Dead on the Island

by Bill Crider

  I looked into the office first, but it was empty. The other room on that side of the hall was also deserted, a combination kitchen/dining room area furnished with a cheap dinette set. That left the door on the other side.

  I opened the door carefully. There was no one inside there, either.

  No one alive, that is.

  It was a bedroom, with a dresser, a padded rocking chair, and a double bed. Ferguson was in the bed. I could see him in the light from the hall. He wouldn't be getting up anytime soon, not under his own power.

  He lay on top of the spread, dressed exactly as he had been the last time I saw him. Maybe the shirt was different; it was hard to tell in the dim light that came in from the hall and the graying sky that I could see through the window.

  There didn't seem to be much blood, but Ferguson hadn't died like Terry Shelton. He'd been shot. There were two holes in the front of his Western shirt, one of them located right about in the center of his chest. There was blood around both holes, though not enough to stain the entire shirt. I walked over to the bed, reached out a finger, and touched one of the stains. It was still a little wet.

  Ferguson lay there as if he'd been arranged, hands at his sides, legs straight out. His glasses were still on his face, but they looked slightly askew. Maybe he'd been shot somewhere else and placed on the bed. Maybe he'd been told to lie down and then he'd been shot. I didn't know, and I couldn't ask him.

  Well, I could ask, but I didn't think he'd be able to come up with much in the way of an answer.

  I looked at him for maybe a minute, and then I was out of there, using the tail of the sweatshirt to wipe the light switch and doorknobs I'd touched. I wiped the wall and the surface of the doors, too.

  A minute later I was back in the Subaru, on the way to Galveston.

  12

  As the Subaru rolled down the Freeway to Galveston, there was plenty of traffic headed in the opposite direction, all of it going toward the big city. It was not very long after sunrise, or what would have been sunrise if the day had been clear, but anyone who wanted to beat the really big crush had already started out, beginning a smaller crush of their own. Very few drivers were going toward Galveston, however, and my headlights played along the gray road in front of me without reflecting from the bumpers of any other cars.

  I had a lot to think about. I turned on the car radio to see if it would help me. I found a station playing Smiley Lewis, who was singing the only really good version of "I Hear You Knockin'," but he didn't have any clues for me.

  A confusing situation had now become even more confusing, not to mention more serious. It was bad enough to have one dead body in the case. Two were almost more than I cared to think about, especially since I still hadn't figured out how the first one fit in. I wondered if the undercover cop I'd talked to in The Sidepocket would remember me well enough to describe me. Probably. So would the bartender. But it didn't really matter as long as they never saw me again. A man like Ferguson was bound to have plenty of enemies to select the suspects from.

  Of course if the cop recalled that I had mentioned Terry Shelton, and if someone in Houston had heard about the murder in Galveston, then things could get pretty interesting around my house. The odds of that happening, however, were small.

  My greatest problem at the moment seemed to be that no matter what the Houston police were able to come up with I no longer had any suspects, except possibly for Sharon Matthews, and no one knew where she could be found. I certainly didn't.

  Hank Ballard and the Midnighters came on the radio singing "Let's Go, Let's Go, Let's Go." Great idea, Hank, but where the hell am I supposed to go? I thought about Sharon, going back over everything that had happened so far. There must have been something I'd overlooked, something that I hadn't thought about enough, something that would give me a crack to start poking around in.

  I was sure there was something, but I couldn't figure out what it was.

  Terry Shelton was dead.

  Chuck Ferguson was dead.

  Someone apparently wanted Dino dead, and he almost had been.

  I started to feel lucky that I'd only been beaten up.

  The sky kept getting grayer, but that was it. There wasn't going to be any sun, not for a while if at all. Heavy, low clouds hung down, almost low enough to touch the roof of the Subaru. The Capris were singing "There's a Moon Out Tonight." Not here, there wasn't.

  Something occurred to me just as the lead singer was stretching out that last "to-ooo-oo-oo-ni-iii-iigt." Sharon had only recently found out about her mother's past. She hadn't been overjoyed by what she'd discovered. How might she have reacted, under the circumstances? Was it possible that she could have engineered her own kidnapping? She could have seen it as a way to make her father pay--if she'd known who her actual father was and not just what her mother had been. Even the shooting made a crazy kind of sense if you looked at it right. She decided that she'd rather have a dead father than have his money. She'd been told that her father was dead, so she'd seen to it that he was dead.

  I thought about that angle. If I was right, Terry Shelton and Chuck Ferguson were mixed up in the plot somewhere. Why not? Sharon would need help to pull off something as complicated as a kidnapping.

  So where did that leave me? Clyde MacPhatter was asking "A Lover's Question," but I had a different kind of question in mind. I thought maybe I knew the answer now, or at least part of the answer. I sent the Subaru over the bridge and down toward Broadway just as a pink rim appeared on one of the clouds. Maybe the sun was going to shine after all.

  ~ * ~

  Nameless was waiting for me when I got home. I stashed the pistol under the seat again, fed him, and changed sweatshirts. The bruises on my ribs looked like hell, but they didn't hurt as long as I didn't make any sudden moves.

  While I was changing, I watched the early morning news from Houston. The remains of a young woman had been found in a field near La Marque. The sheriff was understandably agitated, since it was the fifth body that had been found in the same general area in less than a month. Someone very unpleasant was using the sheriff's county for a dumping ground. There wasn't really much left of the body, mostly scattered bones and a few scraps of clothing. The investigators estimated that the remains may have been in the field for as much as eight months. Maybe a year. Two grade schoolers had found the remains late the previous afternoon when returning from a rabbit hunt.

  I thought about Jan. I'd have to remember to call the sheriff's office and remind them to check her dental records. I'd sent them some time before, when the first body had been discovered. I didn't think this one was her, either, but I had to make sure.

  Strangely enough, the reporter's story didn't bother me as much as it would have even a few days before. I was beginning to accept the fact that Jan might really be dead and that I was never going to find her, something that I had accepted intellectually a long time ago. It had never reached me emotionally, though, down in that dark cavern of the mind where we all really live. It reached me now, and my interest in Dino's problems had turned the trick. Maybe it was just that I had something else to occupy my thoughts. Or possibly I had really reached acceptance.

  I didn't have time to worry about it. Nameless had spread himself out on the couch, his back pressed against the cushions, his legs extended. He was nearly as long as the couch.

  I picked him up and carried him down the stairs. "Sorry," I said. "But it's outside again." I tossed him out and went down the steps to the car. He sat and looked at me resentfully as I drove away.

  I went by McDonald's for an Egg McMuffin and then drove down to the Bolivar ferry. I drove right by the street where Evelyn Matthews lived, but I noticed nothing out of the ordinary there. At this time of day and year, there was no wait for the ferry. I drove right on the Gib Gilchrist, stopped the car, set the brake, and got out.

  The ferry was far from full, but it began its journey anyway. There was a slight chop on the bay water, but nothing to make me uncomfortable
. I get seasick very easily.

  I hadn't brought any popcorn or stale bread to feed the seagulls with, and neither had anyone else. This wasn't a tourist time of day. The gulls that followed us for a short distance, swooping and diving at the boat, soon gave up and went away. I looked for the dolphins that sometimes came to observe the ferry, but they were elsewhere, or maybe they were asleep. I didn't know what hours dolphins kept.

  The trip took only about twenty minutes, and it wasn't until I drove off the boat that I remembered I hadn't found out Terry Shelton's address. It had occurred to me that Shelton's house might be a good place to hide if you were Sharon Matthews and you wanted people to think you'd been kidnapped. It was free, after all, and there was really no reason for anyone to search there. Terry would have said that he hadn't seen her for several days if anyone had asked.

  But no one was going to ask him because he was dead. Did Sharon know that? Would she still be there, if she had ever been? Had the police searched the house? It wouldn't take me long to answer at least one of those questions. The others might take a little longer.

  I drove past the Bolivar Lighthouse. A hundred or more people had weathered the 1900 storm there. It didn't look any the worse for wear or for the ninety years that had passed. It stood as straight as ever, but it was safely out of the public's way behind a chain-link fence.

  In the little town of Port Bolivar I stopped at a Stop-and-Go to ask about the Shelton house. The clerk was a woman about thirty-five, a little on the heavy side, wearing a striped uniform top. Her nametag said that she was "Debbie." I got a can of Big Red from the cooler and then paid her.

  She gave me my change. "Thank you," she said. "Have a nice day."

  I started to tell her that I had other plans, and then thought better of it. No one wants to help out a smart aleck. "I'll try," I said. I started out the door and then turned back as if I'd just thought of something.

  "Can I help you?" Debbie asked.

  "Maybe so. I was just wondering. I heard the Shelton house was for sale."

  "Oh, no, I don't think so," Debbie said. "You must've heard about something else. Wasn't it terrible about the Shelton boy, though?"

  "What about him?" I took a sip of Big Red and looked guileless, or as close as I could come.

  "Why, he got killed over in Galveston. Got his neck broke!" Debbie's eyes were wide with the horror of it.

  "No kidding," I said.

  "No kidding. Everybody wonders what it was all about." She looked around to see if any big-time drug dealers were listening. "I bet it was some kinda drug deal."

  For an area that had once been known for bootlegging, drugs had become a new form of an old vice. "Probably," I said. "There's a lot of that going on. Well, I wouldn't want to buy a drug-dealer's house."

  Debbie shook her head. "I don't think it's for sale."

  "I'm sure I heard it was. That big house just down the street from here, faces on the Intracoastal Waterway?"

  "Well," she said, "it faces on the Waterway, all right, but it's about half a mile up the road. It's yellow, with a green porch."

  "Not the one I heard about, then," I said. I went on out the front glass doors, and tossed what was left of the Big Red, which was most of it, in the trash. Even for me, it was too early in the morning for Big Red.

  I found the Shelton house without any trouble after that. I could see why Debbie thought Terry might have been involved with dope. The house was an ideal location. A boat could tie up at the dock, wait for a load of the stuff to arrive from Columbia, or wherever it was coming from these days, and sail out into the Gulf to meet the ship, then sail back to the dock and unload into station wagons or vans that could carry the junk into Houston. It would work, if the Coast Guard didn't catch you. Since you'd have to sail right in front of the Coast Guard station, you'd have to have pretty good nerves, or very little sense. Money does strange things to people, though.

  I stopped the car a few houses away from the Shelton place. It looked deserted, but I didn't feel like taking any chances. I didn't see anyone anywhere around, and for just a second I thought about slipping the pistol out from under the seat, but I didn't. This looked like a perfectly peaceful area, the kind of place where nothing ever happened and where kids played in the yards with their dogs.

  I walked down to the house, which was raised up on posts about ten feet off the ground. There was a place underneath to park a car, but there wasn't one there. The curtains were drawn in all the rooms that I could see. There was no sign that the police had visited it, though I thought they probably had. And it was likely that Terry Shelton's parents had been there to look at his things. It would have been easy for Sharon to leave and return, of course. But if she had left, where had she gone?

  I looked up at the house for a minute or two, and then climbed the green stairs that led to the door. The door was not on the front of the house, but on the side. I knocked as if I were an insurance salesman or a poll taker. There was no answer.

  I waited a second or two before I tried to doorknob. It didn't budge. I wondered if there was an alarm system. Well, there was one way to find out. I took a Visa card out of my billfold and slipped the latch. It didn't take more than a couple of seconds. The door opened easily. There was no deadbolt.

  And no alarm. No bells rang, no buzzers buzzed, no lights flashed. Of course the phone could already be dialing the police station, but I didn't think that was likely. I eased into the cool dimness and shut the door behind me.

  I stood quietly, waiting for my eyes to get used to the dim light. There was nothing exceptional to see when they did. A room with a couch, a bookcase, a TV set, and a coffee table. A few magazines on the coffee table, Time, Newsweek, National Geographic. The subscription labels all had Terry's name on them. There was carpet on the floor, but it didn't quite fit the size of the room. Probably bought as a remnant. There was no padding under it.

  I was looking through the bookcase when I started getting the feeling that I wasn't alone. Terry Shelton's taste in reading, or his parents', ran to paperbacks by writers like Stephen King and Robert R. McCammon. I had just flipped through a copy of McCammon's They Thirst, which was apparently about the vampire take-over of Los Angeles, when I began to suspect that someone was watching me.

  I put the book back in place and turned around slowly. There were two doors leading out of the room I was in, and both probably led to bedrooms. The kitchen/eating area was a part of the room I was in, separated from the living section only by a long breakfast bar at which three stools stood.

  I could decide if there was someone in the room on the right or the one on the left. I wasn't even sure that there was anyone there at all. Maybe I was just reacting to the paperback I'd been looking at, with its bloody, toothy cover.

  I stood and watched the doorways. There was no motion, no sound in the dimness behind them.

  "Sharon?" I said. My voice cracked slightly, so I said it again. "Sharon?"

  There was no answer. I walked to the door on the right, feeling like that character in "The Lady or the Tiger?" I could see a double bed, covered with a dark spread. There was a line of light on the floor at the bottom of the curtains.

  "Sharon?" I said.

  There was no answer, no sound of any kind. Feeling like a fool, I stepped through the doorway. I was convinced there was no one there.

  Luckily my conviction didn't slow me down. I stepped pretty quickly and thereby avoided most of the blow that was aimed at me. It missed my head and hit me right between the shoulder blades. Even at that, I was flipped ass over elbows and landed on the bed.

  My mind momentarily went into neutral and my body was paralyzed. Pain jabbed me in the ribs.

  I got over my paralysis quickly and rolled to the side, which was just as well, since I managed to avoid the chair that came crashing down on the bed where I had been.

  I slipped off the side of the bed onto the floor. I got my knees under me and raised my head up carefully, jerking it back down to avoid th
e chair once more. It was a black bentwood chair, very light weight, but I had no desire for it to come into contact with my head no matter what it weighed. I wished sincerely and futilely that I had brought the Mauser, especially since the man wielding the chair was one of the gorillas from The Sidepocket's parking lot.

  I didn't know what else to do, so I slid under the bed. It was dark and dusty under there, but I could look out and see the guy's feet. He was wearing a pair of white canvas deck shoes, and he was standing on the side of the bed opposite the one I'd slid off of, no doubt wondering what to do next.

  He didn't know whether I was armed, but he was pretty sure I wasn't dangerous. After all, he'd taken me out once, with the help of his pals. As soon as he figured out where I was, he could toss the bed over and beat me to a pulp or just kneel down and shoot me if he had a pistol.

  Maybe I could take him. I wasn't a small man by any means, and I was probably in good enough shape unless he kicked me in the knee, but there wasn't very much I could do in the uncomfortable position in which I found myself. I eased closer to the deck shoes, then reached out and grabbed the ankles sticking out of them. I jerked forward as hard as I could.

  There was no rug on this floor, and as soon as the man's head came into contact with the floor I slithered out from under the bed and on top of him. He was surprised and stunned, but not out. He caught me under the chin with a forearm that snapped my head back and shivered my timbers.

  Before I knew what was happening, he was up and aiming a kick at my head. I rolled away and tried to grab his foot, but I missed. I got a grip on his pants leg, but he jerked away.

  Then the chair was coming at me again. He must have picked it up, though I don't remember seeing him do it. He didn't miss this time.

  In the movies when someone gets hit with a chair, the chair splinters satisfactorily, and pieces of it fly all over the room. This was not a movie chair. It stayed in one piece, one leg hitting my head while the others hit my shoulders and ribs. I tried to get up, but I felt like the two-thousand-year-old man.