped. “By what? I just fell when your arm pulled back.”
“Someone shot at us just as you tumbled backward. From up behind us. We should be out of sight now, but they may come down here after us.” I dragged us downstream until the bank lowered and I could push her out beneath a tangle of honeysuckle and scramble after her. I pulled her tightly against my side, tucked the canvas bag against my other hip, and waited.
15
If a car had driven away on the ridge road, it had happened while we were thrashing about in the pool. I hadn’t heard engine or tire noise. We remained immobile, pressed flat beneath a screen of twisted leaves and stems. Through a break in the cover, I could see two red squirrels chasing each other up the checkered trunk of a persimmon. Somewhere overhead, a pileated chattered, announcing an all-clear.
I pulled a finger up across Joseph’s lips, whispered “stay” in the ear that was inches from my own lips, and tucked the sack in against her stomach. As I eased backward, my neck sliding along her hip and legs, a crimson streak painted her shorts and exposed skin. The sting above my ear seeped blood where a fragment of rock had cut into my hairline. Back in the stream, I stripped off my shirt, ripped it into wide strips, and tied a tight band over the larger cut on my head. Sitting back against the current, I let it drift me downstream.
At the first break in the brush, I pulled myself onto the bank and scrambled back into the woods at a low crouch, skirting the pasture and moving quietly through the thick stand of walnuts until within sight of Nettie’s trailer. If the attacker was waiting, he would be watching the patrol car from the hill opposite the creek. Slipping around the house on the stream side, I crouched at the corner, scanned the ridge for movement and, seeing none, zig-zagged to the back of the Explorer. The ridge remained quiet.
My weapon of choice is a Sig P320, the civilian version of the military’s M17. I’d stashed mine in a small gun safe secured behind the rear seat of the Ford when we went to the creek. Cracking the rear hatch, I slithered in and retrieved the weapon, then tumbled over the seat to the radio.
“Grace, can you pick up?”
She answered immediately. “Yeah, Tate. Where’ve you been? I’ve been trying to call you.”
“Go to secure,” I said, directing her to a frequency away from the standard department setting. Monitoring police calls is popular entertainment around the county and this conversation needed to be private. I switched to the safe frequency and waited for her “I’m on. What’s up?”
“I’m with Officer Joseph out at Nettie’s. We were just fired on from the ridge. Can you run out here and cruise the road to see if anyone’s camped up there? The shot came from about a quarter mile this side of Darnell’s place.”
“On my way. Are you alright?”
“Yeh. Missed us by a fraction of an inch.”
“Where are you now?”
“I’m at the cruiser in front of Nettie’s. Joseph’s hunkered down back along the bend in the creek. If we’re not at the car, come look for us there.”
“Be there in fifteen,” she said.
I slipped out of the Explorer and twisted back through the trees to the edge of the stream where we had first entered the water. The s
hot had smashed into the rock face just to the right of the crevice, leaving a crater the size of a dinner plate. Any bullet fragments had tumbled back into the pool.
“You okay, Joseph?” I called down the bank.
“I’m here. Did you find anything?” She began to back out of the honeysuckle clump.
“Wait. I’ll come get the bag. It will take you right to the bottom. Float downstream and you’ll see a place to climb out. Skirt back around here and take my weapon while I get the coins.”
She slid backward until half in the water, perched the canvas sack on the bank, then dropped into the current. I waited until she could circle around to cover me, then waded the sack out of the stream. As we made our way back to the squad car, she swept the woods around us with the Sig. From the end of Nettie’s trailer, we sprinted one at a time to the rear of the Ford, squatted together against the bumper, then swung the hatch open. I plopped the wet bag onto the rubber matting of the rear compartment. Up on the ridge road, Grace ran her siren through a couple of cycles to clear the area.
“Want to take a look before company arrives?” Joseph wondered.
“Damn right—after all that.” The top of the bag was cinched with a tightly knotted leather thong that broke away as I tugged at it. I spilled the contents onto the mat.
“Oy vey,” Joseph exclaimed under her breath. “There’s a fortune here. And they all look in mint condition.” She glanced past me as Grace turned her car down the hill. “You ready to show these to your deputy?”
I quickly counted seventeen bright Indian Princess dollars. “Not ‘til we know more.” I scooped them back into the sack, spun open the gun safe, and thrust them into the back, followed by the Sig. Grace swung her cruiser up beside us and climbed out.
“I thought you said you didn’t get hit,” she exclaimed, looking us over critically and settling on my stained headband.
I fingered the blood-soaked strip. “A couple of pieces of rock grazed me. I don’t think it’s too bad.”
“You better get in and have that checked.” She shifted her gaze to Joseph with what I read as unveiled disapproval. “Have you two been getting in a little creek time?”
I looked down at my bare chest, then over at the shirt and shorts that clung to Joseph like cellophane. “We dove in when the shot passed over our heads,” I lied. “It seemed like the best cover.”
“You were standing by the creek when the shot came? Dressed like that?”
“We were trying to get a measure of how much timber Nettie has that’s still uncut. I thought we might need to do a little wading. If the Greaves weren’t in jail, I’d of guessed it was one of them who shot at us.”
Grace continued to measure the wet inspector. “I got bad news for you, Tate. Judge Werner said we either had to charge Verl or let him go. I had to turn him loose this morning.”
“We couldn’t hold him on the video I sent of the cut trees?”
“He said they had permission. There’s really no one who can refute that.”
“Shit.” The word slipped out before I could stifle it. “Excuse the French,” I said to Joseph, then turned back to Grace. “Is that what you were trying to call me about?”
“That, and something even more complicating. I had an office visit this morning. Do you know anything about a Galen Suskey?”
The name tinkled a very small chime back in the recesses of my memory. An over-heard conversation about Nettie at dinner when I was a kid visiting my uncle’s place on the ridge. Uncle Jack had asked Mother, “You know what happened to Nettie’s no-good brother Galen?” Mother had shrugged. “He was a few years younger than Nettie. I remember Dad telling us once that Galen was a trouble-maker and dropped out of school at about fifteen. Took off, and hasn’t been seen since.”
“Yeah. I vaguely remember mention of him, Grace,” I said. “Why?”
“He came in this morning. Wants to talk to you. I told him to come back this afternoon after 2:00, thinking you might decide to come into work.”
I shot her a disapproving frown, knowing as I did that she was right. I hadn’t been checking in like I should have been.
“So, he decided to show up all of a sudden after all these years. Where’s he been, and how did he learn about Nettie’s death?”
Grace returned my frown with a tight-lipped smirk. “We didn’t chat much. He wanted to talk to ‘the real sheriff.’ So I told him to come back, and I’d try to find out what the real sheriff was up to.” She cast Joseph another sidelong glance. “When you get yourself changed, you might both want to meet with him. He’ll be impressed to have a real state investigator, too. But I should warn you. This old guy is a real piece of work.”
16
Joseph drove as we climbed back up the drive out of the holler with Grace trailing close behind. We turned left toward my place, Grace went right to stop by Darnell’s studio to see if he’d seen anyone pass on the ridge road. And the shot had been close enough that he might have heard it.
Joseph was silent until the other squad car disappeared behind us, then said, “As soon as we get changed, I need to run you by the clinic to get your head checked. Then we’d better get those coins locked away somewhere safe.”
Without the distraction of the sprint from the creek and the bag of gold dollars, the cut over my ear was beginning to throb. I had to focus for a minute to sort through what she’d said.
“The department’s got what used to be the vault of the bank,” I said finally, addressing what seemed most important. “We use it as our evidence locker. Probably more secure than anything most departments have. Deputy D’ Amico keeps an eye on it. But once I put the coins in one of the old safe deposit boxes and label it ‘restricted access,’ he won’t bother it without checking with me. I need to get Ezra Suskey’s letter in with it. That’s still at the house.”
“They’ll be alright in the gun safe until we get your head looked at. That needs to be first.”
I saw no reason to argue, and the cut was starting to ache like the dickens.
We drove for another couple of minutes in silence then, out of the blue, she said, “I think your Girl Friday has some issues.”
I’d been thinking about the shot from the ridge that had almost killed the inspector, and her comment made no sense at all.
“My Girl Friday? What are you talking about?”
“Your chief deputy. She’s got some issues?”
“Grace? What kind of issues?”
“With me. Couldn’t you see it?”
I shrugged. “She looked a little annoyed, but I think that was from being dragged out to check on a shooter.”
“No. She doesn’t like you working with me.”
I fingered the cut that was beginning to swell. “Ah, don’t be crazy. Why would Grace care if I was working with you?”
Joseph glanced over with a thin smile. “I don’t think she likes another woman getting your attention.”
I sniffed. “I thought I told you, she has a steady boyfriend.”
“Maybe that’s because she doesn’t see you as being in play.”
I started to untie the bandage to have a look at the cut in the visor mirror.
“Leave that thing in place,” she ordered. “It’s stopped bleeding. You’ll just open it up again.”
I re-cinched the knot and sat back restlessly. I didn’t like where Joseph’s conversation was taking us.
“Are you in play?” she pressed.
“I’m not sure what you mean by that.”
“Have you been out with anyone since you lost Adeena?”
“What’s that got to do with you or Grace?”
“I’ll take that to be a ‘no’” She wasn’t going to let the subject drop.
“Have you ever lost someone you truly loved?” I asked.
“My father.”
“No. I mean passionately loved. Had given your whole heart and soul to.”
“No. I can’t say that I’ve ever cared for anyone like that.” We had turned
down my drive and were parked in front of the house.
“It’s not something you get over easily. And not a kind of pain you want to set yourself up for again.”
Joseph turned off the ignition and sat frowning into her lap. “I can understand that. And I imagine Grace Torres does too. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have some pretty strong feelings for you.”
I shook off the suggestion. “And you think you could tell that from the five minutes we spent in front of Nettie’s.”
She continued to stare downward. “A woman can tell. Especially when she’s been wondering some of the same things herself.”
Now, I know I’m a guy and can be pretty clueless about some of this stuff. But I hadn’t seen this coming. Admittedly, it hadn’t escaped me that Joseph was very easy on the eyes, especially in that clinging shirt and pair of shorts. And I’d had my little fantasy the night before about bumping into each other in the kitchen and ending up in the same bedroom. But this was starting to get too close to serious relationship talk. And it seemed all the stranger with me sitting next to this woman wearing only a pair of damp shorts, with my shirt tied around my head.
“I think you mis-read Grace,” I said lamely. “She’s never given me any indication I was anything to her but her boss. And as for being ‘in play?’ I’ve never really thought about it since Adeena died.”
Joseph smiled faintly, shifted her gaze out the window, then sucked in a deep breath and straightened in the seat. “Just something I noticed,” she said, and opened the car door. “We’d better get some dry clothes on and get your head looked at. Then to your office to get the coins locked away and meet with this Galen Suskey. And if you’re feeling up to it, I think I’d like to go looking for Verl Greaves.”
17
Galen Suskey was a male version of his sister, a squat, gnome of a man with shaggy gray hair that looked like it hadn’t been washed in the last month and two weeks of stubble on his craggy face. His rumpled clothes hung like a dust cover over an old sofa. He hunched into the office, looked around uneasily for a chair he thought might accommodate his stumpy legs, and decided to stand.
