by Bob Mayer
He stepped outside with Sarah, and Erin locked the door behind her. As Chase stepped to the side, he noticed a group of standing objects on the side of the building, hidden in the dark shadows, and his hand started to move for his gun.
“Easy, cowboy,” Erin said. She walked over to the corner of the building and hit a switch. A spotlight illuminated a life-sized chess set, the pieces spread out over an old parking lot. The squares were painted on the asphalt. The knights were unicorns, the pawns foot soldiers with spears, the castles strangely-shaped keeps, and the bishops were wizards, but the king and queen were a king and queen, although she was slightly taller than the king.
“Looks like you have a game in progress,” Chase said, admiring the setup. Now he remembered: she’d always had a book with her, something to do with knights and princesses and dragons. Fantasy.
Erin flipped the light off. “I enjoy it.” She shifted the topic. “So are you asking me to take your friend to my place?” Erin didn’t wait for an answer. “I believe she has a voice, don’t you, Sarah?”
“I do,” Sarah said. She looked at Chase. “I think I’d be safer with you.”
Chase shook his head. “I’m going to find out what’s going on. It’ll be easier if I don’t have to worry about you.”
“I can help,” Sarah said.
Chase considered the type of help he might need, and Sarah wasn’t it. But it got his mind working.
“Horace?” Erin prodded, pulling him out of memories. Erin shifted targets. “Why don’t you stay with me, Sarah, while Horace does whatever it is he does? My partner won’t mind.”
Chase took a step back toward his Jeep. “Trust me, Sarah. It’s better that you stay with Erin.” He paused. “What happened to Doc Cleary?” he asked Erin.
She shrugged. “No one knows. He’s been gone over a year now. Since your mother passed. Sailed off, and no one knows where he is. I’m awfully sorry about your mother, Horace.”
“Thanks.”
Sarah took a step toward his Jeep. “I do have a say in what I do with my life. I’m going with you, Chase.”
Chase looked at Erin as Sarah got in the passenger seat with a finality that brooked no argument. Erin walked up and stood on her tiptoes, and gave him a peck on the cheek. “Good luck. You were never very good with women, and I mean that in a nice way.”
“Partner?” Chase asked.
“Things have changed since you’ve been gone, Horace. Times have changed, people have changed. But some things haven’t changed in South Carolina, and I still can’t get married.”
“Oh,” Chase said.
“Oh, poor Horace.” Erin laughed as she turned for Volkswagen. “Your mother and her poetry—seriously? Horace? That’s the best she could do? Stay safe.”
Chase got in the Jeep. Sarah was staring straight ahead through the windshield, arms folded across her chest.
It was still dark, dawn quite a bit off. Chase drove back to Spanish Wells, albeit slower. He pulled up to the gravel driveway, noting his house was the only one not festooned with security lights and floodlights pointing at the shrubbery and other signs of wealth. It was one of the few original one-story ranches left in a place where people bought lots, the old houses just a hindrance that had to be razed.
“Let’s check your place,” Chase said.
Sarah broke her silence. “For what? It’s a rental, and the only things in it are Cole’s and my bags.”
Good point, Chase thought. He turned into his place, also noting that he had the only gravel driveway. He rolled down it, past several large, old trees, and pulled up to front. The front door was unlocked.
“We’ve got a couple of hours before it’s dawn,” he said as he locked the door behind them.
He grabbed his bedroll, consisting of a Therma-a-Rest pad and a bivy sack, and rolled it on the living room floor in front of the fireplace. “Why don’t you catch a couple of hours of sleep?”
Sarah stood next to the bedroll, a slim, dark silhouette in the moonlight reflected off the Intracoastal and the neighbor’s security lights. “What are you going to do?”
“Think.”
Chase walked out of the house, through the back sliding glass door, and past the pool. Down the rough lawn onto the walkway for the dock. He carefully walked over the boards, noting that a third of them needed to be replaced, to the end. A metal gangway descended to the floating dock. Chase went down, took of his boots, and sat on the edge, feet in the water. Dawn was still a few hours away. The water was chilly, but not too bad. Not the 86 degrees it would warm up to in the summer, but the Gulf Stream kept it from getting cold.
A security light on the end of Rollins’ dock was much too bright, ruining the view of the stars overhead. But it was bright enough to read by. Chase reached into his pocket and removed his wallet. He pulled out the carefully folded letter inside. It was stained with blood, Chase’s blood.
He unfolded it and read.
My Dearest Horace.
We are both at war, but I fear I am losing mine. The cancer has spread too quickly.
Fate has dealt you a final card from the father you never knew and the man I hardly knew. Don’t be like your father. Don’t be too brave. Come back from the war.
I know we haven’t spoken in a long time. I know you don’t want to hear this. I blame myself for that. But maybe someday you’ll think better about me. I hope you will.
Sometimes there are broken people. Like me. Like you. I was trying to do the right thing for you. Now I know I did wrong by giving you your father’s legacy. The Medal of Honor and the Academy appointment that came with it, and all afterward. But maybe it isn’t too late.
Even broken people should get another chance.
Be a good man.
With my dying love,
Your Mother.
PS: In my will, there’s a house. An old house. But it’s a good house in a good place. It will be yours. It’s the house we spent the summers in on Hilton Head in the Low Country. It’s from an old friend. He’s a good man. You won’t understand now, and will think the wrong thing because you tend to think the wrong thing first. It’s all I can give you now.
Chase folded the letter and put it back in the wallet. He took out the picture that he carried next to it. The father he’d never met. A faded, black-and-white photo of a young man sporting a wide smile. He wore jungle fatigues and a green beret with the old, original flash for 5th Special Forces, the colors of the Vietnamese flag angled across the black background.
The father who’d earned the Medal of Honor, posthumously. And it was the earning of the nation’s highest award for courage that had gotten Chase his automatic appointment to West Point. Some guys got grandfathered into Harvard because of family connections and money. Chase had been projected into the United States Military Academy because of his father’s heroism in death.
Chase stared out at the dark water of the Intracoastal. His mother’s ashes had been spread out there by Doc Cleary. Chase had been in a hospital in Germany, recovering from the wounds, which stained the letter with blood.
Doc Cleary hadn’t waited for Chase, because his mother had told him not to wait.
She knew Chase better than he knew himself.
Sylvie, back in Boulder, had known Chase well, too. She’d upbraided him for never coming here to pay respects to his mother’s memory. Another piece of the unraveling of that relationship.
He was here now.
The creak of boards caught his attention. He turned his head and saw Sarah standing at the top of the steel walkway. She made her way down and sat next to him, close by. He could feel her warmth.
“I don’t want to be alone,” she said.
“Sorry.” Chase wasn’t sure what else to say. This was not at all what he had expected, but now he realized he’d had no expectations on the long drive to South Carolina from Colorado. His mind had been mired in the past, choices made and not made. Lives that were now gone. People that were now gone from him, whether through
choice or through death.
Sarah leaned against him. He put his arm around her, awkwardly at first, but her body relaxed into his.
“I miss him,” Sarah said. “I miss Cole so badly it’s like a hole has been punched through me. Right through my heart. I didn’t know I could hurt this bad.”
“We’ll get him back.”
“‘We’?” Sarah asked. “You were going to leave me back there.”
“For your own good. But I’m going to need help,” Chase added. “I know you don’t want the cops involved, but I have to go find out what they know. I used to be one,” he added. That felt like a lie. His time wearing a badge in Boulder seemed distant, and part of a life lived one step out of sync with reality. And the cops in Boulder, other than his partner, hadn’t considered him one of the brotherhood.
“No cops,” Sarah said, but her voice was tired.
“I need information,” Chase said. “Trust me on this.”
Sarah’s head slumped into the crook of his arm. Her voice was muffled. “All right. I trust you.”
* * * * *
The first tinge of dawn, which came from behind them, found Chase still seated on the edge of the dock, carefully cradling Sarah’s head exactly where it had come to rest on his arm.
She stirred, slowly uncoiling from him. She stretched her arms, then suddenly stiffened.
“Cole!”
Chase retrieved his arm, the muscles stiff. He got to his feet. “BMNT.”
“What?” Sarah was confused as she also got up.
“Beginning morning nautical twilight,” Chase said. “The time when the sun is just below the horizon. An opportune time to attack.”
“You were military, besides being a cop,” Sarah said.
“Yes.”
“I knew you were different from the first moment I saw you,” Sarah said.
“Different isn’t necessarily good.”
“I’m sorry I got your dog shot,” Sarah said as she followed Chase to the gangplank up to the long walkway back to land.
“You didn’t shoot her,” Chase said. But when he caught who did . . .
“What’s the plan?” Sarah asked as they carefully walked along the warped planks.
“Who is the law here?” Chase asked. It wasn’t something he’d concerned himself with when he was a kid visiting. “The guy yesterday was from the Sheriff. There’s no Hilton Head Police?”
“No,” Sarah said as they reached the end of the walk and strode up the grass to the concrete surrounding the pool. “Not even a substation of the Sheriff’s Department. They operate out of Beaufort.”
“That’s odd.”
“That’s Hilton Head,” Sarah said.
“They’ve got to have around thirty-thousand full-timers here, and a couple of million visitors a year to the island,” Chase noted. “Weird, the police headquarters is thirty-some-odd miles away.”
“That’s the way they like it here, according to Walter.”
Chase had almost forgotten about Walter. He still felt the warmth of Sarah’s skin on his arm. “We’ll pick up something to eat on the road.”
“Whatever works for you,” Sarah said. She looked at her phone.
“Anything from your husband?”
“Nothing. If anything had changed, he’d have texted or called. Are you sure it’s smart to check with the police?”
“I’m going to talk to the cop who was here yesterday,” Chase said as they walked out the front door to the Jeep. “I have a feeling about him.”
The open top on the Jeep prohibited further conversation. Chase drove over the bridge, leaving the island, as the sun rose in the east. Traffic was already heavy, as it was a Saturday and the weeklong rentals all turned over on the weekend. Carloads of worn-out families were heading back home after a week vacation at the beach. The license plates indicated an array of states within driving distance, Ohio the predominant one. Even though it was off-season, the island was still a beacon for those from the north wanting to escape winter’s lash. Finishing up a week’s vacation was an oxymoron, because the glimpses Chase caught of the people in the cars showed sunburned men driving, looking haggard, wives next to them looking even more worn-out, and kids passed out in the back. It didn’t look like fun.
Chase turned off Highway 278, the main drag off the island, onto 170, the coastal highway. He headed north to Beaufort.
Forty-five minutes later, he pulled into the parking lot of the Sheriff’s department. It was a modern building, complete with barriers to prevent a car or truck loaded with explosives from driving into the lobby. Why terrorists would target this building, Chase had no idea, but some contractor had made good money putting those barriers in. In Chase’s experience, a lot of things were built more to make someone money than for practicality. Every time he went through security at an airport, it depressed him, because it meant the terrorists had won. The top two floors of the four-story building had the narrow, hard windows that meant there were cells on the other side.
“I think you’ll be all right out here,” Chase said. “Call your husband while I’m inside, and check if there’s been anything new.”
Chase disarmed. He put the MK, a dagger, the garrote from the inside of his belt, and a small Leatherman attached to his key chain in the metal console between the two front seats.
Sarah watched him do this with interest. “You sure you got everything?”
“I’m sure,” Chase said, but he thought about it for a second, mentally running through his personal armory. He locked the console, then got out of the Jeep and went to the front door.
A fat, old man in a deputy’s uniform sat at a table next to metal detector.
“Morning. Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for Lieutenant Parsons,” Chase said.
The deputy didn’t invite Chase to pass through the metal detector. He picked up a phone. He spoke in a low voice, glanced up at Chase as if what he heard wasn’t good, then hung up.
“All metal in the bowl,” he said.
Chase put the key in it along with his belt. The deputy waved him through, and he succeeded without a beep. He collected his key and belt.
“Down the hall, up the stairs, right and right.”
“Thanks.”
Parsons was waiting at the top of the stairs, holding the high ground.
“Cuhnel,” Parsons said as Chase climbed up to his level. He stuck out his hand. “Fancy seeing you coming for a visit. Is it social or business?”
“There were—a” Chase began, but Parsons waved him silent as he led the way down the hallway. They went into an office, and Parsons shut the door.
A Marine Corps flag decorated the wall on one side, a cluster of plaques and photographs on the other. A window, not a narrow one, was behind the chair. Parsons sat down in a leather chair while Chase took the hard plastic one in front of the desk.
Parsons tapped the computer on the left side of his desk. “I been reading up on you, Cuhnel. You were an officer of the law in Boulder, Colorado, for a brief spell. One of them fancy F.L.I.s the Feds been sending out. We have not been honored here in Beaufort with one of your kind yet, unfortunately.”
He said it in a way the indicated it was not unfortunate at all.
Chase waited, knowing he was on Parsons’ turf now.
“Seems you separated from both the police and the Feds pretty quickly, pretty recently,” Parsons continued. “And there’s not much on your Federal Service record. West Point, Infantry, into Special Forces, then it sort of disappears, much like I imagine you did.”
Chase remained silent.
“What happened in Colorado, if you don’t me asking?”
“I mind,” Chase said.
Parson’s face tightened. “Keep your secrets, Cuhnel.” He picked up a mug with a unit flash emblazoned on it, and took a drink. He didn’t offer Chase any from the pot on top of a filing cabinet. “You know, I could always call over to Boulder and chat with one of your former colleagues. What m
ight I hear?”
“Depends who you talk to.”
Parson gave the ghost of a smile. “Always does, always does. What can I do you for?”
“Did you get a report of shots fired in Spanish Wells last night?”
Parsons leaned back in his chair. “We sure did.”
“I didn’t see any flashing lights.”
“That’s cause there weren’t,” Parsons said. “Spanish Wells security called us right after. Kids with fireworks on the beach, they said. Said they took care of it.”
“And your people didn’t investigate?”
“No flashing lights, right?” Parsons leaned forward. “Let me tell you some of the realities of your new home, Cuhnel. Hilton Head has seven gated communities. Completely private. Each with its own security force. Each of those security forces is armed and certified by the State as a legitimate police force in their own right.
“They don’t depend on the county or the state for nothing. The island even has its own fire department. Technically, yes, they’re in Beaufort County, but my boss, the County Sheriff, he’s made it clear there’s a line we’re not to cross unless invited. That line goes right between those fancy pillars at the entrance to each of those communities. Pretty much actually starts right at Pinckney Island as you’re hitting the on-ramp for the bridge.”
“You visited the other day,” Chase noted.
“I sure did,” Parsons said. “I was invited.”
“They thought the badge would scare me.”
Parsons shrugged. “May well be what they thought, Cuhnel. But it didn’t, did it?”
Chase didn’t answer.
“I’m assuming, dumb southern sheriff that I be, that it wasn’t kids on the beach with fireworks. And given that you are now a prized member of the exclusive Spanish Wells community, and knowing your background, why do I have to also assume you were involved?”
Chase considered the lieutenant, not sure what angle the man was playing, or where his loyalty lied. The Semper Fi thing could be a mirage, something to draw him into confidence with a man not worthy of it.