Quint Mitchell 01 - Matanzas Bay

by Francis, Parker

  “You won’t need this anymore,” he said and I heard the gun hit the beach twenty feet away.

  Lying in the wet sand, head pounding, hands behind my back, I weighed my odds. I might reach out blindly and attempt to trip him, but that was such a long shot it almost guaranteed a bullet to the brain or at least another whack to the skull. I felt as impotent as Henderson must have been when Watts pushed him off the top of the lighthouse.

  “You’re a real knight in shining armor, aren’t you, Mitchell? Too bad you stuck your— Shit.”

  Watts stumbled backwards. I took a chance and lifted my head. He held a hand to his cheek where Erin had scratched him. He must have hit her with the gun because she was sprawled in the shallows, her legs splayed.

  Digging my feet into the sand, I propelled myself toward Watts, using my head as a battering ram. I collided with his crotch and he gasped as my skull smashed his tender parts.

  He staggered back with a cry of pain, and I jumped to my feet. Barreling forward and wrapping my arms around him, I drove him backwards. Watts staggered, trying to catch his balance. He pounded the Glock against my kidney as I struggled to hold his arms down. I ignored the blows. A greater fury had taken control of me.

  All of my pent-up stress and anger erupted in a vicious frenzy. With a primal scream, I swung a loopy right against Watts’ temple and dragged him into the water.

  I grasped his gun hand, digging my thumb into the soft tissue of his wrist. Watts grunted and flailed at me with his other hand. I covered his body with my own. He stopped beating on me and for an instant it looked like he’d given up. Instead, he snatched a fistful of hair and yanked savagely. Stars burst in the periphery of my sight. Still holding his wrist, I grabbed his throat with my right hand and let the black rage carry me away. My fingers compressed his windpipe until he released my hair. I wanted to crush the life out of him, but Watts was strong and slippery.

  He gyrated beneath me and we shifted and thrashed together, rolling in the shallow water until we were beneath the walkway. As we struggled, he forced his gun hand upwards, inching closer to my head. I pushed against his arm with every ounce of strength I had. The hand holding the Glock crashed roughly against the side of my head. Tears blurred my vision, but I whipped his gun hand and the gun tumbled into the water.

  Jackhammers banged away inside my skull. Dizziness and nausea swept through me. Watts flipped me over until I was face down in the tepid waters of Matanzas Inlet.

  One of Watts’ knees pressed into my back, and he pushed my face into the slimy silt of the bay. The water was only two or three inches deep at this point, but deep enough. Salt water oozed into my mouth and nose. I held my breath, chest aching, lungs burning. Reaching back, hoping to find an eye to poke or anything to grab, but he stayed out of reach, and I thrashed helplessly.

  My chest ached from lack of oxygen, my lungs felt like they’d explode if I didn’t take a breath. It couldn’t end like this, I told myself. I kicked and bucked in a futile attempt to shake him off, but he stayed on top, holding my head down with one hand while the other snaked around my throat. I jerked violently with my last ounce of energy and his hand tore at my shirt as I twisted away. I felt a sharp tug at the back of my neck and realized Watts had pulled the chain from my neck when he tore my shirt.

  The dolphin medallion. My link to Andrew was gone. With a blackness born of desperation, I pulled my knees under me and rocketed my head back into the bridge of his nose.

  Screaming obscenities, furious heat pulsating through my cheeks, I turned, ramming my head against his face over and over. A manic howling roared through me as our heads collided. I heard the satisfying crunch of cartilage and pulled back. A bright flume of blood poured from Watts’ broken nose. He sprawled backwards in the water, stunned, eyes glazed.

  Still on my knees, I gasped for air, the taste of blood filling my mouth. Watts lay back in the water. Blood poured from his nostrils and he had a nasty gash in his forehead. My hands pushed against my thighs as I struggled to stand. My arms shook uncontrollably and my vision rolled in and out of focus.

  Watts wasn’t finished.

  He sat up and shook his head, droplets of blood flying to either side. One muscular arm rose from the water and I saw the silver chain wrapped around his index finger, the dolphin medallion glinting in the moonlight.

  He groped in the shallows by his knee with his free hand. His fingers dug beneath him as though trying to pull his leg from out of a hole. When he raised his hand it held the Glock. I wanted to throw myself to the side, hoping he’d miss, but all of my reserves had been burned. As he pointed the pistol at me, its ugly black snout dripping water, I let myself fall back, closing my eyes against the inevitable.

  A pop sounded at the edge of my consciousness. I expected to feel something, even momentary pain. Maybe a wrenching white light as the bullet passed through my brain. Nothing. Opening my eyes, I saw Erin Marrano standing over her brother’s body.

  He lay on his side in the water like he’d curled up for a nap. The bullet had stamped a dark hole into his left temple and a line of blood the color of rose petals trailed down the side of his face. I stared at Erin and for the first time noticed my Smith & Wesson in her hand.

  FORTY-THREE

  It seemed like a night at Disney World with flashing lights from four police cars and an emergency rescue vehicle. Apparently, when Watts crashed through the front gate, it triggered an alarm. A park ranger investigated and quickly called the local authorities from nearby Crescent Beach. They, in turn, called for an emergency medical unit and put in a call to both the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office and the City of St. Augustine Police Department.

  An emergency medical technician had already tended to my many contusions and given me a pain killer. Peering into my eye, he advised me to have my head examined. Too late for that.

  After conversations with officers from the different jurisdictions, I now focused on the familiar face of Sergeant Buck Marrano. Erin and I were sitting on either side of a picnic table in the middle of the park. Marrano stood at the head of the table taking notes as I gave him the details.

  “Let me get this straight.” Marrano’s expression told me he wasn’t totally buying the story. “This guy Watts was Henderson’s son and Erin is Watts’ twin sister? Henderson’s daughter?” He turned towards Erin with a raised eyebrow.

  “Henderson had a set of twins, but he gave them up after his wife died while they were still infants,” I said for the third time.

  Erin shivered despite the oppressive humidity and a temperature hovering close to eighty. She had a wide bandage on her forehead and one of the EMTs had given her a light blanket. She wrapped her arms around herself, grasping the blanket as though expecting a heavy wind. She nodded in response to my statement.

  The confused look still lingered on Marrano’s face. “Why would he kill his own father?”

  I gave him some of the back story I’d learned from Jack Fuller—the adoption scam, the foster homes, the abuse Watts endured. “Somewhere along the line, the abused kid turned into an abuser and then a killer,” I added.

  “You think he tracked down his father intending to knock him off?”

  “That’s what it looks like,” I said with a little shake of my head. I gritted my teeth against the torrents of pain cascading through my brain. I wanted to lie down and let the drugs do their work. “Listen, can we take care of this later? Both of us could use some rest.”

  “Just a few more questions.” Marrano turned to Erin. “Did you know about all this—Watts and Henderson?”

  She glanced at me for a moment before answering. “I knew I was adopted, but had no idea Henderson was my father when I moved to St. Augustine. I didn’t know anything about my birth parents or if I had any siblings.” She shivered again and pulled the blanket tighter around her. “Mr. Mitchell informed me yesterday about my twin brother, but said he’d died of scarlet fever.”

  She looked away, gazing between us in the directi
on of the inlet. “No, I didn’t know Jarrod Watts was my twin brother until tonight.”

  Her face was unreadable in the flashing lights. It reminded me of the statue behind the courthouse, stark and distant, a study in alabaster indifference. I noticed she hadn’t mentioned Henderson’s will or the money she and her brother would have inherited.

  “I had my suspicions, but didn’t put it all together until earlier today,” I added.

  Buck Marrano still looked puzzled, trying to make sense of the strange aggregation of events that began with his brother’s death. I’d already told him what Watts said about following William Marrano to the hunting camp and killing him in a fit of rage. How he later buried Buck’s brother at the excavation site, and planted the evidence in Jeffrey Poe’s storage shed.

  He ran a hand through his curly hair. “I don’t know. You’re telling me Watts killed my brother? He gives his father the heave-ho from the lighthouse, and then tries to kill his twin sister?”

  “Don’t forget Lem Tallabois.” Marrano had already told us they found Tallabois in front of Erin’s house.

  “Right. Tallabois. The kid was a freaking killing machine.”

  “And he almost fed me to the alligators.”

  Marrano stared at me for a moment, lips twisted as though he’d bit into a rancid peach. He scribbled something in his notebook and closed it. “Okay. I guess that’s enough for now. Come in to the station tomorrow and write out your statements.” He moved behind Erin, putting his hands on her shoulders and helping her up. “I’ll give you a ride home,” he said to Erin. “How about you?”

  “I’m fine to drive,” I answered. “I just want to put some distance between me and this place.”

  Together we walked through the curtain of strobing lights toward our cars.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Sergeant Marrano had already taken Erin’s statement by the time I arrived at police headquarters late the next morning. He met me in the lobby and walked me down the hall to his office. After sitting in the chair next to his desk, Marrano handed me a white legal pad and a ballpoint pen, saying, “Write down everything that happened last night. Anything you think might be helpful to us.”

  I clicked the pen a few times, looked at him and asked, “What about Jeffrey Poe?”

  Marrano inhaled and let it out slowly through his nose before answering. “We released him. The chief offered him the apologies of the department and wished him well.”

  I could see he was struggling to keep his emotions under control. I waited. He sighed and said, “And I apologized, too.” The desk seemed to hold some fascination for him. He stared fixedly at it and finally said the words I was hoping to hear. “I’m sorry, Quint. You were right and I was wrong.” He looked at me and I nodded.

  Thirty minutes later, I finished my statement, signed and dated it.

  “You might want to touch base with a man named Jack Fuller,” I said. “He’s the Deputy Director of the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation’s Special Ops Unit, and the man who helped me get the goods on Watts. I wrote his name and number down for you.”

  “Good.”

  I started to get up.

  “There’s another thing you should know,” Marrano said.

  I sat back down. “What’s that?”

  “That night Walter Howard …” He paused and cleared his throat. “When the Klan beat him up.”

  “Yeah, what about it?”

  “I was there.”

  I remained silent. Marrano licked his lips and continued.

  “Everyone knew my grandfather was in the Klan. He was proud of it. To his mind, there was an accepted order of things and he was protecting that order. Know what I mean?” His shoulders were slumped and fatigue etched his face.

  I waited for him to continue.

  “He’d written my father off as a loser, but he liked having me and Bill around. We got to ride in his deputy car from time to time. He took us hunting, and to a few Klan rallies.”

  His chin rested in his hand, his eyes fixed on the floor. I had the feeling he may never have spoken of that night with anyone. He lifted his head, letting his arm drop and looked me in the eye. “People think there’s a lot of my grandfather in me, but I never had the stomach for his kind of white supremacy hatred and violence. When I saw that club come down on Howard’s knee it made me sick to my stomach.”

  Silence smothered the office for a minute before I asked him, “But your brother enjoyed it, didn’t he? Couldn’t wait to take the first swing at Howard.”

  Marrano shook his head. “That’s the thing. Bill wasn’t there that night. He was home sick with mono.”

  “Come on, Howard saw both of you. He’s dead. Why protect him now?”

  “It wasn’t Bill.”

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  He hesitated, and I sensed a shift in his expression as though a great weight had been lifted from him.

  “It was Kurtis Laurance.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Laurance is my cousin. He and Bill were about the same age and pretty tight when we were kids. He used to come to some of the Klan rallies with us, and my grandfather brought him along that night to show us ‘how they dealt with troublemakers and niggers,’ is how he put it.”

  “Laurance is your cousin? This isn’t public knowledge, is it?”

  He shrugged. “His family moved away when he was thirteen or so, and Laurance didn’t move back fulltime until four or five years ago. Naturally, he didn’t want to publicize his family connection to Bill after they began working together on the Matanzas Bay project. Conflict of interest is how it would look.”

  “I’ll be damned.”

  “When you told me you’d met Serena’s uncle I thought you might find out who those two kids were.” His eyes shifted away from mine then back. “I told Kurtis about it.”

  “You told him?”

  “He’s family, so I figured I owed it to him. But only to give him a heads-up in case of any bad publicity.”

  While my brain scrambled to link together the implications in Marrano’s admission, he jumped in again.

  “I’m afraid that’s what provoked your attack at the Alligator Farm. It wasn’t Watts, it was—”

  “Tallabois. Laurance sent Tallabois after me?”

  “I don’t think Kurtis put him up to it. Anyway, we can’t prove anything, and Kurtis denies it all. He does admit telling Tallabois you were becoming a problem.”

  “But killing me seems like a radical solution to the problem.”

  Marrano picked up a stack of papers and tapped them against the desk, evening the edges, before laying them back down. “I went to his house last night after I left you and we had a long talk. Kurtis swears he had no idea Tallabois would attempt to kill you. He said Tallabois hated you and took it on himself after they talked.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “Doesn’t matter what I think. There’s no way I can prove Kurtis is linked to the attempt on your life. Hell, I’m not sure I could prove Tallabois did it.”

  Laurence’s job offer now made a lot of sense. Tallabois botched the job, so Laurance figured he’d buy me off the case.

  “I checked out Tallabois with the New Orleans Police Department and he had a reputation for running his own games and playing outside the rules,” Marrano said.

  I still wasn’t convinced Tallabois had acted on his own. “What about the burglary at Erin’s house?”

  “Kurtis said he and Bill had exchanged correspondence about the Matanzas Bay project, including emails, which might prove compromising if they were misinterpreted, is what he told me. So …”

  “So, Tallabois to the rescue.”

  Marrano nodded.

  “Of course, Laurance knew nothing about that, either, did he?”

  “It was all Tallabois’ idea. Told me the guy couldn’t control his temper, and he was sorry he’d ever hired him.”

  “Did Tallabois find the letters?”
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br />   “I don’t know, but I think not. Probably why he went back last night. Bad timing. Watts shows up and maybe thinks Tallabois is the police or a private bodyguard and kills him.”

  “So what happens now? With Tallabois out of the way and no proof of Laurance’s involvement, I guess he has a clear road to the governor’s mansion.”

  Marrano stood and I did the same. “You probably don’t believe this, but I think he’ll make one hell of a governor.”

  “Sure, like Hitler was one hell of a Chancellor.”

  He walked me down the hall. “Thanks for everything,” I said, and left him standing in the lobby.

  I pulled into Jeffrey Poe’s driveway later that afternoon. He was mowing the front lawn, but killed the engine when he saw me. He wiped his face with the front of a ragged T-shirt that looked like it might have come from his collections of ancient artifacts. Instead of his trademark wide-brimmed hat, he wore a Michigan Wolverines ball cap. A shadow fell across the top of his face masking his eyes.

  I climbed out of my car and walked over to him. “How you doing, Jeffrey?”

  “Much better today. I understand I have you to thank for getting me out of jail.”

  “Erin Marrano should get the credit,” I said. “She’s the one who saved me from the embarrassment of having to explain how I got myself killed.”

  Poe smiled at my sorry attempt at humor displaying the gap in his front teeth. “How ‘bout a beer?”

  We sat on his screened porch while a ceiling fan spun overhead in wobbly circles and made hard clicking noises. I hoisted the bottle toward him and we clinked. “Here’s to what doesn’t kill us, making us stronger,” I said, and took a long swallow.

  He peered at my injured face. “You seem to have taken the brunt of the damage, Quint. I’m sorry, but I do appreciate everything you’ve done for me. You were one of the few people who believed in my innocence. You and Erin Marrano.”

  “It probably would have worked out even if I hadn’t been involved.” I looked at the half-mown lawn and gestured toward the mower. “I hope you’re going to take a few days off before heading back to work.”