Blackwater Sound

by James W. Hall

  No, she’d work the talk some more, see where it led.

  “You like movies?” she said.

  This time his silence lasted so long, she thought he might’ve left his post.

  Then she heard a harsh rasping and peered up at the hatch cover.

  She blinked, not believing her eyes. She shrank back, teetered on the ladder, had to snap a hand out to catch hold and regain her balance.

  The silver tip of his blade was poking through the lip of fiberglass that held the hatch cover in place. He was sawing through the woven plastic as though it were paper. Even with an extremely sharp blade it would require phenomenal hand strength. But there it was, the weirdly serrated blade working around the lid, following the grooved seat of the hatch cover. Curls of shredded plastic fell into her hair like confetti. He was a quarter-way around. A little more and he could simply stomp on the hatch and it would explode in her face.

  She raised the flashlight, shifted her grip, took aim with the butt, and hammered the blade. The first blow knocked it free of his hand, then she smashed it again and a third time and a fourth.

  “Shit,” he said. “Shit, what’d you do that for?”

  She’d bent the blade at such a severe angle he couldn’t pull it free. She nailed it one more time.

  “Hey! That’s a good knife. What the hell’re you doing? You just ruined the Vaquero Grande.”

  Alex pounded the blade twice more.

  “Okay, okay, you made your point.”

  “You stabbed that old man, didn’t you? That was your knife sticking in his back. The old man driving this boat.”

  The guy was quiet. She heard him resetting his feet. Less than an inch of fiberglass separating them.

  “How the hell do you know about that?”

  “The old man you stabbed is sick and confused. He’s losing his memory. He might not know where he is or why he’s there. I’m here to bring him home. That’s all I want. I don’t care about anything you might have on this boat. I’ll get out of your way. But I want to get that old man back.”

  “I can’t help you there, lady.”

  “But you know where he is, don’t you?”

  He hesitated a half second too long.

  “Hell, no, I don’t know where he is. I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  Alexandra could feel him moving around overhead, hear the grind of his boat shoes against the roughened deck as if he were pacing back and forth, trying to devise a strategy.

  A truck blew past on the highway, tires squealing.

  Alex twisted the lock open. She moved to a higher step, huddling into a crouch. Resetting her feet on the ladder, she cocked her weight against the hatch cover. She lowered her voice, tried to perfume it with a hint of erotic eagerness.

  “Maybe there’s another way to work this out.”

  His movement halted.

  She brought her voice down to a whisper.

  “Do you know what I mean?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t.”

  His voice moved nearer as though perhaps he were squatting close by.

  With a throaty purr, she murmured something deliberately unintelligible.

  “I can’t hear you,” he said.

  She let a second pass, time for him to lower himself still closer. Then she set her hands flat against the underside of the hatch, sucked down a quick breath, and uncoiled her legs, heaving upwards. She took two quick steps up the ladder, the fiberglass door slamming into some solid part of him. His skull perhaps, or knee. Whatever it was it sent him tumbling backwards and broke a sharp yelp from his throat.

  She lurched onto the deck, swung the heavy flashlight against his shadowy shape, glanced off his wrist. He was sprawled on his butt, hands upraised to fend off her blows. She risked another shot and cracked him this time across the forearm and he cursed and scooted backwards out of range.

  She blinked the focus back in her eyes and caught a glimpse of the silver glitter of a blade. A second knife. He was worming backwards past the fighting chair. The skin prickled on Alexandra’s shoulders and neck. She’d vacillated a second too long, lost the momentum of her assault and her advantage. She swung around and scrambled over the edge of the transom, dropped down into the darkness. But she didn’t gauge the distance well, twisting her right knee and crumpling hard against the sandy ground.

  She hauled herself up, struggled into a clumsy trot, taking a quick look back at the beached yacht. If the blond man was pursuing her, he was staying well inside the shadows. She scaled one powdery dune and scuttled down the other side. Halfway down she caught her ankle on a hidden vine, floundered for a moment onto her knees, tipping forward, tottering, then lost her balance completely. She managed to tuck her head, lower her right shoulder and somersault the last ten feet down the steep hill of fine white sand.

  She came to a halt in a grassy ditch. Dizzy and out of breath. Above her the dune glowed with golden moonlight. Somewhere in her tumble, she’d lost her flashlight. She lay still and listened for the squeak of his tread against the fine white grains, the chuff of his approach. But all she heard was the dry whisper of a breeze through the heavy fronds of a coconut palm like some bashful voice murmuring from the sky.

  She got to her feet, staggered across another low dune till she located the Jeep. She climbed aboard, started it, shoved the lever into first, and tried to follow Granger’s tracks back up the steep dune. The engine roared, sand flying behind her, the wheels slewing, but the Jeep plowed doggedly up the hill and crested the dune a few feet from the highway. She bumped onto the asphalt and slammed through the gears. Twenty yards ahead a white Toyota was parked on the shoulder of the road. Alex gave it a quick look, then revved the Jeep and hauled ass up the narrow highway.

  Eighteen

  A half mile down from Treasure Cay beach, Alex backed the Jeep into a narrow lane and waited for almost an hour before the white Toyota pulled onto the road and headed her way. She stayed put until it disappeared around the first sharp turn, then she cranked the balky engine to life. Grinding the gears, she lurched onto the road, got it into second, wound it to thirty, and slammed it into third.

  She kept the lights off, staying well back of the Toyota. Then after a quick hairpin, suddenly a pair of headlights was bearing down on her.

  The lights flashed and flashed again. Finally Alex realized her mistake and yanked the wheel left, fishtailing out of the path of a jitney bus, its horn honking wildly as it passed.

  Heart hammering, she stayed in the left lane, switched on the lights, pushed the Jeep to forty, then forty-five, and watched as the Toyota’s tail lights came back into view. She kept them in sight as she passed through a small settlement, a few shops, a brightly lit restaurant, then the road was swallowed by darkness again, snaking along the coastline, up and down a succession of gentle hills.

  A good half hour later, after passing through two more small villages, the white Toyota wheeled off the road, making a hard right into the lighted entrance of a hotel complex. Alex drove past, shot a look at the lighted sign out front. Abaco Beach Resort. In a driveway half a mile farther on, she turned around and went slowly back up the highway and cut into the entrance. The Toyota had already passed the guard’s gate and was headed toward the main buildings.

  Alex eased up to the gate, ready to sweet-talk the guard, flash her police ID, whatever it took, when the chunky woman in a white uniform and white pith helmet saluted her and simply raised the gate. Nodding back, Alex let out a long breath and rolled into the compound.

  She parked in a densely shadowed corner of the lot and sat there for a few moments trying to relax the clench in her jaw. She listened to a night bird calling from the high pines and the ocean breeze stirring their needles into an eerie whine. In the distance there was a band playing, and the sound of riotous voices, people high on the night air, on their immense good fortune, partying under the intoxicating tropical skies and a moon as ripe and golden as a fresh peach.

  Two men
lay dead on Treasure Cay Beach. She went over it slowly, tried to absorb the facts, measure the weight of her guilt. As she stared blankly through the windshield, an owl fluttered out of the darkness and landed on the hood. It hopped twice until it was facing in her direction, staring through the windshield with large, unflinching eyes. It was wide-shouldered and wore a long gray shawl like a monk’s cloak.

  She stared back, tempted to take the owl as a sign, a display of godly forgiveness sent down in feathery form. She gazed at the dignified bird for another moment, trying to believe, hoping to feel some small rush of comfort. But it just didn’t wash.

  Those two cops, Darrell and Granger. She’d dragged those innocents into harm’s way without fair warning. Keeping them uninformed because her own mission seemed too critical to jeopardize with such petty worries. She betrayed her training, misled fellow police officers, put them in mortal danger. Two innocent men lay dead. No goddamn owl was going to absolve her of that.

  Behind the hotel office Alex found an outdoor pay phone and managed to get through to the local outpost for the Bahamian police. Without preamble, she gave her name to the man who answered, described the events at Treasure Cay Beach, and told him her present location. The dispatcher was an older gentleman and he seemed bewildered by this grim flood of information.

  “I have the officers’ Jeep,” she said. “I’m following one of the suspects now. I’m at the Abaco Beach Resort in Marsh Harbour.”

  “You are a police officer from the United States?”

  “That’s correct. Alexandra Collins is the name. Miami Police Department. Except I’m not an officer. I’m just an ID technician.”

  “A technician?”

  “Crime scene specialist,” she said. “Photos, fingerprints, like that.”

  She could hear the scratch of his pencil as he crossed out words, added others.

  “And there are two dead police officers?”

  “Yes, their names are Granger and Darrell.”

  “Granger McAdoo?”

  “Granger is all I know,” Alex said. “Granger and Darrell.”

  “And this happened at the beach resort?”

  “No, at Treasure Cay Beach. I’m at Abaco Beach Resort now.”

  “And where is Granger McAdoo?”

  “He’s dead. Lying on a rock at Treasure Cay Beach. His throat was cut.”

  The pencil stopped scratching.

  “Hold on, missus, I must speak to the captain.”

  The phone clattered onto a table and she heard him walk away, calling out in a shrill voice for his superior. Alex kept the phone pressed to her ear. From her position she could see most of the marina, row upon row of yachts sparkling in the moonlight. As she scanned the grounds, a husky man with stringy blond hair marched along the sidewalk heading toward the far dock. She wheeled around, slapped the phone back on the hook, and started after him. The police had enough for now, enough to find the bodies, locate the Jeep. She’d call them later, face the consequences.

  She trailed the stocky man to the last dock. He was twenty or thirty yards ahead, returning helloes from some of the late-night revelers who’d spilled out onto the decks of a few of the boats. He wore dark shorts and a white T-shirt, boat shoes, the standard uniform from what she could tell. Alex hung back, strolling now, trying for a casual self-assurance she didn’t feel. Her clothes were wrong, too citified, too dowdy for this brightly flowered, low-cut, strapless crowd. What she really wanted to do was run the chunky guy down, cuff him, slam him up against a wall, throttle him, then slam him again and again until he spilled his guts, revealed every last twist of the whole dirty mess.

  Instead, she found a piling to lean on halfway down the dock, no one on the adjacent boats. Her hands were trembling but she pretended to gaze out at the moonlit water, with an eye on the blond guy, watching as a tall, muscular man in a uniform stepped out of the shadows and spoke to the stocky man, then moved aside and let him pass. Alex watched as he climbed aboard the white yacht moored at the very end of the dock.

  “His name is Johnny Braswell.”

  She swung around, bumped a shoulder into Thorn’s chest.

  “His boat is the ByteMe. B-y-t-e. Cute, huh?”

  “What’re you doing here?”

  “Same thing you’re doing, I imagine,” Thorn said.

  He had on a blue denim shirt, sleeves rolled to his elbows, khaki shorts, and leather thongs.

  “That’s the Braswells’ security guard down there. Guy by the name of Maurice. Nice enough fellow, but he doesn’t have a very highly evolved sense of humor. I chatted him up earlier this evening and the guy didn’t crack a single smile. Just stood there grinding his teeth, like what he really wanted to do was chew my nose off. So if you were planning to hop aboard the Braswells’ boat to see if Lawton’s inside, I’d think again. Looks to me like it’s going to require a more creative approach.”

  “Sometimes he used a fake finger,” Lawton said. “Nobody ever noticed either, a little hollow finger that he gripped between his other fingers. And he could hide a key in there or a small knife, whatever he needed for a particular trick.”

  “Houdini again,” Morgan said to Johnny. “He’s been talking about Houdini since he came on board.”

  “The magician?”

  “You know another Houdini, brainchild?”

  “He hasn’t said anything about the HERF?”

  “Isn’t that what I just said, Johnny? It’s Houdini this and Houdini that.”

  “Well, it wasn’t on Peretti’s boat. I checked from top to bottom. Zip.”

  “Who was the woman, Johnny?”

  “I don’t know. She was just there with the cops. Maybe she was a cop, too, I don’t know. ‘The work of the police, like that of women, is never over.’ ”

  “And what’s that from, Johnny?”

  “He Walked by Night, 1949. It’s a semi-documentary.”

  She angled close to Johnny, gave his eyes a careful look, trying to keep the anger out of her voice.

  “And how’d she get away, Johnny? This woman.”

  “She attacked me. Almost knocked me out. You want to feel the lump? It’s like an ostrich egg.”

  “No, Johnny. I don’t want to feel your lump.”

  Johnny stared at the stateroom wall.

  “I send you out to do things and what happens, Johnny? What always happens?”

  “I fuck up.”

  “That’s right. You fuck up. Always. Every time.”

  Lawton was watching them. He was sitting on Morgan’s bed. His wrists were clasped together with a plastic handcuff, ankles bound the same way. Just a simple self-locking cable tie that electricians used to bundle wires. Worked great as handcuffs, like what the cops used nowadays in riot situations, though Lawton didn’t think much of them. A flick of a sharp knife and the cuffs were off. All that disposable stuff seemed unprofessional to him. Give him a good pair of steel manacles any day, shackles, irons, something with a little heft.

  The young woman, Morgan, was wearing a white robe. She had short black hair, parted on the side like a man’s, and her eyes were a bluish-white color like a welder’s flame, the kind you can’t look at long or you go blind. Lawton wasn’t looking at her eyes or any of the rest of her, at least trying not to. He couldn’t help himself now and then because her robe kept falling open and one of her breasts peeked out. Lawton had a soft spot for breasts. Even a woman like this, an obvious felon, it gave him a jolt of pleasure to glimpse that pink tip.

  He wasn’t sure why he was here. Wasn’t even sure where he was. He’d known earlier but now he was tired and the reason for his being here had faded. It would come back though. He wasn’t worried about that. All he needed was a reasonable night’s sleep, and he’d remember everything again, and get on with whatever it was he was doing, probably an investigation of some kind. That’s what he did. Lawton Collins was a cop. And a damn good one if he didn’t mind saying so himself.

  “You’d think someone would notice a man wit
h six fingers,” Lawton said. “But no, they didn’t. Not once in his long career did anyone ever notice.”

  Johnny stepped up to the old man, drew back his right hand, and whacked Lawton across the cheek. Red shards flashed in his head. Lawton blinked. His eyes watered and the room went muddy.

  “Johnny, what the hell are you doing?”

  “I’m hitting the man who walked off with the HERF and won’t tell us where he hid it.”

  He slapped him again on the other cheek. The room got muddier, starting to spin a little. Lawton blinked to slow it down.

  “Stop it. The old man can’t remember his own name, how’s he going to remember where he put the HERF?”

  “Early in his career,” Lawton said, “Houdini used to let people from the audience tie him up, use whatever knots they wanted, tie ’em as tight as they liked. Then he’d go into a cabinet onstage. And if he couldn’t untie the knots, he’d cut them with a knife he’d hidden in the cabinet, then he’d hide the cut-up pieces of rope in that same compartment and step out, holding up a new length of rope that he’d stashed inside the box. But later on, when he got really good, he’d sit right out in the middle of the naked stage, all the lights on full-blast, no funny business. Just do it with skill. Kind of skill that only comes with a lifetime of practice.”

  Morgan sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “This is what I’ve been listening to all night. Houdini bullshit.”

  Johnny reached into his pocket and came out with his three-inch Ka-Bar.

  “It was never magic, it was always skill,” Lawton said. “That’s my point. Something might look like magic, but it never is, it’s always just talent. And it works the other way, too, somebody with a big talent, when they do that thing they’ve learned how to do, it looks so amazing, it’s like magic. You stand there looking, shaking your head, not believing what you just saw. So it goes both ways. That’s my point. Magic is skill and skill is magic.”

  He’d gotten their attention. Morgan and Johnny were both staring at him. The woman with the welding-torch eyes, the boy still gripping the knife, a little sweat showing on his forehead.