Blackwater Sound

by James W. Hall

  “But when the battery dies, it’s over. No more trips. No more chasing.”

  His smile drifted away, eyes blurring.

  “And you’ll come back to work. Start minding the store again.”

  He blinked and returned from somewhere far off.

  “I know this has been hard on you, Morgan. I’m very proud of you, the way you stepped in and took charge. I couldn’t have managed without your help.”

  “So you’ll come back and everything will be like it was.”

  “Someday, sure,” he said. “This can’t go on forever.”

  “No,” she said. “It can’t.”

  He took her hand and gave it a squeeze, then swung back to his work.

  Morgan stood behind him for another moment and watched her father shift through the screens. Entering new data, studying the small mutations that this fresh information made on the global model.

  She watched him type, watched him click the mouse. She reached out and laid a hand on his shoulder but he did not register her presence. He simply continued to type, to move from screen to screen, entering the latest information, then switching back to the global chart to see what effect his new data had on Big Mother’s position.

  Morgan closed her eyes and tried to focus all her being on the palm of her hand. Tried to feel the energy that resonated from her father. But all she could sense were the tiny adjustments of muscle and sinew as he typed, as he clicked, as he peered at the cold, bright, deathless screen.

  Four

  The bar at Sundowners was quiet. Willie Nelson crooning softly from the overhead speakers, the bald, heavyset bartender whistling along. Only Thorn and a couple of schoolteachers on spring break from Chicago staring at each other across the bar. A short, blocky blonde and a tall redhead with a piercing laugh. They talked to him for a while. Told him what they did for a living, where they were from. Going home tomorrow, back to the grind. All those papers to grade. After ten minutes of flirting, they bought him a round, then came around the bar, took the stools on either side of him to watch him drink it. The redhead giggled. They were drunker than he was. Having a lot more fun.

  They leaned behind his back and whispered to each other. The blonde whooped with laughter. Thorn poured the Bilge Burner down his throat and stared straight ahead at their reflections in the dark glass that looked out on the canal. The alcohol wasn’t working. The smell of scorched flesh still lingered and he could hear whimpers echoing from the shadows of the bar.

  The blonde cupped her hand around Thorn’s ear and leaned close.

  “Can I interest you in an orgasm,” she whispered. “Two-for-one special.”

  The redhead scratched a message on his wrist with her fingernail.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “Sorry?” the blonde said. “What’s that mean? Sorry.”

  “It means I’m not that kind of guy. At least not tonight.”

  “Every guy is that kind of guy,” said the blonde.

  “He’s telling us he’s gay, Charlotte.”

  “He won’t be gay after we get through with him,” Charlotte said.

  “You’re drunk,” said her friend.

  “Well, of course I am. This is the Keys, isn’t it? That’s the law down here. Get drunk, stay drunk. Isn’t that the law, Mr. Scruffy Keys Man?”

  “Thanks for the drink,” Thorn said, and got up and moved around the semicircular bar.

  For the next fifteen minutes the two schoolteachers glared at him and murmured to each other till finally Sugarman showed up.

  “Friends of yours?” he said, nodding hello to the schoolteachers.

  “They think I’m gay.”

  “You don’t look gay,” said Sugarman. “You look morose.”

  Sugar was his oldest, closest friend. Jamaican father, Norwegian mother. From that odd mix, he’d inherited a quirky nature, a blend of hot-blooded and serene, sexy island rhythms and cool detachment, a jovial nature, a dissecting mind. He was strikingly handsome with short, dark, curly hair and a thin, straight nose and shrewd dark eyes. His mouth was supple and he had half a dozen different grins at his disposal. His skin was silky and its color was two shades lighter than Thorn’s tan. Wherever he went, Sugar got second looks. Once down in Key West, while walking along Duval, two breathless adolescents mistook him for some TV star and pestered Sugar for his autograph, making such a fuss that finally he signed their napkins to make them go away.

  A few years back Sugarman resigned his job as a Monroe County sheriff’s deputy and opened a private investigation firm down in Tavernier. Since then he’d been scratching by on runaway kid cases and occasional security work. Enough to pay the mortgage and buy groceries, but no frills. Then last summer Jeannie, his wife since high school, decided she’d had enough of flirting with poverty. She filed for divorce. “Irreconcilable economic aspirations,” is how Sugarman put it. Somehow, she won custody of Janey and Jackie, their twin girls. Jeannie carted the two-year-olds and the rest of her possessions up to Miami, where a few months later she moved in with some charlatan who was pocketing large sums by guiding weak-minded souls to their previous lives. Jeannie always had a soft spot for gurus.

  “You realize you’re a TV star, Thorn?”

  “I heard.”

  “They been running the same footage over and over. You’re in your skiff pulling some old guy out of the water. I’ve seen it half a dozen times already. An unidentified Good Samaritan. How’s it feel to be famous?”

  “Shitty,” he said. “Very shitty.”

  Sugarman ordered a Corona. The schoolteachers were arguing. The blonde wanted to move on to another bar. Her friend wanted to go to bed.

  “Thanks for coming, Sugar.”

  “Hey, you call, I come. That’s how it works.”

  “Something’s strange.”

  “Strange?”

  “About the crash.”

  Sugarman took a longer look at him, and shook his head sadly.

  “Oh, no. Here we go.”

  Sugar’s beer arrived and he removed the wedge of lime and took a sip.

  Thorn told him about the boat he’d seen, the three people aboard.

  “So they didn’t want to get involved,” Sugar said. “Nothing weird about that. A lot of people freeze up in emergencies.”

  “Afterwards, at Flamingo the kid came over to me. He was trying to be cagey, but it was clear he wanted to see if I’d noticed them before the crash. Like he was worried I had something on him. He had a weird knife and real dodgy eyes. Talked like some half-assed gangster.”

  “A weird knife and dodgy eyes,” Sugar said. “Hell, let’s go arrest the son of a bitch, toss him in solitary.”

  Thorn told him about going to the library, about the articles on Morgan Braswell, her father, A. J., about driving to Palm Beach, the run-down mansion, the tight security at the plant.

  Sugarman had a sip of his beer. He squeezed some lime into the bottle and had another sip.

  “You’ve been so good lately, Thorn. Everything’s coasting along so nice and easy.”

  “You think I’m making this up?”

  “I was wondering how long it would last. This stretch of tranquillity.”

  The schoolteachers paid their bill and got up. They walked behind Thorn and Sugarman. The blonde leaned close and hissed and flashed her claws.

  “The world springs from your mind, Thorn, and sinks again into your mind. That’s what the Buddhists say. And if you ask me, there’s something to it. You see what you want to see.”

  “That goddamn airplane didn’t spring from my mind, Sugar.”

  They sat in silence for a while, watched the bartender wash the teachers’ glasses. Thorn pushed his drink away. He was wasting good alcohol, pouring it into a bottomless cavity.

  A couple of guys with long hair and Hawaiian shirts came into the bar. The schoolteachers were with them. Everyone laughing. On the same boozy wavelength.

  “There’s nothing weird about this, Sugar? You sure?”

&
nbsp; “Nothing you told me sounds weird, no. Some rich assholes from Palm Beach didn’t want to scuff their manicures. That’s all. I think what it is, you’re shell-shocked. An airplane crashes in your lap, it’s only natural you get a little case of post-trauma. And the way you’re dealing with it, being Thorn, you rush out and start sniffing around, thinking you gotta fix things.”

  Thorn looked over at the schoolteachers and their new friends. Bilge Burners all around.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I’m full of shit.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Yeah, you did. Not in those words, but it’s the same thing.”

  The bartender came over and asked if they wanted another round. Sugar said no. Thorn shook his head.

  “I think the NTSB might want to talk to you. Transportation Safety Board. You’ve heard of them, right? The people that investigate these things.”

  “I’ve heard of them.”

  “They’d probably like to debrief you. You being an eyewitness and all.”

  “What am I going to tell them? I saw the plane crash. It nearly capsized my boat. I don’t know anything else.”

  “You should call. It’s your civic duty.”

  “Sure,” Thorn said. “Soon as I get a phone installed.”

  Sugarman finished his beer and slid it to the edge of the bar. He picked up the tab and kept it out of Thorn’s reach.

  “You want me to, I’ll call them for you.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m going to stay the hell out of this.”

  Sugar got down from his stool and rested his hand on Thorn’s shoulder.

  “You get some sleep, buddy. You’ll feel better tomorrow.”

  “Yeah,” Thorn said. “Some sleep. That’d be nice.”

  Morgan put the leftover Chinese in the refrigerator. Six white boxes. Shrimp fried rice, garlic chicken, the usual. Enough for dinner tomorrow. She wiped off the table, rinsed the plates and silverware, put them in the dishwasher. She corked the Pinot Noir and set it on the shelf. Set up the coffee machine for the morning.

  Johnny was upstairs in his bedroom. Her dad was in his study. Leaving her the woman’s work. Just like they’d treated her mother.

  Morgan turned off the kitchen light and went upstairs and stopped on the landing outside Johnny’s room. Marlon Brando was lecturing one of his thugs, using his muffled Godfather voice, as though his cheeks were stuffed with dental cotton. She stood for a moment listening to the familiar dialogue. Johnny watched them every night, gangster movies. Said it relaxed him. Cagney, Bogart, Pacino, Mitchum. Gunfire coming from his room, sirens, swelling music, fuck this, fuck that. For years she tried making fun of the movies, tried bullying him. Neither worked, so finally she gave up. She wasn’t his mother. If he wanted to wallow in that trash, fantasize an alternate life, it was his own choice. She was only his sister. That’s all she was, a sister and a daughter. Her brother and her father were mature adults. She had to keep reminding herself.

  She went down the narrow hallway and opened the attic door, took a deep breath, and climbed the narrow stairs into the dark, airless heat. It’d been months since she’d been up there. That long since she’d needed to make the journey. But it was coming up on Easter, the anniversary of all the bad shit. And then there was the stuff from work, the pressures, the desperate come-from-behind finish she was trying to pull off.

  A wedge of light angled across the dusty floor of the attic. Passing into the shadows, Morgan bumped her shin against a footlocker. She winced, sucked down a breath, and kept on going, slipping past a broken rocking chair, a stack of old records, a baby bassinet. The cane-back chair was still there. Standing upright now.

  She held on to the back of the chair and stepped onto it, teetering for a second. When she had her balance, she reached overhead into the darkness and found the rafter, and ran her hand down the smooth wood until she came to the nylon rope that her mother had knotted there.

  She touched a fingertip to the bristly end where Johnny’s knife blade had sawed through the strands. She closed her eyes and gripped that stub of rope and held on until the blood ran out of her arm and it began to grow heavy and numb.

  Morgan lay in the dark, her head on Andy’s pillow. His room was the same. Untouched in ten years. His clothes ironed, hanging neatly in his closet. His shelves lined with novels and science texts. His trophies from high school, a photograph of Albert Einstein, a bust of Beethoven. His notes organized in colored folders. His careful script. A treasure trove. Notations, pages of math, detailed technical drawings, his storehouse of ideas. Like some young Leonardo da Vinci, his engineering designs and scientific observations, his experiments light-years ahead of his time. Morgan had managed to decode only one of his ideas so far and it alone had managed to steer MicroDyne back to profitability. There were hundreds of pages of other formulas, detailed drawings of machines and microcircuitry he’d conceived. And there were the anatomical doodles of women with boyish hips and small breasts. Dozens of them. All with Morgan’s shape.

  Morgan could no longer smell his scent on the pillowcase. She had long ago inhaled all those leftover particles. Absorbed them, taken them into her bloodstream. Now there were only the invisible molecules, charged atoms, the last traces of his fairy dust lingering in the air. She breathed them in, let them out. Breathed them in again.

  Then she was drifting into a dream: Andy was writing on a chalkboard, Morgan sitting in the front row of an empty classroom. Andy was walking her through a formula, the numbers hazy in her dream. She squinted at them but couldn’t make them out. She raised her hand, and was waiting for him to turn from the chalkboard and call on her when the phone shook her awake.

  She fumbled in the dark and got it on the third ring. Her hello was deep-throated and groggy.

  “Morgan Braswell?”

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Julie Jamison.”

  “All right.”

  “I’m sorry to disturb you so late, Miss Braswell.”

  “Is this a sales call?”

  “I’m a writer,” the woman said. “I’m calling to confirm a few facts on a story I’m doing.”

  “About me?”

  “Your family,” die woman said. “Do you have a minute? Somebody’s made some pretty serious accusations. We’d like to hear your side of things before we go ahead with this.”

  It was nearly two in the morning when Morgan parked the six-year-old Mercedes in their space at Hobe Bay Marina. Johnny shuffled along behind her, head bowed, mumbling. Morgan marched down the dock. It was breezy and the halyards were jingling and dark water sloshed against the pilings.

  “My thumb aches,” Johnny said. “I think I nicked the bone. It really hurts.”

  “Not now, Johnny. Not now.”

  Their Hatteras was moored in the last slip on A dock. The yellow security lights gleamed against the sleek hull.

  Morgan halted ten feet from the slip and raised her hand. Johnny stopped behind her and started to speak but Morgan shushed him.

  On the side dock that bordered their Hatteras, Jonas Mills, their night security guard, was asleep in a canvas-backed chair. His head propped against a piling. He was Jamaican, father of five. He’d been with the Braswells for over a year. No complaints. At least not till now.

  Morgan stepped over to him. She raised her right foot and planted the bottom of her tennis shoe against the arm of the chair and threw her weight against it. Jonas’s eyes came open and he yelped once and kicked his legs out straight, then tumbled backwards. His skull whacked against the rub rail of the yacht and he dropped ten feet into the glistening water of the harbor.

  She and Johnny peered over the dock and watched him bob to the surface, gasp several times, then begin to thrash.

  “He can’t swim,” Johnny said.

  “It’s time he learned.”

  Jonas reached out for a ladder mounted against the piling, and yowled as his hands shredded against the barnacles.

  “Jesus,” Johnny said
. “You just going to leave him down there?”

  “Unless you want to shoot him. Fill him full of daylight.”

  Gasping, Jonas grabbed hold of the ladder and hauled himself up to the bottom rung.

  She stepped aboard their boat and Johnny followed silently.

  She opened the cabin with her key and switched on the lights in the salon. She went down the narrow gangway to her stateroom. Flung open the door and stalked to her wardrobe and shoved aside the panel.

  “That’s where you hid it, in your closet?”

  “Right there.”

  There were a pair of sandals on the floor. That was all.

  “You’re sure?” Johnny said. “Right there on the floor? Blueprints, too?”

  “That cocksucker.”

  Johnny stared into the closet.

  “Which cocksucker?”

  “Who do you think, Johnny?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who else could it be? Who else had access? No one would question him. No one would think to tell us he’d even come aboard. Everybody’s big buddy.”

  “Arnold?”

  Morgan slammed the closet door shut.

  “That cocksucker,” she said. “That goddamn son of a bitch.”

  Five

  “I thought we were going fishing,” said Lawton Collins.

  “Soon as we’re done here, Lawton. Another minute or two.” Arnold gave him a pat on his bare knee.

  They sat side by side in the high-backed leather booth, Lawton Collins and Arnold Peretti. Both of them seventy-two years old. Longtime buddies.

  Lawton had on his yellow Bermudas with a blue sleeveless T-shirt, nicely weathered by paint specks from projects over the years. His daughter, Alex, said that outfit made him look like a trailer park derelict and tried to dress him better. But the clothes were comfortable and they reminded him of things from the past. Things he couldn’t name, but he could still sense them when he put on those clothes. So he wore them as often as Alexandra would allow.

  Lawton Collins held the box on his lap like Arnold had told him. Everybody at the table was aware of it, like the thing was glowing. Lawton didn’t know what was inside it, but it was as heavy as a goddamn box of rocks.