Harry and I picked up chow at a po’boy joint on the DI Expressway before we turned west. Harry ate as he drove, brushing crumbs and lettuce from his chest to the floorboards. We pulled off I-10 and dropped southwest toward the coast, not the white sand shores of tourist Alabama, but land with dense expanses of brush and sea grasses. The road was an armadillo graveyard, the car-struck beasts studding the tarmac like scaley mines.
I heard a passing vehicle at our backs and saw Harry shoot a glance into the rear-view mirror as his hand tensed on the wheel.
“Check this out,” he said quietly.
I looked up as a large black pickup truck passed, three males jammed in the front, another in the bed. They were in their twenties and thirties, shirtless, heavily tatted, crosses and swastikas and lightning bolts. The driver was wearing a plastic Nazi-style helmet and drinking from a can of Miller. They stared at us as they passed, not a happy look. A Harley-Davidson logo filled the rear window. Celtic runes decorated the bumper, book-ended by Confederate battle flags.
Though no one was in the oncoming lane, the truck swerved in front of us. Harry jammed the brake as I slapped my hand to the dash. The pudgy guy in the bed grinned like a Jack-o’-lantern, turned for a one-handed grab of the chrome light bar atop the cab, and dropped his pants, showing us his hairy white ass.
The driver hit the accelerator and I heard the roar of a V-8 as the truck blew away at what had to be a hundred ten.
“Man,” Harry said, “I can smell the ugly.”
We drove another few miles, turned hard south. The Merman had printed out a satellite shot of the area in question. We angled down a few sand-and-shell roads that led to shattered boats and the mason-block foundations of houses reduced to driftwood and termite fodder.
“I don’t see anything,” Harry said, staring into scrub pine and land as flat as a billiard table. “Not that I know what I’m looking for.”
“Check over there,” I pointed. “A dune where a stretch of pine got blown away.”
We stopped and got out. The sun was climbing toward noon and the air was close enough to induce claustrophobia. Insect sounds rose in waves from the stunted trees. We swatted biting flies from our faces. Harry ramped a hand over his eyes and studied the trees.
“There. Something’s not right.”
I followed to a sand-drifted stretch of road. Uprooted brush covered a metal gate. The gate blocked a slender lane, barely more than a scattering of broken shells in the hard sand. Since storm-uprooted trees were everywhere, the camouflage was effective.
We tugged away brush, sweating like stevedores, then drove down the lane, branches screeching against the car doors. Six hundred feet later the lane terminated in a webwork of marshy channels. I saw the hulks of shrimp boats in the sand, prows pointing upward like they were sailing out of hell. In the distance were a few tumbled houses, once home to shrimpers, now rotting wood and rusting metal. We saw a house trailer half-flattened and blown over on its side. It looked like a shoebox someone had kicked down the road.
“Over there,” Harry pointed. “I see a dock.”
We jogged to a rickety pier extending into the marshy channel. Harry passed me, stepping carefully to the end of the dock, boards creaking beneath his feet. He dropped to his knees and studied one of three old tires nailed to the sideboards of the dock, the bargain version of boat bumpers.
“Check out the tires, brother,” Harry said.
I knelt and studied the surface of the rotting rubber. Saw streaks of paint worn into the now-gray whitewalls. It seemed to match the bilious green of the rowboat. But green was a popular color for boats.
I nodded. “There’s a chance the kid got launched from here.”
“Cars, check behind the trees.”
Harry pointed to the far side of a stand of short trees. I saw truncated pilings, ragged black spikes pointing at the sky. We pushed through brush and found the burned-down house once supported by the short pilings, a tumbled pile of blackened wood and sheet-metal roofing.
“It burned recently,” I said, squatting to puff at a soft pile of soot. “Otherwise rain would have pounded away the softer ash.” I walked the edge of the debris pile, seeing burned and broken supports, a fried chair and couch, a blackened toaster.
“Uh, Cars…” Harry said. “Step over here. Carefully. I’ve got something.”
I walked over and looked down to see several feet of twisted cinder with a bulb on top, a former human being. I’d seen this phenomenon a half-dozen times after structure fires.
“Oh shit, a dead body.” I pulled out my cell. “I’ll call it into the county police.”
Harry tugged my sleeve. “You’re missing the interesting part. Look closer. Down by the belly.”
I crouched close. Details congealed in the shadows and I saw an object emerging from the charred abdominal area: four feet of scorched steel rod entering a blackened shaft of scorched hardwood. What was left of the corpse’s hands were clutching at the shaft.
“That what I think it is?” Harry whispered.
I stared at the pierced corpse. “If you’re thinking harpoon, I’m thinking you’re right.”