by Mark Murphy
She thought for a minute, her arms akimbo.
"Look, I'm a big believer in gut instinct," she said at last. "It's a reporter's gift, I suppose. I can usually smell a liar a mile away, my ex-husband being the lone exception to that rule. And I don't get the sense that you are lying. But I have to ask myself one thing: what if you are lying? What happens if my instincts are wrong again, like they were with Sam?"
Malcolm thought for a minute.
"Come with me," he said.
"Where are we going?"
"Just back to the house. I want you to meet someone. It won't take but a minute, I promise."
She hesitated for a moment before her curiosity got the best of her.
"I'll have you know I've got my cell phone on 9-1-1 speed dial, in case you try any funny business," she said, following him up the shell path to the back door.
"You don't even have to go into the house," Malcolm said. "You can meet my friend on the back porch."
Malcolm unlocked the door and turned off the alarm.
"Daisy?" he said.
The old dog limped out of the laundry room, tail wagging furiously, and ambled out the open back door.
"This is my dog Daisy. Daisy, meet Ms. Baker."
Daisy nuzzled against Tina Baker's outstretched hand.
"See her leg? That's a bullet hole. It's fresh. The real killer shot poor old Daisy when he kidnapped my wife and child. I dressed the wound and she feels better now. So answer this: would I really shot my own dog? And if I had, would she come to me with her tail wagging afterwards when I called her?"
Tina was silent.
"I suppose not," she said. "Point taken."
Malcolm put Daisy back into the laundry room, making certain she had plenty of water and food, and closed the laundry room door before locking the house up once more. He then took a moment to punch in the alarm code.
"Billy's waiting in the boat at the end of the dock," Malcolm said.
Tina's brow furrowed. She rubbed her temples with her fingertips.
"You're going by boat?" she said.
"At least at first."
"Okay, here's my two cents' worth: Suppose I agree to go with you. If you and I head down that dock and get on a boat right now, I've got no cameras and no recording equipment. Then it's your word and mine against everybody else's, and that may not be good enough to dissuade a bulldog cop like Sam. Sam might even think that I'm just trying to make him look bad. However, my camera guy is a worthless pothead. Worse, he's the station owner's nephew, so he knows he can't be fired no matter how stupid his actions are. That idiot would like nothing better than to take the afternoon off and get high. I can send Nick home to his stash of weed, disguise you as my cameraman and get you out to Tybee in my news van. Then we can save your family and film the real killer at the same time.
Deal?"
She extended a tiny, well-manicured hand.
"Deal," he said, taking it.
"Looks like you've got yourself another friend, Dr. King," she said.
"It's Malcolm," he said.
"Tina," she said. "Now, let's get you looking like a genuine member of the WKKR news crew."
"You're not going to make me smoke pot, are you?"
"No, sir. That's only part of the job description if you're related to the station owner."
The reporter and the surgeon walked back through the sun-dappled woods toward the WKKR news van, which was parked right by the front gate of Rose Dhu subdivision. As they walked, Tina called cameraman Nick, who as predicted was happy to take a break from the monotony of work. Malcolm called Billy, whose boat was still idling at the dock.
"You can go ahead to Tybee. I've got alternative transportation," Malcolm said.
"You sure?"
"I'm positive. Now go save my wife and kid. And Billy?"
"Yeah?"
"Thanks. Really. Thanks for everything."
"Don't mention it. It's what we Indian trackers do. Right, kemosabe?"
Malcolm smiled.
"Damn straight," he said.
Malcolm said a silent prayer for the big Seminole as they hung up.
The front gate to Rose Dhu subdivision was a massive stone-and-mortar structure with a guardhouse and a twenty-foot-tall wrought iron gate. The gate, an edifice which had been there for over a century, had once been the main entrance to the Houstoun family's Rose Dhu Plantation. The stone walls of the gate extended back a hundred feet into the woods. The land around the gate had never been developed, never tilled, and never cleared. As such, the gate was surrounded by a small but dense forest of virgin timber, from live oaks covered in Spanish moss and thick-trunked loblolly pines to towering palm trees striving to reach the sun. Vines as big around as a man's arm strung themselves from tree to tree. The forest floor was carpeted with bright green palmettos. The dense foliage stole almost all of the sunlight before it could reach the surface, making the woods around the gate a dark, otherworldly place.
The WKKR news van was parked right by the gate. Five or six other news vans were huddled nearby, on thin strips of grass on either side of the road. A black-and-white police squad car squatted forbiddingly next to the guardhouse.
The patrolman in the squad car was a corpulent red-faced kid with a crew cut and reflective aviator glasses. He was sitting behind the wheel with the window rolled down and with a meaty left arm draped over the door. He appeared to be nodding off. The news vans all appeared to be deserted. Malcolm could see no activity in or around them. It was as though everyone was having a siesta.
"Is it always like this?" Malcolm whispered, crouched behind a small dogwood tree.
"TV news is a collection of 30-second sound bites layered in between hours and hours of sheer boredom," Tina said.
"That's pretty good. Did you just make that up?"
She shook her head.
"Nah. Some movie I saw a few years back. Sounds good, though."
The glimmer of a smile flickered across her face.
"Stay here. I'll be right back," she said.
She disappeared into the underbrush, returning a few minutes later with a WKKR shirt and cap and a pair of cheap wire-rimmed sunglasses.
"Put these on," she said, handing him the shirt and cap. "The jeans are fine. You know, that idiot Nick had already lit one huge doobie up in the van, in plain sight of that cop right there?"
"What did you do with him?"
"An even better excuse to send the sorry S.O.B. home. I made him walk. He'll just hitch anyway. Lost his license with a DUI a couple of years back, so he hitchhikes all the time. Always ends up smoking dope with whoever picks him up, too."
She shook her head.
"Nick Corvallis, corrupter of America's youth," she said with a sigh.
Malcolm pulled on the ball cap and put on the sunglasses.
"How do I look?" he said.
"Like Nick Corvallis's replacement. Only cleaner, and better-dressed," Tina said.
Malcolm looked at his watch. It was 12:36 PM.
"Let's get going," he said. "We're running out of time."
"Follow me," said Tina, walking back toward the van.
She turned back to him and handed him the keys.
"By the way, you drive. I'm the star," she said, batting her long eyelashes.
28
Billy guided his skiff under the Wilmington River bridge, listening to the metallic roar of the cars overhead as he did so.
He checked his cell phone. The GPS signals were still there, coming from Tybee Island.
Billy flicked his spent cigarette overboard, feeling a slight twinge of regret as he did so. He hated littering, but he littered. He hated deception, but he had deceived. The ends always justify the means. Like his grandfather once said, "If you want results, you have to be willing to take the risk."
Would he kill, if he had to?
Billy was absolutely certain he would.
The sky overhead was a brilliant blue. Large cumulus clouds drifted on unseen currents. Wh
en he was a child, he thought that those clouds were kingdoms in the sky, populated by mythical winged creatures whose intrinsic nobility and honor far exceeded that of anyone here on earth.
His mother had called them angels.
But Billy did not believe in myths anymore.
He guided the boat along the marsh's edge toward the Savannah River, its frothy white wake streaming out behind him like the tail of a comet. He spied an osprey perched on a dead tree branch in the cemetery at Bonaventure, its topaz eyes clear and vigilant. A blackbird, glossy wings tinged with flashes of red, flitted away into the marsh grass on the afternoon breeze.
Billy envied birds sometimes. They could take wing and escape, could "slip the surly bonds of earth" as the poem went. They could fly up into the clouds.
Like the angels.
But no, Billy was not one of them. Like in Iraq, he was a grunt, a troglodyte emerging from the depths of the underground, eyes blinking stupidly in the sunlight.
When it was quiet like this, he often thought of Janie. It made his chest ache, but the pain at least let him feel some emotion besides the barely-contained fury that normally poisoned his every breath. Billy woke up every day with the taste of ashes in his mouth and went to bed every night having accumulated anger so deep and so pervasive that it bled over into his dreams. After Iraq, he had dreamt of violence and warfare for months. That eventually dissipated. Six months after his tour ended, it was completely gone, replaced by the unconditional love of his wife.
But this time it was different. He could not shake the pain.
Billy tried to block it out, but one thought kept coming back to him: how Janie must have felt when she knew she was going to die. Even now, Billy felt as impotent and as powerless as he had when Jimbo was eating his last meal on Death Row, knowing he was about to be executed for something he did not do.
He failed Janie, just like he had failed Jimbo. He could not protect her from the monster when it came calling.
And the monster had sliced her up and fed her to a bunch of goddamn reptiles.
He passed Fort Pulaski, its massive brick walls still pockmarked with craters from rifled cannon during the Civil War. He passed the tiny white lighthouse on Cockspur Island, a beacon in the Savannah River's south channel, its lights forever dimmed now after nearly two hundred years of existence by the redirection of commerce though the deeper north channel. And then he was at Tybee, turning his skiff into the placid waters of Lazaretto Creek beneath the island's only bridge.
Tybee is an anvil-shaped Georgia barrier island which lies due east of the city of Savannah and directly south of the resort island of Hilton Head. It is the easternmost point in the state of Georgia. Hundreds of years ago, the island was an old Euchee Indian hunting ground; the name Tybee derives from the Euchee word for "salt." Later, Spanish missionaries occupied the island; still later, pirates used it as a refuge. Nowadays, it's a comparatively sleepy place, with about 4,000 year-round residents and a collection of low-key bars and restaurants. Most of the island's activities center around the island's dune-lined two-mile-long Atlantic beachfront. And although several celebrities quietly own houses there, and movie stars from Burt Reynolds to Miley Cyrus have shot films on Tybee, the quaint little island remains a principal refuge of "drunks and sailors," to quote a well-noted—and now deceased—Tybee historian (who, incidentally, proudly fell into both of the above categories before he fell in his bathtub and broke his neck).
Billy had been to Tybee before—years ago, as a college student on spring break. That seemed like another lifetime now. Before Janie. Before the Shadow Man entered his life.
Before the whispers began.
The whispers were a sound Billy had heard every blighted day since Janie's death, all day and all night. They were terrible and quiet, like the dry voices of the dead. He wasn't certain where they came from. They could be the sound of the blood coursing through his veins or the air whistling through his nostrils--sounds that reminded him of the curse of his own existence. The only thing Billy knew was that the noise in his brain, much like that of the cars careening across the Wilmington River bridge, could not be silenced until the monster was dead.
God willing, that day was at hand.
A dark pressure was building behind Billy's eyes. He knew the Shadow Man was nearby. He could feel him out there, waiting, fingers drumming, eyes darting back and forth. Indeed, to Billy, the Shadow Man was more than a man. He was an entity, a force of nature, a black hole that swallowed all light and all hope.
And that black hole was pulling Billy in with an irresistible force.
The water in the creek was glassy, smooth. It reflected the sky and the clouds like a mirror, and Billy smiled.
Was something there? Did something move in that reflection?
Billy looked up at the sky. All he saw was the same collection of billowing clouds set against a field of Carolina blue.
But, for a second there, he thought he saw some winged creature reflected in the water, smiling back at him.
Billy tied up the boat, tucked in his shirt, and checked the magazine of his handgun before tucking it into his belt. A nearly full package of cigarettes fell out of his shirt pocket and hit the ground.
Billy stared at the pack of cigarettes for a moment before tossing them into the trashcan beside the dock.
"I'm coming," he whispered.
And, with that, Billy began walking toward the twin amber GPS signals that even now glowed on his phone display like a pair of eyes.
The phone signals were now coming from a spot only a few blocks away.
29
Mimi woke up to the sounds of splashing water.
She could not see. Okay, she could see, but not much. There was something over her eyes, something ragged that smelled of oil and fish, and what she could see around that was the edge of a gray board and a few thin rays of sunlight.
Her hands were bound behind her back. She was, in fact, hogtied— ankles bound, thighs wrapped tight.
And then there was that other noise. A snuffling sound, like a tiny pig. Or like someone trying to breathe.
"Mom?"
No answer.
That Birkenstock guy was supposed to be her dad's friend. Joel, he had said, call me Joel, which struck Mimi as odd.
He had seemed cordial enough when she had answered the door. But something about him wasn't quite right.
Your dad and I are working on a paper, he had said. Is he here?
Joel had stayed at the doorway as she went into the house to print up the paper he had requested, but she had kissed his name on the title page with her mother's lipstick on after she printed it. Sort of an impulse. Mimi crumpled the title page up and tossed it in the trash. Didn't know why she did that, except that the guy had given her the creeps. She knew no other way to put it.
Joel was not at the door when she went back. Mimi felt his presence behind her—his bulk looming behind her, like granite, so heavy that it seemed to distort gravity somehow—but it was too late by then. He was too quick for her, almost catlike, his supple fingers seeking and finding her mouth and nose. Those fingers clamped over her face like the tentacles of a cuttlefish.
She had glimpsed the lifeless body of her mother, lying crumpled on the floor, out of the corner of her eye. It looked like she'd just been dropped there like a sack of flour. This was the last thing Mimi saw before she blacked out.
And now she was here, wherever here was.
She worked her wrists. There was not much play in the bindings. She felt the hairs on her arms pulling, as if there were some adhesive there. Probably duct tape, she thought.
She held her breath. It was oddly quiet. There were no car horns, no people talking, nothing. Just the sound of water, like waves breaking, and . . .
Wait a minute.
That sound again. A rattling, shuddering sound, someplace to her right. Was it him?
"Who's there?" she said, her voice breaking a little.
There was st
ill no answer.
She heard a seagull's lonely squawk, and then another. The distant sound of a dog barking.
Maybe if I move my eyebrows, she thought.
She had always hated her eyebrows. Jacie Jones had said they were too thick for any girl's eyebrows, that she needed to pluck them and shape them up. Her mom wouldn't let her do it.
I love your eyebrows, Mom had said. You've got the rest of your life to be a woman—and, believe me, it's hard work. Why don't you enjoy being a girl a little while?
Besides, Mimi thought, Jacie's a bitch.
She moved her eyebrows up and down and the blindfold shifted a bit. She could see more of the room now—a simple clapboard dwelling, windows partly boarded up. No furniture. A roll of silver duct tape. She could see a patch of angry sky out of one corner of the window.
She heard the snuffling noise again. To her right and behind her.
Mimi began wriggling up and down, like a sideways inchworm, slowly rotating rightward as she did so. At first, she saw an Adidas-clad foot, then a sock, then the leg of her mother's pink warm-up.
And then her mother's left hand, wedding ring in its proper place, her well-manicured nails an ugly cyan blue.
"Mom!" Mimi yelled. She did not know where the granite man was now, or care if he heard her. She only knew that her mother's hand was blue. And blue was a very, very bad color to be.
The bindings on her legs began to loosen. She flexed her thighs and kicked her legs and they loosened further, fraying at the edges.
"Breathe, Mom!" Mimi screamed.
She could see her mother's lips now. They were motionless and dusky. There was no air coming from them.
"MOM!"
Mimi pulled her arms over her shoulders. She felt something strain and then pop in each of them as she did so. Lightning bolts of pain shot down her arms. In each hand, her fourth and fifth fingers went numb. But Mimi did not care.