As he massaged his throbbing tendons and watched the hypnotic current drift slowly down the creek, he wondered how he was going to eat tonight. He’d spent the last of his shrimping money on the Loki Lightning Redfish Rod—and two sixers of Coronas. It was a greenhorn mistake, laying down his fishing pole unsecured. His shrimp boat first mate Harley would’ve given him hell if he’d—
His thought was interrupted as the escaped Jon boat thumped him hard in the back of the head. He tumbled forward and swallowed what must’ve been at least a quart of salt water. Scrambling out of the path of the boat sent a new shock wave into his knee, and he coughed harshly, expelling the briny water. He gingerly stood up and the boat nudged him like a lost dog.
“Double dangit,” he cursed as he shoved the boat past him down the creek, “stop followin’ me!”
It finally drifted away but seemed to look back plaintively. Troy flipped his hand toward it like he would if it’d been a stray dog. “G’on, now, git!”
Troy waded painfully to the creek bank and began limping his way back upstream. Assessing himself, he was sure his ACL was re-torn, and an egg-sized knot had risen on the back of his head. But all in all, he was ok. He reached up to check the knot and was flabbergasted to realize the straw cowboy hat was somehow still perched on top of his head. And there it would remain.
His fingertips came away from the bump on his head with a splotch of blood on each. Dang boat had split his skin, though probably not bad enough for stitches. Salt water’s supposed to be good for that stuff anyway, he thought.
As he took stock, he was relieved to find his Leatherman tool still strapped to his belt and his Costas still on their croaky strap, though the LSU cap was long gone from his back pocket.
Dang, he thought, lost my favorite hat.
3
Spotted Dick
Deputy Chesney R. Biggins was the first on the scene after the tip had been phoned into the Garden City Police Department. His CB radio had squelched out the call, and he’d been only too happy to leave the Keep Georgetown Beautiful rally and head out to Midway Inlet.
“Dick, we got a hard one for ya out there!” snickered the voice from his crackly CB.
Chesney (whose middle name was Richard) was the constant butt of jokes at the Georgetown PD. His very mature colleagues had discovered that when used together, his middle name, shortened to Dick, and his last name, Biggins, were far more entertaining than any of their old fart jokes. Chesney had heard it all before ... in middle school.
“I’m on it, Todd,” he replied with no hint of emotion in his voice.
“Thank you, Deputy Dick Biggins!” Todd’s boisterous reply was backed by howls of laughter. Chesney reached over and turned the volume down on his radio. Idiots, he thought.
He already had a full front and back page of scribbled notes with key details from the tip called into the station that morning. Holding the yellow pad in his lap he reviewed the facts as he drove:
1) Two hikers—maybe joggers—had phoned in the tip at 7:02am.
2) Both are medical professionals on vacation from Tennessee.
3) Discovered dead body of a man while jogging out by Old Beach Road.
4) Body was bloated and had apparently washed up on the beach (Their medical opinion given the state of rigor was that the man had been dead less than twenty-four hours).
5) Being vacationers, they didn’t recognize the discovered man.
6) Man was dressed in a light-colored suit with some stains around the chest and neck ... blood?
As Chesney read the last word, his cruiser slammed into something and jolted him out of his thoughts.
“What in God’s name!” he blurted as coffee sloshed sideways out of his thermos and burned his right hand. “Great.”
It only took a second for him to register what had happened. With his eyes down, his cruiser had swerved onto the sidewalk and run into a parked ice cream truck. Several startled children were staring in wide-eyed wonder at the police car now jammed into the crumpled mess of the truck.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Chesney muttered, throwing his car into park and wiping the coffee from his hands as well as he could with the yellow pad.
He sighed as he opened his door and stepped out of the cruiser. He immediately recognized the old-timey round ice cream truck that belonged to old-timey Willie.
One-eyed Willie—as the local adolescent crowd called him behind his back while making a dirty joke that they probably weren’t old enough to really understand—was a bent up old black man from down in the deep south of Alabama; Chickasaw, he thought the old guy had told him once. Said he’d been the on-call cook for events at the J.C. Davis Auditorium and the Charles E. McConnell Civic Center. Said he’d learned to make ice cream down there that no one, not no one, could resist.
He reminded Chesney of Dick Hallorann, the chef of the Overlook Hotel, as played by Scatman Crothers in the Stephen King movie, The Shining. He had that odd way of being the grandfatherly comfortable type, and creepy as hell, at the same time. He only had one eye for God’s sake ...
Willie’s truck was a completely round vehicle with a pointed roof that was designed to look like some sort of circus tent. Bright blue and red diamond shapes attracted children from blocks away while hidden speakers warbled out such favorites as Pop Goes The Weasel and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
The impact on the police car was minimal; a basketball-sized dent in the bumper was the extent of the damage. The ice cream truck, however, was not so lucky. The back end was caved in, making the formerly round truck look more like a horseshoe or a crescent moon.
Willie had apparently scrambled up on the coolers in the front of the truck to avoid the crash. He was still sitting there shaking, half in rage and half in fear, and a nutty buddy ice cream cone in one hand and an orange crush flavored push up in the other. Both were halfway melted lumps of streaming, dripping goop sliding down on Willie’s recently spotless white ice cream man coveralls.
“My truck!” he yelled, coming to his senses. “Look whatchu gone ‘n done to my truck!”
It wasn’t easy to look Willie in the eye; his only good eye, anyway. The other was covered with an oddly painted patch that was supposed to look like a clown’s eye. The pupil didn’t quite point in the right direction, giving him not only a crazy looking eye but a lazy one as well.
“Calm down, Willie,” said Chesney, who held his hands up. “Don’t worry, the city will pay for the damages.”
“Pay fuh the dam-a-ges?” The one-eyed ice cream man slid down off the coolers and slopped the two melted treats to the floor. “Do you know what kind a truck dis is?”
“No, sir ... I don’t.”
“Issa fully ree-stored Merry Mobile ice cream truck!!” He said Merry Mobile as one word; murraymobeel.
Willie lurched toward Chesney and the officer swore he could see the eye painted on the patch reddening with anger. Creepy, he thought and shuddered back a step.
“Look, Willie ... ” he raised both hands and eased toward his own car door. “Just go down to the station and file a report. The city will make sure you’re compensated for any repairs.”
“Ree-pairs??” the ice cream man croaked. “Who you know dat ree-pairs nineteen-fifties ice cream trucks, huh?!?”
Chesney said nothing but inched closer to his cruiser. Willie took his ice cream man cap—the kind that looked like an old white sailor’s cap with a black glossy patent leather bill—off his head and smacked it to the ground.
“And here it is, Satuhday ... biggest day’a da week fo an ice cream truck. Dagnabbit!”
Chesney didn’t bother to reply. He quickly opened his car door, slid in, and shifted it into reverse. The metal squealed as his bumper pulled torn pieces of the ice cream truck away as he backed up. Willie screamed again as frightened children, who would surely have therapy-requiring nightmares about this day, scattered in all directions. Clumps of ice cream splattered against Chesney’s back window as he pulled away.
Cruiser number 47 was back on track, heading south on Ocean Highway—though now it was dragging a sparkling piece of red, white and blue metal under its front end.
Ocean Beach road ended in a mix of sand and gravel and Chesney’s tires crunched as he stopped his car. A man and woman were standing beside the road. The unlucky body discoverers, he thought.
The man looked to be in his late fifties with sandy-brown thinning hair and was marathon-runner rail lean. He wore almost distastefully small blue running shorts and a faded brown Life is Good t-shirt with a picture of a jogger on the front. Chesney noted that the man’s socks were pulled up high on his calves and wondered if he was aware that style had gone out with the seventies.
The woman appeared to be around the same age, but more appropriately dressed in a blue road-race t-shirt emblazoned with the bright orange words: Knoxville Track Club Expo. Chesney couldn’t help notice that while the man’s hair looked windblown and unkempt as if he’d been on a long beach run. The woman’s blonde hair appeared to look the same way it might have when she first stepped out the door to go jogging. She was wringing her hands in worry and looked to be on the verge of tears.
As he approached them, the man put out his hand and opened his mouth to speak, but the woman spoke before he could say anything.
“You must be the officer we were told to wait for,” she said quickly and rubbed her arms as if she were cold. “We’ve been waiting for over an hour and it’s really starting to get windy. Well, at least it feels like it’s windier than when we got here, don’t you think so, Jack?”
“I—”
Jack had hardly opened his mouth when she interrupted and spoke—or rather tittered—rapidly and turned to back to Chesney. “But it could just be my imagination, what with all this excitement over the ... well, over the ... ”
“The body, ma’am?” Chesney helped her.
Once again Jack opened his mouth, and once again she butted in. “It really took us by surprise—” she thumbed toward Jack— “and he didn’t even see it. I’m the one who spotted it out here, which is really odd, considering I didn’t have my glasses and my eyes, ugh, they really are getting worse. I don’t know what I’ll do about it ... just keep buying stronger reading glasses I suppose.”
“I’m sure the nice officer doesn’t want to hear about your reading glasses, Dianne” Jack said with a grunt.
“Jack and Dianne ... ?” Chesney pointed his pen back and forth from the man to the woman.
“Oh yes, Jack and Dianne Smith,” the woman said, “from Knoxville, Tennessee. We’ve been coming to Pawleys for over twenty years now.”
She considered this for a moment and launched into it again. “Gosh, almost thirty years, I guess. We used to stay at the Dolphin House on the North end of the Island, but then we moved further south to a new place. It was okay, but I didn’t like the layout of that one. This year, we’re staying in a beautiful place ... ”
Chesney scribbled a new note on his yellow pad as she continued to ramble on:
7) Joggers are Jack and Dianne Smith
It was all but inevitable that the song lyrics entered his mind ... somethin’ somethin’ somethin’ bout Jack and Diane, somethin’ somethin’ somethin’ doin’ best they can.
When Chesney looked up, he realized she was still talking about their various rental homes on Pawleys Island. Jack rolled his eyes and put his hand on her arm.
“I don’t think this is what the officer wants to know.”
“Well, of course, it isn’t, but I was just being polite.”
“It’s okay, really,” Chesney said and looked around them. “I’d actually like to have you show me the body.”
Jack opened his mouth again, and of course, she started speaking before he could get a word out.
“Oh yes, oh yes,” she said excitedly—as if about a new baby in the family or an exciting new restaurant she’d discovered—and laughed uncomfortably. “It’s really incredible to find such a thing. I mean, we are medical professionals, well, he’s in the NICU and I’m ... well, we have seen bodies, but ... it’s not a normal thing for us to ... And naturally, that’s why you drove all the way out here.”
“Yes ma’am, it is.” Chesney snuck a glance at Dianne’s husband who said nothing but rolled his eyes yet again. He had the feeling that he’d have to wade through the woman’s never-ending details for at least an hour when he might’ve gotten the same information (sans asides) from the man in two or three minutes.
She pointed to the other side of the road and walked toward the cruiser. As she passed by, she noticed a scrap of metal hanging beneath the front bumper and raised her eyebrows.
“Did you have an accident on the way?”
“Something like that, ma’am.” Chesney tried to brush off the story casually. “A bit of a tangle with an ice cream truck.”
As soon as he’d said the words, he wished he could take them back.
“Oh gosh, that reminds me of the ice cream truck we used to have in Louisville when I was a little girl,” she said, off again. “It was round and had a tent on top and the man would stand in the middle. I used to sit out by the end of the driveway with a nickel ... can you believe it was only a nickel back then? But, anyway, it’s true, I’d sit out there at the end of the driveway and wait on the ice cream man for hours!”
She laughed and kept telling her story, but Chesney’s attention had shifted to the two bare feet sticking out of the scruffy brush.
He couldn’t help hearing more lyrics in his head:
Somethin’ somethin’ somethin’ life goes on,
long after the somethin’ somethin’ somethin’ of living is gone.
4
Another Hat Trick
Karah Campobello, whose mother couldn’t decide between the names Kelly and Sarah for her firstborn daughter and simply combined the two, had just finished reading page one of her new beach novel—Ocean Blue Murder by Carrie R. Hughes—when she heard the commotion a few docks north of her. Her head was a little fuzzy from a Drunken Jack’s hangover, but she was suddenly alert with the prospect of something exciting happening today.
She was alone in a hammock and guessed the man she spotted hadn’t noticed her lying there. It was something she was used to—not being noticed—but her sophomore year of college was going to change all of that, she was sure of it.
Her dad had just bought her a glittering silver Land Rover that perfectly matched her Ray Ban Wayfarers. Surely the guys at Auburn would notice her cruising the campus in her sexy new ride ... if she went back.
She had come to Pawleys claiming to be in for the week on Spring Break visiting her cousin, Laura-Kate. But back in Auburn, her grades had been slipping and her performance on the volleyball team had been less than stellar. The partying life of a sorority debutante was taking its toll on her and as a result, both her academic and athletic scholarships were in danger of slipping away.
With school having been paid for (or so he thought), her dad had taken the money out of her college fund and bought the new Land Rover; a wonderful and terrible surprise. Karah was now in what she’d call a pickle! Without that money, her dad wouldn’t be able to send her back ... but God that Land Rover was a nice ride. Oh, well, I’ll figure that out before next semester, she thought.
She laid the open paperback book on her stomach and watched the man a few docks away.
He was a good-looking guy, maybe forty, a little lanky but in decent shape. His ruddy tan was the kind she’d seen on fisherman and construction workers. Jet-black almost shoulder length hair crept out from underneath what looked like an LSU baseball cap. His hair matched his jet-black, exquisitely manicured beard. He had sunglasses on, but she thought he must surely have blue eyes ... piercing, navy blue eyes, like the last scream of the ocean before a storm, as her beach novel might call them. She grabbed her phone to snap a pic for Instagram: #springbreak #vaca #bestever.
Karah watched intently as the scene with the boat played out. Man picks
up cowboy hat out of boat, exchanges it for his own cap. Eww, bugs, she thinks but continues to watch. Man pushes boat away from dock, but then leaps into water for no apparent reason—she hadn’t seen his rod and reel fall in—and proceeds to splash and gargle his way downstream doing ... a butterfly stroke? The noise—and the man—continued to move closer, splashing crazily down the creek.
Goosebumps formed on her sun-warmed skin as she watched. This was way more exhilarating than her novel. She bit her lip as the man finally stopped swimming and stood up. He rubbed his knee and peered down into the water ... looking for something, she guessed. His gaze was disappointed and never moved in her direction, though now they were only ten or fifteen feet apart from each other.
He eased back down in the water and she straightened to snap a photo with her phone. At exactly that moment a streak of silver flew toward him from behind.
She gasped but soon realized the boat had caught up with him. Thankfully, it hadn’t appeared to hit him hard enough to do much real damage. Even sprawled out in the creek she could see he was more handsome at this distance than she’d realized. This vaca is going to be amazing, she thought. She added the #hottie #headboat and #ouch hashtags to her Instagram photo.
She almost giggled out loud when he sent the loose boat downstream, waving it off like a ... well, kinda like a stray dog. He was muttering to himself as he limped out of the water and hiked back toward his own dock. The cowboy hat did suit him much better, she thought.
Sitting up she watched as the boat he’d been wrestling with drifted past. She considered swimming out after it and hauling it back up to the man. I found your boat, she would say while batting her eyelashes furiously. But no, she had just washed her hair and didn’t want to get it wet. Besides, he hadn’t seemed too concerned about the drifting boat anyway.
The Complete Troy Bodean Tropical Thriller Collection Page 10