Vacant Shore

by Jack Hardin

  Ringo leaned back against the counter and used a single finger to scratch at an eyebrow. “When?”

  “Two days ago.”

  “Have you heard the prognosis?”

  “No, but we’re listening.”

  Ringo inspected his nails as he thought. Finally, he said, “Have Yolanda make preparations to leave Wild Palm. It may take her a while to put things in order.”

  “Chewy has already spoken to her.”

  “Perfect.”

  Andrés said, “Also, Quinton arrived yesterday.”

  Ringo’s brow lifted. “A week early. Did he say why?”

  “I did not ask him.”

  “Set up a meeting in Ionia,” Ringo said. “I can be up there tomorrow evening. There isn’t much more for me to do around here until the insurance checks show up.”

  “Of course.”

  “I want you and Chewy at the meeting as well. I have something to share with all of you.”

  “Ok, Jefe. I will tell Chewy.”

  Ringo examined the younger man’s face. “Andrés, are you familiar with the English word melancholy?”

  “Melan…”

  “Choly,” Ringo finished for him.

  “No, Jefe. I don’t know that word.”

  “It means sad...gloomy. I bring it up because, Andrés, you look melancholy.”

  “Ahh, it’s nothing.” Andrés tried to smile. “I’ll go back now.” He set the Coke on the counter.

  Ringo rested a hand on Andrés’s shoulder. “You and Chewy are like sons to me.”

  Andrés stared at the floor, bit down hard on his bottom lip. “My madre. In the town where she lives, the turf fighting has started again.” Then he straightened his shoulders. “It will be okay.”

  Ringo picked up the Coke, handed it back to Andrés, who nodded a thank you, took a sip, and said, “Some men, they came through her front door and took all they wanted. They didn’t hurt her, but they took much.”

  “I’m sorry, my friend. You should take some time off and go see her.”

  “Thank you. I might when things settle down. Andrés’s jawline tensed and a little muscle pulsed along the edge. “You know, Jefe, only a few years ago there was respect. There was respect for the older people. Now these new young ones take everything from everyone.”

  “You’re scared for her.”

  “Yes.”

  “Think about going to see her soon. Now, be safe going back. I’ll see you all tomorrow evening.”

  After Andrés left, Ringo remained in the kitchen, leaning back against the counter, arms crossed, pondering the younger man’s plight and the slick mess that Kyle Armstrong had just spread across his lap.

  Chapter Six

  Ellie waited for everyone to disembark into her backyard before guiding the Bayliner onto the lift and bringing it out of the water. Tyler stood in the yard, motionless, looking numbly at the grass, appearing a little worse for wear. He removed his ball cap and ran a hand through his sandy brown hair. Chloe ran up to him.

  “See, Mr. Tyler, that was fun!”

  He squatted down to her eye level and smiled. “I guess maybe it was. Your Aunt Ellie was a lot better at driving this boat than the last time I got on one with her.”

  Ellie rolled her eyes and stepped off the Bayliner and onto the top of the seawall. “Well, the breeze was about forty knots less than last time. That may have had something to do with it.”

  “Chloe, let’s get you into the shower,” Katie said. Chloe reached in and gave Tyler what was, in her mind, a bear hug. She growled as she squeezed. He growled back.

  “You’re fun,” she told him.

  “You’re fun too.”

  She let him go, and Katie said a quick goodbye to Tyler as she shepherded her daughter through the back door. Citrus, Ellie’s Jack Russell, who had been scratching and whining from the other side of the door, shot out of the house like he was on fire and jumped up into Tyler’s arms.

  “Whoa there, Bucko.” Tyler grabbed the dog and roughed a hand over his head. He looked at Ellie. “You really need to stop putting rocket fuel in his water bowl. I told you that was only for the rocket.”

  Ellie set a couple of fishing poles against her house and called Citrus over. He struggled off Tyler and bounded to his owner, sitting at her feet and looking up at her like she held the patent on dog biscuits.

  “I’m not going in yet,” she said. “I have to flush the engine.” He whined and sat there staring at her, his head vibrating with energy, his eager eyes alternating between his owner and the canal. “Look,” Ellie said. “I didn’t take you out today because you would have found a way to accidentally knock Chloe overboard.” Ellie put her hands on her hips. “I’m not sure I want you getting wet right now.” Citrus’s entire body started to tremble. He pawed at her and yipped, then looked back to the water. Ellie sighed. “Fine. Okay. Go on.”

  Then, like he had been ejected from a slingshot, Citrus barked and ran out of the backyard, disappearing around the house. Tyler stood up and looked at his watch. They waited. Citrus finally appeared on the other side of the house, ran across the narrow strip of grass that was the backyard, and vaulted off the seawall, falling spread-eagle into the salty water.

  Tyler looked at his watch again, yelled down to the dog. “Eleven seconds. You’re getting slow.”

  A yip from the water.

  “You want to stay for lunch?” Ellie asked Tyler. “I can run up to Winn-Dixie and grab some sandwich stuff. Even some hot dogs, if you’re so inclined.”

  “You’re pushing your luck,” he said. “I got on a boat today.”

  “There is such a thing as ‘all beef’ dogs, you know.”

  “I prefer meat that isn’t emulsified by people in white lab coats. For instance, a slab of steak.”

  “So do you want to stay or not?”

  “Thanks, but I should get back to work. Those trees won’t walk away by themselves. I hear that the rotting process could take up to twenty years. I don’t want to wait that long. It would be highly irritating to my patrons.”

  Ellie felt a tinge of disappointment at Tyler’s reply. “I thought you had some help with clearing the trees,” she said.

  “I did for a couple days. But it’s the same as your uncle’s situation. Everyone who would typically volunteer is still busy working on their own properties. All my safety officers and instructors are further south, helping their families with cleanup and repairs. All I have at my disposal right now is Casey, but I’d already planned to send him to rangemaster training in Tampa this week. Then add that to the bar’s materials getting delivered tomorrow and you catch my dilemma.”

  The entire west coast of Florida up to Tampa had been affected by the storm. Piles of vegetative refuse now perched on the edges of the island’s roads like misplaced burial mounds, waiting for overworked county trucks to come and haul them away. Even with all the cleanup at Reticle, Tyler had offered up his time to help repair the damage to The Salty Mangrove. The island’s favorite bar had seen its covered seating area ripped away by the storm. Major, Ellie’s uncle and the bar’s owner, was still fifty miles south at Marco Island, coordinating cleanup and insurance claims at his marina down there, which had been decimated by the higher winds and storm surge.

  Ellie was good at a great many things. Framing in a structure was not one of them. “Thanks for helping Major out,” she said. “That’s kind of you.”

  “Glad to. He’s got enough to deal with right now.” Tyler stepped in close and gave her a goodbye hug and an accompanying peck on the cheek as he pulled back. He lingered a fraction longer than usual, and Ellie smelled a combination of sweet sweat and musky deodorant. Her faced warmed. “Get out of here,” she said. “I’ll see you later.”

  “And you’ll be super glad when you do.”

  Ellie watched him disappear around a cluster of fan palms rooted at the front corner of her house. She bent down and picked up the hose, unsnaked it, and pulled it over to the boat. She stepped back int
o the Bayliner and tugged the hose over to the transom, then removed the flush connector from the engine and threaded on the hose. After it was snug she returned to the spigot and turned it on halfway. The engine needed a good fifteen minutes to flush. Citrus continued making his rounds up the doggy ramp and flinging himself back into the water.

  As Ellie returned to the boat and brought out the cooler and the last of the rods, her thoughts turned again to her father. When Ryan Wilcox was still alive, Ellie had been content to patiently wait for answers that she knew he would deliver in time. It had been Ryan who had informed her that her father was still alive, that Frank O’Conner had not, as he had led everyone to believe, been killed in a late-night car accident two years ago.

  Earlier in the week, as soon as she had hung up with Eugene Riser, Ellie had put in a call to Nathan Price, an old and trusted contact at Langley. She explained the situation surrounding her father and asked him to see if he could find anything on Frank O’Conner besides an online obituary in the Pine Island Eagle. Ellie informed Nathan that, as far as her father had ever led his family to believe, he had worked at the Department of Justice for the last twenty-five years. But in light of recent events and the shared connection in Ryan, Ellie was now thinking that her father either worked for the CIA or the other side, whatever side that might be. Allowing herself to consider that her father might be on the wrong team drew up deep feelings of guilt, as though she were betraying all that she knew to be true about him.

  But the hard reality was, she just didn’t know anymore.

  Nathan Price was as good an officer as they came, and a wonderful husband and father of three. During her two years in Afghanistan, Nathan had been Ellie’s stateside intelligence analyst, working closely with her and her team to provide up-to-date intel on Assam Murad and his terrorist cousin, Fahad Sarkaui. He had since been promoted to an operations director, based out of Virginia. Nine months ago, after Ellie chose to leave the CIA and arrived back in the U.S. for three weeks of exit debriefings, Nathan and his wife had her over to their house for dinner on a couple of occasions. Once her dismissal was finalized, Nathan told Ellie to reach out should she ever need anything.

  At the time, Ellie thought it was all behind her. For good. She couldn’t imagine a scenario where she was back here in South Florida, leading a quiet civilian life, suddenly needing to call in a favor to someone within the intelligence community. But a week ago, she had reached out to two such people in a single day.

  Ellie kept the hose running and went inside, leaving her amphibious canine to his water-bound ways. She went to the kitchen sink and washed her hands. On top of everything else there remained one additional barb pricking against a quiet conscience.

  She still hadn’t told her sister that their father was alive.

  When Ellie had found out three months ago, Katie was still living in Seattle and wasn’t talking to her. But everything had changed several weeks ago, when Ellie picked Katie and Chloe up from the airport and brought them back to their childhood home here on the island. In the last several weeks, whenever Katie mentioned their father, Ellie felt like a traitor. Katie had just as much right to know as Ellie did, she knew that. When Ryan was still alive, Ellie had decided to withhold it from her sister because she had no answers. But now things had changed.

  Katie stepped out of the hallway bathroom, where Chloe was taking a shower, and shut the door. She walked into the kitchen. “Tyler leave?” she asked.

  “He did. I offered for him to stay for lunch, but he said he needed to get back to work. I think maybe he’s a little queasy.”

  “Are you two ever going to start dating?” Katie opened the refrigerator and brought out a cold can of LaCroix. “Because if you’re not, I’m thinking about asking him myself.”

  “You’re not his type.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “He likes blondes.”

  “Well, I can dye my hair. Ellie, that little cleft on his chin. And the stubble...”

  “Stop...”

  Katie took a sip of her water and shrugged. “Well, you know I’m right.”

  A picture of Frank O’Conner hung on the wall directly behind Katie, taken several years ago by Major. Ellie had probably been in Brussels at the time. Frank O’Conner was sitting on a barstool at The Salty Mangrove, beer in hand, looking off somewhere. He wasn’t smiling and he wasn’t frowning. He was just him. Handsome, contemplative, distinguished in his own laid back kind of way. Major had gifted Ellie the photo after she had moved back home. A house-warming gift, he’d said.

  “Hey,” Katie waved a hand in front of Ellie’s face. “Are you all right?”

  “Sorry, yes. Have a seat for a second,” Ellie said, and motioned toward the kitchen table.

  “Okay… If what I said about Tyler was—”

  “No. You’re fine. Really.” Ellie took a seat next to her sister and swallowed hard around a rock in her throat, realizing that she felt more nervous in this moment than when she was looking through a scope, about to take someone’s life. That dryness in the throat, the elevated heart beat, the knowledge that you won’t be able to turn back and change things. Ellie knew that sisters could be mad at each other. But they couldn’t stay that way. Somehow, the universe would always conspire to bring them back together again. Because the blood that made them sisters also made them friends.

  Ellie placed her hand on top of her sister’s. “So, listen,” she said. “There’s something you need to —” she was interrupted by a knock at the front door. She released a frustrated smile. “Hold on.”

  “The suspense,” Katie said.

  Ellie walked across the living room and opened the door. “Well, hello,” she said, a little intrigued. It was Mark Palfrey, her former partner.

  “Hey, Ellie. Do you have a minute?”

  Chapter Seven

  Ten Years Ago

  The television was mounted high in the corner and emanated a nearly undetectable whine. It was set to her favorite team—the Chicago Cubs—playing their bitter rivals, the St. Louis Cardinals; the Cubs up seven to three in the eighth.

  The door to her room opened to a tall, broad-shouldered man with a strong jaw, strong nose, and rugged features. He was bald, in a rugged sort of way. She had always thought him handsome. The older he got the more drawn and creased the lines on the sides of his mouth became. Today, like every day, he was wearing shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. “Hey, Daddy.”

  “Hey, Kat.” His voice was drawn. Quinton Davis smiled unnaturally and approached her hospital bed, sat into the chair positioned between the bed and the window. Katrina’s eyes remained fixated on the game, but all he could do was watch her. He finally leaned in and placed a gentle kiss on top of her head—across her Cubs bandana—and stroked her pale, browless forehead with his thumb.

  She didn’t take her eyes off the pitch when she asked, “Did they get me into the trials?” She asked it hopefully, optimistically, as an eleven-year-old child who had not yet learned the fine art of closing a hard fist around her own plans for her life.

  He kept stroking her forehead and with his free hand took her frail, clammy hand in his. She turned to him. Her eyes were gaunt, her skin jaundiced. His chin was quivering now. “No, Kat. They...they ran…” He looked away. “Ran out of funding. They can’t take anyone else.”

  “Okay.” She turned back to the television.

  He looked back to her, a devil’s fury raging on the inside, wishing he could take this with the same childlike acceptance as she did. One might think he had just told her she had to wait until after dinner to have a popsicle.

  Okay.

  And it wasn’t even that she failed to understand. She did understand. They had talked about it dozens of times over the last three weeks. It was all they thought about; their final and collective hope. She knew that “No, Kat” meant that her days were drawing up, that soon she would be moving on, leaving her father behind.

  The hot anger within was fueled by the fact that th
e trials—funded by a non-profit—had no money left to accommodate Katrina Davis. This wasn’t breast cancer. Quinton had just heard on the radio that next year the NFL would have their players wear pink shoes and gloves to raise money to help fight that disease. Real men were about to wear pink after all. This wasn’t heart disease, with financial warriors lobbying on behalf of the American Heart Association. No, his little girl was dying of APL, acute promyelocytic leukemia, an aggressive disease that was but a blip on the radar compared to those other two major killers of mankind. But Katrina wasn’t a blip on the radar. Not his, anyway. She wasn’t a number or a patient or a statistic. She was his daughter and the entire world should be screaming and vying and donating and praying to get her the treatment she needed.

  Kat had no white blood cells left. She had survived her induction therapy, but the chemo hadn’t worked. All other treatments had betrayed her.

  Her attention was fixed on a pop fly heading into left field. “You’ll still finish the list, right?” she asked. “You’ll save Wrigley for last?”

  Quinton nodded and stood, choked out, “Sure, baby. Of course.” Then he made a hasty exit from the room, tapped furiously at the elevator button until its doors opened, and, as they shut, collapsed into a loose bundle of hot tears and wailing grief.

  ____________________

  Nine Days Later

  Warren Hall stepped from his Jeep Wrangler and walked across the newly paved parking lot, the afternoon humidity condensing on his skin, the sun assaulting the earth with an unrelenting commitment to make the human race as miserable as possible. As he made his way to the front entrance, Warren passed a looming willow tree that stood in the center of the turnabout. He had recently decided, after coming here each day for the last two months, that he liked willows after all. They displayed an inherent grace, their tendrils hanging lazily from hardy branches, the lightest of breezes sending them swaying in elegant unison. A symphony of nature.