Wrecked

by Mary Anna Evans

  Nate was starting to pant a little, but he kept talking. “Wasn’t about to let you find out which one it was.”

  Joe tried to laugh, but he was getting out of breath, too. Nothing came out of his mouth but “Heh.”

  He noticed Nate looking over his shoulder as he hustled Joe toward the marina, like a man who was trying to calm his friend but was still pretty weirded out about what had just happened. As the patch of trees receded behind them, Joe could feel the hand on his back start to relax. He was just starting to realize how close he’d come to real trouble, and he had Nate to thank for getting him out of it. He might have Nate to thank for being alive.

  It took a real friend to run into danger to keep his buddy from doing something idiotic. Joe had known Nate for a few years now. They’d fished together. Every now and then, they’d drunk a few beers at the marina while they watched pelicans dive for their dinner. He wouldn’t have counted the man as one of his closest friends, not like Sheriff Mike, Magda, and Emma, but he liked him. Considering what Nate had just done for him, he might need to reevaluate this attitude. There were few things that Joe valued more than having friends he could trust.

  As they neared the marina parking lot, they slowed to a walk, as if they had crossed a magical border into a place where the shooter couldn’t come for them. Or wouldn’t come for them. Now that Nate could breathe again, he seemed to have gone straight back to guessing who shot Ossie and why.

  “Maybe it was just somebody who really hates drones and the people who fly them. Maybe shooting that gun was a way to say, ‘How dare you fly a camera over my head and invade my privacy? Get out of my sky!’”

  Joe shook his head. “I don’t do that. I respect people’s privacy. I try to only fly Ossie over public places. And I get permission to take pictures of people and their stuff. Mostly, I just fly her over the water, which is what you were doing. Well, I used to fly her and I used to get permission to take those pictures. I guess there’s nothing left of Ossie for me to fly now. I’m really going to miss her.”

  “You’re talking about a machine, Joe. You can buy another one just like her. Heck. I can buy you another one just like her, and I’ll do that. I was the one flying her when she got shot.”

  Joe shook his head. “It wasn’t your fault. Could’ve happened to anybody. Besides, I can buy another drone. No problem.”

  Joe knew that Nate was no ordinary newspaper reporter and his dad was no ordinary editor. They had inherited money, serious money. If he was going to be friends with a rich man, he couldn’t let Nate spend money on him all the time. It wouldn’t be good for their friendship, and it wouldn’t be good for Joe’s pride.

  “Actually,” he said, “our business can buy it. Faye and I have been talking about how aerial photos are always a big help when we’re working a site. With a drone, we can take our own, and we won’t have to make do with library photos that are a year old. Or twenty years old. They’ll be up to the minute.”

  As they stepped from the patchy, weedy grass onto the marina parking lot, it felt to Joe like he was waking up from a nightmare.

  Nate, too, seemed to relax a bit. He shook his head as if to clear it, saying, “Hey, this thing has had me too rattled to think straight. We need to call Sheriff Rainey. Should’ve already done it, actually.”

  “Um, weren’t we hightailing it from a crazy person with a gun?”

  “Coulda been. But we can call the sheriff now. Even if it was just a kid who pulled that trigger, the sheriff needs to know about it.”

  Joe reached in his pocket for his phone. “We should probably call Sheriff Mike. He’s old school. Mike will naturally more put the fear of God into that kid.”

  “I hear you. But Sheriff Rainey’s the one wearing the badge these days.”

  Joe was still groping for his phone. “I can’t find my…oh, yeah. My phone’s attached to the controller for Ossie. You got it?”

  “I had it.” Nate looked blankly at his hands. “I haven’t given it a second’s thought since that gun went off. I must have—” He turned around and scanned the open area between the spot where they stood and the trees. “Maybe I dropped it when I kicked off my flip-flops? I am so sorry, Joe. I’ll go back and look for it.”

  Joe looked down and saw that his friend was picking his way across the gravel-strewn and broken pavement of Manny’s parking lot in his bare feet. It was his turn to grab Nate and stop him.

  “Don’t be an idiot. The person who shot Ossie could still be hiding behind any of those trees. We’re gonna go inside and you’re gonna call the sheriff, since you’ve still got a phone. He can send out some people who know how to take care of situations like this. They’ll find the controller and my phone.”

  “Neither one of us is thinking straight. The sheriff’s in the marina. Remember? We don’t need my cell phone to call him. Yours, either.”

  Joe turned around to see if he could spy the controller. He saw nothing between him and the tree but grass and weeds. Right near the water, he could see two small, flat objects that must have been Nate’s flip-flops, but he didn’t see anything that could be an electronic device. This made him think of the downed drone. He supposed that the shore and water on the other side of the trees could be littered with pieces of Ossie.

  “Leave it where you dropped it,” Joe said. “It’s just a controller for a busted drone.”

  “And your phone.”

  “I can get another one. Besides, maybe the sheriff will find my phone.”

  “Please tell me it was backed up.”

  Joe cleared his throat, embarrassed. “Faye’s always after me to do that. She uses the cloud, whatever that is. I was planning to get serious about backing things up when I got that external drive for storing my pictures. I’m guessing it would have had enough space to back up my phone and my computer, too.”

  Nate’s mouth was hanging open. “You don’t back up your devices? My whole life’s in my phone. And my computer. I back them up in triplicate, religiously. It’s worth it, just so I never have to worry about losing a story when the paper’s going to print.”

  “That’s the difference between you and me. My whole life’s on Joyeuse Island, where my kids are. And in my car, too, since my wife’s driving it around the county right now. Faye makes sure our business stuff is backed up, and she takes care of our family pictures. Until I started taking pictures with Ossie, I just didn’t care about anything on my phone or my computer bad enough to worry about losing it. And also I really hate fussing with passwords.”

  If Joe hadn’t been so upset about losing Ossie, the horrified look on Nate’s face would have made him laugh until he cried.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Sheriff Rainey didn’t have much to say other than, “This is a small town. Heck, the area around the marina ain’t even a town. It’s just a wide spot in the road with a few businesses and a church. Not to mention that I know pretty much everybody in these parts. It’s really hard to hide in Micco County. We’ll find out who did it, Joe.”

  His words were encouraging. His facial expression? Not so much. Joe knew that the man’s resources were limited, and he preferred that the sheriff spend them on finding out what happened to Captain Eubank.

  “I don’t even know what the law says about shooting a drone. It’s not like Ossie was a person, and there wasn’t a person anywhere close,” Joe said.

  “Willful destruction of property ain’t murder,” Sheriff Rainey said, “but it’s surely criminal mischief. It’s no felony unless that was a right expensive piece of equipment, like maybe a thousand dollars or more—”

  Joe shook his head. He said, “Ossie couldn’t have been that expensive. She was a Christmas present. Sheriff Mike and Magda wouldn’t have spent that much,” then he felt bad about saying “Sheriff Mike” in front of the real sheriff.

  “So shooting it down wasn’t a felony. It was still a misdeme
anor, though. Maximum sentence for that is a year in jail. That ain’t nothing to sneeze at. Discharging a firearm in a public place is another misdemeanor,” the sheriff said, “and it can also bring as much as a year behind bars.”

  Joe could see that Sheriff Rainey was trying to make him feel better, but nothing he’d said indicated that he had enough evidence to even find out who did the shooting. His deputies had turned up almost no sign of the shooter. They’d found some indistinct footprints among the trees at the edge of the cypress swamp, but the prints had led into a small clearing carpeted in unkempt weeds. This is where they petered out.

  There was no obvious evidence of a parked car nearby, but the shooter had gotten away somehow. Most likely the car had been parked in one of three parking lots within a half-mile of the spot where Ossie had gone down. There were tire tracks from any number of cars and trucks in those lots, but it was going to be hard to link any of them to the shooter. The sheriff had assigned someone to find security camera footage from the entities associated with the lots—a restaurant, a church, and an RV park—but none of them looked especially prosperous. Joe wouldn’t be surprised to hear that none of them had been able to afford the expense of a security system.

  “I guess Ossie was busted into a million pieces,” Joe said. “If you found the card, though, I guess I might be able to recover some pictures I took with her.”

  The sheriff shook his head. “We didn’t find the card or even the main body of the drone where the card would be. To tell you the truth, we didn’t find much of Ossie at all. At first, we thought she went down over the water.”

  It did not escape Joe’s attention that the sheriff had picked up his habit of talking about the drone as if it were alive. Well, good. Maybe this quirk would have an effect on the sheriff and the people he had working the case. If they felt the emotional connection to Ossie that they would have felt for a person or an animal that had been ambushed and killed, then maybe they’d feel driven to find the culprit.

  “Why don’t you think she went down over the water?” Joe asked.

  “After a lot of looking, we found a few little bits of plastic and a couple of pieces of the battery on the ground. The more interesting thing is that we found them right around where we found those few footprints. If I had to guess, the shooter took the time to pick up the biggest pieces and carry them away. There wasn’t time to get them all, because the shooter knew it was important to get to the car and get away, but the big pieces? Yeah. They’re gone. And so’s the controller and your phone. We even tried calling it and listening for the ring. Nothing. Either it’s in the water and shorted out or somebody took it. And even if it’s in the water, that still means that somebody—probably the shooter—threw it out there. You would have noticed if Nate had overhanded it into the Gulf.”

  “Seems a little weird to me for somebody to spend time picking up my phone and the pieces of Ossie, when they knew that somebody’d probably called the cops,” Joe said. “But I don’t understand where else my phone could have gone, unless Nate accidentally dropped it in the water. The boats at the marina keep it stirred up there, so it ain’t real clear. My phone could be right there at the edge under a layer of silt, and it would be the devil to find it. Or maybe he dropped it when we were standing at the edge of the woods and the person that murdered Ossie was able to get to it without us seeing.”

  “Well, that’s just one of the things I’ll be asking this person who goes around shooting a gun where guns shouldn’t be shot. I’m looking forward to being face-to-face in the questioning room.”

  Joe noticed that he planned to do the questioning himself. He doubted that sheriffs made a habit of scheduling face-time with misdemeanor suspects, so he was taking this thing seriously. This was good, although Joe didn’t have a clue why he’d do that. For all their talk about Ossie as if she was a recently murdered human being, she wasn’t. She was just a hunk of plastic with a camera and a memory card, powered by a battery pack.

  Captain Eubank, however, had been a human being. He’d had a sister and friends who loved him, and he’d loved life. Nobody could look at his library and believe that he wasn’t fascinated with the world and the people in it. Joe hoped that his death had been a terrible accident, but he wasn’t sure. And he needed to be sure.

  “Do you think this crime has anything to do with what happened to the captain?”

  He expected a blank look, but he got a guarded one instead.

  “I can’t think of a single thing to link them, other than that they happened close to each other geographically. I’m sure you know that ‘These things happened close to each other, Your Honor!’ is not something that will hold up in a court of law. Still, there’s nothing to stop me from investigating them both a lot more closely than is strictly required.”

  “And you’re doing that?” Joe didn’t know Sheriff Rainey quite well enough to know how he would respond to this kind of pushback, but he was in the mood to test him. It’s what Faye would have done. He wished she were standing there beside him.

  “With no crime scene and no physical evidence other than the captain’s body, there’s not much more I can do, other than wait for that autopsy. But, no, I have not written his death off to an accident or natural causes. Not yet. Unless we find some shred of evidence that it was foul play, though, I’ll have to do that soon enough. Right now, I’m just listening to the creepy feeling in the back of my brain saying that something’s not right.”

  Sheriff Rainey fiddled with the change in his pocket like a man whose nerves were nagging at him. Then he went back to talking. “And I guess that’s true of this Ossie-shooting incident. There’s nothing to say that it’s anything more than simple vandalism and there’s nothing to say that it’s linked to the captain’s death, but I’ve still got that creepy feeling that things aren’t right. When I get that feeling, I listen to it. Does that approach meet with your approval, sir?”

  At first, Joe recoiled at his use of “sir.” It seemed like a sarcastic way to answer him. When he saw that there was no sarcasm on the sheriff’s face, he heard the “sir” differently, as a signal that Sheriff Rainey respected his opinion enough to answer him, but he also wanted to keep the conversation light. Since Joe wasn’t sure he could walk that same conversational tightrope, he just nodded.

  Chapter Eighteen

  It had taken Faye forever to run Amande’s delivery route, and she’d spent that time in parts of Wakulla County that were still without a functional cell tower. This had become obvious when she finally edged out of the hurricane zone, because her phone had lit up with notifications. She’d had calls and texts from Joe, Amande, Magda, and Emma, and none of them made sense.

  Even Manny had shot her some messages that were meant to be reassuring:

  Dont freak out

  Joes telling the truth

  He’s ok

  Then, as soon as she’d read the messages and listened to the voicemails, she’d lost service again. This forced her to drive for another quarter-hour wondering what people were talking about. Why on earth would somebody shoot Ossie?

  Also, despite what everybody said, somebody had been firing a gun in her husband’s vicinity, so she felt completely entitled to freak out. And she did, within reason. She held herself together enough to handle the car, but the inside of her brain was a mess.

  When she got Joe on the phone, he sounded fine. He was already home with the kids. This gave her permission to finally fall apart. She found a stretch of road where the shoulder wasn’t heaped with hurricane debris, parked her car, and indulged in some hysterics while he kept saying that there was no reason for her to do that.

  “You keep saying you’re fine,” she said between hiccuping sobs, “but the things you’re telling me don’t sound fine. I’ll be home as quick as this car can get me there. And my boat…which isn’t at the marina, is it?”

  Joe tried to say that he’d come ge
t her, but she interrupted him. “You’ve been through enough today, and so have the kids. I’ll use Amande’s boat. I’m sure she won’t mind, but I’ll ask her. She thinks I don’t respect her space. I don’t want to make her right about that.”

  As soon as she ended the call, her phone rang again. It was Amande, trying to sound like she hadn’t been crying about the captain or Ossie or the pain of being nineteen. All she said was, “Please use my boat to get home as soon as you can,” and then she was gone.

  * * *

  Faye was finally, finally home. She buried her face in Joe’s chest, grateful for the feel of his heartbeat against her cheek. “I was so scared.”

  Michael was sandwiched between them, yelping for air.

  “What happened?” she asked. “Why would somebody be shooting at you?”

  Joe shook his head, saying, “They weren’t shooting at Nate and me. They were shooting at Ossie. She’d been out over the water and was just coming inland when we heard the shots, two of them. As soon as Ossie was on her way down, there weren’t any more.”

  “Mission accomplished,” Amande said. “A perfectly harmless machine was dead, so they stopped shooting. I’m sure this makes perfect sense to somebody, but not to me.”

  And now the children were crying over Ossie, forcing Joe to say, “She was just a machine. I mean, it was just a machine. We can save up our money and buy another one just like her. I mean, just like it.”

  Faye came to his rescue. “Ossie can be replaced. Your dad can’t. Everything turned out for the best. And if the sheriff can find the person who’s shooting a gun when they’re way too close to people, that’ll be even better.”

  * * *

  When Joe had seen Faye trudge into their house at the end of a terrible day, he’d had a feeling about what she was going to say. And he’d been right.

  “I’m not sure Sheriff Rainey is taking the captain’s death seriously enough,” were the first words out of her mouth when the children were out of earshot, and Joe wasn’t at all surprised. And her next words weren’t unexpected, either. “We’re supposed to be happy that he hasn’t closed the case and called it a day, but I don’t sense that he’s as hell-bent on solving it as he should be. I’m gonna call Sheriff Mike.”