“People should be sleeping at this hour,” Harry Nautilus muttered.
Beside me, I heard the metallic click of his fishing reel. To the east, the horizon held the blue glow of approaching dawn.
“It’s the best time to fish,” I countered, whipping my lure into the low waves of the Gulf of Mexico.
“Fish should be sleeping at this hour.”
Harry’d stayed in my guest room last night, expecting to fish today. I’d not planned to awaken so early, but hadn’t been sleeping much lately, kept awake by the files on my desk at the Mobile Police Department, a dozen mean and horrific homicides in the past two months. When I’d looked at my clock – 4.37 a.m. – I figured we’d catch the early-shift fish.
“Coffee, bro?” I said.
“Don’t ask, just pour.”
I reeled in my line, set the rod in a tubular spike in the sand. I pulled a thermos of homebrew from my tackle bag, half cheap-ass Mexican espresso, half New Orleans-style coffee with chickory. I’d filled the thermos three-quarters full, topped it with scalded milk, added a quarter-cup of demerara sugar and a tot of Kentucky bourbon. Liquid zip-a-dee-do-dah with a jolt of my-oh-my.
“Crap,” I said, rifling through the bag.
“What?”
“I forgot mugs. Be right back.”
I started jogging to my stilt-standing beachfront home a hundred yards away, across dunes bristling with sea oats. I live on Dauphin Island, thirty miles south of Mobile. It’s my second home on the site, the first having been knocked cockeyed by Hurricane Katrina.
“Wait a sec, Carson,” Harry called from behind me. “There’s something out on the water.”
I turned and wandered back to Harry’s side. Squinting into the dark, I saw a small craft out thirty yards or so, an aluminum rowboat rocking in the waves. It was nearly swamped, water licking its gunnels, the side-slipping tide pulling it parallel to the beach. It was a ghostly sight, like a lifeboat from the Flying Dutchman.
“Jeez,” Harry said, frowning at the empty boat. “You think someone got knocked overboard?”
I sighed and pulled off my T-shirt. “More likely it slipped its moorings. I’ll swim out and grab it.”
“It’ll beach soon enough,” Harry grunted. “Get the mugs. I need coffee.”
I glanced east. A half-mile away lay the wide mouth of Mobile Bay. The tide would draw the boat into the path of watercraft soon to pour from the bay into the Gulf.
“The damn thing’s a navigation hazard,” I said, kicking off my moccasins. Harry rolled his eyes as I sloshed waist-deep in my tattered shorts, threw my hands in front of me and dove. I set my bearings on the boat and pulled a lazy freestyle in that direction.
It took a half a minute to reach the craft. I grabbed a trailing painter, the bow rope, which suggested someone’s knot hadn’t held the boat to the dock. The sloshing craft was too unstable to board, so I put my hands on the gunnel and kicked high enough to glance inside, seeing only a cheap plastic tarp floating on trapped air. I pulled it toward me, planning to jam it under a seat so it wouldn’t drift away and foul someone’s propeller.
The tarp began unfolding. I felt something wrapped in the plastic. With my legs kicking in the water and my biceps on the gunnels, I unwrapped the tarp. A second package dropped out and floated in the water. A pink insulated bundle…
Topped with a baby’s face.
A wave crashed over me, not water, but horror.