Black Hammock

by Michael Wiley

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Recent Titles by Michael Wiley

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Note on the Daniel Turner Thrillers

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Recent Titles by Michael Wiley

  The Joe Kozmarski Series

  LAST STRIPTEASE

  THE BAD KITTY LOUNGE

  A BAD NIGHT’S SLEEP

  The Detective Daniel Turner Mysteries

  BLUE AVENUE *

  SECOND SKIN *

  BLACK HAMMOCK *

  * available from Severn House

  BLACK HAMMOCK

  Michael Wiley

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2016

  in Great Britain and the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2016 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD

  eBook edition first published in 2016 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2016 by Michael Wiley.

  The right of Michael Wiley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Wiley, Michael, 1961- author.

  Black hammock.

  1. Turner, Daniel (Fictitious character)–Fiction. 2. Cold

  cases (Criminal investigation)–Fiction. 3. Murder–

  Investigation–Fiction. 4. Police–Florida–

  Jacksonville–Fiction. 5. Detective and mystery stories.

  I. Title

  813.6-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8600-2 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-702-9 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-763-9 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

  are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described

  for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are

  fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  To Julie, Isaac, Maya, and Elias

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My thanks to Keith Cartwright for introducing me to Black Hammock Island, to Mary Roach, Norman Cantor, and Ruth Richardson, whose books have guided me through the morgue, to Julia Burns and Clark Lunberry for reading and advising, to Christine Kane for spinning the web, to Philip Spitzer, Lukas Ortiz, and Jennifer Woodason for always knowing the best way through, and to Kate Lyall Grant, Sara Porter, and Charlotte Loftus for making it happen.

  In Black Hammock, Lexi reads from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The Birthmark,’ Stephen Crane’s ‘A Dark-Brown Dog,’ and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

  NOTE ON THE DANIEL TURNER THRILLERS

  In each of the Daniel Turner thrillers, Homicide Detective Daniel Turner plays an important secondary role. He is the common element in others’ lives and deaths, getting caught in the spirals of crime that he investigates. These are North Florida city, swamp, and island thrillers – set far from the well-traveled crime fiction of Miami Beach, Disney World, and the Everglades – and the people who star in them are city, swamp, and island characters.

  In writing about them, I dig into the psychologies and motives of heroes and antiheroes, persecutors and victims, criminals and seekers of justice (legal or vigilante), the beautiful and the ugly. Daniel Turner is a character in their stories. He is their brother, their childhood friend, their enemy, and their protector, and they love him or hate him – or sometimes think barely at all about him – as we do the people in our lives who hurt us and save us.

  Emerging from others’ shadows, Turner is the man who, at the end, wears a badge showing his right to use deadly force and to order the world. When the dust settles, if it settles, he embodies the law – shaky, just or unjust, sometimes arbitrary but generally necessary.

  Let your story be that you are a stranger.

  Sophocles, Electra

  ONE

  Oren

  The land south of Atlanta turned fast enough to scrub forest and waste and big flat timber tracts that looked like a brown wind had come through and other tracts that were still uncut and green to the edge of the road. High-wire power lines, hanging from metal towers, stretched through channels cut in the green parts of the forest like wire straps that could hold the earth down if gravity forgot itself. The sun was shining so bright it seemed it would twang those power lines.

  We had set out from Atlanta to kill my mother and her husband. A slow kill. An orchestrated kill. A slow-motion war of obliteration.

  Why not just shoot them and be done with it? First, if I pointed a pistol at them, they would point theirs at me. Second, they took me apart piece by piece, so I would take them apart piece by piece. Then I would blow them from their house. Big bad wolf.

  Paul’s Ford Taurus groaned when he accelerated on I-75-southbound, and a truck blasted its horn as it slid past. We kept the air conditioning on full, but my T-shirt and jeans were wet with sweat. Paul didn’t sweat, though he was a big man, three hundred fifty pounds, which he carried mostly in his chest and thighs. He leaned over the steering wheel, his forehead close to the windshield, and asked, ‘What will you say to your sister and brother?’

  I said, ‘How about, Once upon a time …’

  ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Keep it simple. Don’t freak them out. Make
it traditional. Nice and clean.’

  ‘Nothing’s clean,’ I said. ‘It never was.’

  ‘Pretend it is,’ Paul said. ‘Pretend it was. Just pretend. Every word is good if it takes you where you’re going. Let your story be that you’re a stranger.’

  Paul was tall too, so tall his knees rubbed the dashboard and his hair buffed the inside roof. ‘Tell the story straight and they’ll get it,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not a straight story,’ I said.

  ‘Didn’t say it was. I said, tell it straight.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  I’d met Paul at a bookstore in East Atlanta Village. I was there with my girlfriend Carol when Paul walked in. Carol said, ‘If I ever want to do it with a giant, that’s the giant I want to do it with,’ and I said, ‘Thanks a lot,’ and she said, ‘Did I say I want to do it with a giant?’ and I said, ‘Just the same.’

  He went to fiction and picked up William Faulkner’s Sanctuary.

  I asked, ‘Is he really that good-looking?’ and Carol said, ‘Uh-huh.’ She went and stood by him and said, ‘That’s a nasty book,’ and he said, ‘I know, so I’m doing the world a favor,’ and slipped it into his pocket without paying. Not to be outdone, I held my hand for him to shake and said, ‘My name’s Oren.’ His hand swallowed mine and he grinned the biggest grin, because when he wasn’t driving around in his Taurus or training security dogs, which is how he made his living, he was smiling the sweetest smiles – the kind of smiles that would make the neighbors say afterward, He was good at heart.

  ‘Paul,’ he said. ‘My name is Paul.’

  And it was all downhill from there.

  Was this trip to Black Hammock Island his idea? Not strictly speaking. Strictly speaking, it was my idea. But he encouraged it. Encouraged, conspired, and weaponized. He had a hand in it – two hands, the giant hands of a man the Greeks would have called a god and the Romans would have thrown into a ring with lions. Old story.

  The July sun shined high and hard over I-75-southbound. It bleached the pavement. It flaked the green paint on Paul’s hood. It sparkled off the roofs of other cars, turning them into a thousand wandering stars. Dogwoods and hollies and sourwoods and scrub oaks hunched on the sagging highway shoulders, their leaves spangling. Kudzu draped a stand of deadwood like sheets on furniture in an old house after the owners are dead.

  ‘What?’ Paul looked at me sidelong.

  I must have been staring at him. ‘You could hit the gas,’ I said.

  ‘I thought you wanted to do this slow,’ he said.

  ‘There’s slow and there’s backwards.’

  ‘We don’t want to lose the others,’ he said.

  The others. Carol drove behind us in her jacked-up yellow Silverado pickup. Three of Paul’s German shepherds – Cereb, Stretcher, and Flip – rode in crates in the truck bed. In the cargo box mounted between the dog crates and the truck cab were the guns, big and small. Seventeen of them to go against the forty or fifty that my mother and her husband Walter took from my dad. Behind Carol, Jimmy drove his red Tacoma pickup with a red BMW F800 motorcycle strapped on – the F800 because it rode well on pavement and great in the dirt. In his cargo box were jugs of gasoline, fireworks that Jimmy had bought in South Carolina, and a stick of dynamite that Paul had found wherever he found such things. Behind Jimmy, Robert rode a Honda NC700 because cabins and insides gave him the shakes.

  ‘What’s the plan when we get to the island?’ Paul asked.

  He knew the plan. He’d helped make it.

  ‘What’s the plan?’ he asked again.

  He’d had me repeat it a hundred times. ‘I’m not saying it again,’ I said.

  He gave me the sidelong look. His eyes belonged in a baby seal, not a six-foot-eight, three-hundred-fifty-pound gladiator. His eyes made women think they might like to do it with him.

  ‘Speed up, will you?’ I asked.

  He eased his foot off the pedal. We hung in the right lane with Carol and Jimmy and Robert drifting along behind us, the German shepherds barking because they could.

  I said, ‘If a golf cart comes on to the highway, slide to the side so it can pass, all right?’

  He eased the gas again.

  I said, ‘The plan is set them up, make them dance, and knock them down.’

  ‘That’s not the plan,’ he said. ‘That’s an outline. Not even an outline – it’s an outline of the outline.’

  ‘I know the plan,’ I said.

  ‘Tell it to me again. Reassure me.’

  ‘I’m not telling it to you again,’ I said.

  ‘It’s theater, you understand?’

  ‘It’s not theater,’ I said. ‘It’s war.’

  ‘It’s a theater of war,’ he said. ‘It’s a goddamned five-act play. If you forget your words – if you step left when you should step right – they’ll kill you. Tell me the plan.’

  I told him the plan. I’d gotten to the point where we would have basically ended my mother’s painting career, wrecking the self-portraits that had given her a name beyond Black Hammock Island, and we would have her and Walter locked and helpless inside their own house. We would have taken or destroyed their guns. We would have their yardman Tilson working with us. We would have their neighbor Lane Charles too.

  Then Robert opened the throttle on the Honda, cut into the center lane, raced up alongside, and stared into the puttering Taurus, as if to say, What the hell? I kept telling the plan, and Paul kept his eyes on the road, but he gave the car enough gas to take it to the speed limit, and Robert dropped back.

  ‘The end,’ I said, when I finished the plan.

  ‘The end is the beginning,’ Paul said.

  ‘Like a circle,’ I said.

  ‘Nothing like a circle,’ he said. ‘But like a revolution.’ Paul was smart too. He was as smart as he was big. For a man who looked like a gladiator, he was psychologically astute.

  I agreed with him, more or less. ‘Like a circular revolution.’

  Then my phone rang. Caller ID said, Mercer School of Medicine. If I had answered, the caller, a bird-voiced woman, would have asked – again – Where’s our shipment?

  I would have said, It went out this morning. I’m terribly sorry for the delay.

  She would have said, Anatomy begins in two weeks. We need prep-and-process time.

  I would have said, Of course you do. Look out your window. The trucks are coming.

  She would have said, Next session, we’ll be looking for a new supplier.

  I let the call ring through to voicemail, which said, We’re currently out of the office. Please leave a message. It wasn’t that I was uncaring. I’d been preoccupied.

  We drove past the city of Forsyth, dropped into an area of farmland and back into the forest before Macon. Traffic thinned and we shared a stretch of southbound with a refrigerated semi-trailer truck that looked as closed and tight as a black beetle.

  When Paul caught me staring at him again, he said, ‘You know we’ll do anything for you. Anything to make this right.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘You just ask it,’ he said. ‘We love you. We all do.’

  ‘You’re already doing it,’ I said.

  We got off the highway at Tifton at two in the afternoon. The signs said, Visit Historical Tifton, said, Visit the 19th-Century Village – Farmhouse! Sawmill! School House! Turpentine Still! Grist Mill! said, Tifton is The Friendly City. But Tifton was a bunch of roadside businesses with boarded windows – and other places, still kicking, that said, Speedy Cash, New Fashion, Georgia Auto Pawn, Titlebuck Title Pawn. A city to pass through, not to visit.

  My phone rang again. It was Jimmy and he said, ‘Lunch?’

  So I called Carol and said, ‘Lunch?’

  We swung into the Ole Times Country Buffet, a restaurant with blond-wood paneling that looked sickly in the overhead lighting. Carol squeezed between me and Jimmy on one side of the booth because Paul had the other side to himself and Robert borrowed a chair from anothe
r table. Carol asked, ‘How far to where your dad grew up?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe an hour.’

  She sawed a slice of ham four ways like a tic-tac-toe game and forked the middle square into her mouth. She said, ‘I don’t get it. We could be on Black Hammock tonight.’

  ‘If you dig up the dead, you’ve got to do it right,’ I said. ‘You want to consult with the relatives beforehand or, if that’s impossible, at least honor them. It’s the right thing to do.’

  ‘It’s respectful,’ Paul said.

  ‘Oren’s always been respectful,’ Jimmy said.

  ‘Disrespect is bad karma,’ Robert said.

  ‘What goes around comes around,’ I said.

  The road from Tifton to Waycross passed cotton farms and sugar cane fields, algae-slicked ponds, and half-painted houses with screened-in front porches and open carports. We drove through the cotton and lumber town of Enigma, passed more farms and fields and miles and miles of slash-pine timberland, then rolled through Willacoochee, with an old Lockheed T-33 Shooting Star airplane perched on the roadside in front of the Masonic Lodge. My dad taught me many lessons before my mother and Walter killed him, among them to remember names and places.

  Then after another slash-pine forest we came to a neighborhood of red-brick apartment houses and red-brick churches, a Coca-Cola distributor, a bunch of clapboard single-family houses, and a line of automotive shops. A sign said, Welcome to Waycross.

  I asked Paul, ‘You know where you’re going?’