My left arm had been aching all day, the one that has a metal rod and screws holding it together, the result of a six-month-old gunshot wound. The standoff the day I got shot could have ended a lot worse, so I didn’t like to complain, but I’d noticed that the arm throbbed when bad weather brewed. Maybe that was what Mom meant when she said she felt the storm’s approach in her bones. Funny how body parts and animals sense bad weather before humans feel it in the wind and see it in the sky.
After talking to Gabby and checking in with the captain, I reluctantly left David at the park. I wanted to stay and work on the investigation into Joey Warner’s disappearance, but David insisted that wasn’t necessary. That didn’t relieve my conscience, but it did convince me that I had no other choice. It wasn’t my case, and I had an investigation of my own to work. During the drive to meet Professor Benoit, my cell phone rang again. I’d already heard that no fingerprints were found on either of the longhorn carcasses. This time, our ballistics guy had the results on the shotgun shell fragments and pellets recovered from the bulls’ remains.
“Not surprising that it cratered their skulls,” he said. “The weapon was a twelve-gauge shotgun loaded with triple-aught buckshot.”
“Triple-aught?” I repeated. “The shooter wasn’t taking any chances.”
“I’ve never actually tried to kill one, but I figure that’s enough firepower to bring down a water buffalo,” he estimated. “On the good side, if you catch a break, it’ll make it easier to make a match when you find the weapon, as long as it’s loaded with the same ammo. People don’t use triple-aught much. Too big for birds and most game. We’ve got enough wadding and fragments to make a firm ID.”
“Any chance you can recognize the brand from the samples you have on file, or through the computer data banks?” I asked. “If they’re rare enough, maybe we can track down who sold them and even, if we’re really lucky, who bought them.”
“I tried that,” he said, ending the conversation. “Didn’t work. Nothing we have is a match.”
“Ah, well. It was a shot,” I said. “Anything else occurs to you, keep me informed.”
I’d arranged to meet Professor Alex Benoit at the Westover spread, an early-nineteenth-century sugarcane plantation in Brazoria County, less than an hour south of Houston. Settling in for the drive, I clicked on the car radio, only to wish I hadn’t when I heard that the storm had turned even more to the north. Still two and a half days out, Hurricane Juanita was sowing panic. The reporter said fights were breaking out among folks scouring Houston stores looking for staples, bottled water, batteries, and ice, the things Mom had stocked up on a day earlier. I’d chided her for it, but it appeared her senses had kicked in even before my bionic arm took notice that the storm was heading our way.
“Yes, Sarah, we’re fine,” Mom said when I called the ranch. “Frieda and I were outside working on the stable, nailing some loose boards down. We’ve got a month’s worth of horse feed. Maggie’s still in school, but when she gets home, we’re going to put her to work helping to get the horses ready for the storm.”
“Do we have everything we need?” I asked. “Because from what I’m hearing, the odds are increasing that—”
“I know what you’re hearing, that the storm’s looking more and more likely to come ashore somewhere around Galveston,” Mom cut in, impatient. “Sarah, we’re as ready as we can be. Once the bad weather blows in, we’ll hunker down and ride it out.”
I thought again about little Joey Warner, wondering if he was in a safe place to survive the coming storm. My heart felt as if it skipped a beat or two when my mind strayed from where the kidnapper had him to what he might do to the boy.
“Sarah, are you still there?” Mom asked.
“Yeah. Okay. But if there’s something I can pick up on my way home tonight, let me know,” I said. “And I may be a little late.”
“Meeting up with David?” Mom asked, suddenly sounding concerned. “Have you two had that talk yet? I think the world of David Garrity. You know that. But he owes you honesty, and you deserve to understand what his intentions are.”
She was right, of course. But that didn’t make it easy. Nothing seemed simple when I stepped back and looked at the situation. David had been divorced for years. When we’d begun dating, his past life was in his past. Then his ex-wife called him. She’d left her second husband, and she wanted David back, to try again to make their marriage work. To sort through the situation, David went to Denver for a visit but came back as confused as when he’d left. “If it weren’t for you, for us, what we have, I’d put in for a transfer,” he’d said to me over a candlelit dinner after he’d arrived home. “But now I’m not sure what to do.”
If I were honest, I’d have to admit that I wanted him to say it wasn’t a tough decision, that as soon as she’d asked, he’d told her he wouldn’t go. But in addition to an ex-wife, David had someone else who wanted him in Denver, his teenage son, Jack, a kid David rarely got to see. Stuck in limbo while David made up his mind, I thought about asking him to stay in Houston but felt selfish, not so much that I was willing to tell David to leave, but enough not to ask him to stay. Still, part of me wondered, If he’s considering the move, what does that say about us?
“You two need to get away to talk, without a lot of distractions,” Mom rattled on. “I don’t like the way he’s doing this. The longer it drags on—”
“I know, Mom. I know.” I didn’t disagree, but I didn’t want to hear it. “This just isn’t the time. David’s knee-deep in that missing kid case, and I’m heading south to Brazoria County, to talk to an anthropologist about two very expensive, very dead longhorns.”
Mom paused and then said, “Okay. I understand. No more motherly advice.” I could picture the look on her face as she nearly bit her tongue to keep quiet. “We’ll table this for now, Sarah. Until things settle.”
“Agreed,” I said, wondering if she’d be able to live up to the bargain.
Settling in for the rest of the drive, trekking southwest, I traveled ever closer to the storm churning in the Gulf, yet the graceful trees that lined the highway barely rippled in the stifling hot breeze. I switched channels, and a preacher with all the fire and brimstone of a Pentecostal railed about Hurricane Juanita, calling it the hand of God, a storm akin to the one in the Old Testament that Noah and his herd rode out in the Ark. “The Father Almighty will raise His great hand and strike down the sinners, using the storm to punish the evil,” he hissed, his fervor building. “Bodies will float in the bayous, many carried out to sea. Will the innocent die? Yes, as casualties of God’s war against the wicked. Those who are taken will perish only because their deaths are needed for God to strike vengeance. But for the innocent, their suffering will be brief, as they’re welcomed into the heavens, to the strains of harps and the joyous music of salvation!”
How did he know the innocents were only casualties of the war against evil, not those intended to perish? I don’t pretend to understand how it is in heaven, but in my world, the victims were too often like Joey Warner, who’d hurt no one, those who deserved the opportunity to grow old. I liked the preacher’s view of the world, that if folks died in the storm, they’d mostly be those who deserved such a tragic end. I liked it way better than my own worldview, one that held that more often the innocent suffer.
I pushed another button on the radio and Brad Paisley crooned, as I imagined what it must have been like before the days of TV weathermen with Doppler, before planes flew above to catch aerial views of approaching typhoons. Hurricanes must have hit like earthquakes, unexpected and therefore even more deadly. When you know a storm’s coming, you can flee or take cover. I wondered how much notice my ancestors had of approaching storms, if any, and where they went to escape. I’d heard of my mother’s great-great-aunt Constance, who drowned as a young girl in the devastating hurricane of 1900. The way the story goes, my ancestor, who lived in Galveston, was a bit touched and ran to the beach that morning to swim in the storm surge. Maybe Great-Great-Aunt Constance didn’t understand how deadly the undertow could be.