by Ben Rehder
“Hey, I bet you know Meatball, too,” I said.
“Oh, sure,” Zane said. “Everybody knows Meatball. He gets around.”
“He sure does,” I said. “He come in here a lot?”
“Here, there, and everywhere,” Zane said. “I think he goes out every night of the week, when he isn’t working.”
I nodded knowingly and took another drink.
“Shame about what happened on the party barge,” I said.
“Yeah, no kidding,” Zane said. He was done washing glasses. “Hey, hang on a second.” He came around the bar and went over to check on the couple in the far corner. He came back with their empty pitcher, refilled it, then took it back.
When he returned behind the bar, I gave it a minute, then said, “I guess Meatball was working that night, huh?”
“Which night?” Zane asked.
“Friday night,” I said. “When the guy drowned.”
“Yeah, I guess so, since he’s the only deckhand Gilbert’s got right now.”
“That’s gotta be pretty freaky,” I said. “Being out there and suddenly someone’s missing.”
I heard the familiar and unmistakable sound of pool balls cascading downward in a coin-operated table. I glanced backward and saw that the couple from the corner had decided to play.
Apparently Zane didn’t have much more to say about the barge, so I had to keep the conversation going—without sounding like I was more than a guy stopping in for a beer.
“I almost drowned once,” I said. “Tubing on the Comal. Got sucked under on some rapids and almost didn’t make it out. I wasn’t expecting it, so I didn’t have a chance to take a breath before I went under. I’ll say one thing—it made me realize how quickly it can happen, even when you’re a good swimmer.”
“Yikes,” Zane said.
“I’ve never been on one of those party barges, though,” I said.
“It’s fun,” Zane said. “As long as things stay mellow. Problem is, there’s usually at least one asshole on board, and you’re stuck with him for the duration. Sometimes it’s a group of dudes seeing who can be the loudest and most obnoxious. Want another beer?”
“Sure.”
He poured a fresh one and sat it in front of me.
“Thanks. I guess it’s a good thing most of those boats have two levels. So you can move away from the obnoxious guys.”
“Yeah, but if you’re a good-looking lady, they follow you.”
“Speaking of which,” I said, “I heard Starlyn was on that cruise, too. On Friday night.”
“I hadn’t heard that, but it doesn’t surprise me. She goes out on that boat a lot, considering she gets free rides. Obviously.”
I tried not to appear too interested. “She does?”
“Well, yeah, if it’s not sold out.”
“Why? They like to have pretty ladies on board?”
I figured it was another marketing tactic: give free rides to beautiful women and pretty soon men would want to ride that boat. Similar to having a bikini contest at a bar. It brings in the men, who spend money.
“Well, yeah, that doesn’t hurt business,” Zane said. “But also because her stepdad owns the boat.”
Now, finally, I was getting somewhere.
14
At 11:32, Mia got a call from Roscoe Trout on her cell phone. “Ah, fuck it,” he said right off the bat. “Guess we should throw in together and see how it goes.”
“Who is this?” Mia said, just because she couldn’t resist needling him a little.
“Roscoe Trout,” he said, indignant as hell.
“Yeah, okay,” Mia said. “First thing we should do is set up a meeting between Dennis and my brother’s lawyer, so we can—”
“Whoa,” Roscoe said. “Hold on.”
“What?”
“No meeting. Not with Dennis. The lawyer can meet with me.”
“But she’ll have to talk to Dennis eventually. There is absolutely no way around that. And I don’t understand why Dennis is so reluctant to meet with anyone. What’s the deal?”
Mia had decided it was time to push Roscoe harder. If he and Dennis were stringing her along—i.e., scenario one—there would be no harm in pushing. If it was scenario two or three, she stood to gain an advantage by trying to force a meeting with Dennis. As for actually producing her imaginary brother and his imaginary lawyer, Mia could and would handle that when the time came. It was not an insurmountable obstacle by any means.
“Roscoe?” she said, because he hadn’t replied.
She could hear him let out a long sigh.
“What’s the problem?” Mia asked.
“Dennis is the problem,” Roscoe said. “He’s... different.”
“In what way?”
“He’s always been a little out there. There’s no telling what he might say or do.”
“Okay, well, could you give me an example?”
“Not really. He just has a weird sense of humor, that’s all. He likes to say stupid stuff.”
A weird sense of humor? Was that why Dennis had dropped the note for Mia?
“Again, can you give me an example?” Mia asked.
“Man, I don’t know. Not really. He’s just flaky, but not all the time. He can be a smart-ass and a goofball. Reason I bring this up is that your lawyer might not like the way Dennis acts. In fact, we met with a lawyer when all of this started, but he wasn’t interested in the case. I think Dennis turned him off.”
Mia had no idea what to make of this. Was Dennis Babcock’s alleged neurological affliction nothing more than a joke that had gotten out of hand? Not a scam, just a joke, but Dennis got carried away with it? Or maybe Roscoe and his wife had believed it, so Dennis kept the act up.
So Mia had to ask the obvious question—without screwing up the potential partnership she was suggesting by merging Dennis’s case with her imaginary brother’s case.
“Roscoe, did the lawyer think Dennis was faking it?”
There was a big difference between asking that question and asking whether Dennis was in fact faking it.
“Got no idea,” Roscoe said. “All he said was he couldn’t take the case.”
“Okay, well, can’t you just tell Dennis to quit screwing around?”
Roscoe snorted. “That just makes it worse.”
“We’ll deal with it,” Mia said. “The important thing is to arrange a meeting and move forward with the lawsuit. We need to put pressure on the manufacturer of the tetanus shot.”
She could hear Roscoe sucking on a cigarette, but he didn’t say anything.
“Won’t be long before the media won’t care about Dennis anymore,” Mia said. “They’ll move on to the next thing. That means your case will lose momentum. So will my brother’s. We’ll miss the window of opportunity.”
“How do you know so much about all this shit?” Roscoe asked.
“Our lawyer,” Mia said. “And doing research on my own. I want to get some serious cash for Roy. Enough to go around, if you know what I mean.”
“Who the hell’s Roy?”
“My brother.”
Another long pause. Then Roscoe said, “I’m gonna have to think about this some more.”
“If you study these kinds of cases,” Mia said, “you’ll see that we’ll be stronger together, and that means we’ll get the biggest settlement possible.”
“Settlement?”
“Well, yeah, unless you want to wait five or ten years to go to court. Roy’s lawyer can explain all these things.”
Roscoe gave her a noncommittal grunt.
By this point, Mia was confident that Roscoe was not pulling some sort of prank in conjunction with Dennis. A scam, yes, but not a prank. If Dennis’s note was a joke, Roscoe wasn’t in on it. In which case he would be the key in helping Mia expose the scam for what it was. Without knowing, of course.
“Tell me what you’re thinking, Roscoe,” Mia said. “We need to get on the same page.”
“I’ll get back to you,” he sai
d, and he hung up.
So close. Mia felt she was on the verge of breaking this one open. If she had to orchestrate a meeting between Roscoe, Roy, and Roy’s attorney, she’d make it happen.
Five minutes later, the cell phone for R&M Flowers rang. Mia had been monitoring that line ever since she’d given the business card to Roscoe yesterday.
Caller ID listed the caller as unknown, but she answered anyway.
“R&M Flowers,” she said. “What can we arrange for you?”
Nobody spoke for three seconds, and then the call disconnected.
I was still at the Bock Dock, nursing my second beer. Zane had gone into a small room behind the bar. Replacing a keg, probably. Checking the inventory of bottled and canned beer. That sort of thing. When Mia had been a bartender, I had watched her work often enough to know what the job entailed.
Here’s what I knew so far:
Jeremy Sawyer had gotten drunk and flirted with some women on the party barge. Both behaviors were out of character for him.
One of the women was Starlyn Kurtis, the stepdaughter of the boat’s owner, who was named Eric Moss. Starlyn’s boyfriend, Anson Byrd, was also on the boat.
At some point, Jeremy had gone overboard and drowned, and nobody realized he was gone until it was too late.
Meatball had denied that he’d known anyone on the cruise that night, but he obviously knew Starlyn and probably Anson. Meatball was wary when questioned, and the captain, Gilbert Holloway, was downright hostile.
Then, right after I’d left the marina, Creek Guy had shown up at my acreage and assaulted me. He may have been simply trying to discourage me from looking further into Jeremy’s death, or he might have been trying to outright kill me.
The conclusion I drew from all this was that Meatball didn’t want to discuss Starlyn because she was somehow involved with the death of Jeremy Sawyer. Or maybe Anson Byrd was. But how? What had happened? And how had it happened without any witnesses? Surely, even in a group of drunk partiers, there would have been one or two witnesses who were also sober enough to tell the deputies what had taken place.
And what about the burglary and resulting assault at Harvey’s house? Was that related? Was it possible that Harvey held the key to the mystery? Was that why his phone had been stolen? Or could it have been something in his wallet? Or maybe something else had been stolen, but Harvey hadn’t realized it yet.
The couple was still playing pool behind me. I’d watched them for a few minutes, and boy, were they bad.
I’d asked Zane quite a few follow-up questions, of course, when he’d mentioned that Starlyn’s stepdad owned the party barge.
First one was, “Excuse me?”
Then I’d kept digging and learned that the stepdad—Eric Moss—had grown up in this area. Star athlete back in the day for Lake Travis High School. Football, baseball, track. Sort of a golden boy. Was a baseball walk-on at UT and made the team. Played one year in a limited role before injuring his shoulder. So he began to focus on his studies instead. Graduated with honors, just like his stepdaughter. Opened a boat rental company that was wildly successful from the start. Not party barges at that point, but ski boats. Now he had fleets of boats on lakes all over Texas.
Finally I reached a point where I had milked all of the information from Zane that I was going to get. Time to take off, but first, I hit the men’s room. When I came out, a new customer was at the bar, three stools down from mine.
I took two more steps, then froze, totally taken aback.
Mystified.
Befuddled and bemused, even.
Unless I was mistaken, there, sitting twenty feet away, casually drinking a bottle of Budweiser, was Creek Guy.
Very often, in my line of work, you have to react to a particular situation in a matter of seconds. This was one of those times.
I was staring at Creek Guy’s profile, knowing he might turn my way at any moment, and I had to make a decision. Zane and the guy were making small talk, so neither of them was focused on me, but that could change at any time.
Should I confront him? Or attempt to sneak out behind him, and then follow him later when he left? At a minimum, I wanted to identify him. Assuming it really was Creek Guy. I was about ninety percent sure it was.
Sometimes you just have to wing it.
I walked back to the bar and sat in my stool sideways, facing him. Oh, yeah, it was definitely him. He was wearing a baseball cap, but I could see that the upper portion of his forehead was bandaged.
Zane was talking to him, saying something about some skis he had bought recently, when Creek Guy slowly turned to see who had come out of the bathroom.
I was waiting. Grinning big.
His gaze settled on me, and his eyes got real big.
“Fuck,” he said, but it was no more than a whisper—just something that escaped spontaneously.
“We meet again,” I said. “I know it’s trite, but I’ve always wanted to say that in a situation like this. It’s just so perfect.”
Then Creek Guy did something entirely predictable. He tried to pretend I hadn’t just surprised the hell out of him, and that everything was fine, because he didn’t know me at all—right? He ignored what I’d said and turned back toward Zane, trying to act cool.
But Zane had seen what had just happened, and he was confused by it.
“Y’all know each other?” he asked.
Just as Creek Guy began shaking his head, I said, “You bet. This guy tried to drown me yesterday, but I beaned him in the head with a rock. It was actually kind of fun.”
Zane said, “Uh...”
“Then I nailed him with another rock square in the back as he ran away.”
Creek Guy attempted to appear as puzzled as possible, saying, “Dude, I got no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You didn’t take a drama class in high school, did you?”
“Now I’m really lost.”
“You’re overacting.”
“What the fuck’re you—”
“Okay, then tell us. How’d you hurt your head?”
“None of your damn business.”
Zane said, “Guys, I don’t know what this is about, but you need to take it down a notch.”
“What’s your name?” I asked Creek Guy.
“Fuck off,” he said.
I looked at Zane, hoping he’d tell me, but he said, “I’m staying out of this. Y’all just be cool.”
“No problem at all,” I said. I turned back to Creek Guy and kept my voice low and relaxed. “Here’s the thing,” I said. “You left a trail of blood at my place. I called the sheriff’s office to file a report, and a deputy collected some of that blood. You’re looking at a charge of attempted murder.”
“Shit, that’s not even—”
“You tried to drown me,” I said.
“Bullshit.”
“Guys,” Zane said.
“It’s all in the report,” I said. “Everything I told them will match up. They’ll see the injury on your head and probably a big bruise on your back, right? They’ll do a DNA test and that blood will come back to you. You’d better get yourself a damn good attorney. Even then, well, you’re looking at major problems, especially if you have a record already, and I bet you do.”
Creek Guy said nothing. Took a drink of beer and tried to look unconcerned. Had both elbows up on the bar, eyes on the silent TV.
“You might do okay in prison,” I said. “For awhile. But the gangs—they’ll wear you down. Make you do stuff you won’t find pleasant.”
Zane said, “Dude, seriously, you should probably leave.”
I looked at Zane again. “I don’t want to cause trouble for you, okay? But this guy here is a suspect in an attempted murder. You want to give me his name?”
“Not particularly,” Zane said.
“Fair enough,” I said. “But if you do know his name and don’t give it to me, you could also be opening yourself up to some charges. I’m willing to ignore all that, but I’ll
leave when I’m ready to leave. Understood?”
Zane held up his hands. We’re good. No issues here. Take your time.
I returned my attention to Creek Guy. “When I go outside, I’ll see a new vehicle in the parking lot. Yours. I’ll take a picture of the plate and it will be easy for the cops to find you. At that point, you will have no more options. You hear me?”
I waited a moment, but Creek Guy kept quiet, staring straight ahead, trying to ignore me. He hadn’t had any experience with this sort of thing. He didn’t know what to do.
I grabbed a cocktail napkin from a nearby stack.
“Here’s the only way you’re gonna avoid screwing up the rest of your life,” I said. I took out a pen and jotted my cell number on the napkin. I said, “And now I’m about to deliver another cliché. You ready? Here it comes. I need to know who sent you.”
Creek Guy didn’t respond—as I knew he wouldn’t—so I placed the napkin beside his glass of beer.
“I need a name, and I won’t tell anybody where I got it.” I looked at Zane, who hadn’t budged. “You won’t tell anyone either, will you?”
“Hell, no,” he said. “I don’t even know what y’all are talking about.”
Back to Creek Guy. “You’re in way over your head,” I said. “You’ve got twenty-four hours to call me with a name. After that, you really are fucked. That’s a promise. But if you do call with a good name, I might forget what you did yesterday.”
He still wasn’t looking at me, but the sour expression on his face said I’d shaken him up plenty.
I left a twenty on the bar for Zane and walked out. There I saw a newish Chevy Avalanche parked right beside my van. I snapped a photo of the license plate and took off.
15
Of course, I didn’t need the cops to run the plate for me. I had access to a website that allowed me to obtain that kind of information myself, for a reasonable monthly fee.
An hour later, back at my apartment, when I got around to running the plate, the name of the registered owner almost made my laugh. Almost.
Dirk Crider.
Good Lord, this couldn’t get any more convoluted. Everything was linked.
Lawrence Crider owned the Bock Dock. I was betting Lawrence was Dirk’s daddy. Could be an older brother. Or maybe a cousin.