by Mike Stewart
“The stairs are the only way down, but we can go up.”
A lightbulb went off. “The crow’s nest?”
“Yep. But there’s no way down from there either, unless…”
“Can we…” A shotgun blast shattered the quiet. Glass exploded downstairs, and footsteps crunched across broken windows.
Susan gasped and yanked my arm by the elbow. I turned to look, and she was hauling ass. I caught her as she hooked a left and charged up a short flight of steps that dead-ended into the ceiling. She twisted some little knob I couldn’t even see and pushed open a hatch. Stars filled a three-by-four foot hole in the roof. Susan shot through, and I followed. Up on the catwalk, I quietly fitted the hatch back into place.
We crouched on narrow strips of teak that made the banistered catwalk look like a miniaturized deck. We had a space about six feet wide and twenty feet long and nowhere to hide. Susan breathed hard. She said, “Do you think we’ll be able to stay here?”
I looked around. “Do we have a choice?”
“There’s a palm over there at the back corner. The roof’s steep, but if we could figure out how to slide down at an angle somehow, we could get hold of it and climb down to the driveway.”
“What?” She started to explain again, and I stopped her. “Listen.” The house was quiet. “What the hell? Susan, come on. Stay low. Get over here. We better sit on the hatch.”
“They might shoot through it.”
“And they might just try it and move on. It’s better than leaving it open so they can pop through and shoot at us.”
As Susan started to edge over, she glanced through the banisters toward the shoreline. She said, “Look,” and pointed down at the beach. We saw a figure in dark clothes kneeling on the sand.
And he saw us. A black shape moved in his hands, and a sharp rap sounded a split second before something small and hard and deadly hit the copper roof below us.
I said, “Let’s do it. Stay low, and go through the banisters. Don’t go over them.” Susan wiggled through a repeating diamond shape in the banister and began inching down the side of the steep metal roof opposite the beach. Easing my head to the far edge of the catwalk, I looked for the gunman. He was motioning to someone in the house. He was motioning at the roof. Shit. Belly crawling to the other side, I found Susan flat on her back, butt against the roof with both feet wedged in the rain gutter. She was eight feet away from the palm fronds and inching her way there not nearly fast enough.
Just in case, I tried to fit my shoulders through the banister. It wasn’t even close. Taking a deep breath, I came off my knees at a full run and hand sprinted over the railing. I expected to hear, or maybe even feel, another gunshot. The guy on the beach just stood there. He probably couldn’t believe his eyes. For all the world, it had to look like I was leaping into a full gainer over the driveway.
It felt that way too. I hit the copper roof on my right hip and bare shoulder blade and started sliding like a downed skier on a patch of ice. I managed to get my butt under me and my head up in time to nail the gutter with my heels. The jolt jammed my knees and ankles, knocked a section of gutter loose, and flipped me forward into a face full of palm tree. It hurt like hell. I hurt everywhere, but I managed to grab fists full of spiky fronds and hold on.
The world scrambled for a second. When it fell back into place, I looked around for Susan. She had fallen sideways trying to grab me before I flipped off the roof, and she was almost gone. Her feet were on the roof’s edge. Her right hand had a death grip on the piece of gutter I had slammed loose, and her left hand was reaching out for me. Clenching a thick frond with my right fist, I bent my knees, swung to the left using the frond as a pivot, and grabbed Susan’s hand. Her grip on the gutter came loose, and I swung her into the tree trunk with a painful thud. She held on.
“Go, Susan. They know we’re back here.”
She started down the trunk and, with me shinnying behind her, had made it to within six feet of the ground when three gunshots snapped the night air. Susan dropped.
Joey yelled, “Move. They’re coming. Move!”
Susan scrambled to her feet and ran. I dropped ten feet, executed an unplanned and painful backward somersault, and sprinted down the driveway. Up ahead, Susan veered left into underbrush and I followed her. Out of nowhere, a hand grabbed my wrist and spun me into the ground. As I landed in sea grass, Joey said, “Stay down.” I did. Joey sat crouched in a shooter’s stance with his .45 automatic leveled at the house. Susan lay on the ground next to him.
“Susan? Susan, did you get hit?”
Joey said, “Nobody got hitânone of us anyhow. That was me shooting. One of ‘em came around the corner while you two were monkeying around that tree, so I fired three rounds. Think I hit him.” Susan reached over and squeezed my hand to let me know she was okay. Joey said, “Here they come. We better go.”
Tearing through sea grass, cockleburs, wild azaleas, yucca plants, and a thousand species of lowland brier bushes, Joey ran full out ahead of us for what seemed like a couple hundred yards. Next to a wooden walkway that stretched from the road to the beach so normal people could avoid the brush and thorns we had just run through, Joey stopped, motioned with his head and said, “See that big, funny-looking bush?”
I looked, and it was kind of funny looking. “Yeah.”
“Carli’s over there. I’ll be back. If I’m not, stay away from the house and figure out some way to get Susan and the girl out of here.”
I started to say something, to tell him I’d come with him. But he was gone.
Susan walked toward Joey’s bush. I followed. We found Carli sitting in a fetal position on the dark side of the bush away from the moonlight. She didn’t cry. She didn’t speak. She hugged her knees and rocked and looked impossibly small.
Susan sat on the sand and put an arm around Carli’s shoulders. I found some shadow nearby where a big, funny-looking bush wasn’t blocking half the world from view. I peered into the dark and watched for nameless, faceless men who had come to murder two women in a house on the beach.
Minutes crept by. In the distance, sirens swirled through the night air. Two shots popped almost quaintly farther down the coastline. More time passed. The sirens grew louder as Joey emerged out of the underbrush. I met him at his bush next to Susan and Carli.
I asked, “What happened? I heard a couple more shots.”
Joey said, “That was me. When I got back to the house, they were loading one of ‘em into a pontoon boat on the sand. So I did hit him. Anyway, when he was in, one stayed with him and the other one jumped out and looked like he might come back for more. I took a couple of shots, and he jumped behind the boat and pulled it in the water. They took off.”
Susan said, “Did you shoot to scare them off?”
“Hell no. I shot to kill the sonofabitch. He was just too far away for me to hit him with a pistol. They were getting ready to haul ass, anyhow. One of ‘em was shot, and you could hear the cops coming.”
I asked, “Are the police there now?”
“Probably are. I didn’t stay around to find out.” He wedged his .45 in the back of his waistband, looked at me, and said, “So, Counselor. That’s what I do. Now do what you do. What’s the plan?”
Susan and Carli were silent. The teenager was still now, but she still hugged her knees tightly against her breasts. Susan stroked her hair.
I said, “You got a license for that gun in Florida?”
Joey said, “Nope. Licensed in Alabama. Not here.”
“Okay. Susan and I are going back. You look after Carli. Take her wherever you need to to keep out of sight, but,” I pointed at the street end of the wooden walkway, “be on the path next to the road in, let’s see, it’s about two-twenty now, be there at three-thirty.”
“What are you gonna say?”
“Don’t worry about it. You and Carli were never there. See you at three-thirty. Susan? You ready?”
Susan hugged Carli and whispered something I c
ouldn’t hear.
On the way back, I briefed Susan, telling her to stay as close as possible to the facts with only the changes we specifically discussed. Twenty yards from the house, I led her out onto the pavement so we could approach along the driveway. Jumping out of the bushes at a bunch of nervous, heavily armed deputies seemed like a bad idea.
As we neared her drive, a deputy stationed to keep people out said, “What the hell?”
Susan’s now filthy T-shirt was ripped across her stomach where she had snagged it on the palm. Cuts and scratches covered her arms, and dirt smudged her face. I was worse, having scrambled down a palm tree, rolled around the driveway, and torn through Br’er Rabbit’s playground without a shirt. A grapefruit-sized strawberry covered my left nipple. From the waist up, I was pretty much one big stinging scrape.
I said, “I’m Tom McInnes, and this is Susan Fitzsimmons. This is her house.” The deputy seemed to think about that for a second before he pulled out a nickel-plated revolver with a six-inch barrel and pointed it at us.
He said,” “Walk up to the house,” and that’s what we did.
chapter seven
We had rolled into Mobile as the sun rose in our rearview mirror. Now it was dark again, and the faint sounds and peculiar aromas of breakfast cooking pulled me out of a hard dreamless sleep and into a tangle of covers.
It was an old house and elegant, but nothing seemed to fit quite right. Warm light from the hall shone through an inch-high crack under the door, spotlighting ball-and-claw feet on an antique dresser and softly illuminating the room like a night-light. Without thinking I rolled to the right, found the floor with bare feet, and straightened up. Pockets of pain erupted in every joint and muscle, prodding me with memories of sliding down roofs, jumping from trees, somersaulting on oyster shells, and running through picturesque coastal thickets.
I stood there for a while and hurt. Eventually the pain subsided, and I was able to walk over and switch on the overhead light.
When we arrived, we had taken turns with the shower and the Bactine. Now I was surprised that the sandy-headed, scratched-up guy in the mirror looked better than I felt. Beneath the mirror, neatly folded squares of someone else’s clothes were set out on the dresser. I put them on and went in search of fellow victims.
The place was a maze of oak floors and crown molding. After visiting an empty living room and wandering twice through the same study, I found the kitchen by locating the dining room and then following the sound of voices through the butler’s pantry.
“Good morning.”
An ex-stripper named Loutie Blue, who was our hostess, said, “It’s seven o’clock.”
“Oh.”
“At night.”
“Oh.” She handed me a cup of coffee, and I sat in a chair at one end of a table with food on it. Joey sat at the other end eating thick Belgian waffles. Susan perched on a bar stool next to the center island where Loutie was working.
“Where’s Carli?”
Susan said, “She’s still sleeping.”
I said, “Oh,” and drank some coffee.
Loutie said, “With everybody just waking up, I decided to make breakfast for dinner. You hungry?”
I realized it had been twenty-four hours since I had eaten. I told her I was starving, and she poured batter into a waffle iron from a stainless steel pitcher.
Loutie Blue was tall, exceptionally tall for a woman, which, I thought, might be one reason Joey felt so comfortable around her. Standing next to Loutie, he would have looked almost normal. She had shoulder-length chestnut hair and greenish-brown eyes that grew harder the longer you looked at them. She wore black jeans, white tennis shoes, and an oversized blue polo shirt with the tail out. And, even in that domestic outfit, standing over a steaming waffle iron chatting with Susan, you could see how she had retired from stripping in her twenties with enough money to buy that house. Loutie Blue was beautifulâin a thoroughly intimidating kind of way.
She and Susan seemed to enjoy each other’s company. They weren’t really saying much. They just looked comfortable together.
I looked at Susan, “How long have you been up?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’ve been up and down.”
Joey said, “Checking on Carli.”
I said, “Oh.” It was becoming my trademark. I looked at Loutie. “I hope it’s not out of line to ask, but would it be all right if Susan and Carli stayed here with you for a couple of days? I need to get back to the office in the morning and try to figure out what to do about all this. And, in the meantime, you know, after what happened at my office and at Susan’s beach house, I’m not sure yet where else they’ll be safe.”
Loutie said, “Joey already asked. Glad to have them.”
Loutie Blue was resourceful and intelligent and, under the right circumstances, a disturbingly dangerous woman. I knew from past experience that, as far as the statuesque woman cooking waffles was concerned, if Joey wanted something, he got it. She felt an extraordinary and intense devotion to my giant friend.
I turned to Joey. “I don’t know what you’re working on right now, but I could use your help on this.”
Joey said, “You mean more help, don’t you? In case you missed it, I’ve been buried ass deep in this case since about two this morning when I started shooting people.”
“I didn’t miss it. But, unless you’ve got a better idea, we need someoneâyouâwho can hang around St. George and Apalachicola and bang on doors or bang on heads, or whatever it is you do, to get a lead on who might be trying to kill our client. And I’m guessing it’s going to take more than a day or two to do it.”
“So you’re not really asking if I can do it. You’re asking if I can do it for free.”
“More or less. I can cover expenses, but Carli’s going to have trouble coming up with seventy-five an hour for your time.”
Susan interrupted. “I’ll pay.”
Joey looked embarrassed. “Shit, Susan. I was just jerking Tom’s chain. I damn sure wasn’t trying to get you to pay. You know if you’re in trouble, I’m gonna help you.”
Susan stepped down from the bar stool and pulled up a chair at the table. She said, “Thank you. But I asked you and Tom for help.”
Joey said, “You asked Tom for help. I just showed up.”
Susan said, “That’s right. You showed up last night and saved our lives. You don’t need to be noble here. A lot of things have been hard for me since Bird died, but with our investments and Bird’s life insurance and a studio full of finished canvases, my crazy artist husband left me pretty well off.”
Loutie walked over and poured fresh coffee in Joey’s cup. He watched steam curl off the surface. “Okay. I’m hired,” Joey said. “But, look, we’re gonna be dealing with a bunch of crooks. And crooks, if they’re making a living at it and they got any sense, generally keep a wad of cash stashed away for emergencies. So, let’s say you’re paying the tab for now, but we can renegotiate if I stumble across any free money along the way.”
I said, “I didn’t hear that.”
Joey said, “Kinda late in life to be turning into a Boy Scout.” And I agreed that it probably was.
Whether she was sleeping the whole time, I don’t know. But when Joey and I left around ten, we hadn’t laid eyes on Carli.
After Joey had departed for his place, Susan loaned me her snub-nose .38. I drove home to Point Clear where I half expected to find my burglar alarm blaring. Everything was fine. Maybe an unlisted number had spared my house the same fate as my office, or maybe the burglars had already stolen everything they needed. I managed a few more hours’ sleep in my own bed, then drummed sore muscles under a hot shower before dressing and driving in to the office. Building maintenance had nailed a square of unfinished plywood over my broken window. It was not a look designed to impress clients.
Inside, Kelly was in her office, and a fresh pot of coffee wanned the kitchen. Kelly heard me rattling around for a mug and came in as I was adding sug
ar to my coffee. She looked anxious, “Is Susan okay?”
Oh hell. I had forgotten all about Kelly. I said, “I’m sorry. Susan’s fine. Three men with guns did come after her and the teenager last night when we were there, though.”
She asked what happened, and I told her. When I was through, she said, “Loutie, huh? I should have thought of that. I called Susan’s after the police left and I got back home, but by that time her phone was out. I guess I called you and Joey about twenty times this morning.”
“Kelly, I’m really sorry. You shouldn’t have had to think of calling Loutie Blue’s house. I should have called you.”
“You were busy.” She paused. “I thought of something. You said when you and Susan went back in the house after the cops, or I guess the sheriff, got there that that deputy who took you to meet those painters was there.” I said she was right. She nodded and went on. “And you said the sheriff was the only one out of uniform, which means that that deputy…”
“Mickey Burns.”
“It means that this Deputy Burns was in uniform, but when you called earlier the operator told you he was off duty.”
“And the other deputy, the one who met us in the driveway, was on duty that night because he got the call about checking on Susan. Even though he never got around to doing it.”
“So, the sheriff and Deputy Burns are both off duty. It’s two in the morning, and Burns shows up in full uniform. Isn’t that strange?”
“Yeah, it is.”
“Do you think it means anything?”
“I have no idea.”
Four uneventful days passed. I made some calls, practiced a little law, and learned that See Shore Cottage was owned by ProAm Holdings Corp. Apparently, the same company owned a number of beach properties scattered along the Panhandle, in addition to substantial real estate investments in one of the agricultural regions located in the north-central part of the state. Also, finally, on Tuesday morning I spoke with Billie Timmons at Dolphin Rentals about the painting duo of Tim and Sonny. She refused to “divulge information” about the property, but did offer to let me rent the place for a nice vacation with my wife and children. I told her I didn’t have anyone who fit into those particular categories but that I knew a private cop with an ex-stripper girlfriend who might be interested, and she thanked me for calling.