Gravewriter

by Mark Arsenault

  Flagg clambered to his feet. The driver calmly stepped from the cab. He had a nickel-plated pistol in his right hand. He jabbed the gun in Flagg’s direction and fired.

  The bullet whistled over Flagg’s head.

  “Jesus Christ!” Flagg screamed. He hugged the money and ran up the road.

  Bang.

  Bang.

  A slug hit near Flagg’s feet and ricocheted. Flagg yelped and dashed into the woods, staggering over a fieldstone wall, knocking stones to the ground.

  I promised I’d disappear.…

  Flagg stomped through the forest, plowing through underbrush with the grace of a rolling boulder. He panted and whimpered as he ran, lost and without direction, crashing, bashing through the thick forest, cradling the money against his heart. Branches raked his skin. Sticks and roots grabbed for his feet and tried to twist his ankles. His eyes watered from pain and from fear.

  It was only fifty thou.…

  Bang.

  A white-hot drill bore into his left calf.

  He shrieked from deep in his belly.

  Flagg stumbled, fought to stay on his feet, knocked his head on a downed tree, saw wisps of white cloud twisting in a circle against a perfect blue sky, and then tumbled down a steep hill, still clinging to the money. He landed with a thunk on a path of packed stone dust. The ground beneath him trembled. Lifting his face from the dust and shaking his head clear, Flagg recognized the railroad ties, laid side by side like piano keys, and the steel rails upon them, shining like mirrors in the sun.

  Around a bend, an oncoming train grew louder. Flagg crawled. He rose, wobbly, to his feet. His chest ached. His thighs had turned to pudding. The pain in his gunshot calf spread down his leg, like he had one foot in a bucket of lightning. He staggered ten paces.

  Bang.

  The slug slapped Flagg’s neck and he could no longer breathe. He watched his own feet stumble onto the tracks, between the rails. He felt drunk, or like he was watching somebody else’s feet.

  The high-speed train was on him in an instant. He pushed the money at it. Hit it square on the nose.

  twenty-eight

  To sneak into the boathouse during daylight, Billy and Mia approached by sea. They slipped their kayaks into the bay about half a mile to the south. Billy’s used thirteen-foot fiberglass boat was banana yellow, scuffed like a tiger’s scratching post, tight on his hips and fast in the water. Mia paddled a rented twelve-foot plastic boat, lollipop red, fat, as stable as a beached rowboat, and slow. Not that speed mattered; no matter how anxious they were to search the boathouse, they wanted to look like recreational paddlers braving the dark and ugly water of the upper bay.

  “Let’s stick together,” he told Mia. “We look like a happy couple enjoying the sun on a day off from jury duty.”

  He watched the ying-yang symbol tattooed on Mia’s upper left arm. The symbol flexed as she worked the paddle. Billy felt a squirt of embarrassment.

  A happy couple? We could almost be father and daughter.

  They stayed a hundred feet off a shoreline that cut in and out like the ridges of a key. They passed beach houses on their left, mostly small bungalows, more than fifty years old, with back porches and tiny lawns that dropped off at concrete retaining walls, cracked and pitted by the tides. Many of the homes had small wooden docks. Others had just stairs leading down to the water, or, at low tide, to beaches of foul black muck. The water smelled vaguely of sewage. Billy tried not to think about the untreated waste that oozed into the upper bay each year, carried there when heavy rain overwhelmed the treatment plants. When was the last big rain? he wondered. He was glad he couldn’t remember.

  They paddled around a stone breakwater, like a finger laid in the bay to protect a small cove from storms. Stray cats watched them from between the rocks, or tore at baitfish left by anglers. Seagulls gathered on the rocks, flapping up nosily when a cat came too close.

  Billy pulled the paddle as much with his abdomen as his arms. Ahead on the left, the boathouse appeared suddenly as they rounded a small, jutting peninsula. The front half of the boathouse was built into the slope; the back half stood on twenty wooden piles. The gentle dark cove water rode up and down the posts. On the back of the building, three sheets of plywood covered what had been a panoramic window overlooking the water. A dozen steep wooden stairs led from a short dock to a door. Glass in the door had been smashed and crudely repaired with silver duct tape and cellophane plastic.

  Billy threaded between the piles and beached his kayak in mud under the boathouse.

  Mia’s boat slid up close to his. She said, “Are you going to tell me what we’re looking for before I help you search the place?”

  Sitting in the kayak, Billy slipped off his life jacket and stuffed it between his legs. “You saw barefoot prints in blood leading away from J.R.’s body,” he said.

  “Somebody walked away on tippy-toes.”

  “We assumed that Peter Shadd didn’t slaughter J.R. because he had no blood on his prison jumpsuit, and none on his sneakers.”

  “And his hands—his hands were clean.” She whipped off her life jacket.

  “I try to pay attention to the testimony in court,” Billy said. “Though sometimes I feel like the only one who gives a shit. Early in the trial, we learned that Garrett Nickel’s body was found south of here, having floated down a small stream.”

  “He was shot at some industrial building, you said.”

  “I’ve been wondering what Garrett Nickel was doing at that shitty industrial building; he should have been driving to Maine. But I had overlooked the three items of clothing he was wearing when he went into the stream.” He ticked off the items on his fingers. “One pair of cotton pants. Checkered flannel shirt. Running shoes.”

  She nodded each time, waited for more.

  “Where the bloody hell,” Billy asked, “was his orange prison jumpsuit?”

  In the boathouse attic, Billy toed the edge of the bloodstain but did not step on it. He avoided treading on the stain as he would stepping on a grave. Billy was not squeamish over blood—he had seen plenty flow from his own nose throughout a decade of phoning bookies with his bad hunches. So why couldn’t he step on the stain? Why did his feet refuse to do it?

  Mia stood hands on her hips and tapped her foot in the center of the goddamn thing.

  “Garrett must have had extra clothes with him,” Billy said.

  “How would he get the clothes?” she asked.

  “If what his cell mate said in court was true, then somebody on the outside helped Garrett get a stolen car,” Billy said. “Throwing some old clothes in the trunk would have been easy. Do you know how often J.R. hung out here?”

  “Only to drink,” she said.

  “Was that often?”

  “He could have gotten his mail here.”

  Billy rubbed his chin in thought. He realized he hadn’t shaved in three days. “If there was no blood on the stairs, let’s assume he killed J.R. here,” he said. Billy looked around the room. Old newspaper, forty-ounce beer cans, shopping bags, and a hundred other distinct pieces of trash littered the corners. “And if Garrett killed him here, then his jumpsuit could still be around.”

  “He could have run off and changed someplace else,” Mia said, not with doubt, just offering the possibility.

  “Don’t think so. We know he walled away barefoot—I’d guess he was naked. He stripped off the prison outfit, wiped his hands on it, and shoved it somewhere. Then he put on clean clothes someplace else. Downstairs, maybe.”

  Trash was piled in front of the crawl space over the eves. Billy dug through it. He took Bo’s tiny flashlight from his pocket—the kid had been honored to lend it for his father’s mission. The beam made long shadows behind lumps of trash. He grimaced at the sour stench of rotting waste. “Like the outhouse at a leper colony,” he said.

  She clapped him on the shoulder. “This will be good training if you ever want my job,” she said.

  “This tunnel,” he grumbled
, “smells like the shortcut to hell.”

  Clenching the flashlight in his teeth, Billy crawled on hands and knees through the trash and into the hole. The stench brought tears to his eyes. He blinked past them and breathed through his mouth. Floorboards creaked under his hands. He swiveled his head to shine the light around. A cluster of stubby white candles, burned nearly to their bottoms, sat in a puddle of congealed wax. There were dozens of empty cigarette boxes, crumpled fast-food wrappers, balled-up blankets, an old army-issue sleeping bag, foam coffee cups, piss-stained sheets, batteries bleeding their corrosive guts.

  Mia called to him in the singsongy rhythm of a limerick. “There once was a guy name Billy, whose ass was looking quite silly-crawling through a smell, down the shortcut to hell—where a hundred degrees would be chilly.”

  She giggled.

  Billy laughed, too. “You’re a h’ain in de h’ass,” he told her, the flashlight still clenched in his teeth.

  He pawed through debris as he crawled, trying to keep his hands out of the smears of human waste. The tunnel ended at a wall of planks and two-by-fours. There was no room to turn around.

  “Anything?” Mia called down to him.

  He grunted no.

  Where did you hide it, Garrett?

  Billy backed slowly the way he had come, shining the light around. Black ants scurried from the light like it was the end of the world.

  Wait a sec—would Nickel have had a flashlight?

  Billy closed his eyes. If he had no light, how would he hide something here?

  His hands groped.

  He found a crack to his left, where the plank floor met the sloped roof. The space was just wide enough to sink his fingers in. He pulled. It was stuck fast—at least at this spot. Billy backed up three feet and tried again. The board creaked but would not yield.

  He backed up three more feet, wormed his fingers inside the crack, and yanked. A narrow two-foot board popped up and whacked Billy in the forehead.

  “H’uck!” he cried. He spit out the flashlight and repeated, “Fuck!”

  “What?” Mia yelled. “Are you all right?”

  He rubbed his head. “This boathouse attacked me,” he yelled. Billy grabbed the light, aimed it where the board had been, and gasped.

  A thousand black ants bustled in happy chaos over two bloody sneakers crushed down the hole. He could see the orange jumpsuit below the sneakers; it was stained deep brown.

  “Hey fellas,” Billy whispered grimly to the ants. “I think I saw a Snickers bar a few feet down that way.”

  “Are you talking to yourself?” Mia asked.

  “I’m trying to con some ants, but they’re not falling for it.”

  “They’ve seen your type before.”

  Billy grabbed the sneakers and the fabric, wrestled them from the hole, and shook them. Ants dropped, their hard little bodies sounding like soft rain. They went berserk—this really was the end of their world. Probing beneath the clothing, Billy found a thick book, crusted with dried blood, a knife tucked in it like a bookmark. He gathered all the items from the hole and backed all the way down the crawl space. He tumbled out with an “Ahhhh.”

  The jumpsuit had dried in the rectangular shape of the hole. Mia snatched it from Billy and pulled it back into shape. Nearly the whole thing had been stained with blood.

  “Jesus, what a mess,” Billy said.

  Above the chest pocket a stencil read:

  Rhode Island Department of Corrections

  NICKEL, Garrett

  Black ants crawled over the jumpsuit.

  “The son of a bitch killed J.R.,” Mia said softly, as if awed.

  Billy stood behind her. He imagined his finger lightly tracing the bump of her spine on the back of her neck. She turned around.

  “No skull,” Billy blurted.

  “Huh?”

  “No place to hide a human skull in there that I could see.”

  “The bastard stole his head?”

  Billy brushed ants off his chest and then examined the book. It was four inches by six, two inches thick, and bound in faux leather. He turned it over.

  Gold lettering said simply Holy Bible.

  Billy opened the front cover. “It’s the King James Version,” he said. “Stamped by a prison Bible-studies group.”

  “Not the kind of reading you’d want after stealing somebody’s head,” Mia said.

  The eight-inch hunting knife with a green rubber handle had been stuck in the Second Book of Kings. The blade was jagged and sharp, frightening even at rest in a Bible. Without touching the knife, Billy read one verse aloud.

  “ ‘And he did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord.’ ”

  “For sure,” Mia said.

  Billy closed the book. “The clothes and the Bible came from the prison,” he said. “Whoever helped Garrett Nickel with the getaway car must have left him this knife.”

  “How does this affect the trial?”

  Billy thought about it. “It proves that Nickel and Peter Shadd were both in this place on the same night,” he said. “They must have come together. That’s bad for Shadd. It means he was probably here when Nickel killed J.R.”

  Maybe the rest of the jury is right.… Maybe Shadd is another Garrett Nickel, just in more sympathetic packaging

  “Couldn’t Shadd have shot Nickel by the river and then wandered here by chance?” she asked.

  “Possible, but I don’t like the coincidence.”

  “We should call the cops,” Mia urged.

  Billy grimaced. After ten years betting with bookies, he had gotten used to avoiding the cops. “I can’t,” Billy said. “I’m a juror and I’m defying a court order to stay ignorant about the case except for what happens in court. If I get thrown off the jury, then Peter Shadd gets convicted in five minutes. I can’t let that happen while I still have doubt.” He drummed his fingers on Garrett Nickel’s Bible. “You call the cops … tell them you were here, doing your job, and you stumbled onto this stuff. They’ll have no choice but to accept the story if you stick with it.”

  She looked down to her black canvas sneakers. “I can’t,” she said.

  “You can be totally believable,” he encouraged.

  “I won’t lie to the police. I can’t, Billy—my stepdad … he was chief of detectives. Retired now, but still in touch with his guys.”

  “Ah,” Billy said as he fought the crazy urge to run. So that was how she got access to police computers. He thought about the secrets he had shared with her. He drummed his fingers on the Bible again. He regretted he hadn’t yet told Mia about his dreams. He wanted to share himself with her, but he could not tell her now.

  A cop’s daughter?

  “We can’t just hide this stuff again,” she said. “We solved an open murder case. The killer is dead—but so what? Somebody out there might care about J.R. They’ll want to know who murdered him. Somebody besides me.”

  Billy thought for a minute. “There’s one person I trust—though he’s not going to like it.”

  twenty-nine

  The box from FedEx on Martin’s desk was wrapped tighter than King Tut.

  Martin sawed at the box with a metal ruler. His attention was on the radio. Pastor Abraham Guy was getting close to announcing his candidacy for governor on Galaxy AM:

  “… The lack of morals among those who have run our state the last few generations has left Rhode Island in a precarious position. State services are being cut because of declining revenue. Why is revenue declining? Because business doesn’t want to be here. They don’t want to move their operations, and their high-paying jobs, to a medieval BACKWATER where the local politicians expect to be GREASED for every building permit they issue, or every sewer tiein they allow.…”

  “He’s in top form today,” Carol said. She jotted down the pastor’s quotes in shorthand, in case he mentioned anything inflammatory about criminal justice.

  Martin twirled the box, looking for a weakness to exploit with the edge of the ruler. T
he package, a littler bigger than a shoe box, was light and made no noise when he shook it. As a defense lawyer for the poor, the deranged, and the despised, Martin got a lot of weird mail, mostly incomprehensible letters scrawled in near madness with a leaky ballpoint. But this package, which had been express-shipped from across the city, intrigued him. The return address was simply “J.R.”

  That was what the headless bum in the old boathouse had called himself.

  Martin was an expert in that unsolved murder. He had battled ferociously in pretrial motions to forbid any mention of the mutilated body at Peter Shadd’s trial. If Dillingham wasn’t going to charge Peter with killing J.R.—and he couldn’t because of a lack of evidence-then Martin had to be sure the state couldn’t use the body to poison the jury against Peter. Winning that motion had been a great victory, though Martin had begun to think it might have been the high-water mark of the defense.

  On paper, it might have seemed that the trial was going well—the prosecution had rested, with no direct evidence having been presented that would link Peter to the shooting of Garrett Nickel, and Martin had undercut Larry Home, the star witness of the state’s circumstantial case. But jury trials are more than logic on paper. Martin sensed the jury slipping from his reach. He had lost his best juror to a leap from a parking garage. Those who remained would never agree to acquit Peter Shadd. The best Martin could do was persuade one or two to hold out against the majority and force a mistrial. A do-over.

  “… What this state needs is a return to the principles of morality on which it was founded,” the voice on the radio raged. “It needs leadership that is not afraid to shine the light of truth into the dark corners of political sleaze, which for generations has dragged our state down and slowed our progress. Our state symbol, the anchor on our state flag, should not stand for the terrible weight of corruption.…”

  “It’s getting riskier every day to put him on the stand,” Martin said.

  “Then don’t.”

  “I have no choice, especially now that Franklin Flagg has disappeared.”

  “You still have the assault report Flagg filed against Garrett Nickel.”