by Mark Murphy
He could hear some shorebird—a killdeer, perhaps—chirp-chirp-chirping someplace in the distance. Waves thudded dully into the pilings. Mal could taste the sharp tang of seawater as it bit into his tongue. His senses were hyper-alert, nerves hot-wired and ripping impulses like lightning bolts, as if they had been stripped of all insulation.
As he reached the dock house, he saw his outboard dangling in the boat hoist, swaying slightly in the breeze.
Just lower it into the river and we're out of here, he thought.
And then he saw the apparition.
It materialized on the edges of Malcolm's vision, like something out of a nightmare—his own nightmare, in fact. Tall, thin, eyes like coals. Wearing a broad-brimmed hat.
The Thin Man was standing in the corner of the dock house.
He's not real, Malcolm thought.
The man took two steps toward him. His boots jangled as he walked.
Malcolm felt a scream rise in his throat, but he swallowed it. His temples throbbed. His bones ached. Each breath stabbed him in the rib cage like a stiletto.
"You'll fail, you know," Malcolm said.
His comments were met with silence.
"I won't let you frame me," Malcolm said.
The Thin Man was as quick as lightning. He was standing in front of Malcolm and then, suddenly, he was behind him, twisting Malcolm's right arm behind his back.
How could he move that fast? Malcolm thought.
"They've come for you," the man said, his voice a low whisper. "We need to go."
"I'm not going anywhere with you, you . . . you goddamn murderer."
"Get in the boat," he said, shoving Malcolm forward.
"The boat's not even in the water," Malcolm said.
"Not your boat. My boat. Get in."
A sixteen-foot skiff was tethered to the floating dock, bobbing up and down in the waves.
The Thin Man shot a glance toward the house.
"Hurry. They'll be down here soon."
He pushed Malcolm into the skiff, untied the bowline from the deck cleat, and shoved the craft away from the dock with his boot. Moonlight scattered flecks of silver across the waves. The boat drifted silently with the current into the center of the Vernon River. Waves slapped at the boat's fiberglass hull.
When they reached the marsh grass sprouting from the bank at the opposite shore, the Thin Man spoke at last.
Malcolm felt the Thin Man's hot breath in his ear.
"I'm not the person who's setting you up," he said, pulling the ripcord on the engine.
The motor coughed and sputtered before starting up. The man took the tiller and began guiding the little boat along the edge of the marsh.
"If you aren't the killer, who are you?" Malcolm said.
"Name's Billy Littlebear. And right now, I'm your best friend in the whole damn world," the Thin Man said.
14
Both men were silent at first.
A seagull flapped alongside, looked them over, and flew away.
Malcolm glanced at his watch. The watch face glowed in the moonlight.
It was a little before 4 AM.
The little boat chugged downriver, drifting past Beaulieu, where the French fleet had dropped anchor during the Revolutionary War. Hugging the shoreline, they entered the murky waters of Green Island Sound. Salt spray splattered Malcolm's lips. The water lapped at a jumble of short, sandy beaches and tangles of branches that grasped vainly for the sky like the arms of dead men.
Malcolm was shivering, his pulse throbbing in his temples. His mouth was dry, his palms moist. But there was something else, something that left a bitter taste in his mouth.
Malcolm was pissed.
I could push him over, Malcolm thought, glancing at the other man through the corners of his eyes.
He decided against it. If they fought and the boat flipped over, they'd both drown, or freeze to death, or something. No good any way you slice it.
Better to take my chances on land, he thought.
"We'll pull up here," Littlebear said.
He killed the engine and let the skiff drift onto one of the beaches. The bow struck the shoreline with a soft chuff, disturbing a roosting brown pelican, which flapped its ungainly prehistoric body into the sky.
"Get out," Littlebear said.
"What's to keep me from running away?" Malcolm said. Littlebear shrugged.
"Run, then. This is Green Island. It's uninhabited. When you get done, we'll talk. But you'd be wasting energy that would be better spent on other things."
"You've been following me," Malcolm said.
"Had to. Didn't know when they'd come. But I knew they would."
"What do you want from me, asshole?"
"Look, call me anything you want, but I'm not your enemy. In fact, nobody out there can help you more than I can. The cops just want to bring you in. I can help you find the guy who's framing you."
"How do you know that someone is framing me?" Malcolm said.
"You said so."
"But you seem to know all about it. You weren't surprised at all when I mentioned it. How did you know what I was talking about?"
"Because the same man did the same thing to my brother."
Malcolm felt something settle in him. He had no tangible reason to trust this Thin Man, this Billy Littlebear—if that name was a real one at all. But he had dreamt of the Thin Man, had heard the Thin Man's strange language, and he had not been frightened. When he first saw the Thin Man, he had thought that he might be a mere hallucination, or a ghost. To find out that he was flesh and blood was somehow comforting. And Littlebear seemed to have some knowledge of the desperate situation that Malcolm found himself in.
That, in itself, was the greatest allure of all.
"You're not trying to kill me?" asked Malcolm.
Billy stepped out of the boat onto the beach and stared back at Malcolm.
"Are you stupid?" he asked.
"No. Jeez, Billy Bob Bear or whatever your freakin' name is, I'm a surgeon. Why would you say that?"
"The name is Littlebear. And If I really wanted you dead, haven't I had plenty of opportunities to kill you? I mean, you had me playing hide and seek all over your back yard with that fat-ass dog of yours the other night."
"Well, I . . ."
"Help me out here," said Billy, grabbing the boat's gunwale.
"Don't make fun of my dog," Malcolm said.
Billy glared at him.
The two men pulled the skiff onto the short beach.
"We'll need to hide it. Let's haul it up the bank," Billy said.
They pulled the boat up into the scrub palmettos at the edge of the maritime forest and covered the craft with Spanish moss and palm fronds, rendering its stark white hull nearly invisible.
"That's better," Billy said, wiping his hands on his jeans
"Who are we hiding it from?"
"Everybody," Billy said.
"That's ridiculous."
Billy grabbed Malcolm by the shoulders. Malcolm knocked his arms off.
Billy stared into Malcolm's eyes. His stare was intense. Malcolm had seen it before—in prisoners, in surgery residents hungry for a difficult case, in running backs when the game is on the line and they want the ball.
Hell, he'd seen it in himself.
It was the icy stare of the predator—the eagle who spies a mouse scampering across the wiry grassland, or the cat with its eyes on the oblivious goldfish in a bowl.
Malcolm's eyes reflexively averted, flicking down to the forest floor.
"Listen, boy genius," Billy said. "I'm a cop. And you're just about the most wanted man in the entire state of Georgia right now. Everybody on the Savannah police force, from the Chief of Police on down to the daisy-fresh beat cops right out of the academy, would like to be the hero here and take you down. They think you are a serial killer. Visions of citations are just dancin' around in their heads. They're thinkin' CNN, Fox News, Cops. So you've got to be invisible. Anybody sees you an
d you're done for. I'm telling you, they're out for blood, and this guy who's settin' you up will make certain that they get it."
Malcolm felt something inside him collapse. His bones suddenly seemed to be made of chalk.
"Shit," he said softly.
"You hungry? I brought some Powerbars," Littlebear said, holding up a handful of foil packets.
Malcolm shook his head.
"Food is the last thing on my mind right now," he said. "I want explanations."
"Suit yourself," Littlebear said, tearing off a wrapper. "They're not bad."
They stood at the edge of the forest together, gazing at the river as it captured stray rays of moonlight. Clouds drifted across the sky. In the distance, Malcolm heard the call of an owl. A second one soon answered it, oot-oowah, its eerie call echoing through the dense phalanx of trees.
"So you know about this," Malcolm said at last.
"I do."
"What kind of name is Littlebear? I take it you're not Irish."
"I'm Theminole," said Billy, chewing, his mouth half full of Powerbar. "From souf Florida."
"And how did Billy Littlebear, a Seminole cop from south Florida, manage to show up at the end of my dock with a boat at the precise moment that I was running from the police?"
"That," Billy said, stabbing at the air with his index finger, "is a good question."
The Indian retrieved a smashed pack of unfiltered Camel cigarettes from his jeans.
"Smoke?"
Malcolm shook his head.
"I should give these up. Picked up the habit when I was in the Army. Doesn't help me much when I'm on the job, that's for sure."
He struck a match and held it to the end of the cigarette. Billy's eyes glittered dully, an impenetrable onyx. A jagged scar traversed one eyebrow.
Billy exhaled a thin ribbon of smoke, which drifted under his hat and made it appear as though his head was about to spontaneously combust.
"Let me start at the beginning," Billy said. "That's as good a place as any."
He took another drag on the cigarette.
"I was born and raised on an Indian reservation in south Florida. Little place called Brighton, in Glades County. There's a casino there now, but that wasn't there when I was a kid. Pretty much nothing was there, as a matter of fact. Just five hundred or so Indians, a gas station, and a torn-up bar near Lake Okeechobee."
He took one more puff on the cigarette and stubbed it out.
"You know what Seminole means? It means 'runaway.' We're not actually one distinct tribe. My people at Brighton were descended from the Creeks. We hid in the swamps and the other out-of-the-way places in Florida, the places that nobody else wanted, while the white men took over the coastlines and drove the rest of our people out. They relocated many of the Seminoles to Oklahoma—or just flat-out killed us. By 1858, there were only about 200 or 300 Seminoles left in the whole state of Florida. We laid low for nearly a hundred years, finally gaining our independence in 1957. But it was a hard road. Most of us farmed or worked on crafts, or left the reservation and got jobs elsewhere, like anyone else without an education. Ironic, isn't it? Florida State's football team is named after us and hardly any true Seminoles even got a chance to attend any college."
"But what does this have to do with you ending up on my dock in Savannah, Georgia?"
"I'm gettin' to that. All of this is relevant, believe me."
Billy took a silver flask out of his back pocket, swigged a sip, re-capped it, and put it back.
"My older brother Jim—we called him Jimbo, but everyone in college knew him as Jim Littlebear--was the exception. He was a great high school athlete—football, track, baseball, you name it. He was a natural, like in that Redford movie, a born leader and a good student. Smartest person I ever knew, in fact. Went to FSU, played football and baseball there, then turned down an offer to play pro baseball in order to go to medical school. His dream was to become a surgeon. He wanted to open a hospital in Hollywood to help give something back to our people."
"Like Doc Hollywood?" Malcolm said.
Billy rolled his eyes.
"Hollywood, Florida. Not exactly a magnet community for the stars. But he never got to open the hospital anyway."
"Why not?"
"The tribe has its own constitution and its own government, independent of the state and federal governments. There are several clinics the tribe owns, including a really nice one in Brighton. But the hospital idea got all caught up in tribal politics and went nowhere. So my brother took a position as a surgeon on the faculty of the University of South Florida in Tampa. The whole tribe was still very proud of Jimbo. He was famous among the Seminoles. I felt privileged just to be his little brother."
Billy uncapped his flask again and held it to his lips, then stopped. His dark eyes were someplace else.
"About ten years ago, a girl was found murdered in St. Pete."
Billy took a swig from the flask.
"Her eyes were cut out."
Billy shook his head.
There were tears in his eyes. "There were two more murders in the Tampa Bay area. The whole community was in a panic. The killer removed the eyes of each victim, cutting through the muscles and the optic nerve but leaving the lids intact. The last girl had even more damage done; the killer cut her mouth open from ear to ear. That case was the one that blew the investigation wide open. They found a scalpel at the scene with the victim's blood on it. It had been just dropped there—as if it were left there on purpose."
Billy took one final swig and put the flask away.
"They analyzed the girl's stomach contents and found out that she'd eaten this particular dish that was only served at this restaurant called the Columbian. It's a famous local chain down there. As it turned out, the Columbian's maitre d' remembered seeing the woman the night before because she was with one of their better customers."
"Your brother," Malcolm said.
Billy nodded.
"The two of them had dinner there the night she died. During the autopsy, they found that she'd had sex that night. My brother's semen was found in her vagina. So when they searched my brother's home . . ."
"Oh, my God," said Malcolm.
"The eyeballs from all three victims were hidden in his attic." Malcolm felt nauseous.
Billy wiped a tear from the corner of his eye.
"My brother insisted that he was innocent. He said that he had indeed slept with the murdered woman but that he had seen her safely home that night. But it was his word against the eyeballs and the scalpel. The strength of the evidence was overwhelming. Jimbo was sent to Death Row."
Somewhere in the distance, Malcolm heard the plaintive cry of a shorebird.
"I was on a one-year tour in Iraq during the trial. Army, Special Forces, 10th SFG. Can't exactly claim leave for a family crisis when you're a Green Beret. But when I came home, I visited my brother in prison."
"And he was not guilty," Malcolm said.
Billy shook his head.
"I knew my brother's heart. I could see the truth in his eyes. When he told me he had killed no one, I believed him. I still do, even though he is dead."
This revelation hit Malcolm like ice water.
"Who killed him?"
"The state of Florida. April 17, 2007. Lethal injection, Florida State Prison at Starke. It made all the headlines, with him being a former FSU star and a notable surgeon, to boot."
Billy stared straight at Malcolm.
"So you want to know why I'm here?"
Malcolm nodded.
I think I already know, he thought.
"My brother told me he'd been set up. He made me swear that I would clear his name, that I would restore his honor. So when my tour with the Army was over, I didn't re-up. Instead, I got an appointment with the Seminole Tribal PD. The tribe's allowed to resolve our own issues autonomously; we only turn over things we cannot handle to the state and federal governments. So I can travel outside the reservation to hunt down a lead. Any l
ead."
Billy's dark eyes hardened.
"My family comes from a long line of Indian trackers. My father was a tracker, and my grandfather before him. Growing up, my dad and my granddad taught me everything they knew. The Army took what the tribe gave me and honed it, made it razor sharp."
Billy took a long sip from his flask, closing his eyes as he swallowed.
When he opened them, they glittered like diamonds.
Malcolm felt like Billy was staring right through him.
"I can find anybody. And I will find this S.O.B. and clear my brother's name."
"So how did you find me?"
"My brother and I had some theories about who might have done this to him. First of all, to plan something like this, he had to have done it before. Serial killers don't normally just decide to kill people and set up someone else as the fall guy. Whoever this guy is, it's a game to him. Second, the guy has some surgical experience. The person who cut the eyes out of those women knew just where to cut to cleanly sever all the connections to the eyeball. Third, my brother figured it had to be someone he knew, someone who knew his routine and who knew who he was dating at the time. And that narrowed it down a lot. So I looked online and, on a hunch, looked at serial murders where practicing surgeons had been convicted during the past twenty years. I found three of them besides my brother, scattered all over the country. All three had professed their innocence. One, in Texas, had already been executed by the time I found out about him. I interviewed the other two, one of whom was convicted after Jimbo. Know what I found out?"
Malcolm shrugged.
"I have no idea," he said.
"Every one of them—even the one who had been executed—had been to a surgical meeting in Miami within six months prior to the first murder in their respective series. Every one."
"What about your brother?"
"Him, too."
Malcolm cut a glance at Billy.
"You know I was at a surgical meeting in Miami just last week," Malcolm said.
"I'm quite aware of that."
"So do you have any leads?"
Billy sat down on the ground and leaned against a pine tree.
Malcolm, suddenly overcome with fatigue, sat down as well. The ground felt damp beneath his jeans.