Blackwater Sound

by James W. Hall

“He makes my skin crawl. The man’s truly evil.”

  Wingo reached out, touched her cheek with a fingertip, ruffling the fuzz.

  “I’m going to have to get back to Miami, darling. An hour or two, then I need to go.”

  “What if you didn’t go back?”

  “What?”

  “What if you disappeared, dropped out of sight?”

  “What’re you talking about? I can’t do that.”

  “But what would happen if you did?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Morgan.”

  “You’ve been telling people about the HERF.”

  “Yes.”

  “But they haven’t listened to you. Apparently, they don’t take you seriously.”

  “Like I said, it’s a hard sell. They’re very conservative.”

  “But if you disappeared, Jamie, what would they think then? Would your colleagues be more inclined to believe your claims? Might they think you’d been kidnapped, or perhaps even murdered by these people, these terrorists you were trying to warn them about?”

  He shifted forward, turned his head slowly and studied her.

  Morgan dug the point of the nail file into her thumb, watched her flesh whiten.

  “You think I should disappear?”

  “I think it might work. Yes, I do. I think it might.”

  “I don’t know, Morgan. It wasn’t the plan.”

  “I’d miss you,” she said. “I’d miss you terribly.”

  She turned to him, reached out her hand, cradled his cheek, and guided his lips to hers. His mouth softened and she felt him sinking away into the kiss.

  She plunged the nail file into the side of his throat.

  He jerked back, his eyes fastened to hers, lips puckering as if he meant to whistle a last tune.

  She pulled it out, then plunged it in again. He gagged and grabbed for her hand but she was too quick, and drew it free and rammed it in a third time. His eyes held hers. They were foggy and perplexed as though he were about to ask a question, some final knotty problem that she could help him unravel.

  He coughed and his left eye closed, then his right. Blood retched from his lips, spilled down his chin. He tottered briefly like some tall building whose foundation has been demolished, shock waves passing up through its length. Then he tumbled backwards against the sheets.

  She drew a breath. Stared at his body. His eyelids quivered. There was a spasm in his right arm. A moment later, when he finally grew still, she leaned close and peered at this dark, silent man, at the silver stub of her nail file lodged below his Adam’s apple, at the black thread of blood that coiled down the glossy flesh of his throat, staining her cheerful yellow sheets.

  She lowered herself and pressed against him while his body was still warm. She lifted her head and rested it on his narrow chest, closed her eyes, and touched a fingertip lightly to his hairless nipple. So much like Andy’s. Just that dusting of nearly invisible hair. She eased forward, flattening her ear against his left breast, and listened to the faint, final gurgles of his heart.

  “Lover’s quarrel?”

  Johnny shut the cabin door behind him and stepped into the room.

  Morgan sat up and yanked the sheet over Wingo’s head.

  “What’re you doing in here?”

  “I came to wake you. But I see you’ve already been up for a while. What’d he do, rub you the wrong way?”

  “Get out of here, Johnny.”

  “I never liked that guy. Never understood why we needed him.”

  “We don’t need him. Not anymore.”

  “Just an empty suit, trying to hang out with the tough guys.”

  Johnny paced across the cabin. He wore blue-and-white baggies and a white tank top, his sunglasses hanging around his neck. He spread his legs, and squared off in front of her as if presenting himself for inspection.

  “ ‘You kill a man, and that’s not a pleasant thing to live with for the rest of your life.’ ” A faint smile rose to his lips. “I love Raymond Burr. He was much better at being bad than being good, don’t you think? Kind of like me.”

  “We have to get rid of this body, Johnny.”

  “We can cut him up for bait.”

  “I’m serious, Johnny. We need to get him out of here.”

  Johnny broke his pose and stepped over to the bed and sat down at the edge. He reached out and touched Wingo’s bare right foot.

  “Were you unfaithful with this guy?”

  Morgan stared at him, making an effort to keep the shock out of her face.

  “What did you say?”

  “Unfaithful,” said Johnny. “Were you unfaithful with Wingo?”

  Up on deck, her father started the big diesels. He revved them once, then cut them back to idle.

  “That’s the wrong word, Johnny. Unfaithful doesn’t apply.”

  “Unfaithful to Andy, I mean.”

  Her lungs emptied and she struggled for a moment to refill them.

  “What’re you trying to say, Johnny?”

  “You don’t have to play games with me, Morgan. I knew about you two. I knew what was going on. Andy tried to hide it from me, but I knew.”

  She opened her mouth but the words wouldn’t form.

  “He was kind of freaked out there at the end. He didn’t know what to do.”

  “He talked to you about me?”

  “No, he never said a word. But I could tell. I knew Andy pretty good. I mean, I know I’m not the sharpest tack on the board, not smart in the way Andy was, or the way you are. But I knew Andy. I knew what he was going through.”

  “What do you mean, he was freaked out?”

  “Freaked out,” Johnny said. “Mom came into the room, got in his face. She sent me outside, but I snuck back and pressed my ear to the door and heard the whole thing. She knew what was going on between you two. Man, was she pissed. That’s when Briarwood came up.”

  “Briarwood?”

  “That girls’ school in Vermont where they were going to send you, straighten you out. For delinquents, head cases, dopers.”

  “They were going to send me away?”

  “You mean I know something you don’t? Wow, there’s a first. Yeah, they were going to split you two up.”

  “Keep Andy at home, send me away?”

  “I guess they figured it was you that seduced him. It was, wasn’t it? That’s what I always thought.”

  Morgan got down a breath. Let it out. Eased down another. Working hard to keep from shattering.

  “You know, I always wondered about that, the way Andy died. Coming when it did right after Mom and him had their big talk. Like, if there was some connection. I mean, Andy taking three wraps like that on the leader wire, it wasn’t something he would’ve done. He knew better than that. It just seemed weird, coming right at that moment. Him being so depressed.”

  She looked across at Wingo’s body beneath the sheet, felt the rumble of the diesels through the deck, the boat throbbing like some giant tuning fork.

  “You and Andy always reminded me of those two characters from Double Indemnity. Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck. You know, what Edward G. Robinson said about them.”

  The boat rocked gently from a passing wake.

  “ ‘They’re stuck with each other and they’ve got to ride all the way to the end of the line. It’s a one-way trip and the last stop is the cemetery.’ ”

  Twenty-Two

  When Thorn got back to the boat with fresh coffees, Alexandra was barefoot, stretched out in the fighting chair, wearing one of Thorn’s T-shirts, faded red with a logo from Snook’s Bayside, a Key Largo restaurant. Riding dangerously low on her narrow hips was a pair of his old yellow gym shorts. The traveling clothes she’d packed were in the Jeep the police confiscated the night before. She wasn’t about to try to reclaim them.

  She hadn’t slept well. Twice when he woke in the night Alex was padding around the tiny cabin, stepping in and out of the moonlight, making an aimless circuit. At dawn when
he woke in the bunk across the cabin from her, she was snoring softly, face smushed in the pillow, her body in a tight tuck beneath the sheets. He studied her profile, the long, straight line of her nose, the angled cheekbones, a small sideburn brushing her ear. It was a strong face, Irish but with a whisper of Italian around the nose and eyes. As if some Roman nobleman was lurking in the tangle of her genes.

  He watched her sleep for a minute, but when her snoring sputtered to a halt, he turned and headed outside.

  Now as he stepped aboard, she yawned and stretched a sleepy arm toward the Styrofoam cups.

  “One of those for me?”

  He handed her one and she took a cautious taste.

  “Cream, no sugar,” she said. “You guessed right.”

  “You have that cream-no-sugar quality.”

  She looked at him, then stared down into her coffee.

  “I’ll take that as a fumbling compliment.”

  “Exactly how I meant it,” Thorn said.

  While she sipped, Thorn stood at the transom and surveyed the marina.

  Up and down the docks engines were burbling, lines casting off, crew members wishing friends on adjacent boats good luck for the day’s fishing. Today it was just recreational. But for a large part of the year these same guys competed intensely against each other in a variety of marlin tournaments with a great deal of cash at stake. Twenty-five-thousand-dollar entry fees, two to three million paid out to the winners. Side bets, calcuttas also in the millions. With a percentage of the boat’s take often split among the crew, things could get fierce.

  These boats were manned by blue-collar guys and owned by white-collar bosses, Harvard grads, Yalies, men who’d always finished at the top of their class, and didn’t accept failure gracefully. As a result, many of these mates and captains bounced from boat to boat, moving up or down the pay scale as their reputations flourished or declined. He’d known a few of their kind. Far different from the deep-sea charter guys around the Keys. The charter crew’s status wasn’t measured by the trophy fish they brought in, but by how good they were at attracting repeat customers. A good catch was part of it, but not the only thing they were selling. Good sandwiches, good humor, patient instruction, and icy beer was often enough.

  But these marlin guys were in another class. They were big-league pros. Their yearly wage was based on the size of the boat they crewed: captains got roughly a thousand dollars a foot, mates a little less. Not bad for prepping lures, checking the drag on the reels, keeping the heavy monofilament free of nicks, the boat scrubbed and polished, and for acting as lunchtime grill chef. Three, four thousand a month to stand at the transom and wire the fish. Early mornings, late nights, all day out in the sun, rough seas or smooth, a boy’s life.

  What made the good ones worth the price was the tournaments. Win even one category in the Bisbee Black and Blue down in Cabo San Lucas, and the salaries were covered and the boat was tanked up for a full twelve months.

  Considering they were such elite fishermen, there was nothing snooty about these guys. Their club was small and tight, but not restrictive. If you had the skills to bring giant blues back to the weigh station, it didn’t matter if you were overeducated or undernourished, from Atlanta or Afghanistan, you could sit among them and share their smokes and drink their beers and partake in their late-night rituals.

  For a season in his mid-twenties, Thorn had dabbled in their heady world. Second mate, then first on a fifty-five-foot Hatteras, the Chupacabra. But he quickly tired of the fishing, wearied of the team spirit, the obligatory camaraderie. He was too much of a loner for that kind of work. Too solitary to spend fifteen hours a day bumping shoulders with another twenty-year-old in a cockpit smaller than a motel bathroom. And the fishing itself was a long way from the kind he valued, stalking hair-trigger bonefish across the transparent water of the shoals, where fish and fisherman were on nearly equal terms. Fishing for marlin meant dragging bait for ten hours, replacing it from time to time, clearing the lines, making occasional adjustments to your pattern, but mainly you watched the baits hop and dive and skitter across the everlasting sea. Trance city. Zone-out time.

  Hour upon identical hour, until finally, if you were good enough or had the gods on your side, there came that blinding explosion of fish and water, the cries, the screaming reel, and then the fight, sometimes tedious, sometimes quick, but more about brute strength and resolve and willpower than technical skill. A good marlin fisherman caught more fish than a bad one. But you could drop a sixty-year-old insurance salesman with a paunch and weak knees and sloppy reflexes into the fighting chair and coach him step by step through the routine, and with the captain backing down on the fish at twenty knots, that giant blue fish would more often than not come floundering up to the transom. That was what finally turned Thorn away from the deep sea. Some sickening sense that he had participated in a ritual killing. That he had aided and abetted men who were far less magnificent, far less powerful, and much less capable of beauty and grace than the animal they killed.

  “You’re not exactly Mr. Communication this morning.”

  She had finished her coffee and dropped her cup in the trash bucket. Now she was standing with her arms crossed beneath her breasts, hugging herself against the early morning cool.

  “I was off visiting my youth,” Thorn said.

  “You did this, this kind of fishing?”

  “Briefly,” he said.

  “Couldn’t cut it, huh?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t put it that way.”

  “What way would you put it?”

  He considered it for a moment, holding on to a painful grin.

  “Okay, okay,” he said finally. “I couldn’t cut it, no.”

  It won a tiny smile.

  “Bored you, I bet.”

  “Bored,” he said. “And disgusted me sometimes.”

  “I’ve never actually done it. But Dad talks about it a lot. Sounds too much like a bullfight to me. I’ve seen a couple of those. The big Hemingway spectacle. Bravery and honor and tragedy. A man stepping in the dangerous path of the bull. But come on. What kind of risk is it really? For every matador that gets gored, thousands of bulls die. Hell, it’s probably more dangerous to work in a meat-packing plant.”

  “You talk like a cop.”

  “How’s a cop talk?”

  “Not much patience for bullshit.”

  “And you have?”

  Thorn shrugged.

  “Hemingway still works for me.”

  “I could have guessed.”

  “Not his life,” Thorn said. “All that barroom bullshit was sad. But some of the books stand up. The old guy alone in his boat catching that marlin, that’s worth reading again from time to time.”

  “He catches a fish and the sharks eat it before he gets it back. Sounds like existentialism one-oh-one. Sisyphus and his rock. Best thing about that book is, it’s short.”

  Thorn looked at her, then turned his eyes back to the busy marina.

  “The old guy could’ve quit anytime, but he didn’t. That’s what I liked.”

  “Tenacity,” she said. “The pit bull approach. Clamp on, don’t let go.”

  “Steadfastness,” said Thorn. “That’s a better word.”

  “You a college boy, Thorn?”

  “Hardly.”

  “Sometimes you talk like one.”

  “Is that bad?”

  Alex shrugged.

  “I graduated,” she said. “But I learned more in the first month of police work than in four years of school.”

  Alexandra trained her eyes on the ByteMe. It was moored on the next dock at the very last slip. From Thorn’s slip they could make out only the flybridge and the tuna tower rising above it.

  “My dad’s over there,” she said. “On that boat with the goddamn guy who stabbed him, and I’m sitting here having coffee, shooting the shit.”

  “Shooting the shit with a beach bum.”

  “Okay,” she said. “So I got it wrong.”
r />   “And you don’t even know for sure that Lawton’s over there.”

  “Johnny Braswell as much as told me last night.”

  “You said he denied it.”

  “He was lying.”

  “You could tell that, just hearing his voice.”

  “I know a lie when I hear it.”

  “But we agreed,” Thorn said. “We’d see if the plan works. If it doesn’t, then we’ll think of something else.”

  “I’m giving it an hour,” she said. “Not one minute longer.”

  “I’m impatient, too. Sure, I want to go over there right now, try to muscle our way on board, use whatever force we have to. But even if they do have him, he might be on the boat, or they might have him somewhere else. In a motel room, a private house. He could be anywhere. We go rushing over there, and it fails, we’re screwed.”

  “I can’t do this much longer, Thorn. Just sit here.”

  Down the dock there was a stir, voices, murmurs. Thorn craned to his right and saw Farley Boissont in gray shorts and a tight black T-shirt striding down the dock. His muscles were freshly pumped and seemed to be lit by a quiet radiance from within. Wearing a pair of narrow wraparound sunglasses and bathed in the fresh morning sunlight, Farley resembled some kind of rough-hewn demigod, one of Poseidon’s henchmen. All he needed was a three-pronged spear and strands of seaweed threaded in his hair. Beside him was a man a little older than Thorn with curly gray locks. He wore a white long-sleeved T-shirt and a pair of black running shorts. He was deeply tanned and barefoot and had a well-toned, athletic body, but walking next to Farley, he seemed almost scrawny.

  The two of them helloed and nodded their way down the dock, every eye following Farley’s rolling gait. They halted behind the Heart Pounder and Farley asked for permission to come aboard.

  Thorn waved him on, but the other man held back, staring at Thorn with depthless eyes.

  “I’m A. J. Braswell,” he said.

  “The name’s Thorn, and this is Alexandra. You can come aboard if you like, or we can all get cricks in our necks looking up at you.”

  He didn’t register the remark. Just peered at Thorn’s face, his eyes with a dull and empty shine, like a man so focused on his inner landscape that the world outside his body was a gray, one-dimensional place, not worth his best efforts. Thorn knew all too well about the haunted and the damned, their peculiar trances. The sun orbited their obsession, the galaxies arranged themselves in heavenly alignment around the object of their desire. They were all-powerful. They were nuts.