Tales from Stool 17; Dark Days of Judgment: The Nigel Logan Stories (3)

by Kirk Jockell

  Nigel nodded his head as he looked at the picture. He almost smiled when he thought of the rattlesnake that bit him and the big gator that took him as a prize. He shifted his eyes to the big guy. There was nothing to smile about in that picture, and he felt himself getting angry again.

  Nigel slid the pictures back across the table and said, “Bastards. The both of them.”

  “And you don’t know them? Never seen them before?”

  Nigel was a little annoyed that he was having to repeat himself and it came through when he replied, “That’s what I said. I’ve never laid eyes on them, ever.”

  “Why do you think they were here? Why would they want to come all the way down here from Virginia to do this to you?”

  The sheriff and Nigel looked at each other. Nothing was said at first. Then Nigel said, “I think you already know the answer.”

  “Well, I have my ideas. I just want to get your take on it.”

  “Let’s not play games, sheriff. I hate games. I really do. If you have a specific question you want to ask me, then clear the air and ask it.”

  “Okay ... I’m sorry.” The sheriff pulled out a piece of paper, looked at it and put it back in his pocket. “Terrance ‘T-Daddy’ Lundsford. Is this about him?”

  “It’s the only thing that fits. I have no enemies except for maybe the vermin closest to that worthless piece of shit.”

  “But what were they after?”

  “Hell, sheriff. I don’t know. Goddamn revenge, I guess.”

  “Revenge on an innocent man?”

  Nigel got quiet. He was controlling his anger. He stared across the table and, in a softer tone that shifted the direction of the conversation, said, “Sheriff, I’m not revisiting Virginia. Period. I left all that behind, or at least I tried, when I set out on my boat.”

  “But, if the two are connected...”

  “There is no if. They are connected. There’s no other explanation. So what? It doesn’t change anything. Please. Don’t let the history of my past fog your perception of the current reality. I’m not one to take on the role of a victim. I can take care of myself, but it was me that was attacked. I was beaten and thrown in the trunk of a car. I was taken to Tate’s Hell to die, but didn’t.”

  The sheriff said nothing.

  After a few moments of silence, Nigel said, “Listen. I’m sorry all this happened. Trust me. I didn’t ask for this and neither did you. So let’s get back to why I am here, to help you fill in some gaps.”

  Now it was Sheriff Williamson’s turn to stare at Nigel. They were both leaning in across the table, quiet in their examination of the other. Williamson studied Nigel with over thirty-five years of law enforcement experience. Even in a rural, small-town environment, the one thing Sheriff Lamar Williamson prided himself on was the ability to read people. To him, it’s one of the most important parts of the job. To serve only by the strict letter of the laws means to give away part of your practical application of common sense. Justice isn’t always black and white. After all, the laws we live under were written by men as flawed as the men that break them. Nobody’s perfect and everybody’s guilty of something.

  Then he thought about his retirement, only a few months away. He thought How do I want to spend my final days? Preparing for a life of leisure, or wasting my time chasing after some case with a probable pointless outcome. Justice may have already been served.

  The sheriff relaxed and smiled. Then he sat back and said, “May I call you Nigel?”

  Nigel sat back himself. He even went so far as to rock back on the rear two legs of his chair. “May I call you Lamar?”

  “No,” said Sheriff Williamson with a grin.

  “Good then!” Nigel said with his own smile. “I’ll call you Sheriff. And you can call me Chief.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Nigel didn’t say anything.

  “So, Chief. Earlier you said, ‘I was the one taken to Tate’s Hell to die, but lived.’ Tell me about that last part, about how you lived.”

  And he did, at least for the most part.

  Nigel started, “It was strange. Everything happened so fast and so slow at the same time.”

  He described the lengths he went through to escape from the duct tape that bound his wrists and legs. He relived for the sheriff, the best he could, how he surprised them with the tire iron when they opened the trunk. He shuddered a bit at the memory of the handgun going off as he knocked it away. He shook his head to help remove the memory of being so close to being shot, then said, “After knocking the big guy unconscious, I was able to bust the other one’s ribs and escape the trunk.”

  “So,” the sheriff said, “there was a tire iron? What happened to it? We never found it at the scene?”

  “You should have,” Nigel said. “I dropped it on the ground.” This was truthful, but not the full truth. He wasn’t about to go there.

  Nigel went on to explain how dark it was and how he hid in the grass as the one named Willie searched the area for the gun. He half-smiled as he described the rattlesnake bites and how the skinny one discharged all his rounds in a fruitless attempt to kill it.

  “Hmmm ... that makes sense then. We found the bullets grouped together tight in the ground.”

  Nigel said nothing.

  “What happened next?”

  “That’s when I stood up with the tire iron.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  Nigel looked away toward the wall and said nothing.

  “Well?”

  Talking to the wall Nigel said, “No. No I didn’t.” Then he turned back toward the sheriff and continued, “But I was going to. No doubt.”

  “What then?”

  “He tried to run. His only escape path was the water. That’s when the gator took him. It had to be the biggest gator I’ve ever seen. I’ve never seen such a splash. Just like that he was gone.”

  “What about the other one?”

  “I really have no idea.” Which was a lie. He had his ideas, but he wasn’t going down that road. He continued, “Hell, the guy could still be alive for all I know.”

  “He’s not.”

  And as the sheriff began to pull some more photos out of his briefcase, Nigel said, “Excellent.”

  The sheriff slid the pictures across for Nigel to see. As Nigel studied the shots, the sheriff said, “That’s how we found him. Scattered about the woods. He’d been ripped apart.”

  The sheriff said nothing and watched Nigel’s face as he went through all the photos. Nigel never displayed any sign of shock or surprise. He had that look one has when forced to look at somebody else’s wedding pictures. Stoic and uninterested. When he finished, the photos were stacked up and slid back across the table. “Good riddance, motherfucker.”

  The sheriff put the pictures back into the brief case and asked, “How could this have happened? For him to have been torn apart like that?”

  “I don’t know. At some point the big guy regained consciousness. He snuck up and grabbed me in the dark. He was squeezing the life out me. He cut off my air supply and I couldn’t breathe. I passed out.”

  The sheriff said nothing.

  “Believe me when I tell you, I was shocked when I woke up on the ground. No one was around, so I searched the car, grabbed my stuff and a cell phone I found, and got out of there.”

  “Is that the phone you used to call Red?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  “No,” Nigel lied. “I ditched it in the trash.”

  There was silence between them. They were both thinking. Then Sheriff Williamson said, “Let’s back up a bit. You said that there might have been three of them.”

  “I only saw two.”

  “Yeah, but you said that you half-expected three.”

  Nigel thought about it. The memory of the one unexplained gunshot flashed across his mind. He couldn’t be sure of anything, so he said, “I guess I was wrong.”

  More silence followed before the sheriff s
aid, “I’m not sure how else you can help. This is all you remember?”

  Nigel didn’t get a chance to answer before the sheriff asked, “You don’t remember seeing or hearing anything strange or out of the ordinary?”

  Nigel was quiet before answering, “No. But everything was out of the ordinary that night.”

  The sheriff was quiet and studied Nigel’s eyes. Then he opened the briefcase again. He pulled out two more pictures and asked, “Are you sure? Think hard. This is important.”

  Nigel didn’t take two seconds to look at the pictures before handing them back. “Nothing.”

  The sheriff looked at the two pictures then pulled an old snapshot from his breast pocket and handed it to Nigel. “I took this one myself. About ten years ago. Pretty amazing, wouldn’t you say?”

  Nigel handed back the photo and said nothing.

  The sheriff put the crime scene photos back in the briefcase and closed it. And with great care he put the other photo back in his shirt pocket, patting it flat to create a mental note that it was there.

  “Nigel...” The sheriff chuckled and said, “I’m sorry. Chief. Chief ... I’ve lived in Franklin County my entire life. I have seen a lot, just about everything. I’ve fished every stream, hunted every acre, and driven every mile of road. There hasn’t been much get by me.” He patted his breast pocket again and said, “I was in a deer stand when I took this one. You are one of the very few I have shared it with; not even my wife has seen it.”

  Nigel said, “To preserve the good impressions others have about us, some things are better left unmentioned, even if it’s caught on film from a deer stand, or witnessed while standing in the middle of Tate’s Hell. Some things need to remain a mystery.”

  The sheriff was nodding his head in agreement. Then he said, “So I guess we’ve both seen a lot in our times.”

  “Yes, sir. That seems to be the case.”

  “Oh, shit. Just call me Lamar.”

  The Storm

  The late afternoon light gave way to dusk sooner than normal. Ominous, heavy cloud coverage crept eastward, saturating the western sky with moisture and activity. Rumbles of thunder could be heard in the distance. Storms were coming.

  Nigel took refuge in an Adirondack on the front porch of his little cottage. He was substituting his normal evening beer for club soda and lime. He had already consumed more than his recommended daily allowance of Coors Light and needed a change. It had been a long day at the beach fishing with Red. Not rod and reel fishing, but cast net fishing for mullet.

  As he relaxed, clean from a fresh shower and wearing nothing more than a pair of well-loved khaki shorts, he felt the air move across his skin. He could differentiate between the artificial wind created by the ceiling fan and the outside breeze that was building and coming through the screen.

  It had been a long, but satisfying day. He loves to eat mullet and he’s addicted to tossing the net. And since the only way to catch mullet is with a net, the combination of the two make for the perfect pastime. Sitting there under the fan gave him pause to think about the day he learned to throw.

  There’s a long-standing joke. If Nigel were a castaway, alone on some deserted island with all the world’s finest fishing gear and an unending supply of bait, he would starve to death in a week. He can’t catch a fish to save his life. He’s a hopeless case, even the fish in a stocked pond are safe. Everyone has something, a skill or talent that escapes them. For Nigel, it’s fishing … but not completely.

  Throwing a cast net is an altogether different matter. It was a couple months before the incident in Tate’s Hell that Red gave Nigel his first and only cast net lesson. Red spread the net out making a big circle on the beach and said, “When you throw it, that’s what you want, to open the net up out over the water.” He showed Nigel the series of lead weights along the circumference of the net and explained the importance of not getting them tangled. Then he gave Nigel the hand line and attached it to his right wrist. He had Nigel coil the line and portion of the net in one hand. Then he had him gather up about half of the remaining net and place it with the coil. With the net all made up in one hand, Red showed him where to grab one of the weights with his free left hand. Red looked Nigel over and said, “That’s it. You’re ready to throw. Just make sure that weight in your left hand is the last thing to leave your body. Let the rest of the net clear before you let go.”

  Nigel said, “Show me the motion of throwing.”

  Red pretended to throw the net twice and said, “Let her fly.”

  Nigel gave it a whirl out over the sand. As it launched, it opened up in mid-air and landed as a perfect pancake on the beach. They both looked at it for a long while. Then they both looked at each other. Nigel asked, “That’s good, right?”

  Red said, “Do it again!”

  And he did, and not just once. Each throw resulted in the lead-line expanding to full capacity, the weights thumped in unison as they landed on the beach. Red made him throw it over and over again, until he was sure it wasn’t just beginner’s luck. It wasn’t. Nigel was a natural. Red shook his head and said, “Give me that damn thing.”

  Red made up the net and threw a banana. “Dammit,” he said. He pulled the net off the sand and reached out to Nigel. “Here, throw it again.”

  He did, and it was perfect. Red said, “What the hell. You’ve been holding out on me.”

  “I’ve been trying to get you to show me.”

  “Nigel ... I think this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship.”

  They wasted no time after that first lesson and jumped into Nigel’s truck to roll down the beach. They were headed toward the horn of the cape, keeping a close eye out for the lazy, less-than-acrobatic, flopping jumps of mullet. “There!” Nigel said pointing. Two mullet had taken to the air at the same time. Red looked and found a third.

  They got out of the truck and Nigel made his way out into the water with the net. As he stood in the surf, Red stood in the back of the truck looking for activity in the water. He called out a command to Nigel. “To your right,” hollered Red. “School at two o’clock!”

  Nigel let the net fly. It spread out like a dancing girl’s dress as she spun. It landed wide across the water’s surface. As Nigel took in the line, he felt the pull of the catch. It was strong, more powerful than he would have expected. He looked back at Red. They were both smiling. Red said, “Drag it on out here. Let’s see what we got.”

  The catch flipped and flopped around on the sand. Red started to throw them in a five gallon bucket. There were nine mullet and a couple pin fish that got tossed back into the surf. Red was staring into the bucket overcome with happiness. You could almost see tears puddle in his eyelids. “Dinner!” he said. Then he looked up at Nigel and said, “Get my filet knife. It’s in my other bucket.”

  Nigel did and Red went to cleaning the mullet, being careful to extract the gizzard. Mullet are vegetarians, which is the reason they must be caught with a net and the reason they have a gizzard. Red extracted the first little jewel and held it up to the light. “Yummy.” And threw it in with the beer and ice.

  “Seriously,” said Nigel. “I can’t believe you like that shit.”

  Red ignored the comment, and said, “What the hell are you doing just standing there? Grab that net and get your ass back in the water.”

  He did, and in less than one hour, he netted more fish than he had ever caught in his entire life. Three shy of the limit. For fifteen more minutes, he continued to throw looking for those last remaining fish. No dice. The mullet had moved on. So, on his first outing with the net, Nigel dragged a total of 47 mullet to the beach.

  Working the net today was quite different than that first day. Today was more about stamina and persistence ... and nourishment (beer). The schools were small, as were the catches. But they both stayed after it, each throwing, each taking turns to clean. Red had the biggest single catch between the two of them: three. Most other catches, when there was something in the net, were bro
ught in one at a time. Most of their throws came up empty except for the pin fish, sting rays, and an occasional whiting.

  Throwing a cast net for any extended period of time can be exhausting. After a while the lead weights that make up the skirt of the net start to get a little heavy, but Nigel has the shoulders and arms needed for such punishing activity. Over the course of the day, he must have thrown over 200 times, but there were plenty of beer breaks in between.

  Regardless, it doesn’t matter how big and strong you are, anyone that throws a net like that will pay the price of soreness in the morning. Nigel knew what to expect, so he washed down four Advil PM with his club soda. Eight hundred milligrams of Ibuprofen for the pain and 100 milligrams of Diphenhydramine for a good night’s rest. It was just what the doctor ordered.

  He sat back and listened to the wind and the gentle thumping of the ceiling fan as it chopped at the air. The quiet led him to think too much. His thoughts turned to Tate’s Hell and other recent troubles. He tried to ignore the bad memories, replacing them with happier thoughts, but it was no good. Every bad memory flooded his mind. He needed a distraction, so he got up for some more club soda and tuned in Oyster Radio.

  As he was pouring, another reminder of the night in Tate’s Hell came into the kitchen. It was Nigel’s feral cat, Tom. He decided being inside was far smarter than facing the elements of the approaching storms.

  It wasn’t long after that dreadful night that Nigel installed the small pet door, so Tom could come and go as he pleased. It took a while for him to get used to it, but the cat’s a pro now. Putting in the door was the least Nigel could do, especially after Tom almost surrendered his own life protecting him and the cottage.

  The memory of that day remains fresh in his mind. Nigel relives parts of it every time he sees the cat. He guessed the cat’s memory is pretty good too. The way Nigel sees it, they are in this to the end and are bound by ties thicker than the blood, sweat, and tears that were shed that day.

  “Hey, buddy. Whatcha been up to?”