Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 11 - Flashback

by Flashback(Lit)

  They walked on, circumnavigating the fort. Anna felt no need to talk, and Teddy was busy with her own thoughts, perhaps scripting her confession scene with her husband. The sun baked sweat from their bodies, the wind sucked it away. Anna's throat grew dry. Across the narrow isthmus on Bush Key the sooty terns wheeled in a gray cloud crying their endless cries. Tourists dotted the old coaling docks and sat on beaches enjoying their day in the sun. They reached the sally port and went into the fort. The grass on the parade ground was so dry it crackled underfoot, putting Anna in mind of crispy Chinese noodles.

  When they reached Teddy's back door and the wooden stairs to Anna's second-tier apartment, Anna spoke again. "Would you mind coming up for a minute? There's something I'd like your opinion on."

  The pull to escape into her house, to be with Bob, was so great Teddy's body actually leaned in that direction. For a second Anna thought she'd refuse. Evidently she decided keeping on Anna's good side was worth extending her stay away from her wifely duties.

  "For a minute," Teddy said.

  "Sit down," Anna said when they'd gone inside. Teddy perched on the edge of the couch. At the far end Piedmont opened his eyes the merest of slits. Apparently the idea of sharing his bed with a stranger appalled him. He jumped to the chair, curled up, and resumed his nap.

  "I'm thirsty," Anna said. She opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of sparkling water.

  "Can I pour you a glass of water?"

  "That'd be great," Teddy said. No hesitation. No flicker of alarm.

  Anna put the bottle back and took out two Cokes. "The water's gone flat," she said. "I'd forgotten."

  Teddy pulled the tab. Anna sat by Piedmont.

  "What did you want my opinion on?"

  "Drugs. If somebody wanted to induce mild psychosis, hallucinations, paranoia, what would be the best way to do it? You know, tasteless, easy to get a hold of, easy to administer in liquid."

  Teddy liked story problems. She leaned forward, elbows on knees, can of pop in both hands. "Legal or illegal?"

  "Doesn't matter."

  "Lysergic acid diethylamide."

  LSD. The old classics were always best.

  "Any way to control the dosage?"

  "In a lab, sure, but with street stuff who knows?"

  That fit with Anna's experience. One of the tainted bottles had agitated her only a little. The other had taken the top of her head off.

  "Thanks."

  "Why? You planning on taking a trip?"

  "Just curious," Anna said.

  Another time Teddy might have stayed and tried to wheedle the truth out of Anna. Today the need to be with her crippled husband took precedence.

  Anna walked her home.

  She stood for a minute in the sun. Air-conditioning could be counted on to provide two wonderful moments: the first blast of cool air when coming in from a sweltering summer and the relief of being enveloped in heat when one stepped out again. While standing in the Shaws' tiny courtyard feeling her skin expand and grow supple after the dry arctic winds of General Electric's winter, Anna's radio crackled to life. The noise startled her. With Bob gone the radio waves had been uncharacteristically empty.

  It was Donna the lighthouse keeper on Loggerhead. "Dick Tracy hit pay dirt," she said.

  "I'll be there shortly," Anna replied. Glad to have direction, she set out for the docks.

  With no discernable change in the weather, the sea had entered another season and rose gray and choppy, the low short swells guaranteed to unsettle the stomachs of the uninitiated. To her shame, Anna was not a particularly good sailor and had been known to run for the rail with the best of them. When she was piloting the boat, this was changed; she had a stomach of iron. In these warm seas where the spray was a blessing and not a curse, she enjoyed the ride.

  Patrice was at the house. Donna, Anna was told, was at the top of the seventy-five-foot-tall lighthouse inspecting the railings. The lighthouse had been built in 1886. The railings around the walkway at the top were rusting away. It wouldn't be good for the park service's image to have a visitor plunge to her death while on holiday.

  As Patrice ushered Anna into the tiny and wonderful old house, pots and pans, tiny stove, sink, and two-person dining table lining the stone walls, Donna joined them. Come for no other reason, Anna guessed, than to bask in the cleverness of her beloved. In a serendipitous aping of Daniel, Donna was wiping her blunt square hands on a red grease rag. With the two broad-shouldered rough-voiced women in it, the ground floor room with its pint-sized appliances was further reduced until Anna felt she'd entered a dollhouse.

  "Upstairs," Patrice said and led the way. The open staircase was made to scale with the house. For Anna it was just narrow enough to feel cozy. With a big woman in front of her and another behind, she was suddenly aware of the structure's great age. Treads creaked in protest, and Anna could feel challenged wood thrumming through the soles of her deck shoes. She took comfort in the fact that, should the stairs collapse, Donna's substantial self would break her fall. Then it occurred to her Patrice would fall on top of them both.

  The bedroom was reached without incident. Anna and Donna sat on the bed that took up most of the space. Patrice loaded one of an impressive stack of videotapes into the VCR set beside a television with a thirteen-inch screen.

  "I knew it was here somewhere," Patrice said. "My clerical skills being on a par with Donna's cooking, it took me a while to find it."

  Donna snorted but seemed unoffended.

  "That boat you found-or one like you described to us, might not be the same banana-has been out here a bunch of times in the last couple of months. We get a lot of regulars and I don't videotape them, but these guys were acting fishy."

  "No pun intended," Donna interjected.

  "I never paid much attention to them till they beached on the west shore under the lighthouse." The tape was in. Patrice joined Anna and Donna on the bed and the three of them stared intently at the small screen as a video of white sand and blue water began to play.

  "There's no beaching here-"

  "As you know," Donna interrupted.

  "But that doesn't mean boats don't laud. Donna or I just politely shoo 'em away or, if there's a problem, call you guys. So, this guy beaches." Patrice let the tape lay for fifteen seconds or so in silence. A sleek green missile of a boat thrust into frame and she paused the tape. The picture held but twitched and jerked as if the power of the boat would pull it back into play.

  "This guy," Patrice continued, pointing at the captured image, "beaches that thing. He and another guy jump out. Both Hispanic: Mexican, Puerto Rican, Panamanian-something. So Donna here goes down to shoo them away."

  "It was my turn," Donna explained, apparently needing Anna to know nobody wore the pants in this particular family. "I'd just done my hale-fellow-well-met wave and smile preparatory to chucking them nicely back into the sea. They saw me and got themselves launched, back in the boat and were leaving a wake wide as a three-lane highway before I had time to get my arm down."

  "Donna told me about it and I kept an eye out. Next time they showed, I taped them."

  "You can take the woman out of the policeman..." Donna said.

  "But you can't take the policeman out of the woman," Patrice finished. This was an old joke, the best kind, and the two of them enjoyed themselves.

  "They never beached again. Never even came close. That's why this shot's not all that great. But it's the same boat."

  For a long minute the three of them stared at the tape. Patrice had zoomed in on it but it still was a good ways away and, on the thirteen-inch screen, no more than three inches long. It was a Scarab. Anna had looked up go-fast boats on the Internet and familiarized herself with the various silhouettes. The differences were small, but each designer left his or her mark on the product. The boat Patrice had caught on film was the same metallic green as the one wrecked off East Key. There was no way to prove to a jury the two were the same boat, but Anna didn't need to. At pr
esent she needed only to satisfy herself.

  "It's the same boat," she said.

  Patrice leaned forward and clicked off the television, ejected the tape and gave it to Anna without being asked. "I'd like it back when you're done."

  "No problem." The three of them continued to sit, each alone with her thoughts, blissfully unaware they painted a picture of the "see no evil" monkeys as middle-aged white ladies.

  "Why do you figure they beached here, then took off?" Anna asked at last. She had her own theory but respected Patrice's police skills enough to entertain others.

  "My guess is they thought the Key was unoccupied," Patrice said. "You'd think a great phallic black-and-white tower with a light on top would have tipped them off, but there's a few Keys out here with buildings that are abandoned."

  "You said you'd seen the boat before."

  "Right. It's been out here-or we've seen it-maybe five or six times. Five or six, Donna?"

  "About that but not before it beached and ran. That was the first time."

  Patrice thought about that. "Right," she said. "I had my brain calendar screwed up. Because it beached I got interested, not the other way around."

  "You said it the other way," Donna pushed.

  "I'm old and I'm fat and I lie, but you adore me." Patrice said and smiled at her partner.

  Donna threw up her big grease-stained hands. "What can I say? I like to walk on the wild side."

  The three of them gnawed over the question of the green boat till it was frayed and sodden, stretching the possible from the probable to the fantastical to see if anything shook loose. In the end they returned to earth not that much wiser. The go-fast was not fishing or camping, yet it frequented the park. The go-fast boat was owned or captained by males of a Hispanic cast, two of whom were now dead. The boat had probably beached on Loggerhead mistakenly, either believing it to be uninhabited or believing it to be a different landfall entirely. These paltry facts, put together with the fuel containers that had obliterated the sunken hull and the operator's strong desire to remain unnoticed by anyone in authority, seemed to point to drug smuggling. Smugglers drove powerboats to outrun the coast guard cutters, carried extra fuel, and used isolated and uninhabited places for caches of illegal goods. The drawback to this theory was that if the men killed on the Scarab were drug smugglers, they had to be among the stupidest criminals ever to cross the law. This was a grave insult, given criminals are not known for their cleverness, education, long-term planning or impulse control.

  There were thousands of square miles of Caribbean and Gulf waters. To choose the fifty thousand or so acres of that vastness guaranteed to be crawling with tourists, flown over by seaplanes and patrolled by federal law-enforcement officers in the persons of park rangers, made no sense. A vampire in the Vatican would have a greater chance of going unnoticed.

  Anna took the videotape and went home. There were three things on her To Do list today that couldn't in good conscience be put off. She needed to call Lanny Wilcox and let him know he was not insane. She needed to revisit the Theresa Alvarez abdication/vanishing. And it behooved her to dive the green Scarab one more time. With Bob laid up and Mack on the mainland, she'd be diving alone. Teddy Shaw was an accomplished diver and had come to her aid after the fuel tanks blew up, but Anna couldn't help seeing her in B-movie guise: the angel of death in starched white uniform, cap and squeaky shoes, slipping into a hospital room, dripping syringe in hand.

  As she'd taught herself to do over the years, thus earning an undeserved reputation for never procrastinating, Anna chose to do the most revolting chore first. It was the adult equivalent of holding the nose and gulping the brussel sprouts without having to taste them.

  She docked at Garden Key, got her gear from her quarters then, quickly-surreptitiously, if that was possible in the light of day amid a cloud of tourists and pelicans-took tank, vest and regulator from the storage room behind the ladies' toilets. She had no fears of diving alone in this warm shallow place of coral reefs and sand, particularly since she had no intention of getting within forty yards of anything that looked as if it could roll, fall, shift, explode, scrape or bite. The concern that prompted the desire for stealth was that, were her intentions to become known, she might not be diving alone.

  The water remained choppy but in no way dangerous to anything but digestion. Over a sandy spot near the wrecks she dropped anchor. Having tucked a garbage bag in her vest, she pulled on latex gloves and went over the side. The garbage bag seemed a bit callous, but she figured she would not find any parts of the Scarab's captain too big to fit. In a perfect world-that is to say a world without people-she would have left the pur‚ed remains to feed the fishes. However, when and if the man was identified, it would behoove the National Park Service to have retrieved the body-or what there was left of it-and stored it with proper respect.

  Whatever forces of nature conspired to make the surface waters rough had also stirred up the bottom. Visibility was not great. Anna could only see a hundred feet or so. Because she valued her own skin more than that of the fragmented boatman, she first inspected the engine that had nearly marked her final resting place. There were shiny scrapes and scars that could have indicated the thing was levered up by someone intending to squash her. They could also have been made by the metal prongs of the anchor when it moved the engine so Mack could pull her to safety.

  No epiphanies in the iron, she moved on to her gruesome harvest. The accidental chumming of the man Anna'd known only as a finger and a half had attracted scavenger fish. The only ones Anna was concerned with were two largish sharks. One swam close as if to assure it's tiny prehistoric brain that she was not shark food but a largish fish in her own right. Other than that they showed no interest in her. She was careful to do nothing that might offend them.

  Thirty minutes searching and she had gathered all she could of what had once been a man. That it was a man was left in no doubt. Trapped beneath a metal sink, blown intact from the galley, was half a penis. With a nod to John Wayne Bobbit, Anna put it in her garbage bag. A line from an old Uncle Bonsai song robbed the moment of its gruesomeness. If I had a penis, I'd still be a girl. Anna bagged the evidence and wondered if the song's prophecy would come true. If she'd make much more money and conquer the world. Had ill-timed merriment not so recently gotten her in trouble, Anna would have laughed.

  Scavengers had carried away or eaten what the explosion had not obliterated. She did not find the head-a failure for which she was grateful-or much in the way of edible meat. The right hand was recovered. It had been immersed in salt water for a while, and smaller fishes had been snacking on it, but there was a good chance prints could still be lifted. Oddly enough she found both feet together and relatively intact. One was still wearing a bright blue flip-flop. Because of their humanity it was these and not the coarser discoveries of a shoulder and clavicle or a part of a ribcage that got to Anna. Before she'd had time to do more than rip out her mouthpiece, she vomited. Immediately schools of tiny fish rushed over to partake of the unexpected bounty.

  Life goes on.

  Topside, the bits and pieces in the garbage bag disturbed her more than the actual handling of them underwater. Flopped on deck they became somehow more real. Feeling a little silly but doing it just the same, she covered the black plastic sack with a yellow tarp so she wouldn't have to see it on the trip back.

  Not stopping to put tank and vest away, she gathered up the four corners of the yellow tarp, the black plastic shroud tucked inside, and walked toward the fort as quickly as she could without drawing attention to herself.

  It was three o'clock. Tourists crowded beach and dock, gathering to get back onto the catamaran for the two-hour trip back to Key West. Three giggling girls, the littlest not more than eight or ten years old, caught up in a windstorm of their own making, tumbled into her as she stepped from the sand onto the planks of the drawbridge. One collided with the yellow tarp. Involuntarily Anna cried, "Oh, God!" as if she carried fine china or ni
troglycerin.

  The child was unharmed, her spirits undimmed by this collision with death in the least attractive of its myriad forms. Breathing out her relief, Anna became aware she was too tightly strung. Consciously getting a grip on herself she hurried toward the researchers' dorm and the chest freezer.

  "Hey, what did you bring me?" Daniel called as she passed the shop.

  "Takeout," was her first thought and "seafood" her second, but to hold the thoughts more than a nanosecond would have brought on a second attack of nausea.

  "Don't ask," she hollered back.

  Alone in the researchers' dorm, she tied an apron she found in one of the drawers over her swimsuit and donned a fresh pair of latex gloves. Feeling more like Dr. Frankenstein than Quincy, she sorted through the bits of bone and flesh, bagging each separately. Forensic pathology was an alien science to her. It grew and changed on a monthly basis as brains and technology raced each other into an unknowable future. Bagging the hand, she wondered if freezing it would further destroy the whorls and ridges making identification harder-or impossible. Till she could ask someone, she decided to put it in the refrigerator. The rest went into the freezer like so much venison to await its ride to Key West on the Activa.