The next morning, Tony and I went back to the hospital to be there when Pardee surfaced. We were too late. Alicia was beaming at his bedside. Pardee had come out of it on his own and announced he was hungry, damned hungry. The doctors were very pleased and yet equally adamant that there would not be a party just yet. They asked us if we would mind very much just going away and coming back later. We slunk away to find some coffee in the hospital cafeteria. I told Tony about what had happened last night, and he looked at me with new respect. I told him that he’d eventually get his vehicle back if he’d just be patient, and that, no, I didn’t intend to share the news of Moira’s departure call with Creeps and company.
We had our coffee and then went down to see Bernie Price to close the loop on the Thomason case. He had been in touch with the reluctant sister, who was now on her way home to the U.S. to see about her brother, and possibly even her sister, Allie. She had told Bernie that there had been an inheritance from their parents, but Allie’s revolt and subsequent enlistment with the sheriff’s office had provoked their father to verbally disown her. When the second parent died several years later, the money had been much larger than they’d known, and the older brother, acting as executor, had divided it between himself and Allie’s sister, even though the trust had specified a three-way split. Allie had apparently just found out, and had gone to Helios to confront Dr. Thomason. Whether she threatened to expose him wasn’t known, but when I had made that call to the sister in Turkey, she had known that the chickens might be coming home to roost. I suspected Thomason had admitted to Allie what he’d done, and when she threatened to expose him, he poisoned her with moonpool water. The loving sister would probably never admit that, but Bernie said she was in for some pointed questioning.
Alicia took Tony back to Triboro when she went back for a day with the kids. The docs would not let Pardee go until he’d been observed operating normally for forty-eight hours. I drove back over to Southport. I decided to stay at the beach house as long as Pardee was still stuck in the hospital, even though Alicia said she’d be back down in a day or so. That evening, Sergeant McMichaels stopped by the house again. He had a rustic-looking individual with him. I thought he’d come for his bottle of radioactive water, but fortunately that wasn’t the case. He introduced the other man as a local fisherman, who had some news for me.
“Think mebbe I got your dogs,” the man said. “One German shepherd, one black wolf-lookin’ one?”
My heart jumped. “Where?”
“My place,” he said. “On the river. They wandered in yesterday mornin’, I called the sergeant here. He’d had word out, you was lookin’.”
“Are they hurt?”
The man shuffled his feet and looked warily at McMichaels. “You can tell him,” the sergeant said.
“The black one? He’s done lost him a back leg. Looks like somebody shot it off. Got him a hurt eye, too. Bad hurt, I reckon. The other one’s okay, but she won’t eat nothin’ and she keeps makin’ teeth at me.”
That would be Frick, I thought. “Let’s go,” I said. Frack’s lost a leg? The thought of that almost made me wish it wasn’t them. Almost.
The man turned out to be an inshore fisherman. He ran a one-man-band operation and plied his trade in the Cape Fear estuary for the Wilmington restaurant markets. His riverside place was in a small community of riverbank places whose yards were cluttered with boat gear, junked cars, wobbly-looking piers and boats, and weathered mobile homes. He took us out back to a makeshift dog kennel, where I heard a familiar bark.
Hallelujah. It was them. Frick was thin and a bit tattered, but she perked right up the moment she saw me coming across the backyard. I heard a couple of other cars pulling up out front but concentrated on greeting Frick and then examining Frack. I could tell immediately that his right eye was a total loss. His left rear leg was gone from the elbow down. The fisherman had put some kind of horrible goo on it that stank of fish, but I didn’t see any swelling or other signs of infection. He couldn’t stand up, but he was very glad to see me, and his tail worked just fine. I sat down in the pen between them and just talked to them, trying to keep a dry eye and not really succeeding as I watched Frack try to get closer to me. It was such a relief to see them alive, battered as they were.
“Y’all gonna put that one down?” the fisherman asked. McMichaels studied his shoes, as if already knowing the answer to that one.
“Hell, no,” I said. “He’s going to be like me—retired.”
“Well,” Sergeant McMichaels said, “there’s one more thing. Lots of folks in town appreciated what you did. We talked about what happened to the shepherds. So, well, over there.”
I looked through the pen wire to see a dozen or so locals standing by the corner of the fisherman’s trailer. I recognized some faces from the Southport diner.
“Seems that some of the folks in town wanted to do something, pay you back,” McMichaels said, pointing to my dogs with his chin. “Your partners here getting hurt and all. We got together. We have something for you. Someone, actually.”
He signaled to the small crowd by the trailer, and a man came around the corner with a very large sable shepherd on a leash. No one spoke as he walked over to where I was sitting in the pen. Frick got up and stared, but the big dog ignored her and simply sat down and looked at me through the wire. I don’t think I’d ever seen a shepherd with as much gravitas as this one. She turned out to be a female. Calm, amber eyes, erect ears, broad chest, and an aura of complete superiority.
“This here,” the man said, “is Kitty. She’s yours, you want her. Folks here were trying to think of some way of repaying you. I bred her, but she’s yours, if you can use her.”
“Kitty.”
The man smiled. “My wife’s idea of a joke, before we knew how big she was gonna get. Should Carol ever get herself into trouble, she wanted to be able to say, ‘Here, Kitty, Kitty,’ and have a big-ass ol’ German shepherd come around the corner. The bigger she got, the funnier that got. What do you think?”
I got up, patted my two pals on the head, and went out to meet Kitty. I sat down on the ground in front of her, and she examined me gravely. I let her smell my hands and the big bandage on my right forearm. Frick gave a jealous woof. Frack, on the other hand, put his head down between his paws. I think he knew that his replacement was on deck. I realized I’d have to work on that.
Kitty stood up, walked around me once, and went to the pen to touch noses with Frick, who wagged her tail, before coming back to me. She sat down again.
“Shake on it, Kitty,” the man said.
Damned if she didn’t put out a big old paw. The people over by the trailer started to applaud.
And me?
Well.
Read on for an excerpt from the next book
by P. T. Deutermann
NIGHTWALKERS
Coming soon in hardcover from
St. Martin’s Press
They came out of the darkness, riding lean, hungry horses. The engineer put down his unlit pipe and reached for the shotgun in the cab, but then relaxed. The riders were Reb cavalry, not goddamned bluecoats. He could tell by their slouch hats, the mish-mash of uniforms and weapons, and those big CS buckles gleaming in the engine’s headlight. The officer who appeared to be in charge rode right up to the locomotive. The others slowed to a walk and spread out in a fan around the train’s guard detail, who were lounging in the grass beside the tracks while the engine took on water. The riders were greeting the men with soft drawls and questions about what was going on up there in Richmond City.
The officer wore the insignia of a major, and he tipped his hat to the engineer with his left hand while holding the reins close down to the saddle with his right. He was wearing a dirty white duster that concealed the lower half of his body.
“Major Prentice Lambert, at your service, suh,” he declared. He had a hard, hatchet-shaped face with black eyes and fierce eyebrows. “This the documents train?”
The engine
er said yes, a little surprised that the major knew. There were only four cars behind the engine and its tender, three of them passenger cars stuffed to the windows with boxes of official records from the various government departments up in Richmond. The twenty-man guard detail rode in the fourth car, but they were all disembarked for a smoke break and calls of nature. The guards, who were an odd mixture of old men, teenagers, and even some walking wounded from the trenches at Petersburg, seemed relieved to see Confederate cavalry.
The major nodded, as if the engineer’s answer was hugely significant. The engine puffed a shot of steam from the driver cylinder, spooking the major’s horse sideways, but his rider held him firmly.
“Any more trains behind you?” the major asked, shifting his reins to his left hand as the horse danced around.
The engineer shook his head. “We heard ole Jeff Davis took one south two nights ago, but ain’t nothin’ comin’ down thisaway that I know of. Jig’s ’bout up in Richmond.”
“All right, then,” the major said, and raised the big Colt Dragoon he’d been holding down beside his saddle horn, pointed it at the engineer’s belly, and fired.
The engineer sat down hard on the steel grate of the engine cab, the wind knocked clean out of him, and this awful, ripping feeling in his guts. He grasped his midsection with both hands and felt the blood streaming. He was dimly aware of more shooting now, as that arc of cavalrymen also opened fire, shooting down the stunned soldiers as they sat in the grass or leaned against trees, all their weapons still back on the train. He bent over to look down at his middle, lost his balance, tumbled off the engine steps onto the cinder bed, and then rolled into the grass. His knees stung where he’d hit the track bed, but then that pain faded, and he relaxed into the sweet feel of that long, cool grass against his cheek. His middle was going cold now, and his legs were buzzing with pins and needles.
He looked back up at the train, his vision shrinking into a red-hazed tunnel. He saw a single white face at the nearest window in the front car, a young face, no more than a kid, maybe fifteen, sixteen. One of the guards? He tasted salt in the back of his throat, and it was becoming really hard to get a breath of air.
Why hadn’t that kid gotten off the train? What was he doing in there among all those boxes, while his comrades outside were being slaughtered like beeves?
One of the horsemen saw the kid’s face and surged his horse forward, his black cap and ball pistol pointing at the window. The engineer heard the major’s voice call out, No. Not him. Leave that one be.
The horseman reined up. “That’s your spy? That boy?”
“Train was right here when it was supposed to be, weren’t it?”
“Yeah, but you said now. No goddamned witnesses.”
“There won’t be,” the major said, getting down off his horse. “But I need to know one more thing.”
Then the engineer heard the other horseman swear. He realized he’d been spotted, eavesdropping on their conversation. He tried to crawl up the bank, trying to get under the locomotive, but his limbs had turned to rubber. He thought he heard the Major say, Oh, goddammit, and then a bolt of lightning exploded in his head and he was gone to see the Baby Jesus.
The Moonpool Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Wilmington, North Carolina
Triboro, North Carolina
Wilmington
Table of Contents
Start
Cam - 03 - The Moonpool Page 37