Dead Sand

by Brendan DuBois

  * * *

  Instead of going into the shed that serves as a garage, I made a sloppy turn in front of my house and faced my Ford back up the incline of my driveway, leading back to the parking lot of the Lafayette House. I put the Ford in park and said, “I’m going to pop inside. If I’m not out in two minutes, drive away and call the Tyler cops. Ask for Detective Sergeant Woods. Tell her what I just did.”

  Annie said, “If you’re trying to scare me, you’re doing a hell of a job.”

  “Not scaring,” I said. “Being cautious.”

  I touched her hand and stepped out, then strolled up to the front door. I unlocked it and quickly checked the living room, upstairs, and then, back downstairs, the small dirt-floored basement area that holds my oil furnace and not much else. Clear. I went out and gave her a cheery wave, climbed back into the Ford, and drove it into the garage, and a minute or two later, we were in the living room of my home, her baggage on the floor.

  Annie said, “Look, I appreciate what you’ve said, but I really think you need to go to the cops.”

  “No, I’m sorry,” I said, hanging up her coat in the downstairs closet. “If I do that, then it’s official. When it becomes official, it becomes news. When it becomes news that one Lewis Cole of Tyler Beach was the victim of a kidnapping and perhaps an attempted murder, then a lot of old stories from last winter are going to be dug up. About me and Senator Jackson Hale.”

  “We can handle—”

  “Annie, please,” I said. “You’re a few weeks away from the November election, your guy is in the fight of his life, and I’m not going to provide ammo for his opponent.”

  Annie said, “But it’s … hold on.”

  “What?”

  She came up to me, put a hand to my head, gingerly touched the bump there and the clotted mass of blood about my hair. “Christ on a crutch, Lewis, you’re hurt.”

  “You should see the other guy,” I said.

  “I thought the other guy was a rock,” she said.

  “True.”

  “Lewis…”

  “Not a good comparison, I admit.”

  She took my hand. “Upstairs. Now. We’re going to take a look at that before anything else.”

  “Just a sec,” I said, and I went to make sure the front door was locked and the dead bolt slid into place, and then I followed Annie, walking up the short set of stairs to the second floor. With her coat off I noted her black hose, short tan skirt, and a couple of other things. As she reached the second floor, I said, “Since when are garter belts and stockings back in fashion?”

  She turned and flashed me that impish redheaded smile that had intrigued me the first day I met her, and she said, “I don’t follow fashion trends, sweetie. I set them.”

  I went with her into the bathroom, and she left and came back with a straight-backed chair that I keep in my office for those few visitors actually curious enough to spend time in that little book-lined cubby. I sat down and noted that the bedroom door was open, and I could see the nightstand next to the bed. In the top drawer of the nightstand was my 9 mm Beretta semiautomatic pistol, and underneath the bed, on a foam cushion, was a 12-gauge Remington pump-action shotgun with an extended magazine. Even in my current state, I knew I could get to both weapons in seconds if somebody tried to break in through the front door.

  “Off with your shirt,” she said, wrinkling her nose at my odor, no doubt, and after that sodden bit of clothing hit the tile floor, she went “tsk tsk tsk” and got to work. I sat and took it fairly well, with only one or two winces, as Annie cleaned up my hair and gently touched my bump, then put on a bit of gauze with surgical tape.

  She stepped back and said, “Not a bad job, if I do say so. If your head had been any softer, or that rock any harder, you would have needed some stitches.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Anything else you’ve got for me?”

  “No, but you’ve got to take a shower, and either wash or burn those clothes, Lewis. I mean … I’ve stuck with you for the past hour, but there’s a limit to what a girl can put up with.”

  I stood up, kissed her for a moment, and started taking off my clothes.

  “No offense, m’dear,” I said, “but it looks like after a long flight, you could use a shower yourself.”

  She leaned back against the bathroom counter. “Flight was under two hours. Not long at all.”

  “Now you’re being technical?”

  “You forget I’m a lawyer, young man,” she said.

  “Details, details,” I said, moving over to turn on the shower, and when I turned back, she had taken her blouse off and was reaching behind to unsnap her black lace bra. I gave her a look, and she shrugged.

  “No time to get caught up in details,” she explained.

  * * *

  Some sweet time later we were resting in bed, her head on my shoulder, her fingers idly running across my chest. She blew a bit of air across my shoulder and said, “Remind me again why you thought it was a good idea to talk to this rabid antinuker guy.”

  “Part of my research.”

  “Unh-hunh,” she replied. “Research for a story for your magazine, or for Lewis Cole, defender of the faith and lady folk?”

  “A bit of both,” I admitted.

  “What did you hope would happen when you talked to the antinuke guy? That he’d throw up his hands and confess?”

  “Nope. I just wanted to ask questions and to poke around and stir things up. You stir things up, interesting items can pop to the surface.”

  She pinched me in a delicate spot, and I yelped. “Or interesting items like a magazine writer can be tossed in a swamp.”

  “Wasn’t a swamp,” I said. “It was a salt marsh.”

  “Okay. So stirring things around is your strategy. What is your endgame, what do you hope happens?”

  “With me stirring things around, showing up at odd places, asking inconvenient questions, I hope somebody gets nervous. I hope somebody makes a mistake. I hope somebody steps out of the shadows … and I find out who the shooter was.”

  “Then what? Tell the cops?”

  “Eventually.”

  “Mmm … eventually. What does that mean?”

  I shifted in the big warm comfortable bed. “Eventually means that once I’m convinced I got the right guy, then he ends up with the cops interested in him. That’s what. Then I let the law enforcement professionals take care of it.”

  “You don’t think they’re already doing that now?”

  “I have a personal interest,” I said. “Sometimes that lets me do things and go places they can’t.”

  “Strange way to get the killer of that Toles character under arrest.”

  I said, “This is going to sound cold, but I don’t care that much that Mr. Toles got himself killed. What I do care about is that this shooter has practically destroyed an old friend of mine, a friend who is hiding out scared, afraid that she’s the next target.”

  “She could go to the cops for protection,” Annie said.

  “True, but there’s a limit to what they can do. Always a limit. You know the towns around here. They’re stretched thin as it is. There’s no witness protection program, no way for her to get twenty-four/seven protection from a small-town police force.”

  She gently stroked my hair around where the gauze and tape were still in place. “So it’s your job, then.”

  “Not a job.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “Friendship,” I said. “Friendship and loyalty.”

  With that Annie moved around so that she was now lying on top of me. She kissed my nose, her red hair hanging about her face, her warm smooth flesh melding into me.

  “All right, friendship,” she said, “but if you decide to go back to days of yore, when you were wooing Miss Quinn, then I’m going to give you a bump that will make the one you have back there look like a mosquito bite.”

  I leaned up some and kissed her back. “One wild woman at a time is my limit.”


  She sighed in apparent contentment and said, “Your wild woman is getting a bit hungry. You think she could get some late breakfast in this joint?”

  “I don’t see why not,” I said. “Care to join me downstairs?”

  “Ack,” she said, pulling the sheet and comforter up to her shoulders. “I’ve been flying from one state to another in this great land these past several months, and this is the most comfy bed I’ve been in since. No, sir. I’m not leaving. My big boy is going to give me a kiss and go downstairs and make us some breakfast and bring it back up. Is that all right?”

  I kissed her freckled nose. “Since when can I ever say no to a redheaded wild woman?”

  So I went downstairs and puttered around in the kitchen, and in a while came back upstairs with orange juice, instant coffee, scrambled eggs, toast, and sausage links, and while we ate, Annie said, “I promise to keep things on a nonpolitical keel here during my day off, but my God, I’m enjoying every second of this. It’s like parachuting back into the world of reality after spending months in cloud-cuckoo-land.”

  “Cloud-cuckoo-land?”

  She nudged me with her shoulder. “It is what it is. It’s day after day, one miserable long slog after another … it’s not a race, Lewis. It’s a goddamn long marathon—and just a couple of weeks more. Just a couple of more weeks.”

  “Then what?”

  “Like most marathoners who finish a long race, I plan to throw up, drink a lot, and sleep for a day or two.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “Only if you’re around to join me.”

  “In a heartbeat.”

  We finished up our breakfast and, being the gallant man that I am—or so I was told—I gathered up the dishes and brought them downstairs. I was tempted to toss them in the sink, but the latent Boy Scout in me kept me in the kitchen to wash and dry and put everything away.

  When I got back upstairs, Annie was doing something fancy with a scrap of black lace and said, “I’m in the mood to play some more. Are you up for it?”

  “Not sure,” I said. “My head still hurts a bit.”

  She gave me a naughty look. “Which one?”

  “Don’t you lawyers have a process called discovery?” I asked.

  “We do.”

  After tossing off my robe and joining her in bed, I said, “Then get discovering, woman.”

  * * *

  Much later, after another mutual shower and mutual drying off, we went downstairs, where I built a fire in my stone fireplace, and Annie curled up on the couch in an old UNH sweatshirt of mine and not much else, with a down comforter wrapped around her legs. Outside a cold rain was falling, splattering against the sliding glass doors that led out to the rear deck overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.

  “Two things, my boy,” she announced. “One, you’re going to take that television remote and turn on something that is nowhere near a cable news channel. Turner Classic Movies or something similar would work well. Then you’re going to take the remote and hide it.”

  “Hide it?” I asked, feeling refreshed and comfortable, wearing an old dark blue terrycloth robe.

  “Hide it,” she repeated. “This day is my day off with you, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to be sucked into watching the latest campaign news, of who’s up, who’s down, and what else makes the world go round. However, knowing the political junkie I am, I can’t trust myself. So hide it.”

  “Deal,” I said, getting the remote, flipping it on, and finding TCM, just as she had requested. They were in the middle of coming attractions, but I was hoping something good would show up. Annie burrowed into the comforter and said, “Second thing, my boy, your wench is starving again and requires a fine meal. That means no cheeseburgers, no pizza, no hot dogs, no pastries, nothing I would get in a conference room, an airport lounge, or a 7-Eleven. Deal?”

  “Deal,” I said. “And for dessert?”

  She winked at me. “Depends on how your head is feeling.”

  * * *

  I went into the kitchen, hid the remote in the silverware drawer—some hiding, I’m sure that Annie saw what I did—and then made a phone call to the Lafayette House across the street from my home. I got hold of Ramon—and I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know his last name—who was the chef for the Lafayette House, and I explained to him what I needed.

  “Jeez, Lewis, I don’t know,” Ramon said from the hotel’s kitchen, and in the background I could hear shouts and dishes being tossed around. “Most times it’s okay, but a takeout today.… we’re getting slammed.”

  “I’m going to make it worse,” I said. “I can’t leave the house, so you’ll have to have someone deliver it here.”

  “You can’t leave the house? What’s that? You under arrest or something?”

  Or something, I thought, looking over at Annie curled up on my couch, a nice fire roaring along, the sound of the rain and wind striking my old home. Even though it would take only ten minutes for me to go up to the hotel and get my takeout order, I wasn’t going to leave her behind. Not with my Henry out there, the guy who tried to drown me and shoot me in the space of a few minutes.

  “Yeah, house arrest with a woman friend.”

  He chuckled. “All right, m’man, maybe I can squeeze something in, but I can’t send somebody over, it’s a hell of a—”

  “Fifty bucks.”

  “What?”

  “Fifty bucks to get it delivered.”

  “Oh, come on, that’s—”

  “One hundred dollars, Ramon. One hundred dollars.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line, and then his voice whispered, “That’s some house arrest. Okay. A hundred it is. You’ll get your food in a half hour.”

  I hung up the phone. Annie was watching me, her face gently smiling, but I sensed something else behind those eyes.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Thanks to whichever god rules cable channels, when I joined Annie on the couch, TCM started showing The Lion in Winter, with Katharine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole. Annie graciously shared the down comforter with me as we watched the film, and she said, “God, yes, the Dark Ages, when cutthroat politics really mean cutthroat politics.”

  So I joyfully settled down with my woman, aching but feeling loose-limbed and refreshed, and looking at the nearby clock to see how much longer dinner was going to be. Another twenty minutes or so, if things went well. The rain was really coming down harder, and wind was splattering some of it on my rear deck windows, and Annie cuddled in closer to me and said, “My God, I’d forgotten places and times like this still exist.”

  I said, “It’s here for you, whenever you want it.”

  She laughed. “My life the past few months has been living out of suitcases, finding a place that does dry cleaning in an hour, and trying not to eat pizza four days in a row. I haven’t been home to Boston in weeks, my mail is probably two feet high, and after the election, I swear, I’m going to collapse.”

  “Then collapse here,” I said.

  “Mmm,” she said, “you know, I was thinking about after the election and—”

  The ringing phone cut right into her, and I pulled myself free to answer it. “Lewis?”

  It was Paula. “Hey,” I said. “How’s it going?”

  She laughed, but her voice sounded brittle. “Better … last night I managed to get a good two hours’ sleep, and I didn’t have a nightmare. So I’ve got that going for me.… and did you see today’s Chronicle?”

  Annie’s face was impassive. I said, “No, I haven’t.”

  “Well, my story … hell, your story was in it. I just wanted to thank you again.”

  “No problem, Paula,” I said, and with that, Annie’s left eyebrow rose. “Glad I could help.”

  “The big demo is set for tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll see you at the usual place?”

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  “Want me to pack a lunch for us?”

  “If you’d like, that’d be fine,” I said.

/>   She was quiet, and Paula said, “You’re not alone, are you.”

  I said, “That’s absolutely right. And you?”

  She sighed. “The honorable Mark Spencer has a meeting later on with some financial types looking to support him for his state senate run. He may or may not join me for dinner. In the meantime … thanks again. And you take care.”

  “You, too,” I said, and hung up the phone. I went back deep into the couch and Annie reassembled herself against me. On the television screen, Peter O’Toole, playing Henry II, was chewing up the scenery as only he could. Annie asked, “Paula?”

  “Yep.”

  “What’s up with her?”

  “She wanted to thank me for helping her out with a story the other day. We’ll probably see each other at tomorrow’s demonstration.”

  “She still has her boyfriend?”

  “For the moment,” I said.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Her boyfriend is the town counsel for Tyler. He’s considering running for state senate. That seems to be taking up his attention more than Paula.”

  Annie said, “Sounds like a dick.”

  “No argument from me.”

  “Still,” she said, squeezing me under the comforter, “if she dumps him and is back on the market, I have first and last dibs on you.”

  I kissed the top of her head. “And all the dibs in between.”

  On the screen, Katharine Hepburn, playing Queen Eleanor, was being as commanding and elegant as only she could be when the phone rang once more. I muttered something inconsiderate and answered, and it was another woman in my life, Denise Pichette-Volk.

  “Lewis?”

  I said, “The same.”

  “The last piece you did caused quite the stir. Especially that ‘fucking Russians’ quote. What do you have for me next?”

  What I had next was my reporter’s notebook, lost somewhere in the mud and grass of the Falconer salt marsh. Annie stirred, and I kept my arm firm around her. I said, “How does an exclusive interview with the head of the Nuclear Freedom Front sound?”

  “Really?” she asked.