by Greg Iles
Dread settles in my stomach as I drive down the steep incline of Front Street to what locals call Lower’ville—short for Lower Bienville—but which the Chamber of Commerce calls the Riverfront. The Mississippi is already high, even for spring, and a brisk breeze is kicking up whitecaps on its broad, muddy surface. Pulling my eyes from the water, I focus on the cars parked along the timber guardrail blocking the precipitous drop to the river, but this does little to calm my anxiety. I’ve tried for more than thirty years to rid myself of what is surely a phobia about this river, but I’ve failed.
I’m going to have to gut it out.
Two narrow streets are all that remain of Lower’ville, the den of the demimonde who lived in the shadow of the Bienville bluff in the nineteenth century. Two hundred years ago, this infamous river landing offered flatboatmen and steamboat crews everything from gambling and fancy women to prime whiskey and rentable dueling pistols. Through Lower’ville moved a brisk trade in everything from long-staple cotton to African slaves, enriching the nabobs who lived in the glittering palaces atop the bluff and whose money flowed back into the district as payment for exclusive vices.
Today all that has changed. The relentless river has reduced Lower’ville to two parallel streets and the five short alleys that link them, most of which are lined with tourist bars and restaurants. The Sun King Gaming Company maintains a small office and transit bus stop here to serve its garish Louis Quatorze–themed casino, which stands a mile upriver. A local tour operator runs open-air buses from down here, and a whiskey distiller practices his craft in an old warehouse butted against the foot of the bluff. Everything else is overpriced shops. There are no whores, steamboat captains, knife-wielding flatboatmen, or pistol duels. The duels happen in Bucktown these days, the weapons of choice being the Glock and the AR-15. For gambling you have to shuttle upriver to the Sun King. I almost never visit this part of town, and on the rare occasion that I’m forced to meet someone in one of the river-facing restaurants, I sit with my back to the picture windows, so I don’t have to look at the big water.
Today I won’t have the luxury of avoiding my stressor. Parking my Ford Flex a few feet from the river’s edge, I spy the county rescue boat anchored in the current a quarter mile south of the landing, a hundred yards out in the river. A broken line of people stands watching the desultory action on the water. Three-quarters of a mile beyond the bobbing boat, the low shore of Louisiana hovers above the river. The sight from this angle brings on a wave of nausea, partly because of the river, but also because I’m starting to internalize the reality that Buck Ferris could have left the planet last night while I slept in my bed. I knew he might be in danger, yet wherever he went last night, he went alone.
Forcing myself to look away from the opposite shore, I walk downstream from the gawkers to get a clear line of sight to the boat. Without binoculars I can’t see much, but the two deputies on board appear to be trying to wrestle something out of the water on the far side of the boat.
There are three kinds of snags in the river, all of which could, and did, wreck many a steamboat back in the age of Mark Twain. The worst is the “planter,” which occurs when an entire tree uprooted by the river wedges itself into the bottom and becomes braced by accumulating silt. Often showing only a foot or two of wood above the water, these massive trees lever gently up and down in the current, waiting to rip deadly gashes in the hulls of boats steered by careless pilots. Given the deputies’ obvious difficulties, I figure they’re struggling to free the corpse from a half-submerged fork in a planter. Even after accomplishing this, they’ll have to deadlift his body over the gunwale of the rescue boat, which is no easy task. As I ponder their predicament, the obvious question runs through my mind: What are the odds that a man who fell into a mile-wide river would float into one of the few obstacles that could have stopped him from being washed toward the Gulf of Mexico?
While I watch the sweat-stained backs of the deputies, a whirring like a swarm of hornets passes over my head, pulling my attention from the boat. Looking up, I see a small quad-rotor drone—a DJI, I think—zoom out over the water at about a hundred feet of altitude, making for the sheriff’s department boat. The drone ascends rapidly as it approaches the craft; whoever is piloting it obviously hopes to avoid pissing off the deputies. Knowing the Tenisaw County Sheriff’s Department as I do, I doubt that pilot will have much luck.
One deputy has already noticed the drone. He waves angrily at the sky, then lifts binoculars to his face and starts panning the riverbank in search of the pilot. I follow his gaze, but all I see is a couple of city cops doing the same thing I am, scanning the line of rubberneckers for someone holding a joystick unit in their hands.
After thirty fruitless seconds of this, I decide the pilot must be guiding the drone from atop the bluff behind us. If the drone pilot is working from the bluff, which rises two hundred feet above the river, flying a low approach to the county boat was smart. That gave the deputies the feeling that he or she must be working from the low bank. Without tilting my head back, I scan the iron fence atop the bluff. It doesn’t take long to notice a slight figure 150 yards south of the landing, standing attentively at the fence with something in its hands.
While I can’t make out features or even gender at this distance, the sight gives me a ping of recognition. I know a kid with a knack for capturing newsworthy events on his aerial camera: the son of a girl I went to high school with. Though only fourteen, Denny Allman is a genius with drones, and I’ve posted some of his footage on the paper’s website. Most kids wouldn’t have a way to get to the bluff on a Tuesday morning while school is in session, but Denny is homeschooled, which means he can get away from the house if, say, he hears about a dead body on the police scanner he begged his mother to buy him last Christmas.
As I watch the figure on the bluff, the coroner’s wagon rumbles down Front Street. It’s a 1960s vintage Chevy panel truck. Rather than stop in the turnaround, as I did, the driver pulls onto the hard dirt and drives downstream along the riverbank, finally stopping about thirty yards from where I stand. Byron Ellis, the county coroner, climbs out and walks toward me, avoiding the gawkers who pepper him with questions.
You don’t have to be an M.D. to get elected coroner in Bienville, Mississippi. Byron Ellis is a former ambulance driver and paramedic who, as he approached his sixtieth birthday, decided to become the first African American to secure the position. Byron and I have gotten to know each other well over the last five months, for a tragic reason. Bienville is in the grip of a violent crime wave that’s 100 percent confined to the black community. About six months before I arrived, black teenagers began killing each other in ambushes and shoot-outs that have terrified the citizenry, both black and white. Despite the best efforts of law enforcement and dedicated intervention by church, school, and neighborhood leaders, the cycle of retribution has only escalated. Byron and I have stood alone over too many bullet-riddled children, facing the inarguable fact that our society has gone mad.
“Who’s out there, Marshall?” Byron asks as he nears me.
“I’ve heard it’s Buck Ferris. Don’t know for sure yet. I hope to hell it’s not.”
“You and me both.” Byron slaps my offered hand. “That man never hurt a fly.”
I look back at the deputies struggling in the boat. “I figured you’d beat me down here.”
“Got another kid in my wagon. Been sweating my ass off already.”
I turn to him in surprise. “I didn’t hear about any shooting last night.”
He shrugs. “Nobody reported this kid missing till his mama went in to give him his Cap’n Crunch this morning and saw he wasn’t in his bed. Convict road crew found him lying in a ditch out where Cemetery Road crosses Highway 61. He took eighteen rounds, best I could count. I pulled what looks like a .223 slug out of what was almost an exit wound in his back.”
“Goddamn, Byron. This is getting out of hand.”
“Oh, we’re way past that, brother. We in
a war zone now. Drowned archaeologist seems kinda tame after that, don’t it?”
It takes all my willpower to hold a straight face. Byron has no idea that Buck Ferris was like a father to me, and there’s no point making him feel bad by telling him now. “Maybe,” I murmur. “I’ll be surprised if this was an accidental death, though. I’ve got a feeling there’s something serious behind this. Some powerful people.”
“Yeah? Well, that sounds like your department.” Byron chuckles, the low laughter rumbling in his generous belly. “Look at them keystone cops out there. Deputy Dawg, man. That drone ’bout to run ’em crazy!”
“I’ll call you later,” I tell him. “I’ve got work to do.”
“Sure, man. Just leave me out in this sun. Don’t worry ’bout me.”
Byron winks as I give him a mock salute.
Getting back into the Flex, I push the engine button and head up Foundry Road, which ascends the bluff on an opposite angle to Front Street. As my motor strains on the incline, a pistol shot cracks over the river, echoes off the bluff face. I jump in my seat, stunned by the reckless idiocy of a deputy firing into the air in a populated area to try to hit a drone. Another shot pops off below me. I hope they don’t have a shotgun on board the boat. If they do, they can probably bring down the little aircraft, which by law must carry a registration number. And since Bienville has an asshole for a sheriff, the pilot will wind up in a lot of trouble. If the pilot is who I think it is, that’s a story I don’t want to have to cover.
I don’t pray, but all the way up the hill I beg the universe to grant me one dispensation in the midst of its daily creation and destruction: Let that body belong to someone else. Don’t let it be the man who stopped me from killing myself at fifteen.
Don’t let it be Buck.
Chapter 5
On the Bienville bluff, you can’t park closer than thirty yards from the edge. Within the city limits, there’s a buffer of green space between Battery Row and the iron fence that keeps kids and drunks from killing themselves on a daily basis. As I’d hoped, the slight figure standing at the fence turns out to be my friend’s son, fourteen-year-old Denny Allman. Denny surely recognized my Flex as I parked it—if he hadn’t, he would have bolted.
I lift my hand in greeting as I approach him. Denny tosses his head in acknowledgment, then turns back to the river, his hands never leaving the drone controller. Even with his back to me, I can see his mother in his stance. Dixie Allman was athletic and attractive in high school. A C student, mostly because of laziness, she had a quick mind. Her problem was that from age ten she’d focused it solely on getting male attention. She married at eighteen—pregnant—and divorced by twenty-five. Denny’s father was her third husband, and he abandoned them when Denny was five or six. Dixie has done her best to raise the boy right, and that’s one reason I’ve encouraged him by posting his stuff on our website.
“Did they shoot at your drone?” I call to him.
“Shit, yeah! Morons.”
I force a laugh and walk up to the fence. Denny has a salty vocabulary for an eighth grader, but so did my friends and I at that age. “They probably called a backup car to hunt for you.”
“They did, but it went down to the river. I grabbed some altitude and landed behind some trees farther south. They’re trying to work their way down there now. They’ll never make it through the kudzu.”
The drone controller in his hands mates an iPad Mini to a joystick unit. Denny has strapped a sun hood onto his iPad, so I can’t see the screen with a casual glance. Looking over the fence, I see the county boat down on the river. It’s headed toward the dock now. The deputies must have finally taken their cargo on board.
“Did you get a good look at the body?” I ask.
“Not live,” Denny replies, focusing on his screen. “I had to keep my eyes on the deputies while I was shooting.”
“Can we look now?”
He shrugs. “Sure. What’s the rush?”
“Did you ever meet Dr. Ferris, out at the Indian mounds?”
“Yeah. He came to my school a couple of times. I—” Denny goes pale. “That’s him in the water? Old Dr. Buck?”
“It might be.”
“Oh, man. What happened to him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he was looking for arrowheads or something and walked too far out on a sandbar. They collapse under people sometimes.”
The boy shakes his head forcefully. “Dr. Buck wouldn’t do that. He walked rivers and creeks all the time hunting for stuff, usually after storms. He found tons of Indian swag, even mastodon bones. You should see the stuff he’s found for the museum in Jackson.”
“I have.”
“Then you know there’s no way he fell into the Mississippi. Not unless he had a heart attack or something.”
“Maybe that’s what happened,” I say, though I don’t believe it. “Or a stroke. Buck was over seventy. With some luck, we’ll find out where he went in. That might tell us what he was doing.”
I can see Denny making mental calculations. “I need to leave the DJI down there till the cops leave,” he says, “but I can access the file from here. It just eats up a lot of my monthly data allowance.”
“I’ll reimburse you.”
His face lights up. “Awesome!”
He stabs the iPad screen, waves me closer. Thanks to the sun hood, I now have a glare-free view of what Denny shot only a few minutes ago. On the screen, two deputies with no experience at hauling corpses out of water are attempting to do just that. All I can see of the dead man is one side of a gray-fleshed face and a thin arm trailing in the muddy current. Then the head lolls over on the current, and a wave of nausea rolls through me. My mouth goes dry.
It’s Buck.
I can’t see his whole head, but the far side of his skull appears to have been broken open by some sort of fracture. As I strain to see more, his head sinks back into the water. “Fast-forward,” I urge.
Denny’s already doing it. At triple speed, the deputies dart around the deck of the rescue boat like cartoon characters, occasionally leaning over the gunwale to try to yank Buck’s body free of the tree fork holding him in the water. Suddenly one looks skyward and begins waving his arms. Then he starts yelling, draws his pistol, and fires at the camera suspended beneath the drone.
“What a freakin’ idiot,” Denny mutters, as the deputy fires again.
“Does he not realize those bullets have to come down somewhere?” I ask.
“He flunked physics.”
“Don’t they teach gravity in grade school?”
After holstering his gun, the deputy stomps back to a hatch in the stern and removes what looks like a ski rope. Then he makes a loop in the rope, leans over the gunwale, and starts trying to float the lasso he made down over Buck’s body.
“No, damn it!” I bellow. “Have some goddamn respect!”
Denny snorts at this notion.
“He needs to tie the rope around his waist,” I mutter, “then get in the water himself and free the body.”
“You’re dreaming,” Denny says in the lilt of a choirboy whose voice has not yet broken. “He’s gonna lasso the body, gun the motor, and leave a rooster tail all the way back to the dock.”
“And rip Buck’s body in half in the process.”
“Was it Buck for sure?” he asks. “I couldn’t tell.”
“Yeah. It’s him.”
Denny lowers his head over the screen.
It takes some time, but the deputy eventually gets the rope around Buck, and he does in fact use the motor to tear him free of the snag’s grasp. Thankfully, the corpse appears to stay in one piece, and after the boat stops, the deputies slowly drag it up over the transom.
“Oh, man,” Denny mutters.
“What?”
“Look at his head. The side of it. It’s all messed up.”
It doesn’t take a CIA analyst to see that something caved in the left side of Buck Ferris’s skull. The vault of his cranium has a hole the
size of a Sunkist orange in it. Now that he’s out of the water, his face looks oddly deflated. “I saw.”
“What did that?” Denny asks. “A baseball bat?”
“Maybe. Could have been a gunshot. Gunshot wounds don’t look like they do on TV, or even in the movies. But it might be blunt force trauma. A big rock could have done that. Maybe he took a fall before he went into the river.”
“Where?” Denny asks, incredulous. “There’s hardly any rocks around here. Even if you fell off the bluff, you wouldn’t hit one. Not igneous rocks. You’d have to hit concrete or something to do that.”
“He could have fallen onto some riprap,” I suggest, meaning the large gray rocks the Corps of Engineers carpets the riverbanks with to slow erosion.
“I guess. But those are right down by the water, not under the bluff.”
“And he would have had to fall from a height to smash his skull like that.” Despite my emotional state, I’m suddenly wondering about the legal implications of Denny’s drone excursion. “You know, you really need to turn this footage over to the sheriff.”
“It’s not footage, man. It’s a file. And it’s mine.”
“The district attorney would probably dispute that. Are you licensed to fly that drone?”
“I don’t need a license.”
“You do for commercial work. And if I put it up on our website, or pay your data bill, you’re doing this for hire.”