Assignment Austin

by Lucey Phillips

  Colin nodded. “So what are we trying first? The trailer or the marina?”

  “A marina’s kind of a terrible place to hide, don’t you think? It’s busy and public.”

  “So is the home address of the nearest relative,” he said. “I don’t really like the idea of lurking around the trailer park, though. My uncle lives in a place like that. The homes are so close together and people just love to gossip.”

  “If we’re trying to get on his good side, I guess we shouldn’t waltz in there and draw a ton of attention to him,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  I reached for the navigation device to look up the marina. I knew that finding Neil at the marina—or anywhere—was a long shot. But I thought about the pleading in Mia’s eyes after Kara had been taken to jail. Even if this was a bust, at least I could tell them I tried.

  Anyway, I needed to get out and do something—something distracting.

  | Nineteen

  There were only a couple hours of daylight left when we arrived at the marina. It was busy with boaters coming in, refueling for tomorrow, and docking.

  In the parking lot, we walked past a man carrying a sleeping toddler, trailed by two elementary school-aged children. There was a boy carrying a small cooler and a girl with a big duffel bag. Both had sun-warmed cheeks.

  The man nodded politely when Colin said hello.

  We made our way into the marina’s main building. Past a jet ski rental booth and a barbecue restaurant, we found the outfitter’s booth.

  It was dark. A sign on the countertop listed information about the business’ hours and phone numbers.

  I looked to Colin, suddenly feeling sheepish that I’d drug him out on yet another fruitless adventure.

  He seemed to be reading my mind.

  “While we’re here, I’m going to get some shots of the lake. If we hang around a little while, the light is going to be perfect.”

  He draped an arm around my neck and guided me out to a wide deck overlooking the lake.

  The sky reflected a deep blue on the water. A little brown bird dove toward its target in the lake and, down by a boat ramp, several ducks noisily gave up their swimming area when a pickup truck began backing a boat trailer down into the water.

  Colin leaned against the railing.

  “It’s almost the golden hour,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You know, the golden hour? Right before sunset?”

  I shrugged.

  “It’s when the sunlight hits the Earth at, sort of, a sideways angle instead of from above. It makes everything glow gold. And it throws off these really dramatic shadows.”

  I nodded and absently wondered why I wasn’t the type of person who appreciated—or even noticed—different kinds of sunlight.

  The rumble of a fishing boat’s diesel engine grew louder as it approached the dock below where Colin and I stood. A green wooden sign hung from the boat’s beige awning. It said “Stripers Unlimited.” I gripped the deck’s railing and leaned forward, trying not to be too obvious as I gawked. I couldn’t believe it.

  “Colin! Look!” I half-whispered, half-hissed. “That’s it.”

  Two men were on the boat. One wore a cowboy hat, T-shirt, and cargo shorts. The other one wore a baseball cap, T-shirt, and athletic shorts.

  “Think we should go down there?” he whispered.

  Thanks to our day of stand-up paddling, we were both keenly aware of how well voices carry across flat water.

  “Yeah,” I answered him. “No—wait. Use your telephoto lens to see if one of those guys is Neil.”

  The man in the cowboy hat stepped onto the dock and began wrapping a rope from the boat around one of the metal cleats attached to the dock.

  After he adjusted his camera, Colin pointed it toward the man in the cowboy hat.

  He looked at me and shook his head.

  “What about the other guy?” I whispered.

  Colin raised the camera again.

  “Can’t get a good look at him,” he said.

  “I’m going down there.”

  I took off at a brisk walk back into the building, looking for a quick way down to the dock. After a wrong turn down a hallway that led to an employee break room, I found a stairwell.

  As I descended the stairs, I could hear Colin’s footsteps close behind me. I’d deliberately avoided asking him to follow me into what could be another dangerous situation, but I knew he’d come along anyway.

  I’d hoped the stairwell would take me directly to the dock, but it didn’t. The exit door opened onto a gravelly slope. I saw that I could get to the dock from this location, so I began scrambling down the slope. It was steeper than I expected, and maintaining my footing was difficult in the casual flats I wore.

  Keeping one hand on the cinderblock wall, I made my way down. I slowed when I saw the two men hauling coolers, buckets, and fishing rods from the boat onto the dock.

  The healing skin on my knee, where the sutures had been, was still tender. I didn’t want to think about falling on gravel.

  I looked back over my shoulder. Colin wasn’t there. Maybe he’d gone to find a better way down to the dock.

  I crossed a walkway onto the dock and squinted at the two men as I approached. The man in the baseball cap did look like Neil.

  When I got closer, the man in the cowboy hat smiled and asked if he could help me. I smiled back, trying to look casual and hide the fact that I was out of breath.

  “Hi, I’m just here to talk to Neil,” I said.

  Neil had been leaning over, arranging life vests in a storage compartment. His head snapped up at the mention of his name. His eyes were wide, and I knew he’d recognized me immediately. I was finally sure it was him.

  “Neil, please, I need to talk to you—it’s about Kara,” I said.

  I tried to walk closer to the boat, but the man in the cowboy hat stepped in front of me.

  “You need to leave. Now,” he said, all of the customer service-style friendliness suddenly gone from his voice.

  Keeping my gaze on Neil, I ignored the other man.

  “We need your help, Neil! Kara’s in jail right now,” I pleaded.

  Neil’s hard gaze met mine for a fraction of a second.

  I stood motionless, silent and stunned, when I realized he wasn’t concerned about his girlfriend.

  Neil stepped up to the boat’s controls and jerked the throttle. The boat started to pull away, but it was still tied to the dock.

  “Hey, bro, stop!” the man in the cowboy hat shouted to Neil.

  The wooden dock squeaked and groaned against the force of the tethered boat. I stumbled a step backward, but caught my balance.

  Neil took out a huge saw-tooth knife and cut the rope with one swift motion. The boat motored away toward the center of the lake, while the rope floated for a minute, slack and curling in the water, before sinking.

  Meanwhile, the man in the cowboy hat held his arms out, palms upward, at Neil.

  “Where does he think he’s going? This isn’t the ocean,” he muttered.

  He turned to me and announced, “Neil is innocent and the cops are trying to railroad him.”

  “So he just runs away and leaves his girlfriend to sit in jail?” I asked.

  “She’s got an alibi and a clean record. She’ll be fine.”

  He went back to packing his equipment.

  “Tell him to come back to Austin,” I said, before I walked away. “It’s the right thing to do.”

  Without looking up from his work, he shook his head, letting out a bitter-sounding chuckle.

  I made my way back down the dock, wondering what had happened to Colin. When I got to a staircase leading up to the parking lot, I took my phone out of my bag to text him.

  When I activated the screen, though, I saw that he’d already texted me. Colin had written, “Rolled my ankle. I’m back on the deck.”

  It took me a few minutes to make my way up the stairs, across the parking lot, through
the marina, and back to the place where we’d first seen Neil’s boat.

  Colin was sitting on a bench at the far end of the deck, with his right leg propped up beside him. Even from this distance, I could see that something was wrong. He looked like he had a grapefruit where his ankle should have been. I rushed over to him.

  “What happened?”

  He shrugged.

  “This happens sometimes, especially when I’m on stairs. I broke it riding my bike as a kid. I tore some ligaments and stuff,” Colin said. “Ever since then, if I land on it funny, it just sort of gives out on me.”

  I wrinkled my nose.

  “Does it hurt? It looks like it might be broken.”

  “It hurts. I’m used to it though.”

  “I think you at least need an X-ray.”

  He waved a hand dismissively. “It’s fine. I just need to get some ice on it.”

  “How did you get back here from the stairwell?”

  “Hopping. And holding myself up with the railing. It was pretty awesome,” Colin said with a laugh.

  I sat down at the end of the bench and looked at his ankle. Swollen flesh seemed to bubble out around the shoe, which appeared painfully tight.

  “Should you take this off?” I asked, looking at the shoe.

  “Nah, it’s keeping the swelling down.”

  I wondered if he could even feel his toes, but I didn’t ask. Colin seemed like he was ready to stop talking about the injury.

  Colin handed his camera to me. “I missed all the action, but I did get this.”

  The screen showed a zoomed-in shot of Neil, looking back over his shoulder as he piloted the boat across the lake. The photo was grainy, but the man was obviously Neil. While I looked at that picture and scrolled through Colin’s other images of the lake, I explained to Colin what had happened on the dock.

  I told him about Neil running away and his friend defending Neil’s refusal to help get Kara out of jail.

  Then I held up the camera with Neil’s image on the screen. “What should we do with this?”

  Colin shrugged, but it seemed like he was holding back.

  “It’s good to have, I guess.”

  I scowled at the image, wondering why I couldn’t accept Neil as a viable suspect. Colin didn’t have a problem with that, and Quinn seemed convinced that Neil was guilty.

  I handed the camera back to Colin.

  “So, how do you want me to carry you? Piggy back? Or cradled like a baby?”

  Colin laughed and looked down at his injured ankle.

  “I can hobble along,” he said, handing me the car keys. “But you should probably do the driving.”

  “I’ll pick you up at the front entrance,” I said while I stood and heaved Colin’s camera bag onto my shoulder.

  “No, Jae, I’ll get that,” he said, reaching for the bag.

  But I was already a couple steps away.

  When I pulled the car up to the front of the building, Colin was there waiting for me. He leaned against a concrete planter with his head down. He started to approach the car, his gait stiff and cautious. Colin’s gaze stayed on the ground two feet in front of him.

  I’d never seen him like that before—so obviously in pain and so determined to hide it. He opened the door and slowly climbed into the car, never looking at me.

  I bit my lower lip and looked out the windshield in front of me, fighting the urge to try to convince him to go to the hospital.

  “Thanks for driving,” he said quietly.

  He found the Bluestem Inn on the navigation device—we’d programmed it as “home”—and pointed the screen in my direction.

  Neither of us spoke during the first twenty minutes of our drive. That golden hour Colin had told me about faded into twilight.

  The car was so quiet, in fact, that it startled me when my phone, resting in the console, began to ring. I asked Colin to answer it for me. It had been a while since I’d driven and I definitely wasn’t comfortable multi-tasking.

  “It’s probably Quinn,” Colin said, tapping the screen. “I’ll put it on speaker.”

  “Hey, Quinn. Colin and I have you on speaker,” I blurted loudly, and obviously, before she could say anything embarrassing.

  A familiar giggle came from the phone speaker. “Oh, hi, Colin. Hi, Jae,” Quinn said, following her greetings with another coy giggle.

  Colin smirked and shook his head. There was a lightness in his eyes that I hadn’t seen since before he got hurt.

  “Hi, Quinn,” he said.

  “What are you guys up to?” she asked. I could tell by the sound of her voice that she was grinning.

  I told her we were on our way back from Canyon Lake and explained my encounter with Neil.

  “Colin got a good shot of him floating away,” I added.

  “You should turn that picture in to the cops,” she said, matter-of-factly.

  “I don’t know…” I hedged.

  “You’re gonna know after I tell you this,” Quinn said. She sounded even more fired-up than usual. “I found alibis for your other suspects.”

  My stomach tumbled just a little. “What? Who?”

  “Bonnie Key and Dylan Soto. They have an airtight alibi,” Quinn said.

  She went on to explain that she’d found bank records showing Dylan and Bonnie had been at a nearby bank, meeting with a loan officer. They were applying for a joint mortgage.

  “I’ve got electronic signatures and everything,” Quinn said. “I got into their digital security camera files, too. It’s just taking me a long time to go through everything, but there’s probably images of them going into the bank.”

  “Damn,” I muttered, my cheeks starting to burn.

  I was wrong.

  Colin was too classy to say “I told you so,” but Quinn—not so much.

  “Ha!” she said, victoriously. “Now what do you think about Neil?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I grumbled. “You were right. I just—I don’t know.”

  I trailed off. Something didn’t seem right about the idea that Neil was out killing some guy, for virtually no reason, while he was supposed to be sleeping between night shifts.

  Colin shot me a what-do-we-do-now? look.

  “So, yeah, let’s get that photo to Kruger,” I said, defeated. “At least that should get Kara out of jail.”

  “If her lawyer has a shred of competence, she should be out already,” Quinn said. “That was absolutely ridiculous—straight-up extortion.”

  “Well, you know how Kruger is,” I muttered. “Anyway, I guess we should just email it to Felix High. He’ll pass it along to the detectives. That way, at least, I won’t have to deal with Kruger’s gloating.”

  | Twenty

  I didn’t know if I would be welcome at the Trash Bash. And I didn’t know if I wanted to be there anyway. The main subject of my Assignment Austin travel story—Kara and the Capitol City Wreckers—was now mired in a murder case.

  After we’d tipped off the police about Neil’s location, his cousin’s trailer was raided and Neil was arrested. Kara had been released first thing in the morning.

  The team would be pleased that their captain was out of jail in time to lead them through the tournament, but Neil’s arrest was a devastating blow. It would be especially tough on the people who’d believed so strongly in his innocence—people like Mia.

  I had no idea how she would react if she found out I was the tipster that landed him in jail. And with the closeness of the community and the lightning speed of gossip, there was no doubt she already knew.

  Colin’s ankle looked a lot better today, but I’d still insisted on doing all the driving. When I dropped him off at the door of the tournament venue, he walked with a little more confidence than he had the previous evening, but still slower than usual.

  I parked the car and went inside. One thing I hadn’t gotten for my story yet was the fan’s perspective. My plan for today was to interview some fans. Hopefully I would get enough good quotes to draw the focus o
f the story toward the league as a whole—with less attention on the now-scandalized Wreckers.

  The first fans who caught my eye when I entered the venue were a man in a business suit and a boy who looked about thirteen years old.

  But before I could approach them, I heard my name being called from somewhere in the distance, on the other side of the track. I turned to look for the person calling my name, but didn’t see anything.

  Then I saw her.

  “Jae! Over here!” It was Kara and she sounded happy.

  I waved and smiled meekly, unsure how I should act, knowing I was the one who helped put her fugitive boyfriend behind bars.

  Kara skated up to me, grinning brightly. Her high-watt smile was an odd contrast with her dull, pale skin and red-rimmed eyes. She threw her arms around me. When she pulled away, I got a quick look at a small purple mark on the underside of her left forearm. That was probably the site of her jail-administered tuberculosis test.

  “Are you okay?” I asked Kara.

  She shrugged and offered a hollow smile.

  “I survived,” she said. “And if nothing else, I thought of a ton of new anthropology research ideas while I was in there.”

  “I’m sorry about Neil.”

  Kara’s smile vanished. She replied, “Me, too.”

  I wondered, was their relationship over now? But I didn’t ask—this wasn’t the time.

  “So you’re still going to do your story about us?” Kara asked, looking hopeful.

  I wasn’t sure how to answer her.

  “Well, I’m doing features on roller derby, Mia’s shop, paddle boarding, and some other stuff,” I said. “I don’t expect the Harris Myer stuff to get in the way, but really that’s up to my editors. If there’s a trial and it gets into national news for some reason, it could be an issue.”

  Kara waved a hand and offered me another empty smile.

  “Can you leave me out of the story? Just make it about the sport?” she said. “I’m really proud of what derby does in women’s lives—how they’re empowered by it.”

  Kara’s willingness to stay out of the spotlight showed what a good leader she was. And it made me want to put her in the story even more.