by Neil Clarke
There were boats in the trees. Two shrimpers, eighty feet long at least, lying tilted on their hulls in scrub oak and pine, at least half a mile from their bayou. Bows shoved into the green, their white masts and rigging rose like bleached treetops. Still not pulled out, nine months since the last hurricane had howled through here. The Feds had other things to do, like hosting amphibians from another star.
That, and discounting insurance for new construction along the Gulf Coast. Never mind that the glossy apartments and condos were in harm’s way just by being there.
Just barely off-road, a trawler had its bow planting a hard kiss on a pine. He drove through a swarm of yellow flies, rolling up the windows though he liked the aroma of the marsh grass.
He had heard the usual story, a Federal acronym agency turned into a swear word. A county health officer had the boats declared a public hazard, so the Coast Guard removed the fuel and batteries, which prompted FEMA to say it no longer had reason to spend public money on retrieving private property, and it followed as the night the day that the state and the city submitted applications to “rescue” the boats. Sometime real soon now.
Wind dimpled the bays beside the causeway leading to Mobile Bay. Willow flats and drowned cypress up the far inlets gave way to cattails, which blunted the marching whitetops of the bay’s hard chop. They were like endless regiments that had defeated oil platforms and shipping fleets but broke and churned against the final fortress of the land.
He drove toward Mobile Bay and soon he could see what was left of the beach-front.
The sun sparkled on the bay and heat waves rose from the beaches so the new houses there seemed to flap in the air like flags of gaudy paper.
They were pricey, with slanted roofs and big screened porches, rafts supported meters above the sand on tall stilts. They reminded him of ladies with their skirts hoisted to step over something disagreeable.
He smiled at the thought and then felt a jolt as he saw for the first time the alien bunker near the bay. It loomed over the center of Dauphin Island, where Fed money had put it up with round-the-clock labor, to Centauri specs. The big dun-colored stucco frame sloped down toward the south. Ramps led onto the sand where waves broke a few meters away. Amphibian access, he guessed. It had just been finished, though the papers said the Centauri delegation to this part of the Gulf Coast had been living in parts of it for over a year.
He slowed as the highway curved past and nosed into a roadblock. A woman Fed officer in all black fatigues came over to the window. McKenna handed out his ID and the narrow-faced woman asked, “You have business here?”
“Just following a lead on a case.”
“Going to need more than that to let you get closer.”
“I know.” She kept her stiff face and he said, “Y’know, these wrinkles I got at least show that I smiled once upon a time.”
Still the flat look. He backed away and turned along a curve taking him inland. He was a bit irked with himself, blundering in like that, led only by curiosity, when his cell phone chimed with the opening bars of “Johnny B. Goode.” He wondered why he’d said that to her, and recalled an article he had read this week. Was he a dopamine-rich nervous system pining for its serotonin heartthrob? Could be, but what use was knowing that?
He thumbed the phone on and the ME’s voice said, “You might like to look at this.”
“Or maybe not. Seen plenty.”
“Got him on the table, IDed and everything. But there’s something else.”
The white tile running up to the ceiling reminded him that this place got hosed down every day. You did that in damp climates because little life forms you could barely see came through even the best air conditioning and did awful things to dead matter. Otherwise it was like all other autopsy rooms. Two stainless steel tables, overhead spray hoses on auto, counters of gleaming stainless, cabinets and gear on three walls. The air conditioning hummed hard but the body smell layered the room in a damp musk. The ME was working and barely glanced up. The county couldn’t afford many specialists so the ME did several jobs.
Under the relentless ceramic lights the body seemed younger. Naked, tanned legs and arms and face, the odd raised welts. The ME was at home with bodies, touching and probing and squeezing. Gloved fingers combing the fine brown hair. Fingers in the mouth and throat, doubtless after probing the other five openings with finer tools. The ME used a magnifying glass to look carefully at the throat, shook his head as if at another idea gone sour, then picked up a camera.
He studied the extremities, feet and hands and genitalia. The magnifier swept over the palms and fingers and he took pictures, the flash startling McKenna, adding a sudden whiteness to the ceramic room.
The ME looked up as if noticing McKenna for the first time. “Wanna help?”
They turned the body after McKenna pulled on rubber gloves. A head-to-foot search, careful attention to the tracery of raised yellow-white marks that now had deep purple edges. The bruises lay under the skin and were spreading like oozing ink. The ME took notes and samples and then stepped back and sighed.
“Gotta say I just dunno. He has two clear signatures. Drowning in the lungs, but his heart stopped before that.”
“From what?”
“Electrocution. And there’s these—” He showed five small puncture wounds on both arms. Puckered and red. “Funny, not like other bites I’ve seen. So I got to do the whole menu, then.”
The county had been going easy on full autopsies. They cost and budgets were tight. “At least you have his name.”
“Ethan Anselmo. No priors, FBI says. Married, got the address.”
“Wounds?”
“The big welts, I dunno. Never seen such. I’ll send samples to the lab.
Those punctures on the hands, like he was warding something off. That sure didn’t work.”
“Torture?”
“Not any kind I know.”
“Anybody phone the widow?”
He looked up from his notes, blinking back sweat though the air conditioning was running full blast. “Thought that was your job.”
It was. McKenna knocked on the door of the low-rent apartment and it swung open to reveal a woman in her thirties with worried eyes. He took a deep breath and went into the ritual. Soon enough he saw again the thousand-yard stare of the new widow. It came over her after he got only a few sentences into his description. Ordinary people do not expect death’s messenger to be on the other side of the knock. Marcie Anselmo got a look at the abyss and would never be the same.
McKenna never wanted to be the intruder into others’ pain. He didn’t like asking the shell-shocked widow details about their life, his job, where he’d been lately. All she knew was he hadn’t come home last night. He did some night jobs but he had never stayed out all night like this before.
He spent a long hour with her. She said he sometimes hung out at The Right Spot. McKenna nodded, recognizing the name. Then they talked some more and he let the tensions rise and fall in her, concluding that maybe it was time to call their relatives. Start the process. Claim the body, the rest. Someone would be calling with details.
He left his card. This part went with the job. It was the price you paid to get to do what came next. Figure out. Find out.
Ethan Anselmo had worked as a pickup deck man on shrimpers out of Bayou La Batre. She hadn’t asked which one he went out on lately. They came and went, after all.
McKenna knew The Right Spot, an ancient bar that had once sported decent food and that knew him, too. He forgot about the Pinot Grigio chilling at home and drove through the soft night air over to the long line of run-down docks and sheds that had avoided the worst of the last hurricane. The Right Spot had seen better days but then so had he.
He changed in the darkness to his down-home outfit. Dirty jeans, blue work shirt with snaps instead of buttons, baseball cap with salt stains. Last time he had been here he had sported a moustache, so maybe cleanshaven he would look different. Older, too, by half of a p
retty tough year. Showtime . . .
Insects shrilled in the high grass of the wiped-out lot next door and frogs brayed from the swampy pond beyond. There was even a sort-of front yard to it, since it had once been a big rambling house, now canted to the left by decay. Night creeper and cat’s claw smothered the flowerbeds and flavored the thick air.
There was a separate bar to the side of the restaurant and he hesitated. The juke joint music was pump and wail and crash, sonic oblivion for a few hours. Food first, he decided. Mercifully, there were two rooms and he got away from the noise into the restaurant, a room bleached out by the flat ceramic light. A sharp smell of disinfectant hiding behind the fried food aroma. New South, all right. A sign on the wall in crude type said FRIENDS DON’T LET FRIENDS EAT FOREIGN SHRIMP.
The joint had changed. He sat at a table and ordered jambalaya. When it came, too fast, he knew what to expect before the first mouthful.
It was a far, forlorn cry from the semi-Cajun coast food he knew as a boy, spicy if you wanted and not just to cover the taste of the ingredients. The shrimp and okra and oysters were fresh then, caught or picked that day. That was a richer time, when people ate at home and grew or caught much of what they ate. Paradise, and as usual, nobody had much noticed it at the time.
He looked around and caught the old flavor. Despite his disguise, he saw that some people notice you’re a cop. After a few minutes their eyes slide away and they go back to living their lives whether he was watching them or not. Their talk followed the meandering logic of real talk or the even more wayward path of stoned talk. Half-lowered eyelids, gossip, beer smells mingling with fried fish and nose-crinkling popcorn shrimp. Life.
He finished eating, letting the place get used to him. Nobody paid him much attention. The Right Spot was now an odd combination, a restaurant in steep decline with a sleazy bar one thin wall away. Maybe people only ate after they’d guzzled enough that the taste didn’t matter anyway.
When he cut through the side door two Cajun women at the end of the bar gave him one glance that instantly said cop at the same time his eyes registered hookers. But they weren’t full-on pros. They looked like locals in fluffy blouses and skinny pants who made a little extra on the side and told themselves they were trying out the talent for the bigger game, a sort of modern style of courtship, free of hypocrisy. Just over the line. He had seen plenty of them when he worked vice. It was important to know the difference, the passing tide of women versus the real hard core who made up the true business. These were just true locals. Fair enough.
The woman bartender leaned over to give him a look at the small but nicely shaped breasts down the top of her gold lame vest. She had a rose tattoo on one.
“Whiskey rocks, right?” She gave him a thin smile.
“Red wine.” She had made him as a cop, too. Maybe he had even ordered whiskey last time he was here.
“You been gone a while.”
Best to take the polite, formal mode, southern Cary Grant. “I’m sure you haven’t lacked for attention.” Now that he thought about it, he had gotten some good information here about six months back, and she had pointed out the source.
“I could sure use some.” A smile and a slow wink.
“Not from me. Too old. I can remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty.”
She laughed, showing a lot of bright teeth, even though it was an old line, maybe as ancient as the era it referred to. But this wasn’t what he was here for, no. He took the wine, paid, and turned casually to case the room.
Most of the trade here was beer. Big TVs showed talking heads with thick necks against a backdrop of a football field. Guys in jeans and work shirts watched, rapt eyes above the bottles pressed to their mouths. He headed for the back with the glass of indifferent wine, where an old juke strummed with Springsteen singing “There’s a darkness on the edge of town.”
The fishermen sat along the back. He could tell by the work boots, worn hands, and salt-rimmed cuffs of their jeans and by something more, a squinty look from working in the sea glare. He walked over and sat down at the only open table, at the edge of maybe a dozen of the men sipping on beers.
It took a quarter of an hour before he could get into their conversation. It helped that he had spent years working on his family’s boat. He knew the rhythms and lingo, the subtle lurch of consonants and soft vowels that told them he was from around here. He bought the next table over a round of Jax beers and that did it. Only gradually did it dawn on him that they already knew about Ethan Anselmo’s death. The kids on the beach had spread the story, naturally.
But most of them here probably didn’t know he was a cop, not yet. He sidled along and sat in a squeaky oak chair. Several of the guys were tired and loaded up with beer, stalling before going home to the missus. Others were brighter and on a guess he asked one, “Goin’ out tonight?”
“Yeah, night dredgin’. All I can get lately.”
The man looked like he had, in his time, quite probably eaten dinner in lot of poolrooms, or out of vending machines, and washed off using a garden hose. Working a dredger at night was mean work. Also, the easiest way to avoid the rules about damaging the sea bottom. Getting caught at that was risky and most men wouldn’t take it.
McKenna leaned back and said in slow syllables, “This guy Ethan, the dead guy, know him?”
A nod, eyes crinkling with memory. “He worked the good boat. That one the Centauris hired, double money.”
“I hadn’t heard they hired anybody other than on Dauphin Island.”
“This was some special work. Not dredgin’. Hell, he’d be here right now gettin’ ready if he hadn’t fell off that boat.”
“He fell?” McKenna leaned forward a little and then remembered to look casual.
“They say.”
“Who says?” Try not to seem too urgent.
A slow blink, sideways glance, a decision made. “Merv Pitscomb, runs the Busted Flush. Now and then they went out together on night charter.”
“Really? Damn.” He let it ride a little, then asked, “They go out last night?”
“I dunno.”
“What they usually go for? Night fishin’?”
Raised eyebrows, shrug. “No bidness of mine.”
“Pitscomb works for the Centauris?”
“Not d’rectly. They got a foreman kinda, big guy named Durrer. He books work for the Centauris when they need it.”
“Regular work?”
A long tug at his beer. “Comes an’ goes. Top dollar, I hear.”
McKenna had to go slow here. The man’s face was closing in, suspicion written in the tight mouth. McKenna always had a problem pressing people for information, and that got around, but apparently not to The Right Spot just yet. One suspect had once named him, Man Who Ax Questions
More’n He Should. True, but the suspect got ten to twenty upstate just the same.
McKenna backed off and talked football until the guy told him his name, Fred Godwin. Just then, by pure luck that at first didn’t look like it, a woman named Irene came over to tell them both that she’d all heard about the body and all, and to impart her own philosophy on the matter.
The trouble with teasing information out of people was you get interrupted. It felt like losing a fish from a line, knowing it would never fall for the hook again. Irene went on about how it was a tragedy of course and she knew it weighed upon everybody. That went without saying, only she said it. She looked to be about forty going on fifty pretty hard, and unsteady on her shimmering gold high heels.
“Look at it this way,” she said profoundly, eyes crinkling up above her soulful down-turned lips, “Ethan was young, so that as he was taken up on an angel’s wing to the Alabaster City, he will be still brimming with what he could be. See? Set down at the Lord’s Table, he will have no true regret. There will be no time for that. Another life will beckon to him while he is still full of energy, without memories of old age. No fussing with medicine and fear and failed organs, none. No such
stations of duress on the way to Glory.”
He could hear the capitals. Godwin looked like he was waiting for the right moment to escape. Which meant it was the right moment to buy him a beer, which McKenna did. To keep control of the conversation, maybe hinting at an invitation to sit with them, Irene volunteered that she’d heard Ethan had been working on the Busted Flush the night before his body washed up. Bingo.
McKenna bought Godwin the beer anyway.
Up toward the high end districts of Mobile the liquor stores stocked decades-old single malt Scotch and groceries had goat yoghurt and five kinds of oregano and coffee from nations you never heard of since high school. You could sip it while you listened to Haydn in their coffee shops and maybe scan the latest New Yorker for an indie film review.
But down by the coast the stores had Jim Beam if you asked right and the only seasoning on their shelves was salt and pepper, usually lots of pepper for Cajun tastes, and coffee came in cans. There was no music at all where he shopped and he was grateful. Considering what it might have been.
He got a bottle of a good California red to wash away the taste of the stuff he’d had earlier and made his way to the dock near the Busted Flush mooring. From his trunk he got out his rod and tackle and bait and soon enough was flipping his lure toward the lily pads in the nearby bayou. He pulled it lazily back, letting the dark water savor it. In a fit of professional rigor he had left the good California red in the car.
The clapboard shack beside the mooring was gray, the nail holes trailing rust and the front porch sagging despite the cinder blocks loyally holding it up from the damp sand. There was a big aluminum boathouse just beyond but no lights were on. He guessed it was too austere and indeed the only murmur of talk came from the shack. A burst of cackling laughter from the fishing crew leaked out of the walls.
