by Neil Clarke
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.
He sat in the s
hadows. An old Dr Pepper sign was almost gone but you could still see the holes from buckshot. Teenagers love targets.
It made no real good sense to fish at night but the moon was coming up like a cat’s yellow smile over the shimmering gulf and some thought that drew the fish out. Like a false dawn, an old fisherman had said to him long ago, and maybe it was true. All he needed was the excuse anyway so he sat and waited. He always kept worms in a moist loam pail in the car trunk and maybe they would work tonight even if this stakeout didn’t.
The Busted Flush crew was hauling out the supplies for a night run. There was always something to do on a boat, as McKenna knew from working them as a teenager, but these guys were taking longer than it should.
He had learned long ago the virtues of waiting. At his distance of about a hundred meters simple binoculars told him all he needed, and they had an IR filter to bring out the detail if he needed it. The amber moonlight glanced off the tin-roofed shotgun shacks down along the curve of the bay. Night-blooming flowers perfumed the night air and bamboo rattled in the distance like a whisper in his ear.
Then a big van rumbled up. Two guys got out, then a woman. They wore black and moved with crisp efficiency, getting gear out of the back. This didn’t fit.
The team went to the dock and Merv Pitscomb ambled along to greet them. McKenna recognized him as skipper of the Busted Flush from a car fax he had gotten from the Mobile Main library, after leaving the restaurant. His car was more his office now than the desk he manned; electronics had changed everything.
The team and Pitscomb went together back to the van, talking. Pitscomb slid open the side door and everyone stepped back. A dark shape came out—large, moving slowly and in a silence from the Feds that was like reverence.
McKenna froze. He knew immediately it was a Centauri. Its arms swung slowly, as if heavily muscled. The oddly jointed elbow swung freely like a pendulum, going backward. In water that would be useful, McKenna imagined. The arm tapered down to a flat four-fingered hand that he knew could be shaped to work like the blade of an oar.
The amphibians were slow and heavy, built for a life spent moving from water to land. It walked solidly behind the two guys in black, who were forming a screen of what had to be Federal officers. No talk. Centauris’ palates could not manage the shaped human sounds, so all communication was written.
It shuffled toward Busted Flush on thick legs that had large, circular feet. With help at the elbows from the Feds it mounted the gangplank. This was the first he had seen for real, not on TV, and it struck him that it waddled more than walked. It was slow here, in a slightly stronger gravity. Centauris had evolved from a being that moved on sand, seldom saw rock, and felt more at home in the warm waters of a world that was mostly sea.
He realized as it reached the boat that he had been holding his breath. It was strange in a way he could not define. The breeze blew his way. He sniffed and wondered if that rank flavoring was the alien.
It went aboard, the Federal officers’ eyes swiveling in all directions. McKenna was under a cypress and hard to spot and their eyes slid right over him. He wondered why they didn’t use infrared goggles.
Busted Flush started up with a hammering turbo engine. It turned away from the dock and headed straight out into the gulf. McKenna watched it go but he could not see the alien. The shrimp nets hung swaying on their high rocker arms and Busted Flush looked like any other dredge shrimper going out for the night. That was the point, McKenna guessed.
When he finally got home down the oyster-shell road and parked under the low pines, he walked out onto his dock to look at the stars above the gulf. It always helped. He did not want to go right away into the house where he and his lost wife had lived. He had not moved away, because he loved this place, and though she was not here at least the memories were.
He let the calm come over him and then lugged his briefcase up onto the porch and was slipping a key into the lock when he heard a scraping. He turned toward the glider where he had swung so many happy times and someone was getting up from it. A spike of alarm shot through him, the one you always have once you work the hard criminals, and then he saw it was a woman in a pale yellow dress. Yellow hair, too, blond with a ribbon in it. Last time it had been red.
“John! Now, you did promise you’d call.”
At first he could not tell who she was, but he reached inside the door and flipped on the porch light and her face leaped out of the darkness. “Ah, uh, Denise?”
“Why yes, did you forget me already?” Humorous reproach, coquettish and a little strained.
She swayed toward him, her hair bouncing as if just washed. Which it probably was. He felt his spirits sinking. If the average woman would rather have beauty than brains, it’s because the average man can see better than he can think. Denise believed that and so was even more dolled up than on their first date. Also, last date.
“I figured out where you lived, so stopped by.” Her broad smile was wise and enticing. “You didn’t call, you know.”
The vowels rolled off her tongue like sugar and he remembered why he had found her so intriguing.
“I’ve been awful busy.”
“So’ve I, but you cain’t just let life go by, y’know.”
What to say to that? She was here for a clear purpose, her large red handbag on a shoulder strap and probably packed with cosmetics and a change of underwear. Yet he had no easy counter to it.
“Denise, I’m . . . seeing someone else.” Easy, reasoned.
Her expression shifted subtly, the smile still in place but now glassy. “I . . . I didn’t know that.”
“It didn’t make the papers.”
No, that was wrong, humor wouldn’t work here. He decided on the physical instead and held out a hand, edge on, thumb straight up, for a shake. A long moment passed while her eyelashes batted beneath the yellow porch light and he could hear frogs croaking in the night marsh.
She looked at his hand and blinked and the smile collapsed. “I . . . I thought . . .”
It was his duty to make this as easy as possible so he took her half-offered hand and put an arm around her shoulders. He turned her delicately, murmuring something that made sense at the time but that he could not remember ten seconds later. With a sweeping arm he ushered her down the wooden stairs, across the sandy lawn in the moist sea air. Without more than soft words they both got to the car he had not even seen parked far back under the big oak tree aside the house. He said nothing that meant anything and she did the same and they got through the moment with something resembling their dignity.
He helped her into her car and turned back toward his house. A year ago, in a momentary fit, one member of the sorority of such ladies of a certain age had tried to run him down. This time, though, her Chevy started right off, growling like a late model, and turned toward the oyster driveway that shimmered in the silvery moon glow. He walked away from it, the noise pushing him.
The lie about seeing someone settled in him. His social graces were rusty. He mounted the steps as her headlights swept across the porch, spotlighting him momentarily, like an angry glare. To jerk open the front door and finally get inside felt like a forgiveness.
McKenna got into work early. It had bothered him to usher Denise off like that and he had stayed up too late thinking about it. Also, there was that good California red. Not that he had failed to enjoy Denise and the others in their mutual nonjudgmental rejection of middle class values. Not at all.
But that style wasn’t working for him anymore. He had set out vaguely searching for someone who could bring that light back into his life, the oblivious glow he had basked in for decades of a happy marriage. He had thought that if it happened once it could happen again. But since Linda’s death nothing had that magic to it. Not dating—a term he hated, preferring “courtship”—and most of the time not even sex, his old standby.
So Denise’s sad approa
ch, the stuff of every teenage boy’s dream, had been too little, too late.
He was still musing about this when he got to his desk. Homicide was a big squad room in worn green industrial carpet. The work pods had five desks each and he walked past these because he at last had gained a sheltered cubicle. The sergeant’s desk was nearby his lieutenant’s cubicle and framing the whole array was a rank of file cabinets. No paperless office here, no. Maybe never. At least there was no smoking anymore, but the carpet remembered those days. Especially after a rain, which meant usually.
The morning squad room buzzed with movement, talk, caffeine energy. Homicide detectives always run because it’s a timed event. You close in on the perp inside two weeks or it’s over.
And here was the ME folder on Ethan Anselmo. Once you’ve studied a few hundred autopsy reports you know you can skip the endless pages of organs, glands, general chemistry, and just go to the conclusions. Forensic analysis had a subreport labeled GSR, which meant gunshot residue, that was blank.
The ME was confused. Heart stopped, lungs full, much like a drowning victim who had fought the ocean to his last. But the strange ridges on his skin looked like nerve damage, seared as if in an electrocution. The punctures McKenna had seen just obscured the case further.
McKenna hated muddy cases. Now he had to assign cause, focusing the ME report and the background he had gotten last night. He didn’t hesitate. Probable homicide, he wrote.
The usual notices had gone through, assigning case and ME numbers, letting the Squad and Precinct Captains know, asking if there seemed any link to other cases—all routine. Section Command and District Office heard, all by standard e-mail heads-up forms, as did Photo and Latent and Lab.
He took out a brown loose-leaf binder and made up a murder book. First came the Homicide Occurrence Report with Mobile Main as the address in the right upper corner. Then the basics. A door that opened wide with no sure destination beyond.
McKenna sat back and let his mind rove. Nothing. Sometimes an idea lurked there after he had reviewed the case; not now.