Hell's Bay

by James W. Hall

  After she was safely aboard a scarlet beauty, Charlie squatted ankledeep in the water, holding the stern. He had a simple smile but seemed more weary than a man his age or profession ought to be.

  She looked down the corridor of tea-stained water and trickled her fingers through the warm stream. Two canoes slipped past, father and son in one, mother and daughter in the other. The kids chattering to each other while the adults paddled, everyone snug in orange life preservers.

  “It’s as lovely as I remember.”

  “Oh, it’s picturesque,” he said. “For the moment, anyway.”

  She gripped the paddle, waiting for him to release her into the current.

  “But things keep going like they been, won’t be long before I’ll be shopping for another river.”

  She held his eyes, and after a few seconds she watched them harden and grow bleak. Once again she’d been recognized.

  He licked his lips and licked them again as if fetching for a curse.

  “I’ll be damned. You’re that woman, Bates International.”

  “That would be me. Abigail Bates. Nice to meet you.” She didn’t bother holding out a hand.

  “Well, goddamn it all to hell.”

  “Go on,” she said. “Say your piece.”

  “I’ve seen you at the meetings, sitting with that shithead lawyer, Mosley.”

  “Nothing’s settled yet.”

  “That’s a damn lie. It’s a done deal. Train’s left the station. It’s already chugging down the rails; there’s no turning that big-ass monster around. From the governor on down, the fix is in. Permits approved. Those meetings are just for show. Letting people think they got a choice in the matter when we got no choice in hell.”

  She sighed and shook her head and looked into the river’s wavering shine. What he said was true, of course. The meetings were a sham. The people would be patiently listened to, but ultimately the decision was not theirs. Such as it was, such it had always been. The few deciding for the many.

  She wanted to reach out and give the young man a reassuring pat but felt sure he’d swat her hand away.

  “This river’s been taking care of itself for a long, long time.”

  “Never been any threat like this. Not even close. Already this year it’s down another foot. It’ll be a dribble before you people are done.”

  Abigail stared out at the steady current. She’d heard it all before, every dire prediction.

  “Anyway, it’s more than the damn river,” he said. “Way more than that. It’s where the river goes, what it does. All the people who depend on it whether they know it or not. Goddammit, I don’t believe you just walked right up and thought you could rent one of my canoes.”

  “Maybe I should’ve called in advance. You could’ve written a speech.”

  “Or brought my gun.”

  He held her eyes for a moment, then his face went pale and he swung away as if appalled by his own rage.

  Abigail bent to her bag and dug out the Beretta.

  She gripped it by the barrel and offered it. She’d been shooting all her life but only lately started carrying a pistol as the death threats mounted.

  “There’s no safety. Just aim and shoot.”

  Charlie Kipling pivoted back and stared at the pistol. His shoulders shook as if he’d felt a cold draft across his back. He looked into Abigail’s eyes. Then with the mix of dread and boldness a man musters to snatch up a snake, he shot out his hand and wrenched the pistol from her grasp. He fumbled with the Beretta briefly before he found the grip.

  It surprised her. The young man had struck her as another spineless tree-kisser with no muscle behind his convictions. But as she watched him raise the trembling muzzle and direct it at her body, Abigail drew a resolute breath and saw again that damn possum on the side of the road, a clear warning that any country girl should’ve taken seriously.

  Charlie was panting, a bright sheen of sweat on his cheeks.

  “If I took you down, I’d be a hero to a lot of people.”

  “I’m sure you would.”

  She watched his eyes flick right and left as if consulting the river spirits.

  “If I thought it’d make any difference, I’d do it.”

  “I’m not trying to talk you out of it,” she said.

  A gold dragonfly whisked between them.

  Over Charlie’s shoulder, Abigail saw a minivan pull into minivan pull into the lot and park beside her Jaguar. After a moment, the side door slid open and three girls leapt out followed by two young mothers in shorts and T-shirts.

  Charlie glanced over at the arrivals, keeping his aim fixed on Abigail.

  The red-haired woman in the lead noticed the pistol in Charlie’s hand and swept up the children and herded them back to the van.

  “Hey!” the other woman called out and took a couple of steps toward Abigail. But her friend shouted and she whirled and trotted back to the van.

  “You lost some paying customers,” Abigail said.

  After the van screeched onto the highway, Charlie tipped the pistol toward the muddy bank and fired. Muck spattered the side of the canoe and dotted Abigail’s shirtsleeve. He gritted his jaw and squeezed the trigger again and again. When he’d emptied the clip, he dropped her pistol into the shallow water at his feet where it sank to the bottom and gleamed within the swirl of mud like the flash of fish scales.

  The glow drained from Kipling’s face.

  “Noon at the ramp,” he said, his voice vacant as a sleep-walker’s.

  Then he shoved her canoe out into the moving water and Abigail straightened it and felt the current take hold. She tested her stroke, port side then starboard, felt her heart struggling to regain its cadence.

  If Kipling didn’t show, it was no tragedy. She’d phone her security people in Sarasota to come fetch her. An hour drive, no problem. But she believed Kipling’s fury was spent, and he had every intention of keeping the appointment—if only to present his case in a more calculated manner.

  A hundred yards downstream she turned and looked back and he was still standing in the shallows watching her go. After a moment, he swatted at a bug near his ear, then turned back to his pine shack.

  She traveled almost an hour downstream before her killer appeared.

  CHAPTER TWO

  By then Abigail Bates had spotted three deer in the brush along the river. An eagle, four osprey, a red-tailed hawk feasting on a plump dove, numerous ibis, a handful of limpkins, and a large creature rooting in the shrubs along a section of private farmland. Probably a feral hog, one of the descendants of the creatures Hernando de Soto’s conquistadors introduced centuries before.

  Despite the tannic tint, she could see the bottom of the river in most places, twenty to thirty feet deep, and the fish were visible—a snook, one huge catfish, bass, bream, hundreds of minnows flicking by in nervous, synchronized schools.

  Because it was midweek and not yet tourist season, the river traffic was light. Only a single kayaker passed her, a stalwart young woman in a skimpy swimsuit who was paddling with the sharp, focused strokes of an athlete in training. The air smelled of snakes and damp mud and an occasional gust of a sharp, insistent citrus scent that made her think of a teenage boy’s first cologne.

  A few feet ahead the river narrowed and the cypress and pine and flowering shrubs crowded close to the water’s edge. Abigail steered the canoe around a tight corner. And there, standing about ten yards to her right on an outcropping of rock, was a woman with flesh so white her body might have been carved from cheap soap.

  She was long and bony and wore a green one-piece bathing suit.

  Abigail paddled two hard strokes on the starboard side to angle away from the woman’s perch on the bank, though at this narrowed spot, the shoreline where she stood was only twenty feet away.

  When the canoe was almost abreast of the woman’s position, she dove. Five feet down she frog-kicked toward the canoe with powerful strokes.

  When she surfaced nearby, a mouthfu
l of water drooled from her lips. She treaded water and gave Abigail a cheerless stare. The woman had heavy eyebrows, a braided rope of coal-black hair, hollow cheeks, and harsh cheekbones. She was in her mid-thirties and had the gaunt look of one who’d known more than her share of rough treatment. Peasant genes. Italian, maybe Greek. A woman who would be a great attraction for certain peckerwoods in the region—men with a fascination for the exotic.

  Almost certainly this was the driver of the pickup truck who tailgated her to the canoe shack. After Abigail turned off, she’d driven down the highway until she’d come to this place where the canoe would be pinched between two banks. Perfect spot for an ambush.

  No crime of impulse. This was not the sort of woman who carried a swimsuit in her pickup for river frolics. Which meant she’d followed Abigail with full knowledge of her destination and had brought the required equipment. Abigail’s lungs hardened. Only one person knew where she was headed today. Only one who might have betrayed her.

  For a moment they floated parallel, eyeing each other in silence.

  At that juncture, with two solid strokes she could be a boat-length beyond the woman and it would be a race downstream.

  But she hesitated, for it had never been Abigail’s way to dodge a battle. A fighter as a girl, a fighter still. You didn’t swerve from conflict. You took it on and overcame. Those were her daddy’s lessons passed on from a long line of hardass daddies. Back down once, it becomes a way of life.

  She shifted her grip on the paddle, finding a hold that once, many years before, she’d used with a garden spade to hack off a rattler’s head.

  The swimmer blew a mist from her lips and slid toward the canoe on an angle that would bring her into range in a second or two.

  The moment was gone when Abigail might have fled, and a ghost of gloom swelled within her for she saw she’d erred. She should have raced this lanky woman to the next bend, used the river’s flow to her advantage. But she’d behaved the way old people so often do. A stubborn attachment to habit. Failure to adapt. She’d made that mistake a lot lately. Treating the new world as if it were still the old.

  With two precise strokes the woman closed the gap and her hand shot out for the edge of the canoe. Abigail chopped the paddle blade against her bony wrist and knocked her away. While she recovered just out of range, there was another window for escape. But again Abigail faltered.

  Sculling one-handed, the young woman rubbed at her damaged flesh and squinted at Abigail with the stony indifference of one who’d absorbed greater pain than any this old woman could deliver.

  “Last chance,” Abigail said. “Go back where you came from.”

  The woman smiled bleakly, then glided to the bow and took hold. With that effortless act, she had Abigail in her control. No way in hell could she work her way forward in that tippy vessel to attack the woman.

  “How long can you hold your breath?” The woman’s voice had a country flavor.

  “What?”

  “Thirty seconds, forty? How long?”

  The woman rocked the canoe back and forth as if testing its balance. Abigail gripped both gunwales and held on. At each tip she was only a degree or two from going over.

  “Tell me what you want. I can make it happen. Whatever it is.”

  “What I want,” she said, “is to see how long you can hold your breath.”

  Like she was taking down a steer at branding time, the woman slung her arm across the prow and twisted the boat onto its side and Abigail slid across the metal bench and sprawled headlong into the river.

  The woman looped an arm around Abigail’s waist, securing her with a grip both solid and restrained as if determined to leave no crime-scene bruise. Abigail balled her hands and hammered at the rawboned woman, but she absorbed the blows with the forbearance of a parent enduring a child’s tantrum.

  Blind beneath the river, all she could make out was a fizz of bubbles as the woman dragged her toward the sandy bottom, ten feet, fifteen, swimming with one arm, the other locked around her waist. Strong as any man her size, this woman seemed at home beneath the surface, knifing down with an easy power.

  As they sank, the water cooled. A swirl of dizzy light spun around her, then she released half the air in her lungs, the glittering froth lifting in a cloud to the surface.

  Doing that for the woman’s benefit. If she could make her body go limp, the woman might mistake her for dead and drop her guard.

  Through slitted eyes she saw where the woman was dragging her.

  A cypress root that bowed out from the bank like the handle of a large door, the door to a bank or some impressive office building like so many Abigail herself had entered. A woman of authority. Doormen holding them open for her. The long car waiting while she did her business.

  Abigail watched the young woman take hold of the root as if she meant to open that door for Abigail, show her into the next world.

  Above her the riverbank jutted out and put them in shadows and out of view of any passing paddler. She willed herself motionless, though the pain in her chest was vicious and her consciousness was dimming fast.

  After a moment more, the woman relaxed her grip and Abigail thought she’d fallen for her ruse. She jerked hard against the woman’s hold, threw an elbow at her face. It missed. She tried a savage kick, but that failed too. The toe of her sneaker wedged in a crevice and came off.

  In that spasm of exertion Abigail lost control of her lungs and watched with black horror as a final bubble burped from her mouth, and rose shining toward the sun.

  She felt her mouth slacken as the iron in her veins dissolved. Letting go of her ferocious determination, letting go of everything. Her lungs filled and she felt the gentle tug of the current across her flesh. Abigail Bates shivered hard and surrendered.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sasha knew the woman was dead but waited just the same, holding the root in one hand, the woman in the other.

  The old lady’s clothes rippled in the current, and her hair broke from its bun and flowed forward, long and white like a ghost in a windstorm.

  Sasha checked the surface and saw nothing passing, then she let the body go. With water heavy in her lungs old lady Bates drifted near the bottom, arms loose by her sides, feet tickling the sandy bottom like a drunk tiptoeing home from an all-nighter.

  High in Sasha’s throat a knot began to tighten.

  It would be as simple as taking a deep swallow. A tempting thought. Sasha and Abigail Bates could go arm in arm on a long death march down the Peace. Miles from here their remains would wash into Charlotte Harbor, spill out into open water, then catch the tide as it fanned into the Gulf of Mexico, and in the following days they’d be swept up in the loop current that filtered south and east through the Keys, then the Gulf Stream would catch them and whisk them along on a long clockwork tour of the globe. The large unfailing mechanisms of the sea churning on, carrying the two of them along for the ride.

  That simple. Open her lips and inhale. A beautiful journey.

  Sasha watched the dead woman stumble and drift, sun-light rippling along the sandy river bottom before her.

  The throb in her throat grew. But no. Sasha wasn’t ready to hitch that ride. Soon, perhaps. But now there were promises to keep. Miles to go.

  She released her grip on the root and the water lifted and propelled her twenty feet downstream. With a wild gasp she broke through the surface and swam to the bank.

  Her tracksuit was tucked under a bush nearby and her Ford F-150 was hidden a half mile away on an abandoned logging road. She dressed and jogged to her truck. She saw no one. When she was back on the highway, she held to the speed limit all the way to work.

  In the women’s dressing room she changed out of her tracksuit, hanging her damp bra inside the locker on a metal hook to finish drying. Her security jumpsuit was sandy brown, the color of the landscape she would patrol. A camouflage that made her feel invisible as she roamed the property.

  Out in the hallway, she nodded hello
to the four guys coming out of the men’s locker room. Couple of nods in return. Sasha stood to the side and listened to their small talk about the Buccaneers’ new quarterback, listened to one guy’s racist joke, then walked out to her Jeep Cherokee.

  The vehicle was painted the same ashen shade as her uniform, same as the earth and the gray soot that coated the trees and made the sky hazy for miles around. There was real color underneath it all, but it was muted and dull, the way a black-board gets after years of chalk dust films it over.

  She took the access lane for half a mile, went another mile down the public road and parked in the shade of a loblolly pine near the long border of cleared land that ran along the shoulder of the highway.

  A mile away the dragline was at work—its massive bucket scooping up tons of earth in single swipes. She felt the thunder rising from the earth, quaking through the frame of the Jeep. She watched her coffee cup tremble in the holder. She rolled up the window, but it did nothing to still the rumble.

  Sasha was one of five members of the Bates security team who earned a meager wage making the rounds of the three-thousand-acre mining operation. Her afternoon task was to police the perimeter of #309, one of the gypsum stacks where 80 million tons of toxic sludge were stored. Its earthen walls soared twenty stories and its base covered three hundred acres. Today she was dispatched to check for settling, cracks in the surface of the berm, any sign of a sinkhole opening up or weakening in the structure, and to keep watch for eco-warriors trying to photograph one of the gypsum stacks or climb its banks to take air samples.

  Sasha was lean, white-skinned, with eyes the gray-blue of wood smoke. Muscles more solid than most men’s. In high school she’d tried out for the wrestling team, pinned every boy in her weight class and ten pounds above. The coach was fine with it, but some fathers protested and she was gone.

  Six months after graduating she married C.C. Olsen, eight years older, a science teacher at the high school. Biology, chemistry, physics, whatever needed to be covered, he could do it. Brilliant man, her hero. Wasting his talents in that hick school. But C.C. was dedicated to his hometown, the place that got him started on a life of learning.