First In Flight

by

TR Pearson

_______________________

Barking Mad Press

For Stella

Queen of the Beach

1   

I blame my dog.  The dead one.  Monroe.  We’d gone to the ocean one time and she’d been so taken with it that I’d promised to scatter her ashes in the surf at Kill Devil Hills.  I was drunk, of course, but I’ve always considered my promises to animals more binding than the ones I make to people. So there I was eight years later on the Outer Banks of North Carolina with Monroe’s ashes in a pickle jar.

It was November and looked it.  Low clouds.  Rough surf.  I’d parked in the driveway of a vacant beach box and walked over the dunes to the shore.  A woman in yellow boots and a parka was scouring a shell bed for sea glass (I guess), and there was a guy down towards the Avalon pier working a patch with his metal detector.  Pelicans out beyond the breakers.  Sandpipers littering the beach.  Sea foam on the tide line.  The odd scrap of Day-Glo trash. And me and my jar half full of ashes and gravel-sized chunks of bone.

She’d been a hell of a dog.  Grumpy, vaporish, willful, unaffectionate.  Immune to instruction. Indifferent to punishment. Wouldn’t eat kibble on a bet. She wasn’t permitted to live into cranky, canine decrepitude.  A neighbor of mine shot her, a fool up in Virginia. The sort with bullets and opinions and a sofa on his porch. 

He liked dogs even less than Mexicans.  That was the one thing he got out before I knocked him over and kicked him half to pieces. There was no point talking to him. He’d already made up his mind about everything the way people like him do. 

He found his lawyer on a billboard and sued me fourteen ways from Sunday.  Monroe would have gotten a hoot out that — making trouble even dead.

I buried her in the yard of my rental house before I remembered the promise I’d made her.  So I dug her up and got her reduced to mottled ashes and clatter.  I had a tough time reaching the ocean because I was having to scratch and scramble.  No force would hire me after the lawsuit.  I worked guard jobs instead.  Nights mostly in industrial parks and a gig at a Richmond high rise.  I was down to my truck.  Some clothes. A few books in a box.  A room by the week.

I finally ended up on the Outer Banks by way of disappointing a girlfriend.  A coworker  I’d had a roll with.  Drunk again, don’t you know.  I kept telling her I wasn’t up for anything stable and steady.

“Oh, Ray,” she’d say and fling her hair like it was cute I had boundaries and all.

When she started making Thanksgiving plans — the turkey she’d fry,  the friends she’d have over — I loaded my king cab and left her a Post-it.  I cleared town while she was on shift. The trip wasn’t thought through or anything. I headed east for no good reason and was buying coffee at a Sheetz near Norfolk when I remembered Monroe and the beach.

That dog wouldn’t have insisted on much from me.  She wasn’t sentimental, which is the way with the sorts of creatures that can eat what they throw up. I hadn’t decided on just how to send her off until I was ankle-deep in the surf.  I unscrewed the jar lid, had the breeze at my back.  I tilted and shook.  She flew.

“Go on now,” I told her as the wind shot her into the face of a breaking wave.

I’d been planning on feeling nothing.  After all, it was eight years later, but I’m a bad one for putting that sort of stuff on hold.  With my pickle jar empty and my best dog gone, I just wanted to drop and weep.   

The woman in the yellow boots gave me a wave. She looked primed for a spot of a chat, so I rolled down my pant legs, put my shoes back on, and kept moving. I headed south in the direction of the pier and the guy with the metal detector.  He had a steel scoop shot full of holes that he could shove in the sand with his foot.  As I passed, he sifted up a bottle cap and what looked like a rusty door key. He flung them both into the foamy surf and spat.

The kid was a quarter mile beyond him on the far side of the pier.  At first, I thought he was a pelican. He was knee-high and in gray pajamas.  He was up near the dunes, and he kept sitting down and standing right back up.

Once I’d drawn even with him, I looked around for a grown up.  Even I knew enough about toddlers not to leave one alone on a beach. He had a hand in his mouth and was holding something stringy in the other.

I stepped his way. “Hey, sport,” I said. 

He slobbered past his fingers.

“Where’s your mom?”

A gust made him wobble.  He sat down. He stood back up.

I pointed at the house behind him.  An old cottage, unpainted and shabby. “That yours?”

He shoved my way the stringy thing he was holding. It looked like a clump seaweed at first. I eased in and was hard beside him before I recognized it for a plug of human hair.  Strawberry blonde and yanked out with violence. There was bloody scalp attached.

“Where’d you find that?” I asked him.

He told me something on the order of “Ngharln.”

“Want to show me?”

He didn’t at first, but I waited.  He finally led me through the dunes in the direction of the shabby cottage.  Then he turned south towards the slightly finer place next door.

We stopped at the back deck stairs.  The sliding door was standing open.

“Is your mom in there?”

By way of response, he glanced at the hair he was holding. I heard a thump from inside the house and told the kid, “Stay here.”

I gave him Monroe’s pickle jar.  He laid the hair plug aside,  plopped right down, and started filling the jar with sand.

I eased up the stairs towards the open slider, paused to arm myself with a greasy grill brush.

“Anybody here?” I shouted.

Nothing.  I stepped into the kitchen of the place. Tidy.  Unused.  Naked counter. Empty drainer.

“Hello.”

Nothing.

The furniture in the main room was beach-rental ugly. Bulletproof upholstery in ungodly plaids. There was a Bible-school-worthy picture of Jesus perched on a donkey beside the front door.  A yellowed newspaper clipping that was mostly a photo of a guy standing next to a fish.  A stack of jigsaw puzzles in battered boxes on top of a chest against the far wall, which was directly under a massive TV fixed to a swivel mount. Knotty pine bead board everywhere — walls and ceiling both.

Another thump from deep in the house. Something soft and flailing about it.  I eased along the back hall. The doors were all half shut.  I pushed the closest one open and peeked inside. A cedar dresser. Two stripped beds.  A seagull hunkered on a mattress.  It tilted its head to have a look at me.  Flew into the far wall and bounced off.

When I backed out, it came along and followed me down the hallway. The thing slipped up once to peck my ankle but fell back when I gave it a look.

“Don’t ever,” I informed that bird, “promise shit to a dog.”

The second bedroom was empty and stripped as well. The bathroom looked untouched.  I saw blood on the floor near the end of the hall. Smelled it a little too. The floor covering was some kind of rolled tile with machined pits and imperfections. The gore had collected in the fake mortar joints where it had skinned and crusted over. I knew well enough from years of policing somebody had been emptied out.

I pushed the last door open and saw, first thing, a bloody smear on one of the windows.  There was splatter on the ceiling, more spilled blood on the floor.  The blade of a hatchet was sunk into the top of a chifforobe against the side wall. The best I could stomach was a glance at the bed where a human lay hacked and dead.  I caught a glimpse of entrails. Lacquered toenails. Freckled flesh and exposed bone.

That was enough for me.  I retreated, driving that seagull before me.  It veered back into its bedroom. I tried the phone in the kitchen, but it was dead.

I found junior where I’d left him.  Monroe’s pickle jar was entirely full of sand.  My cell phone was in my truck cupholder.  It lacked the juice anymore to be mobile, so I snatched up junior and headed around the house, figured I could reach my king cab in six or eight minutes at a trot. But we got lucky, I guess I’ll call it.  I’d gone hardly thirty yards when a steel gray Charger pulled off a side street.  Light bar. Decals. KDH PD.

I waved and got a yip on the siren. That Dodge eased to a stop alongside us as the driver’s window came down.

The cop under the wheel was a woman with her hair pulled back tight and pinned like they do.  Her wrap arounds were parked on the top of her head.  She reached over and turned down her squawker.

“Problem?”

I nodded and pointed.  “There’s a woman dead in there. Murdered, looks like.”

The cop shifted into park and threw open her door.  “Hands on the car. Do it.  Now.”

I set junior on the trunk and pressed my palms against the fender. That’s the way with cops anymore.  The only good civilian is wearing cuffs.

Officer Meekins on the black, plastic tag on her shirt flap.  She seemed rattled.  Twitchy.  I went slack for her every way I could.

“Who’s dead?” She ratcheted the cuffs down tight.

“I don’t know.  His mother maybe.  Found him on the beach.”

My fingers were tingling. She fished out my wallet and put me and junior in the back seat of her cruiser while she stood on the side of the road and read my details into her mic. Then she drove us the few yards back down to the driveway and unloaded us. 

“Around back,” I said.  “The sliding door’s standing open.”

A thump from inside and Meekins drew her gun.

“Seagull,” I told her.

She gave me that cop look like she’d heard enough out of me. Meekins shoved me towards the back of the house. She picked up junior and brought him along.  We got planted on a deck bench and told to stay put. Meekins sucked a breath and stepped inside the house. She soon blundered back out and vomited over the rail. I got a glare.

“I just found her. That’s all.”

Meekins didn’t seem persuaded.  She keyed her shoulder mic and raised a colleague. Dennis.  She managed to tell him the milepost, but that was about it. We listened to his siren as he worked his way over to us.  Meekins passed most of her down time throwing up.  The sound of her heaving made junior cry. He held onto one of my belt loops.

Dennis soon came huffing up the back stairs and gave me a slack once over. I’d worked with plenty of his sort before.  High school lineman gone to seed.

“Back bedroom,” Meekins told him. She only remembered to say, “Gull,” once Dennis was inside and out of earshot.

Dennis turned out to have a thing about birds and squeezed off a couple of rounds.  He missed the gull, but the bullets passed through the wall and hit his cruiser.  That bird had known quite enough of beach box living by then. He stalked out over the threshold and joined us on the deck.

Dennis showed up shortly thereafter to vomit onto the grill. I was beginning to wonder if KDH PD ever met with a homicide.  Dennis decided he was finished before he actually was and so spewed a second time between his fingers.

The boss showed up shortly thereafter. He climbed the deck stairs trailing a pair of doughy patrolmen who might have been clones. The both had institutional crew cuts, unflattering glasses, and receding chins. I could only tell them apart because one of those boys had a wine-stained ear.

Cutler on the boss’ tag.  He was fit and sixty. Ex-gyrene — no doubt about it.  Ironed shirt.  Creased trousers. A salt and pepper flat top all Butch Waxed up just so.

“DB,” Dennis told him and jabbed a thumb towards the open door.

Cutler glanced my way before he went in.  The boys he’d brought stayed outside with Dennis. They all three treated me to the brand of study you usually get from cows.

“We like him?” one of the chinless boys asked.

“Maybe. Yeah,” Dennis said.  “Don’t know.”

“Whose kid?” the other one asked. 

Dennis glanced at junior like he’d not noticed him before. He appeared to think as highly of toddlers as he did of birds.

Cutler came back out and failed to spew. He stepped straight over to Meekins and quizzed her.  They both kept glancing my way as she filled him in.   

“Check these others,” Cutler instructed the boys, indicating the nearby houses.

Then he pointed my way and told Meekins, “Unhook him.”

She did, and I shook my hands until the blood was flowing again.

“So you were on the job in Virginia, North Carolina, and . . .”

“Georgia.”  That from Meekins.

I nodded.

“What brings you here?”

“Dead dog.”

He waited.

“Came to spread her ashes,” I told him. “The ocean’s the only thing she ever liked.”

“And the kid?” He wiggled a finger at junior who eyed Cutler like he was daft.

I gave him the entire story.  “Plug of hair around here somewhere.”

“You know the deceased?”

“Doubt it.  Didn’t really look that close.”

“Let’s fix that.”

He made for the back sliding door and waited on the sill for me to follow.

“Door  was standing open?”

“Uh huh.”

We stopped in the tidy kitchen.

“Don’t think I touched anything. Might have dropped a grill brush somewhere.”

I followed Cutler into the front room.

“Candy says you’re mall copping or something.”

I didn’t know any Candys.

“Meekins,” he told me and glanced towards the back sliding door.

“Something like that.”

“Why?”

“Hit a guy. Judgment went against me.”

“Need hitting?”

I nodded. “He made my dead dog dead.”

Even though we’d come inside for a good look at the victim, we both lacked the stomach to do much more than loiter close to her and glance.  A strawberry blonde in panties and a bra laid into with a hatchet.  She was sprawled atop the bedspread on her back with her left leg bent at the knee and the other stretched out straight.  Ragged scraps of underwear were mixed in with gore and entrails.  Lung.  Intestine.  Stomach, I guess.  Liver or something as well.  Blood all over.  Looked like cast off.  Offal stink mixed with cigarette.  One bloody blue shower shoe on the floor.

We both fixed on the hatchet plunged into the chifforobe to keep from looking at her.  It had a fresh edge, shiny ground bevels everywhere the blood hadn’t stuck.

Their part-time forensic guy was a pediatric surgeon from Tennessee.  He’d come out a few years back on a fishing trip and had stuck and stayed. His name was Orby, but they all called him Doc-O.  He was blunt and insulting as a matter of course and unduly pleased about it.  His assistant, Janice, carried his gear and served as a reliable disappointment to him.

When Doc-O said anything to her, it was usually some version of, “Christ!”

Doc-O mounted the deck and blew smoke in my face by way of “Hello, nice to meet you.” Then he barked, “You coming?” and Janice climbed the stairs with a pair of oversized tackle boxes.

“Tatum here found her,” Cutler told Doc-O.

Doc-O shot his butt into the dunes as he gave me a sneering once over. Then he strolled inside and left Janice to trudge along behind him with the cargo.

“He seems nice,” I said.

“Where’s junior?” Cutler asked Meekins.

Candy made apologies to him.  She’d been off in the driveway or somewhere doing something. Seeing to stuff.

She and Cutler decided he was under the deck and went squatting low to find him.  I had a better idea and followed the path through the dunes to the house one down and then turned towards the beach, and there he was sitting just about where I’d first seen him.

He had Monroe’s jar lid in one hand.  The other was shoved in his mouth.  He stood up.  A gust of wind hit him, and he sat right back down.

“Hey, sport,” I said.  I dropped beside him.

He offered me the jar lid, and I took it.  That freed a hand for my belt loop. We gazed out over the gloomy Atlantic. Rolling swell.  Floating birds. Beach trash.  A foamy tide line.

“Some day, huh?” I said to junior. 

In time, he told me, “Ngharln.”

––––––––

2

By the time Doc-O came back out, his paper coveralls were stained with suet and blood.  He peeled off his nasty gloves and dropped them on the decking.  Janice handed him a Pall Mall and a Bic to fire it up. Doc-O grunted and groaned as he lit and smoked. He smiled once he’d noticed the grill was doused with vomit.

“So?” Cutler said. 

“Might have choked her first.”

“Let’s hope.”

“Could have been two of them.”

Cutler waited for more in silence.  That seemed to be the general strategy with Doc-O.  He’d tell you what he had to say but only at length and in time.

“A lot of footprints to sort through. He coming?”

Cutler nodded. Janice had fresh gloves at the ready for Doc-O.  He flicked his but, snatched them from her, and plunged back into the house.

“Who?” I asked Meekins.

“Glenn. Shoots stuff for us sometimes.”

He showed up a quarter hour later.  Glenn was still wearing his Staples vest. Glenn had some sort of community college forensic photography degree and a hard-sided box on a hand truck where he kept all his equipment. He also had a thing for Meekins and cringed every time she glanced his way.

“Homicide,” Cutler informed Glenn.  “Everything shot and scaled.”

Glenn nodded and opened his trunk with a key on a chain around his neck.  His stuff was labeled and wrapped, all of it neatly situated.

I was immediately reminded of an anal retentive med tech I’d known in Gastonia.  Jamie.  He wore referee sneakers and was scared of women too. Jamie killed himself with a rifle in his unfinished basement, used his big toe on the trigger to fire a round up through his chin. He did it back in a corner where he’d laid a tarp and taped plastic to the walls. All we had to do was gather the stuff like foil from a roasting pan.

I’d say Jamie was thoughtful if I believed there was any thinking to it. Folks like Glenn and Jamie scour and tidy the way some people drink.

“He found her,” Meekins told Glenn by way of explaining my presence.

Glenn cringed and made a nasally noise at Meekins. Junior was already better with people, and all he could say was “ngharln.”

Janice soon came out of the house with Doc-O’s cases.  He was close behind her with an unlit butt between his lips.

“Hey, princess,” he said to Glenn.  “Stewpot in there.  Mind the giblets.”

Glenn nodded and muttered.  He fixed a lens on his camera as he headed inside.

“Baby,” Doc-O told us and pointed.

I turned to find junior under the deck bench trying to get back to the dunes.  It was probably a three-foot drop, but he wasn’t equipped to care and was about to go over when I grabbed him by an ankle. He didn’t wail or fuss, just gurgled a little and produced a bubble of spit.

Dennis and the chinless boys returned from checking the houses either side.

“Buttoned up,” Dennis reported.  Guernsey nods from his colleagues.

“Where are you staying?” Cutler asked me.

“Didn’t know I was.”

“Driftin’ Sands,” he said to Meekins and then turned back my way.  “We’ll cover it, at least for a night or two.”

“What if I’ve got somewhere to be?’

“Do you?”

I didn’t.  He seemed to know it.

“Driftin’ Sands.” He said it to me this time .  “Cable and everything.”

One of the chinless boys took my truck keys and headed up the road with Dennis.

“We’ll keep it safe for you,” Cutler told me. “Might poke through it some.  All right?”

I nodded.  They’d do what they’d do.  I’d leave the place when they let me. There was no point chafing against it, so I let go and relaxed.

By the time me and Meekins finally got around the house, my ratty gym bag was sitting on the hood of her Dodge.

Meekins let me ride in the front unshackled once she’d shifted some stuff to make room.

“Don’t touch anything,” she told me.

I think she meant her racked shotgun and maybe her bundle of flares.  I was more interested in the power bar wrapper stuffed in her cup holder.

“Got another one of those?”

She shook her head.

“Anywhere to eat around here?”

We went maybe two miles down the beach road before she pulled in at a tavern. A couple of pickups in the lot.  A weathered plank facade.  It wasn’t dead seedy inside, more like Key West with a slight meth habit. Illuminated signs for the brands of beer no half-solvent sober person would drink.

There were five customers, one waitress, and a whiskery bartender.  All of them said, “Candy,” as we headed for a booth. 

She picked the one under a genuine sea turtle shell hanging on the wall.  Somebody had written Yebba!!! on it in luminescent yellow road paint.

“Get the chili or the burger,” Meekins advised me.

Our waitress was blonde and leathery. She looked like a Dot or a Madge, equal parts mentholated cigarette stink, treacly perfume, and phlegm. She sighed and held her pen at the ready.  I was a long way from breakfast and ordered the burger and chili both.

“We’re hearing stuff,” Dot/Madge said to Candy.

Meekins shook her head.  “Can’t.”

They must have had a scanner on the bar back. It was just that sort of place.

“That burger bloody, okay?”

“Comes like it comes,” Dot/Madge told me.

Meekins ended up with a cup of greasy coffee that she stirred a couple of times and pushed aside while I shoveled down my chili and then went at my gristly burger. As tough as shoe tongue.  Soggy bun.  More onion than I’d eat in a year.

“First homicide here since . . . ?”

“Last March,” Meekins told me.

“What flavor?”

“Domestic. Probably what this is.”

I chewed.  I shrugged.

“What?”

“Wouldn’t make up my mind.”

Meekins gave me the kind of hard once over that would have put Glenn in a pile.

“Got a theory?” she finally asked me.

I shook my head. “A few questions, though.”

She deployed her go-on-dickhead gesture. It’s universal female signage.

“She renting that place?  The kid hers?  Who’s the father, and where is he? If he’s out of the picture, who’s the boyfriend?  One assailant or two?  That hatchet’s got a fresh edge.  Sharpened just for this? Why not take the kid or kill him? Aside from him alive, there’s no evidence of restraint. Deal gone bad or love gone wrong? Got a traffic camera close by?”

“Sort of.”

“Might help, and I’d park on the beach for a few days.  Talk to anybody who passes.” I ate a home fry.  It was damp and hadn’t been warm in a while.  “I’ve seen plenty of domestics.  This feels like something else.”

The lady in the office at the Driftin’ Sands Motel was a Pekingese enthusiast.  She had the punched-in crocheted face of a Pekingese on the sweater she was wearing and framed snapshots of dogs with the ribbons they’d taken on the counter where I signed for the room. I don’t think I ever actually saw a dog, but I heard one of them wheezing — drawing air through its collapsed snout somewhere behind counter.

“Ain’t no smoking anymore,” the lady told me. “And don’t be cleaning fish in your sink.”

Meekins walked me to my room down at the far end of the breezeway.  She unlocked the door and shoved it open. Handed me the key. More knotty pine.  More cedar. A gaudy ocean scape hanging over each of the beds.  I switched on the wall heater, and a blower bearing clattered like a rock in a can.

“Food Lion.” Meekins pointed with her nose. “We’ll call you.”

Then she was straight back to her cruiser, under the wheel, and out of the lot.  I stood there in the doorway and watched her go.  The Pekingese lady had come outside to talk on her cell.  She eyeballed me from the asphalt.  The homely dog on her homely sweater eyeballed me as well.

I tried to take a shower, but a quarter hour later I was still waiting for the water to get hot. I stuck my head in the office long enough to tell the Pekingese lady all about it.

She squinted at me from behind the counter.  It was a look that said mostly “So?”

I circled around through the weeds and the sand burrs towards the back of the motel property and headed for the four-lane and the retail clutter to the east.  I crossed a couple of roads lined with houses on stilts, junky beach boxes with vinyl siding.  Even the trashiest ones had names on planks and plaques. Dolphin’s Dream.  4 Gone.  Oh, Buoy!. Hook, Line & Sinker. Beach Daze. Just Chillin’. A shack with a half collapsed deck and a storm door in the yard had a square of puckered plywood clamped to its weathered light post.  Hadda-Havit was spelled out in conk and clam shells and dirty nubbins where the glue had failed.

No people anywhere.  No residents anyway, just the mail lady in her white Jeep.  She stopped at every box and shoved in a K-Mart flyer. Even the four-lane was mostly empty along with the Food Lion lot.  It was going on four o’clock by then.  Dingy sky.  Blown sand all over.  The whole place was built for the summertime quarter million that descended, and once they’d cleared out after Labor Day there was a whole lot of elbow room left.

An entire back corner of the grocery store wasn’t in use for the offseason.  The customers were chiefly the unkempt flip-flop and parka crowd. Spent surfers, snowbirds (mostly in the form of grumpy women), tradesmen and D0c-O wannabes in jackets with fish-gut stains. I bought bananas, a box of saltines, some potted meat, and jerky.  The two checkout girls were Russian and only chatted with each other until they informed you of your total in that world-weary, Russian way.

I paused to look in the window of the beach crap store just down from the grocery.  Plastic Adirondack chairs, canopies, and umbrellas, skim boards, coolers, hats hanging everywhere a hat might hang.  A sign on the door read Be Back in March! Hand-lettered — lurching and sloppy.  Red Sharpie and delirium. I pictured the owner escaping at a run.

I wandered across the parking lot, through the vacant neighborhood, and back to the Driftin’ Sands where I stayed just long enough to drop my goods.  Then it was across the road to the beach for me on a path straight through the dunes.  Nobody anywhere.  Just the surf, a dead skate, a half dozen sandpipers.  I picked up a busted conk shell, and I watched a gull ride the wind without so much as twitching.  Up and over and down and back. It watched me a little as well.

Three pelicans were floating on the swell just past the breakers, and there was what looked like a trawler on the horizon. Empty roads.  Vacant houses.  Briny desolation.

“God help me,” I told myself.  “I like it here.”

***   

I was sprawled on the bed watching TV when Cutler came to fetch me. I’d started out high-minded with a documentary about the prairie chicken but soon switched to women’s volleyball. Not the beach kind in bikini tops but the college sort indoors.  Leggy coeds in brief shorts and squeaky sneakers.  There was a blue team and a green team and a lot of yelping and knee pad adjustments.  Most every commercial I’d jump to a gay martinet making veal shanks on a budget.  He appeared to cut costs chiefly by using regular cow instead.

Cutler banged on my door while the guy was sweating his aromatics. Medium heat.  Dash of salt.  “Look for the glisten,” he told me.  I rolled off the bed, let the saltine crumbs fall, unhooked the chain and opened up.

“Come on.” Cutler was still neat somehow.  Still unwrinkled.  Still tucked in.

“Kind of late, isn’t it?” It was probably half past eleven.

He didn’t appear to care.  “Come on.”

“Let me get my shoes.”

Cutler stepped inside and had a look around.  You’d have thought he was inspecting a kennel.  I do kind of explode into a motel room.  Duffel dumped.  Both beds undone.

“What are we doing?” I asked him as I pulled on my boots.

“Army rolled in. Looks like she’s one of theirs.”

The Kill Devil Hills police station was back in some sort of municipal complex just south of the Wright Brothers Memorial.  The whole place was shingled and vaguely Cape Cod-ish.  Cutler eased up in front of a wing that looked more like a brunch spot than a cop shop.

A man in army dress greens and shiny black shoes approached us as we stopped.

“Come on,” the guy told me and lead me up the wooden steps to the landing. “We’re in the back,” he said, and I followed him into the bowels of the place.

The PD looked like a doctor’s office made over.  There was a dispatcher’s cubby.  A coffee niche.  A squad room with maybe six desks and carpet halfway up the walls.

“In here.” He pointed.  I went in first. He was a lieutenant.  Browne with an e.  I could see myself in his brass name tag.

Plush for an interrogation room. Veneer on the table.  Cushions on the chairs. Cutler didn’t join us.  We’d lost him somewhere along the way.

“Sit.”

I did.

“We’ve got a few questions.”

“We who?”

He started fishing stuff out of a banker’s box.  A stack of forensic photos.  An overstuffed file folder. A couple of bulging evidence bags.  I prepped myself for a slog.

“You drove down from Richmond? Something about your dog?”

I nodded.

He waited for me to elaborate. I didn’t.  He gestured.

“I drove down from Richmond,” I said.  “Something about my dog.”

These sorts of things always sour fast.  That’s my experience anyway. Start asking people what they’ve been up to, and they’re sure to get defensive. Especially the ones who haven’t been up to anything that’s any business of yours.

“Tell me about the kid.” The lieutenant plucked free a photo of junior looking crusty around the mouth.  He slid it across the table my way.

“By himself on the beach.  Didn’t seem safe. Had a plug of hair in his hand.”

“So he led you here?”  A photo of the beach box came my way across the table. “Just a baby, isn’t he?”

“Yeah.”  I let that cover anything he wanted.

“Door was open like that?”

Another photo.  I nodded.

“And you went on in?”

“Heard something knocking. Turned out to be a bird.”

“When did you see the blood?”

“Might have smelled it first.”

That earned me a look.

“It’s not something you forget.”

The lieutenant tried to slide a few shots of the body my way, but I raised a hand to stop him.  I’d seen enough, and he obliged me. He set the photos aside, reached into his box, and gave me my pickle jar instead.

“Yours, right?”

I nodded.  “Dog ashes.  I didn’t buy an urn.”

The door opened just then, and somebody came half in but stopped to finish a chat.  Pale green sleeve.  Creased twill trousers.  One shiny brogan.  Small hand on the knob.  Small watch.  Small wrist.

“Later on that,” I heard, and then she came entirely inside. The lieutenant tried to tell her something privately, discreetly, but she ignored him and gave me her full attention. 

“Mr. Tatum.” She offered her hand.  “Major Kim Pratt.”

I took it. She was the strong, wiry type. “Ma’am.”

“The lieutenant filled you in?”

I glanced at him.  “About what?”

“The victim today . . . the woman you found . . . she’s one of ours.”

The major was probably mid-forties. A looker.  Black hair.  Blue eyes.  All sinew and angles. A guy having a roll with her would likely need a cut man.

“You saw a child on the beach, heard a noise in the house, went in and found the body, yes?”

I nodded.  “Is the kid hers?”

The major sifted through printouts and photographs.  “That’s . . . unsettled.” 

She turned up the photo she was looking for and handed it to me. No sliding stuff across the veneer for her.  Our strawberry blonde pre-hatcheted. Hair up and clasped tight. Collar bars.  I could see she’d been a lieutenant too.

“Know her?”

Pretty girl.  Freckles.  Big front teeth.  “No.”

“Sure?”

I nodded.

“Tabitha Joyce Kline, with a K.” She handed me more photos, casual snapshots mostly. “Virginia girl. Grew up in Raphine. Shenandoah Valley.”

“Pretty.” I pushed the snaps her way. “Sad business.”

“Came down about your dog?”

I was tired of me and my story.  “Yeah.  Found the kid.  Found the girl.  Just one of those things.”

The major passed a good quarter minute merely looking at me.  The lieutenant leaned in to tell her something, but she waved him off. I’d had a Galway girlfriend once — the raven hair, the ice blue eyes.  Denise, by way of Boston. I’d not thought about her in a while.

“Mr. Tatum,” the major started, “take me through it.”

I drew a breath and pointed at the pickle jar.

“Start in Richmond.” Major Pratt reached over as she said it and lightly touched my hand.

“There’s this girl I was seeing a little,” I said and moved on to the threat of Thanksgiving.

The major never interrupted me, but the lieutenant snorted once or twice and finally did enough conspicuous twitching to cause the major to turn and glare him straight out of the room.

I was a good twenty minutes getting to the hatchet and the gore.  When Major Pratt raised her first question, it was about why I’d parked where I had to go onto to the beach. The major held a pen the whole time but didn’t take any notes. She looked at me with the sort of attention what I was saying didn’t rate.

Once I’d finished, the major said, “Fine then,” and she asked me where I was staying.  I told her, and she led me out of the building to her sedan.  It was a five-minute ride to the Driftin’ Sands. I don’t believe a word passed between us.  She wouldn’t let me bale out but insisted on parking.  Then she followed me to my door.

We didn’t speak.  We didn’t need to. I unlocked my room, and she followed me in.  The major was away from home like I was, and she wanted what she wanted.  It turned out she’d decided I had something that would do.

Major Pratt set the night chain and kicked off both her shoes.  She yanked my shirt up over my head and bit me on the shoulder.

By way of suave banter, I think I told the major, “Ouch.”

––––––––

3

She was hardly the sort to stay the night.  Once I’d served my purpose, she split.  We did have kind of a give and take there in the small hours. 

I apologized for the blower clatter.

The major told me, “Right.”

Then she checked my tackle, judged it fit for service, and made use of me again.

The major’s hard, unsentimental streak ran straight through to her marrow like a vein of coal.  Once she was done and dressed, she paused at the door to lay a finger to her lips. Coming from her, it looked a lot more like an order than an ask.

I was a sight the next morning in the bathroom mirror.  I was scratched and bruised and bit.  I had a mouse below my left eye where the major had caught me with an elbow.  I’d cramped up while she was trying to finish, and she’d not taken it well.

I turned on the shower and waited a while.  Then I walked over to the office and told the Pekingese woman I’d clean a porpoise in the tub if she didn’t get my water hot.

Meekins rolled in when I was on my way back to my room.

“What happened to you?”

“Tripped.”

“Army wants you.  Come on.”

I climbed in. Meekins had loosened her hair a bit.  It wasn’t girlish exactly, but she’d unpinned it enough for me to notice, and she looked to have curled it some.

“Anything new?” I asked her as we headed north on the beach road.

“They’ll tell you.”

“Where are we going?”

She whipped into a driveway.  “Right here.”

It was the crime scene beach box, which looked like all the others but for the pair of unmarked sedans out front.

Meekins left her engine running and shifted into reverse.

“They’re inside,” she said.  As I climbed out, Meekins added,  “Watch your step.”

I found Major Pratt on the back deck, talking on her phone. She turned away for a bit of privacy, but all she was saying was, “Yes, sir.”  Probably a dozen times in the course of five minutes.  I parked on the bench and tried to keep warm in my ratty fatigue jacket. It wasn’t much of a match for the wind off the sea.

Cutler came out the back door before the major had finished her call.  He was carrying a three-ring binder full of crime scene photos.

He noticed my cheek and squinted.

I shrugged, and he let me leave it at that.

Cutler dropped down beside me. He was neat again and smelled of aftershave and Butch Stick.  His flat top never so much as wiggled in the wind.

“Two of them for sure.  A size twelve and a ten.  They choked her first, like Doc-O figured.”

“So the hatchet’s all post-mortem?”

“Looks like it,” he said. “Found this under the bed.” He showed me a photo of a human finger.

“Whose?”

“She’ll tell you.”

We both watched the major say, “Yes, sir,” into her phone.

Lieutenant Browne came out onto the deck. He decided the binder full of crime-scene photos was nearer to a civilian than he wanted, so he stepped straight over and snatched the thing from Cutler.

He managed a sniffy “Mind if I take this?” but well after he’d done what he’d done    .   

The major signed off with a robust “Yes, sir” and then came across the deck to where me and Cutler were sitting.

“Walk it through?” she said.

There was fingerprint dust all over the kitchen counter.

“So,” the major started in, “No rental agreement that we can find.”

“She might have been booked somewhere else,” Cutler suggested. “House.  Motel. Ended up here somehow.”

“She from Bragg?” I asked the major.

If I’d been standing a bit closer, I might have caught another elbow. She gave me her coal seam look. 

“You’re only here as a courtesy.”

She did a damn fine frosty.  I was sporting teeth marks from that woman. Me and Cutler followed her into the front room.

“Two hits,” the major told us. 

The lieutenant produced more documents. Booking sheets. He passed them directly to Cutler.

“Fingerprints,” she said, tapping one sheet.  Then she tapped the other.  “Finger. Know them?” she asked Cutler.

He didn’t bother to screen me, so I had a look as well.  Two white guys with priors and ill-considered tattoos. One of them had a peroxided mohawk. The other a gappy beard, a lazy eye, and a bunch of larceny charges.  Mohawk had those as well along with some menacing thrown in.

“Him we know.  Tillett.” Cutler pointed. Bad beard. Wandering eye. And now a finger short of jazz hands.  “He comes from down by Wanchese.”

“And the other?” the major asked him.

Cutler shook his head.  “Jimmy haircut.  Never seen him.” He ran his finger down the booking sheet.  “Grandy address.  I’ll ride up and check.”

“Good,” the major said.  “Come.” With that, she led us down the hall.

The stink was little short of staggering. Spoiled meat and rancid seepage.  Only the major failed to lay the back of a hand to her nose.

“We thinking some kind of frenzy?” Cutler asked.

The lieutenant looked sympathetic, but me and the major were elsewhere entirely and both told Cutler, “No.”

I don’t know what she’d clued in on, but I’d worked a rage killing before.  Sour mash and jealous fury with a butcher knife at hand.  A guy up by Afton, Virginia.  Roger. He pumped out septic tanks for a living and doted, he told us later, on his wife.  I think he meant he’d come home nights and do with her what he pleased, which Roger had decided was a variety of devotion.

He went to the races in the valley one Sunday but left early with a stomach bug and rolled in to find his wife with a buddy. They were just sitting at the dinette having hard cider, but Roger claimed he got a whiff of where that sort of thing would lead.

“They’d have been at it,” was the only explanation he ever gave us.  Roger had just enough Jack and ginger in him to make that all he needed to know.

I’d never seen such a mess. He’d gone at them in a fury.  Stabbing and hacking and kicking and pounding.  He’d taken the buddy’s head clean off, and the wife was as good as turned inside out.  There was arterial splatter and cast off and pools and smears just about everywhere, and Roger sitting on the sofa with a pint of ice milk and SportsCenter at full volume.

The buddy’s wife called us when her husband didn’t come home.  He’d made the cider and had carried some over so Roger and his missus could have a taste.

It turned out Roger’s wife had been having a thing with Roger’s little brother who tried to pay a guy I worked with to get him into Roger’s cell.  So as whiffs go, Roger had the music but was well wide on the words.

There was something else at work in that nasty beach house bedroom.  They had the murder and the frenzy swapped and upended.

The major selected photos from the binder and dropped them on the stripped mattress.  A few shallow wounds to the victim that looked tentative,  glancing. The bruises on her throat and marks on her forearms where somebody had mounted her to choke her. Smudged prints from gloved hands on the knotty pine wall planks. Boot smears on the floor.

“What do you see?” the major asked us.

“Planning,” I told her.  “Something blind rage would have crowded out.”

“Why hack up a dead girl?” It sounded like Cutler was talking to himself.

“Exactly.” That from the major.

“Army business or she on leave?”

The major looked set to ignore me but appeared to think better of it. “That’s another conversation.  Those two first,” she said.

“All right, then.  Grandy.” Cutler turned my way. “Come on.”

I followed him through the house and onto the deck.

“Don’t need a ride.  I can walk back from here.”

“Uh uh.”

So it was around to the drive and into Cutler’s sedan.  He turned north, away from the Driftin’ Sands. I waited for an explanation.

“Hole in my roster.”

I waited some more.

“You’ve got nowhere to be.”

He wasn’t wrong.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Now Cutler waited. 

“Have I seen your best and brightest?”

I got a gassy glance from Cutler followed by a nod.

“Hole in something all right.”

I’d already done a bit of fretting in the small hours about what might follow the Driftin’ Sands, so I was more relieved and grateful than I saw fit to let on.

“The major says you were CID.” We were on the four lane by then swinging east towards the Wright Memorial Bridge.

I nodded.  “Frankfurt. Pisa-Livorno.  Okinawa for a bit.”

“So you can talk her language.”

“Maybe.”

“She’s warming to you.”  He tapped his nose.  “I can tell.”

On the open span out over the sound, the wind rocked us a little. I eyed Cutler’s twill shirt. He caught me at it. 

“Plainclothes,” he said.  “Wear whatever you want.” Then he eyed me good.  “Within reason.”

We reached the far shore, and the road opened up.  It was four lanes nearly to Norfolk. They called it the Caratoke Highway. We were on a spit of land with the Albemarle Sound on one side, the Currituck on the other.  The road was lined with produce stands.  Beach junk stores.  Family restaurants.  Gas marts.  The route was a parking lot in the summertime with everybody going and coming, but in November, it was just us and a string of empty asphalt lots.

I studied the printouts on our suspects as we went.

“Tillett,” Cutler said. “Wanchese, down south. The boy’s got no violence to him.  He’d rat out Jesus for a dollar, but I doubt he’s ever thrown a punch.”

“But you don’t know mohawk?” I scanned for his name.  “Kenny Fulcher?”

“Know his people,” Cutler told me.  “They’ve got kind of a rep.”

“For what?”

“General trashiness.  Nothing lethal.”

We turned off the highway and east towards the water.  We’d passed through Grandy proper and were just north along the shoreline.  Little Narrows, Cutler called it. We rolled as far as the sandy road went, into a marsh with shacks on stilts and a wealth of seafaring rubbish. Shrimp boats drawn up on hummocks to rot and rigging and netting and bait bins and sun-bleached boat bumpers all over the place.

“Don’t want local PD?”

“Let’s nose around first. We’ll give them a shout if we have to.”

We were two guys from a county over with one uniform between us, and Cutler wasn’t even wearing a gun.

He kicked at a rusty net winch.  “Look at this shit.” 

Then he whistled a couple of times like he was trying to round up hounds. It didn’t strike me as a wise approach, but I was visiting from Virginia and couldn’t be sure you didn’t whistle for crackers on the Carolina coast.

He got a response almost immediately.  Somebody somewhere said, “Fuck off.”

“Looking for Kenny Fulcher,” Cutler shouted.

“Ain’t here.” It dredged.  It spat.

I found her perched in a deckhouse.  The hull had half collapsed underneath it, and the thing was sitting twenty yards off from us in the marsh grass at a tilt.  The windows were all busted out, and she was leaning on the framing.  A large woman in nasty coveralls flipping through a magazine.

“Know where he is?” Cutler asked.   

She shrugged and grunted without looking up.

“We’re coming over, ma’am.”

She flipped a page and sighed through her nose. Whatever.

I let Cutler lead and stepped in his footprints that didn’t fill with water.  It smelled like low tide at the landfill, and it got boggier as we went until there was hardly anything solid underfoot. 

She never left off with her magazine the whole time we were closing. When we reached what was left of the hull she was on — a hunk of splintered planking and ragged fiberglass patches — Cutler said, “We need to talk to Kenny.”

She tossed her magazine into the marsh grass, an Allure with a pixie-haired brunette on the cover.

“Know where he is?”

“Talk to him about what?”

“A break in.”

“Where?”

“Kitty Hawk, around there.”

“Wasn’t him.”

“Probably not,” Cutler allowed. “Still going to need a chat.”

“Good luck with that.”

“Where is he?”

“Don’t y’all talk and shit?” she wanted to know.

“Who?” Cutler asked her.

“Cops,” she said.  “Ain’t nobody around here seen him in like . . . a week.”

“You report him missing?” Cutler asked.

She nodded.

“So the sheriff knows all about it?”

She told Cutler, “Yep.” Then she mashed one nostril shut so she could blow the other clean.

The Grandy sheriff’s office had been a branch bank once.  It was a mile or two south on the main road between a Dollar Store and a Kangaroo Mart.  There was a lone county cruiser parked out front.  The door to the building was locked.

Cutler knocked but couldn’t raise anybody, so we just sat in the car for a while.  Every few minutes, Cutler dialed the sheriff’s land line until the man finally got off the toilet and answered the phone.  It turned out he had two deputies riding the roads and a front desk girl/dispatcher home for the day with some kind of crud.

Cutler knew him a little.  It sounded like they’d fished and had a few beers together. Not friends exactly but like-minded enough.  The Sheriff called Cutler ‘buddy’, and Cutler called the Sheriff ‘sport’ because neither one, apparently, could quite remember the other’s name.

“Yeah, they reported him.”  The sheriff shook his head and muttered,  “Fulchers coming to the cops.”

“She said it was a week ago.”

The sheriff pulled the paper on it and laid the two sheets on a countertop where we all could have a look.

“More like three days.”

I scanned through the particulars.

“What kind of fix is Kenny in?” the sheriff asked.

Cutler told him as little as he could get away with.  “Prints at a homicide,” he said with a snort.  “Just ruling him out.”

“Know who Kenny runs with?” I asked.

The sheriff went hunting for Kenny’s full file.  It was a bulging thing to behold. 

“Bad drunk,” the sheriff explained.  “Pretty tame sober.”

I asked him the question the paperwork begged.  “Why isn’t Kenny in jail?”

“Trades up,” the sheriff told us.  “Always has something on somebody.”

“Ever know him to run with a Tillett from Wanchese?” Cutler asked.  “Big guy.  Lazy eye.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell.”   

“Has Kenny got a best buddy?  A favorite spot?” I asked the sheriff.

He didn’t need to do much thinking.  “Dews Island.  Turn off’s in Jarvisburg.  Get to the liquor store, you went too far.”

“The whole place,” Cutler asked, “or somewhere special?”

“Old oyster bed back in there. North end of the pond.  He’s got a shack or something.”

The wind had picked up and the clouds had closed over by the time we got back out into the lot. My jeans were still damp below the knee and estuary fragrant.

“Swamp again?” I asked Cutler.

“Naw.”  He added brightly, “Mudbank probably.”

4

We missed the turn a couple of times.  Beyond the ones that said Norfolk or Nags Head, nobody seemed to care much about signs.  We finally found the marker we were looking for laid over on the shoulder and then drove for maybe a half mile between fallow fields before we mounted a clattering bridge and crossed an inlet to Dews Island.

There were a few trucks and SUVs parked on the roadside and up around what Cutler identified as a hunting lodge.

He pulled into a ditch and checked the map on his phone.  “Have to walk from here.”

“Got boots or something?”

Cutler nodded and circled around to the trunk where I met him. 

“For me,” he said, and we both flinched from the blast of a shotgun nearby.  “Duck season,” Cutler explained.  “Try not to quack.”

I tried not to do a lot of things as we trudged north towards Kenny’s oyster bed.  I was used to working for bosses and taking instruction from them — police chiefs and sheriffs and security goons (who’d usually been kicked off the badge) — but I could hardly ever do it without grumbling at least a little.  That’s part of why I’d been all over the place and had all the jobs I’d had.

Following Cutler there on Dews Island I realized I’d been in his employ for maybe ninety minutes, and already I was carping in my head.  I was stinky, wet, a little chilled and missing the drafty squalor of my room at the Driftin’ Sands with its ancient Panasonic, its unheated water, its failing blower motor, its ragged translucent sheets.

The thought I had, watching Cutler make his way through the scrub and the marsh grass, was why didn’t I ask for my truck back and just head out.  Then I got to the head out where? part and that drew me up a bit.  There was nothing for me back in Richmond.  Little anywhere else, I imaged.  At least here I had oyster flats to examine, two thieving lowlifes to find, and some sort of homicidal nutbag at the end of this briny rainbow.

I stepped in a wet hole and swore a bit.

“Say what?” Cutler asked me.

“Back here not quacking, boss.” 

We passed a few blinds along the way, a couple with drunk duck hunters in them. Men who’d been fighting the chill with flasks since dawn and probably couldn’t have hit a merganser from four feet.

Cutler stopped at one blind to ask for directions, which earned him a joke back instead.

“Got a Jew and the Pope in the Piggly Wiggly.”

I decided to keep on walking.  There was just the one path, and we were already on it.  Cutler caught up with me soon enough.

“Christ,” Cutler muttered.

I drew aside to let him take the lead.  “He in the Piggly Wiggly too?”

We found Kenny’s oyster bed. Cutler did anyway.  It was a stretch of mud with some shells poking from it like nuts on a frosted cake.

“This kind of mess is where oysters come from?”  I’m not much of a shellfish forager.

Cutler nodded. “The wild ones, yeah.”

He seemed half tempted to wallow on out but then thought better of it once I’d tossed a branch and it buried with a splat.  That mud had the consistency of wet cement and might have been ribcage deep. Who could say?

Cutler had a hard look up the shoreline.  There was a shed in with the scrub.  “Must be Kenny’s,” he said, and we skirted the mud and bushwhacked our way up to it.

It was maybe eight feet square and slapped together.  There was nothing inside but a plastic bin.  It looked like an oversized cooler with the hinge straps busted off.  We lifted the lid on Kenny’s crap.  A trio of Rusty oyster rakes.  Two nasty rain suits.  A pair of rubber knee boots that might have fit me when I was twelve.  A couple of gallon buckets with holes punched in the bottom.  A few corroded oyster knives. Empty beer cans, Busch primarily.  A cookie tin with fish hooks in it,  Skoal longcut mint, some Texas Pete, and a couple of padlock keys.

“Can’t see Kenny as hatchet boy,” Cutler said, eyeing the neglect and the rust. “No edge on anything.”

We stopped in at the lodge on our way off Dew’s Island.  More knotty pine bead board. There were two guys playing cribbage and a half dozen more eating stew and drinking whiskey at a long plank table.  They’d all stripped at least partly out of their estuarial camouflage, which they’d tossed here and there on the floor.

Cutler chatted them up. He appeared to have a knack for that sort of thing.  Ex-marine, after all, and he’d surely absorbed enough palaver through the years to make for a cog and a caution whenever he met with smelly men and gear.

I’ve always been better with the help and the hangers on, so I followed a woman carrying dirty saucers into the kitchen.  She was wearing a house dress and an apron, a pair of grease-stained corduroy mules.  She was thick and plain and chalky and turned out to be working with her daughter who was a slightly sleeker version of her mother with the addition of gothic tattoos. Reptile stuff mostly, pewter and scarlet.  A bit of prose on her forearm — Your Soul Is The Whole World in elaborate, doodly script.

She studied me from my soggy jeans to my cowlick as preamble to fairly spitting my way, “What?”

Her mother didn’t hold with that sort of tone and gave her daughter a look.

“Cop,” the girl explained and so turned her mom against me too.    

“Y’all know the Fulcher’s?”  I country pointed, at the ceiling mostly.

Neither of them let on one way or another.

“Kenny’s missing.  Family’s got us looking for him.”

“Check his beds?” the mother asked me.

“Yeah,” I said.  “He isn’t around.  Seen him out here lately?”

They both shook their heads.

The daughter told me, “Probably off with some gash.”

“Has he got anybody steady?” I asked her.

“Try the Hair Line,” the daughter told me.  “He’s run through all those girls up there.”

Cutler looked to have lost some traction out in the main room with the boys.  The group was debating oyster dishes — raw or grilled or Rockefeller — while he waited for a gap he might lob a question through.

“Got something.”  I kept on towards the door, left Cutler to sign off with his crew.

Cutler had me drive so he’d be free to check with the army and his charges but only after he’d located The Hair Line up in Currituck.

“Those boys hadn’t seen Kenny in about a week at least. He’s due tomorrow to dig oysters for them.”

“Want to just come back?” I asked.

We clattered across the bridge and returned to the spit of mainland.

“Gash first.” Cutler put his phone to his ear.  “Hey.  Got anything for me?”  Cutler listened and then lowered his phone and told me, “Sent Meekins to Wanchese.  No Tillett.” Then he was back on his phone to listen some more and make the odd, lubricating necknoise.

The Hair Line was in the sort of trailer you mostly find at overstuffed public schools.  Silty brown and nearly square. “Walk-Ins Welcome!” on the sign out front.

Cutler was still on the phone when I parked. I climbed out of the car and worked my lumbar the way I have to anymore. The boss rapped on the windshield to get my attention.  I leaned in as he plucked a brass shield from the glovebox and shoved it my way.

“You go.”

I headed alone for the beauty shop landing. I didn’t need to open the door to smell the singed hair and the Final Net.

There were four chairs but only three girls working.

“Kathy’s in Vegas,” one of them explained.

They didn’t strike me as much of an advertisement for their skills and talents.  Two of those women were over-teased and erratically highlit.  The third had a boy’s regular gone lesbonic . Shaved on one side and severe bangs on the other. All of this, of course, from a guy who trims his hair with yard-sale dog clippers.

“I’m here about Kenny Fulcher,” I said.

That touched off a round of groaning among not just the trio of stylists but the two customers as well. The teased girls quickly moved to comfort the boy’s regular who seemed to be working through Kenny heartbreak.  The two ladies in the chairs — both on the wrong side of sixty and with twisted strips of aluminum foil on their heads — appeared to disapprove of Kenny in equal exasperated measure.

“That boy’s burned a lot of bridges,” one of them said.  She got nods and amens all over.  Lesbonic tried to fight the tide and defend him, but one the teased girls cut her off. 

“Aw, sugar, he’s just bad.”

The poor girl gave up and blubbered.

“See what you did?” the other teased one asked me.

“Kenny’s missing,” I told her back. “That’s all I know about him.”

That proved just the sort of news to make boy’s regular slightly hopeful.  If harm had come to Kenny, then he had a fit excuse for not taking her calls or answering her texts.

“Missing?” she said with some sunshine to it and stepped over to grip my arm.             According to the rest of the women in the place, Kenny was a hound. Boy’s regular objected feebly at first, but she soon got swamped and overwhelmed.  Kenny was not discreet, apparently, and not all that selective.

“Probably off with some skank,” one of the customers said.

Boys regular inhaled sharply. I decided not to probe the particulars of the local skank/gash axis.

“When did you last see him?” I asked boy’s regular mostly, but it was one of her highlit colleagues who chimed in.

“Tuesday,” she told me.  “Piggly Wiggly.”  She country pointed at the ceiling.

I couldn’t help but picture a rabbi and the Pope.

“By himself?” Boy’s regular beat me to it.

The girl nodded.  “Buying beer and shit.”

“Have you heard from him since then?” I asked boy’s regular.

She tried to fling her bangs.  She blubbered.  She told me something with mucus mostly that sounded like a “No.”

“What about his friends?”

“Got none,” boy’s regular told me.  “It was just us.  Me and him.”

“Aw, sugar.” The highlit girls consulted.  One of them told me, “Lars.”

“Lars who?”

General shrugging, and then the ceiling got pointed at again.  “He calls them antiques, but it’s all crap and mess. Turn at the CVS.”

Cutler looked long finished with his phone call by the time I got back outside.  He was leaning against the sedan fender smoking a White Owl.

He flicked the foul thing into an oily puddle.  “So?”

“Got a line on a Lars.  Friend of Kenny’s. Where exactly’s the CVS?”

Cutler went back to driving.  He had two theories about the murder that were jostling in his head, so he gave them to me as we traveled north a couple of miles from The Hair Line.

She knew them or she didn’t was apparently Cutler’s bottom line, hardly the sort of thing I could quarrel with. He had a raft possibilities he trotted out along the way, all half-baked and wishful, based on hardly anything.

I listened.  Nodded when that seemed fitting and finally told him, “We need more on the victim.”

“We’ll have a sit down with the major,” Cutler said it more with dreary resignation than any kind of pluck and hope.  She was the brand of willful, flinty woman to have that effect on a man.

Lars’ stuff was junk all right.  Not antiques. Rusty tractor seats and shot up road signs.  Crockery and tools.  Musty books.  Weathered stable tack.  Eight track tapes and cake plates.  One wall of his store was hung entirely with clocks, and not even particularly nice ones but the sort you’d see on the wall at the DMV.

“Closed!” He was somewhere in the back.

“You Lars?” I shouted.

“Who wants to know?”

“Looking for your buddy, Kenny,” Cutler told him.  That seemed to touch off a spot of scrambling. We could hear the knock and clatter of a guy in a hurry to take something out or put something away.

The shop was in an old block building with high awning windows in the walls, the sort common in suburban basements.  No light much and plenty of dingy junk to soak up what little came in.

“You coming?” Cutler shouted.

More scrambling.  I circled around one way and Cutler went the other.  We had to pick routes through the clutter. It was a hoarder’s maze in there.  Lars was back in what passed for his office.  I found him by his lamplight.  I could hear metal on metal as he fiddled with something.

He was sitting at an overstuffed roll top desk, a big towheaded guy gone lardy.  There were invoices and receipts and indiscriminate paper leaking out of all the cubbies and spread across the desktop except for one little cleared spot where Lars was busy at something. I couldn’t see what he was doing, but I could hear the racket of it.

“Friend of Kenny Fulcher’s, right?” I said.

Cutler had gotten stymied and stopped back in the gloom somewhere.  I heard something fall over.  I heard Cutler say, “Shit.”

“You’re Lars, aren’t you?”

He swung around my way as he slammed a clip into the handle of what turned out to be a vintage Mauser.  I hardly had time to flinch before Lars pulled the trigger.  I think I shut my eyes.  I heard the hammer fall.  I waited to be dead. The gun went click.

Lars fiddled frantically while I grabbed the first handy item I could reach.  A dusty bronze Joan of Arc in elaborate armor with a sword. She’d been turned into a lamp base.  I had just enough room to wade in and catch Lars a solid blow.

He told me, “Grmph,” and pitched onto the floor.

I was all for dragging him outside and stomping him half to death, but that was just the adrenalin taking hold after the fact.  Cutler had me breathe and pace.  I added the swearing on my own.

The EMT truck came rolling up after maybe a quarter hour.  Two beefy girls with pony tails piled out.  They both said, “Jesus, Lars,” and then they soaked in me and Cutler like we’d boiled up out of hell. 

“What did y’all hit him with?” the larger one asked as the smaller one squatted to examine the damage.

Cutler left it to me.  I told her, “Enthusiasm.”

The pistol, as it turned out, was in perfect working order, but it was made to fire .765s and Lars must have only had .38s. He’d jammed a couple of rounds in the clip, but they were both stuck fast. I showed the thing to Cutler.

“Lucky for you he’s an idiot,” Cutler explained. “Let’s have a poke,” he suggested, so we went plundering through the store.

I focused mostly on Lars’ junky desk.  Canceled checks.  Business cards.  Carbon copied invoices.  Nothing looked terribly recent or significant in any way.  I found a half bottle of Dewars in a bottom drawer and maybe an eighth of an ounce of pot.

“Thought we were robbing him?” Cutler asked.

I shook my head. “Worse. Saw it in his eyes.”

“Show me how it went.”

“I might have said his name. He swung around.”  I leveled a finger at Cutler and told him, “Click.”

“Let’s bring the gun and whatever you hit him with. You know, in case there’s trouble.”

I pointed at the lamp.  Cutler picked it up and held it where the feeble light could bring the details into relief. 

Cutler squinted at the Maid of Orleans.  “Who’s he?”

5

They brought Lars around with an ammonia popper. He had a welt and an inch of scalp laid open.  When he came to, he rolled over and threw up. I’d seen enough vomit in the past two days to hold me for a while.

“Concussion probably,” the slighter girl told us.

“That it?” the other one asked as she pointed at the bronze Cutler was holding.

He nodded.  Lars groaned.  Those girls glared at me and Cutler.

“Tell us about him,” Cutler said.

They weren’t eager.  Lars spewed some more.

“Good guy.” That from the larger girl. The other one nodded.

“Then why did he try to shoot me?” 

I showed them the Mauser. They both looked genuinely surprised. They shook their heads.  They couldn’t say.  The Lars they knew didn’t do stuff like that.

“Does he have trouble in his life?” I asked them.

“Might have thought you were somebody’s husband.” The slighter girl studied me while she was saying it.  Skeptically, like it was crowding science fiction.

“Kenny Fulcher,” Cutler glanced at Lars.  “Friend of his?”

The larger girl dabbed at Lars’ mouth with a towel.  “We all know Kenny.” She said it with a distinct dash of contempt. “He’s nobody’s friend.”

Cutler was about to follow up when Lars groaned and spewed again.

“He ought to get checked out,” the larger girl told us.

“Where?” Cutler asked her.

“Clinic.  Currituck.”

Cutler nodded. “We’ll follow you over.”

They shoved Lars into their truck, and we tailed them back to the four lane and up to a medical clinic.  Those girls rolled him in through the front door, and we entered just behind them.  There was a quartet of wheezy civilians in the spartan waiting room.  One of them had his own IV on a pole.  Another had a dachshund in her lap.

The girls didn’t trouble themselves with niceties.  They blasted past reception and straight down a hallway to a large room across the back of the building where a wiry lady in a white coat with a pencil in her hair was sitting on a stool having an apple and flipping through the Auto Trader.

“He busy?” the larger girl asked her.

“Stitches.  Won’t be a minute.” She stood up and closed on the gurney.  “Hey, Lars. What happened to you?”

Lars gurgled and leaked a little.

The slighter girl glanced my way.  “He hit him in the head.”

The wiry woman pulled a flashlight from her lab coat pocket and shined it in Lars’ eyes.    

“I’m fuzzy,” Lars said in a feeble, breathy voice.  He laid the back of his arm across his forehead like a maiden aunt suffering from the fantods. It was a drama club caliber performance all around.

“Start talking,” Cutler told him.

Lars groaned.  Lars gurgled.  “Hold on,” he finally said and eyed the women in the room.  “Not here.”

Cutler glanced towards the EMT girls and the woman in the lab coat. “Y’all mind?”

The EMT girls were ready to leave anyway.  The lady in the lab coat grabbed the rest of her apple and her Auto Trader and left as well.

“All right,” Cutler said.

We waited.  Lars gurgled.

“I wanted a love seat.”  He tried to sit up, but the throbbing in his head drove him flat again.

We waited some more.  Cutler and I had clearly learned the same lesson about people.  If you give them long enough, they’ll eventually shovel in the details you need.

“Lady up in Moyock came looking for a hide-a-bed.  A little one for a spot she had. Kenny said he’d bring one in. She called.  I hadn’t seen him, so I went looking for him.”

“Looking where?” Cutler asked him.

“His place, but he wasn’t around, so I swung by his unit.”

We looked at Lars.  We waited.

“Storage.  Coinjock.  Down around there.”

“Find him?”

Lars shook his head.

“Found something, didn’t you?” I said.

He gurgled. He winced.

The doctor came charging in just then.  He was one of those guys who shoved doors open.  Big and loud.

“How is everybody?”  He had a gut the size of a mooring ball and sneakers without laces.

“Lars got a bump,” Cutler told him.

The doctor had a look at the thing for himself.  He mashed it with his thumb, which got a rise out of the patient. 

“Cut’ll close up when the swelling goes down.”  The doctor leaned in and checked Lars’ pupils.  “Take it easy, and stay up as long as you can. Got some aspirin somewhere.” He dug around in a drawer and found sample pack of Advil.  He tossed it at Lars’.  Told him,  “Here.”

Then he headed for the door, flung it nearly off its hinges.

“We’ll give you lift,” Cutler told Lars, who looked appreciably short of grateful.

We let him ride in the back seat stretched full out.  He tried to sell us on his decency as we traveled south towards Coinjock.  His pitch came down primarily to “There’s lots of shit I just won’t do.”

Cutler made phone and radio calls on the way. I did the driving and loosed the odd, responsive noise Lars’ way.  He cataloged for me various examples of stuff he’d never get up to.  Felonies for the most part with a few social indiscretions thrown in. I heard him out.  He gurgled. He groaned. Bad-mouthed Kenny Fulcher.

Kenny had a couple of storage units in a facility at the edge of a bean field.  There was a fence around the compound, but the gate was standing open.  It was hardly the sort of place you’d keep your heirlooms.  It was more for stuff your basement couldn’t fit.

Lars sat up when we hit the gravel.  “All the way over and straight back.”

The buildings were unpainted, and the doors were aluminum roll ups with rusted hardware.  There was little sign of active maintenance.  Box flaps blowing around. Pallet scraps. Trash everywhere the wind could send it.

Maybe half of the doors had locks on them. Most of the rest were fully raised up, exposing raw block walls and cement flooring.  Odd bits of clothing and squares of particle board.  Low-rent human residue.

“That one.” Lars pointed.  Last unit in the row.  Open lock hanging in the bolt hole.  The door lifted about a foot.

Lars stayed in the car.  Me and Cutler stood for a moment in front of Kenny’s unit.

“Do we need paper or something?”

“It’s open,” Cutler said.  He pointed at the bottom edge of the metal door.  “I’ve got kind of a back thing.”

So I did the lifting.  The tracks were out of true.  I had to wrestle the door up with main force and exposed a unit shoved full to the ceiling with what looked like beach house pillage.  Upholstered furniture. Dining tables.  Night stands.  Deck chairs.  A few boogie boards and beach tents.  Recliners piled on sofas piled on side tables and metal bed frames.  The place smelled like geezer and cigarettes with a little wet dog thrown in.

“What’s that?” Cutler asked and pointed at a trash bag just inside and against the wall.

I half knew what I’d find by the odor before I’d worked the neck of the sack fully open.  The blood was dried mostly but not entirely.  The plastic had seen to that.  Sky blue paper suits, soaked where they weren’t splattered.  Booties and masks.  Gore-stained gloves.

Cutler headed back to the sedan and the radio.  I shouted Lars’ way, “Tell me how it went.”

“I came looking for Kenny,” he said. “Saw that stuff.”

“The door was open?”

“A little.” 

I listened for a moment to Cutler on the radio. “Glenn for sure, and I guess the army. Don’t know what Doc-O can do.”

“So how does finding this stuff,” I said to Lars, “make you point a gun at me?”

“Figured you were the guy,” Lars told me.

“What guy?”

“You know . . .”

I didn’t.

“Hired Kenny.  Paid him good. But bad people, the way I heard it.”

“Get a name?” Cutler asked.

Lars shrugged.  “Ask Kenny.” He covered his face with his forearm again.   

Doc-O came because he had some kind of dinner date in Norfolk, which in his case meant a fishing buddy at half past four at a Chinese buffet.  Nobody had asked him to stop by.  He’d just been listening to his scanner, but that didn’t prevent him from grousing about how imposed upon he felt.

He’d been on the bridge when the call went out, so he reached us a good half hour before anybody else.

“Hmm,” he said when he looked in the sack.

He lifted a glove out with a pencil and asked us for a baggy.  Or he pointed anyway at the trunk of our sedan and made an exasperated face.

Doc-O dropped the glove in the evidence bag.  “This goes to Raleigh.  Once shithead gets done, I want the rest of it.”

“Fine,” Cutler told him as Doc-O noticed Lars for the first time.  Lars had retired to the sedan and was stretched out on the back seat with both of the doors standing open.

“What’s with him?” Doc-O asked.

“Got knocked on the head,” Cutler said. 

Together they stepped over to the car where Lars showed Doc-O his welt. It was raised and ugly,  still seeping a little.

“You might think you’re all right,” Doc-O told him, “and then you get a hemorrhage. Fall down deader than shit.”

If he’d not been empty already, Lars would surely have spewed again.

Doc-O checked his watch.  “Christ!” He was late for Moo Goo and ribs.

Meekins rolled in with Glenn riding shotgun as Doc-O was heading out. Their two cars stopped nose to tail for a spot of passing palaver, long enough anyway for Doc-O to say a belittling thing or two to Glenn.

Glenn set up a couple of light standards and took a bunch of proper pictures.  He even got a shot of Lars’ welt.

“You know,” Glenn explained, “in case.”

“Where’s the army?” Cutler asked Meekins.

“Stayed home,” she said.  “Working on Tillett.”

“Thought you couldn’t find him.”

“Couldn’t.  They found his cousin or nephew or something.” Meekins shook her head.

“What?” Cutler asked her.

“Stupid and high’s the way I read him, but then I was only in the Coast Guard.” Meekins glanced my way.  “Major says ‘Hey’.”

Good nose on her.  She’d smelled it already.

“What’s with him?” she asked of Lars.

“Pulled a gun on . . . Deputy Tatum,” Cutler told her.

My new job was news to Meekins, and she swung my way to give me a sour look.

Lars ended up in the room next to mine at the Driftin’ Sands Motel. Got put there for a night’s worth of safe keeping.  I don’t know what he made of the small-hours racket coming through the wall.  The major beat on the door.  It was going on one, and I was watching Australian football.

I opened up in my undershorts.

“Kind of late,” I told her.

The major pushed past me. She kicked off her shoes. Shucked her coat.  She said back, “Right.”

6

Meekins swung by about eight in the morning to pick up me and Lars.  She’d called ahead, so we were waiting for her out front in plastic Adirondack chairs.

We sat in silence mostly.  Lars owned up to feeling better.

Then he told me, “Wasn’t like I was going to shoot you or anything.”

“You pulled the goddamn trigger.”

Lars thought about that for a quarter minute.  “Well, yeah but . . . ,” was all he finally said.

We stopped in at the auto shop where they’d taken my truck for a thorough once over.  Meekins had been assured they were finished with it, but it was up on a lift with all the tires off. 

She had a sharp word with the shop boss and then came back to the car.

“This evening,” she told me as we left the lot.  We hit the gutter so hard that Lars bounced off the headliner with a groan.

Dennis and the chinless twins were on hand to eyeball me when we rolled up to KDH PD.  I met Betty, the dispatcher/receptionist who offered me one of her cranberry dazzles.  That’s what she called them anyway. They were lumpy cookies with flotsam in them. I took one and bit it. It tasted like acorns and Pepsi with a distinct hint of hand lotion.

“Betty can do a lot of things,” Cutler explained on the way back to his office.  “Baking isn’t one of them.”

He pointed out a trash can, and I dropped my half a dazzle in it.

Meekins joined us in Cutler’s office once she’d parked Lars back at reception. My gun was in Cutler’s out tray, the Ruger I kept under the bench seat of my truck. Cutler handed me a proper badge in a leather folder and had me sign some paperwork.  He told Meekins, “It’s you two.”

“Yes, sir.” She said it with no detectable joy.

“Put on your civvies.  Ya’ll work with the army as far as you can make that go.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll take care of Lars.”

“How about the victim?” I asked Cutler.  “Anything more on her yet?”

He shook his head.  Cutler checked is watch.  “Ya’ll pump them,” he said.  “They want you at the crime scene.”

Meekins liked to drive.  She kind of insisted on it.  We took the department’s dull, black Tahoe.  Grid lights.  Tinted windows. No chrome.

She’d let her hair down when she changed clothes, which made her look maybe nineteen. She’d put on jeans and boots and a tweedy roll-neck sweater. I felt a touch grubby admiring her parts and features like I did.

“How about the kid?” I asked as we crossed the four lane heading east towards the beach road.

“County’s got him.  Last I heard, they don’t know whose he is.”

“Not the victim’s?”

“Nope. They do know that.”

Major Pratt and her lieutenant were in the kitchen of the beach box, both of them on phone calls.  It sounded like the lieutenant was wrangling with a lab.  He had all the diagnostic jargon down and was chewing out somebody, while the major was primarily listening. She’d throw in the odd “Uh huh”. 

There was paperwork laid out on the dinette table, the victim’s military file in with the mix. I plucked it out and had a bit of a look before the lieutenant saw me and snatched it away. I settled on the spot where I’d punch him once he’d provoked me quite enough.

The major finished up her call and joined us.  She gestured for us to sit at the dinette. Meekins pulled a notebook out of her back jeans pocket, but the major told her, “Nope.”

“Results this p.m.,” the lieutenant reported.

“Victim’s file?”

The lieutenant was still holding it.  He nodded crisply and handed it to the major.

They had regular army stuff on the girl — Lieutenant  Tabitha Joyce Kline from Raphine, Virginia.  She’d enlisted in 2010. Basic training at Fort Jackson.  Then the major threw a bunch of acronyms at us and moved Lieutenant Kline around on the map.  She’d done a stint in Mosul and had a spent some time in Frankfurt.  She’d shifted to California and then New Mexico after that.

“What exactly,” Meekins asked, “is CBRN?” She’d jotted it on her palm, a note taker to the core.

“Weapons training,” the major said. She glanced at her lieutenant.  He nodded.

“Chem school,” I told Meekins.  “Out in Missouri. Chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear.  CBRN.” Then I turned to the major. “Let’s cut the shit. What exactly don’t you want us to know?”

The major and Lieutenant Browne considered each other for a moment.

“Let me help you,” I said. “Is this homicide job-related or just somebody’s brand of fun?”

“Give them the clipping,” the major told her guy.

The lieutenant plucked it out of an accordion file on the kitchen countertop.  A grainy copy of a newspaper article that looked like it had been faxed.  He handed it to Meekins.  I read it over her shoulder. The police had recovered the body of a woman from a pond in Vesuvius, Virginia.  Mona Hope Powell.  Twenty-eight.  Foul play indicated.  No suspects.  No arrests.

There wasn’t much detail.  A paragraph devoted to the victim’s local ties.  Her grieving parents. Her staggered fiancé. We finished reading and eyed the major.

“A childhood friend of Lieutenant Kline’s.  We’re told they’d remained close.”

The news story was nearly a week old.  “Strangled?” Meekins asked.

The major nodded.  “And cut.”

“Got somebody on the scene?” I asked her.

“Today.  A colonel’s driving down from D.C..”

“Is the kid hers?”

“We’ll know tomorrow.”

They had a half dozen forensic photos from the Richmond SBI lab.  I counted eight wounds on Mona Hope Powell’s right forearm. Not so frenzied as hatchet damage, but somebody had sliced her good. Cloudy eyes.  Bruised neck.  Choked by hand, it looked like.

The photos shook Meekins up enough to send her out onto the deck.

“Princess all right?” the major asked.

“Give me a week, and she’ll be like us. Won’t feel anything at all.”

“And Mr. Fulcher?”

I was well into an account of what Cutler and I had been through the day before by the time Meekins came back in and took her chair. There were photos of the gore-stained stuff we’d found in Kenny’s unit spread across the table.  Glenn had lit a few shots to throw the giblets into stark relief. Meekins stood and excused herself, left that beach box at a run.

Me and the major settled on an immediate plan of action.  She’d sift and coordinate while me and Meekins did some bird dogging for her.

“Wanchese,” she said.  “I’m told it’s filthy with Tilletts.  Ours is kind of a dud so far.  You try.”

Meekins made a few apologetic noises as we rolled south along the beach road.

I waved her off. “Gag while you can.”   

She had ideas about Tilletts. She’d arrested more than a few.  “Drunks and thieves mostly,” she told me.  “Dennis grew up in Wanchese.  Knows them better than anybody.”

“Rope him in?”

She nodded and raised Dennis on the radio.  He met us at a pullout down by Whalebone on the causeway to Manteo.  The gravel lot ran straight to the water where a couple of guys were parked on folding stools fishing the sound.  They had lines in the water anyway but were chiefly quarreling about the weather. Not the current weather.  They were deep in some kind of barometric pressure beef.

“Ten thousand goddamn millibars,” the one in the cap with the earflaps said.

The other responded by removing his shoe and smacking his buddy with it. It was an ankle boot with authentic heft.  Not some trifling sneaker, so earflap guy objected with cause and swatted his buddy back.

Luckily the one with the shoe had emphysema or something.  He couldn’t fight for long before he had to wheeze and cough instead.

Meekins sighted those guys down her finger. “I’m pretty sure I could hit them from here.”

Then Dennis rolled up and spared them both.  He’d grabbed a woman for shoplifting and had seen fit to bring her with him. He barked a few words of instruction her way as he climbed out of his cruiser.

“Tillett hunt,” I told him.  “She says you’re the man to talk to.”

Dennis nodded. “Used to run with them.”

“Ride over with us?”

He nodded again. Glanced towards his cruiser.  “Klepto.”

“What did she take?” Meekins asked him.

“Canned ham. And get this . . . she’s pissed the key broke off.”

“Punishment enough.” I was heading for the Tahoe.

Dennis gave it some thought and nodded.  He returned to his car and swung open the back cruiser door. He had words with the woman. Then Dennis gave her the canned ham to keep and carry.  He pointed the way she ought to be walking.

“Ain’t no goddamn key!” she said and bounced the ham off the cruiser fender.

Dennis picked it up and threw it at her.  He missed, and the thing spit a ham juice geyser once it hit the ground. The woman cackled and said a hot thing before heading east on foot. Dennis came on over, climbed into the Tahoe.  He informed me and Meekins,  “Smells like Fritos back here.”

Dennis proved to be a talker but not in any coherent way.  He just said whatever made the trip from his cortex to his tongue.

“I used to like shrimp.  Don’t much anymore. What kind of hat is that guy wearing?  I wouldn’t drive a Chevy.  Had an uncle that lived down around Beaufort in a school bus for a while.”

“Tillett,” I said.  “The one we got prints on.”

“Knew him a little. They called him Mick back then,” Dennis told me.  “Got that funny eye. Smoked an awful lot of dope.  Might still.  I don’t know.  Had these yellow socks he wore all the damn time. And I do mean all the damn time.”

“When did you last see him? Meekins asked once we were sitting at the Manteo light.

“Me and Lo Lo picked him up for something.” Dennis paused to recall just what.

“Lo Lo?” I asked Meekins.

A quick shake of her head told me Lo Lo had been fired or had maybe gone to Jesus.

“Oh, right,” Dennis said.  “Sold a boat wasn’t his to sell.”

“Any violence to him?”

“Mick?”  More thinking.  Dennis shook his head and told me, “Naw. He’s got a little brother and a slew of cousins I wouldn’t want to mess with, but Mick . . . .”  More thinking from Dennis.  “Naw.”

We were near the south end of Roanoke Island into Wanchese proper by then.  Tidal marsh on our left and weathered houses on our right.

Where the main road hooked around, we veered onto another blacktop.  Thicket Lump Drive on the road sign.

“What the hell’s that even mean?”

Meekins shrugged.  I glanced around at Dennis and waited for him to tell me something.  He did in time.  He told me, “Had a dog once that ate oyster shells.”

Soon there was marsh either side with clear fingers of water.  Birds all over, and the odd house on stilts. The road ended at a marina with a half dozen sport fishing boats in it.  There was a  store.  A cafe.  Big tanks of diesel.

Dennis directed Meekins to park in the gravel marina lot.  “Got to walk in.”

“Where?” I asked him.

Dennis pointed towards a clump of cypress trees off and away across the marshland.

“Talk to me about alligators,” I said.

“Big lizards,” he told me.  “With teeth.”

We’d crossed the road and cleared a sandy stretch of open ground when Dennis plunged into hummocky reeds and found what he was after.  Rough milled planks fixed between pylons driven into muck.  The boards were six or eight inches wide and weathered and warped and knotty.  The pylons were saplings, and the planks ran between them, resting on nailed two by four cross ties.  That catwalk went its rickety way through the marsh grass towards what looked like a semi-solid island.

Dennis pointed at the lump of raised ground with scrubby wind-whipped trees clinging to it. “Tilletts.”

“Hell of a spot.”

“They’ll know we really mean to see them,” Dennis said.  “So look alive.”

He went first.  We gave him a decent head start to spread the weight.  That’s what Meekins told me we were doing anyway.  I fully expected the whole trashy thing to collapse underneath him and was content to watch it happen from where I was.  Dennis never stopped talking at us as that catwalk creaked and groaned and swayed. The pylons had loosened and listed over time.  The foot planks were hardly sound, and the supports were far enough apart to make you dart from one set to the next.

“Stinks out here,” Dennis shouted.  Then he said something about a dead guy, an unlucky drunk who’d tumbled into a bog. 

“Is he always this chatty?” I asked Meekins.

She gave it some thought.  “I don’t really hear him anymore.” Then Meekins put a foot on the catwalk plank.  “Here goes.” And out she went.

I stayed where I was until Meekins came back a few yards to ask, “You coming or what?”

I looked at the bright side.  My cell phone hardly worked already.  My clothes were fragrant.  My gun was rusty. 

“Coming,” I said and ventured on out. 

That catwalk wiggled and complained with every step I took.  It seemed so ripe to collapse straight into the marsh that you all but forgot about falling off. You’d be in the water soon enough whether you kept your balance or not.

The farther out I went, the more garbage I saw. Somebody drank lots of cheap beer and ate no end of chicken fingers. On a platform above a vein of open water Dennis and Meekins waited for me.  It looked like something kids would build with scrap lumber and left over nails.  There was just enough room for the three of us and what appeared to be an outhouse.

“Shitter?” I asked.

Dennis nodded.  My appetite for shellfish went.

I studied the clumpy stands of cypress ahead and the tangled thickets on the hummocky rises.

“Where are we headed?”

Dennis pointed.  I could just make out a straight run of something that looked vaguely like a roofline.

The catwalk ended in a shin-deep bog.  All black water and rotted vegetation.  Nothing for it but to wade straight through to higher ground. I met with an arm chair in a knot of brambles and then a couple of joint compound buckets before I hit what must have passed with Wanchese Tilletts for a yard.  Sand and garbage and the odd prickly pear bordering a weathered, neglected house raised up on posts.  I motioned for Dennis to shift around back, for Meekins to follow me.  I dropped my clip and checked it, all gritty and ungreased from truck floorboard and studious neglect.

Then it was up what passed for front steps — more rickety mess — and onto a porch that had once been screened.  Additional garbage.  Cereal boxes chiefly. Milk jugs.  Soda bottles. Cole slaw tubs. The odd large animal bone. The front door had three panes of glass in the top, but they were too grubby to hope to see through.

The door wasn’t locked but was stuck in the jamb.  Swollen near the bottom.  I tried to bump it open, but the thing wouldn’t budge, so I had to step back and kick it free instead.  If a Tillett was going to object with gunplay, we’d have been shot dead already.

“Police,” I shouted.  “Anybody here?” Nothing.  I eased inside.

Musty doesn’t begin to cover it. More like goat flophouse.  Filth and dander and barnyard stink.  The greasy sofa had been duct taped at its worn spots.  The coffee table was piled with dishes and balled up paper towels. The main room room gave onto a dining area with a freighted picnic table in it.  The puny kitchen against the back wall was too nasty to venture near.

There were five small bedrooms down a dusty hallway, each of them with space for little more than a bed and a heap of clothes.  No people, alive or otherwise.  Just more white trash/livestock stink.

We all met up in the main room.

“What’s around back?” I asked Dennis.

“Trailer.”

We went over to check it out.  Meekins did the honors.  She jerked open the door and got as far as the threshold.

“No floor in here,” she told us.

I looked in past her.  More junk, all of it heaving up from the ground.

“Some kind of shed down here,”  Dennis said.  He led us over to it.

“Shed” was generous.  Just pitted planking and rotting framing on its way to being a pile.  Meekins had a light, and she played the beam inside.  Old fishing gear.  A tangle of netting.  What looked like a Styrofoam bait bin. More beer cans and scattered trash.  I saw the flash of yellow first.

Not in the shed but just outside, through a crack in the leaning side wall.  I walked around for a look, and there they were — the lower legs of a man in sneakers.  The toes of his shoes pointing skyward like the wicked witch of the west.  Yellow socks and and bare shins.

“Mick,” Dennis said.  “Got to be.”

I borrowed Meekins light and tried to get a clear look under.

“His momma always told him he’d end up dead and shit.”

“I doubt his mother saw this coming.” I handed Meekins light back to her. “Your boy quits at the knees.”

7

The army was first on the scene.  The major stalked along the catwalk like it would give way at its peril.  The lieutenant looked appreciably less confident and lingered by the outhouse to replenish his nerve.

“Doc-O coming?” Dennis asked the major.

She pushed past him.  “One assumes.”

The major had her own light and slipped with it as far under the shed as she could manage.  Then she wriggled back out, said, “Hmm,” and eyed the bare shins, the socks, the sneakers.

“Are we sure it’s him?” she asked.

“He is,” I said of Dennis.  “Your Tillett cousin still around?”

She nodded.  “In the car.”

The lieutenant showed up looking shaken from the walk.

“Go get him,” the major said.

“Who?”

She pointed, and the lieutenant squeaked a little.  I imagined that was as close as he’d ever come to insubordination, and I was enjoying the man’s suffering when Meekins chimed in. 

“I’ll do it.” She went off at a trot, keen for relief from the carnage.

“Find any more of him?” the major asked me.

“Not yet.”

“Where have you looked?”

I did some pointing.  Dennis showed the major a cow bone I’d told him already to put down.

I walked her through the house.  Your ordinary human would have needed to ask how civilized people had come to live like Tilletts did. The major didn’t say a thing.  She shifted stuff with her foot when she had to. Made a few noises.  Eyeballed the furnishings.

Then we lingered on the porch with the rotten screen wire twitching in the breeze. Through the leafless thicket we could just see Meekins driving the major’s Tillett before her.  There was a woman behind her on the catwalk. Janice,  Doc-O’s girl

Doc-O had gone gouty, Janice informed us.  He was back on dry land in the car.  “Wants us to bring him whatever we can.”

“How about snaps?” the major asked and pulled out her phone.

It was hard to know how many shots of lower legs Doc-O needed, but the major didn’t take any chances and shot a slew. When she was finished, she had Meekins bring the live Tillett to the shed.

“So,” the major asked him of the legs, the socks, the sneakers, “what do you think?”

That Tillett might have been rough and ragged, some kind of Outer Banks swamp cracker, but he had enough humanity in him to know to be aghast.

“What do I think?”

The major nodded.

That Tillett shook his head, agitated.  “Mick probably,” he finally told her. He sniffled some and pointed.  “Them’s his socks.”

The major nodded and said nothing further.

“Ain’t you going to pull him out!?” 

The boy went indignant in a flash and lunged at his cousin’s legs.  He grabbed an ankle with each hand and yanked hard once.  That’s all it took.  He pitched over backwards with far less of his cousin than he’d probably been expecting.

He howled.  I would have done the same.  I’m pretty sure I heard Dennis laugh.  Meekins was the first to try to calm him.  I came up right behind her.  We each took a severed leg while that Tillett squirmed and spasmed and flailed and swore.

We decided to carry them on to Doc-O since they were out and loose. I wasn’t sure Meekins could manage it, given her recent history of sputum,  but she shouldered her leg like a joint of mutton and took the catwalk at a trot.  I made decent headway myself and reached Doc-O’s sedan just behind her.  We slapped the pair down on the hood. Doc-O considered them through the windshield.

“Is that all?” he asked.

“So far.”

“Clean,” Doc-O said. “Sharp’s better than serrated. A decent paring knife could do this.”

“Special skills?” I asked him.

He shook his head.  “Black heart,” he said, “and nerve.”

We heard somebody banging along the catwalk and looked over to see the Tillett cousin.  The lieutenant was trailing him.  Picking his way.  Scampering from post to post.

That Tillett hung back once he’d spied his cousin’s legs on Doc-O’s hood.

I went over to him.

“I got t0 get to work and all. They said somebody’d take me.”

“Where?”

“Milepost five.”

“Who do you work for?”

“Tweedy. Rental place.  Keep up a bunch of houses.”

“I guess that puts you in a lot of beach boxes,” I said.  He knew immediately what I meant.

“I ain’t no thief. You can check.  That was Mick’s thing.”

“I’ve seen your sheet.”  I hadn’t.

“That cop was an asshole. I ain’t never had nothing to do with Mick and them.”

“Them who?” Meekins asked.

“Kenny.  J.J..  X-ray. Like that.”

“Kenny Fulcher?”

He nodded.

“And the other two?” I asked.

“J.J. and Mick used to be a thing.  She had a kid.  Got hitched. Went to Edenton or somewhere.”

“And X-ray?”

“He can bust in any damn where.”

“He got a name?” I asked.

“Probably.”

Meekins had crowded close to listen.  She pulled out her phone and called in for a check.

“Who’s taking me to work?” that Tillett wanted to know.

Lieutenant Browne with an ‘e’ was just off the catwalk by then.  I pointed and said, “Him.”

Cutler rolled up.  He had a look at the legs.  He took a spot of abuse from Doc-O and then fairly drove me and Meekins before him across the marsh to the Tillett hummock where the major toured him around and filled him in.

Betty back at the PD might not have been much of a baker, but she had a knack for data bases.   She’d turned up three X-rays for Meekins after twenty minutes at most. Meekins dictated, and I made notes while the major and Cutler walked the compound.

“Hendry?” Meekins listened.  “Manns Harbor, yeah.”

One of the X-ray’s was working the Ocracoke ferry out of Swan Quarter. The last one was up the road in Columbia doing eighteen months at the prison farm there.

Once Cutler had seen all he needed to see, he joined us in the trashy front yard.

“Got three associates to run down,” Meekins told him. “Mainland.  Swan Quarter. Like that.”

He pointed at me as he spoke to Meekins.  “Run him by Belks.” Then he turned my way, eyed me up and down.  “Get you something decent.”

Fair enough.  I was shabby tip to toe.  Inertia had kept me that way.

“And check on that baby,” Cutler said. “I told Ramona you’d look in.”

The Belks was in a KDH strip mall just north the Wright Brothers Memorial.  I found two pair of twill trousers that fit me. Both of them on sale.

“That too,” Meekins said of my fatigue jacket.  She’d selected a topcoat for me and made me buy a packet each of briefs and under shirts.  At the checkout counter, she tossed a jug of body wash on my pile.

“I don’t need that.”

Meekins and the checkout girl made almost identical noises.

We took the four lane up to Kitty Hawk road and turned east towards the sound. We soon hit a regular, unbeachy stretch of blacktop with ranch houses, a middle school, a couple of churches, a trailer park, and a low, homely government building.  It was the sort thought modern in the fifties, the spot where locals came for subsistence help and WIC food.

Meekins pulled in.

“They keeping junior with the cheese?”

“Kind of.”

He was in a play pen, just standing there looking out.  The place was one big room.  Lots of shelves.  A cluttered desk.  A couple of space heaters.  A few chest freezers.  Cans stamped ‘Green Beans’ and ‘Stewed Beef’. A radio somewhere was playing soft rock.  Bread or Air Supply.

Junior appeared to recognize me.  He raised both arms and told me, “Ngharln.”

I was picking him up when a woman came in through the back and said, “Hold on.” Then she saw Meekins and settled down.  “Oh,” she said.  “Hey, Candy.”

Meekins made the introductions.  Ramona tossed her coat aside. She’d been out back having a smoke.

“How’s he doing?” I asked.  Junior threw in a mucousy giggle.

Ramona was forty-something probably and slight, bordering on emaciated.  She had hair the color of red velvet cake that fell in ringlets everywhere.  She shrugged.  Junior was a living toddler making racket.  By that human baby measure, he was fine.

“What are you hearing?” Meekins asked her.

It turned out Ramona had an in with a certain strata of local society.  Predicated — Meekins explained to me later — on the woman’s weakness for bad boys.  Truly bad boys in Ramona’s case.  The kind with time served, parole stipulations, outstanding warrants, like that.        I didn’t know any of this until after we’d left and were back in the four by four, so I was doing quite a lot of reconnoitering during the actual chat between Ramona and Meekins.  Ramona would say stuff like, “Swanky might have got a whiff,” and Meekins would follow up with something on the order of, “Dewey Swanky or Bo Swanky?”

It didn’t mean much to me.  You could chase this stuff for the rest of your life and end up a foot from where you started.

I wandered the place with junior while Ramona opened up to Meekins.  The child was happy to be held.  I set him down once, but he grabbed fistfuls of my brand new trousers and clamored to be picked back up.

“You don’t think I stink, do you?” I asked him when we were over with the canned beef.

Junior had a spit bubble for me.  He giggled and told me, “Ngharln.”

I felt a little like I was at the shelter trying out a puppy.  It was enough of a dangerous sensation to prompt me to put junior back in his pen.

“I call him Brady,” Ramona told me. She’d been half watching me all along.

“Why?”

“Cousin.  Got killed in a wreck.  Had those dimples.  Had that nose.”

I said, “All right,” but I didn’t like it.  I’d worked with a Brady once. He’d been an idiot and an asshole.

I waited until we were back in the Tahoe before asking Meekins, “What happens to him?”

“She’ll keep him until we can locate the family, as long as it’s a reasonable time and all.”

“And if we can’t locate them?”

“Foster care.  Adoption maybe.  You know the drill.”

I did.  I’d run kids through it and had actively worked to forget them like most cops do. We hit the four lane and headed south.  This was a hell of a place for riding dead straight roads, just up and back forever.

“What’s on the menu?”

“The boss is setting us up for the work farm tomorrow.  Might can get to the other two X-rays today.”

“What was all that from Ramona?”

Meekins shook her head.  “Just chatter.  She’ll work it.”

“What’s her in?” I asked.

“Wild girl,” Meekins told me. “And you saw her.  Bony ass.”

“That’s a good thing?”

She nodded. “Seems to be around here.”

On the road, Meekins proved a hell of a lot better than Dennis for supplying me with what I needed to know. She’d point out flora and name it — a tree, a bush, a thicket.  She could tell gulls apart and knew what to call them. She showed me sand cranes I would have missed. Along the way past Manteo and across the bridge to Manns Harbor, Meekins gave me a fair sense of what water was where, precisely how the currents ran, and the route you’d take to reach the sea if you had to.

She was particular about the details of life, which is good in a general way but not so helpful with criminal pinheads who’ll get granular on you in a heartbeat. They’ll give you fabricated chapter and verse bristling with cocked-together particulars, and if you care too awful much about facts, you can waste a lot of time.

I’ll let a lowlife tell me what he thinks he needs to say.  Then I’ll reset him and ask him to try it over again.  A shove.  A punch.  A knee to something tender.  Quick.  Emphatic.  Uncompromising.  Just enough to make him put the lies away.

We found our first X-Ray under an Acura he didn’t appear to own.  He had it up on a lift in a junky garage bay at what had been a service station. There were no gas pumps on the cement islands, just stubbed off pipes and squeegee tubs. A bunch of rusted out cars and trucks in the lot. A couple of functioning vehicles by the road.  Three guys sharing one tall boy among them, two of them in white fishing boots.  And our X-Ray under that new sedan cutting an exhaust pipe with a torch.

He had a helper under there with him. A lanky boy in duct taped gloves whose job was to cradle whatever came down.  They looked to be aiming for the catalytic converter, which was probably worth a grand.

The guy without the boots was the one who told us, “Hey,” once we’d slipped up on the whole crowd of them.  He said it that way his sort do when they mean mostly, “Shit.”

We had particulars on this X-Ray — height and weight, hair color, like that.  His given name was Bosco.  He had to be the guy with the torch.

“What’s up, boys?” I said.

Meekins didn’t hang back exactly, but she seemed to sense that this was the sort of crowd I could probably work.

X-Ray kept cutting.  Sparks kept flying.  The beer boys decided they’d seen all the auto repair they needed to see.

One of them said, “Well,” and let that do for ‘Hail and Farewell!” They all three left in one of the trucks by the road.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

The wiry gloved helper told me, “Pipe got a hole in it.”

I stepped closer and leaned in for a look at the undercarriage.

“Lady owns it,” the ferrety helper said, “says she don’t want . . .” and he went casting for some form of bullshit. 

I tried to help him.  “Her converter anymore?”

That boy got even shiftier and did some powerful glancing at Bosco who dialed down the gas to his torch and set the thing aside.

He looked past me to Meekins.  “What do ya’ll want?”

I crooked a finger at him, and he followed me back into what had once been the quickie mart end of things.  There were just gum racks now.  Dusty shelving.  Beer cans and burger wrappers.  Makeshift ash trays.

I let Meekins endure the first round of categorical denials.  She trotted out all the names we had and asked Bosco who he knew and how.  He stuck with nobody no way even after Meekins had turned her attention to the new sedan on the lift.  “Whose car is that anyway?”

Bosco became a Constitutional authority.  “I ain’t got to tell you nothing.”

Meekins had a noise for that.

I had something for it too — an open hand to Bosco’s near ear.  He went deaf on that side for a bit.

“Hey!”

Bosco looked set to explain to me — preamble and amendments — all the precious freedoms he had when I hit him again.  Same place, same way.  He went instinctive and glanced around for something to hit back with.

That’s when I had him.  It’s all context in the end.  I’m sure Meekins disapproved, but she knew the good sense to hold her tongue.

“Sit down, Bosco.”  I pointed at a stool next to an old candy rack.  He sat.  His one ear was scarlet while the other had gone bloodless and white.

I could see he recognized me for what I was just like I’d recognized him, and without further discussion we came to a transactional agreement.  He’d tell me what I needed, and we’d find some way around attempted grand theft for the car.

All I had to do was jab a thumb towards Meekins, and Bosco cut loose with every little thing he knew about Wanchese Tilletts and Kenny Fulcher.  It wasn’t anything we didn’t have already.

“They work houses,” Bosco told us.  “Another boy runs with them.”

“X-Ray?” Meekins asked.

“That’s me.”

“Him too,” I told him.

He shook his and made a disgusted noise like a world where anybody could snag a handle like X-Ray was hardly worth living in.

“How’d you get it?”

Bosco was too proud to be cautious.  “Shot a guy right through a wall.”

“On purpose?”

He nodded.  “He had a knife and shit, but I hit him in the hand.”

“Hell of a thing.”

Bosco snorted.  He tapped his chest and told me, “X-Ray.”

“You’ll fix that pipe you cut,” I said, “and give that lady back her car.”

“All right,” he told me. What else could he say?

Meekins jotted down all the Acura particulars.

In the Tahoe, I told her, “Sometimes you have to wake them up. A lot of times you don’t.”

“Got that tattooed on your ass, I’ll bet.”

“Right next to my dolphin.”

Swan Quarter, where our second X-Ray worked the ferry in high season, proved to be a good hour and quarter from Manns Harbor through a lot of nowhere much. We veered off south where the road split and drove through a nature preserve.  Miles of scrub and swamp and gnarly cypress with no trace of  shacks and trailers.  Then it was flat farmland for a good half hour, either fallow sandy fields or what looked like winter wheat.

We stopped for gas in a place called Englehard, which was organized around a finger of the Pamlico Sound.  They had farmers and shrimpers both.   I bought us sandwiches while Meekins filled up the Tahoe, and we ate them in a park by the water.  Far Creek, they called it.  We perched on a stack of pylons in a spot of afternoon sun.

“So?” I said to Meekins after a quarter hour of silence.  “What’s on your mind?” She’d long been chewing on something.

“I’m not built for smacking folks around.  Where does that leave me?”

“You mean, like, physically?”

I think she probably only half did, but she nodded.

“It’s attitude mostly. Smacking’s just shorthand.  You’re not a mark, and you want them to know it.”

“So what do I do instead?”

“Pop one or two.  Word’ll get around. Then you won’t have to do much of anything anymore.”

We watched a guy fool with the rigging of his trawler.  Little Lucy. She was in tough shape and needed some paint and patching or a few sticks of dynamite.

“What if I smack the wrong guy?”

“You won’t.  Just don’t wear it out.  Better to be . . . erratic.”

We ate.  We sat saying nothing for a while.  The guy on the boat banged his hand and raged about it.

“I used to think I wanted a boat,” I said.

“He’d probably give you his about now.”

We passed miles of bean fields and and skirted around the scrubby banks of Lake Mattamuskeet before the road bent hard towards the bay and Swan Quarter.  The place was puny and bedraggled.  A couple of churches.  A fire house.  An Exxon station.  A trio of big colonial homesteads that had surely been fine once.

The ferry landing was closed for the season, so we checked in with the fire men. There were two of them on duty.

“X-Ray who?” we got asked by the one with bean dip on his t-shirt.

Meekins checked her notebook for this X-Ray’s given name.  “Harker,” she said,  “Lloyd Franklin.”

“Just missed him,” the other one told us and then gave us the guidance we needed.

Our second X-Ray had so recently migrated to a churchyard that his grave was still a fresh heap of sandy earth.

8

The major showed up at a decent hour and approved of my new underthings. That is to say I got a quick once before she told me, “Look at you.” Then she yanked my t-shirt all out of shape by tugging it with her teeth.

I’d tell you we did the usual if there was a usual with that woman. She was game for every which way all the time and was only held back by my lack of imagination for circus stuff. Lucky for her, she knew how to get what she needed with limited input from me, so I could be spent and contused — even fractured probably — and she’d have found a way to finish.

She’d been in the room just a minute or two when she elbowed the scab off my cheek.

The major didn’t like to talk much after and preferred I didn’t touch her.  She’d roll over and rough me up when she needed me again. So I was surprised when she cocked up on an elbow and said, “Some day, huh?”

I assumed at first she was playing at being normally post-coital, was attempting to treat a man like she cared about the chunk of him above his tackle because she needed to borrow money or have help disposing of a corpse.

I only nodded and made a tentative noise.

“Legs, for Godsakes.  Didn’t expect that.”

“Nope.”

She came closer.  I flinched and raised an arm to shield myself against her. She pulled it away and rested her head on my chest like a normal woman would.

“I can’t quite figure this out,” she told me. 

It was like I was in some weird dream state. I half expected to lurch awake to find her beating me with a poker.

“I hear you’ve got some idea on motive.”

“Idea’s a little strong,” I allowed. “I’m just guessing there must be one.”

“Such as?”

“You know. Love.  Drugs. Money.  Like that.  Throw in a knifey nut job, and you get legs under a shed.”

She’d clearly hoped for something more evolved.  I was enough of a detective to tell that by the snort.

“So you’re official now.  Signed on and all.”

I nodded. “Had nothing else going.”

“Living here?” She gazed for effect around my dumpy motel room.

“Got to find something else.  Need a day without . . . you know . . . legs.”

“Me too.”

She grabbed my tackle.  Just reached over and lifted it up.  Something about it (pliability probably) failed to ignite and captivate her.  She turned it loose, flopped onto her back. “You checked on the baby?”

I gave her a look.

“I hear stuff.”

“What else did I do today?”

“Bought clothes.”

“And?”

“Dries up after that.”

“I don’t hear stuff.”

She took my meaning and cocked up on her elbow again.

“Start with the lieutenant.”

“The dead one or the one that hates you.”

“Dead one.”

And then the major actually opened up a bit. “Chem corps,” she said. “Biological.”

“Does that figure in?”

“Might. We’ve had a couple of . . . incidents.”

I waited.

“Bedford, Indiana.  Ring a bell?”

It didn’t.

“Tularemia outbreak . . . maybe eight months ago.  Laid the whole place low. If you were there, you had rabbit fever.”

“Happens, right?”

“Tick bites usually.  This came from the water supply.”

“Was your dead lieutenant out there?”

“No.” 

The major rechecked my tackle. I knew it would pay me to be inert, so I thought about an uncle — my mother’s bloated eldest brother — scratching his naked belly while padding around in his undershorts.

She flung me aside. “Three homicides during the outbreak.”

“What flavor?”

“Knifey.”

“Tied to our girl?”

“Maybe,” she said. “One of the victims was . . . known to her.”

“Known how?”

The major took a moment to settle on a response suitable for my civilian ears.  “Operationally,” she told me.

“Chem corps too?”

I apparently had sufficient clearance for a nod.

“And the other two?”

“One was a neighbor from across the street.”

“Army?”

“No.”

“What’s the thinking?”

“Wrong place, wrong time.  Something like that.”

“Number three?”

“Repeat offender.  Local guy.”

More waiting.

“Petty bullshit.  All-purpose chiseler.  That kind of thing. They found him out in a hay barn a few weeks later.”   

“Dead how?”

“Four pieces. He had one the victim’s credit cards on him.”

“Chem corps?”

“No.  The neighbor. Blood residue on it too.”

“Whose blood?”

“Chem corps.”

“So he was there?”

“That’s the thinking.”

“Tell me about chem corps.”

“Boland, Nancy Fay.”

“Did you work it?”

She nodded.

“Weapon?”

“Never found one.  Big blade.  Double bevel. We’re thinking bush axe.”

“All of them hacked up?”

She nodded.  “But Boland was strangled first.”

“Just her?”

“Yeah.  The other two bled out.  Blows to the head.  Butchered, but no art to it.”

“You tell Cutler?”

“Sort of.”

“Got a file for me?”

“Tomorrow. All hands. ” She wrenched and yanked and tugged my tackle.

“You always this needy?”

Wrong word.  I got some violence. Somehow I stirred.

“Look at you,” she said.

****

Meekins  rolled in to pick me up at half past eight with news about my truck.

“Bad axle’s what they’re saying.”

“I thought they were just looking for evidence.”

“Were. Found a bad axle.  Want it replaced?”

“I guess.  Now that I’m getting paid.”

“And Cutler snagged a beach box for you.  Lease runs through May.” She handed me a door key on a ring with a realtor’s tag.  “He’s docking you the deposit.”

“Expensive morning.”

“Get your stuff.  I’ll drive you over.”

So I crammed all my clothes in my duffel and let the blower bearing serenade me one last time before Meekins drove me up the beach road to what would be my home for a while.  It was a half mile north of the crime scene on the opposite side of the road. Cedar shakes and louvered shutters. Plastic porch chairs tossed and tumbled by the wind.  Pine bead board and bamboo furniture inside. There was a washer/dryer, a microwave, conch shells all over for decor.

“Is that Jesus?” I asked Meekins and pointed towards a piece of framed artwork across the way.

She stepped over for a better look.  “Jerry Garcia,” she told me.

“Ok, then.  I can stay here.”  I picked a bedroom, dropped my duffle, and we left.

Meekins drove us west to the four lane.  “Work farm’s expecting us first thing. Then Cutler says the major’s got some intel.”

I nodded.  “Homicides like ours.  Indiana.  Six or eight months ago.”

Meekins narrowed her eyes my way.

“She told me already.”

Meekins stiffened slightly.  It felt like a territorial thing.  “You trust her?”

“No.”

“You like her?”

“Not really.”

We were ripping down the four lane by then.  Meekins was pushing seventy and yipped her way through a couple of lights.

“I don’t get men,” she finally said.

“A lot of that going around.”

The work farm was in Columbia, thirty miles due west of Manteo.  The stretch of road between the two was mostly marsh and piny forests, possum carcasses and drive-thru trash. Signs warning us to watch for bears.  Meekins wanted to hear a strategy along the way.  She wasn’t one to improvise.  She liked a scheme and a plan and so pecked and nattered at me.  I’m more of a moment’s notice guy.  Dropped masks.  All that.

I switched on the radio in a bid to deflect Meekins.  We heard all about Raleigh traffic as we crossed the Alligator River and raced up the blacktop towards Columbia.

“You drive awfully fast,” I said at one point.

Meekins told me, “Thanks.”

They had the work farm X-Ray waiting for us in a bright room off reception.  White block walls.  Plastic chairs and tables.  A beefy guard stood by with the sort of haircut wives give when they’re mad.

“Ya’ll got something on my case?” X-Ray wanted to know. “They said ya’ll come here to do for me.”

“Got this other thing first,” I told him.

“Yeah,” he said and waited.

“Kenny Fulcher and Mick Tillett.  Friends of yours?”

X-Ray looked from me to Meekins.  Her face first, then her throat and breasts.  He wasn’t particularly seedy or creepy as jump-suited inmates go.  He’d shaved already and combed his hair, had a more respectable coif than the guard.  His tattoos looked professional, and they appeared to quit at his shoulders and his wrists so he could put on a dress shirt and maybe a tie and pass for semi-respectable.

“What did they tell you?” The routine known associate question.

“Not a lot,” I said, which was true as far as it went.

Meekins had brought in this X-Ray’s paperwork and pulled a sheaf of it out of her satchel. She deposit it on the table between us and let the heft do some talking.

“They’re all over this stuff,” she told X-Ray. “Looks like you guys were a crew.”

He chewed his lower lip.  He eyed Meekins’ neck again.  Her breasts.

“X-Ray,” I said. He turned and made do with me.  “What’s that about?”

“Huh?”

“X-Ray. Your handle.”

He twitched.  Shook his head.  “Picked it up somewhere.” He went back to Meekins’ sternum.  “Might be cause I see through shit.”

He got a touch too leery after that.  You give them rope and hope for the best.  Occasionally they’ll reward you, but more often than not you end up having to reach across a work-farm table, hook your hand behind an inmate’s head, and slam his face down hard.

The guard moved our way but just a half step.

“We’re okay,” I told him, and he stayed where he was.

X-Ray staunched his bloody nose with his sky blue jumper sleeve.  He didn’t look surprised or even mildly irritated.  He was plainly a man who’d given offense and gotten corrected before.

“Kenny Fulcher,” I said.  “Mick Tillett.”

X-Ray smiled.  His teeth were bloody. “What are they into?”

“Hard to know.”

“I’m supposed to tell you? I’ve been in here since . . . shit . . . last year.”

“Have you talked to either one of them?” Meekins asked.

X-Ray managed to look at her face primarily. It appeared to be a struggle. “Maybe. Might have.”

I reached for him.

“Hold on.” He scooted his chair away.  “Kenny,” he said.  “I couldn’t find my ex.  Called him for some canteen money. Tells me they’re working for some guy.”

“When was this?” I asked.

X-Ray did some advanced recollecting.  Staring at Meekins’ breasts seemed helpful to him, so we both just let it go. “A month ago maybe. Six weeks.  I don’t know.”

“What guy?”

“Didn’t say.”

“What kind of work?” Meekins asked.

More leering.  Bloody teeth. A shrug.   “Sounded like the usual.”

“Furniture? TVs?  That kind of thing?” I snapped my fingers to draw him my way.

X-Ray nodded.  “And some muscle stuff.”

“Oh yeah?”

“A boy needed a lesson.” More shrugging.  “They kicked him around.  Half drowned him.  Weren’t but a two minute call.”

“That’s kind of ringing a bell,” Meekins told me. She loosed two buttons and showed X-Ray her cleavage.  She winked.

X-Ray sucked some powerful air and groaned.

They had a visitors’ center in Columbia where the four lane went to two, and me and Meekins made a pit stop there and took a turn on a marsh walk they’d built.  Proper rails and decking out over reeds and water.  Not the sort of mess a Tillett would throw together. I bought Fritos from the machine there and ended up tossing them all to the ducks.

Meekins did a little checking on her phone while we walked, talked to Betty back at the PD.

“There was a guy,” she told me.  “He took a beating under the Avalon pier. October.  It seemed like the usual drunken shit.”

“Wasn’t?”

She shook her head. “Not a tourist.  Drives a bread truck.  Think he was out of Elizabeth City.” The ducks raised a racket.  I showed them my empty hands.  “Too ready to put it all behind him.  I do remember that.”

“Get a description out of him?”

She shook her head. “He said it was dark and all.”

“Priors?”

“Kid stuff.”

“Any tie in with Kenny or Tillett?”

“Betty’s checking.”

“Seen him since?”

She shook her head.

“Might be worth finding.”

The ducks squawked at me.  A lady in the parking lot suggested to her husband (I’d guess), “Shut up!”

9

The major and Lieutenant Browne with an ‘e’ had set up an incident room. Cutler had given over what looked like a former bank V.P.’s office.  Built-in bookshelves.  A credenza and matching desk shoved against the back wall.  The lieutenant had commandeered a pair of rolling cork boards. All the announcements and notices he’d stripped off were shoved in a Bacardi box on  the floor. Christmas toy drive.  Free weights for sale.  Fish fry at the fire house. OBX 10K run.

There was a tin of cookies on the desktop alongside a coffee urn. Betty cookies.  They looked like plugs of particle board under confectioner’s sugar.  The coffee, of course, tasted like lotion because Betty had made that too.

She’d compensated by finding our bread truck guy.   “Ricky Weems,” she said to Meekins as she handed her a slender file.

Meekins checked Ricky’s particulars. The major noticed.  She came my way.

“You two onto something?”

I sipped my coffee and winced.  I shook my head.

When Cutler came in, he sent Betty out front to the phones before pointing at the tin and the urn both and telling the army mostly, “Don’t.”

The major gave us her “settle down” look and then went straight into Indiana.

“Hold on.  Back up.  Tularemia?” Cutler asked, and it went on like that for a while.

Lieutenant Browne pinned up forensic photos as the major talked. I stepped over to the cork board to have a closer look.  Dead chem corps lady.  Dead neighbor.  Both of them slashed and gouged. Dead Indiana lowlife who looked to have gotten the worst of it. Not fully chunked and separated but a half dozen kinds of killed.

Dennis came in for permission on something.  He had a look at the photos,  said, “Hell.”

“Indiana,” Cutler told him.

That let the air out of it for Dennis.  Indiana was somewhere else entirely while he was decidedly here.

I had to guess that sort of living would keep things simple and uncluttered.  You see full-color eight by tens of humans laid open to the bone, but you don’t have to care because it happened a good two-day’s drive away.  

“She was strangled,” the major said.  “Like here.  The wounds are all post mortem.” She indicated the hacked up Indiana lowlife. She pointed at the bloody neighbor. “Not strangled.  Just cut to pieces.”

“Weapon?” Meekins asked as the major handed out sheets on the three Indiana victims.  The neighbor sold tractor tires.  Danny something.  The lowlife went by Ju Ju. 

Lieutenant Browne pinned up a photo of a bush axe, not the actual one that had done the damage but some internet picture he’d found.

“Nancy Fay Boland.  Lieutenant.  U.S. Army.  Chem corps,” the major said.

“When?” Cuter asked.

“March.  This year.”

“She know our victim?” That from Meekins.

The major did with Meekins the thing she’d done with me, some form of national security sorting.  “Operationally,” she said.

“What does that even mean?”  Cutler wanted to know, and he was two decades a marine.

“Trained together,” the major told him.  “Acquainted.”

Meekins pointed at the board.  “Have a suspect?”

The major glanced at her lieutenant. 

“Three,” he told us and produced their sheets.  We each got one, me and Cutler and Meekins. Mine was a Bedford local with a felony arrest.  Pled down.  He hardly looked promising.  He had one eyebrow and no motive.  Not just no motive to kill the chem corps lady and her nosy neighbor, but no relationship (operational or otherwise) with the dead Indiana lowlife who he would have needed to murder a few days later somewhere else. A lot gumption and follow through for a human who looked like my guy looked.

I waved my candidate’s sheet at the major.  “Come on.”

“Local PD,” she explained.  “Their fall back.”

I felt sure Dennis and them had one or two reliable local ringers as well.  You had a crime.  You picked them up.  It looked like you were doing something.

Meekins’ guy wasn’t much better.  “Says here he was in Oregon.”

The major nodded.

Cutler’s guy was a girl.  “With a bush axe?” he asked.

“She cut a cop once,” the major told us.  “They roped her in just because.”

“So nobody and nothing,” I said to the major.

She nodded.

“Any witnesses? To anything?” Meekins wanted to know.

“One.”

The major produced the affidavit.  A neighbor up the block.  She’d seen a sedan she didn’t recognize.  At least two people in it.  They turned into chem corps’ drive and pulled around to the back of the house.

“That’s it?”

The major nodded.

“Color?  Tag?” I asked.

“She couldn’t say. Bad eyes.”

Both women trained at Fort Leonard Wood, the major told us. “Same general class but, by all accounts, not buddies. Boland was from Texas.   Kline from Virginia.  Lived in different barracks.  Different squads and pods. Didn’t socialize off base, as best we can tell.”

“Specialties?” I asked.

“Biological,” the major told me.  “Both of them, but it’s a big base.”

“Overseas?” Cutler wanted to know.

The major nodded.   She pointed at one of the crime scene photos — bloodbath with female and sliced neighbor’s arm.  “Bagram.  One tour. Kline was never there.”

“So our knifey guy’s the link?” I was essentially thinking out loud.

The major nodded.

“He kills the girls and gets some local mutts to cut them up?”

“Seems so,” she said.

“Then somewhere else and sometime later, he kills the mutts as well?”

“That’s what it’s looking like.

“You think he hires them?” Meekins asked.  “Who’d take money for shit like this?”

“Plenty of people,” I told her.  “Might get in it and wish they hadn’t, but that’s what keeps the prisons full. They can tell themselves, ‘She’s already dead.  I ain’t killing her or nothing.’”

“Girls strangled the same way both times?” Cutler asked.

The major had more paper that she passed out to us.  The coroner’s report from Indiana.

“From the front.  Like this.”  She used the Lieutenant. “It’s possible Boland was groggy.  Subdued by a blow.  Something like that.”

“When’s our report coming?” I asked Cutler.

“Body’s in Raleigh. You’re going up.”  He pointed at me and Meekins.  “Tomorrow.”

Ricky Weems proved easy enough to find.  He was stocking shelves at Harris Teeter. The one down in Nag’s Head where, Meekins explained to me, all the swell people overpaid for everything. He had a Twizzler hanging out of his mouth when we walked up on him.

Meekins said his name and showed him her badge.

He deflated. “What did she do?”

It turned out Ricky had a sister who was well known to Nag’s Head PD.  Greenville PD.  Rocky Mount PD.  Raleigh/Durham PD, for that matter.

“Isn’t about her,” I told him.  “Want to talk outside?”

Weems looked from me to the rolling cart he’d stacked his bread racks on.

“We’ll get a sandwich,” Meekins said, “and meet you in the lot.”

That worked for Ricky.  He nodded and looked glum.  I followed Meekins to the deli counter.  There were already two other cops there. The uniformed Nag’s Head variety.

“Candy,” they both said.

She called them by name.  She ordered a sandwich in some sort of deli shorthand and introduced me by jabbing her thumb and saying, “Ray.”

Those boys watched me go for a California roll and some seaweed salad.  They did it with snorts and grins like they’d never seen anything so gay in their lives.

“I’ll meet you outside.” I left Meekins with her buddies and was leaning against our 4x4 crunching on my seaweed when a lady rolled up in a Mercedes wagon.  She was talking to me before she’d entirely gotten out.

“He won’t leave me alone.  There’s got to be a law. You’re police, right?” Quite a bit of assuming for just a guy in the lot with a gun.

I decided straightaway she was talking about her husband or her boyfriend since, in my experience, no other men get pronouned like they do. So I didn’t ask, “Who?”  I just let her rattle on.

“He doesn’t care what I want.  Never did.  Never has.  Never will.”

I took her for pushing seventy.  She was streaky blonde and well preserved.  The woman was pulling off yoga pants, a slinky blouse, and a puffy vest.  Gold slippers, the sorts of flats I’ve always wondered why women wear. She had diamonds.  Her watch was worth far more than my truck.

She went on for a bit.  He had a boat he didn’t need. It just clotted up the driveway.  Did she complain about that?  No sir, she did not.  Why couldn’t he be grateful enough and leave her alone?

I finished my California roll.  A lot more mayonnaise than crab.

“Is this your husband?” I finally asked her.

That earned me the brand of snort that can only translate as, “Duh.”

“Tried counseling?”

She could not begin to believe me and glanced around for some female to exhibit me to.  One came along conveniently.  My partner, Candy Meekins.  Better still, she walked right over.

“What’s with him?” the woman asked.

Meekins looked at me almost like she needed to think about it before she shook her head and told her, “Hard to say.”

I let them talk to each other while I finished my seaweed.  Her name was Fiona.  She and Tod, her husband, had recently retired to the beach.  They lived in one of those massive cedar-shingled houses on a quarter acre of shoreline in a section of Nag’s Head called Cottage Row.  The homes were hardly cottages.  They were mostly pituitary cases with dormers and towers and breezeway-attached wings.  Tasteful awnings and shutters.  Decks and porches all over the place.

Fiona’s cottage had a name, and she used it.  Vent de Mer.  Then she translated it for us — rube cops, after all.  “Sea breeze,” she said.  “Came like that.”

“What exactly’s the problem?” Meekins asked.

Fiona got modest all of a sudden.  She drew Meekins aside to speak to her.  I went looking for a trash can to drop my lunch stuff in. I’d already decided it was all about sex.  I didn’t know how precisely and wasn’t hoping to find out, so it was fine with me that Meekins had come along to get explained at.

“This isn’t really a police matter,” coming from Meekins got more traction than it would have coming from me.

Not a lot more traction.  “Why not?” Fiona asked. 

Then she got around to the taxes she and Tod, her husband, paid.  I’d pegged her for the sort to bring up taxes sooner rather than later.  You don’t wear her kind of jewelry, have her spin-class bony ass, and drive her sort of German car without feeling you’re due some fealty.  Or at the very least a cop telling your husband whatever you think he needs told.

Fiona snorted when a red Jeep pulled into the Teeter lot.  She shook her head and said to Meekins mostly, “Him.”

Tod drove straight at us through empty parking spaces, parked at an angle and hopped out to ask generally, “What’s all this?”

He had on shorts and loafers, a pink dress shirt, some kind of nautical topcoat, and the bearing of a man accustomed to telling people what to do. So his question wasn’t really a question at all. His wife was stirring up a lot of nothing.

“Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll buy you lunch somewhere.”

“Make him stop,” Fiona begged Meekins, who glanced my way.

“Stop what?” I was half looking for an answer, half hoping to send hubby into a rage. I’ve never had much use for people who drive diagonally through parking lots.

Fiona started out by setting the scene for us.  “I am,” she said, “post menopausal.”

“Oh, Christ.” Her husband couldn’t help himself.

“I like a roll around,” she told me mostly and then turned towards him.  “You know I do.”

“Fiona, come on.” He looked to be barely choking off some kind of fit.  His ears were both bright red.

“But you,” Fiona said.  She jangled as she pointed.  Lots of bracelets mixed in with commemorative rubber bands.

“Not here.”

“Yes, here.”  She turned my way.  “How many times a week do you ask the girl in your life for a . . . you know?”

“A what?”

“Fiona!”

“And not just the tippy end of it.” Barbara tapped her neck around her tonsils. 

Fiona’s mister did some powerful muttering and climbed back into his Jeep.

“And it’s all pills anyway.  Isn’t it?” she shouted.

Her husband glared at her, at us, and then raced back through the lot across empty spaces and bounced onto the four lane.

“Can’t you just tell him no?” Meekins asked.

Fiona shook her head. “You saw him.”

We’d seen him all right.  Pot belly.  Bourbon complexion.  Shortness of breath.

“He ever hit you?” Meekins asked.

She thought about it. We waited her out.

“Grabs my head and pulls me down. It’s disgusting.”

“Hide his pills,” It was best I could do being (like I was) a man.

“He plays golf with his doctor. He’ll just get more.”  Then Fiona gave both me and Meekins the stink eye.  “That’s it then?”

Meekins nodded.

Fiona exhaled with conspicuous contempt.  “Figures,” she said and then slipped under the wheel of her Merc. She went diagonally through the lot like her hubby, driving across the empty spaces.

We watched her veer into the four lane without looking.  We heard horns and tires.  No metal.  No glass.

Meekins barely got her snorty noise out before Ricky Weems found us in the lot.  He stopped at his truck to drop off his bread racks and then came straight over to our Tahoe where he said to both of us, “So?”

“A few months back, you took a beating,” Meekins said.

Ricky nodded.  “Didn’t press charges. A couple of drunks.”

“Mick Tillett and Kenny Fulcher?” I asked him.

He did a decent job of looking blank, like I was speaking Klingon. “Never saw them.  Come up from behind.”

“Bullshit,” Meekins said.

“We know somebody hired them,” I told Ricky, “and put them onto you.”

Ricky failed to make any further denials but just waited for us to steer him.

“Why?” I asked him. “What did you do?”

“I got a schedule and shit,” Ricky told us.

“Tillett’s dead,” I said.  “We found his legs.  Well, part of his legs. Kenny’s missing.”

“Who’d want you beat up,” Meekins asked,  “and for what?”

Ricky Weems looked from Meekins to me.  A lady came by with a kid in a cart.  Bread man smile from Ricky.  He let her get out of earshot before he told us, “It’s my damn sister. She was in a jam with a guy up in Greenville.  Couldn’t fuck her way out of this one.  Came to me for money.  She’s blood and all.  Had to help her as best I could.”

“So you stole something?” Meekins said.

Ricky nodded.  “A couple of suitcases.  Car wasn’t even locked.”

“When and where?” I asked him.

Food Lion lot.” He pointed north.  My store, the one near The Driftin’ Sands.

“Make and model,” Meekins said.

“Impala.  New one.  Blue, I think.  Might have been black.”

“See the owner?” I asked him.

Ricky shook his head.

“Then what?” Meekins said.

“My neighbor’s got this old Lincoln,” Ricky Weems told us.  “Just sits rotting in his hard. I put the bags in the trunk.  Figured I’d ice them for a couple of days.”

“What was in them?” Meekins asked.

Another shopper.  Another bread man smile.

“Clothes mostly. Nice ones.  And a pistol.”

Ricky was doling it out in drips and drabs.  Meekins was obliged to say, “And?”

“Sold it to a boy. Paid good money for it.”

“Which boy . . . what gun?” I asked him.

“Some kind of Remington.  I looked it up. Got five hundred for it.”

We waited.

“Wilt,” he told us.

Meekins sighed.  “Figures.”

“What else?” I asked him.

Ricky Weems shrugged.  “Nice shoes.  English.  Didn’t fit.  Swapped them at the thrift store for a coat.”

“Wilt still on Colington?” Meekins asked.

“Far as I know,” Ricky Weems told her.

Then we endured a brief update on Ricky’s wayward sister.  She was seeing a decent boy up in Newport News.  It was going to work this time.

10

“Where’s Colington?” I asked.

Meekins headed across the lot at an angle like she knew somehow it would tweak me. She pointed nowhere much.

“Is this Wilt a shooter?”

Meekins shook her head.  “Samoan sized. He sits on people sometimes.”

On the south end of the Wright Brother’s Memorial, we turned left away from the beach.  I’d been on that hilltop with my family once when I was maybe eight.  Big granite monument shaped like a salt shaker.  Plaques and markers all over the place.  Reproductions of the gliders and a scale model of the Wright brothers’ powered bi-wing plane. It was July, I remember, and the flies were out to get us.  My father made us walk all the paths and read all the inscriptions.  He was thorough like that, unyielding and entirely beyond appeal.  That’s how he spoiled and poisoned nearly everything he got near.

“Ever been up there?” Meekins asked.

I nodded. The brothers’ plane is on the N.C. tags, flying over wind-bent sea oats.  First In Flight. I get a bad nostalgic twinge with every car I see from the rear.

Meekins glanced through the windshield towards the hilltop.  A tad squinty and baleful like she’d endured a sweltering, fly-bitten visit or two as well.

For OBX, Colington is out of the way. It’s kind of its own separate island.  We passed the KDH airstrip and a plush suburb before crossing a little humpbacked bridge over a finger of the sound.  That put us in Colington proper, the eastern outskirts anyway where people had opened and shut various businesses that they’d clearly hoped would appeal to tourists.  There was a weedy go-cart track.  A shuttered tavern.  An abandoned beachwear boutique.  A bird-fouled pit trampoline and carpet golf complex. A french fry shack for lease.

“Too far to come?” I asked Meekins.

“A little.”

The road bent around a shallow harbor where a twenty-foot sailboat was tipped over in muck halfway up its hull.

“Lot of fishermen back in here.  Tradesmen. Minimum wagers. One gated community.”

We passed a functioning local grocery.  A gas mart.  Some manner of bar. A trailer park — the bedraggled single-wide kind, not the semi-permanent RV sort you find up and down the beach.

Wilt lived about as far back in Colington as you could get and still be dry.  His place was beyond the turnoff to the gated suburb of Colington Harbour.

“Wilt works for people in there,” Meekins told me, “and then goes back and rips them off.”

“What kind of work?”

“IT.  Sets up all their passwords and shit.  Scopes out all their stuff.”

“Got anything on him just now?”

“Betty’s checking.”

Once we’d reached the last turn off, Meekins eased to a stop by a dumpster on the roadside.

“Up there.” She pointed.  A manufactured-home subdivision.  Small square houses on eighth of an acre lot, most of them swamped by vehicles and crap in their yards.

Meekins dialed in and got Betty.  She listened and took notes and then signed off and said, “Two parking tickets.”

“Has he ever done real time?”

Meekins shook her head.  “Sitting on people doesn’t usually leave a mark.”

“How do you want to do this?”

“Ask him nice and then go electric.”

Meekins reached over and opened the glovebox.  She pulled out our Taser, an X-26.

“Big guy like him might not feel it,” I said.

“Or maybe it stops his heart.”

“That’s two bad options.”

Meekins said, “Yeah,” with more giddy savor than I’d expected from her.

We couldn’t pull into Wilt’s driveway.  Three golf carts.  A Riviera and a Tercel. Meekins didn’t even bother to hook the Taser on her belt but just carried it up to the door.

She knocked and then joined me in eyeing the crap in Wilt’s yard. He had four brand new wheelbarrows and no grass. A bunch of hand tools — spades and garden rakes — with the store stickers still on them. A couple of spanking new push mowers.

Meekins pounded this time.  “Open the damn door.”

I couldn’t decide if she’d dealt with Wilt before and so knew you had to pound and bellow or if she was just liberated from losing her uniform and letting down her hair.

We could hear Wilt coming.  It was hard to know which would happen first — him arriving to greet us or the house collapsing.

He jerked the door open.  “It ain’t locked,” he said.  Then he eyed us both.  “Hey, Candy.” He turned and left us to follow if we wanted.

“Hey, Candy?”

“He fixed my laptop once.”

I trailed her into the house.

“Is that code for something?”

When she turned to face me, I noticed the leveled Taser first.

Wilt had a couch to himself and was occupying most of it.  His skinny buddy was parked in an easy chair.  They both had controllers in hand and were playing a game on Wilt’s big- screen TV.  Some GI thing with sloppy head wounds and mortar rounds. There appeared to be Nazi zombies.  There was a flying reptile for sure.

They had the volume turned up, so all we could hear was gunfire and explosions, the odd soldier yelling soldierly instructions or, more often, just howling in pain.

“What do y’all want?” Wilt asked as he blew off most of the head of a Nazi with a shotgun. His skinny buddy yipped and hooted.  I had to think he was always working to keep Wilt over on the couch.

“We’re looking for a gun,” Meekins told Wilt.  “A Remington pistol.”

“Ain’t got one.”

Wilt switched weapons and made an impressive waste of a quartet of SS officers with what looked like a pruning saw.

“Guy told us he sold it to you.  Remington .45.”

“Oh, that.  I moved it.”

“Where is it?”

“Hold on.”

Wilt’s skinny buddy got swarmed and killed.  He tried to go off to the kitchen, but I told him, “Uh uh.  Sit.”

He looked ripe to get lippy until Meekins swung her black and yellow Taser his way.

“That the kind with the darts?” he asked her.

She nodded.

He said, “All right,” approvingly and stayed just where he was.

Then Wilt got swarmed on the TV and tossed his controller aside.

“Ricky’s gun?” he asked Meekins.

“That’s the one.”

“I gave it to a guy.  Owed him.”

“What guy?” Meekins asked

“Put that damn thing up,” Wilt said of the Taser.  “We ain’t doing nothing.”

“What guy?”

“You don’t know him.”

“Try me.”

“How’s that laptop doing?”

I wasn’t intending to chime in, so Meekins wasted a glare on me.

“Fine.  What guy?”

“They call him Judo.”

“With the boots and the buckle?” Meekins asked him.

“You do know him.”

Meekins nodded.  “He’s a twat.”

The skinny guy in the easy chair chewed on a hangnail and said, “Word.”

“How’d you come to owe him?” Meekins asked.

“Packers went south on me. He wouldn’t give me no credit.  I set his whole damn network up.”

“So he’s got Ricky Weems' pistol?” I said.

“Yep,” Wilt told me.  “Carries it around shoved in his pants. You know Judo,” he said to Meekins.  “Loves all that gangster shit.”

“Know where he is?” she asked Wilt.

“Around.”

“Can you get a house call out of him?” I asked.

Wilt looked my way.  “Who you?”

“Can you?” From Meekins.

That earned her Wilt’s what’s-in-it-for-me? look.

“Any shit you’ve got outstanding goes away.”

Clever girl.  Two parking tickets.

Wilt thought.  Wilt nodded.  Wilt found his cellphone between couch cushions.  He got Judo on the phone and told him he’d come into an AK.  Authentic Russian.  Not the Chinese junk.

“Yeah, I’m here,” Wilt said and tossed his phone back onto the sofa where it sank into a crease.  “He sees y’all, he ain’t stopping.”

We parked down the road behind a scrub pine thicket where we could keep an eye on Wilt’s junky yard between the branches.

“Is he good with . . . you know. . . laptops and stuff?”

“Him?  Me?  Really?”

“You seem . . . broadminded.”

She was lost for a moment.  Half compliment, half takedown.  It rattled her a bit.  Then Judo interrupted us.  He was driving a gold Defender.  I could have cashed in and retired with Judo’s alloy wheels alone.

He was a lanky guy.  White.  Complicated facial hair.  Some sort of Fu-man ZZ thing. He had tats spilling out of his sleeves.  Rings that caught the sun. A belt buckle the size of a coaster.  He didn’t knock on Wilt’s front door but went straight in.

We hustled down and joined him, slipped inside, eased along the brief front hallway to Wilt’s gaming parlor.

“What the shit’s this?” Judo said when he saw us.

“We ain’t doing nothing!” Wilt yelled our way.  Judo bought it. He did what gangster wannabe pinheads do and reached around for his gun.

That was all Meekins needed.  Judo got both darts.  The charge went singing through the wires, and Judo flailed and danced and gurgled.  He pitched onto Wilt’s coffee table and busted it in half. The skinny buddy enjoyed the calamity way too much, so Wilt threw his controller at him and hit him flush on the side of the head.

I grabbed Judo’s pistol.  It was a Remington all right.

“I ain’t never done it,” Judo told us.

“Done what?” I asked him.

He did a spot of groggy thinking before telling me, “You know.”

I borrowed Meekins’ cuffs and hooked Judo up.

“We need to sort some stuff,” I told him and walked him out into the yard.

I put Judo in the back of the Tahoe.  “We’ll bring your car over.”

I followed Meekins east through Colington in the Defender.  I could see she was jawing at Judo.  She kept juicing the gas to throw him against the seat when he’d lean up.

She finally pulled over in the weedy, trash-strew trampoline-pit and derelict carpet golf lot. Judo had come out of his seatbelt somehow, and Meekins strapped him back in tight.

“Good good?” I asked out my driver’s window.

Meekins showed me one of her fingers.

“Now, Candy,” I cautioned and then watched her take a year off the Tahoe tranny as she blasted out of the lot and up the road.

I was suffering in my own way.  Judo’s Defender smelled like a Peshawar bath house. At the PD, I found a Tec-9 under Judo’s passenger seat and a couple of police-issue flash bang grenades in the cubby with the jack.

We parked Judo in the only legitimate interrogation room we had.  It looked like a junior executive’s conference room but for the eye bolt through the table.

Betty had made Milano's.  Chocolate dipped.  Crumbly.  Large enough to have come out of a condor.  Somebody had put the tin in the interrogation room.  Judo helped himself to a cookie and then said just generally, “Christ.”

“Yeah,” Meekins told him.  “Don’t eat those.”

Judo scraped his tongue with his thumbnail. 

“Now.” Meekins opened Judo’s file and laid out his booking sheet. “What are you up to, Owen.”

It turned out Judo was just some farmer’s kid under the beard and the tats.  He’d grown up outside Williamston, a wide spot called Belltown, and I let Meekins run through his particulars with him without throwing in myself. Soybeans.  Peanuts.  Winter wheat.  Boom and bust.  Flood and drought.  A lot of restructured finance.  Tractors.  Harrows.  Harvesters.  Crop prices never much better than all right.  Who wouldn’t get out if he had half a chance? 

“The gun,” I said when I finally spoke.

“My .45?”

I nodded.  “Where’d you get it?”

“Wilt.  Owed me on the game.”

Enough for me.  “We’re going to need it.”

Judo objected.  Grumbled anyway. So we showed him the Tec-9 and the flash bangs.

I had hoped they’d speak for themselves, but Judo eyed them and said, “So?”

That’s when the major came in.  She didn’t knock or anything, wasn’t a by-your-leave sort of creature.  She was carrying with her a sheet of paper hot off Betty’s printer.  She picked up the Remington and compared the serial number on the barrel to the number on the sheet. Then she had a hard look at Judo.

“Got it from a guy who got it from a guy,” I told her.

“Yo, general,” Judo started in.

The major advised him to shut up.  She didn’t trouble herself with words but jabbed his Adam’s apple once. A sharp, short blow — the kind I was hoping to visit on her lieutenant. She had fine technique.  Easy, fluid motion.  The proof was in the speedy results.  Judo wheezed and wept.

“Stolen,” the major said.  “Nine months ago.  Columbia, South Carolina.”

She handed Meekins the paper she’d brought in.  Meekins scanned it.  “Pawn shop break in.”

“Fort Jackson,” I said.

The major told me.  “You’re reaching.”

Judo coughed and whimpered.

I said to the major, “Don’t think I am.”

“Can’t swallow,” Judo informed us.

“Lay your head back.”  That from the major.  She almost gave him time to do it before shoving his forehead to help him along.

It took me and Meekins and a fair of bit of palaver to finally convince Judo how fortunate he was to get to leave with just his car.

Then Meekins drove me over to pick up my truck.  Wheels on.  Axle replaced.  It still ran like hell, but it rattled less.  I swung by the grocery and headed out to my new place.  I needed a couple of passes to find it again since I’d only seen it the once.

I had a half hour shower.  I toured the house in my undershorts. Heated up my Banquet chicken and uncapped my a second beer. I dumped the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle out on the dining table.  The Matterhorn.  Lots of rock and snow and sky. A couple of goats.  I felt sure it’d hold me for a week or until I got exasperated.

I could hear the light traffic.  The surf across the road.  There was a radio but it only played static, and the cable was off for the winter. I heard footsteps on the side deck and a fist on the kitchen door. The thing was swollen.  I wrestled it open.

I hadn’t mentioned that I’d moved.  I clearly hadn’t needed to.  The major came in and shucked her coat. She eyed me in my undershorts.

“Look at you,” she said.

11

It was a long, dreary way to Raleigh.  Mostly four lane through bean fields and trashy American clutter.  Gas plazas.  Burger and chicken joints.  Dollar stores.  The odd strip motel.  Signs pointing towards historic town centers with the good sense to be somewhere else.

We tried to get Cutler to let just one of us drive the three hours up and three back, but he called it a team building exercise and smiled at us in a way that meant “Why are you still here?”

Meekins attempted to get away with country music, but there are some things I just won’t have.

“You pick then,” she told me.

I turned the radio off.

“Hmm.”

“We could talk.”

“Go on.”

“Ever married?”

We were nearly to Plymouth and hitting traffic. Meekins looked like she was going to tell me, “No,” but then said something better.

“Once.  Kind of.”

I waited.

“Paper thing.  A guy from Joburg.”

“Green card deal?”

Meekins nodded.  The clottage west of Plymouth was getting to her.  She gave a yip on the siren and spooked a Mercury to the curb.

“You get paid or something?”

“Favor. Had a couple of classes with him.”

“Still in touch?”

“Not really.”

“Boer?”

“Zulu.”

“Shit.”

Meekins nodded.  “Yeah.”

“Don’t guess there’s much you won’t do.”

“I wouldn’t fuck a bony major.”

She switched the radio back on.  We got the soybean prices and then suffered a man to tell us about his momma’s infarction in 4/4 time.

We were a good half hour late for our appointment with the chief medical examiner in Raleigh, a bald guy with a waxed head who only answered to Dr. Doug.  We took the wrong exit off the beltway and got mired in university traffic, couldn’t get through on the phone to Dr. Doug and so just apologized once we’d arrived. 

He liked to let on he was one of those guys who was free-wheeling and easy going.  Not the sort to keep to schedules or care if folks around him did.  But free-wheeling, easy-going types don’t usually wax their heads.

When Meekins asked him a trifling question about hardly anything at all, Dr. Doug called her “Honey” and told her we were cramped for time. 

He sounded like a pediatrician, which was curious and queer, especially once we were standing over the earthly remains of  Lieutenant Tabitha Joyce Kline. He didn’t call her hatchet gashes boo boos, but he was sunnier than he ought to have been.

“All of them post mortem,” he chirped our way and then pointed.  “Except for that one.”

“That one” proved to be what looked a knife cut to the lieutenant’s forearm.  There’d been similar ones on her friend in Virginia, the girl who’d ended up in a pond.

“Choked by hand,” Dr. Doug informed us and showed us how on Meekins’ neck.  She was already looking pale enough to do duty as deceased.

“You okay?” Dr. Doug asked her.

“I’m fine,” she said.  “What else?”

Dr. Doug made of show of checking the wall clock before laying photos on an adjacent autopsy table with its flumes and its drain holes and its dull stainless shine.  At the thought of everything that table had seen, I got a little wan myself.

“Stomach contents?” Meekins asked him.

Dr. Doug showed us a photo of what looked like something a dog had brought up.

“Shrimp.  Broccoli.  Snow peas.” He had a separate photo of baby ear of corn.  “Thai maybe or Chinese.”

“Alcohol?” I asked.

Dr. Doug shook his head.  He glanced at the wall clock.

“Cramped for time,” Meekins told him.  “We know.”

“And the legs?” I asked him.

He looked set to go fetch them.

“We’ve seen them already.  Just tell us,” I said.

“Male.  Size ten and a half.  Cotton socks.  Reeboks. Ingrown toenails.” Dr. Doug smiled and shrugged.  “Not a lot to go on.”

“Bloodwork?” I asked.

He nodded.  “Beer buzz probably.  Tetracycline.” He shrugged. “DNA next week.”

Meekins asked of the paperwork, “Got copies for us?”

“Sent already.”  Dr. Doug glanced at the clock.

We were barely outside when Meekins seethed, “We came all the way here for that?”

I’d felt the same way my first couple of times. The coroners like to get you over bodies and show off how steely they are.  I can’t say I’ve ever discovered anything in a morgue a photograph couldn’t show.

“Next time we’ll send Dennis,” I told Meekins.  I pictured Dr. Doug with all his chirping and his poking up against Dennis with his scattershot chat that had nothing to do with anything.

Like most trips cops make, this one included a meal.  Meekins had found a place she wanted to try, and she managed to drive straight to it. A spot between the university and downtown that specialized in pig.  Pulled.  Chopped.  Sliced.  They even had a fried trotter salad.  The place was full of firemen for some reason, and they all seemed to notice Meekins’ sidearm right before they zeroed in on her ass.

“You’ve got fans,” I told her once we’d ordered and parked ourselves in a booth.

Meekins snorted and said back, “Guys,” with the weary indifference most of us rate. “Y’all only want it until you get it.”

I thought about the major.  Sometimes we don’t even really want it and end up with it anyway.

One of those firemen was going to come over.  I could see him working up to it, and he was getting an awful lot of encouragement from his buddies. I pitied the guy.  Meekins lived three hours away and wasn’t in the best of moods.

“Back home,” I said to Meekins, “where would you eat Chinese?”

“Place in Kitty Hawk.  Around milepost four.  Five minutes from where you found her.”

“Hey.”  It was the sacrificial fireman. He was looking exclusively at Meekins.  “My friends call me Bobby.”

Meekins did that squinty thing women do when they can’t even squeeze out a “So?”.

“We’re having a . . .thing this weekend.  Saturday.  Out at Kerr lake.”

Still no help from Meekins.  No nod.  No twitch. Squint only.

“Wondering if maybe . . .”  His buddies were all watching.  Three days on and four days off.  They probably had things at the lake all the time. “You know . . .”

Meekins let the guy give out of words and just stand there breathing for a bit.

“How come I’m not her boyfriend?” I asked him.

He grinned my way.  “You!?”

Then Meekins actually spoke to him. She told him, “Move,” and he stepped aside to make room for the girl who brought our food.

Meekins failed to add anything beyond that, and after a quarter minute, he gave up and left.  He went back to his buddies who yelped and hooted.

“That’s cold.”

“Don’t like firemen.”  Meekins reached with her plastic fork and helped herself to a chunk of my trotter. “My brother used to be one.”

“Still cold,” I said.

She had a bold, raw look at Bobby and all his buddies.  “I’m pretty sure,” she told me, “I’d rather let my house burn down.”

We listened to easy mix FM nearly to Tarboro.  I switched it off in the middle of a Journey ballad.  That seemed like a decent line to draw.   

Cutler was reading through Dr. Doug’s report by the time we got back to the PD.  He failed to raise his head when we stepped into his office.  “He says you were late.”

“Cramped for time.”

“That was it.”

“Hit traffic,” Meekins chimed in.

“Figured.” Cutler went back to reading. “I’m looking at moo goo or something for a last meal.”

“We’re on that,” Meekins told him.

“Anything going on here?” I asked.

I got a sour nod.  “More brass.” We waited.  “A colonel.  Down from Arlington.”

“The Pentagon?”

Cutler nodded.  “He’s out at the crime scene.  Wants a word when he gets back.”

That left us time to pay a call at the shopping plaza up by milepost four. Eight storefronts.   A pharmacy.  A dress shop. Some kind of tea emporium that was hard beside Pan Asian, a pun of a name painted on the backside of a wok. The guy running the place looked east Indian but spoke pure east Carolina cracker.

“S’up, y’all?” he asked as we passed through the door. “Shrimp just come in.”  He pointed at a menu scrawled on a blackboard.

I couldn’t even think about food. I was still up to my ears in trotter salad, but for a skinny girl Meekins seemed to stay awfully peckish.  She ordered shrimp a couple of ways.

The guy was wearing a name tag: Frank. He passed our ticket to the kitchen.

“Hear about the girl that got killed?” Meekins asked him.

Frank nodded and went glum.

“We’re thinking she might have been in here.”  Meekins looked my way.  I was carrying the photo.  Two actually.  One from army records.  One from Dr. Doug. I went with live lieutenant first.

Frank studied the snapshot but couldn’t be sure.

“What do you serve,” Meekins wanted to know, “with little corn cobs in it?”

“Some stir fries.  A couple of curries.”

“She would have ordered one of those.”

“When?”

“You tell us.” I handed Frank the head shot sent by Dr. Doug.  Dead for sure.  Not sleeping.  No makeup.  One cloudy eye open.  No blood.

People usually go squeamish.  Not Frank.  “Oh,” he said.  “Right.  Her.”

“Definitely here?” Meekins asked.

Frank nodded.

“More than once?”

“Yeah.”

“When was the last time?”

“Week ago maybe,” Frank told Meekins. “Could be two.”

“By herself?”

He nodded.

“See what she was driving?” I asked him.

He snapped his fingers.  “Walking.  I told her how to go.”

“Go where?”

Frank jabbed his thumb towards the kitchen.  “Path back there.  Cuts through. The condos.  You know?”

Meekins did.  “The Dunes?”

“I’ll walk it,” I told Meekins and left her to wait for her food and follow.

It was just a track in the sand.  I found it back by the dumpsters and let it lead me through a scrubby lot and between a pair of neglected houses.  It quit where the proper road ended and the condominiums started.  Cedar-sided.  Wings and turrets. Zoysia lawns.  Signs all over the place posted with rules.  Go slow.  Be quiet. Separate your trash.  Pick up after your dog.

There was quite a lot of parking but very few cars.  Like everything else on OBX, The Dunes was rife with autumn desolation. It was a complicated setup.  Courtyards.  Blind dead ends.  A row here and there of townhouses.  Everything a bit warped and weathered.  All of it in need of caulk and paint.

I found a human.  A woman.  I showed her my badge and asked if she had a moment for me.  She told me something in Romanian maybe and rushed off to fetch a guy.  Winter watchman in a parka with The Dunes logo on the breast pocket — embroidered wind-bent sea oats sprouting from a hummock of sand.

“Need something?” the guy asked.

I showed him my badge followed by the army snapshot.  “Ever seen this girl around here?”

“Could be.  Why?”

“Trying to figure out who killed her.”

I gave him Dr. Doug’s morgue pic.  That one shook him up a little.  It was the cloudy, sky-blue eye in a face that otherwise looked all right.

“Yeah. Have seen her.”

Meekins rolled up in the Tahoe.

“Last couple of weeks?” I asked.

Meekins joined us in time to hear the watchmen tell me, “Five or six days ago.”

“Was she staying here?”

He shook his head. “Just visiting.  In and out.”

“In and out where?” Meekins asked him.

“Got some rentals on the back side.”

I thought he’d ask us for a warrant.  He had that libertarian way of looking imposed upon as a matter of course. Then he played another glance on the dead lieutenant with her one cloudy eye exposed.  “Come on,” he said.

We followed him north towards a greasy asphalt parking lot and six-foot hurricane fence.

“I got nothing much to do with this back here,” he told us as we trailed him to a half dozen ground floor apartments.  Older building — block and stucco — low and long like the wing of a motel. Somebody had decided just to leave it and wrap the condos all around.

“I walk through maybe twice a week. Most of them sit empty this time of year.”  He pointed.  “Except those two on the end. I seen her go in the near one.”

“Who’s on the lease?” I asked him.

He shook his head.  “Boss’ll know.”

“Got a key?” I asked.

He nodded.

We followed him to the door. He knocked.  Nothing.  He unlocked it and stepped aside.

Bamboo furniture, just like my place.  A bare mattress on a frame in the bedroom.  A couple of band-aid wrappers in the bathroom trash can.  Moldy coffee in the bottom of the pot in the kitchenette.

I dropped to my knees to have a look under the sofa.  A Jolly Rancher fruit ’n sour. Two pennies. A red golf pencil.  Enough fuzz balls to fill a shoe box. Meekins found over-the-counter sinus spray in a night-table drawer.  There was mayonnaise in the refrigerator and an open can of hard cider. Saltines in one of the cabinets and a box full of sugar substitute. Two empty ice trays in the freezer and twelve thousand dollars wrapped loosely in foil. Not even good foil, the cheap, thin kind you wouldn’t roast a chicken on.

I called the watchman over to show him the bundles of bills. I thought he might sob for a second there.  Meekins found a grocery bag in one of the cupboards to put the money in.

“You saw him?”

He nodded her way.

“What did he look like?” I asked.

The guy thought for a bit with his mouth sagging open.  “Regular,” he said.

12

The name on the lease was Tony Manero. The man who’d met him to hand over the key was off burying his grandmother in Ohio. One of his colleagues in the rental office gave us the paperwork to take.

Mr. Manero paid his deposit in cash.  His rent in cash. He was covered through January.  I checked Tony’s particulars on the lease and shared the choice bits with Meekins as she drove.

“He’s got a Chicago area code. Drives an ‘88 Riviera. His mailing address is in Mendocino.”

“How deep exactly is his love?”

We were pulling into the PD lot by then.  The colonel down from the Pentagon was there to meet us and take the fun out of everything.

“Sir’ll do,” he told us right off the bat.  He was eating one of Barbara’s nut bars, was appearing even to enjoy it.

“Walk.”  He led us to the incident room where he pointed and told us, “Sit.”

The guy’s name was Miles Darcy, which sounded entirely made up to me. The leader of Pemberley’s horn section. Peerage with improvisational chops.  It turned out to suit him because he only ever seemed to be playing a colonel. Everything that came out of his mouth sounded written for him.  I kept waiting for him to drop the pose and shout to his prompter, “Line!”

He acquainted  me and Meekins with his assorted commendations.  It sounded like he’d done a fair bit of bootlicking in the green zone, an officious month or two in Kandahar, and Arlington for the rest.  He had no investigative experience beyond pushing paper for a tribunal.  He impressed chiefly as a weasel who probably had a general’s ear.

Cutler came in long enough to remind the colonel, “They’re not in your army.”

The colonel smiled.  He said, “A moment?” and retired with Cutler into the hall.

The two hissed at each other for a couple of minutes before the colonel stepped back in to join us.

“I’ll be making,” he said, “some changes vis a vis the thrust of things.”

“We’re ready to be of use, colonel.”  I was far more convincing than he’d ever be.

“Good. I understand you visited the medical examiner.”

We nodded.

“No special insights?”

“No, sir,” I said.  “Though we just ran across something here.”

I glanced at Meekins, and she rose and handed the colonel the bag of money we’d found at the Dunes.  He had a look inside.  He glanced at us.

I let Meekins explain it all. The colonel held his chin and made necknoises as he listened.  Then the major and her lieutenant showed up in the doorway and saluted.  They’d been all the way up to Norfolk on the Kenny Fulcher beat.  The colonel showed them the money and pointed at Meekins who told everything again.

“How about the other apartment?  The neighbor?” he asked.

“Couple from Richmond,” I said.  “Just here on weekends. We got names.”

Then the colonel instructed lieutenant Browne with an ‘e’  to go out front and fetch him a nutbar.  He was either courting an intestinal blockage or had some kind of special gene.

“How did you leave it?” the colonel asked. He appeared to be talking to me.

“Leave what?”

“The apartment.  Sealed?”

I pictured the watchman looking for money every damn where in the place he could think of.  “Yes, sir,” I said. “Buttoned up.”

“Good. We’ll bring in our team.” He aimed that mostly at the major. 

She nodded and pulled out her phone as she stepped out of the room.

“Do you have a working theory?” the colonel asked me and Meekins together.

“About what?” she said.  “All of it?”

He nodded.

“Sick twitch with a motive.”

“What motive?” he asked.

Meekins let me have that one.

“Might be personal.  Might be CBRN-related. Something like that.”

“And your dead local?”

“Recruits them,” I said.  “Probably pays them.  Don’t know what they’re getting into until it’s too late to get out.”

“Thieves?”

“Or just hard heads,” Meekins told him.

I flashed on the legs we’d found in Wanchese.  The grimy yellow socks.  No head hard or otherwise.

Just then Cutler showed up to relieve us.  “Dennis is looking for you two.” 

He was at the Verizon store.  The one down towards Nags Head that had once been a Hardee’s. His radio car was parked in the side lot, and he had a woman in cuffs in the back.

“Lynn,” Dennis said. “Took a bunch of chargers and mess.” Power cords.  Phone cases.  He had them all out on his hood.  Just stuff that hadn’t been tethered or bolted down.

“Makes more sense than a canned ham.”  That was the best I could manage.

“Lynn Twiford?” Meekins asked as she stared at the girl’s shaggy profile.

Dennis nodded and made his sour face.  Meekins made one back.

“What?” I asked.

“Her people are all lawyers,” Meekins told me.  “Lot of money.  Lot of sway.”

“So what’s with her?”

“Crystal.” That from Dennis.  “They send her off and clean her up, but . . . folks kind of are what they are.”

That was the A-number-one policing lesson.  Most of us try to resist it at first.  Folks are what they are.  Under the piffle and the manners. After the rehab and the halfway houses. Beyond time served and parole. They do what they do because that’s the way this life is laid out for them.

“What do you want with us?” I asked Dennis.

He opened the back door of his cruiser.  Lynn didn’t turn.  Didn’t twitch.  The meth had her.  You could tell.  The sunken cheeks.  The crinkled lips hiding what used to be teeth.  Even still, I could see she was pretty in there somewhere, which must have been the Twiford holding on.

“Tell them,” Dennis said.

She didn’t.  She wouldn’t.  They never do.  They won’t.  Dennis gave her a nudge to unlock her.  All part of the deal.  She spat onto the seat back.

“He’s over there with Lars and them,” she said.

“Who?” Meekins asked her.

She had a toxic glance for Meekins.  Teeth and hair and eye makeup.  Probably even perfume. The cunt.

“Kenny.”

“With the mohawk?  That Kenny?”

Lynn dredged phlegm and loosed it.  Told me, “Yup.”

We bought the details with a sack of Butterfingers and a liter of 7-Up.  It was past dark by the time we’d finished with Lynn, and she’d given us meth-head directions.

“We’ll go in the morning,” I proposed to Meekins.  “Take him and Cutler.”

Dennis nodded a bit too avidly.  This was as close as he’d get to SWAT. “Lock her up?” he asked.

“Just so we know where to find her. Feed her supper.  No charges. I’ll talk to them in here.” I gathered the pilfered stuff off the hood and carried it inside the store.

The major didn’t show that night, what with a colonel to sink her teeth in, but two drunk guys pulled in at the house across the street and had a fight in the small hours in the dunes. Not as bad as cats but close.  I wrapped my head in the pillow and tried my best to ignore them, but they wouldn’t quit yipping and yelling and breaking bottles in the road.

I went out in just my undershorts and my boots and carried with me a hickory walking stick from the pickle tub by the door.  Those boys were battling over a woman, naturally.  She’d left them both for some third boy they were scheming to fall upon later, but first, they had to shove each other and wrestle in the sand.

They were both too loaded to be surprised to see me.

“What do you want?” one of them yelled my way after I’d been watching them for a while.

“Yeah.”  The other one stumbled backwards.  Sat down in the sand.  Got right back up.

I was reminded of junior.  I told the pair of them, “Ngharln.”

They took it as an insult.  The louder one with surer footing threw their empty beer box at me.  Corona.  They’d already broken all the bottles in the street.

They came at me together, so I tapped them with my walking stick.  One blow to stun them.  One each to shut them up. I treated them like a couple of carp. They groaned a little.  They snored a lot.  I was pretty sure, once I’d crawled back into bed, I could hear them from the house.

So it was not a restful night for me.  I felt it.  I must have looked it. Meekins offered me her coffee in the PD parking lot.

I shook my head and let her keep it.  “Had some already. Didn’t help.”

I dozed on the ride up. Jarvisburg again.  We followed Dennis’ cruiser. Cutler would be coming along behind us.  He had brass to deal with first.  We all figured — Cutler especially — that the army was hardly the proper tool to use on Kenny Fulcher.  Kenny was anti-authoritarian from his mohawk to his bunions. His daddy had washed out of the Coast Guard after taking a boat out drunk.  Not terribly drunk and not awfully far, but they’d discharged him anyway, so Kenny grew up in an atmosphere that was toxic against armed service.  Air Corps.  Navy.  Black Watch.  It didn’t matter to Kenny.  If an ensign couldn’t take a launch a mile out with a buzz on, then the sand monkeys and the ass hats had already won.

That’s how Dennis explained it anyway, and Cutler knew enough to believe him.  So Cutler slipped out a bit behind us once he’d plied the colonel with some lies.

Dennis had Lynn Twiford with him.  She’d had a tough night at the PD where there was only Mountain Dew in the machine and not nearly enough of that. Dennis had stopped first thing for a fresh liter of 7-Up, and Lynn was drinking it in the back seat. Some of it.  Half of it. All of it. Then Dennis pulled off so she could pee.

That gave us the chance to have a confab in the Quickie Mart parking lot in Point Harbor, just barely over the bridge.  Dennis wanted my blessing so he could bring his AR-15 out.

“What are you even doing with that?” I asked him

“Shotgun’s busted,” was the best he had.

It was Meekins who noticed Lynn in the scrub out past the propane tanks. “Where’s she going?”

We had to chase and corral her.  Caught her at a run of fencing.

“Kenny’ll kill me,” Lynn explained to us.  “Now days he chops up people and shit.”

“Where’d you hear that?” I asked her.

“Around.”

“Who’d Kenny chop up?”  That from Meekins.

“Boy with the eye. That’s what they say.”

“Mick Tillett?” I asked.

Lynn shrugged. She wasn’t big on names.  “I need a soda.”

I bought her one and a sack of pecan clusters.

“Where are we going?” I asked her.

“On up.  A little past the church.”

It was a left-hand turn in Jarvisburg.  We followed it clear to the water.  What they call the North River up that way, but it’s just a finger of the Albemarle Sound.  Tidal stink.  Shoaly reaches.  Dead cypress trunks fifty yards from shore. Somebody had built a fine home where the road broke north and ran up along the water.  There was a gate and a lock and enough eight-foot fencing to look desperate and defensive.  A stockade’s worth of second thoughts from somebody with qualms about his neighbors.  Looking around, I couldn’t blame him.  There were clearly some poor citizens back there.

I counted four trashy parcels.  Two of them littered with boat hulls, sedan carcasses, and assorted appliance casings.  The third one featured upholstered furniture out in the weather and several piles of half-burnt rubbish.

“Where?” Meekins asked Lynn.

She pointed towards a gap in a thicket where a sand track led back to some kind of clearing.

“House?  Trailer?” I asked.

Lynn shook her head.  “Storm box.”

“Show us,” I said.

We followed her down the track through the scraggly bay bush thicket and shortly reached the burned out ruins of a house. The place had been charred and incinerated down to the sills and flashing.  There was a shed as well, one of those faux Tudor things like you buy at the Home Depot. The particle-board doors had disintegrated halfway up, and there was clearly nothing inside.

“Storm box?” I said Lynn’s way.

She didn’t point, but she kept walking.  We passed a neglected garden plot and what looked like an old chicken pen.  I finally spied the thing on the far side of an upside down lawn tractor.

I’d never seen one this far north.  Down in deepest Dixie, they’re common.  Probably out in the midwest too.  It was a tornado shelter made of cement, about the twice the size of a septic tank with a steel door on the front and vents in the roof. People with even a shred of gumption bury them in the ground.  In rocky places, they’ll just strap them down sometimes.  This one had only been dropped from the truck. It was sitting on a sandy spot with trash outside the door, which was standing partly open.  Wisps of smoke rose from the vent pipes.

Me and Meekins slipped up on that shelter from the side. I left Dennis to stand off out front with his AR-15 pointed skyward.   The storm box had no windows, of course, and the walls were six inches thick, so we didn’t have to be too awfully careful drawing close.  I motioned for Meekins to pull her side arm. I needed my hands free for the door. It was standing open a half a foot.  We could hear voices through the gap. The hinges squeaked, of course, and spooked the occupants.  Sea salt spoils everything.

There they were sitting in lawn chairs with their feet resting on the same cooler.  I’d caught Lars in the middle of relighting their bong, some jackleg PVC thing.

He said, “Hell,” at the sight of me.

Kenny (I assumed) said, “Hell,” as well.

Kenny, unfortunately, had a gun to hand.  He raised it like a high guy would which left me plenty of time to shove the door mostly shut before he’d squeezed off his first round.  The slug hit the steel and bounced off, went singing around the inside of the storm box.  Because he was not altogether in charge of his senses, Kenny fired again.

He managed to wing both him and Lars, just did it eventually.

They finally swore in unison with enough pitiful regret to prompt me to open the door far enough to shout into them, “You done?”

“I guess.” That from Kenny as he tossed the gun aside.

It hit the cement floor and went off again.

13

At first, only Lars knew he was hit.  Kenny insisted he was fine until blood ran into his eyes.

“Kenny Fulcher, right?” Meekins asked him.  She’d gone in and picked up the gun — a knock-off Glock with the right bullets in it — and then had come back out with her hand over her nose.  The pot and man stink mixed with cordite was little short of overwhelming.

“Naw,” Kenny said.  “Don’t know him.”

He’d tried to comb over his mohawk.  It looked like he’d made use of engine oil. Aside from growing one out or cutting one off, a mohawk kind of is what it is.

“We know it’s you,” Meekins said.

Kenny shook his head. “Naw.” 

He looked to Lars’ for support, but Lars just told him, “I’m shot, man.”

Lynn had Dennis walk her over.  She guessed she could do with a bit of ganja.

Lars and Kenny both told her, “Hey,” like they’d strayed across her at the mall.

“Give me a hit,” she said.

Dennis looked at me.  At Meekins.  We both shrugged. He turned Lynn loose to go in for the bong.  She carried it over by the water and was still gurgling away when Cutler finally showed up. 

We had Lars and Kenny out on the ground by then and were patching their wounds with gauze from our kit.  It must have looked like a white trash house party gone hard sideways.

“Kenny?” Cutler asked and pointed.

Me and Meekins nodded. 

Kenny said, “Naw.”

“What’s on his head?” Cutler asked me.

“Ten W something.”

We both favored Kenny with the brand of sad look Charles Darwin would have given him as well.

Cutler wanted a chat with Kenny before we shared him with the army, so he had us follow him to a Jarvisburg motel.  It claimed to be on the water on its billboard at the four-lane, but it turned out to be situated on a ditch.

Cutler sprung for adjoining rooms.  We made Kenny take a shower to wash the oil out of his hair.

He stripped out of his clothes right there in front of the bunch of us, but it wasn’t like he got fully naked given how sheathed in dirt he was.

Cutler had brought in paper jumpsuits from the trunk of his sedan.  “Put this on.”

Kenny muttered his way into the bathroom as Cutler motioned for me to retire with him outside.

“We can put Kenny in the apartment,” he said.

“At The Dunes?”

Cutler nodded.

“How about Tillett?”

“Yep.”

“So they spent time with the guy?”

“Looks like.”

“What are we hoping for here?”

That earned me a wink from Cutler.  He said, “The truth.”

You don’t get the truth out of people like Kenny Fulcher. You get lies that erode in time into shiftless dodges, if you’re lucky.

“How do you want to do it?”

“You go at him,” Cutler said.  “Me and Meekins’ll throw in.”

So we put Kenny in a chair in the near room in his paper jumpsuit and put Dennis in charge of Lars and Lynn in the room next door.

“Who are you hiding from?” It seemed like a good place to start.  That was the piece of news we were all after.

Kenny shrugged.  He told me, “Just hanging with Lars.”

“Seen Mick?” I showed Kenny one of Tillett’s booking shots.  One eye on the camera lens.  One on the Mongolian steppe.

“Going to Myrtle, last I heard.”

“Why?”

“Got people there.”

“What people?”

Kenny shrugged.

“Must not have made it.” I plucked a photo out of the file.  Just legs.  I shoved it Kenny’s way. He eyed the thing.  His blood drained south.

“What’s this?”

“Mick. Some of him.”

Kenny tried to give the photo back, but I wouldn’t take it.  He dropped it on the floor.

“We’re hearing you did this.”

I plucked up the photo and laid it on the bed.  Alongside it, I laid out various others.  More of Mick’s legs.  The bloody leavings in Kenny’s storage unit.  A few choice grisly shots of the hacked lieutenant. 

“Looks like you boys got into a mess.”

“Where’s Lars?”

I pointed at the wall.

“I was in Richmond. Ask him.”

“When?”

Kenny motioned towards the photos as if to say, “During all of that. Whenever that was.”

“When exactly?”

“I ain’t like that.  I was in Richmond. Got a cousin there. I was cutting her grass and shit.”

“We’ll call her,” Meekins said as she shoved a pad and a pen Kenny’s way.

“She ain’t got no phone.”

“How about an address?”

“Out in the country somewhere.”

“Out in the country in Richmond?”

Kenny glanced my way like I might save him.  Fat chance.

“He’s looking for you,” I told him. “And motor oil won’t help.”

“We find him or your legs,” Meekins said.

Kenny still needed a moment to decide which way to fall. That’s a measure of how slick and trashy he was.  He had to think about his choices.  Talk to the cops or run the risk of getting sectioned like a fryer. That was a teaser for Kenny. He truly had to give it some thought.

“He ain’t like y’all,” he finally told us.  “He ain’t like nobody.”

Kenny said he couldn’t talk on an empty stomach, so Cutler sent Meekins out after burgers and chips and soda. Dennis and Lars and Lynn watched some lame sitcom in the next room.  Four episodes straight.  We could hear the jangly music.  The odd bit of strident dialogue.  The canned laughter and the ads.

Kenny talked as he ate. Not a pretty sight. “I was in fear for my life, you know?”

Kenny, like most guys of his ilk, started in the middle.  “When we come in the house, she was deader than hell.”

“Row back,” Cutler said.  “How’d you meet him?”

Kenny got pouty.  “We got to do all that?”

“Lay it out,” I told him.  “We’ve got people in pieces.”

Kenny sneered at me like I was making some brand of prissy distinction.  That girl was dead when he first saw her, and that was enough for me to know.

“He give you a name?” I asked.

Kenny shook his head. Names didn’t much matter to Kenny.

“Where’d you meet him?”

“Dooley’s.”

I turned to Meekins.

“Kitty Hawk. A bar.”

“Describe him,” Cutler said.

Kenny passed a half minute in deepish thought.  “About your size.” He pointed at Cutler.

“Hair?”

Kenny nodded. “We was shooting pool.  He come up.  Did we want to earn a little.  Like that.”

“We who?”

“Me and Mick,” he told me.

“Describe him.” That from Cutler.

“Kept changing, you know?”

We didn’t know.  “Changing how?” I asked him.

“Brown hair.  Black hair. Glasses and then not.”

“Same guy?” Cutler said.

“Think so.  Always dark and shit.”

“He give you a name?” Cutler asked.

“Duke.”

“That’s it?”

Another nod. “Said he needed a place.  Private.  No neighbors.  Wanted us to put him in an empty.”

Kenny shoved a handful of chips in his mouth. We waited.

“Doing some super secret shit. Like classified and all.”

“This you and Mick?”

Kenny nodded my way.

Meekins showed him a photo of the beach box where I’d discovered the lieutenant. “This it?”

Kenny gave the shot some study.  They all do look sort of alike. “Yeah, I guess.”

Meekins recited the address.

“KDH.  Near Helga,” Kenny told us.  “Wasn’t nobody else for probably a half mile.”

“So you break in?  You and Tillett?” Cutler asked.

Kenny grinned.  “Something wrong with the latch. Damn door wasn’t even locked.”

“What did he pay you?”

“A hundred apiece,” Kenny told me.

“Right there at the house?”

Kenny nodded.

“Anybody with him?” I asked.

Kenny shook his head.

“When was this exactly?” Cutler wanted to know.

Kenny didn’t do exactly.   He just shrugged.

I showed Kenny the morgue shot of the dead lieutenant.  Ashen flesh.  Cloudy eye. “Ever see this girl alive?”

Kenny glanced.  He told me, “Uh uh.” He dumped chip bag leavings into his mouth.  “Saw the other one a time or two.”

“What other one?” Cutler asked him.

Kenny shrugged.  “Black hair.  Barfly.” Kenny pointed at the photo of Lieutenant Kline with the cloudy eye. “That was all Mick. I ain’t built for that shit.”

“Easy to say,” I told him, “now that he’s just legs.”

It went like that for a considerable while.  It would always go like that with Kenny. He only ever decided what he’d done in retrospect, and time and distance had a way of washing Kenny clean.

“Tell us about his apartment,” Cutler said once we’d lost traction on everything else.

“What one?”

“In The Dunes.”

“Thought that was hers,” Kenny told Cutler.

“Her who?”

“Black hair. Only went maybe twice, and she was always there.”

“She got a name?” I asked him.

“Might have been Amy,” he told me.  “Or Jody.”

We waited. You always like to believe Kenny’s sort’ll build up some momentum.  He’ll get the flavor of what you’re after and just pick up the reins and go.  You like to believe that, but that would mean Kenny would need to be regular people with some sense of what’s expected of him and what he needs to do.  Kenny’s sort usually doesn’t get that far, but Kenny actually surprised us.  What had looked like gas turned out to be deep thought.

Kenny snapped his fingers.  “Judy,” he told us.  “Don’t run across many of those.”

“They a couple?” Meekins asked.

“She was.”

“Not him?”

Me and Cutler shared a conspiratorial glance from Kenny before he set out to do some explaining to Meekins about romance and men.

“It’s like this,” he started, “she was all for him, but he ain’t for nobody.”

“You said local?” I asked him.

Kenny nodded. “Think she said her people had a place.  Maybe Southern Shores. She called the name if it one time.”

We waited.  Kenny tried to remember but couldn’t.

“Tell us about her,” I said.

“Big caboose.” Kenny had a glance at Meekins' southern half.  “Probably two of yours.”

“What else?”

“He cut her.  I know that.”

We waited.

“Sex thing. She showed me. Said she liked it.”

“Judy from Southern Shores.”

Kenny nodded my way.

“And what about this one?” Cutler was back on the dead lieutenant.

“All Mick.”

“You still going with Richmond?” I said.

Kenny nodded.

“Then how,” Meekins started, “did your fingerprints get on the hatchet?”

Cutler had the photo of the thing sunk in the chifferobe and shoved it Kenny’s way.

Kenny grinned.  He was too smart for our shit.  “Uh uh.  We was wearing gloves,” he said.

We waited some more so Kenny could catch up. “Need to drop a deuce,” he finally told us and pointed towards the crapper.

Meekins stepped in to check the window, a tiny thing Kenny would never fit through.

Kenny grabbed a nightlife magazine off the top of the television and shut himself in the bathroom where he raised an awful gastric fuss.

“Telling the truth about that at least,” Meekins said.

“Somebody’ll have to light a match or three.”  I gave Cutler points for being hopeful.

More racket.  A few groans from Kenny.

I said, “Somebody might have to paint.”

14

Colonel Darcy wanted a solo session with Kenny once we got him back to the PD. He implied with a wink he’d extract all the nuggets we’d left untouched.  The major had helped the colonel organize the evidence we’d collected.  Photos and prints.  Forensic reports.  A statement from Lynn the meth head stoolie.  Footage from the traffic light camera on Helga — Kenny in a Dodge sedan,  Kenny on foot,  Kenny taking a whiz against a light pole.

“He’ll spill,” the colonel assured us all.

He seemed to have Gitmo business in mind.  But it’s one thing to break a jihadi.  It’s something else entirely to gain useful sway over cracker trash.

The colonel had trouble at first getting Kenny away from Meekins in the hallway.  Kenny had decided she had eyes for him, and he was telling her as much.

“Mr. Fulcher,” the colonel said with force, but Kenny just ignored him.

Kenny told Meekins' backside primarily, “You’re damn T all right.”

“Mr. Fulcher.”

“Me and you could make some music.”

“Mr. Fulcher.”

“When you get off from here?”

Meekins took Kenny’s hand like she was intending to write her number on his palm.  Then she twisted and bent him enough to make him wish he was triple jointed.  It served to make Kenny more willing to get squired and driven out of the hallway and towards the eyebolt where Meekins slapped the cuffs on and locked him down.

“Ow, baby,” Kenny told her. He winked, I believe.  I had to admire the way Kenny always seemed to like his chances.

“He’s taken.” I broke the news to Meekins once she’d returned to the hallway.  “Wiry thing. Hairdresser.  Bangs on one side of her head.”

“Oh, hey.”  Kenny again.  The colonel and the major had stepped in the room and we’re just about to shut the door.  They left it open long enough for Kenny to tell us what he needed.  “Pink Perfection,” was what he said.  “That house.  Up in Southern Shores.” 

The door swung shut with a bang.

“Judy?”

Meekins nodded.  “Worth a look.”

So we headed north in the Tahoe to see what we could find.  I’d not been up to Southern Shores.  It was a few miles out of my orbit. I was usually turning east towards the Wright Memorial Bridge instead of heading straight up the coast.

“Bigger dollar,” Meekins told me as we veered off the four lane to keep north.  “Some of these places have been here since the forties.  Made it through Hazel and Isabel.  Block and stucco.  Low to the ground.”

She swung slightly right on Ocean Boulevard once we were in Southern Shores proper, and while there were some newer showplaces here and there — three and four stories of hurricane kindling — there were more flat-roofed stuccoed houses, sheltered by the dunes and close to the ground.

“Here we go,” Meekins said as we slowed in front of a pink house well off the road.  Not hot pink, but sun-faded salmon.  Two wings and a breezeway.  A sprawling yard.  The thing was sitting on nearly an acre of what looked like zoysia lawn.

Meekins pointed at the mailbox.  Pink Perfection painted with no art to speak of on the side.  She radioed in the street number to Betty and then wheeled into the drive.

The place looked vacant, same as all the neighboring houses.  No parked cars in sight.  We tried the garage door, but it was latched.  Knocked on the front door.  Nothing.  There was a screen porch around back and a roofed gazebo perched on the dunes.  I walked out and had a look.  Nobody anywhere on the beach.

“Don’t see any rental signs,” Meekins said as she joined me.  “Probably family only.”

Then her squawker came alive, and Meekins got the tax particulars from Betty.  The house was owned by Wombles from Greensboro.  Betty read out numbers and names. It turned out we didn’t need them.  The racket from the radio woke up the girl we were after.

“What do y’all want?”

We couldn’t find her at first.  She was talking to us from the outdoor shower. We closed on the thing together.

“Judy?” Meekins asked.

She got just click, click, clicking back.  A butane lighter, it turned out.  I drew open the stall door and found the girl sitting next to a green sand bucket and a couple of fractured conk shells.  She was trying to a light a damp cigarette but couldn’t raise more than spark.

She was wearing a black cocktail dress.  He mascara was smeared. She burped.

Her hair wasn’t as black as advertised. Dark, arterial red, I’d call it.  Somewhere between Irish Setter and midnight in Killarney.

She was sitting on her handbag. She tossed her cigarette aside and yanked the thing out from under her. Plundered through it. The girl turned up greasy drugstore readers. An eyelash curler.  Lip gloss.  A phone. 

“What do y’all want?”

“You Judy?” Meekins asked.

“Who?”

She finally found the key ring she’d been after in her bag. “Come on,” she said, and we followed her onto the back screen porch and into the house.

The place was a mess. Take-out trash.  Beer cans and liquor bottles.  A cereal bowl full of cigarette butts.  Meekins snapped a picture of the girl with her phone and texted it to Betty.  She heard back shortly and nodded my way.

“Mohawk says it’s her.”

“Judy?” I asked. 

She laid a lit fag on the sofa arm.  I picked it up. Meekins commandeered the handbag and found the girl’s driver’s license.

“Natalie Denise Akers.”

“Ever go by Judy?” I asked her.  I think she might have nodded.  I know she burped. “Have you been drinking, Ms. Akers?”

She looked my way and cackled.  “Sherlock fucking Pink Panther,” she said and stretched full out on the couch.

“Tour?”

“Why not,” I said and joined Meekins on a stroll through the house.

Three bedrooms and a couple of toilets.  Knotty pine.  Painted slab floor.  Lots of framed black and whites of fish and weather.  A blimp over the Wright Brothers Memorial.  The wild northern beaches with ponies years before Duck and Corolla were there.  Family too.  Wombles we figured. White folks in too few clothes.

Meekins pointed out a child in one of the photos.  “Her?”

Right vintage.  Could have been.

She’d come around a little by the time we returned to the main room.

“What do y’all want?”

“Need to talk to you about a friend of yours,” I told her.

She pulled a thread on her skirt hem.

“Might go by Duke,” I said.

Another burp. Ms. Akers pointed towards the kitchen and said, “Cuervo.” Meekins went and got the bottle for her.

“Know where we can find him?”

Natalie Denise Akers shrugged Meekins’ way. She took a pull of tequila. Drained what little had been left.

“Where’d you meet him?” I asked.

“Pelican.”

That meant nothing to me.  I glanced at Meekins.  She nodded.

“Duke what?”

“Six,” she told Meekins.

“The number?”

Ms. Akers giggled.  “Big Duke Six,” she said.

“Describe him,” Meekins said.

“Nice dresser.  Neat, you know?  Get sick of flip flops and mess.”

Meekins went digging in Ms. Akers’ handbag and came out with her phone.  She pulled up the photos and found a snap that included half of Kenny Fulcher.

“Who’s he?” Meekins asked.

“Turd.”

Meekins then showed her a picture of a scrap of guy. Just his left arm and a bit of his shoulder.

“Duke,” Ms. Akers told us.

Got any more?” I asked.

She shook her head.  “Not big on pictures.”

“Describe him,” Meekins said.

Instead, Ms. Akers pulled her dress up over her head.  Her flesh was scored on her back and her sides.  Thin, parallel cuts made with something treacherously sharp.

“Freaky,” she told us from underneath the fabric.

“Might help to know what he looked like.”

Ms. Akers dropped her dress back down around her and gave me a look like I was hopeless.  “Regular,” she said. “Can’t really see the kink.”

We loaded her into the Tahoe, and she complained all the way to the PD. We marched her straight back to where they had Kenny shut up.

“Yep,” he told us. “Hey, Judy.”

“You know him?”

She nodded at Meekins and then said to Kenny, “Turd.”

“Where from?” I asked her.

“Duke used him for stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“Plumbing or something,” she told me.

“Anything else?”

“Ask him.” She pointed at Kenny.

“Tried that.  He won’t really say.”

We sat her down in a chair across from Kenny. She eyed her chipped fingernail lacquer. 

“Do this better with a beer.”

“Domestic or imported?” I asked Natalie Denise.

That earned me a modest smile, like maybe I was only half a loser, but she took it back when I returned from the Hess with a can of Olde English 800.

It seems she’d passed the wait having a chat with Kenny.  He’d say something to her cleavage. She’d tell him, “Shut it.”  Then he’d go with, “All right,” and say something to her cleavage again.

Major Pratt came in as the beer was getting poured.  A full Dixie cup for Natalie Akers.  A half a serving for Kenny.

“Is this standard protocol?” the Major asked me.

I told her, “Is today.”

15

Natalie Denise Akers’ uncle had no idea she was in his house.  I ended up talking to the man on the phone once Betty had found a number for him.  I endured from him an earful about his wayward niece.

“I’ve spent half my life getting that girl out of trouble.”

“Looks like she fell in with a bad sort,” I told him.

“How bad?”

“We’re dealing with a couple of homicides.”

“And she’s in it?”

“Can’t tell yet.  She could be a lot more helpful.”

I heard him grunt.

“How far would she go?”

“She’s not mean,” he said, “just loose. Stupid sometimes. Think I ought to come down?”

“Maybe you could give us a trespass to hold her until you or somebody can get here.”

He proved willing.  The man turned out to be an estate lawyer, but he was a mightily pissed uncle as well.

So we charged Natalie Denise Akers with trifles and took her clothes.  Meekins snapped pictures of her cuts.  Then we gave her a paper suit that wasn’t even so nice as Kenny’s.  Blue and stiff with the scent of pulp mill.  We’d all graduated to turds by then. Especially Ms. Akers’ uncle.  She told us about a skag he’d been banging.  Kenny quizzed her on the details but got no satisfactory answers.  I wondered if skag was an inland, landlocked thing while gash and skank belonged to the sea.

Ms. Akers grew sullen and quiet in a while, especially after Kenny had sucked down the last of the malt liquor.  We left the two of them in the room together and watched them on the monitor as Ms. Akers made a bid to pout while Kenny wouldn’t let her. There was no rancor she could manage that would curb Kenny much at all.

He yammered at her and quizzed her, indulged in study of her caboose.  In short, Kenny did his bid to validate my long-held personal theory that cracker trash should have its own slot on the autism scale.

Natalie Denis Akers was pleading for her own room by the time we went back in.

“I know shit,” she said.

Meekins gestured for her to spill.

“Big Duke?”

We nodded at her.

“He’s still here.”

We put Kenny in our only cell. It was a cage in a makeshift squad room. They shipped most overnighters to Elizabeth City or Manteo.  There was a bunk.  There was a chair.  No toilet.  A prisoner had to make nice for that.

“Keep an eye on him,” Cutler told Randy, one of the chinless twins.  The guy was half doing paperwork, half playing some sort of shoot-em-up game on his phone.

From the face Randy pulled, you’d have thought Cutler had asked him to rotate his tires. I couldn’t really blame him.  Kenny broke wind straightaway.  He told Randy he wanted a TV and a “goddamn turkey sandwich.”

The major took the first crack at Natalie Denise Akers, but she hit the rocks in pretty short order.  Ms. Akers was one of those females who had no practical use for women.  She saw them all as competition, especially a bony thing like Major Pratt.  The woman had blue eyes, high cheekbones, no body fat to speak of.  She was clearly the sort who could walk into a dress shop and pluck anything she wanted off the skimpy end of the rack.

“What do you weigh?  Like sixty pounds?”

“Ever hear him called anything other than Duke?”

“Eat any damn thing you want, don’t you?”

“You say you met him in a bar.  The Black Pelican?”

“I used to know a girl like you. I fucking hated her.”

Me and Meekins and Cutler were watching on the screen in Cutler’s office. The major showed Ms. Akers a few ghastly photos, but the girl just pushed them away. She was about to ask for a lawyer.  I could tell by the look on her face.  That or a pitcher of margaritas, but the major was losing her either way.

I didn’t wait for clearance but went straight up the hall, stuck my head in and said, “A minute?”

That earned me a poisonous glance from the major, but she came out anyway.

“She’s folding up.”

I didn’t get an argument.

“Could be she just needs a guy.”

The major yielded ground without a struggle. “But enough with the beer,” she said.

I went in. I shut the door. I sat where the major had sat.

“Your turn?”

“I guess.”

She looked around the room.  Carpet partway up the walls.  Ugly sconces. Ratty shelving.

“I got a loan here once.  It used to be a credit union.”

“Sounds about right.”

“You’re new here, aren’t you?”

I nodded.

“I’ve seen the rest of them around and stuff.” 

She leaned towards me in a way to show her cleavage to best effect.  The crinkling from the paper suit undid the attempt a little, but I knew to act stirred and embarrassed. Had the good sense to glance once helplessly before I looked away.

I shifted in my chair.  Cleared my throat. “Ok then.” It came out squeaky.

As far as Natalie Denise Akers could tell, she was back in charge. 

“So what’s all this about Duke?” she asked me.

“We want to talk to him about some trouble.”

“That sort of trouble?” She pointed at the photos. Pale dead girl.  Freckles and gashes. Splattered blood.

I gave her my more in sadness than anger nod.

“What’s turd boy got to do with it?”

“He puts Duke on the scene.”

“You going for that?”

I shrugged.  “Got to check it out.  You know something different?”

“Might.  Me and Duke, we were . . . close.”

“Over?”

It was her turn for a more in sadness than anger nod. 

“You mind telling me a little about him?” I pulled a pen out of my pocket and made ready to write on the back of the folder the major had left on the table.

Ms. Akers gave me a whatever shrug.

“What does he drive?”

“A Chevy.” She rested her chin on her hand.  “No, wait.  Might have been a Dodge. Nothing special.  Duke’s not into cars.”

“Sedan?”

She nodded.  “Black.  Blue.  Something.”

“Tattoos?”

She tapped the underside of her left forearm.  “Had it taken off.”

“He say why?”

“Duke’s got this . . . clean thing.  Like real clean. Everything, all the time.  Tattoo didn’t go with that.”

“That’s what he told you?”

“I put it together.”

I nodded.  Made a note.  “What else did you put together?”

She leaned in, all cleavage and crinkle.  “Don’t think his name is Duke.”

“Any ideas?”

She nodded.  “Foster. On his underwear.”

I made a note.  “Guess he’s been to camp.”

“I’m not going to have to stay here, am I?”

“Your uncle’s pretty pissed.”

“He coming down?”

I nodded.  She groaned.

“How’d you meet him.”

“Saw him.  Went over.”

“Black Pelican, you said?”

She nodded.    

“So he’s there already, and you come in?”

She nodded. “Happy Hour. Three or four weeks ago.”

“He buys you a drink?”

“Later.  He’s eating.  I talk to him, you know?  The usual chatty shit.  He looks right at me.  I mean like for a while.  Doesn’t say anything back.”

“Not a peep?”

“Nothing.  Just goes back to eating.  Big Greek salad like they do there.  Spitting out olive pits. Tells me he’s meeting somebody. Business thing.”

“Then what?”

“I’m pissed, you know? He’s not even looking at them.”

We both glanced at her cleavage.

“Maybe he’s nervous.  Shy.”

“Gay, I’m thinking.”

“Hmm.” I made a note.

“I had a gay boyfriend once.  He was always tired.”

“So what happened?”

“He leaves, but I see him like two nights later.”

“Same place?”

She shook her head.  “Dooley’s down in Nag’s Head.”

“Better luck?”

She nodded and jiggled.  “Turns out he’s not gay.  Really not gay.”

I nodded and let on to be making a note.

“Tells me he sees the horizon and the road.”

“He said that?”

She nodded.  “He’s like philosophical and shit.”

“And you bought it?”

“I saw how he was,” she told me.  “Always did what he needed to do.”

“Like what?”

“Balled me just to get off, you know?  Hundred percent wham bammer.”

“And that was ok with you?”

“Quicker than I wanted.  That’s for sure, but . . . yeah.  He smelled good.  I’ll give him that.”

“Ever talk about his work?”

She shook her head.  “Got the feeling he sold stuff.  Had accounts.  That sort of thing.”

“And he lived at the Dunes?”

“Don’t know.  We went to my place mostly.”

“Pink Perfection?”

She nodded.

“Stopped in at some dump at the Dunes once, but he said it was a buddy’s place.”

“Meet the buddy?”

She shook her head.  “Just went in to get a jacket or something.”

I went digging through the folder I’d been jotting on and found an ungory, presentable photo of Lieutenant Tabitha Joyce Kline.  I passed it across the table to Ms. Akers.

“Know her?”

Ms. Akers shook her head.

“Never seen her before?”

“She with him now?” Natalie glared at the photo, appeared to resent the shiny strawberry blonde hair and the freckles.

“He ever tell you much about himself?”

“Like from when he was little and stuff?”

I nodded.

Ms. Akers snorted and shook her head. “Where the hell are you even from? It was sex, man.  That’s all.”

“You sure?”  I tapped on the photo.  “I saw how you looked at her.”

“You’re like old, right?”

“Getting there.”

“Ever hang out?”

“Maybe. What’s it involve?”

“Yeah,” she told me.  “Old.”

“What are you . . . thirty?”

She endured some kind of spasm.  “Twenty-eight, asshole.  Jesus!”

“Must be the paper suit.”

She had kind of a snit.  I let her.

“What does he look like.  Start at the bottom.”  I pointed at the floor.

“Feet?”

“Shoes.”

“Black.  Shiny.”

“Never sneakers?”

“Sneakers,” she muttered like I’d said sarsaparilla.

I waited.  She nodded.  I made a note.  “Jeans or slacks?”

“Slacks.  No pleats.”

Another note.  “Good.  Belt?”

“You’re weird.”

“Focused.”

“Yeah.  Leather.”

“Buckle?”

“I guess.”

“Showy or . . .?”

She shook her head.

“Shirt?”

“Blue sometimes.  Black sometimes.”

“Dress shirt?”

She nodded.

“Ever see a label?”

She was giving the details some thought instead of sneering her way through it.  She squinted.  She nodded.  “Valentino. Not all of them, but one or two.”

“Any jewelry? A watch?”

“Big watch.  Looked expensive.”

“Good. Any rings?”

She shook her head.

“Glasses?”

“Sometimes.  Metal frames.”

“Hat?”

“Never.”

“How about his hair.”

“Black.  Short.  Better than you.”

“Parted? Combed?  Or left to Jesus?”

“Combed.”

“Anything else?”

“Mole on his sack.  Probably ought to get it checked.”

“Shaped like?”

She squinted as she weighed her options. She finally told me, “California.”

16

Cutler had decided to send me and Meekins clubbing. 

“He likes bars,” he told us.  “Might get lucky. Candy knows where to go.”

“You’re my brother,” Meekins informed me in the lot.  “Visiting from Richmond.” She gave me a dire once over.  “Change first.”

I did.  More new stuff from the Belks.  It wasn’t very becoming. Even I could tell as much.  Saggy all over. Hanging where it should have clung.

“I forget how to drive?” I asked her as she slipped under the wheel of  my truck.

“Never learned,” she told.  “You’re a little slow. We’re all sad about it.”

We started at the Black Pelican just in case their big Greek salad had some strain of magnetic allure.  A few people were eating at the tables on the east wall where the windows overlooked the beach, but most of the action was at the bar.  There was some Bravo mess on TV.  Blondes sitting at a kitchen counter quarreling through their noses and pointing their French-nailed fingers at each other.

Meekins parked herself near a guy who looked like he was on the prowl.  He took Meekins measure with a glance.  Jerked his head by way of greeting.

The bartender came over and said, “Candy.”

Meekins ordered some kind of cocktail.  She said, “This is my brother, Norman.  Pepsi for him.”

The guy beside Meekins leaned back and jerked his head my way, but he was there chiefly for the chance to have a look at Meekin’s backside. If my recent personal experience on the Outer Banks was any indication, I was in a profoundly caboosey sort of place.

“I’m over here, Jasper,” Meekins said.

“It’s Ben,” the customer told her.

“What’s your story?”

Ben didn’t have a story.  He had a Corona Lite and a plate of sliders coming. Ben kept up with local happy hours the way some people track the phases of the moon.

“I was at Mo’s,” Ben said and pointed with his bottle neck.  “Came over here when the shrimp gave out.”

“That’s all you got?” Meekins asked him.

Ben made a noise in his neck.

I grew rattled listening to her.  It had been so long since I’d chatted up a woman in a bar, I’d forgotten what sort of heavy lifting it could be. I felt for Ben a little, but better his entrails laid bare than mine. The bartender knew to stay elsewhere.  He probably saw carnage like this every night.

A waitress showed up with Ben’s sliders.  Meekins asked him, “You mind?”

He gave her one, naturally.  It was easier than conversation.

I leaned in and said lowly to Meekins, “Can I have bite?” I hadn’t eaten since noon.

She pulled away.  “Come on, Norman.  You’re vegan.  Remember?”

That did the trick for Ben.  I was clearly worse off than him. Lumpy. Vegan.  Probably both gay and mildly retarded.  What grown man sits at a bar and drinks a Pepsi, for god sakes?

I have to hand it to Meekins, she was patient and strategic with the guy.  A buddy of Ben’s came over, and she roped him into the chat as well.  I was halfway through my big Greek salad by then, and it wasn’t half bad but for the pits.

Mostly I listened and scoped the place.  It was vaguely scented with weary desperation, which I had to think was the base note of offseason at the shore.  You were at the very spot where people rolled in to have fun just not at the time of year when they actually rolled in and had a little.

“How’s that salad treating you?” the bartender asked me. He said it slowly and enunciated like he’d decided I was damaged.

I had a mouth full of lettuce and feta.  I nodded and think I said back, “Ngharln.”

Guys, as a rule, don’t like it when women ask about other guys, so Meekins tried to make her questions sound like an obligation.  She was saddled with the chore of finding Foster (she called him) because he was her cousin’s friend, new to the area, and she’d promised to look him up.

“I owe her,” she explained.

“I got people like that,” Ben told her.  “Always after me for something.”

“Isn’t that the way,” the other guy said.

It went like that for a bit.  I listened and ate and caught the eye of a woman.  She was mature (I’ll call her), and I felt sure she was looking at somebody behind me until she picked up her bourbon, swaddled in its soggy cocktail napkin, and came over to claim the stool just to my left.

“Don’t know you,” she said.

I wiped my mouth.  “Norman,” I told her.

She had a toxic look at the back of Meekins’ head.  “Your girl?”

“My sister.”

“Live around here?”

“Just passing through.”

That appeared, unfortunately for me, to be a very agreeable answer.

“Naomi,” she said and offered her fingers.  She had rings on most of them.  Blue nail polish.  Clattering bracelets. We shook.

She eyed my soda.  “What are you having, Norman?”

“Pepsi.”

Naomi wiggled a finger at the bartender. He came over.  Naomi pointed at my drink.  “Put some rum in it.”

He did as instructed.  We tapped glasses together.  I sipped.

Meekins swung around to check on me and sized up the situation.  She had a chuckle, I heard her.  Then she turned back to her boys.

“What brings you here?”

I gave her about the same song and dance that Meekins had tried on her guys. “Maybe you know him. He comes in here sometimes.”

“Doesn’t sound local.”

“Midwest, I think.  In the army for a while.”

“My second husband was in the army.  Hot head. He did this.” 

She pulled up her sleeve and showed me a glassy patch of skin near her elbow.  She was a lot more wrinkly and saggy up there than I’d anticipated.  I caught myself wondering if maybe she was the type I should count on anymore.

“No way to treat a lady,” I told her.  Meekins glanced towards me and sneered.  She was proving more of a multi-tasker than I had any use for.

I went back to Foster.  “He comes in here sometimes.  Sits at the bar.  Gets this salad.”

That sounded cop-ish enough to make Naomi suspicious.  I could see it in her eyes.

“Truth is,” I told her and glanced around, “he beat a friend of ours and we’d like to . . . talk to him about it.”

That worked better for her.  She knew plenty of guys who needed to get talked to.

“Still don’t know him.  He might.”  She wiggled her finger, and the bartender came over.  Naomi did all the describing.  I let it sit, even the stuff she got wrong.

The bartender nodded.  “Real tidy with stuff.”  He showed us how he wiped down the bar with cocktail napkins and studied and buffed his fork.  “Tried to talk to him once.  Just looked at me.  Didn’t say shit.  Never tried again.”

“Ever see him with anybody?” I asked.

He nodded again.  “Girl.  Kind of local. You know her,” he told Naomi. “Southern Shores. Tiny dresses. Big ass.”

“That bitch.”

“Natalie?” I asked.

“That’s the one,” the bartender said.  “Knows how to do everything but tip.  Him and her might have had a night or two.  That’s what it looked like anyway. You don’t remember him?” That was for Naomi.

She shook her head.

“You ran smack into him at the door.”

She squinted.  “When?”

“Remember?”

She looked like she kind of did, or she ran smack into so many people the whole enterprise was hopeless.

I excused myself and went off to the men’s room and then slipped out into the lot.  I sat in my truck for a half hour waiting for Meekins to join me. I watched customers come and go but didn’t see anything of use. I thought about Naomi’s jiggly flesh between her elbow and her shoulder. There was something to recommend the major.  She’d probably never have any of that.

Meekins finally came out with a guy in her wake.  Not Ben but the latecomer, his buddy. He was doing that pitiful, pleading thing that men get up to sometimes.

“Don’t go, baby.  Let’s have some fun.”  He went on in that vain for a bit.

“Can’t,” Meekins told him and headed for the truck.

“Hold on.” He’d moved past whining and grabbed Meekins by the shoulder.

I was about to roll out and help her when Meekins made that boy sorry he had a thumb.  She used it as a handle and set the guy down. He whimpered and kept trying to make his case until Meekins did slightly more twisting. Then she explained something to him in a whisper, leaned close and talked right in his ear.

He looked instructed and even a bit contrite until she let him go and took two steps towards my pickup.

That’s when he told her, “bitch!”

Meekins wheeled around and kicked him, caught him square on the bridge of the nose. He hinged over.  He bled freely.  Meekins appeared to have belated misgivings.  I detected the frantic look of a creature who was tempted to hand herself in. She pulled out her phone.

“Don’t,” I told her.  “Come on.”

It turned out I’d misread her.  She took a picture of the guy and then came over to the truck. She let me drive. I left without running over him.  That had to count for something.

“You got a scrap book?” I asked Meekins.

“Dear diary,” she said dreamily.  “Met a fuckwad in a bar.”

We hit four more places with about the same result.  Less carnage in the parking lot but no information to speak of.  I drank a lot of sodas and chatted up the help.  Meekins sifted through barflies who weren’t so keen to talk about some dude.  We got a possible spotting at the bowling alley down beside the Nag’s Head Petco.

“Left handed?” a guy asked Meekins. She looked at me.  I didn’t know.

“Maybe,” she said.

“Dressed like Johnny Cash, right?”

That sounded close.  Me and Meekins nodded.

“Sitting right where you are.” He pointed at me.  “Shined up his fork.  Looked damned hard at the shaker and wouldn’t use the salt.”

“Him all right,” I told him. 

The guy called over the short order cook.  They were both whiskery more out of neglect than design.  Grimy caps.  Sun-bleached shirts.  The cook was in a nasty apron.

“Remember that guy, weird as hell?”

The cook laughed and shook his head.  He was cooking burgers in a bowling alley off season on the Outer Banks.  Weird as hell came with the territory.

There were six people bowling as we sat there in the grill.  A couple of boys who looked like shrimpers sharing a pitcher of cheap tap beer.  A woman screaming into a payphone on the wall next to the door.

“The hell you did!”  If she said that once, she said it six times in a row.

“You know,” our whiskery civilian told the whiskery short order cook. “Shined his fork.”

“Oh yeah. Grilled cheese.  No cheese.  No butter.”

“What’s left?” Meekins asked him.

He thought for a moment.  “Toast.”

“Ya’ll talk to him?” I asked.

The cook pointed at the patron.  “Talking’s all he knows.”

“I’m an extrovert. He was a chore, that boy.”

“How old?” I asked .

“Thirty maybe.  Don’t know.” He glanced at the cook who nodded.

“Ever get him going?”

“A little.  Said he’d been to Pea Island.  Down there where you look at the birds.”

Meekins nodded.  She knew where he meant.  “How long ago was it?”

“Two weeks maybe.  Only seen him the once.”

“By himself?”

“Think so.” He pointed in the general direction of main doorway.  “Saw him talking to some girl.”

“Describe her.”  Meekins was over eager.  Both our whiskery guys noticed.

“What did he do?” the cook asked.  “Ya’ll cops and all aren’t you?”

“Custody thing,” I told him.  “Two-year-old.”

Even the frothiest cop hater can usually see his way past that.

“Freckles,” the guy at the counter told us.  He glanced at the cook who nodded.

“Her?” Meekins showed them a photo of Lieutenant Kline on her phone.

They both nodded straightaway.

We bought our guy a beer and a burger.  I gave the cook a ten dollar tip.  If we kept harvesting just dribbles and drabs, the whole department would go broke.

By the fifth stop, Meekins had shifted to straight tequila and increasingly blunt talk.  Guys approached her everywhere we went.  They couldn’t seem to help it. “Candy,” some of them would ease up and say. She usually got a “Hey, sweet thing” or two.

By stop number six — a sports bar on the four lane between the Ace Hardware and a jacuzzi dealer — Meekins had lost the thread of our endeavor and was advising most of the guys who came her way, “Fuck off.”

“Another night, all right?” I said at last, and I was helping Meekins off her bar stool when a boy tore himself away from college b-ball (Texas Tech was playing Baylor and losing by two dozen) to come over and tell me, “Leave her alone.”

I only got as far as exhaling.  It’s a tiring thing to wrangle beered-up boneheads in a bar.  But I didn’t have to do much beyond letting out a weary breath because Meekins vomited enough on the boy to prompt him to reconsider. As upchucking went, this was modest by Meekins usual standard, but it served to take the glow off the girl.

“Whoops,” Meekins said on the way to the truck.  She let me get out on the road before she told me, “I’ve got to pee.”

My place was barely a mile down the beach road and as good a spot to pee and hurl as any.  I unlocked the door, and she pushed past me and found the bathroom on her own.  I turned on the radio to keep from hearing what exactly she was up to.

When she came out, they were playing Handel.

“Classy,” Meekins said.  “I used your toothbrush.”

She shucked her sweater and unbuttoned her blouse.

“What are you doing?”

She was down to her bra and working on her jeans zipper.  “Let’s get this over with,” she told me and went lurching down the hall.

I’m usually the go along/get along sort when it comes to women. I take what I’m permitted.  I don’t agitate for more. I try to be agnostic about motives.  You want to get back at your boyfriend or your philandering husband?  Fine.  Got a temporary felt need that’ll evaporate by sun up?  Why not? Just bored?  Ok.  A little loaded?  Up to a point, that’ll work.  With colleagues it gets more complicated.  There’s higher math to do. I couldn’t even figure the equation out with Meekins.  Too young.  Too drunk.  Too willing. Sure to marinate in regret.

I was working up some version of “Let’s don’t” when I switched on the back bedroom light and didn’t see her on the queen.  I checked the floor between the bed and the wall.  She wasn’t there either.  I tried the room with the twins and the room with the double.  Eased into the bathroom as well.  I finally found her in the room with the bunk beads.  She was on the bottom one, sprawled face down and snoring.

I covered her up with a blanket and stepped over to the window to shut the blinds.  That’s when I saw the flashlight beam.

It was in the house across the road.  I went out and circled around to the street.  No car in the driveway.  More light from inside.  Still just a torch beam.  I had my Ruger shoved into my waistband.  I went up under where the trash cart and the grill were kept.

I could hear them.  Two voices. They sounded a touch soused as well.  I eased around to the beach side and climbed the stairs to the back deck.  Nice view of the ocean.  Dead low tide.  Streaks of phosphorescent foam.  More lancing light.  Some laughter.  The back doorknob turned in my hand.

I stepped inside.  Tidy kitchen.  A woman’s handbag on the counter.  It was laid over with the contents half spilling out.  A compact.  A phone.  The sort of key ring a janitor might wear.

“No.  Wait.  Wait,” I heard from down the hallway. 

I pulled my Ruger and held it close to my side.  I eased towards the voices.

“Just pull it.” That from what might have been a female.

“What way?”  That from what surely was a man.

They’d left the flashlight on.  I slipped up for a look and peeked around the door jamb.  It looked to me like willing grappling taking place on a naked mattress.  No Duke.  That was for certain.  I was trying to slip away when the girl saw me in the bureau mirror. She screamed and knocked the guy onto the floor.

I showed them my pistol.  I didn’t point it anybody.  I just held it up so they could see what exactly was in my hand. Informed choices was what I was hoping for, but I just got yelled at some more.

“Creep!” That from a woman with her bra on backwards and her sweater around her neck.

The guy made various threats as he attempted to hike his jeans.

“This your house?”

They both told me, “No,” like I was a fool to ask the question.

“Got permission to be here?”

They looked at each other.

“How’d you get in?” I asked them.

“Who the hell wants to know?” The guy continued to wrestle with his pants.  He’d somehow maintained his erection.  I figured him for thirty. His pockets were all inside out.  I felt nostalgic and relieved both at once.

I pulled out my badge and showed it to them. I flipped the case open and held the shield up in a TV sort of way.

“You’re kidding, right?” That from the girl.  She was so pissed she hadn’t even tried to fix her clothes.

“I’m calling Dennis.”

She fairly sprung off the bed. She told her man friend, “Hold what you’ve got.”

I followed her out to the kitchen.  Bare back.  Sweater bunched.  Bra cups facing my way.            “You in real estate or something?” Kind of a dumb question.  Most everybody on OBX seemed to be in real estate one way or another.

She found her phone.  Located the number she wanted.  Started the call. “Officer what?”             She looked like a creature who could raise a ruckus.  And yet perky as well,with tan lines in November, and out with some stallion doing what God intended in a house people rented all summer for maybe even grubbier things.  

“Huh?”  She was clearly the type who’d be filing papers on me.

“Norman,” I told her.  I even spelled it.  Then I gave her a “Ma’am” and left.

17

Cutler had us all for Thanksgiving against Mrs. Cutler’s wishes.  She didn’t say anything explicitly but managed to look more unhappy than even national family holidays can make most people get.

Cutler’s wife was named Marjorie and she was pleasant to her guests in a theatrical and insincere sort of way.  She kept calling us “Bill’s friends”.  That included the major and her lieutenant who showed up on orders from their colonel.  He’d commissioned a flight and gone home.

Meekins brought a date.  Danny.  He arrived looking stunned and sheepish and stayed that way for the afternoon.  I had to think she’d corralled him for my benefit, just to make sure I understood she had no thing for me.

It turned out Danny had been after Meekins for a while.  He told us about it on Cutler’s deck — just me and Dennis and the chinless guy with the wine-stained ear — Lowell.

Danny hauled nets on a trawler.  He’d met Meekins in the Manteo Shop ’n Save. It sounded like he’d stalked her for a while.

“She was buying apples, so I bought apples.  A bunch of bananas.  Me too. Then I told her she was pretty and all, and she said I should clear off.”

Dennis and chinless just gurgled.  It was left to me to be social.

“That must have been discouraging.”

Danny shook his head. He grinned.  “Get in that row and keep on plowing.”

Not terribly nautical of him.

Danny laid out his romantic strategy.  Not just for Meekins but for women generally. He’d decided he was the sort of guy a female needed to get used to. He smelled like fish.  He dressed like a farm hand.  He looked (I’ll call it) symmetrical at best.

“I’m all right, as far as it goes,” was the way Danny chose to put it. “Got to wait them out. I’m fine with that.”

“So you finally got Candy out of produce.”

“Damnedest thing,” Danny told us. “She just called and said ‘Come on’.”

“This your first date?”

He nodded, Meekins joined us on the deck. She came out with purpose, looked primed for an intervention.

“Come help,” she told Danny and grabbed his arm in a way that was vaguely tender but somewhat MMA.

Danny grinned as if to say, “You seeing this?  She wants me and shit.”

“Arrested him once,” Dennis said as soon as it was just me and him and chinless.

“Danny?”

He nodded.

“For what?” I asked him.

“Punched a girl.  Broke her tooth.”

“Does Meekins know?”

Dennis shrugged. “She kind of had it coming.”

Just then the major stepped out to grab my arm — far more MMA than tender — and she walked me down the steps and into the yard.

“What are you doing after?”  She had a constrictor’s grip.

Since it was more in the way of a threat than a question, all I needed to do was nod.

Marjorie Cutler had bought all the food readymade, except for the green salad.  She wouldn’t let any of “Bill’s friends” help her and then said barbed things about how shiftless we all were.

The more Cutler called her “Honey”, the more acidic she got.

We finally sat down at the dining table about three in the afternoon.  Cheap beer.  Rank wine.  Desiccated turkey.  Candied yams with marshmallows.  Broccoli with something called cheese gravy.  Iceberg lettuce with cucumbers and chunks of onion.  Some kind of nuclear density bread.

Cutler made us join hands while he gave thanks to the Lord.  I was sitting between the major and Meekins who were both so irritated and/or put out that they each left a mark.

The meal, like the whole affair generally, was awkward and inadvertently revealing.  Nobody could choke down the turkey.  Marjorie drank about a quart of merlot.  Danny ate exclusively cheese gravy and bread.

“I hear ya’ll got people chopped up,” Danny said after one of the many lulls. We’d already chewed over the weather, the Redskins’ chances,  and the pathetic OBX Christmas parade.

Meekins looked primed to shut Danny down, but Cutler raised a hand to stall her.  “What are folks saying?”

“A lot of us knew Mick.  Tilletts have been on the water forever.” Danny shoved a plum-sized plug of bread in his mouth.  Wiped greasy cheese gravy off his chin.

“Yeah, but what are they saying?” Cutler asked again.

Mrs. Cutler sneered at Danny.  It was just like one of Bill’s friends not to answer a straight question.

“You know.  Stuff. Him and Fulcher got tangled up with some boys.  Stuff like that.”

We were all peering at him with interest by now.  Danny didn’t like the attention.  He looked a trifle queasy.

“What boys?”  That from the major.  She was in civvies and so could pass for a rankless flinty woman with ice blue eyes. Still scary but unofficial.

“You police?”

“Worse,” she said.

Danny shoved a crusty heel of bread into his mouth.

“So this is what it’s come to?” Cutler asked us generally.  “We’re pumping a guy who doesn’t know shit and came by that third hand?”

We were all as frustrated as Cutler was.  Well, maybe not Dennis and wine stain.  They both appeared to be suffering from yam-inflicted torpor and seemed content enough with the state of things as they were.  But then they didn’t have primary duty to make sense of the carnage we’d seen.  We had just a name from an underwear label.  We had a guy who polished his forks. We had a woman he’d romanced and carcasses he’d helped to make.  We had his vacant apartment.  His twelve thousand dollars and forty-seven possibles from the defense department data base.

But we still didn’t have a coherent motive or anything resembling an actionable lead.  So we were most of us feeling something approaching Cutler’s peevishness.  Especially Mrs. Cutler who rose to her feet and gave a rambling, belated toast. It both lacerated her husband and left us all to understand that we’d be taking loads of turkey home.

Betty came in as me and the major were clearing the dining room table.  She’d had her holiday with her family but had swung by, as promised, for dessert. She’d brought an inedible sheet cake slathered with runny orange icing.

Mrs. Cutler greeted the sight of it with a raised glass and “Sweet Christ!”.

****                              

We reinterviewed everybody who seemed worth the trouble, and we got Kenny and Natalie Akers back together to give us another description.  We’d tried software first, but Mr. Foster (we were calling him) had come out looking too generic to be of any practical use.  He had hair.  He had eyes.  He had a nose and a chin. 

I showed the printout to the Black Pelican bartender.

“Hell, buddy,” he told me, “I get a dozen of him every night.”

So Cutler recruited a human artist.  A painter his wife recommended.  She specialized in lighthouses on driftwood and beach scapes on crosscut saw blades.  She sat and sketched on regular paper while Kenny and Natalie Akers debated our suspect’s features. Kenny held out for a squarer head than Natalie could possibly tolerate.

Luckily our artist was practiced in some manner of self actualized meditation, so she kept on drawing while Kenny and Natalie graduated to full tirade.  I slipped up behind her and looked over her shoulder.  She’d drawn six or eight faces on her page.  Two of the suspect.  Passably lifelike.  One of Natalie.  A few of Kenny. She seemed to find his mohawk fascinating.  And one of Dan Rather (I do believe) standing in front of a canoe.

That lady returned in a week with two small canvases — our suspect from head on and in profile.  He looked like he belonged on a doubloon.

“What’s he wearing?” Cutler asked, when presented with the paintings.

It appeared to be an ascot. “I don’t do necks,” the woman said.

We didn’t even bother to show those around.  Cutler put them in a drawer.  He made me call and thank his wife.

“Which one are you?” she asked me.

“The new one.”

“Oh,” she said.  “Bill had hopes for you.”

We caught something approaching an actual break after weeks of nothing and Christmas coming.  It was largely thanks to Lowell, the wine-stained twin.  He got called in on a fight at a packing shed back on the sound.

Some boys had been out fishing and were warring over their haul.  They’d had a good day of it — white marlin, drum, yellowfin, snapper, blues — and they were full of beer and got to quarreling over who would take what home.  Things went to blows soon enough.  The wives and girlfriends got involved, and a lady out walking her Labradoodle put in a call to 911.

Chinless Lowell got there first and hung back to reconnoiter.  He was outnumbered six to one and guessed they’d turn on him in a flash.  People hate cops nosing in 0n their messes far worse than the messes themselves.

So Lowell watched while he waited for help to arrive.  It was drunken grappling mostly interrupted by cigarette breaks.  Then somebody’d try to claim a fish, and the brawling would start again.

One of those guys found a steel pike to swing and beaned two fellows with it.  Lowell readjusted his strategy.  He slammed four rounds of riot ready pellets into his shotgun, rolled out of his cruiser, and went straight for the shed.

“All right,” he told the pack of them.  “That’s enough.”

They ignored him. They’d all armed themselves by then.  Metal was clashing and people were swearing.  Somebody was sure to get something lopped off if Lowell just waited around for help.  So he fired a blast into the air.  That snared everyone’s attention.  They all watched Lowell swing his barrel their way.

“Put it all down.”

A lot of steel hit the slab floor. They all looked at Lowell.  He looked at them.  One of the boys in the shed finally spoke for the group.  He asked Lowell in a petulant, put-upon way, “What!?”

Dennis and Randy rolled up shortly along with the rescue squad and a fire truck.  There were sutures to see to and icepacks to apply.  Statements to take and versions to sort, fish to refrigerate.  Lowell was the one who went around and collected all the weapons.  Tools for the most part, including a makeshift carcass hacker that looked to be a ground down mower blade with a maple handle fixed to it.  Just the stripe of thing for taking a big fish apart.

The blade was beveled on both sides, freshly ground and shiny.  Clean work.  A steep angle. Lowell, to his credit, remembered that he’d seen a piece of ground steel very much like it before.  He set that tool aside from the rest of the stuff, wrapped it in a towel, and put it in his cruiser trunk. The following morning he found me in situation room.  I was reading through the army files on our four dozen possible suspects.  It was my third attempt to find any nuggets or scraps that seemed to suit.

“Had a call last night,” Lowell told me.  “Fight in a boat shed.  Found this.”

He pulled the blade out of the towel and held it up to show me the edge. Lowell started to tell me why he’d brought it in, but I didn’t need to hear it.

“Yeah, yeah,” I told him and took the thing from him just as the major came in.

“Look.” I showed her the bevels. 

She barked out for Lieutenant Browne with an e to fetch the hatchet. He carried it to us in its evidence bag, and we eyeballed the two blades together. Same pitch.  Same grind.  Same polish.

“Where’d it come from?” the major asked.

I pointed at Lowell.  “Fight,” he said.  “Last night.”  Then he gave us the particulars.

“We holding any of them?” she wanted to know.

Lowell shook his head.  “Find some at the boat shed probably.  Fish to sort.”

I rode over with the major.  She was all business in the day light.  Hell, all business between the sheets, if you got down to it.

We stopped in the ditch near the boat shed.  Those boys were sorting fish sure enough.

“Let me,” the major said.

It was all I could do to keep up with her as she stalked across the lot to the water’s edge. The sight of her alone deflated those boys.  That’s all they needed, the goddamn army. Like they didn’t have trouble enough.

The major showed them her credentials and told them, “DOD,CID.”

I translated.  “Army cop.”

“What did we do?” His name was Rollie, as it turned out, and he was kind of the leader.  He owned the boat anyway, an old aluminum Sea Ark.  It looked like a twenty footer, all dinged and scraped and neglected.      

“This blade.” The major waved the hacker at him.

Rollie recognized it. He nodded.

“Who sharpened it?”

“Probably Jo Jo.”  He held out a hand, and the major let him have the thing for a look.  He examined the edge and nodded again.  “That’s him. Got an old step truck.  Comes around.  Puts them on a grinder.”

“Where does he live?”

Rollie looked at his boys.  They didn’t know from Jo Jo.

“Got a number for him?”

“Like I said,” Rollie told her, “just comes around.”

“When?”

“Whenever.  Rolls up.  Sharpens shit. Takes fish for pay.”

“Been around lately?” I asked.

Rollie shrugged.

“Last name?” That from the major.

Another general glance from Rollie.  Four guys together knowing nothing still. With the hacker in hand, Rollie told the major, “We could kind of use this.”

She reached over to relieve him of it.  He was foolish enough to resist her, so she tapped his Adam’s apple. Only had to do it once.  That was the thing about the major —she was never not decisive.  Rollie coughed and rubbed his neck.  The hacker went with the major, where it was always going to go.

The major headed back towards her sedan.  I felt obliged, as a man, to console those boys in the boat shed.

“You’ll get your stuff back shortly.”

I heard a sharp whistle, a summons from the major.

“That’s all right,” Rollie told me. “At least we’re not you.”

18

Dennis knew Jo Jo the grinder man.  Even Meekins did a little.

“Kind of whacked out,” Dennis told us.

Meekins went with shell-shocked. “Desert Storm. Killed a bunch of people.  Wishes he hadn’t and all.”

That raised a grunt from the major.  She had no use for regret.

I was more empathetic.  I’d killed one guy in the army and still felt pangs about.  He was an American GI, a psychotic we’d exported, and I’d hit him in Manila with a truck.  He’d beat a prostitute to death with a coffee mug and had crippled her handler, had stomped him into a pile.  I was trying to arrest him, but he wasn’t keen to go along.  He was shooting up a side street when I ran over him instead. 

I can still feel the girth of him under my tire. He fired a couple of rounds through the floorboard and refused to die right away.  He lived long enough to snarl at me and the world.  I catch myself thinking about him while washing dishes or tying my shoes or sitting on the toilet or something.  He’d earned it.  That wasn’t a question.  I just hated I’d doled it out.

“Has he got a sheet?” I asked.

Meekins and Dennis shared that cop look between them that suggested they’d cut Jo Jo an awful lot of slack.  They both shook their heads and studied the carpet.

“What’s he like?”

“Yells a lot,” Dennis told me.  “On the beach. In the Walmart.  Out at the mall.”

“About what?” I asked.

“Bible stuff sometimes.”

Meekins elaborated.  “He’s got this thing about us — all of us —getting scoured from the earth.”

“How about an address?” the major asked.

Meekins fetched Jo Jo’s file.  He’d had one arrest a decade back for disorderly and resisting.  A string of home addresses.  All of them were marked through.

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Dennis said, “if Jo Jo lives in his truck.”

“You look.  We’ll look,” Meekins told Dennis. “Got to be somewhere around here.”

That was fine with Dennis.  He went north.  We went south.  The major was happy enough to stay behind and wait for us to haul him in.

Meekins turned west off the four lane and put us on the road that skirted the sound. I was reading through Jo Jo’s meager paperwork.

There were stop signs at every cross street where the blacktops met the bay drive. A couple of blocks ahead of us a car whipped out without even slowing down.  An old Wagoneer with rusted fender wells and two surf boards strapped to the roof.

“This dickhead first.” Meekins switched on the grill lights and gave a yip.

I couldn’t argue with her.  Too flagrant to ignore.  Then the guy wouldn’t stop for four or five blocks.  Something came out the passenger window.

“See that?”

Meekins nodded and yipped again.  The Wagoneer finally rolled into the ditch.

We did like you do.  Came up on the flanks.  Meekins tapped the back window to get the driver eyeing the mirror.  Two guys in the front.  Wet suits heaped in the back.  Thirty somethings.  Surfers. The usual arm tats and hipster doofus clothes.  The general surfer attitude — what the fuck you doing on my planet?

I’d run into my share of these guys on the beach.  They fixate like toddlers.  Instead of a plastic beach shovel or a mylar baloon, they spend all their concentration on the waves.  East coast waves which are usually, by surfing standards, pretty shitty.  But it’s all they care about, foamy four footers that don’t so much break as collapse.

“What did you throw out?” Meekins asked.

Those boys gawked dully at her.

“I was, like, going slow,” the driver finally said.

“You ran a stop sign,” Meekins told him.

That proved a fascinating wrinkle.  “No shit.”

“License and registration.”

“It’s my friend’s car.”

“Give me what you’ve got.”

Both boys went digging.  Through the junky console.  Through the junky glovebox.  Receipts.  Coupons.  Ancient packs of gum.  An Altoids box. I took it from the near guy and lifted the lid.  It was half full of hash.

“That was here already,” the driver said.  He looked peeved enough that I suspected it was the truth.

They never found a registration.  The driver finally dug up his license. Meekins took it back to the Tahoe to call it in.  I told the fellow in the passenger seat, “Come with me.”

He grumbled, but he came.  I walked him back to about where I’d seen the goods fly.

“What did you toss?”

He shook his head and did a bit of clueless hand waving. It didn’t much matter.  I spied the pill in the grass.

“Pick that up.”

He did and gave it to me.

“What is it?”

A shrug.

“You threw it out.”

“You can’t, like, prove that, man.”

Talking to him made me tired. I tried a different tact entirely.  “You live around here?”

He nodded.

“Know a guy named Jo Jo?  Sharpens stuff.”

He squinted and scrunched.  “Jimbo?”

“Jo Jo.”

More strain.  “Old guy?  Beat-up truck?”

“Sounds right,” I said.

He laughed.  “Shit, man.”

I waited.

He pointed at the capsule on my palm.  “If that was ours.  It isn’t, you know, but if it was, it came from him.”

We let them lead us to a spot they knew Jo Jo to frequent once they’d been unable between them to describe it to any useful effect.

“That place, you know? With the trees?”  That was the best we could wrangle from them.

They ended up taking us down an access road off the parking lot at Jockey’s Ridge.  It was a sandy track just north of the regular lot where the tourists parked to hike the dunes.

“See!?” the driver yelled our way.  Him and his buddy both were pointing.

There was a truck all right parked in among the pines on the far side of a dumpster.  It was uneven red.  Spray paint red. Blistered spots and hardened drips.  Overspray on the glass.

Me and Meekins climbed out of the Tahoe and cut those boys loose.

“Hey, Jo Jo,” Meekins called towards the truck.  “Need to talk to you for a minute.”

Nothing.  No answer, no racket at all.  Meekins eased around one way. I went the other.  The sliding cabin door on the driver’s side was open.

“You in here?” I said.

The key was in the ignition.  The driver’s perch was more duct tape than stool.  The passthrough to the back was open.  Meekins, ever ready, pulled out a light and played the beam of it towards to the rear of the truck.  A work bench.  A grinder.  A bunch of rags and trash.  What looked like a kerosine heater and a rickety military cot.

Shoes.  Clothes.  Canned soup.

“Sure looks like home,” I told her.

I went around and opened the back doors from outside.  The stink was metallic and feral all at once.  There was an ax head in a vice on the bench.  Ground already.  Shiny bevels.  It had been half buffed up with a finishing file.

I like to think we were giving some active thought to calling in the Nag’s Head PD, when a guy rolled up in Bronco.  Winch on the front.  Light bar on the top. We’d been ranging around informing no one, and it was bound to catch up with us.

“We got a story?” I said sidelong to Meekins as the officer rolled out and came our way.

“Let me.”

We both showed him our badges as he approached.  His uniform rivaled Cutler’s for starch and tailoring.  He was slender and clean-cut, about twenty-five with shiny shoes and a curt, crisp manner.  R. L. Hodges on his name tag.  He was clearly the un-surfer.

“Candy, right?”

She nodded.  “Meekins.”  I got a head twitch. “Tatum.  Just signed on.”

“What brings you back here?”

He sounded reasonable enough.  There was no jurisdictional bass note.  Straight questions.  Meekins went with equally straight answers.

“We’re looking to talk to Jo Jo.”

“You know him?”

“A little,” she said.

“Then you know how he is.”

We both nodded. Meekins enlarged for Hodges a baby step at a time. “He might have run across a guy we’re looking for.  Might have done some grinding for him.”

“What guy’s this?”

Meekins glanced at me.  I decided to chime in.

“Homicide investigation.  It’s . . . complicated.”

“Heard ya’ll caught an ugly one.”

Meekins nodded.  “This is probably nothing. We’re looking for a handle anywhere we can find one, you know?”

“Come on,” he said, and we followed him up the track.

“We probably give him too much room,” Hodges allowed.  “Our chief was in Iraq.  She’s got a thing for Jo Jo.”

“Is he violent?” I asked.

Hodges responded with what sounded like a qualified, “No.”

I waited for more.  Meekins waited as well.

“He yells a lot,” Hodges finally told us.  “Scares people.  They’re here with their kids on vacation.  Didn’t come to get screamed at by some filthy old guy.”

“What do you do with him?” I asked.

“Feed him. We got him motel rooms for a while, but he’d just tear them up.”

“Is he delusional?”

Hodges nodded.  “Not much for taking meds.”

We came out of the scrub pine and onto the sandy reaches of Jockey’s Ridge proper.  Another place I’d been forced march through in scalding July heat with bugs.  We passed a big wooden sign that welcomed us to “The Tallest Active Sand Dune System in the Eastern United States.” Behind plexi there were photos of a fox and a hognose snake.  I had one of those ugly childhood flashbacks that tend to hit me like a shiver.  The sound of my father telling me no child of his could possibly need a canteen.

Whenever I thought of the vacations we used to take, I’d see the back of his knees.  His socks pulled up.  His Weejuns. The sweat coursing down his calfs.  The worried look on my mother’s face as she glanced at me and my brother.

The park is chiefly three massive ridges of sand that constantly get sculpted by the wind.  The dunes are bigger than you expect from the lot — hidden by the scrub and out of sight from the four lane.  In the creases between them, you could swear you were in the Sahara.  Fine sand and sky.  Nothing else.  At least that was the case in early December.  In the summer, it’s kids racing everywhere.  Ill-humored parents.  The odd sweltering dog.

“He up here a lot?” Meekins asked as we climbed the first dune.  Powdery sand poured into my shoes.

“It’s his getaway place,” Hodges said.  “Three or four times a week.”

“You know he’s selling his meds, right?”

Hodges nodded.

“Ever run him for it?”

Hodges stopped and looked my way.  “He gets evaluated maybe twice a year.  They send him to Rocky Mount. Comes back with a haircut and a bath and a new prescription. A week, maybe ten days, and he’s right back where he was.” He added, “No.  I’m not about to run him.”

There was one other person in the entire park.  A girl in a raincoat and fatigues.  She was standing on top of the middle dune smoking a cigarette.  She had Day-Glo hair. Part pink.  Part blue.  Part copper. We headed straight for her, and she didn’t see us coming because she was looking east out over a string of houses to the sea.

We squeaked when we walked, so she eventually heard.  She glanced our way and appeared to tell Officer Hodges mostly, “Oh.”

Heroine.  Methadone.  Something.  I knew an addict when I saw one.  She dropped her butt in the sand, covered it over, and lit up again.

“What?” she said.

“We’re looking for Jo Jo,” Hodges told her.

It was cold on the ridge.  The wind found you up there.  The stiff breeze coming off the ocean had some bite.

The girl smoked and gazed.  She seemed more tuned in than she wanted to be.  Anxious.  Agitated.  Way too far from high.

“Seen him?”

She pointed.

Meekins spied Jo Jo first.  He was all alone on a strip of sandy beach facing the sound.  He stalked from one end to the other and back.  He was yelling as he went.

“Can he talk sense?” I asked on the way down.

Jo Jo was pacing and raging.  He’d stop here and there to scream, “NO!” and kick at the sand.

“Eventually,” Hodges told me.  “You hear him out, he’ll hear you out.  That’s usually how it works.”

“Help to know what he’s mad about.”

Hodges smiled. Hodges said, “He’ll tell you.”

There were condos just to the north and a fence to keep the likes of Jo Jo out.  Every time he got close to it, a guy in the parking lot yelled at him.  A resident, I had to figure, keen to shut Jo Jo up.

“He’s going to make Kenny look like a star witness,” I said.

“Fulcher?” Hodges wanted to know.

Me and Meekins nodded.

He muttered “Jesus” mostly to himself.

We reached the beach. It was a beauty spot.  Sheltered from the breeze and with a vista on the sound.  You could see across to Roanoke island.  Gulls on pylons.  The bridge to Whalebone Junction to the south. The condos poisoned the view a little along with the guy in the parking lot.

“Do something,” he said.  Then he said it again and said it another time.

Jo Jo saw us as he stalked, but he was in the sort of dudgeon that didn’t allow for him to draw up and chat.

“Just wait,” Hodges told us.

Jo Jo headed away in a rage.  He pivoted at the end of the beach and came back to us irate as well.

“He stays scarce in the summer,” Hodges said.

“An off season lunatic?”

Hodges nodded my way.

“Then how crazy could he be?” I went to join Jo Jo on the beach.

I’m a nut job whisperer, always have been. As a rule, most cops set nut jobs off.  They can tell when you’re patronizing them. They’re used to reading cues.  It’s a talent that’s refined by paranoia.

I got within probably ten yards of Jo Jo before he actively objected.

“NO!”  He kicked at the sand.

“Iraq, right?”

That earned me a fresh once over.  A little more human now.  Less cornered dog.

“Desert Storm?”

He made a noise.

“Regular army?”

“Like hell!”

He was a filthy old cuss.  Iron filings and honing oil, clothes no laundromat could save.  Canvas shoes, what was left of them.  And he had a license to drive?

“Get some food in us. Talk it out.  How’s that?”

“Food,” Jo Jo told me.  That was the first thing he hadn’t bothered to scream.

“Yeah, brother,” I said.  “Come on.”

He unclenched a bit.  He was all but heading my way when condo guy said one of those things that people like him say.  Something about his rights.  About the sanctity of his real estate holdings.  Like that.  It was less the words than the tone of stick-up-his-ass entitlement. He might as well have shaken Jo Jo hard by the shoulders.

Jo Jo stopped.  He reclenched.  He went stalking and yelling down the beach again.

I turned and pointed at condo guy.  Told Meekins, “Shoot him, please.”

19

Jo Jo proved ready to have a meal bought for him but not just any meal.  He had quite a lot to say about sustainable agriculture.  Pesticides and phosphates.  The general plight of cod. None of it made much sense, but the man sure was armed with factoids.

We ended up eating organic pizza on a deck above the beach.  A weathered shack between a motel and a craft shop where the pizza guy had made his name by putting any damn thing on a pie.  Smoked herring.  Cheez Doodles.  Chutney. Duck bacon.

Since Hodges was far more familiar with Jo Jo than me and Meekins were, he knew to start out talking about Jo Jo’s beloved Davidson Wildcats.  Jo Jo was a basketball fan like some people are Christians, which is to say only notionally.

Hodges had no specific information.  Wasn’t aware of the games the team had played.  What their prospects were for the season.  Couldn’t even name the coach.  But that didn’t matter to Jo Jo.  He knew as little himself.  He’d merely owned a Davidson sweatshirt once, had found it on the beach, and he liked to pass himself off as a fan and an alumnus.

“I like their chances,” Hodges told him.

Jo Jo nodded.  He creased a slice of pizza and shoved the whole thing in his mouth. He might have been objecting to the shad roe when he fairly bellowed, “Like hell!”

“Shad’s a spring thing, isn’t it?” I said mostly to Meekins.

“Not if it’s pickled,” she told me.

“Artisanal fish roe?”

Meekins nodded.  This in a run of country that couldn’t cook a hamburger rare.

I watched Jo Jo drip tomato sauce down the front of his ratty sweater.  I decided to charge right in.  “You sharpen a hatchet for a guy?”

Jo Jo gave me a slack-jawed once over.  “Who’s he?”  He seemed to be talking to Hodges.

“Works for the paper,” Hodges told him.  “Going to blow the lid clear off.”

Jo Jo grinned.  He had a nasty set of choppers.  I’d rather have been bitten by a possum.

“Hatchet?” he said, speaking squarely to me now.

I nodded.

Jo Jo squinted and rubbed and head.  He rolled up another slice and shoved it in.

“I’ll get it.” Meekins went off to the Tahoe.  She brought the hatchet back in its plastic evidence bag.  It was a grim thing.  Still encrusted here and there with blood.

“Your work?” That from Meekins.

Jo Jo focused on the beveled business end and presently told us, “Uh huh.”

“Who for?” I asked him.

“Captain,” Jo Jo told me.

“What kind of captain?” Meekins asked.  “Police? Army?”

“Yeah.”

“Uniform or he just tell you that?”

I got a “Yeah” as well.

“You put a fine edge on it.” I admired the gory hatchet as I talked.  Some of the blood had flaked off and collected in the bottom of the bag.  “What do you charge for something like this?”

“Five.”

“Is this all the captain wanted?”

I got the gimlet eye from Jo Jo.  He looked like he wasn’t sure about me anymore.

Hodges leaned in and took up my cause.  “He’s all right.”

He got the gimlet eye from Jo Jo as well.  Who was a Nag’s Head cop to be vouching for anyone?

Jo Jo’s bullshit detector might have shorted out every and now and then, but when the leads were making contact, it seemed to work just fine.

“He killed a girl.  Your captain,” I told him.  “A lieutenant.  Just up the beach.”

Jo Jo swallowed and wiped his mouth with his nasty sweater sleeve. He pointed at the hatchet.

I shook my head.  “Choked her. Then went with this.”

Jo Jo made a noise in his airway.

“Might have killed a couple of more folks too.”

Jo Jo pointed again at the hatchet.

I nodded.  He whimpered.

“Not your fault,” I told Jo Jo.  “No harm in the hatchet.  The captain . . . he’s the problem here.”

Jo Jo took a slug of sweet tea and got most of it in his mouth.

“How’d he find you?  Remember?”

Jo Jo raised a grubby finger and pointed.  “Dunes,” he said.

“Jockey’s Ridge?”

He nodded.  “Up on top.”

“You’ll show us? Tell us all about it?”

Jo Jo shrugged.  He guessed he would.  But there was crust to collect and put in his pockets first.

So it was back to the sand for us.  We parked behind Jo Jo’s panel truck and followed him on the route he preferred, through scrub pine and thickety bay bush.  There was proper path we could have taken, but Jo Jo shook his head to warn us off it and pointed at the sky.

“They might see,” Hodges translated.

It wasn’t entirely crazy.  There were fighter jets overhead in a regular way from Pope Field or maybe Norfolk.  Who could say what else was up there keeping tabs on Jo Jo.

The middle dune was where we ended up.  Right on top along the ridge.  There was just us and a man with his pet iguana.

“Boyd and Murray,” Hodges told us.

I didn’t bother to ask which was which. The four-foot one with spines down his back looked unhappy in the chill.

“So right here?”

Jo Jo walked ten yards south and stopped. He pointed at the sand.

“What did he say to you?”

Jo Jo gave a shake and shrugged.

“Uh uh,” I told him.  “Price of pizza, soldier.”

Jo Jo still resisted.  We waited him out.  He finally confessed, “Followed me up.”

He was embarrassed.  That was the problem.  Jo Jo had been so worried about getting watched from above that he’d left himself blind to the guy who’d been stalking him from behind.

“Did he tell you his name?” Meekins asked.

Jo Jo squinted.  “Rogers.”

“Captain Rogers?”

Jo Jo nodded.

Meekins fished out her notebook and jotted.

“Captain America,” I told her. “Rogers.  Tony Manero.  Movie buff.”

“Who isn’t?” Meekins asked me.

“Talk about anything?” I asked Jo Jo.  “You and the captain?”

“They were flying, you know?” He turned towards the dune to the east.

“Hang gliders?” That from Hodges.

Jo Jo nodded.  “Big wind,” he said.

“So you and the captain watched them?”

Jo Jo told me, “Yeah.  He said he’d done that once somewhere.”

“Young guy?”

Jo Jo nodded.

“Like him?” I pointed at Hodges.  I had him pegged for twenty-five.

“A captain,” Jo Jo told me sternly.

“Thirty?  Thirty-five?”

The second one got a nod from Jo Jo.

“Did he say where he’d served?”

“They were flying,” Jo Jo reminded me. Then he pointed towards the lizard.

“Yeah,” I told him.  “Big lizard.”

That’s when Jo Jo flopped onto the sand.

“Uh oh,” Hodges said.

Before Hodges could reach him, Jo Jo started rolling. We all ended up just watching him.  There was nothing else to do.  He rolled down in the crease between two dunes.  It took him a couple of minutes.

I had enough sand in my shoes by the time I reached him to fill a planter box.  I sat down beside him.

“So,” I said.

Jo Jo yodeled (I’ll call it).

“Finish on up, and let’s you and me figure this out.”

He yodeled some more.  I just sat and endured it. There was only so much yodeling, as it turned out, a guy full of shad roe pizza could do.

“Ready?”

He nodded.

“What did he say to you?”

“You the man with the grinder.”

“He’d seen your truck?”

Jo Jo shook his head.  “He just knew.”

“Somebody told him about you?”

A nod in reply.

“Who would?”

“People.” Jo Jo shrugged.  He thought and groaned before boiling it down to three candidates, possibly four.

Meekins had arrived by then.  She jotted as Jo Jo talked.  We had the guy with the boat  shed.  A woman who cooked in restaurant on the beach road. A guy who hired Jo Jo to sharpen his landscaping tools.

“He still owes me,” Jo Jo said and waited for Meekins to note it down.

The fourth was some kind of sculptor.  Wood mostly.  He had all sorts of chisels and blades.

“Guy with a mohawk?  Guy with a lazy eye?”

“Naw.”

“Like one better than the rest?”

He tapped the last name in Meekins notebook.  The sculptor got the nod.

20

The guy was nearby, so me and Meekins went straight to him.

Hodges had warned us, “I know him a little. Kind of an asshole.”

He wasn’t wrong.  The sculptor’s name was Evan.  He had other names too, but he didn’t use them. Just Evan. He was an artist.  I know that because he told us as much, at first and right away.

He had artist hair, thin fly-away stuff that hung down to his shoulders.  He had artist stubble and artist eyeglasses that he wore on top of his head.

We found Evan in his studio.  He was carving an owl from a hunk of maple.  In truth, the place was primarily gallery with a work bench in the back.  Lots of tables and pedestals, carved stuff on display.  Animals mostly.  Angular and abstract.  Nicely done and more than a little compelling.  The man was not without talent but had a bit less than he behaved like he had.

“Evan’s engaged,” his assistant told us.  She was Bulgarian as it turned out. Dark and small and tragic.  She was built to work for Evan.

“We just need a minute,” Meekins said.

We could see him at the back of the place.  Mallet in one hand, chisel in the other, giving the bird coming out of the maple a thorough, artistic once over.

“But . . . he’s engaged.”

“Excuse us.”  I was talking to Evan.

He ignored me.

“Hey!”

The great man threw down his tools and left the building through a back door.

“See?” his sad little helper said.

The place had a back garden full of rusty yard art.  I had to think our sculptor had previously been a welder instead. Evan was parked on a bench made of fence posts and pallet boards.  He’d lit up a Gauloise and was half hidden by sour, blue smoke.

He looked to be wearing hardly anything underneath his leather apron.  A wife beater.  Swimming trunks maybe.  Flip flops.

“What?” Evan said.

“Just a couple of questions,” Meekins told him.

He had a sad Bulgarian girl for such things.  He sighed and shook his head.

I fingered a whimsical something next to me.  It was made from a saxophone, rebar, and what looked like road-sign tin.

“Jo Jo tells us he sharpens your tools.”

Evan squinted at Meekins.

“Whacked out.  Filthy.  Drives a panel truck,” I said.

“Whacked,” Evan mouthed with sneering deliberation, “out?”

“Disturbed,” Meekins told him.

“War damaged.” Evan corrected us both.

I flicked a whirligig.

Evan stood.  Took a last puff.  Dropped his butt and left it smoldering. He pushed past us and went back inside.

“He didn’t meet our captain,” I said.  “He’d already be in thirty pieces. I’d help.  Wouldn’t you?”

Meekins nodded and gave the whirligig a spin.

We found Evan back at work in the ‘studio’.  He was pondering his owl anyway. He pointed at a strip of tape on the floor once Meekins had stepped across it.

Evan’s tragic assistant elaborated.  She gestured towards the front of the room.  “Retail,” she said and then gestured towards the workbench.  “Creative.”

Evan got saved by customers. Two women from Connecticut.  Proudly from Connecticut and indulgently amused by all of the trifling piffle they were finding at the beach.

“Eeewww,” one of them informed the assistant, apparently about something “creative”.

Those ladies took sour notice of a hickory sand piper and a lightly carved driftwood turtle. They were clearly not going to buy anything.  Their vacation was built chiefly on happy-hour cocktails, the occasional view of the ocean, and pissing on local stuff.

Even we were better than those two.  Evan might have recognized it. We were trying, in our way, to do some good. “What do you want to know?”

“Jo Jo with the grinder,” Meekins said.

Evan nodded. He pointed.  “Chisels.  Every six or eight weeks.”

“Ever recommend him to anybody?” she asked.

I could tell Evan was hardly the sort to do even poor Jo Jo a favor.

“Recommend him?” he asked as if it were the most novel possibility he’d come across in a while.

“How about you?” I asked the assistant.

She handled transactions.  She wrapped purchases for tourists.  She sat at her little table in her retro cotton dress and looked sad. A head shake was all I was going to get.

I said to Meekins, “Let’s go.”

The Meekins I’d first met would have had to press on until she’d framed the question so as to get a proper response. I felt a twinge of pride when she muttered, “Fuck it,” and passed me on the way to the door.

If I truly had her where I wanted her, we wouldn’t even have gone in.  I’d seen all I’d needed in the window out front.  Not so much the carvings.  They were decent enough if you liked gimcrackery.  It was the photo of the artist with his chin on his palm gazing lovingly at an egret he’d half coaxed out of a hunk of poplar.

I drew Meekins’ attention to the picture. “Who does he know about?” I asked her.

She saw it now and snorted.  “Only him.”

The landscaper was hunting up in Virginia, so we went looking for the restaurant girl instead. She cooked out of a place up the beach road, on the corner just past Wink’s.  It was ambitious as Outer Banks restaurants go, not an all-you-can-put-in-your-piehole sort of place. It was called Tidal but in looping script you couldn’t hope to read.  They had tablecloths in the dining room and a separate menu at the bar.  No TVs at all.  Trio jazz coming through the ceiling speakers at low volume.  The wait staff wore aprons clean down to their ankles.  Proper tunics in the open kitchen.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this place?” I asked Meekins.

“You can’t afford to eat here,” she said.

A guy in a suit greeted us.  Groomed guy.  Proper suit.  We got a tasteful welcome.  He fished menus out of a caddy.  A lady in the dining room howled with laughter like she was at the circus.  That’s the grit in the gears of tony restaurants: any damn body can come in.

“Is . . .” Meekins dug out her notebook, rifled to the proper page  . . . “Lisa De. .”

“Decicco,” he said, helpfully.

“She in?”

We short circuited the rest with badges, and he showed us to an alcove near the bar.

“Smells . . .edible,” I said.

“Thirty bucks an entree.”

“Ouch.”

“Come for a drink.  Pick up a hottie.”

“Usually drink at home,” I told her.  “Just wait for hotties to knock.”

“How’s that working?”

“All right.” I reached instinctively for a bruise at the base of my neck.

The bartender pointed us out to a rangy lady in a tunic.  Lisa Decicco, chef and owner.  She was one of those casual lookers getting by on metabolism and bone structure.  A headband.  Baggy chef’s pants.  The stink of shellfish.  It didn’t matter.

“You looking for me?” she asked as she walked over to us. She even had one of those smokey voices.  She wasn’t a creature who’d ever cackle.

I introduced myself and Meekins and made us out to be detectives.

“What’s up?” She glanced towards her open kitchen and saw one of her minions doing something she needed to correct.  She called him by name.  She set him straight.  She turned back our way.  “Sorry.”

I liked her.  Bossy. Handsome. Indifferent to me.  Very possibly gay.  Just my type.

Meekins told her why we’d come.

“Jo Jo with the truck?”

We both nodded.

“He’s a mess, but he knows what he’s doing.”

“Ever recommend him?” I asked.

“To. . . ?”

“Anybody.  Colleague.  Acquaintance.  Customer.”

“Funny.  Now that you mention it.” She did that thing women like her do.  They pull focus on you like you finally matter.  Like they’re seeing you at last.  “A guy in here was asking about him.”

“Recently?”

Lisa nodded my way.

“Describe him.”

She turned towards her bartender.  “The guy with the watch,” she said to him.  “About six feet tall?”

He nodded.

“What watch?” Meekins asked.

“Big thing.”

“Diver’s watch?”

She nodded at me.

“What else?”  Meekins asked.

“Pretty good looking.  But intense, you know?”

“You’ve talked to him?”

She nodded.

“Tattoos?  Distinguishing features?” Meekins asked.

“What did he do?” she asked.

“Tattoos?”

“Tattoos?” She’d turned to her bartender.

He shrugged.  Who noticed anymore. “Tooth,” he said.  “Turned sideways.”

“Show us,” I told him.

He did. Lower front.  Left side.

“How does he dress?” Meekins asked.

“Neat. Creased pants.  Like that. Nice shoes,” she said.

“Just missed him,” the bartender told us.

“He was cobb?” The chef asked and got a nod.  She turned our way.  “Might have passed him pulling in.”

I couldn’t remember passing anybody. Truth be told, I was not so keenly observant for a cop.

Meekins stepped over to ask the bartender about his receipts.  I walked out into the parking lot with Lisa Decicco right behind me.

“I’m no good with cars,” she said.

“Truck?  Coupe?  Sedan?”

“Sedan. Funny color.  Brown.  Green maybe.”

“Tags.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean . . .”

“I know.  Best I can do.”

“You know his name?”

“Jake.”

“Jake what?”

She couldn’t say and shook her head.  “And ‘Jake’ was like his coffee name.”

“How could you tell?”

“Just a feeling.”

“Any other feelings?”

She shook her head.  She sniffed the air and went crinkled.  “Low tide,” she said.

I wrote my phone number down on a sheet notepaper, tore it out, and gave it to her.  “Call me if he comes back in.”

“What did he do?”

“We’ve got a few questions for him. Don’t tell him we’re looking.”

“Right.” She checked my scrawl on the sheet. “Ray?”

I nodded.

“And if he doesn’t come back?”

“Number’s still good,” I said.  That was as close as I’d ever get to smooth, which means she only sneered at me a little. She sure didn’t pretend she didn’t know what I meant.

“I’m a lot of trouble . . . people say.”

“What do they know?”

“And I never much liked cops.”

“Me neither.”

“It won’t end well. Never does.”

“Sounds like it might not even start.”

“You always this sunny?”

I nodded. “People say.”

“Brown sedan?” I asked the bartender once I’d escorted Lisa Decicco back inside.

“Green.” he told me.

“Got that already,” Meekins said.  “And the watch is a Seamaster.  Omega. They talked about it once.”

“Real proud of it,” the bartender said.  “Always buffing the crystal. Checking the time.”

“What does he drink?”

That earned me a look from Meekins.  She seemed to have that already as well.  She glanced at her notebook.  “Gruner Veltliner,” she informed me.

“Austrian white,” the bartender said.  “One glass.  Never finishes it.”

“Fish.”  That from Meekins. “And salad. Usually the cobb.  That’s dinner.  Only the salad at lunch.”

“How does he pay?”

“Tatum,” Meekins said, “what do you think I’ve been doing in here?”

“Sorry.”

“Cash,” she told me.  “Always cash. No conversation of any consequence.  They once discussed . . . Hayden?”

“Handel,” the bartender told her.

“What about him?”

Meekins let me off with just a glare.

“Some song came up from an opera.” the bartender told me. “Said he’d heard it in a movie once.” The bartender got scrunchy with the strain of remembering.  “Florida?”

“What?” I asked him.

“The opera.”

“Handel?”

He nodded.

“Orlando?”

He pointed at me.  Meekins treated me to a mystified look.

“I’m eclectic,” I explained. That didn’t seem to help. I thanked the bartender and led Meekins into the lot.

Sometimes you piss me off,” she told me.

“Florida,” I said.  “The opera.” 

“You know shit you’ve got no business knowing.”

“Yeah, but don’t know shit I should.”

21

Fortunately, we met with a moron between the restaurant and the PD, which gave Meekins a chance to bleed off some the agitation I’d inspired. The guy helped her along by both starting stupid and insisting on staying that way.

He was driving a GTO with a hood scoop.  It was Bondo-tastic, a work in progress. He was barreling north on the beach road.  We met him heading south.  Meekins whipped around without seeking my opinion, and it was lights and sirens for two solid miles before the guy finally pulled over in the Hilton Hotel lot.

“Just cleaning shit out,” he yelled our way, and then revved his engine to screaming.

Meekins was out and on him while I was still reaching for my door handle.

“Shut it off!”

He didn’t, but he did hold up his just-a-sec finger. So it wasn’t like he didn’t hear her.  It was more that he didn’t care.

Smoke poured out the pipes. I came up on the passenger side.  He had webbing in the window like he was heading for Talladega.

Meekins reached in and turned the key the wrong way.  The starter joined the engine and screamed as well.

You’d have thought the driver had been skewered with a lance.  He wailed and moaned and said a couple of hard things against Meekins.  She attempted to bring him out of the car by just his hair.

Conveniently, he had a pony tail.  Not a lot otherwise, but that was enough for a decent grip. Inconveniently, he was wearing his seatbelt, which he couldn’t find the words to explain.  I was helpless on the passenger side.  I couldn’t make it past the webbing, so I tried to get Meekins’ attention over the roof.

Meekins wasn’t really in a listening mood.  The guy in the car was yelping.  We were collecting an audience of Asian retirees who’d been sent out to board their bus.

I slapped the roof.  “Meekins.”

The guy was moaning by now.

“Candy!”

She looked at me like she had plans to get to my pony tail in a minute.

“Seatbelt,” I told her.

That registered enough for her to reach in and grab and jerk some stuff in the vicinity of the buckle.  The driver objected.  The onlookers chattered in Mandarin maybe.  Meekins dove back in for another try, and the driver finally popped out.

He emerged hair first through the driver’s window and got left to pile up on the pavement.

“Got you at sixty,” Meekins told him.  It was at best a guess.

The driver rattled on about the can of solvent he’d dumped into his gas tank.  He had a few words to say about his pony tail as well, but it was all too moist and mucousy to make out.

“Get up,” Meekins told him.  She encouraged him with a kick.

I smiled at our Asian audience, located the driver of the bus, stepped over and asked him to load his people.

He was black and jolly and delighted to see cops kicking a white guy around.

“Yeah, in a minute,” he told me and then stayed right where he was.

So I had to go to Meekins.

“Candy,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Got kind of a crowd.”

She raised her head and had a look around before kicking the guy again. In her defense, he’d started making noise about reparations or something.  Money anyway for his carburetor rebuild.  For his can of gas additive. For the time he was wasting getting his liver and colon battered and bruised. It was less the words, I had to think, than the mopey tone that got to Meekins.

Then he left off being pitiful to bark at me for leaning on his fender.

“It’s primer, dickhead,” I told him.

“Ya’ll keep on, and I’ll get mad.”

Meekins was probably leg weary by then. She finally told the guy, “Get up,” and left him entirely unkicked in case he tried to.

“Dennis,” he said.  “You know him?”

We nodded.

“He let’s me.”

“Let’s you what?” Meekins asked him.

“You know.” He pointed at the roadway.  “He knows cars and shit.”

“He’s not here, is he?”

“No,” the guy allowed and tacked on after about a quarter minute, “ma’am.”

“Speed limit’s thirty-five,” Meekins reminded him.

“Hell, ain’t nobody around.”

“Still thirty-five.”

“You aint’ got to write me, do you?”

The slight whine to it didn’t help him any.

“I’m going be straight with you.”  He looked around like there was stuff he had to tell us that Asian tourists couldn’t know.

It was all I could do to keep from cutting him off and shutting him up.  In the course of my career, I’d had plenty of guy’s be straight with me, and they always ended up telling you stuff you couldn’t overlook.

“I’m going be straight with you.  I sank the Lusitania.  Didn’t aim to.  Just happened.  Long time back and all, but shit.”  Then there’s usually a gap for spit or something before you get the capper.  “We good?”

Our guy was driving with a suspended license on a stolen tag. “Wasn’t me that took it,” he assured us.  “Boy I know,” he said more in sadness than betrayal. “Wife’s running around on him.”  He pointed at the tag.  “Come off her boyfriend’s truck.”

He spotted a smudge on his sideview mirror chrome and buffed it with is sleeve. “Ya’ll don’t need to mess with this,” he told us.  “You got people dead and all.”

“What are you hearing?” I asked him.

Sometimes it paid to know what sort of half-baked rumors were afoot.

He looked from me to Meekins, to the Asians and back.  They’d traded most of their interest in us for the cargo hold of their bus.

“You found some folks in a ditch or somewhere.  Carved up, the way I hear it.”

“What else,” Meekins asked and then consulted his license, “Ted?”

He paused long enough to make Meekins’ suspicious.  She had another look at his driver’s license.  “This isn’t even you.”

“Now I can explain that.”

“You’re driving on somebody else’s suspended license?” I asked him.

“I left mine in a bar or somewhere. Borrowed T-Bone’s.”

“Got other ID?” Meekins asked.

He dug around in his pockets and came up with a Front Porch coffee card.  He was closing in on a free cup. He gave the thing to Meekins.

“Nope.”

“People call me Cal, if that helps.”

“Do they call you that because it’s your name?” I asked.

He nodded.  “Calvin.  For my mamma’s brother. Died in Nam.”

“Calvin what?” That from Meekins. 

This was the usual way with his ilk. The customary battle of attrition.  They’d leak and dribble and wear you down until you’d tell yourself, “Hell,” and quit.

He was a Harrell from Manns Harbor.  Meekins went to the Tahoe to call him in.

“The folks in a ditch,” I said while we waited.  “Carved up how exactly?”

“You the police.”

“I’m asking you.”

“Sex parts cut up.  Like that.”

“Where are you hearing this?”

“Around.”

“Anybody guessing about who did it?”

“We don’t know nobody who’d get up to that mess.”

I described our guy as best I could. Boy’s regular haircut.  Tidy, conservative clothes.  Expensive watch.  White wine.  Salad. Calvin shook his head throughout.

“He ain’t hanging where I’m hanging.”

I asked about Natalie Akers.

Cal shook his head some more.

I described our suspect’s car.

Cal made a face and told me, “Jesus.” He wasn’t the sort to much approve of sedans.

Meekins rejoined us.

“Suspended?” I asked her.

“Revoked.”

Calvin Harrell treated us to his shit just happens gesture.

“How many kids have you got?”

Cal did Meekins the courtesy of trying to be precise, which meant he sifted through his offspring and toted them up on his fingers.  “Six or eight.”

“Child support black hole,” Meekins told me.

“I treat them all good,” he said.

The tour bus pulled out and left us bathed in a cloud of diesel smoke.

“Four warrants that I know of,” Meekins informed Cal.

Another shrug.       

“You got a job?” I asked him.

He had two at the moment.  Meekins chuffed my way.  She knew where I was going.

It would have been an argument.  I could tell by looking at her.  Meekins could ignore an offense or two but not a whole nest of them at once. 

So I was having the back and forth in my head before we could actually bother to have it out loud, but then I noticed a car in the corner of the lot that the bus had hidden from view.  Last space but one, right up against the dunes on the far side of the hotel pool. A sedan.  A Ford by the looks of it.  Flat green with a brownish cast.  Let’s call it olive drab.

Meekins was acquainting Cal with his assorted outstanding charges while giving him as well a preview of the new ones she was tempted to pile on.

“Meekins,” I said.

She ignored me.

“Meekins.”

That got me a look.  I pointed. That sedan stopped her as well.

“Go on,” she told Calvin who’d just remembered another child.

Most regular people would have raised a stink.  Gotten all shirty about having been man handled, but Calvin lived wide enough of the law to take a “Go on” as a gift and a blessing.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said without even a hint of indignation.

He climbed into his GTO.  Buckled up.  Adjusted his pony tail.  He fired the engine and over-revved it.  Went out of the lot with a squeal.

“Call it in?”

I shook her off and headed towards the far corner of the lot.  Meekins could come with me or go to the squawker.  She made her choice and fairly sprinted to keep up.

“Think he’s staying here?”

“Maybe.”  I pointed at the tag.  Government issue.  DLA 43547.  Meekins wrote it down.

The driver’s door was unlocked, so I slipped in under the wheel and fished around.  There was nothing personal anywhere, hardly anything at all.  Just a paperclip in the ash tray.  An ice scraper in one of the door cubbies.  A vehicle registration in the glove box along with a tire gauge and the manual that had come with the car. It was a two-year-old Marquis.  DOD on the registration.

“Can you pop the trunk?”

I found the button on the driver’s door and then went around to join her and gaze down at a lot of nothing.  No dirt or trash, just clean trunk carpet.

“Check at the desk?” Meekins asked.

The car was parked well away from any hotel entrance and just a few steps from a walkway to the beach.

“Hold on,” I said and headed up the plank walk with Meekins just behind me.

There was a covered deck on the crown of the dunes with a couple of benches and a trash barrel and a view up and down the beach.  It was a decent enough day for December.  Not brutal anyway.  No wind much.  Sun in and out.  The sea was flat.  The birds were floating.  From where we stood, we could see seven people.  Two pairs of shell pickers.  On pair of beach walkers.  And one guy standing just out of the shore break’s reach gazing out to sea.

“Can’t be, can it?” Meekins sounded like she felt as lucky as Calvin.

We went down the stairs onto the beach.  He was fifty yards north.  Just standing.  Just looking.  Pea coat.  Creased slacks.  Proper shoes.

We both pulled our sidearms but let them hang low and discreet as we closed on him at a walk.

Meekins put her arm through mine and laid her head fondly on my shoulder. “How are we going to do this?”

“You’ll chat him up.”

She steered me towards the water to sweep us closer.

“And you?”

I pointed towards my Ruger with my nose.  “I’ll put this in his ear.”

None of it turned out to be necessary.  He never looked our way.  His eyes didn’t leave the horizon. Even once we were close, almost beside him.

Meekins was about to speak.  She’d drawn her breath and parted her lips, but he cut her off, still looking out to sea.

“Officers,” he said.  Then he held out his hands. I grabbed a wrist and cuffed him.

“Look.” He nodded seaward as a pair of porpoises breached and vanished. After that he was finished talking for a pretty considerable while.

He said nothing on the way off the beach.  Nothing in the hotel lot.  I felt around his trousers and found the sedan key in his back pocket.

“I’ll bring it,” I said.

I followed Meekins in the Ford, and I could see her checking her mirror every few seconds.  He just sat in the back looking out the side window, watching the crap along the four lane pass by.

In the lot at the PD we got him out and left him standing by the Tahoe while we had a confab a few yards away.

“Put him where?” Meekins asked.

I didn’t quite know.  He was hardly your standard holding cage material.

“Ask Cutler.”

Meekins nodded and went inside.

“Is it Jake?”

Nothing.  He’d gone entirely slack and passive like a guy who knew how to shut down and wait around.  It’s a talent pilots and soldiers have — hurry up but not right now.

“Regular army?

Still nothing.

I glanced at the Ford’s tag.  “What’s DLA?”

His chin itched.  He scratched it on his shoulder.  His shirt was far nicer than any I’d ever owned.  Pale blue.  Oxford cloth. No stray threads.  A hint of tailoring instead of the tails just billowing out of his trousers. His slacks were some kind of upscale improvement on twill.  Khaki with a pedigree.  The cuffs ever so barely touched his shiny black bluchers.

“Over dressed for these parts, aren’t you?”

He made the faintest of noises.  That was about as close as we’d get in the near term to rapport.

Everybody came out.  Meekins.  Betty.  Cutler.  Dennis.  The two no-chins.  The major. Her lieutenant.  The colonel too.  They all needed a look.

“Where to?” I asked Cutler mostly.

He turned and yielded to the colonel.

“Interrogation two,” the colonel said.

I nodded like there was such a place.  We had a room middle managers would have been happy to have their lunch in.  With a table and an eye bolt and a credenza full of printer paper and sleeves of coffee cups.

“Right,” I said.  “Interrogation two.”

They all parted to let us through.  My guy hardly needed steering.  He walked towards the door with me at his elbow. He seemed content enough to get stared at without bothering to look back.

There was a tin of Betty’s pecan sandies on the dispatch counter.  I could tell by the curdled way he eyed them he had the instinctive sense to know they were barely food.

22

The debate about who was in charge and why lasted far longer than the initial interrogation.  The colonel and the major, naturally, wanted the guy all to themselves, and they mounted a case with Cutler who finally said, “My people in the room. You can drive it if you want to.”

I improved my time by collecting all the descriptions and sketches we had and then comparing them to the real thing who sat shackled to the table. Staring straight ahead, gazing dully at the far wall.

The various sketches weren’t all that close.  The pair of oil paintings, though quasi-Victorian, struck me as slightly closer.  The written accounts were what I’d call wrong-ish.  Not badly off but slightly askew.  He was taller than people remembered.  That’s ordinarily not the case.  Shorter is far more likely.  And he was older by six or eight years.  The guy in front of me was pushing forty easy.  Fit though and tidy with tailored clothes — hardly the American way.

Meekins knew me well enough by then to have caught the slight stink of doubt off of me.

“What?”

“Check him for a tooth turned sideways.”

She stepped in the room and told him, “Open.” He figured it out and dropped his chin.  She came out and told me, “Nope.”

“Omega?”

Meekins went back in and inspected his watch.  Came back out. “Tudor.”

“Is Kenny here somewhere?”

“Think so.” She keyed her mic and raised Barbara.  Cutler had Kenny out back detailing his sedan.

I went and fetched him.  He seemed content enough and looked to be making a thorough job of it.

“Want you to look at a guy,” I told Kenny.

He dropped his rag in a bucket and came. I didn’t say anything beyond that, just walked him into the room.

“Him?” Kenny asked.

I nodded.

He got the middle distance stare. Kenny squinted.

“Know him?”

“From where?”

“Does he maybe look like the guy that hired you and Mick?”

“Sort of . A little. Ain’t him.”

“Sort of how?” Meekins asked.

“Hair’s kind of the same.  Clothes.”

“But definitely not him.”

Kenny shook his head.

“Brothers?” That was less of a question to Kenny than Meekins thinking out loud.

“Could be.”  I’d had the same thought.  “Let’s see what the army pulls on him.”

Kenny had lapsed into study of Meekins’ chest since her backside was swiveled from him and out of view.       

“You’re going to get smacked.”  I nearly got it out before Meekins caught Kenny on his ear with her open hand. Either she was speeding up or I was slowing down a little.

I pointed in the general direction of Cutler’s half-washed sedan. Kenny took my meaning  and made eyes at Meekins’ rump on the way out.

They were still waiting on an ID when the major went in for the opening session. Me and Meekins got to sit in chairs against the wall and watch.      

“Name.”

Nothing.

“Soldier, I asked you for your name.”

Nothing.

“We show your vehicle detailed to A.P. Hill.”

Nothing.

“Still on base as far as they know.”

There wasn’t an ounce of tension to him.  Sometimes he watched the major talk. Mostly he stared towards the back wall, just over our heads.  He left his hands to lay on the table top. He looked relaxed, almost serene.

“What brings you here, soldier?”

Nothing.

“We’ll have your file within the hour.”

He didn’t seem to care in the least.  Kept staring at the wall.

“Anything to say?”

Nothing.

“Fine.” The major stood as did her lieutenant.  She tossed her notebook into a box of files and photos on the table. “Keep an eye on him.”

That was for us, I guess.  The major couldn’t be bothered to look our way.

They left, the lieutenant hauling their box.  We sat.  We watched him.  He watched the wall.

After a quarter hour, I finally tempted him to speak.

“Got the time?” I asked. 

He ever so eventually told me, “Yes.”

Dennis finally showed up with Natalie Akers.  She was about half loaded.

“Had to drag her out of Spanky’s,” he told us.

“So?” Natalie Akers said.

She was standing two feet from our suspect.

Meekins pointed. “Know him?”

Natalie looked. She wobbled.  She focused in time. “Should I?”

Our guy was studying the back wall.

“He remind you of anybody?” I asked.

“Not really.”

“So this isn’t Duke Six?” Meekins asked.

That earned her a snort and a “Jesus!”  Only then did Natalie Akers give our guy her full regard.  She circled the table where he was sitting.  He even glanced over at her once. 

“Look at him.  He’s like . . . old.”

It took nearly three hours before the major got pinged.  He came back Pettigrew.  Nathan Donald. The major read from his record off her laptop right in front of the guy, aiming for theatrical effect.

“SF.  Second Lieutenant.  A stint at SOG.  Fort Campbell.  Out in 2009.”

Nothing.

I translated for Meekins.  “Special Forces.  SOG’s part of the CIA.  Fort Campbell probably means . . . what?”  That was for the major.  “Persian Gulf?  Horn of Africa?”

She glanced at me like I was rancid.

“Spook,” I told Meekins.  “Hard core.”

“Nate?  Is that it?”  The major had gone back to our suspect. “We’ve got just the sort of carnage a guy like you could make.”

“A minute, major?” I said.

Another dyspeptic glance.

“It’s important,” I told her.

“Crucial probably.” That from Meekins.

We got a sneer.  She led us out the door.

“It’s not him,” I told her.

That raised the snort I’d expected.

“He’s probably in it somehow but . . .”

“We showed him to Kenny Fulcher,” Meekins told the major.  “Natalie Akers too.”  She shook my head.

“And he doesn’t fit the description we got,” I said. “A bartender.  Saw him up close.”

“A bartender?” The major might as well have said, “A crack whore?”

“I’d check him for family.  Army buddies.  Something like that.”

The major glanced from me to her lieutenant who, like always, was lurking hard by. He nodded and lit out for the situation room with the white board and the grisly photos. 

“Proper jail,” the Major told us.  “And you two take him.” That was a swipe at Dennis and his ilk who the major couldn’t see doing much right.

We cuffed him in front and rode him in the shotgun seat of the Tahoe.  Meekins drove.  I held to the seatback and quizzed him along the way.  He was melting a little. I could feel it. Mostly in how he breathed — inhaling maybe to have a word my way and then thinking better of it.

“Let’s stop for a minute,” I suggested once we were halfway down through Nag’s Head.

Meekins had taken the beach road to buy us a bit of time.  She pulled off in a lot next to an access trail through the dunes.  It was late afternoon with nobody around.  I let Meekins wrangle Pettigrew.  I picked up a couple of cider cans and tossed them in the refuse barrel.  Then I headed towards the beach and left Meekins to follow with the lieutenant.

She was polite and respectful.  “Watch your step, sir.”  The girl knew what she was doing in a way that Dennis and the chinless twins would never even approach.

Aside from the birds, we were alone on the beach.  The cottages as far as you could see were shuttered and vacant.  There was a washed up hunk of tree to the north.  What turned out to be a weathered scrap of boat bumper to the south.  The tide was low.  The wind was meager.  We could walk and not suffer for it.

I waited for Meekins and the lieutenant down where the sand was packed. She took the cuffs off Pettigrew without so much as a wink and a nod from me.

“A little air won’t hurt,” I told him mostly, and then the three of us walked south.

Meekins did what I did, which was nothing but walk.  We were a good ten minutes in silence. Then we stopped and watched a porpoise.  Meekins tossed a beached starfish into the surf.

“Brother?” I asked.

He looked my way. I got a sigh and a noncommittal twitch.

“In arms maybe?”

I took it for a nod.  Result enough to walk some more. Sandpipers ebbed and scattered before us.  A family way down the beach was taking their Christmas photo.  They’d brought a decorated spruce that they crowded around while the dad and the kids took turns trying to get the camera to fire.

“Why?” I asked. “Just nuts or something else?”

Pettigrew inhaled like he had designs to tell me, but then he made that face you make when stuff’s more fraught than you can say.

“You chasing him? Is that it?” Meekins asked.

Pettigrew inhaled again.

We tried to get a name out of him, but he wasn’t up for that.  In truth, he wasn’t up for much beyond watching the waves break and the gulls kite on the breeze.

We turned around after a mile or so and walked back to the car in silence.

We cuffed him again in the parking lot.

“Get to where you want to talk,” I said as I buckled him in, “you might best talk to us.”

He didn’t look convinced.

“Army’ll bury you.”

He made a noise in his neck that I took for “No shit, sport.”      

They put him in the far cell at Manteo.  The shift wouldn’t change for a couple of hours, so we couldn’t talk to the night guy, but we impressed on a handy sergeant that they should feed him if he wanted and otherwise leave him entirely alone.

I knew she’d show up, colonel or not, so when I got back to my beach box, I didn’t bother locking the door. The major was a quarter hour behind me, must have seen Meekins drop me in the PD lot.

She came straight in.

“So?” the major asked me.

“Pumped him, but . . . he’s not much of a talker.”

“Bet you did that folksy shit you do.”

“Can’t much help it.”

“You’re doing it now.”

“Am I?”

She poured herself a couple of inches rye.

“Nothing at all?”

“I didn’t say that.  Might be a brother in arms. Could be he’s chasing him too.”

“A dead Pettigrew sister is all we found.”

I must have looked slightly alarmed.

“Not fresh. ’84.  Car wreck in Pennsylvania.”

“How about army buddies?”

“His old CO’s putting a list together.”

She drained her rye.  She eyed me.  I knew what I was in for.  She closed on me.

“Don’t rip it,” I told her.  “I’m a little low on shirts.”

The major was ferocious, and not in the usual passingly unpleasant way but with sustained enthusiasm.  She was all teeth and elbows and rage.

“Where’s the colonel?” I asked her once she’d taken a breather.

“Around.”

“I thought maybe you were . . .”

“Shut it.”

“Post-coital breakthrough?  We’re having . . . like . . . a conversation.”

“Mid-coital,” she said as she grabbed me.  “Sit up.”

I couldn’t help but do it, getting hauled like I was.

The major ended up staying the night. We slept in shifts.  She’d conk out, and then I would. She only worked me a little in the small hours.  I had to think all the local bloodletting was taking a toll on us both.

There didn’t seem to be passion behind any of it, just clinical determination inspired and fueled by God knew what.  At least in a slaughterhouse, there’s a living to be made.  Our stuff was all something less.  Still senseless to us after weeks of sniffing around and squinting at it.

Our brand of getting somewhere but only in glacial stages can leave you numb.  It’s a narcotic thing.  I sure felt it.  The major must have as well,  notwithstanding her insect metabolism and unquenchable ambition.  She could fight it better than I ever would but not entirely and altogether.  I’d known her a bit by then but had never before seen her asleep.  And not just napping but collapsed and drooling, with all her exhaustion exposed.

“Getting to you?” I asked as the sun was coming up

She chuffed my way. It was her version of “I’m good.”

To prove it, she lifted the covers and had a gawk at my equipment. I’d woken up the way most men do.

“Look at you,” she said.

23

To hear it from the army, Nathan Donald Pettigrew had no friends at all.  They accounted in his paperwork for assorted distant blood relations, but his officer evaluation reports were all zero defect/lone wolf stuff. He was flawless and solitary. Special Forces, War College, mechanical and munitions, armored, infantry.  They’d plugged Pettigrew in all over, and he’d performed wherever he went.

“Regular tourist,” the colonel said as he handed me and Meekins our thin and redacted version of Pettigrew’s file.

We took turns flipping through it.  There was little worth seeing.  They’d taken all the useful stuff out.

“He out?”I asked.

“AWOL,” the major told me. “Walked off eighteen months ago.”

“No CBRN?” I asked the colonel. He glanced at the major.

She said, “Nope.”

Then Pettigrew himself showed up in the company of Lieutenant Browne. He was still as tidy as Cutler, even after a night in the Manteo lockup.  Creases only where he wanted them.  A shine still on his bluchers. The lieutenant hooked him to the eyebolt in interrogation two, and Betty set a cup of coffee before him in her ‘World’s Best Grandma!’ mug.  He sniffed it. French Roast and Jergens.  The boy had the sense to leave it untouched.

The colonel had decided they’d let him sit for half an hour while they rehearsed strategy in our situation room.  They tried to run me and Meekins out, but Cutler wouldn’t allow it.  All we heard was army brass making it clear they’d never interrogated anybody before. Not properly and for a criminal complaint or even a witness statement. It was the colonel mostly who had it all wrong.  He came across like a man who read trashy procedurals and watched way too much TV.

“He’s smarter than that,” I told him.

The major had the temerity to nod, which earned her a sidelong stand-down look.

“He’ll talk.  He’s army,” the colonel said.  He had a glance at Meekins. I do believe he even winked.

“Sounds like he’s his own thing now,” I told the colonel.

“So what would you do?” the major asked me.

I shrugged. “Just know pulling rank won’t help.”

“We’re going to charge him,” the colonel informed me and Meekins.

“What with?” Meekins asked him, and he shoved some sort of army form her way.

“For the car?” She kept from laughing somehow.

The colonel nodded.

They had a relay set up for the audio. We could hear it from where we were through a crappy Radio Shack speaker.  The creak of door hinges.  Chairs scraping. Paper getting sorted and shuffled.  Nothing from Pettigrew. He had a reptile stillness to him.

“Now,” the colonel started.  More paper. He’d passed across the charging sheet. “About your sedan.”

I now know Pettigrew shook his head.  The colonel thought he was making progress.  The smug was already rising in him when he told the suspect, “Go on.”

“Those two cops,” Pettigrew told the brass.  “Not you.”

They made all the noises they had to make.  Wasn’t for him to say.  Like that.  And the colonel aired a few low fiction threats about where a guy in Pettigrew’s circumstances might end up rotting and why. But you couldn’t play and bluster Pettigrew’s sort.  Me and Meekins had kind of come to that already.

“Sounds like we’re up,” Meekins said.

Chair scraping.  Hinge squeaking.  Then the brass was back in with us.

“If you’ve got better intel,” I told the colonel mostly, “give it.”

He handed me his unedited file. “We’ll be right here.” He pointed at our shitty speaker.

Me and Meekins went next door, unlocked Pettigrew from the eyebolt, walked him out to our Tahoe, and left the lot.

Betty raised us on the radio about the time we hit the four lane.  “Army wants you,” she said.

I wilcoed and 10-4ed and then switched the unit off.

“Where to?” Meekins asked me.

“Let’s find a piece of empty beach.”

She headed north.  Had a spot in mind.

“You eat?” I asked Pettigrew.

He nodded and showed me the cuffs he was wearing.

“When we get out,” I told him.  “We’re going to need something first. Who is he?”

Pettigrew considered his answer for a good quarter minute before he finally said back, “Me.”

“You?”

“He thinks so,” Pettigrew told me and showed me his cuffs again.

“How far?” I asked Meekins.

“Past Duck.  Ten minutes.”

Pettigrew shook his head.  He didn’t have ten minutes to spare.  “Got an itch,” he said.

“You’d better.”

I unlocked his cuffs.  He had a lumbar complaint and went clawing at it hard. He used one hand to steady himself while he gave relief with the other.

“Fleas,” he told us.

“Manteo?”

He nodded. He scratched some more.

“We talk, maybe you go somewhere else.”

“We’ll talk, and you’ve got nowhere else.”

“We’ll buy you some spray.”

Meekins was acquainted with a spot between Duck and Corolla where you could get out to the beach if you knew just where to turn off.  She drove straight down to the tide line. We left the Tahoe and walked farther north.  No people.  Just birds and something bigger a little ways up.

“Horses?” I asked.

Meekins nodded. “Run loose all the way to Virginia.”

The tide was out, and there were dead skates here and there along the shore.  Big ones, already stinking a bit. Ammonia tinged decay. We walked three abreast towards the clump of horses. I counted four of them.  They were eating sea oats.  They took turns watching us come.

“He got a name?” I asked Pettigrew.

“Don’t know it.”

“He army?” Meekins asked.

“Doubt it. Free mover.”

“Acting alone?” I asked.

“Picks up locals, but yeah.”

“How do you know him?” Meekins asked.

Pettigrew paused to organize himself, even stopped cold for thirty seconds. “It’s kind of complicated.”  Once he was ready, we moved on.

It was about the oddest story I ever hope to hear.

“I got a picture of a woman,” Pettigrew said.  “Part of a woman anyway. Found it in my porch light.”

He was living off base in Texas. One night his porch light was regular bright, and the next night it was dim.  Somebody had shoved something into the globe.  Pettigrew loosened the screws and dropped the thing down.

“A Polaroid,” he said.  “An arm.  A head.  A bit of torso.”

“Know her?” Meekins asked.

“Not exactly.”

Pettigrew did allow that she’d looked familiar to him, and he said he soon found out why.

“Worked the gate sometimes at Sam Houston.  I was six weeks there for training.”

We walked and waited.  He didn’t seem all that used to talking.  He’d fix his mouth to say and thing and then reconsider and think some more.

“Know her outside of work?” I asked.

He shook his head.  “I helped her with her gearbox once.”

“What’s that even mean?” Meekins wanted to know.

“On the gate arm,” Pettigrew told us.  “It got hung up.  I helped her shake it loose.”

“Where was she killed?”

“Found her at Lackland.  Leon Creek.”

“Lackland Air Force Base?”

Pettigrew nodded my way.

“You go to the cops with the photo?” Meekins asked.

“Came to me.”

“Why?”

Pettigrew tapped his inner thigh.  “My social was written right there.”

“On the body?”

He nodded Meekins way.

“Any suspects aside from you?” I asked him.

“Yeah.”  He squinted as he started to dredge them up. 

One of the horses up the beach went frisky and charged into the surf.  The others just lifted their heads and watched before going back to the oats and the scrub.

“Best bet was a sergeant with a woman problem.” Pettigrew showed us his fist. “A couple of San Antonio lowlives.  They pulled prints from one of them around the scene.”

“What was his story?” Meekins asked.

“Blackout drunk. No gumption.  No motive.  Couldn’t remember being anywhere. Doing anything.”  We all heard a pelican hit the water like a valise.

“They didn’t find that guy for a couple of weeks.  Warrant out on him in Indianapolis.  He was in the back seat of the car he’d stolen. Parked in the lot of the Alamodome. Six pieces. My social was on him too?”

“Cops there must have put you through it,” I said.

He nodded.  They liked him a lot, but who’d write his own social on a corpse.  So then they liked him only a little.  Then they thought he was lying to them about deviants he knew.  After that they went cold on him until the case got shifted, and a brand new pair of detectives decided they liked him all over again.

“I made lists,” he said.  “Everybody.  Even people I’d just seen and didn’t know. Pages and pages.  Culling and sorting.  Talked to all my neighbors.  Pulled all the files I could get on base.”

“And?”

“Nothing,” Pettigrew told me .  “I mean, the usual twitchy shits, but nobody jumped out.”

“You go see them?” Meekins asked.

“The ones I could find. Best prospect was in El Reno.”  We waited.  We walked.  “He was doing a bit for larceny, but he’d gotten up to some evil shit in the army. Bladework mostly.”

“Where?”

“Zabul.  Pakistan border.”

He told us what he could remember of the El Reno inmate.  A PFC from Idaho.  Aggressive but with a psychotic streak.  Probably started with sparrows and cats and then worked his way up to Pashtuns. Men mostly.  He’d gut them like brook trout, though there was a woman he did take apart.

“How did he end up free to do time in El Reno?” Meekins quite sensibly wanted to know.

“You serve?” Pettigrew asked.

She shrugged.  “Coast guard.”

“Shooting war.  Long one.  A blind eye gets you through.”

The horses scattered as we closed.  They were scrawny and looked moth-eaten, probably about like you had to look if you lived on the beach and ate dune scrub.

“Why are these even out here?” Pettigrew wanted to know.

I was a bit surprised.  First impression had him as guy with his facts all down, but the more we talked to him, the more we heard from him, the looser he got.  The more ordinary.  He had a bit of a twang he’d picked up somewhere.  Not Pennsylvania, where he’d been born.  And while he might have been creased and tidy outside, he was a fair bit more casual under the skin.

“Spaniards,” Meekins told him.  She had all the details ready, had probably explained those ponies to tourists a blue million times.

Pettigrew heard her out. He finally said,  “Look a little like goats.”

We stopped.  The wind had picked up out of the north, so we eased over to the shelter of the dunes and sat among the sea oats and the usual sprinkling of beachgoer trash.  Crinkly water bottles, the head of a child’s yellow shovel. A pile of shells somebody had collected and left behind.

“How do you track him?” I asked. “News reports?”

Pettigrew shook his head.  “He sends me stuff.”

We waited.

“Maps.  Brochures.  Photos.  Hair. Coasters.  Napkins. Coupons.  Stuff.”

“Hair?”

Pettigrew nodded Meekins’ way.  “Braided strips, tied with twine.”

“Get it tested?” I asked him.

He nodded. “Victims’ sometimes.  Sometimes not.”

“You’ve been to the Feds about all this, right?” Meekins asked.

The answer should have been, “Of course.” Pettigrew knew it.  Me and Meekins knew it too.  But Pettigrew had stuck to his army contacts and and tried to manage the thing on his own.  A bit of homicidal bother that was personal at bottom.  He’d figure it out.  He’d lay hands on the guy. He’d do what he had to do.

“Not as such,” he told Meekins.

She snorted, but I was middlingly sympathetic.  If a guy roped me in like that, I might just chase him myself too .

“So what’s the pattern?” I asked Pettigrew.  “And how does CBRN figure?”

“Don’t know that it does.”

“The brass here seems to think it’s all bundled together,” Meekins told him.

“Doubt it.  Not in any way they think.”

“You got a theory?” I asked.

He nodded.  “Or three.”

We waited.  He started with the one he liked least. It’s was essentially the army’s version with vague terrorist undertones.  

“Probably bullshit,” he said in the end.

Meekins wasn’t so sure.  “Why?” she asked. 

“Hard to mix harm to the many,” I told Meekins, “with butchery to the few.  Different impulses.  Almost always different people.”

“So I can’t hack you up and then blow you up?”

“You could,” I told her, “but you wouldn’t.”

Pettigrew nodded and pointed my way as if to tell Meekins, “What he said.”

It was a fact of homicidal life.  People did things their way for their reasons. Cold or impassioned.  Planned or improvised. Diabolical or stupid and wasteful.  One or the other and only ever rarely the two together.

“He looks kind of like you,” Meekins told Pettigrew.  “You aware of that?”

Pettigrew nodded.  “Nos sumus.”

We waited.

“It’s latin.  He painted it on my door frame in San Antonio. Red lacquer.  Right across at the top.”

We waited some more as Pettigrew watched the breakers.  Only ever so eventually did he translate. 

“We are us.”

24

The colonel was threatening to climb the ladder, call the governor or something, by the time we hit the asphalt again and I’d switched the radio on.

“He wants you both charged,” Betty said.

“What with?”

“Absconding, I think he called it.”

“Tell him to meet us at the first house. Lieutenant Kline,” I told Betty.  “Twenty minutes. And they need to bring Pettigrew’s car.”

That beach house smelled like a sock drawer.  The owner was agitating to rehab it.  He’d gotten some kind of insurance pay out and wanted to dress the place up a little before he put it back up for rental as a macabre attraction.

He’d explained it all to Cutler and had figured he could make, high season, an extra five hundred a week. Now he was just pecking at us to turn it loose already.  He was in the driveway moving sand with a snow shovel when we pulled up.

“Now what?” he said.

“Almost done,” I told him.

He muttered and moved more sand.  He had a layer of it on his asphalt driveway.  By the end of the week, it would all have blown right back.

We left him stewing and went around to the deck and let ourselves in. The colonel and the major rolled in not five minutes later.  Both mad.

I watched Pettigrew eye the place while I ignored the colonel’s various questions about what we’d gotten up to.  The major at least knew to study Pettigrew too as her lieutenant came in to hand over the keys to his Ford.

The colonel took them.  “I don’t know where you think he’s going.”

“Wheel well?” I said to Pettigrew and put out my hand for the keys.

He nodded.  “Under everything.”

I went around front just as Cutler was rolling up in his cruiser. More muttering from the owner.  No room to shovel anymore.

“Anything?” Cutler asked me.

I unlocked the trunk of the Ford as I told him, “Might be weirder than we figured.”

I pulled the spare tire out of the well.  The jack.  The lug wrench.  A half a quart of oil and long-neck bottle of gas treatment. A couple of rags.  A can of WD-40.

Cutler watched and waited. “Weirder how?” he finally asked me. 

I found the loose bit of trunk carpet just where Pettigrew had said I would and tugged at it until the whole thing came free like a scab. He’d packed the stuff into freezer baggies.  A half dozen of them in various sheet steel channels and depressions.  I collected them all and put them in order.  They were dated and numbered where you’d usually write “chicken cutlets” or “chopped steak”.

Bag number one — October of 2012.  The porch light photo was right on top where I could see it through the plastic.  Pieces of a girl.  I showed the snap to Cutler.

“Texas,” I said.

“So he’s talking?”  Cutler glanced towards the house.

“Just had to give him some space.”

We went inside, and I laid the baggies on the dinette.  Lieutenant Browne with an e made like he wanted to organize and catalog the contents, like the stuff was his already just from being where it was.  But the major knew better.

“Let him,” she said of Pettigrew, who took careful and deliberate charge of all his stuff.

We watched him pick through the contents of each freezer bag and lay out the snapshots and post cards, receipts and coupons, bar coasters and cocktail napkins, letters and envelopes in just the order he wanted. He was never quite done.  He’d pause and assess, but there was always something a little out of place.

Finally, once he was passably satisfied, instead of starting in on his story, Pettigrew took another look around  at the house we were in.  Jesus on a donkey by the doorway.  The guy next to the fish.  Fingerprint dust on the microwave. Dirty coffee cups in the sink.

“Tell me about here,” he said.

The major pointed my way.  “He found her.”

“Get a call?”

“No,” I told him.  “I was just a civilian back then.  Found a kid on the beach, followed him here.”

“How old?” Not a question I’d expected.

I swung around to eye the women like maybe they’d know better, being girls and all.  I forgot it was the major and Meekins, neither exactly the motherly type.

“Barely walking,” I said.  “I don’t think he can talk.”

“Child of the deceased?” Pettigrew asked.

I shook my head.

He pointed towards the deck door.  “Through there?”

I nodded.

“How’d it go?”

“It was open a little.  The place was neat.  Some racket down there.” I pointed towards the hallway.  “Seagull in the front bedroom.”

“Part of it?”

“The bird?”

He nodded.

“I figured it came in on its own.”

I walked down the hallway with Pettigrew just behind me and the colonel and the rest of them trailing.

We stopped at the front bedroom. “Bird.”

“Door closed?” he asked.

I cast back.  It had been. I nodded.

Then he gestured down the hallway. “Go on.”

“I think I smelled it first.  Blood, you know?”

He nodded.  Right, blood.

“It had leaked out under the door.” I pointed.  “The shallow stuff was crusty.”

“How long had she been here?”  Pettigrew asked that generally.

Lieutenant Browne with an e, at the back of the pack, spoke up and said, “Eight to twenty-four.”

Then we all crowded in the murder room, which was pretty much untouched but for the scraps and bits and bobs of things that had been hauled off for evidence.  The knotty pine ceiling was still splattered with blood. The mattress — it’s cover confiscated — was still stained from getting soaked through.

“Hatchet was there.” I pointed towards the chifforobe and Pettigrew went over to have a look at the crease it had left in the wood.

“He’s used hatchets before?” the major asked.

Pettigrew paused to give the question some thought.  The colonel made an impatient snorty noise, but Pettigrew couldn’t be rushed.

“Camp ax once,” he finally said.

“That’s a . . .?” the colonel started.

“Tweener,” Meekins told him.  “Hatchet with ambitions.”

“Any writing on her?” Pettigrew asked.

The major told him, “No.”

“How many victims?” the colonel wanted to know. “Altogether.”

Pettigrew squinted like that was a number he’d have to do some math about.

“Ballpark it,” the colonel instructed him.

“There are primaries and secondaries,” Pettigrew said.  “Worker bees.  Collaterals.  You know?”

We did.

“I’d guess a dozen,” Pettigrew finally told us.

“That’s workers and . . .?” the colonel asked.

“Primaries only.  Hard to know about the others.  Probably haven’t found them all yet.”

We went back to the dinette where Pettigrew busied himself rearranging his snapshots.  He would pick up a photo, see it semi-fresh, and tell himself some version of “Oh yeah.  This.”

He laid the victims out in order and then had to readjust them.  He had snaps of most of the primaries, delivered to him in porch light globes or something.  Newspaper clippings for the rest of them. A baker’s dozen as it turned out. Most of them active service.  A couple of them mustered out.  Eleven women, two men.

“That’s odd, isn’t it?” Cutler asked.  “I mean the whole thing’s damn strange, but wouldn’t you think it’d be all one or the other?”

Plainly Pettigrew had run that through his machinery as well. “You would.  This isn’t.”

That was Pettigrew all over — answered and non-responsive both at once.

“Ever seen him?” I asked.

Another pause.  “I think so.  Maybe.  Memphis.”

He had a dog-eared piece of a map, a couple of squares that had ripped from the rest.  Memphis along the river.  Mud Island.  Jeff Davis Park.

“Here.”  He tapped his index finger on a building by the river, the Tennessee Welcome Center.  “Saw I guy at the sink when I went in the men’s room. Finished up and went over.  Found this.”

Pettigrew plucked a Polaroid of a human leg from in among his assortment.  There was something written on it, in Sharpie it looked like. “On top of the towel dispenser.”

“What’s it say?” That from the colonel.

“Italian.  Scalogna. Bad luck.”

“Latin?” I said.  “Italian? What’s the deal?”

Pettigrew just shrugged.

“What did he look like?” The major once more.

Pettigrew squinted and thought.  “Neat.  Slim. Built to blend.” He could well have been describing himself.

“Any idea why?” Cutler asked. He gestured as if to say all of it.

“He’s got a plan,” Pettigrew said.  He picked up a receipt and flipped it over.  French on the back in black ink.  Don du ciel. “Godsend,” he said.

“From where?” I asked of the receipt he was holding.

“Mail slot.  Savannah. He’s definitely got a plan.”

“We’re listening,” the colonel told him.

“It’s his plan. You’ll need to ask him. I’m just in it somehow.”

I knew what he meant.  I’d chased a nut before.  Less ambitious.  Killed cats and tree squirrels out in the Blue Ridge countryside where people tend to do that sort of thing in

a recreational way.  You’ve got a gun.  You see a cat.  You’re halfway into a pint of rum. It happens.  You might even regret it a little your first sober moment in the morning.  But the world’s full of cats.  And one running loose . . . his time’s borrowed anyway.

As for the squirrels, it’s easy to write them off as a plague of vermin.  So my nut was playing within the limits for at least the first little while. Then he started taking pieces.  It’s one thing to find Fluffy dead and stiff out in the kitchen garden.  But if she’s been hauled off and brought back with, say, her bladder gone, then that’s a whole other brand of upset.

People out in the Blue Ridge are self-sufficient and clannish, so various pockets of them decided they’d deal with the vicious shithead themselves.  They had to locate him first, and it was a shithead-rich environment, so there was quite a lot of sifting and sorting that went on. That’s where I got involved.  I got called out one Wednesday night to a church supper where a woman had brought a casserole with suspicious meat goods in it.  Rabbit, as it turned out, but she got such a quizzing that her husband and her son had to come to her aid and ended up in a fight.

The husband’s older brother had served in Korea where people made meals of cats, and the man didn’t like the insinuation that his wife had gone oriental.  They didn’t own cats.  They didn’t like cats.  They didn’t stew cats in cream of mushroom soup.

“So maybe squirrel then,” one of the inquisitors suggested, and the husband with the brother who’d fought in Korean took that worse somehow.

To his way of thinking, squirrel was what you ate if you lived in Kentucky.  He’d known people from Kentucky, and he’d never liked them much. 

They fell to fighting, of course, and there’s no fighting quite like the back hollow Baptist sort.  Steel-toed boots and folding chairs. Lots of Scripture flying around. By the time me and a couple of colleagues showed up, there was widespread call for sutures and bags of ice.

Back in the hills, I was always the one who got to listen to the various witness accounts and the stories the malefactors had decided justified them.  I wasn’t from the Blue Ridge.  I was from down in the urban flatlands, so I’d make people explain every little thing like I’d just dropped from Mars. Sometimes that took the wind out of them.  Other times, like with the cats, we found out stuff we hadn’t known.

“Cats and squirrels?” I remember asking.

The clan that was upset was mostly upset about Mitchell.  A big brindled cat that had long hung around the retread man’s garage.  Everybody knew Mitchell.  Even I knew Mitchell.  He’d sleep on the discarded stack of tread rubber right between the bay doors, and whenever you’d walked past him, he’d take a swipe.  Claws out.  Murderous intent. Mitchell wasn’t remotely friendly, so we might have admired his sour spunk, but nobody liked him much. 

Then he got gone, and people adored him, especially that clan of Baptists who’d decided he was in the with the green beans and canned fried onions and the soup.

“Rabbit,” the woman told me.  And her husband had started in backing her up when one of the boys in the Mitchell clan began ticking off cats he knew to be gone.

“Hold it,” I said.  “Gone how?”

And that’s how the law got filled in.  That was the way it went up there in the hills.  We were the last to know just about everything. Even still, it wasn’t like we mounted any sort of investigation.  Coyotes killed cats.  Dogs killed cats.  The felines that went missing were always living rough.  The cats were out and available.  They got gone.  The squirrels were more in the way of a public nuisance.  More tomatoes to go uneaten.  More fruit to ripen on the trees.

We all had theories.  Most of us anyway.  There was a guy named Flynn with the state police who couldn’t be bothered with a theory. “Hillbillies,” he’d say as his explanation for every local enormity. 

They did get up to a lot of mess, those people, but we suspected the cat and squirrel stuff to be out of the ordinary, especially once we got shown a couple of felines with guts removed and all stitched up.

We persuaded a local vet to open one up and tell us what was missing.  Just about everything, as it turned out.  All of it replaced with a doily. A lacy one big enough to cover a table two feet around. It had coffee stains on it mixed in with blotches of seepy cat gore.  It hadn’t been shoved in in any particular way.  Not rolled or pleated or folded.  Just crammed.

“Must be some kid,” the vet suggested.  “You know how mean they can be.”

We let that satisfy us.  We weren’t an investigative force.  We just tried to keep the locals from actively killing each other.  Locked them up when they were drunk at the wheel or warring with their wives.  It was that sort of place.  Barely civil. Only just holding on.

Then a woman none of us really knew died of a coronary.  She passed in her sleep and laid in and soured for the better part of a week. She had no people locally, just a daughter down in Mobile who only checked in every other month or so.  Consequently, she would have been spoiling for longer if a man hadn’t come around wanting to top the black oaks in her yard.

He smelled her.  He called us.  He hoped — like people do — for a finder’s fee or at the very least a radio spot for his business.  Tree topping was not the thriving enterprise he’d sort of planned on it to be.

Since foul play didn’t look to figure in, my colleagues mostly stood around.  They did it way out in the side yard, upwind from the house.  I wasn’t intending to poke through the place, but a jar in the kitchen caught my eye.  A pint jar on a shelf above the sink.  It was parked between a glass ballerina and a corncob with a face and contained a little brownish thing about the size of a shelled peanut.  It turned out to be a squirrel part in brine.  A gland I’d never heard of. A cecum.

I did that thing I do sometimes, told myself, “Hmm.  I wonder,” and went off on a scour on the strength of that floating brownish thing alone.

She had a room set aside for her hobby.  It might have been a nursery once.  It was off a bedroom on the far end of the attached bath.  You had to pass the toilet and the shower stall to reach it, and it was quite a thing to discover.  A poisoned psyche on elaborate display.

It’s hard to describe.  The contents were organized but not remotely tidy.  Cat and squirrel parts in pickle jars.  Drawings on dime store notebook paper like a child would do.  Photographs clipped from magazines.  Lots of chipmunks and possums, I noticed.  She’d been taking them apart as well, but they’d gone entirely unmissed.

There were a couple of leather-bound photograph albums.  Family snapshots mixed with guts.  And some skins tacked up on the wallboard.  Cat.  Racoon.  Weasel, I think.  Bullfrog certainly.

“Hey, Ray,” I heard one my colleagues shout.  It was Phil, a kid from the valley who was way too soft for the work.  Not that he couldn’t handle himself.  Just that he was overly hopeful and had a way of wading into stuff thinking it would all work out.

“Back here.”

Phil found me standing in among the critter detritus.  “Suzy got up with the daughter,” he started, and then he saw what I’d found.  

“No!” he said.  People kept disappointing him.

“Yep.”

“Christian woman. Bibles all over the place.”

“Right.”

The last I heard, Phil was teaching English to orchard migrants in the valley. Working for hardly anything on some kind of government grant.

Pettigrew’s guy was a different fish but was swimming in the same kind of water.  The stuff Pettigrew had collected was good for tracking down the corpses, but puzzling over all the details wasn’t going to help us much.

That was my position anyway.  The colonel and the major differed as did, most especially, Lieutenant Browne with an e.  He was profoundly officious, and Pettigrew’s stuff could be organized and ranked.  Some of it dispatched to Quantico and tested.  That sort of thing always sounds productive, and sometimes even is. 

Meekins and Cutler were plainly half-seduced by the appeal of handing the goods to the army and letting them come back with a profile.  Or, maybe better, a DNA or a fingerprint match.

I had other ideas and went diplomatic. “Let’s go both ways,” I suggested.  “You do your stuff,” I told the major, “and we’ll go around with the bait.”  I meant me and Meekins and Pettigrew. “Where’s the harm?”

“Flush him out?  Like that?” Cutler said.

“Maybe.  If he’s still here.”

Cutler glanced at the colonel and the major as if he was seeking their permission.  But that was just a thing he did,  a prelude to saying, “All right.”

“Is he still here?” the major asked Pettigrew.

Pettigrew considered the question.  He nodded.

“The longer this goes on,” he said, “the more he’s where I am.”

25

Officer Hodges from Nag’s Head called Meekins with grim news just before we left the house. The army took Pettigrew, and we headed south.  They were waiting for us in the pull out beyond the lot at Jockey’s Ridge.  The same spot where we’d found Jo Jo’s truck the last time we were there. 

It was sitting pretty much where it had sat before. Me and Meekins took a look in the trashy back bay while Hodges did the courtesies and introduced us to his sergeant.

“What ya’ll got going up there?” he asked us and glanced north towards Kill Devil Hills.

I let Meekins take it.  “Motivated nutbag.”

The sergeant nodded.  Chewed something, probably his cheek. “Squash him, why don’t you,” he suggested and then went off to have a butt.

I saw no trace of Jo Jo anywhere.  “Where is he?” I asked Hodges.

He motioned for us to follow him and led us out of the scrub and into the dunes. We crested the first one and went down in the crease where the crime-scene boys had set up a tent in the sand.  A big sky blue one with the sides rolled down.

“How bad?” I asked.

“Hard to say.”

Hodges drew back a flap and let us go in first.  There was woman, a civilian, squatting by a pair of upraised legs.  They were planted in the sand around mid thigh.  Greasy pant legs on them that had retreated almost to the knee.  Nasty socks and cruddy boots.  Jo Jo all right.

Hodges tried to introduce us to Dr. somebody, but she threw up a hand to stop him.  She’d met all the cops she needed.

“When you dig him up,” she said to Hodges, “big clearance, and box the sand.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

We did what inspecting we could manage.

“Blood anywhere?” I asked.

Hodges shook his head.  “Nothing.  Here.  The truck.  In between. Not a drop.”

A couple of paper-suit boys came in with shovels. As they dug and bagged, me and Meekins took a long, looping walk downwind.  The breeze was coming off the ocean, and anything it caught would have ended up in the dunes and the scrubby weeds down along the sound.

Meekins told as we headed towards the water, “Now I’m just pissed at the guy. Jo Jo, for fuck’s sake?”

I’d been there.  I told her, “Yep.”  You start vengeful and indignant but touched still with a bit of mercy. People lose their heads and do awful things.  Been doing it throughout time.  It could be you — drunk, angry, and with a pistol at hand.  But the repeaters like our guy are just malignant.  There’s no sense in feeling complicated about them.  Pissed is the way to go.

“Who else are we going to find in pieces?” Meekins asked.

“Anybody missing?”

“Of course. It’s the beach in goddamn winter.  Half the people here came to be missing.”

I stopped and had a leisurely, assessing look at Meekins.

“I thought,” she told me after a moment, “I might even like this job.”

“Well, there’s your mistake.”

We went back to stalking through the fine sand towards the sound.

“You seem to like it.”

“Nope. It likes me.”

I told Meekins about a case I’d cracked.  Must have been my second or third.  Double homicide on the outskirts of Commerce, Georgia.  A guy and his brother-in-law, both of them shot with the same pistol.  A .38 the brother-in-law owned.

“One of them dead in the front doorway.  The other out in the yard.  Rubberneckers down in the road.  I was holding them back with my partner.  He kept jawing at them.  ‘Back up.  Go home.’ Like that.  Me, I just watched them and listened.”

It wasn’t a strategy.  More my disposition. I’d heard a boy say, “They’s shitheads.”  He was telling it to himself.  There was a tone to it.  A way it came out.  It sounded like an explanation. I stuck with that guy.  Just hovered around him and watched him fall apart.”

“He confessed?”

“Sort of.  Big misunderstanding, you know?  Unfortunate accident.”

“So I should be a better listener?”

“You do that pretty well.”

“What then?”

“Don’t sour on it yet.  That’s all I’m saying.  This is a bad one, a hard one.  Stuff’s usually simpler than this.  You can see through the clutter. That’s one thing I know.  Dennis and them . . .” I shook my head.

Meekins chewed on that compliment (rare-ish from me) as we approached a wire fence at the bottom of the dunes along the sound.

“Think of the fix you’d leave Cutler in.”

She saw it first.  I heard it.  It was an odd racket for OBX.  The crinkle and wind-blown snap of a plastic shopping bag, the very kind that had been outlawed at the shore for several years.  So you hardly saw them snagged on stuff or tumbling before a breeze down the street.

This one was white and had Thank You! printed on it.  White anyway except for where it was smeared with something else. I plucked a reed I could bend and used it to pinch one of the handles.  The blood was all on the inside, dried and flakey.  There was a receipt in the bag bottom as well.  I could read part of it.

“CVS.”

“Creeping Jesus.  A clue,” Candy said.  “Tell me it’s talking to you.”

“What’s that?” I pointed at a red thing on the ground. A common item.  Something you see everyday, but not out on its own and loose.

Meekins turned it over with a piece of shell. It was gritty and moist and three inches long — the better part of a human tongue.

Dr. ma’am came down with evidence bags.

“KDH?” she asked as we scoured the fencerow.

Me and Meekins nodded.

“Still using Orby?”

We nodded again.

“That girl of his is going to kill him one day.”

“We’re taking wagers on that,” I said.

She was a handsome woman.  Tending towards hard like the major, but she didn’t look to take it so far. Meekins must have found her to be a handsome woman too because she kept putting me back to work every time I paused to talk to the doctor.

“Ray,” she’d say and point at the ground like our sort of search couldn’t wait.

I felt like I knew what would happen. Me and Meekins were doomed to pass a semi-sober night together, and then we’d snarl at each other about it for a while, and then we’d both be tempered and all right.

Once Dr. ma’am headed up the face of the dune, I made a point of watching her go, chiefly so I could hear Meekins tell me, “Ray,” just like she did.

I was slow to turn back and so wasn’t full around when Meekins hit the water.

“Ray!” This wasn’t about Dr. ma’am at all.

I eased over the half-collapsed fence and stopped at the ribbon of beach.  High tide.  The strip of sand was maybe twelve inches wide.  Meekins had waded out into the water.  I say waded.  The sound is notoriously shallow, so she was ten yards out but still just ankle deep.

“What?”

I could tell by the way she was peering into the water that she’d found something grisly.

“Get her back.”

I whistled.  Dr. ma’am stopped.  I motioned, and she came trudging back down the dune.

It was hands.  Two of them with a carriage bolt through them. Jo Jo’s hands almost for sure.  They were scuffed and and nicked, but they were clean.  Real clean, even under the nails. Meekins left them on the shallow bottom. Two fingertips were just breaking the surface. 

We were both standing in the chilly water.  She’d made me come out too.

Dr. ma’am wasn’t keen to join us.

“What have you got?”

“Pair of hands,” Meekins said.  “Bolt through them.”

“Water’s probably spoiled them already,” Dr. ma’am told us.  “Pick them up and bring them over.”

Meekins didn’t.  I waited.  She waited to.

“You pick them up,” she finally told me. “I did my bit.  I saw them.”

They were icebox cold, the flesh was stiff.

Meekins beat me to the shore.

Meekins and the doc double-bagged the hands.  The bolt was a problem, and Dr. ma’am took charge and carried the package gingerly.  We brought the rest of what we’d come across and all climbed the dune together.

“What have you heard?” I asked as we climbed the dune.

“I know you’ve got victims.  Disarticulation.  Three, right?”  She glanced as best she could in the direction of the sky-blue tent. “Now four.”

“On OBX, yeah,” I said.

That got her attention.

“How many and where?”

I looked towards Meekins.  She wasn’t ready to answer either.

“Going to have to leave it at all over and lots.”

They’d dug up Jo Jo by the time we got to the tent.  It had been easier work than they’d counted on since he was in six pieces.  Legs.  Torso. Arms.  Head.  They’d laid them out on a tarp in no particular order, so it looked weirder than it needed to.

“Hands,” doctor ma’am said and set the evidence bag on the tarp.

We looked on as the boys in the jumpsuits shoveled sand into the sorts of sacks they use in floods and hurricanes.  It didn’t look terribly stained, just powdery and blonde for the most part.

She stepped over to the hole those guys had left and had a glance in for carnage.  Then she inspected the sacked sand and told us all, “Almost certainly not killed here.”

“Does he look extra clean to you?” I asked Hodges.

“Does.”

“Where would you scrub a Jo Jo?” I asked generally.

Meekins knew and told us all, “Somebody else’s house.”

Of course, OBX was wall-to-wall somebody else’s houses, so Cutler put together a chart that ran from Nag’s Head to Kitty Hawk.  The thinking was, if we came up dry, we’d stretch it out in either direction, but we hoped even a full-scale exotic nut like ours would want to cut back on portage. So the bullseye was hard by Jockey’s Ridge, and a mix of deputies from all over went door to door with reps from the management firms who had all the codes and keys.

Straightaway they found a dead guy, nosed him up on the west side of 12.  He’d been shoved into a kitchen cupboard.  It looked like a blow to the head had cashed him in, and a deputy even found the murder weapon, a hideous driftwood lamp.

A couple of the boys knew the deceased.  His name was Porter, and he was a bit of a hound.

He looked maybe six weeks gone.  His woman friend, who worked at the Nag’s Head Dollar Tree, had been saying around that Porter was out in his fishing boat somewhere. She’d claimed to have seen him off.  Said she’d gotten a call or two. She’d landed a new guy in the meantime.  He was big and blunt and dumb.

“See,” I told Meekins once they’d sworn out the warrant.  “It’s usually something like that.”

The search turned up other stuff too.  Stolen goods.  Narcotics.  Lots of moldy cheese food slices.  Then in a cottage called Shore Beats Work N’, which looked just like it had to, a pair of deputies and a guy from Cape Realty found the grim leavings we’d all been looking for.  In the master tub.  On the raw tile floor. Tracks all over the snow-white carpet.  Those boys took turns throwing up.

Cutler brought in Doc-O.  “To observe,” he informed Dr. ma’am, but Doc-O was hardly the observing sort, so he and Dr. ma’am got into a spat that turned immediately toxic and personal the way most everything with Doc-O did. By the time me and Meekins reached the house, the two medical professionals were shrieking at each other on the screen porch.

We found Cutler and his counterpart from Nag’s Head, a stout woman named Marlene, standing in the back bathroom doorway.

Chief Marlene pointed towards the shouting doctors and made a face at Cutler.

He told her, “He’ll get winded. Always does.”

Too many Pall Mall’s and clam fritters.  Doc-O would be panting before long.

“Feds in on this?” Marlene asked.

“Army,” Cutler told her.

On cue Lieutenant Browne with an e showed up in the back bedroom doorway and said to Cutler, “A word?”

He retreated and waited.  Cutler stayed where he was.  He was well past answering to army lieutenants.

The lieutenant lurked for a while and then came back in and tried to speak discreetly to Cutler.  Cutler didn’t like that either and said to Lieutenant Browne with an e, “Spit it out.”

So me and Meekins and Marlene too all got to hear the lieutenant tell Cutler that the colonel and the major were bringing in an army crime-scene team and a couple of forensic specialists to process the scene. That made the shrieking on the porch even more unnecessary.

“Fine,” Cutler told him.

He glanced at Marlene. She wasn’t about to swim upstream on this one.  She shrugged.

“We’ve made arrangements with the hospital.” The lieutenant country pointed towards the facility over by the mall. “We’re set up in the basement.”

“We get to observe,” Cutler insisted.

“Within limits.”  The lieutenant had paperwork to that effect.  He pulled it from his satchel and offered it Cutler who wouldn’t take it and wouldn’t sign it but just stepped into the bathroom as he asked Marlene primarily, “We got a blade yet?”

They did.  It was a kitchen knife, and not an especially fine one but just a standard-issue box-store blade with no edge on it much.  We studied the thing with Cutler through the evidence baggie they’d sealed it in.

“We probably ought to look for accomplices,” Meekins said. “Or pieces of them anyway.”

“Let’s see what they get on the prints,” Cutler told her, “though I guess a head count on our lowlives wouldn’t hurt.”

“Dennis and them?” I suggested.

Cutler nodded.

“Where’s Pettigrew?” I asked.

“Around.”

Closer than I’d have guessed. The army had him back in bracelets, and the major brought him into the bathroom for a look. The scene was hardly as grim as it could have been.  The work had been done in the tub, so most of the blood and giblets had washed down the drain.

Doc-O was sitting in an Adirondack chair by the time me and Meekins reached the porch.  Janice had lit a Pall Mall for him and was standing by with Doc-O’s boxes.  Dr. ma’am was out in the driveway on her phone.

“You all right?” I asked Doc-O.  It seemed a fair question.  He was panting like a pekingese.

He flicked ash off his cigarette.  Collected the breath he needed and then told me (and probably Meekins a little), “Fuck off.”

26

You’d have thought the general populous would have been frantic and up in arms, but there was not a lot of reporting for folks to go on.  Up north in Virginia and east past Raleigh, the murders made a bit of a racket, but there was precious little local news access on OBX proper.  An AM station that specialized in traffic updates and weather reports with some country music thrown in when the roads and the skies were clear.  An FM station that was wall-to-wall advertising in summer for lodging and eats and tourist attractions.  It seemed to run a loop in the winter of orchestral treacle and Bible verses.

The Coastal Herald was the only newspaper, and I think it appeared maybe once a week. They had reporters on staff out of Manteo who covered local zoning issues, wrote up high-school sports and craft shows. All of their proper news was from the wires, the kind that took a long time to go stale. Geo-political upset, gadget reviews, arctic ice melt, like that.

So we were hardly getting the push you might expect from the killings we had.  The community executives got selective details from Cutler but nothing alarming enough to stir them.  They were worried primarily about property values.  That was what mattered most up and down the beach since you couldn’t keep selling crappy stick-built homes on stilts for a cool half million in a resort community where people kept getting separated into parts.

I’d gotten to where I was mostly wondering at the stamina of the killer.  Once you’ve diced up six or eight carcasses, how can you sustain your interest? I was just hoping the guy wouldn’t hang around the shore until Memorial Day. It was rich killing ground, and — to hear it from Pettigrew — he was just the right type to blend in.

So we had incentive enough to catch him, but it wasn’t the usual sort.  No public pressure to speak of, and Cutler was mostly exasperated. By the killings.  By the army.  By our ongoing lack of progress and our reliance, now, on Pettigrew, who was some strain of flake himself.

“This can’t go on, can it?” Cutler had taken to asking me two or three times a day.

So now we had Jo Jo closing on Christmas.  A dead strawberry blonde lieutenant and a pair of legs in November.  Kenny Fulcher charged as an accessory and sitting in the Manteo lockup. Natalie Akers most anywhere they poured tequila. Somebody’s toddler.  We couldn’t yet say whose.  And Pettigrew and his quarry.  Nos sumus.

Me and Meekins chewed on the thing driving north from Jo Jo’s bloody beach box.

“Can’t be Pettigrew.  Can be sure of that anyway.”

I nodded.  At last a thing we could be sure of.

“What’s the draw, I wonder?” Meekins kept looking over.  She wouldn’t let me just sit and shrug.

“Salt air?  Crab cakes?  Hell, I don’t know.”

“If I was Cutler,” she said, “I’d call in the feds.”

“The Bureau?”

She nodded.

“Army not doing it for you?”

She shook her head.  “But then I’m not plowing a major.”

I waited.  I’m damn fine at waiting.  “Plowing?” I finally said.

We rolled into the lot of the PD and dropped into the situation room where Lieutenant Browne had organized all of Pettigrew’s goods. The snapshots.  The sketches.  The scraps of roadmap.  The receipts for various bladed implements and more than a few Greek yogurts.  Coupons for fried chicken and roast beef sandwiches. Found objects (I had to think) like milk jug caps, a plastic spork, and a couple of deflated balloons. A placemat from a pirate-themed restaurant in West Virginia.  St. Pauli Girl coasters and a napkin with a top hat on it.

Somebody had brought Pettigrew back and put him in the cage.  I went and fetched him out.

“How’s the army treating you?” I asked him as we walked down the corridor.

“Only way they know how,” he said.

We went in and joined Meekins who was still pouring through the stuff.

“Why do you think he left the kid?” Meekins asked. It had been on her mind.

Pettigrew shrugged.

“Soft spot?”

That got her a shake of his head.

“Oversight?” I suggested.  “Kid wandered out of the house?”

“Don’t know,” was the best I could get out of him. He finally looked every so slightly rumpled.

Now that Pettigrew had come along, we sure had a lot of stuff, but not much that we could fit together.  It was more like we were making a pile and seeing how high it would stack.

“Think he’ll send you something from Jo Jo?” Meekins asked Pettigrew.

“Maybe.  Reaching me now might be a trick.”

“Where were you staying before?” I asked him.

He was noncommittal in a way that suggested he’d probably claimed an empty house or two as well.

“Ever in the Dunes?”

Pettigrew nodded.  “A night or two after he left.  Outside chance he might come back.”

“Come back why?” Meekins asked.

“Cash in the freezer.  But you know that.”

Meekins looked my way.  “It’s an address at least.”

Hard to argue with her.  We took Pettigrew along and piled into the Tahoe.  Meekins hit the four lane and raced north.

The apartment wasn’t locked.  The evidence tape had been cut.  We went in unholstered.  The lights were on.  Every last bulb burning. Nothing much looked out of place except for the baggy on the range hood.  It was held there with a refrigerator magnet.  Animal clinic in Duck. 

There was a Polaroid in it and what looked like about four inches of intestine. The Polaroid was just a view of the back bay of Jo Jo’s nasty truck.

“They tow it?” I asked Meekins.

She nodded.  She knew just where.

They’d hauled it down to a crash lot by Wanchese. The back truck doors were standing open.  The bay was a jumbled mess.

“What do we look for?” Meekins asked Pettigrew.

“Something that wasn’t his.”

I picked up a white gas lantern from the floor of the bay.  Shook it — fuel enough.  I pumped it while Meekins found a match to light it.  The thing burned bright and hissed and gurgled. I flashed on camping as a child.  The mildewy stink of the canvas tent and the tang of mosquito spray.

We started sifting and sorting.  Tools.  Rags.  Drink bottles.  Beer cans.  Jelly jars with all sorts of stuff in them. Washers.  Nuts.  Steel wool.  Wall anchors.  Upholstery tacks.  Copper shavings.

It all looked like typical workshop trash to me.  Nothing stood out.  Nothing caught my eye. Metal.  Grinder shavings. Oily rags.  General grunge.  There was one of those glasses with a woman in a swimsuit on it whose top dropped when the thing got cold.  The swimsuit had a skirt, and the woman was built like a longshoreman.

“I don’t know,” I finally said.  “I’m only seeing junk.”

Pettigrew was doing his own thing up towards the passthrough to the front cab.  He wasn’t so much picking through stuff as studying it and soaking it in.  Every now and then he’d pluck up one thing or another.  A scrap of paper.  A pencil stub.  A cold chisel.  A sliver of steel. We’d stop, me and Meekins, and watch him, just wait to see what he’d do.

He’d think.  He’d study.  He’d toss whatever he’d bothered to pluck up aside.

Then he found it.  That’s what he told us anyway.  It was a coaster, a round one, advertising Schaefer beer. “The one beer to have when you’re having more than one.” There was a mark on the back.  It looked like grease pencil.  A sketch actually is more like it.

“What?”  Meekins asked.

Pettigrew showed us the sketch. 

“What is it?” I asked him.

I took it close to the lantern for a better view. A pelican, as best I could tell, in a top hat. 

“He left this?” I said to Pettigrew.

“Believe so.”

“Why?”

“Seen that bird. He knows it.”

“Where?” Meekins asked him.

“I’ll show you.”

So off we went again.  Up the four lane.  Way up.  Through Southern Shores to Duck. Not so far as the town proper but just to the side streets heading east.  Most of them lined with framed houses up on stilts.

It was late-ish by then.  Near eleven. So the area was quiet, and the streets were clear.  A few of the houses looked occupied.  Crap in the yards.  Cars choking the driveways.  But most of them were sitting off-season vacant, including the one with the pelican out front.

I think it was chainsaw art.  Or maybe faux chainsaw art.  I couldn’t be sure, but it certainly was ugly.  Four feet tall.  Jowly bird.  Top hat.  It had arms and hands, one of them holding a bouquet of tulips. The other supporting a mailbox.  I could see how it had stuck in Pettigrew’s head.  I looked at it for only a quarter minute, and I was afraid I’d never forget it.

“Was this one of your spots?” Meekins asked.

Pettigrew nodded.  “Backdoor wasn’t latched.”

I smacked my flashlight to brighten the beam and headed for the deck stairs.  Like most of the houses on OBX, the closer you got the worse it looked.  Not a failure of skill and construction but mostly salt and sun abuse.  Everything buckles or rusts.  Puckers and cracks. Too much briny wind and baking sun.  Throw in the odd hurricane and the routine nor’easter, and there’s just not a lot a fixit man can do after a while. You paint. You caulk.  You piece in new planking.  You replace the shingles that blew away.  You wonder what sort of beating you’d take if you put the place up for sale.

The decking on this sprawling, angular house was warped and wrecked all over.  Big squares of paneling on the east side wall were peeling in sheets like pastry.  A flood light kicked on, motion triggered. There was a lamp burning inside well across the living room.

I found the deck door and tried the knob. It was latched but too warped to catch properly.  I pushed the thing, and it swung open.

Nothing rotting inside.  I could tell that.  Just carpet dye and feeble air-freshener stink. A little lemony dish soap.  Dryer lint. Coconut oil.  Like that.

“Hello.”  I didn’t expect a reply and didn’t get one.

Pettigrew followed Meekins into the house.  I found light switches and threw them.  The style of construction might have been modern, but the furnishings were standard-issue beach box junk.  Skirted recliners.  Leatherette sofas. Rough plank tables here and there.  A Virginia Tech beanbag chair.  The refrigerator compressor was whining.  The thermostat was set about ten degrees too high.

“So?” I said to Pettigrew.

He led us on a wander.  We started with a tour through the big front room, pausing here and there.  He picked up a bowl full of scrabble tiles.  Pettigrew stirred the contents with his finger and then set the thing back down.

He sat on a love seat for a couple of minutes. He sniffed the air.  He looked around.  He got up and circulated some more.

“What’s he doing?” Meekins asked me lowly.

I couldn’t say and didn’t try to.  That Pettigrew was an odd one.  He was running entirely opposite from my experience with people — becoming murkier and harder to figure out as time went on.

He went down the hallway.  We trailed him.

He stepped into the master bedroom.  A half minute passed.  He told us, “In here.”

That room was as homely as the rest of place.  Plush carpet with tracks all through it.  A Scandi modern wardrobe next to a French provincial TV cabinet.  A big poster bed with fish netting draped over it.

Pettigrew stopped at the head of the bed and pointed towards the near pillow. There was a Polaroid snapshot resting on it.  A picture of a woman’s foot. Still attached, by the looks of it. 

I studied the Polaroid.  I’m not a foot guy exactly, but I notice digits and nails and distinguishing marks.  It’s just a thing I do with people.  I’ll see a birthmark if you’ve got one, a scar, a mole, and they’ll all drop into a slot in my head that belongs to you.

I knew that foot. The shape of those toes.  Short and meaty.  I’d seen it somewhere.

I bagged the photo.  “What does this mean for her?” I asked Pettigrew.

He was turning over DVDs and sifting through the flip flops.  He was slow to answer like usual. He finally told me, “Nothing good.”

27

So not a foot thing?” Meekins asked me. We were south on twelve covering the few miles down to Southern Shores.

I shook my head. “A hand would have been the same.  Distinctive, you know? It sticks. I’d recognize you from your thumbs.”

“What’s wrong with them?””

“Nothing. Flat at the end,” I told her. “And kind of shovel-shaped.”

Meekins chose to believe I was thumb shaming her. I could feel her glaring at me in the dark.

Fortunately, Natalie Akers’ uncle’s house was just before us by then, and we pulled into the long sand-swept cement driveway of Pink Perfection.  Lights were burning inside.  There was a Lexus parked near the house and a battered Nissan truck with rust-eaten fenders snug up just behind it.

“How you want to do this?” Meekins asked me. “It’s awful late.”

I rolled out of the Tahoe.  “Might just knock.”

Natalie’s aunt answered the door.  The Greensboro lawyer’s wife.  She’d had work done.  Good work, but still.  She looked overly shiny and a bit too taut in places where a woman her age should be saggy and slack.

“What?” she said. She sounded about as frosty as females get.

I apologized for the hour. I told her who we were looking for.  I didn’t bother with why.

“Natalie’s been . . . dislodged.”  She liked what she’d done there.  She smiled to the extent her skin would allow it.

She had one of those weird haircuts that looks architectural. Wings down either side of her head. Curled under at her shoulders. It must have taken a lot of work to make it look like anything.

“Hey, muffin!” a guy called from back in the house.

“One second,” she said. “I’m talking to people.”

“What people?”  He came up and joined us.

I didn’t know him, but Meekins did.

“Luther.”

“Candy. Y’all doing all right?”

“Looking for a girl.”

“My niece,” he got told.  “Chips are on the counter.”

Luther stayed where he was. The chips could wait.  He had on a ladies housecoat with a magnolia blossom pattern.  Was also wearing a grungy Hatteras cap and a pair of ankle socks. That was his rusty truck in the driveway, no doubt.  She must have liked them chapped and smelly.

“Chips,” she said to Luther.

He made a doggy noise and sulked on out of sight.

“Do you know where she went?” Meekins asked.

The aunt flung a hand nowhere much as if to indicate all of out there. Then she adjusted both wings of her hair with practiced efficiency.  She looked like one of those Playboy bunnies from back before they took off their tops.

“Do we have her number?” I asked Meekins.

“Somewhere maybe.”

“You got it?”

The aunt ignored me.  Pettigrew had climbed out of the Tahoe and was lurking just behind us.  The aunt noticed him, appraised him, pointed a French-nailed finger at him.

“I know you, don’t I?”

He shook his head.  “Don’t think so.”

She seemed doubtful and squinted. Thought about it.

“Natalie’s number?” Meekins asked her.

“Where’d all the guac get to?” Luther from the kitchen.

The aunt favored the three of us with a tight, sour smile and said, “I’ll get my phone.”

She retired from the doorway.  First stop, a bit of hissing in the kitchen. We could hear the noise of it and Luther telling her, “Muffin,” once or twice. She came back with her phone in hand looking passably refreshed and collected.  As she scrolled for her niece’s phone number, it hit her where she knew Pettigrew from.

She snapped her fingers.  Her bracelets jangled.  “At the Port Hole,” she said.  “Corolla. You and  your friend.”

Pettigrew looked dully at her.  Appeared unenlightened.

“You told me all about skipjacks. The boat. Remember?”

Pettigrew shook his head. “Sorry ma’am,” he said.

I had to think she was the sort of woman who wasn’t often wrong.  Especially about men.  Particularly men in bars. She eyed Pettigrew.  He eyed her back. Then she read out Natalie’s number.  I dialed it from there in the doorway.  A phone rang in a side table drawer. Mariachi ringtone.

“She’ll come back for it,” the aunt said.

Meekins asked, “When did you last see her?”

“Got any Texas Pete?” That from the kitchen.

“Yesterday.”  A pained expression.  “Maybe the day before.”

“Any idea where she might have gone?” I asked.

She shrugged.  “Round heels. Pick ‘em.”

She took one step backwards and fairly threw shut the door.

“Luther?”

“Shrimper,” Meekins told me.  “Got kind of a rep for being, you know, large.”

“Smells like a crab pot.”

“Rep for that too.”

“She sure seems to know you,” I told Pettigrew.

“Might have been him.”

“He goes around chatting up cougars?” Meekins asked.

Pettigrew shrugged. Couldn’t say.

We decided on some bar hopping in hopes of locating Natalie Akers.  Hit Spanky’s and Mo’s and The Yardarm, even stopped in at the Hilton lounge where the clientele looked like they’d gotten locked out of their rooms and were gloomy about it. We swung by Dockside’s and Little Ruthie’s, dropped in at Trio, which was just closing up.

“Has he got a thing for lieutenants?” I asked Pettigrew on the four lane in between bars.

He grunted.  Seemed doubtful.

“He’s killed a few.”

Pettigrew tabulated.  “Four.”

“How many civilians?” Meekins asked.

“More,” Pettigrew said.  “Lost count.”

“Is there a pattern we’re missing? Some reason he’s picking who he picks?

That earned a snort from Pettigrew.  Some guy pulled in front of us, and Meekins laid on the horn.

“Got to be something driving him.  Can’t be random, can it?”

“Bible stuff maybe.” Pettigrew was half muttering now.

“What Bible stuff?”

“Ezekial twenty-one — ‘I will draw my sword and cut from you both the righteous and the wicked.’”

“You got that from him?” Meekins asked.

A shruggy nod from Pettigrew.  More or less.

“Micah,” he told us, “chapter seven, verse two.  ‘The faithful have been swept from the land.  Not one upright person remains.  Everyone lies in wait to shed blood.’”

Meekins pulled off of the four lane. We were way south past Nag’s Head by then. She wheeled into the trashy sand lot in front of a place called Mickey’s. It was stuck back in the marsh and the scrub with a view of the Bonner Bridge, the span across Oregon Inlet that should never have been built.  Violent surf.  Shifting sands.  In a few years, they’d be sitting on the deck at Mickey’s watching the thing collapse.

Mickey’s proved as local a spot as I’d visited on OBX.  They probably spit-roasted tourists.  It was all fishermen.  Ferrymen.  Road crewmen.  Grizzled past-their-prime surf bums.  And the sorts of women who attach to the kind of men who are all girth and scars and a finger nub or two. Mickey’s was loud.  Mickey’s was fragrant and thick with cigarette smoke.  The music was pure twang old-time country. The patrons shouted over it to be heard. Mickey’s would be open until the sun came up.

The patrons didn’t all turn and look our way.  Nothing stopped.  Nothing even calmed down.  I just heard some guy up by the bar tell everybody, “Shitbirds.”

One of the bartenders rang a bronze bell that was fixed to the wall above the cash box. He had shredded wheat hair and nose the texture of pumice.  Mickey’s was precisely the sort of place a guy like him had to be.

The clanging seemed like a warning at first — cops around — that sort of thing, but it turned out the barkeep was presiding over a contest.  A rum drink off.  Four contestants knocking back shots with each fresh clang.

Pettigrew did his scoping thing.  Planted himself just inside the door and swiveled his head for a look. Meekins, for her part, pointed out a few of the patrons known to her.

“Assault.  Grand theft.  Strong arm.  B and E.”  She indicated various gentlemen and one thick lady as she spoke.

There was some scrambling at the bar.  One of the rum guys threw up in a bucket.  He hit it for the most part and then set the thing back down and staggered over to plop back onto his stool.  The bell clanged. Shots got tossed.  A different guy threw up.

“Classy,” I said.

“Better now,” Meekins told me.  “They used to serve food.”

We heard Natalie Akers before we saw her.  She was right in the thick of the drink off.  The men didn’t like that it that she hadn’t troubled herself to puke even once.

One of them told her as much.  He was brief about it.  He made his mouth work enough to shout, “Cunt.”

Another drink off contestant with a sense of honor and gentlemanly obligation, blundered off his stool for a confrontation.  He managed to get out, “Hey!”

I was going to intervene, but the bartender waved me off.

“Sit the fuck down.  Both of you,” he said.

The two drunk guys thought about it. Then the one who’d said, “Cunt,” the first time said, “Cunt,” one time more. The barkeep hooked a hand around the guy’s neck and slammed his face into the padded bar rail. He bounced off and had gone litigious before he hit the floor.

Once a couple of other fellows had kicked him, he decided to shut up about his lawyer and his rights.

In all the upset, Natalie had reached for the rum bottle and was refilling her glass.  She was just the sort of creature to have a recreational shot right in the middle of a drink off.

I closed on her and said, “Ms. Akers.”

She squinted my way.  Worked to place me.  She burped.  Finally told me, “Oh,” and, “hey.”

“I think you won.”

She burped another time.

“Got a minute for us?”

Natalie Akers eyed Meekins unhappily. Looker.  Bony ass.  Competition.

“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.”

Meekins pointed towards a side door that led onto Mickey’s deck.  There was a guy out there buying cocaine off of Rudy from Manteo.  Even I knew Rudy from Manteo.  He surely would have been locked up except his cocaine was mostly talc.  Talc enough anyway to get him regularly thrashed and throttled.  More punitive than the lockup, we figured.  So we let Rudy run free.

“Jesus,” Rudy said at the sight of me and Meekins.

“Give us some room,” Meekins suggested.

He did.

So it was me and Meekins and Natalie Akers.  Pettigrew wandered out last.

“What’s he doing loose?” Natalie asked us.

She was remarkably sober-seeming.

“Helping with our inquiries,” Meekins said.

Natalie Akers snorted.  Her version of “look at you”.

Meekins pulled out the polaroid we’d found up in Duck.  “Mind taking your shoe off?”

Natalie Akers looked from Meekins over to me.

“Just for a second,” I told her.

It was a knee boot that unzipped.  She sat on one of the picnic table benches and removed her right one. She assumed we wanted the boot and tried to give it to Meekins.

“Sock too.”

We both got studied after that, but Natalie Akers was a girl who must have had odder requests.  She stripped off her sock and wiggled her toes.  Meekins did the comparison, held the bagged photo next to Natalie’s foot.

“What the hell’s that?”

“Hers all right.” Meekins showed the photo to Natalie.  “Remember somebody taking this?”

She thought about it.  “Might maybe.”

“When and where?”

“One night.  I don’t know. His place, I think. The Dunes.  Been trying not to think about him.”  Natalie pulled on her sock.

“Looks like he’s thinking about you,” I told her.

She shoved her foot in her boot and said, “Creeper.”

Meekins asked, “You drive here?”

Natalie Akers nodded.

“Where are you staying?”

“Why?”

“Where?” I asked her.

“Friend’s place.” She’d fixed on Pettigrew by then.  “This one even talk?”

“Why don’t you hang with us for a while,” I said, “until we can get this sorted.”

Natalie burped.  She winced.  She didn’t look delighted.

28

“Ever wished you’d dumped your dog at another beach?”

Meekins put that to me the following morning while we sat on the deck of my beach box waiting for Natalie Akers to get dressed.  She’d spent the night in the cowboy room with the lariat lamps and the split-rail bedstead.

“Three, maybe four times a day.”

Natalie Akers smacked the glass deck door with her open hand.  She couldn’t figure out the latch and said something profane to us. We left her to fiddle some more.  She smacked the glass again and finally made her way onto the deck.

We stopped at Front Porch for coffee, and Natalie got a bran muffin the size of a cabbage.  Meekins wasn’t about to let that crumbly thing in the Tahoe, so we sat at the counter with all the outlets and a couple of guys surfing porn.

Natalie worked at one of the rental management outfits on the four lane.  There was a run of them up towards the Wright Memorial Bridge.

“Y’all ought to talk to my boss or something.  Tell him what we’re up to.”

Meekins went into the place with Natalie Akers while I waited in the Tahoe.  When she came back out, she said, “We need to go pick up her stuff.”

“Where?”

Meekins had written a Bay Drive address on her palm. The place turned out to be the bottom floor of a cedar-shingled house on a decent-sized plot of land that ran down to the sound.  Somebody had run out of money or gumption.  The house was suffering from neglect.  Weedy, overgrown lawn.  A blue-tarped porch roof.  Cedar shakes that had been blown off the side of the house and never replaced.  Just Tyvek and rusty nail heads.  Two of the windows were boarded up.

The house had been subdivided into four apartments — two up, two down.  I’d seen a fair bit of this sort of thing on the coast.  Homeowners couldn’t, for whatever reason, make the improvements anymore that would keep their beach homes on the summer rental lists.  So instead they jacklegged stuff together and took what they could get from the restaurant workers and the motel maids and the box store employees.

“Kind of a step down from Southern Shores,” Meekins said once we’d rolled out of the Tahoe and were giving the place a good once over.  The house was in a bowl of land between the pavement and the sound.  Dank for sure.  Probably crumbling at the footings.  Somebody would buy the lot and flatten it soon enough.

We negotiated the brief, steep driveway.  There was a chewed up Neon with a flat tire parked in front of duct-taped Toyota. A guy opened a window upstairs and said something to us in non-English.

Meekins checked her palm. “2A?”

He was up for barter.  “You give me ride.”

“Where you going?” I asked him. 

He worked at Duck Donuts.  The one just down from the firehouse in KDH.

“No harm in talking to him,” I said.

Meekins found 2A on her own.  It was the unit with the door standing open.  It was impossible to know if the place had been tossed or somebody had just given up on housework. The guy from upstairs came down and followed us in. His name was Egils, but he told us that people called him Don.

“Why?” I asked him.

He said, “America.”  It would prove to be his go-to explanation.  He used it quite a lot.

“Who lives here?” I asked him.

“Boyd,” Don told me. He pointed at a 4x6 snapshot on the bar top that separated the tiny kitchen from the junky rest of the place.  A guy with a tan and enough hair to envy was riding about a twelve-foot wave. That explained the decor — a couple of Firewire surfboards and two folding chairs.

“Seen Boyd lately?” I asked Don.

He thought.  He scratched.  “I hear him.”

“When?”

“Last night.”

“His place always look like this?” Meekins asked.

Don couldn’t say, told us he’d never been inside.

“The door was open,” I said.  “Boyd do that much?”

Don thought some more.  “Surfer,” he explained.

The place was puny and smelled of sour milk and mold.

“Boyd have a job?” I asked Don.

“Surfer,” he explained again and then threw in an “America.”

Meekins was giving the contents of the apartment a sifting through, mostly by turning stuff over with her foot. Junk mail primarily.  Paper grocery sacks.  Clothes.  Lots of clothes.  Mostly t-shirts and undershorts.

“See any of Natalie’s stuff?” I asked her.

Meekins pointed.  There was one actual piece of luggage.  One of those little, round bags women used to take with Cary Grant on trains.

I went and fetched it.  It had been tossed on the far side of a pile of stuff. It felt heavy to me and made me fear it would have a head or something inside it.  No seepage.  That was a good sign.  In flipped the clasps and lifted the lid on some balled up women’s blouses and jeans.  A pair of red boat shoes.  Ladies’ ointments and makeup.

“You want to go through this?” I asked Meekins out of a sense of delicacy.

“No.”

I poked through the stuff with a chopstick I’d found on the floor.  “Just regular girl crap,” I said.

Naturally, Boyd had a massive television.  He barely had a saucepan and probably slept on the same sheets for weeks, but he’d dropped a couple of thousand on a 50-inch TV.  The set was attached to a cable box that was attached to a DVD player.  The drawer was loaded and standing open. The sight of the disc in it stopped me cold.

Somebody had written in Sharpie on the thing.  Tidy.  Regular.  A medieval scribe would have been proud.  I will make my arrows drunk with blood.

I read it out loud to Meekins. Then I set about trying to play it, but I’m just not that kind of guy.  I was pleased to have Don available to take charge of the remote. He manipulated it like a virtuoso.  Got the drawer to shut and the disc to play.  The shot was low.  From the knees down.  Two people in sky-blue paper suits.

“Turn it up,” I said.

Don obliged.

The sound of people breathing.  Hard.  Strained.  They were working at something.  The camera was sitting on the floor.  I could see carpet at the bottom of the frame.

“Is that here?” Meekins asked.

It didn’t look to be.  Too expansive.  Too nice.  Back beyond the legs, I could make out a mezzanine.  The place looked familiar.  Sunlight was streaming in through high windows.  Maybe a wall of glass.

“Place in Duck, isn’t it?  With the pelican?”

“Maybe,” Meekins allowed. “They kind of all look alike.”

“What are they doing?” Don asked.

There was grunting and huffing.  Rustling of some sort.  No voices to hear.  A strip of plastic tarp sagged into view, the milky clear stuff right off the roll. As we watched, it got unfolded and laid out to cover the rug.  It covered the camera too, or the phone, whatever it was. Everything went cloudy. We got movement.  Shadow.  A scrap of muffled conversation. Then the smack of liquid on plastic.  Some gurgling.  And everything went red.

Don said something sharp and quick in his native tongue. Not “America,” I’m sure of that.

Me and Meekins together managed to invoke the Savior in harmony.

I went outside for some air.  Meekins followed.  Don trailed behind us making noises about still needing a ride.  I wandered all the way down to the water. The wind was low.  The sound was flat.  The pale sun was fighting gamely through the clouds.

“We’ll just kill him when we find him,” Meekins suggested.  “That all right with you?”

“Probably got his reasons. Pope diddled him. Something like that.”

Meekins sighed.  “Why’s ever damn thing pecker related?”

It was a fair question, and I was trying to do it justice with a thoughtful response when I saw a guy.  I can’t say why I noticed him only then.  He’s bound to have been there all along.

He was out, way out, on a paddle board.  Maybe a hundred yards from shore.  He had on a blazer and slacks.  Some kind of floppy hat and large sunglasses. Even still, I might not have thought much of him if he’d just been paddling along. But he wasn’t doing that.  He was standing there bobbing a bit on his board and looking right over at us.  His whole self turned squarely our way.

I watched him.  He watched me back.

“They like me there by nine,” Don told us.

My eyes never left the guy in the water. “Know him?”

Don said, “No.”

“What’s he wearing?” Meekins asked me.

“Hey!” I shouted and waved my arms.

He raised a hand.  He waved. Not vigorously.   It was a patrician sort of thing.  I see you, and here’s the way I show I do.

“Creeper,” Meekins said.

“Sure that’s all?”

He shifted his paddle but stayed where he was. He watched us watch him back.

“I think I want to talk to him.”

Meekins chuffed.  She was sick of my dead ends and was maybe about to say so when the guy laid his paddle down on his board and spread his arms like the crucified Christ.  He stayed like that for a good quarter minute.

“I think I want to talk to him too.”

Then he grabbed up his paddle and took off. I say took off,  but it was all splashing and flailing at first until he got into a rhythm and begin to make headway towards a spur of land to the north.

Meekins charged for the Tahoe. I followed.  Don tried to join us, late for his job and all.  But we left him and raced as far north as we could.  Down to a dead end and a parking lot at the head of a path along the sound. We’d have to take the rest on foot.

We went at a trot.  We could see him here and there where the rushes were interrupted by boat docks and private piers.  He paddled for all he was worth and never even stole a glance our way.

When we reached the far end of the trail, we came out on a proper road that continued along the shoreline.  We saw him bail off his board across a finger of the sound.

We had to clear a bridge and cut through some kind of trashy subdivision to put ourselves in the vicinity of where he was.  Meekins accelerated, but I lack the wind to join her.  I ended up walking briskly and just trying to keep her in sight.

The neighborhood dogs were having a fit.  This was blue-collar territory, so there was nobody much at home.  Flatboats in the yards.  A few abandoned cars.  Weeds and sand instead of lawn.  What fencing there was had largely collapsed.

“Candy!”

Nothing back.

A dog came roaring out of somewhere.  A big wire-haired thing that looked two parts airedale and one part donkey. It barked.  It bluffed.

“Go on.”  It wouldn’t.  “Candy!”

That got me nothing but a lunge and some snarling.  I found a clam rake with a shattered handle and used it to drive the dog away.

I tried to keep the sound in sight to my left as I bushwhacked through the saplings and the thorny, tangled vines.

“Meekins!”

I paused and listened.  Nothing.  Or not nothing.  I might have heard the sound of a car engine.  Tires on grit. I couldn’t be sure.

I pressed on.  I filled one boot with swamp.  The chill of it revived me a little.

“Candy!”

She answered sort of.  It was the sort of that gave me pause.

“Candy!”

I got something back that sounded like talking.

“Hey!”

Nothing.

I staggered forward towards what looked like a clearing. I fought my way through a buffer of prickly bushes and came out in a circle of gravel and sand.  There was a track through the woods.  Fresh tire marks.  Deep lugged treads like from a truck.

“Candy!”

“Hold on, will you?”

I couldn’t quite find her and went lurching across the clearing and into the woods on the opposite side.  Cypress and bay bush and cattails in the muck.  Meekins was back among them in what seemed to me an unnatural way.

I was nearly to her before I noticed she was squatting.  She’d lowered her jeans and was having a pee and a shake out in the woods.

“Oh,” I believe I told her.

Meekins showed me her palm and the tag number written on it.  “Dodge.  Busted back side window.  Blue.”

29

Betty pulled up the owner’s info for us.  Avalon address.

“Vincent Wiley Rucker.”

I scribbled while Meekins drove south, heading for Oregon Inlet and the bridge.  We were a good half hour away even at siren and lights velocity.  The chinless twins were closing behind from wherever Meekins had scared them up, and Betty had alerted the Avalon constable who was having a molar pulled.

“Landscaping.  Some plumbing,” Betty told me.  “Warrant on him for petty larceny.  Took some stuff.  Says it was his. Looks like maybe it even was.”

“Got a military record?”

Betty went looking.  “ROTC.  A while ago.”

“Did you try his phone?”

“Straight to voicemail.”

I thanked her and signed off.

“What are we expecting?”  Meekins asked me.

“Maybe nothing.  Maybe giblets.”

The chinless twins tailgated us all the way across Pea Island.  They were driving two cruisers and the front one — wine stain — stayed maybe six feet off our tail.

Meekins kept checking her mirror and making her aren’t-men-morons expression.

“Want me to talk to him?” I had the radio mic in hand.

She shook her head. “Don’t want him driving and doing that too.”

A big yellow loader was shifting sand from the road a couple of miles north of Rodanthe.  We got stopped long enough while he turned on the blacktop to allow Meekins to unbuckle and step back to the cruisers and acquaint both of those chinless boys with precisely what was on her mind.

Meekins came back and buckled in. Shifted and rolled once we were waved through.

“Copacetic?”

She snorted like a woman might after making a bid to explain spatial geometry to raccoons.

Then it was on through Rodanthe with plenty of space behind us.  A lot of winter empty.  The service stations were still open, but most everything else looked shuttered up.

“Why come down here?” I asked myself and Meekins both at once.  “Kind of cornered, aren’t you?”

“No law much.  There’s that.”

That was true enough.  They had a part-time constable and number to call if they needed the state police.  But their trooper could be any damn where.  They might wait a week to see him.

“You know this guy? The constable?” I checked my notes and read out the name Betty had given us.  “Lew Parham?”

Meekins nodded. “Went out with him once.”

“Oh yeah?”

“A couple of years ago.  Dinner.  Movie. Played pool, I think.”

“Romantic.”

We were passing a peach colored four-story house.  Poop Deck. It was fifty yards from the ocean on one side and maybe a hundred from the sound on the other.

“Lord Jesus,” I told Meekins,” will scour this place clean one day.”

The stretch between Salvo and Avon is about fifteen miles of national seashore. Nothing but dunes and blown sand.  Sea oats and peppervine.  Cordgrass here and there.  Trash, of course, too.  Quite a lot of it, people being what they are.

“This road get blocked in the winter?” I asked. There was sand across it here and there, and we’d not had much in the way of storms.

“Sometimes. Doesn’t last.  They plow it.”

I tried to imagine living in a place like Avon where, if a storm tide came, you were stuck. Not a fit place at all for a serial escapee like me.  I couldn’t help but start worrying about getting back to KDH proper by dark.

“Where are we going?” Meekins asked.

I checked my notes.  “Just past the Avon Worship Center.”

“Where’s that?”

“Soundside.”

“And?”

I reached for the mic and got Betty to spell it out one more time.

Vincent Wiley Rucker lived in what looked like a couple of garden sheds with a breezeway.  There were four boats on his property.  A tow truck and a Nissan Sentra.  A few plastic barrels, the blue kind they use for trash along the beach.  He had indistinct weedy piles of stuff too, and a neighbor down by the water proper who was taking a keen interest in us.

The man walked over while were still poking around the yard.

The chinless boys rolled in eventually but were still leery enough of Meekins to stay well back.

“Talk to him,” Meekins shouted their way and pointed at the neighbor. We could soon hear the guy complaining about Rucker from over where we were.

I found a door in a shed that looked functional and knocked on it.  “Police.”

Not a peep.

It wasn’t locked, so I stuck my head inside.  “Anybody home?  KDH PD.”

Meekins shouted at the neighbor, “Seen him lately?”

“I was just saying.” He pushed his way past the chinless boys.  “Him and his goddamn music. Tuesday maybe.  Wednesday too.”

“Yesterday?”

He shrugged.  Couldn’t say. “What did he do?”

“Don’t know,” Meekins said.  “We’re just trying to find him.”

“He ain’t worked in a while.  Might check at Brody’s.”

Meekins was getting good with her pointy-stick look.

“Just past Kinnakeet.  Beside the PO.”  The guy used the sun for his timepiece.  “He’ll be half drunk by now.”

“How about his truck?  Blue Dodge, right?” I asked.

The neighbor nodded.

“When did you last see it?

More thinking.  The guy was losing interest.  Couldn’t say.

Meekins stepped inside the homestead.  She didn’t stay long and came back out.

“Anything?”

She shook her head. “Man shit.”

A Chevy 4x4  pulled into the sandy waste.  It had a generic five-pointed star decal on the driver’s door, a light bar, and a motorized winch on the front.

“He’ll tell you all about him,” the neighbor said.

A guy in sort of a uniform got out of the Chevy holding his jaw. He said something with a fair amount of slobber to it in Meekins’ general direction.

“Hey, Lew,” she told him.  “How you been?”

She got spit and racket back.

“Tell them about that time with gun,” the neighbor suggested to the constable.

Instead, he pointed at his jaw and informed me and Candy about his extracted molar.

I tapped my chest.  “Ray Tatum.”

I got studied by Lew thereafter.  He might not have landed Candy Meekins, but he clearly didn’t want me to.

He pointed towards the joined sheds and said something in saliva.

“Just want to talk to him,” Candy told Lew Parham. “Hear about those murders up coast?”

Lew nodded and said a spit thing.

“We think your boy here, Rucker, got tangled up in it somehow.”

I got the impression from Constable Lew, via dumbshow mostly, that Vincent Rucker was a sad sack and a dope.

“Look at Brody’s?  That sound good to you?”

Constable Lew nodded my way.  He got a twinge and touched his jaw. He made the sort of display that caused us to know he meant to ride over with Meekins.  That’s why she told me, “You go,” and went back into the double-shed house.

Lew pointed at the ground.  He was fine where he was.  The chinless twins would just be an encumbrance, so I headed over to Brody’s by myself.

The place was easy enough to find because there’s not a lot in Avon.  A few realty offices.  Some restaurants (closed for the season).  A Food Lion.  A DQ.  A Little General.  A business duplex near the Avon pier that was half dentistry, half kites.  Everywhere I looked there was water.  The ocean.  The sound.  Glistening wetlands between.  It was like clinging to a sand bar down there at Avon, a strip of dry ground in the Atlantic that was sure to get swamped in the end.

So I couldn’t much blame the patrons at Brody’s for being half-soused well before noon.  They all looked at me when I stepped inside.  Eight men.  Four at the bar.  Two at the pool table.  A couple more off in a corner doing — by the looks of it — something dodgy.  There was a woman of sorts working the bar. She had a complicated hairdo — about half piled, half collapsed — and she was content to make all sorts of assumptions about me.

“Ain’t no lunch today,” she shouted my way.  “Truck never come.”

“All right,” I said. I took a couple of steps deeper into the place.  My eyes were slowly adjusting.

“Got coffee?”

I closed on the bar.

“Yesterday’s.”

I made out to be thinking about it, which gave me time to reach the bar.

“I’m looking for Vincent Rucker.”

“You some kind of cop?”

That came from the guy just to my right at the bar.  He was hairy and unkempt and might have been forty or possibly eighty-five.

“Just need to talk to him.”

“You some kind of cop?” He put more spin on it this time.

I can’t say I was surprised that I’d walked into a stew pot of churlishness. I was probably looking at a bunch of unemployed fishermen whose season wouldn’t open until spring.  In the meantime, they got to try to put a livelihood together by doing the kind of work nobody else much wanted to do. Digging holes.  Pulling wire.  Cutting tree limbs.  Stripping shingles.  Or maybe just sitting in a bar in Avon and hating on the world.

“We think Mr. Rucker might be in some danger.”

That produced general levity.

“Shit,” a few of them said.

“Why don’t you fuck on off,” a boy down the bar suggested.

I could have just left. Probably even should have left.  They didn’t seem to know awful much.  But I hadn’t been in a good barroom scrap in years.  I couldn’t afford to in Richmond — the guard job at the office tower — cause they fired for any sort of trouble like that on the spot.  So I’d last laid hands on some Blue Ridge hillbillies with enthusiasm at a pork pull west of Charlottesville.  They’d shown up in a mood and done their best to sour the evening for regular, decent people.  Me and Gruber, a cop from the valley, were the first to answer the call.

“Look who it is,” the lead boy said when he saw me roll out of my cruiser.

I recognized him right away.  Big, square head.  Broken incisor. Ropy muscle going to gut.  They called him Little Junior.  His daddy had been a notorious hardhead.  His brother, Big Junior, was doing double life at Red Onion.  He’d killed a guy with a cold chisel and then, because he got nosy, killed the dead guy’s neighbor as well. So I knew going in Little Junior came from people who took everything a bit too far.

“Ass wipe,” Little Junior yelled my way.  He was messing with some guy’s pickup, doing stuff they owner wished he wouldn’t do.

The folks running the pork pull were raising money for little league gear or something.  They’d offered Little Junior and his buddies free meals, but those boys just wanted trouble instead.

One of the guys at the pork pit asked me, “Who else is coming?”

“We’re it for now.”

He looked desolate.

“It’s all right,” I told him. I already knew how things would go.

Little Junior hated cops.  They’d put his brother in prison, hadn’t they? So he always started at a disadvantage since Little Junior was, routinely, incensed. His buddies were all cowards.  Scared of him.  Scared of me.  All you had to do was slug one of them hard, and the rest of them were sure to retreat.

“Lock them up, or what?” Gruber asked me.

I shook my head.  “Put them on the road.”

Then I made a general announcement to all the decent people around.  “Y’all hold what you got.  This may get a little bumpy for minute.”

They just needed a bit of warning.  They were hill people mostly and so used to everything getting bumpy every now and again.

After that, there was nothing left but for me to see to Little Junior.  I’d learned the trick with a guy like him from a sergeant I’d worked with down in Mecklenburg.  You don’t bother talking to hard heads.  You give them the stick or the boot, maybe both. That’s not my standard approach to policing, and I’d resisted it at first, but then I found myself in a few too many tussles that I could have avoided if I’d just cracked a skull or laid into a scrotum straightaway.

You’d think Little Junior would have caught on, but that’s the thing about hard heads.  They don’t get educated over time.  They’re just mean and disagreeable and bother people out of spite.  There’s no learning curve.  It’s all flat line until you’re shut away in supermax or sleeping sweetly in a new suit under a layer of foundation and blush.

“Hello, Junior,” I said as I closed on him.

I had to walk around the serving table before I could get over to where he was holding court with a couple of buddies.  I was going to just kick him, but he was turned funny, so I snatched up a skillet.  Iron.  Eight inch.  Barely cool enough to hold.

By the time I reached Little Junior, he was still waiting for me to say something.  Tell him what he ought to be doing.  Tell him what the law required. Instead, I just smacked him with the skillet, and he collapsed like he’d gone boneless.  I only had to hit one of his buddies, caught him mostly on his shoulder.  They withdrew at a jog after that, and Gruber herded them into their car and saw those boys out of the lot.

Little Junior groaned.  A blow like that could well have killed most men, but I’d long since learned that if you’d decided to hit a guy with an iron pan or something, he was probably the sort you needed to swing at maybe twice and pretty hard.

Junior tried to roll over and find some way to stand, so I didn’t just get to hit him. I got to kick him a little too.

With any other sort, I might have felt pressed to offer an explanation.  Something along the lines of “Do right and be lawful, and you can avoid this sort thing.”  But Little Junior was not a learner.  Little Junior was cemented in, so I could simply enjoy the exhilaration of putting a hard head down.

The rescue squad crew had rolled up by then, so Little Junior got seen to straightaway.  They gave him ice in a sack and left him to put it wherever he saw fit.  A child even brought him a plate of food, which he shoved in with his free hand. I’d cuffed the other to a post.

I was getting a distinct Little Junior vibe from a few of those boys in that bar in Avon.  The trick for me was to find the big chief out of such a ragged bunch. The guy to my right down the bar who’d been the first to speak had seemed a candidate until I saw that he was wearing a prosthetic leg from his right knee down.

“You even got a badge?” one of the pool players asked.

I did.  I showed it to them.

“Out of your patch a little, aren’t you?” That from the croaky bartender as she fired up a Merit.

“I’m kind of short on time here. Which of you’s in charge?”

They weren’t the sort to think of life that way, like it’s organized even locally.  Sure there were fools and fuck knuckles running stuff in D.C., but down in Avon, everybody was all pretty much the same. So nobody would commit to being the boss, which left me to find a candidate.

The biggest among looked about half in the bag and was cradling his head on a table, so I opted for one of the pool players.  He was rangy and fit and hadn’t stopped sneering at me since I came in.

“How about you?”

He snorted.  “What about me?”

“You want to be boss for a minute?”

He shrugged and laughed like maybe he could tolerate a promotion.

“That all right with the rest of you?”

I got a regular grunt chorus back.

I gestured for him to join in the middle of the room.  Lucky for me, he laid his cue on the table before he wandered over.

“What?”

“I’m looking for Vincent Rucker.  Know him?”

“I might.”

“Seen him lately?”

“Could be.” He grinned at his buddies.

“When and where?”

“Shit, buddy . . .”

I gave him a hard one to the kidney.  He groaned and squatted.  His pool partner took a step my way.

“You want to be boss now?” I asked him.

He wasn’t sure enough to keep coming.

“When and where?”

That boy wasn’t fit yet for talking.

“It doesn’t have to come from him.”

The guy with the prosthetic said, “We don’t none of us know him that good.”

“Little place like this . . . I bet you do.”

A lumpy guy at one of the tables woke his sleeping buddy up.  He smacked his head a couple of times.  “Go pee before you start leaking.”

He got what he wanted, and the boy who’d been sleeping went stumbling towards the bowels of the bar. They all waited for him to get gone.

“Vinnie’s probably at his place,” the lumpy guy told me.

“Running with his wife,” the bartender threw in.

“Happy now?” the guy with half a leg asked me?

“Not entirely.  Where’s he live?”

A couple of them together gave me country directions.  Turn at broken light pole.  House next door’s got a Malibu in the yard. That kind of thing.

“You going to keep him here?” I had a look towards the men’s room.

I got enough in the way of nodding to figure they would.

“What are you boys going to do next time a cop comes asking questions?”

The one with the leg did duty as spokesman. “Hit him with a goddamn shovel about the time he opens his mouth.”

So they did learn sometimes after all, just always the wrong thing.

30

I decided to stop in and check on Vincent Rucker on my own. I had a couple of runs at the landmarks they’d given me in the bar, which put me in striking distance of a trio of shabby houses.  I knocked on the door of a wrong one first.  A lady answered it with some puny rat dog in her arms.  It had rusty eyes and yellow teeth.  It snarled at me.  Its name was Princess.

“I’m looking for a gentleman.  Maybe you know him.”

“Come right on in,” she said.

Since it was winter on the Outer Banks, you took your company where you found it.  She was wearing a quilted house dress and two different color wooly socks.  The woman looked seventy to me or maybe sixty with hard use.

“Want a Pepsi?”

“No, thank you. I’m just looking for a boy named Rucker.”

“What’s he done?”

She led me into what felt like the only room she was heating.  She had one of those portable jobs that lit up red and looked like an oscillating fan. She dropped into her chair.  The arms were covered in magazines.  Dish towels.  Packets of tissue.  Princess growled on the way down and growled once they’d made impact and settled.  I got pointed to the sofa and had to clear shit to sit down.

“Nothing special.  We just want to talk to him.”

“We who?”

I showed her my badge.

“My Walter worked police sometimes.  Storms and wrecks and stuff.”

I nodded.

“That’s him there.”  She pointed at a framed snapshot of a man standing on the deck of a boat.

I had a glance at it.  I smiled and nodded.

“Who you looking for again?”

I told her.

She strained and squinted as she thought.  “Rodanthe Rucker?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Missing an ear?”

“Don’t really know.”

“Kind of half-cocked then, aren’t you?” Her dog snapped at me for no particular reason.  “Sweetie,” she said.  It snarled at her. “We don’t have company much,” she explained.

“Don’t want to keep you.  Who lives next door?”

“Why?”

“I’m told my guy might be . . . visiting with . . .”

“That tramp?”

I nodded.

“Got a blue truck?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“See plenty of him,” she said.

“Last day or two?”

“Some kind of reward money on him?”

I had one bill I carried anymore in addition to my bank card. “Might be five in it for you.”

She looked suitably disappointed and said something to Princess I couldn’t quite make out.  The dog understood it well enough and snarled my way.

“Day before yesterday.”  She put out a hand. “Might have been the day before that.”

I went fishing for my money.  “Seen anybody else come and go?”

“We still talking five whole dollars?”

I nodded sadly and gave her the bill. Princess snapped at me when my hand got close.

She let me find my own way out up through the chilly front hallway.  I drove the forty yards that took me into the next driveway.  There was a Pontiac sedan with a wheel missing in the yard and a tractor mower with just a hollow where the engine should have been.  I did that thing I do sometimes and walked around the house for a sniff.  Checking the windows.  Checking the doors.  Looking for anything hinky.  It was hard to know with this place since it was mostly a seaman’s midden. 

The occupants had a sufficient sense of propriety to keep most of the junk in the back.  The property was passable out front and looked like a house where semi-civilized people lived, but the illusion gave way behind.

Junked commercial fishing gear.  Bits of net and buoys and bait boxes.  A  gracious plenty of household garbage as well.  Bags busted open.  Dog-chewed.  Racoon-rifled. A heap of beer and bean cans.  Greasy plastic clam shells that slaw and chicken and mess had come in.

I got a decided whiff of something, but it didn’t smell exactly like decomp.  More like sweat and septic.  Maybe mule dander.  Nothing from the sea, that’s for sure.

The back door had a square of cardboard in it and one unbroken window light left.  I climbed the steps to the landing and had a peek in.  The kitchen looked essentially like the back yard under roof. I knocked.  I heard some muffled banging.  I thought at first I’d rattled something loose.  I waited and listened.  I knocked again.  More banging.  Thumping really. I turned the knob. The door swung in.  It dragged and stuck on the linoleum.

I had to think the guy at the bar was lucky to be just where he was.  He could have been home in unmitigated squalor.  At least at Brady’s on the main road, there was cold blue ribbon and pretzels, a bathroom somebody probably even cleaned every now and again.  At home, it was hoarding gone feral.  If a magpie married a wharf rat and kept house, I had to think it would probably look like the one I was standing in.  Lots of stuff saved and stacked up but none of it of any value or even worth eyeing twice.  Trash and litter. Indiscriminate table clutter.  Bulk mail and piles of a local OBX tabloid papers, the sort that were usually half real estate listings and half wedding venues for rent.

“Anybody here?”  I’d pulled my pistol by then. I was ready to wing whoever’d put a house in such a state.

I got thumping back.  Muffled.  Frantic.

“Police.  Come on out.”

More thumping. A bit of squealing as well.

I ventured deeper.  It was no easy matter to move from the kitchen down a short, cramped hallway and into the living room.  Now I would have had some sympathy if I’d thought all the junk and clutter was the result of some sort if diagnosable imbalance of the mind.  That wasn’t the feeling I got, however.  I was looking at a failure of initiative.  An inability to finish a Mountain Dew and put the bottle in the trash.

“Where are you?”

I followed the racket.  I bushwhacked essentially while trying not to touch much of anything. If I couldn’t kick it, I left it alone.

“Hey!”

More thumping.  More squealing.  Two people.  I could smell them.  Perfume.  Urine.  Man sweat.  Feet.  Hair tonic.  Fear.  Shit.

I followed the noise into the far back bedroom.  The hallway was like a World War I trench but with pocket books and ladies’ shoes instead of munitions boxes.  The bedroom was just a couple of paths and a mattress on the floor.  Greasy sheets.  More shoes.  Some blouses.  Encrusted plates and a couple of bowls — half party mix litter, half ants.

“Where are you?”

Wild thumping and shrieking.  I swung open the closet door and then stepped aside as the two of them tumbled out.

I don’t think I meant to say anything, but I ended up telling them, “Good Lord!”

They were meticulously taped.  Packing tape.  The stout sort with fiber in it.  Their heads were wrapped up but for nostril holes.  Their arms were bound against their bodies, and their legs were taped together from the knees down.  Whatever struggling they’d been up to had brought them nowhere close to loose.

I’d broken the blade off my pocket knife trying to open a window at the Driftin’ Sands Motel, so I had to fight my way back to the kitchen to hunt up something that would cut.  The best I could do was cheap steak knife with a flimsy serrated blade.  Consequently, cutting those two loose ended up taking a decent while.  The work was slow, and the stink was powerful.  Fortunately, that pair proved shameless by moral makeup and disposition and so didn’t act like ordinary folks might who were naked and caked with their on waste.

I made the mistake of unwrapping the girl’s head first.  I got her to tell me her name.  Nancy Ann, and then she went irate and righteous.  She wanted to know where the hell I’d been all this time they were shut up in the closet.

“Look what you did!?” she said to her boyfriend while glaring at her shit-stained legs.

He made a noise in his own defense, but he appeared to be breathing well enough, so I decided to leave him taped up a bit longer and deal with her alone.

I pointed at him and asked Nancy Ann, “Vincent Rucker?”

“So?”

“That’s a yes?”

“Yes!”

I worked on Rucker some, but Nancy Ann wouldn’t stand for that, so I cut away more of her wraps and restraints.

“Who did this?” I asked.

“Who do you think!? Him!  That freak.”

“What freak?”

She swore colorfully.  Shook her head.  “Don’t you twats know anything?”

“I’m down from Kill Devil Hills. What’s been going on here?”

She looked at me like I’d told her I was a Gurkha from Neptune.

“We’re after a freak too.  Might be the same guy.”

“Better hope,” Nancy Ann told me as she stripped tape from around her waste.  That’s about when I noticed she was entirely naked.

“Did he . . . interfere with you?”

That was way too BBC crime drama for Nancy Ann.

“Sexually, I mean.”

She snorted.  I felt like I was twelve.

“We were at it, and he just come on in.”

I glanced at the greasy sheets.  One fitted corner off.  The mattress shifted sideways on the floor.

“Right,” I said.  “At it.  When exactly?”

She had to think back.  She looked towards Rucker for help. He wasn’t any, what with the tape and all.

“When is it now?”

“Wednesday.”

“Monday maybe. After lunch. Needed Vinnie’s truck.”

“That’s what he said?  He needed the truck?”

She squinted.  She thought.  She nodded.

I cut Rucker’s his hands-free and left him to uncover his mouth on his own.

“Told you he was trouble.” That’s the first thing he said.

“Who?” I asked him.

“Lomax.”

“The guy who took your truck?”

He nodded.

“You know him?”

“A little,” Rucker allowed. “Him and his cousin.”

“What cousin?”

Rucker was working on his wrapping while trying to avoid everything fecal.  That was quite the job given the state he was in. He jabbed a thumb northeasterly, the casual brand of country pointing.  “You know.” He left it at that.

“I don’t.  How do you know these boys?”

“Reef Road!”  Nancy Ann fairly shrieked it.  She was exasperated.  “Go down there and ask around.”

“Reef Road?”

“Big yellow place,” Rucker told me.

“They live there?”

Rucker and Nancy Ann both nodded.

We didn’t have an address for the Reef Roadhouse, but big and yellow only fit one dwelling on what turned out to be a pretty grand street.  The place was private as vacation houses go and mini-mansion size as well. The lot was surrounded by head-high junipers, so you couldn’t see what was in the driveway or happening in the yard unless you got on the lot proper.  The house looked like four stories of bedrooms and open plan living once we’d circled around to have a peek in on the water side.  Good view to the west as far as you could see of the choppy Pamlico Sound.

“Rucker and his girlfriend said there were two of them,” I told Cutler and Meekins once we were up on the deck peering in.

“Two?” That from Cutler.

I nodded.  “Knows them by Lomax.”

“Might could use Pettigrew,”  Meekins said.

“Army took him,” Cutler told her.

“Where to?” I asked.

“They set up in the Hilton.  Brought a guy down to . . . you know. . . . ask him stuff.”

“What kind of guy?”

“Spooky,” Cutler told me.

“At the Hilton?” Meekins said.

Cutler nodded.  “They took a whole floor.”

Cutler tried the back door.  Locked.  He pushed on a few window sashes and found one that slid up.

We helped Meekins climb through and then waited at the door until she unlatched it and let us in.

The house was the antithesis of Nancy Ann’s place.  There wasn’t two of anything piled up anywhere.  The wood floors where the rugs didn’t touch were entirely grit free and shiny.  The table tops had lamps and coasters on them.  Nothing else at all.  The place was done out in real furniture, the kind you’d have in your regular home if you were living off your investment income.

“Nice,” Cutler said.

I nearly told him, “No shit,” by which I would have literally meant no shit. The smell in the air was some sort of cucumber/melon infusion.  It turned out an atomizer plugged in behind the sofa released a dose of house perfume every little while.

There was no conspicuous sign in the kitchen that anybody had been using the place. I did find a Lavazza coffee can in the refrigerator and a packet of frozen cuttlefish in the freezer along with a pint of soy milk ice cream.  No dishes in the sink or dishwasher.  There wasn’t the first crumb in the toaster.  The appliances were all cased in stainless steel, and there wasn’t a fingerprint anywhere.

“This is weird neat,” Meekins said.

There was a TV room on the second floor. Massive screen.  Wet bar.  Air hockey table.  No sign of human use.  Everything else was bedrooms and bathrooms and decks looking out on the water.  All the beds in the place were stripped but for one — a California king as far upstairs as you could get.

Solid cherry poster bed. A TV cabinet.  A wardrobe.  A master bath with marble about everywhere you could think to put it.  Brushed nickel fixtures.  Plush towels.  A lone sign of life in the form of a toothbrush in a glass.

“I’ll round up a neighbor or two,” I told Cutler and headed down to do just that.

People on Reef Road were scarcer in winter than even OBX sorts generally.  You’ve got to be hardy and committed to live on that stretch of the coast in winter.  The Bonner Bridge to the north is often closed off season for weeks at a time.  The sand shifts around piers and pilings.  The channel gets clogged up.  A couple of good storms, and you might be stuck in Avon until the the spring.

The first guy I found was addled and maybe eighty.  He was walking his poodle down the road.  I told him what I was up to.  He smiled.  He nodded.  He said something back about his shoes.  Or somebody’s shoes.  Then he introduced me to Brutus, his dog, for the second and third times.

A woman called to him from up the block.  “You coming?” she yelled.

He got all right in a hurry and told me sadly, “Her.”

I walked with him.

“This is Brutus.”

“Looks like a poodle.”

“Believe so.”

“You got a name?”

He nodded and told me, “Yeah.”

His wife had a name too.  It was Justine.  She’d had an uncle who was a policeman, and she’d never liked him much.

“Frederick. It’s in Maryland.  Doubt he did them any good.”

“I’m wondering about your neighbors.”  I pointed towards the big, yellow house.

“None of my business,” Justine informed me.  “People do what they do.”

Her husband raised his hand because he had a thing he wanted to say.  It was very possibly a dog introduction.

Justine shook her head and said, “Frank.”

He deflated and fished a shoestring out of his pocket.  Looked at it in silence for a bit.

“Wondering if you saw who was staying down there.”

“Why?”

“A few questions for them.  That’s all.”

“Shifty, those boys.”  She looked towards her husband.  “Didn’t I tell you?”

He smiled.  He nodded.  He said back, “All right.”

For a woman who claimed to pay no attention to anyone else’s business, she came up with a fair bit of detail on the guys staying down the street.  Not two of them.  Three of them. Sometimes anyway.

“You mind talking to my boss?” I asked her.

Justine insisted on a wander through that big, yellow pile of a house first.  She actively disapproved of almost everything she saw. She wouldn’t have had any of the furniture and found most of the space inside wasted.  She had a nephew who was an architect, and he drew up silly places just like it.  No walls anywhere.  Ceilings twenty feet up. You’d go broke heating a house like that unless you were made, of course, of money.

We finally managed to get Justine to sit at the banquette just off the kitchen.

“I wouldn’t have one of these,” she said as she inspected the upholstery and then looked out the window towards the sound.

“Tell us about them.”  That from Cutler.

“Neat, you know?  All of them.”

“Dressed neat?”

She nodded, but that wasn’t precisely what she meant.  “Neat all over.”

I’d had just enough Justine exposure to catch her drift.

“Gay?”

“If you want to call it that. I see them around.  They all look that way.”

Then she noticed a salt shaker she didn’t much care for.  Pewter.  Modern.  “Wouldn’t have one of those.”

“Did you ever meet them properly?  Talk to them?” I asked Justine.  “Get a name?”

The look I got in response suggested Justine wasn’t one to meet neat people. “Didn’t want to meet them.”

“How about Frank?”

We all looked his way.  He was over on one of the leather sofa’s fooling with a bolster button.  Brutus was sitting on the coffee table watching Frank at work.

“Ask him,” Justine said.

So I did.

“What boys?”

“The ones living here.”

Frank thought for a moment.  A long enough moment to make me doubt that he’d remembered what he’d paused to think about.

“Yes,” Frank finally said.  “Had me in for coffee once.”

“In here!?”  Justine was not pleased.

Frank nodded.  “And Brutus.” He gestured towards the dog by way of wordless introduction.

“When?” she wanted to know.

Frank couldn’t begin to say.  He did remember the time of day and showed us where the sun was.  Low on the water, so late afternoon.

“Recently?” I asked him.

He nodded and told me, “No.”

“What can you say about them?” Cutler wanted to know, but that was too open ended for Frank, so I horned in and tried to give him direction, or at least a spot to jump off.

“Jeans or trousers?”

“Trousers. Proper shirts. Pockets and buttons and all.”

“Dress shoes?”

Another nod.

“Big watches?”

He described the size of them with his forefinger and his thumb.

“Thirties?  Twenties?”

Frank told me, “Yes.”

“Dark hair?  Light hair?”

“Dark.”

“All three?”

“Yes.”

“What did you have with your coffee?”

“Cookies.  The thin kind.”

“Sat here?”

I tapped the kitchen table against the rear wall where I was.  Frank stood up from the sofa but lingered in the den.

He shook his head and pointed at the stools against a kitchen island.

“Good place to watch the sunset and talk about . . .”

“Boats,” Frank said.  He pointed towards the water.  “Sloop out there.”

“Sailers, those boys?”

Frank shook his head.  “One of them was from . . .” He squinted, straining to think.  He clapped his hands and grinned.  “Big Piney!”

“Where’s that?” Cutler asked.

Frank swept an arm towards the water.  Off to the west.  Out in the world somewhere. Meekins got busy on her phone and told us, “Missouri.  Or maybe Texas.  Or maybe Arkansas.”

“Anything?” I asked Frank.

He nodded and told me, “No.” After that, he introduced me to his dog. A Poodle.  His name was Brutus.

They were nice enough for neat boys.  That’s about all we came away with.  And who’d want to spring for a Chesterfield couch what with all the creases and divots that did nothing but draw dust?

31

Two MPs were stationed in the lobby of the Kitty Hawk Hilton with carbines.  One of them by the elevators.  The other one near the breakfast bar.

They got stiff and official when me and Meekins and Cutler showed up in a hurry.  They let us know our badges didn’t cut it.

Those boys were puzzling out together what exactly to do with us when the elevator doors slid open, and the major stepped into the lobby.

“A few developments,” Cutler told her.

She pointed more or less towards the ocean and said to the bunch of us, “Let’s walk.”

We ended up back around by the pool.  It was drained for the winter, and the cement deck was chairless, so we just circulated around the pool as we talked.

“ Mr. Pettigrew has been . . . forthcoming,” the major told us.

“About what?” I asked.

“A wide range of matters.”

“For instance?”  That from Meekins.

She got a patronizing smile.

Then Cutler told the major, “Could be he’s in it.”

The major stopped and had a look at us all. Cutler handed off to me, and I was as economical about everything we’d been up to as I could manage.

“Three of them?” she asked.  “You’re sure?”

We all nodded.

“And . . . neat?”

“That’s what they said.”

“Hmm.” That from the major.

“Why don’t you let these two talk to him,” Cutler suggested.

“Yes . . . well.”  Then the major said nothing further for a bit.  More circulating.  We waited.  She let us. “We’ve got kind of a problem,” she finally told us.

More walking. More waiting.

“Mr. Pettigrew. . .” She left it at that for a while.

At first, I thought they might have killed him. You know, just in the course of things and inadvertently.  Then I noticed there was something hangdog about the major’s bearing.  More in the way of acute embarrassment than institutional upset or shame.

“What?” That from Cutler.

“He slipped out somehow,” the major told us.  “Around two a.m., we think.”

Meekins pointed towards the lobby.  “What about those guys?”

“One on duty at that hour, and he was in the crapper.”

“So he just walked out?”

The major nodded my way.

“Was he getting . . . enhanced?” I asked her.

“No need. He threw right in.”

“On foot?” Meekins wanted to know.

“Took the desk guy’s car. The BOLO’s out.  We’ll find him.”

Much muttering ensued.  Cutler especially felt the need.

“What did you get while you had him?” I asked.

The major appeared to sift and sort in her head before she told me, “It’s complicated.” Then she added, “The Bureau’s sending a team from Raleigh. Look for them in a couple of hours.”

“Good.  Finally,” Cutler said.  “Let them run it all down.”

Cutler shifted gears on us.  He had some sort of embezzlement thing he wanted us to look into. It involved, naturally enough, the functionaries at a church.

We both told him, “Yes, sir,” and left him at the pool where he climbed up on the diving board.  He wandered to the end and was bouncing a bit as we passed through the lobby and left.  

“So?” Meekins asked me as we closed on the Tahoe.

“Natalie Akers,” I said.  “One more run at her.” 

“Could be she’s had them all,” Meekins suggested as we bounced out onto the beach road.

“Guess they’re not that neat.”

“Or they had each other, and she just got to watch.”

“She strike you as the watching sort?”

“Might be they’re neat part time.”

“You can do that?”

“I’m told.”

Meekins whipped into the lot of the real estate office where Natalie Akers worked, and we both went in and talked to an unnaturally tan girl at reception.  She told us Natalie was out inspecting properties.  Inspecting got air quotes.

We waited.  She enlarged.

“Friend of hers picked her up.”

“Neat?  Dark hair?  Expensive watch?”

That raised a snort.  She told me, “Goober.” She checked the time on her phone.  “Back soon.  I know him a little.  He inspects awful quick.”

So we waited in the lot for three quarters of an hour, but Natalie and her man friend failed to show.

“Let’s hear it,” I said to Meekins once we’d both gotten fidgety and bored.

“What?”

“Your theory.” She’d been making brainwork noises.

“Nothing really flies.”

“Try me.”

“One guy, I kind of get.  Crazy alone, you know?”

“Unibomber stuff.”

“Exactly.  One guy can have his own kind of sick.  But three guys?”

“I’m right there with you.”

“What is this?”

I had kind of  an answer I’d been chewing on.  “Might be some kind of game.”

That earned me the look I deserved.

“Muskateer shit . . . without a conscience.  Found each other somehow. The one that’s bent most infects the rest.  The rot goes level over time.”  

“Jesus, Tatum.”

“I know.  Sounds awful.  I’m ready to be wrong.”

“Boys do like games,” Meekins allowed. “You?”

“Not really,” I told her.  “But then I was never neat.”

We decided to wait another fifteen minutes for Natalie Akers and just sat looking out at nothing much and saying hardly anything until Meekins asked me, “So what are the rules?”

I hadn’t gotten that far. I shrugged.

“These three’d have them,” she said.  “As anal as they are.”

Seemed sensible. “Could be we’re looking at it wrong.”

“Might be a competition,” Meekins said.  “Each one’s bigger and better somehow.”

“So not how they’re the same, but how they’re different?”

Meekins nodded.

“Do we have anything on Pettigrew pre-army?”

“Not that I’ve seen.”  Meekins reached for the radio mic and raised Betty back at the PD.       “Could even be stupid shit,” I said. “Neat guys are still guys after all.”

“Incident room,” Meekins proposed, “before the Feds take it all?”

I nodded.

“We worried about Natalie?”

“She’s got a hayseed with a hard on.”  I let that serve for “No”.

Betty was deep in her searching by the time we reached the PD.  Cutler had come away from the hotel pool with enough resolve to work on the quarterly budget at his desk with his office door shut.

“FBI?” I asked Betty.

“An hour out. Called from Plymouth.”

“Grab them,” I told Meekins and pointed at Dennis and Randy — the unwinestained chinless twin. “The more eyes the better.”

The four of us convened in the incident room.  Meekins handed out the cases.  We had plenty to go around.  Photos.  Notes. Pettigrew’s stuff.  Doc-O’s findings.

Dennis laid aside a few gibletty snapshots.  “Just ate,” he explained.  A state of nature for Dennis.  He was working on a handful of Cheez-Its as he spoke.

“What are we after?” Chinless Randy.

“Instead of looking for where they’re the same,” Meekins said, “let’s figure out where they’re different. Any little thing that hits you.”

I had the girl in Texas.  Pettigrew had told us she was the first one, but I didn’t want to depend on that.  I scanned the evidence log Lieutenant Browne with a e had drawn up. He was thorough.  I had to give him that. 

“Four pieces. No weapon found.  Ax, they figured, or maybe a shovel.  Garden spade.  Like that.”

“Body all in one place?” Meekins asked me.

I flipped through the notes, the forms, the edited copies.  “Trunk of a car.  Not hers.”

“Whose?” That from Dennis.

“Random lady.  Pediatric nurse.  A Pontiac Firebird. Metallic black.”

“Who drives a black car in Texas?” chinless Randy wanted to know.

More scanning.  “Fay Bascombe,” I said.

“Victim?” Meekins asked.

I shook my head.  “Drives a black car in Texas.  Nurse.”

Meekins had claimed a corner of white board and was writing the particulars down.  The particulars anyway that seemed pertinent to her. Anything she could name or quantify precisely.

“Pediatric?” she said, chiefly to herself. “Where in Texas?”

“Austin. Around there,” I told her.

Meekins raised Betty with a shout and gave her instructions like she wouldn’t have tried to even a couple of months back.  “Looking for a . . .”  She pointed at me.

“Fay Bascombe,” I told Betty.

“Pediatric Nurse.  Texas. Austin area. Cops found a body in her car.  Want to talk to her,” Meekins said.

Betty nodded.  Betty left us a saucerful of what she called pecan turtles.  Nutty blobs of dark chocolate sprinkled with something that looked a bit like Sakrete. Once she’d left, Dennis found an accommodating drawer and pulled it open far enough for Randy to shove the whole plate in.

“You go,” Meekins instructed Randy.

He had Vesuvius, Virginia.  “Strangled. Left whole.  Put her in a pond.”

“Was that the cause of death?” I asked him

Randy read through the report.  “Well now here it says she might have drowned a little. Had some water in her lungs, but not an awful lot. Cut some too.” Randy showed us his forearm.      Recover a knife or anything?” Meekins asked.

Randy scanned.  Nothing.

Meekins wrote Vesuvius, strangled, drowned on the board. “Go,” she said to Dennis.

He had the army girl and her neighbor in Ohio. The rabbit fever folks. “Bush ax,” Dennis told us.  “No prints anywhere.  Booties and gloves, like here.  Blood from both the victims and some they couldn’t identify.”

“How hard did they try?” I asked.

Dennis scanned his paperwork as if it might even hold the answer.

“We’ll get the feds to run it properly,” Meekins said as she wrote stray blood on the white board.

“Wasn’t there a third vic?” I asked Dennis.

He nodded.  “A lot of priors.  Small time.  Thieving and stuff.” He read further and grunted.  “Found him in six pieces.  All piled up in a barn.”

“Whose property?” I asked.

“Doesn’t say.”  Dennis held up a photo of the barn.  It was little short of collapsing.

“Weapon?” Meekins wanted to know.

Dennis sifted and searched.  “Spade.”  He had a photo of that as well and showed it to us.  Short handle.  Square tip. “Left it on the scene.”

“Piled up how?” I asked Dennis.

He found a photo of the body and passed it over.  The formation was Lincoln Log-ish.  Stacked regular and square.  Legs halved.  Arms halved.  An orderly bit of business. I showed the photo to Meekins.  She pinned it up.

“They ever find the bush ax?” Meekins asked Dennis.  She was making those boys snoop and investigate more than probably they ever had. They mostly manned speed traps and wrote parking tickets, kept furious spouses apart.

Dennis shook his head.  “But funny thing . . . they found a picture of it. Kitchen counter.” He showed us a photo of a Polaroid of the honed blade of a bush ax.  It was clean and shiny and laying on a table beside a bath towel stained with blood.

I went fishing for all of Pettigrew’s Polaroids I could lay my hands on and compared them to the bush ax.  There was something about the framing — the flash kind of spoiled the light — but the composition suggested some taste and an eye.  Grim business but studied and organized.

“How many have Polaroids?” Meekins asked.

We sifted through the files. But for ours, snapshots always figured in.

“What are we thinking?” Meekins asked.  “They’ve moved past it, or we just haven’t found the pictures yet?”

“Maybe we ought to revisit the crime scenes.  Look everywhere we can,” I said.

Meekins noted as much on the board and then said my way, “What’s yours?”

“Pennsylvania,” I told her.  “Normalville.”

“Some kind of joke?” Dennis asked.

I’d only ever glanced at this one.  That’s the trouble with a pile of killings.  It’s hard to study them all without seeing much beyond the senseless waste and gore.

“No military connection.  Not an obvious one anyway.”

“How many victims?” Meekins wanted to know.  She was standing at the board with her marker.

“Two.  One of each. He went first.” It took me a moment to locate the pertinent details. “Eight pieces. Shoulders, thighs, knees. With a tree saw.”

I showed the evidence photo around.  It was one of those curved blades on a pole that rides up over a lopper.

As they passed the photo among them, I scanned the details of the Normalville PD report.  “Here’s something,” I said.  “The saw came from South Carolina.  Had a sticker on it.”  There was a photo of that as well that I handed over to Meekins. “Hardware store. Spartanburg.”

That stirred Dennis.  “Got something from down around there.” He found the document he was after. A scrap of road map.  “Cowpens, South Carolina. Spartanburg’s like an inch away.”

“Do we know where our hatchet came from?” Meekins asked me mostly.

I shook my head.  “Figure it didn’t belong with the house. Handle’s a replacement.  Head’s Swedish.  Gransfors.  Pricey.”

“So not Kenny Fulcher’s or Mick’s for sure,” Meekins said.

Dennis and Randy jumped in straightaway and told her together, “Naw.”

Meekins wrote on the board “Rules” and underneath it “Bring the blade.”

“Military/non military?” Meekins asked.  “What’s the breakdown?”

We tabulated.  All green to start with before civilians got roped in.  After that, it looked like a balanced mixed.

“Got it in for the army?” Dennis asked.

“Maybe it’s access?” I suggested.  “Convenience.  They know people in the service.  Women they can get next to before the alarms go off. Started that way.  Circle’s getting wider.”

“And most of the civilians are wrong place/wrong time or for hire?” That from Meekins.

“Some of both,” I suggested.

“What else?” she asked.

More digging and sifting and thinking in ways that felt a lot like police work instead of the usual dragging around and racing up and down the four lane.

“I’ve got a regular civilian,” Randy announced.  “Florida.  Retired.  Wholesale plumbing supply.”

“Ours for sure?” I asked him.  We’d been passed along some ringers.

Randy nodded and showed me an evidence photo. Mr. Phillip Prentiss piled up on a patio chase lounge.  A nice one.  Teak. He’d been disassembled.  No blood to speak of though, and the cuts were surgical and clean.

“Blade?” Meekins asked.

Randy went searching. “Didn’t find one.”

“Photo?” she wanted to know.

“Found this. Drawing of a cane knife. It was in the crisper drawer.” Randy handed over a photo of the sketch on what looked like a page torn from a notebook.  A machete with ambitions, fat on the end for swinging weight. Not drawn with impeccable talent but far better than I could do.

That prompted Dennis to pull an evidence photo out of his stack of paper.  “Looks kind of like it. Kentucky. They just figured it came from the shed.”

It went on like that for a while, until the FBI finally showed.  A couple of guys with toothpicks.  Ned and Bennett.  They’d stopped on the causeway at Basnight’s for the crab imperial.  We got to hear all about it. Then they sighed and got down to business like a couple of fellows charged with laying pipe.

They were familiar with most of the cases the way I’m familiar with string theory. They wanted to start by having us tell them every little thing we’d found out. Cutler had gone from despondent to semi-agreeable, so he directed me and Meekins to oblige them. Nothing came back our way, of course, except for the odd crab imperial burp.

“And your witness/suspect, Mr. Pettigrew?” That one went from Ned to Cutler.

“Army lost him.”

“Had he been charged?”

Cutler shook his head.  “We’re just coming around on him now.  Got reason to think he was involved.”

“And he found out?” Bennett asked.

“Could be,” Cutler said.  “Don’t really know.”

“Might have just got sick of the Hilton,” I told them.  “And the army brass and all.”

“You’re Taylor?” Ned.  I knew his type right down to the ground.  He’d take early retirement and trade in his wife. Maybe buy a horse or two and a piece of a vineyard. Live on Cabernet and Cialis.

“Right.”

He gave me the full shoes to cowlick regard.

“We found the house where they’d been staying?” Meekins told him.

Ned tossed a Post-it pad her way so she could supply him the address.  It bounced off her sternum and hit the floor.

“Avon,” I said.  “Reef Road.  Big yellow thing.”

“Proper directions, chuckles.” That from Bennett.

“South.  I’d say ‘you can’t miss it’, but I’ve worked with feds before.”

Ned began to gather up our files.  “Got a box or something?”

“Sure do,” Cutler said and left. 

He never came back.  Meekins thoughtfully opened a drawer and pulled out the plate of Betty’s pecan turtles.

“Help yourselves,” she told Ned and Bennett.

They did.  Jergens and Sakrete.  We left.

32

The evening crew was coming on — chinless Lowell and a guy from Manteo who was double dipping.  Dennis and them, if the need came up, were just about always on call.      

“Natalie now?” I suggested to Meekins.

“Way ahead of you, chuckles.”

We got lucky and caught the tan girl from Natalie’s office out in their lot.  She gave us three houses to check off the top of her head.

“Thought he was quick,” I told her.

“Always was,” she said.

We started with the house closest by, a monstrosity in Southern Shores.  It was just down the road from Natalie’s uncle’s place and so seemed like a good choice for her. A fine spot to tweak the relatives from, but the driveway was empty and the house was locked tight all around. 

“Next?” I asked Meekins.

“Bay side,” she said.  “Kitty Hawk.”

So back down we went and across the highway over towards the sound.

Meekins told me on the way she’d once half planned on applying for a job with the Bureau.

“Thought I’d get some seasoning here.  Maybe go to Raleigh or Charlotte and then move on to D.C. when the time felt right.”

I listened. I nodded.  I seemed to recall I’d had similar thoughts myself.  My plans hadn’t survived my first exposure to federal agents.

“And now?”

“Those two,” she said and shook her head.  “Standard issue?”

“I met a good one once.  Crazy case up in Virginia.” I hadn’t thought much about that episode for a while.  “Kate something.  World-class instincts but barking mad. Kind of doubt she’s working anywhere anymore.”

There was a truck in the driveway of the Bay Street house.  An old Chevy with a bunch of crap in the bed.  Ropes and planks and rubber boots.  A tangled lump of rusty fencing.

“We got a name on this guy?” Meekins asked as she played her flashlight beam on the tag.

“Speedy.”

That’s when we heard Natalie’s cackle.

“Doesn’t sound dead,” Meekins told me.

The lower door off the carport was standing half open, so we invited ourselves on in.

We could hear them upstairs. He was begging. “Come on, baby.  Come on.” He seemed to  want sex or a cold beer, possibly a sandwich.

We went up the carpeted stairs to the carpeted parlor floor.  It was bigger than most and had more than a few gaudy, bright brass accents to it, but the same sort of furniture as was common. Puffy sleeper sofas with hideous ballistic upholstery.  You needed room for fourteen or fifteen in a house this size to make sense of  five thousand a week.

The kitchen was a floor up.  They weren’t there either.  They’d been there, though, and had trashed it completely.  Bottles on the countertop.  A pizza box from a place in Kitty Hawk where they claimed to be Sicilian but featured Bisquick in their crust. You either ate there only once or you didn’t have much use for food.

We mounted the stairs to the third floor.

“Naw.  Come over here.”  He was pleading.

“Give them a shout?” I asked Meekins.

She was all for springing on them.  Still hoping, I guess, to embarrass Natalie who had no proper sense of shame.

We hit the third floor — jacuzzi on the deck. Steam coming off the water.  Speedy was in the tub pining for Natalie who was dancing naked for him just inside the house.

“Aw, baby!”

She cackled.

We watched her from behind her. There was quite a lot of real estate to see.

Speedy saw us and announced generally, “Sweet Christ!”

I got the distinct feeling they were only just arriving at the copulation phase of the evening, which Speedy had been building to for awhile.  He’d bought pizza and liquor and a twelve pack of lite beer.  Had figured out how to heat the hot tub up.  He’d probably been obliged to listen to various of Natalie’s complaints.  Work.  Relations.  Bloating.  Whatever.  He’d labored to be sympathetic.

Then he’d stripped down naked, climbed into the steamy water, and was finally getting some action in the form of a naked dance.

Natalie wasn’t alarmed to see us and failed to cover herself.  Instead she turned primarily my way and said, “Oh, hi.”

“Put something on.” That from Meekins.

Natalie smiled and stayed where she was.

“Let’s go, Speedy.  Out,” Meekins said.

The boy made a pitiful noise from the tub.

“Your place, is it?”  I felt like I ought to take part.

Speedy pointed in Natalie’s direction and mumbled something.

“I’ve got the key somewhere,” she told us and went looking.

I passed the time cataloging Natalie’s assortment of tattoos. Yosemite Sam on her ribcage.  A snatch of poetry on her upper thigh.  Something on her calf that looked vaguely reptilian, a yen/yangish sort of thing just south of her left elbow. An eagle with an anchor on her left hip.

“Get her a towel.”

That was for me from Meekins.  I realized it eventually and hunted up a towel off a rack behind the door.  I carried it over to Natalie.  She draped it around her shoulders. She’d shaved herself — or somebody had — in what looked like a fleur-de-lis.  Shaggier than it started out, but still crafty for pubic work.

“You do that?” I asked her.

She played dumb until I’d pointed.

“Oh,” she said. We both had a study.  She shook her head.  “Friend of mine.”

“Ray.”  Meekins was fresh out of patience.

I turned towards Speedy. “Get up.”

“All right.  All right.”

He splashed around a little but failed to stand.  He busied himself instead, I imagine, thinking of unprovocative things.  Bull dogs.  Crescent wrenches.  Smelly cousins.  That sort of thing.

“I want a towel,” he announced once he’d managed a crouch.

There was only a small one left.  I tossed it to him.  He whimpered and used it to cover his stalk as, finally, he stood.

“Sugar, I’ll get to you,” Natalie informed him. 

His towel stirred and shifted.

“Where are your pants?” Meekins asked him.

I looked where he pointed.  Greasy, dirty jeans and yesterday’s briefs.  Or maybe last week’s.

“Not touching that.  Go on, Speedy,” I said.

“It’s Leslie,” Natalie informed me.

“Les!”

“Have pity on the guy.”

“I was about to when you and miss thing showed up.”

Speedy banged into the deck door frame.

Natalie shimmied and giggled both.

“Ray.”  Meekins sounded like she was about to draw and fire.

“Clothes,” I told Natalie.

She relented enough to pull a pair of elaborate panties on.  They had filigree and cut outs and shouldn’t have been in the same room with Speedy’s briefs.

“Ray.”

“That bra can go on too,” I said.

It matched the panties. It looked expensive and left Natalie with cleavage to spare.

“She said it was fine to be here.”  Speedy was half in his jeans and already ratting out his date.

“Sugar.”

“You did.” Then he turned towards me.  “Ain’t going to tell my wife or nothing, are you?”

Natalie picked up her skirt and shook it.  “You told me you’d divorced her.”

“Did not.”

“And said you were nine inches angry.”

Speedy grunted and pulled on his shirt.

“Go on,” Meekins told the poor boy. “She’s riding with us.”

Speedy raced for the stairs and was half out of sight before Natalie shouted after him, “Bye, sugar.”

Meekins did some snorting and some glaring.

“She always like this?” Natalie asked.

“You lied to us, didn’t you?” I said to Natalie.

She squinted and waited. Who could keep up?

“Three of them, right?” I pointed at one of her healing cuts.

“Aw, honey,” she said, “with those boys it was hard to tell.”

Meekins made Natalie tidy up and take the trash down to the bin.  She muttered at me about how shiftless and no count a creature Natalie was.

“You’d think she’d care a little.  I wouldn’t want to get hacked up.”

“It’s an act,” I told her.  We watched Natalie hum and wiggle as she shoved stuff in the trash bin.

“Then you talk to her.  You are divorced, right?”

“Very.”

“And what . . . four inches angry?”

Meekins left the house before I could come up with anything clever to say.

Natalie explained it all to us in the Tahoe. She’d only been occupying Leslie while his wife moved up to Moyock.

“Leaving him,” Natalie informed us. “You saw him.  He’s no good.”

“So he’ll go home and . . .”

Natalie nodded and gave us her sad girl smile.  “Big empty.”

“Tough night for Speedy,” Meekins said.  “Where are we going?”

She was talking to me, but Natalie campaigned for the chili burger joint just up the beach road.

“Didn’t you just have a pizza?” I asked her.

“Leslie,” she told me.  “Building up his strength.”

We were hungry as well.  We’d neglected food lately, and one of the guys in the kitchen chili burger place sent us out a special basket of corn dodgers and waffle fries.  He followed them soon thereafter and turned out to have a thing for Meekins.  She introduced him around once I made her.

“Gary,” was all she said.

“So, Gary.  How’d you and Candy meet?”

“Known her since school,” Gary told me.  “I played football.  Candy ran track and all.”

I glanced at Meekins.  “No kidding.”

“Hurdles mostly.” Gary pulled up a chair.

Meekins reached for her fork.  I had reason to fear it might end up in my eye.  Instead she only bent it double as she wore some enamel off her teeth.

Most of what I knew of Meekins was stuff that I’d observed.  I had to think she’d always been a bit of a straight arrow.  Never loose or druggy, so hurdles fit right in.  I knew her father had been a boat hand and that Meekins had done a stint in the Coast Guard, but that was about it.

“Ya’ll go out?” I asked Gary.

Gary blushed.  Gary giggled.

“We hooked up, didn’t we?” Natalie asked and then squinted at Gary like she couldn’t quite hope to be sure.

“Don’t believe so.”

“Wedding.  Avalon Pier. Big wind,” Natalie told him.  “Blew a bridesmaid over.”

Gary colored distinctly as he placed her.  “I was drinking back then.”

“I’ll say.  We were in your buddy’s truck.  Groom’s mother caught us. Remember?”

Gary stood up.  Put the chair back where he’d found it.  “I probably ought to . . .” he told us all and mounted a wholesale retreat.

“King cab.”  Natalie wasn’t one to leave a story unfinished.  “Figured it was his.”  She ate a hushpuppy.  “Wasn’t, as I recall.”

“Can’t help the rest of them,” Meekins said to me, “but her . . . her we can save?”

We drove Natalie to my place.  There was no reason to think Pettigrew knew where I lived. Or any reason really to think he didn’t either.  Meekins, ever cautious,  parked the Tahoe under a raised house four doors down.

I let Natalie have my last tallboy and gave her the TV remote.  I figured she’d fuss with it for a while before I’d have to tell her the batteries were dead and the cable was out.

Meekins wanted to make some kind of plan.

“Let’s get through the night,” I suggested, “and plan tomorrow.”

“You thinking the feds’ll come up with something?”

I did that thing I’d learned at Avon.  I nodded and said, “No.”

We all ended up playing Stratego without bothering to read the rules.  That made for quite enough lively quarrels and insults to keep us up until midnight.  By then, Meekins and Natalie had left off entirely with battlefield maneuvers and were merely belittling each other instead.  Skank.  Gash.  Clitless dyke.  That sort of thing.  I enjoyed it.

Then Meekins made noises like she was going home for the night.

“All those cats to feed,” Natalie said.

“Fuck it.” Meekins kicked off her shoes and stayed.

Natalie took the Caribbean room.  Meekins went with the split-rail bedstead.  I stayed up for a while trying to read a mystery I’d found in a hamper in the half bath.  It was primarily about a homicidal hypnotist in Kansas City who was a lot more flamboyant than a homicidal hypnotist needed to be.

I would have caught him in about ten minutes, but he had the local authorities stymied. Too much Kansas City pedigree.  Too many powerful friends. 

He was having his way with a cosmetologist when Meekins came into my room.  When she tapped anyway, and I said, “Yeah?”

She pushed the door open and entered.  Carefully closed it behind her.  She was wearing the t-shirt I’d given her for sleeping and looked all of seventeen.

“What?” I aimed to be responsible and proper the way men actually do sometimes.

She didn’t say anything. Just pulled back the blanket and slipped into the bed beside me.

“What?”

Still nothing from Meekins as she stretched out close.

I watched her.  I waited.  I had a list in my head of everything I’d best not do.  Lying on my back with a book in my hands seemed tolerably right for the moment.

“Read me something,” she finally told me as she pressed her cheek against my shoulder.

I was up to the part about the Kansas City SWAT boys chasing the wrong man.  They’d cornered him in a warehouse where he made a string of poor decisions that resulted in him getting both shot to pieces and flash banged into bits.  The lead detective rolled up to save him about a minute and half too late, which provided occasion for all manner of departmental backbiting and recriminations. Those Kansas City cops seemed especially good at that.

It turned out Meekins only wanted some comfort.  I wouldn’t have known that at twenty, but I was far enough along to sense it now.

She was warm against my shoulder, and I would have sworn she was asleep until she reached over to twist my book around and eye the cover of it.

Meekins groaned.

“Read something better,” she said.

33

We had the obligatory pow wow once we’d dropped Natalie off at work.

“No ‘inspections’,” I told her.  “You stay here all day.”

Natalie smiled and showed me the pink tip of her tongue.  You couldn’t truly tell her anything. She was wearing yesterday’s clothes and didn’t appear to care at all.  They were probably yesterday’s clothes already yesterday.

“Got to give it to the girl,” I told Meekins.  “She’s kind of her own thing.”

“Yeah.  Like a pterodactyl.”

I pictured a slutty, half-drunk flying lizard in my head.

Ned and Bennett both had on gray suits.  One with stripes.  One without. The colonel and the major had both dressed up a bit as well.  They were pressed anyway and buttoned up.  Jackets.  Green army ties — Lieutenant Browne’s natural state.

We all crowded into the situation room.  Betty had brought in a plate of granola bars. Bennett dug right in, had clearly learned nothing from yesterday’s nut clusters. Ned did most of the talking.  He’d turn to Bennett for the odd nod.

Ned started with logistics, like they always do.      

“Lectern?” He asked Cutler.

“Do we have one?”

Ned nodded.

“Probably.  Somewhere.”

Beyond crossing his arms, Cutler didn’t stir. God love a marine.

Ned gave up. “Let’s recap,” he said. He gestured towards the major who rose from her chair to present.

She was looking even more bony and angular than usual.  The exact opposite of Natalie Akers.  I noticed the colonel had a mouse under his left eye.  It was very nearly elbow sized.

“Tabitha Kline,” the major said and provided details about the girl I’d found.  About Mick Tillett from Wanchese.  About Kenny Fulcher, the survivor.

“Helpful?” Ned asked of Kenny.

“Not yet,” the major allowed.

“Where is he anyway?”

“We’ve got him,” the major told me.

“Got him like Pettigrew?”

She stopped to breathe and search me out for somewhere to land a blow. “He’s secure.”

“Maybe,” Meekins said, “we ought to sit him down again now that things look . . . more complicated.

Cutler agreed.

“We’re talking to him,” the colonel said.

“Local boy.”  Cutler jabbed a thumb Meekins’ way.  “It might go better with home cooking.”

“We’ve got a relationship with him,” I said.

Ned glanced at Bennett who nodded.  “Let them?” That was for the brass.

They decided we could have an hour with Kenny.  They said we’d do it at the Hilton.

“On the beach.”  That from Meekins.

“Tends to loosen them up,” I explained.

The major didn’t buy it, but Ned and Bennett were inland boys and sentimental about the ocean.  They didn’t seem to have much trouble imagining themselves forthcoming with their toes in the sand.

“They ran off with the last guy,” the colonel explained to the Feds.

“Brought him back,” I told Ned mostly. Bennett was busy with his granola.

“Go with them but hang back,” Ned told the colonel.

The colonel nodded like he had a mind to call in air cover as well.

The army was guarding Kenny the way they’d neglected to guard Pettigrew.  One soldier in the room.  One in the corridor. Both of them more or less wide awake.  That must have been torment for the guy in with Kenny since Kenny had nothing but complaints to lavish on us by the time me and Meekins arrived.

He started with his clothes.  Somebody — probably Lieutenant Browne — had brought Kenny a couple of pair of thrift shop shirts and slacks.

“Smell them.”

We wouldn’t.

“Like feet but worse.”

There were nasty canvas loafers as well, which Kenny pointed out.

“I ain’t wearing those,” he told us.

So Kenny walked the beach in his socks. We’d been informed by the colonel that we could only circulate in front of the Hilton.  He was watching us from up on the bistro deck with a pair of binoculars.

Lieutenant Browne and the major were following us.  They kept about forty yards back, but every now and again the lieutenant would hustle up to pass along queries and commentary. Nothing pertinent or pressing, but just enough to keep the guy half winded.

So they were not the best circumstances for a fruitful conversation, but then Kenny wasn’t really in much of a mood to chat.

“How come I can’t go home?” he asked us every way he could think to do it.

“Most people’d be happy at the Hilton,” I told him.

“With the goddam army in the room?”

“Safer,” Meekins said.

“I can take care of me.”

“That’s probably what Mick was thinking,” I told him.  “Wonder where the rest of him went?”

Kenny got pouty.  “I ain’t done none of that.”  Then he sulked and wouldn’t say anything for a bit.

We walked north until the colonel whistled and waved and then pivoted and headed back south. We stopped and watched a scrap of plywood get tumbled onto the beach.

“I want to go home.”

“You cut up that girl.”

Kenny turned to look full at Meekins.  Only barely eyed her chest.  “He made me.”

“He who?” I asked.

“You know.  Him.”

“That’s kind of the trouble,” Meekins said.  “We’re not clear on him.

“I been through all this.”

“Once more,” I said. “The guy we brought in wasn’t the guy you dealt with, right?”

Kenny nodded.  “Mine was like him, you know?  That kind of dude. All regular and shit.”

“We’re thinking there might be a third one too,” Meekins said to Kenny.

“In the car.” He nodded.

“Number three?” I said.

“Uh huh.”

“Why the hell didn’t you tell us?” Meekins wanted to know.

Kenny told Meekins’ third button down, “Didn’t nobody ask.”

I’d gotten didn’t nobody asked  about a thousand times in my career.  There’s a whole class of people on this rock that never volunteer a thing.  They’ll shoot you straight if you put the question just the way it needs to be put.  Otherwise, nothing comes out because didn’t nobody ask.

“Describe him,” Meekins said.

Kenny shrugged, like I figured he might.  “Shit, look!” He bent down to pick up a piece of cobalt sea glass.  Even Kenny probably had a jar at home about half full of the stuff.

“Ever see him out of the car?”

Kenny squinted my way.  “Yeah.  Once.”

“Regular?  Clothes and shit?”

Kenny nodded and grinned like I’d done some powerful mind reading.

“How old?” Meekins asked.

Kenny looked pained.  That was the wrong formulation.

“Younger than the other two?  Older?  The same?”

“Middle,” Kenny told me.  “And a hat, like in the movies.”

“What movies?” That from Meekins.

“You know the guy.  Chasing around and all.”

That was just the way with Kenny’s ilk.  Dump it on us to decipher.  Meekins made a couple of bad suggestions that got snorted at by Kenny.  She was thinking of guys.  I worked on hats and came up with it in time.

“Indiana Jones.”

Kenny snapped his fingers and pointed my way like I was ripe for a Vegas lounge act.

“A fedora?” Meekins was bordering (I could tell) on smacking Kenny.

Fedora was not a Kenny word, but he guessed it would do.  “All right.”

“So three of them?”

Kenny nodded my way.

“Nobody else?”

He shook his head.  “Me and Mick.  That gash sometimes.”

“Natalie?”

He nodded at me.

“Was she in it too?” Meekins was wishing.

Kenny shook his head.  “Party thing. I figure not much she won’t do.”

We both looked at Kenny and waited for any sort of enlargement or explanation.

He finally caught on and told us.  “I went to get money from him once.”

“At the Dunes?”

Kenny nodded my way. “He wasn’t there, but she was. Tied up, you know? Bleeding some.”  He shoved his elbows back.  “Like this here.  On the kitchen floor.”

“You help her?” Meekins asked.

“Wouldn’t let me. Right where she wanted to be.”

“Living anywhere they wanted.  This time of year and all.”

“Ever hear where?” I asked.

Kenny scrunched his face and did some thinking.  A light went on.  He snapped his fingers.  “Carova. Got stuck on the beach.  Shifted somewhere else after that.”

I’d never heard of the place and glanced Meekins’ way.

“All the way up,” she said and then turned to Kenny.  “They ever talk about why they’re doing all this mess?”

That was a Natalie question through and through.  Kenny wasn’t remotely the ilk to trouble himself with why. He looked at her like she was speaking French.  He glanced at me for help.

“We’re close to who,” I said to Meekins.  “We sure know what.  Probably going have to do without why.”

That was about my tenth variation on precisely the same theme.  Meekins was sure to give it up.  She just hadn’t gotten there yet.

“Carova?” I said.

Meekins nodded.  Spat even.  “Yeah,” she told me.  “All right.”

Betty hooked us up with a cop who covered Carova, more or less.  He didn’t go up there often, stuck mostly down around Duck and Corolla, but he tried to take a ride through every few weeks.

“Hippies and shit,” he told us once we’d agreed to buy him a proper lunch. It was only quarter past eleven by the time we reached him, but sitting in a radio car reading a Cabela's catalog can generate (I have to think) a powerful appetite.

Thirst too, I guess.  He got a beer and a plate loaded with fish tacos at a place called Uncle Ike’s.

“I’m going off,” he explained as he knocked back his Fat Tire.  “Ya’ll ain’t eating?”

“Just went on,” I told him as he waved for another beer.

Then he needed Texas Pete.  Then he needed mayo.  Then he guessed he could use some tartar sauce for his basket of home fries.  Once he’d collected all that, it was time for another Flat Tire.

We watched him eat.  We watched him drink.  “Hope you got something for us,” Meekins said.

He did.  He’d emptied the napkin dispenser before he got around to talking.  We waited until the waitress had finally hauled off all his stuff. He went for a slice of pie as well, and they were melting cheese on top when he told us, “Get break ins and stuff up there sometimes, but this was a weird one all right.”

He toothpicked.  He sucked spit.  We waited.  “Folks called.  About three weeks ago.  Live up in Virginia somewhere, had come down for a weekend.  Shook up.  Somebody’d busted in.  Said we needed to see.”

The pie arrived.  He wanted pepper for it right out of a grinder.  The waitress obliged him with a big walnut pepper mill.  She looked half tempted to shove it up his ass. I know Meekins would have helped.  I might even have cheered them on.

He ate.  He hummed whiled he did it.  We waited.

“So me and Donald go on up and have a look. Nothing’s busted.  They slipped the latch or something.  Place is all straight and clean, but there’s this basket on the  dining room table.”  He described it with his hands.  “Hamper, you know?”

We did.  We nodded.

“Full of all kinds of stuff.  Dishes and towels.  A couple of lamps.  Smelly candles.  Coasters.  Stuff from all over.”

“The house?”

He nodded at me.  “But you wouldn’t know from where cause they’d rearranged all the furniture and laid everything out different.”

“Different how?” Meekins asked.

He shrugged.  “Never saw it before, but it all looked fine to me.

“So they redecorated?”

He nodded my way.

“Set the good stuff apart from the bad?”

Another nod.

“Anything missing?” Meekins asked.

“Jeep, but we found it down at the cineplex.”

That would be our ten-screen monstrosity in Kill Devil Hills.

“Another car missing from the lot?” I asked.

He gave me that Kenny look like I’d performed a trick. He nodded. Then he burped before pushing back and heading for the toilet.

“Think he’s finished eating?” Meekins asked me.

“How’s a human to know?”

Officer piehole offered to ride with us up to Carova and show us around, but by then we couldn’t see the need to go.  Our boys had tidied up and left, had moved south to be neat in Avon, so I paid for lunch and carried the receipt back to Cutler at the PD.

“Corolla cop,” Meekins explained as Cutler studied the register tape.

“Four beers?”

We nodded.

“Helpful?”

“A little.”

We didn’t bother to tell it to Cutler alone but waited for the FBI confab.  They had that Fed thing for meetings.  One in the morning and another in the afternoon. We got Power Pointed straightaway. Ned and Bennett had busied themselves collecting data.  Bending bits, they called it. The new FBI, populated with dweebs.

They had a raft of possibles.  Known Pettigrew associates.  Army colleagues.  College friends.  That sort of thing. They’d also worked up a fairly showy and ambitious Pettigrew biopic.  Heavy on the pic.  Family photos.  Pettigrew’s dad had been a commercial plumber, and him and his wife and his son and his daughter had moved around chasing employment.  Office buildings and sports complexes and airports and shopping malls.  From Providence to Atlanta to Memphis to Chicago and various middling locales in between.

“Where’d you get this stuff?” Cutler finally asked.  The one thing we’d all wanted to know.

“Got to know where to look,” Bennett told him.

“Facebook,” Meekins said.  “Instagram.  They social media-ed all this shit.”

Ned smiled and nodded Meekins’ way.  He told her, “Yes, ma’am,” like she might just be the sort to have a future in the Bureau.

“Get anything past this stuff?” I wanted to know.  “Childhood friends?  Schoolmates? That sort of thing?”

Ned gestured towards Bennett.  He had charge of the slide show and ran past a half dozen photos to age the family a decade or so.  Bad haircut.  Pimply skin.  Nathan Pettigrew in high school.

“Here’s where it gets interesting,” Bennett said.

“Kind of a crew,” Ned told us.

More boys.  More haircuts.  Not as bad as mine have been, but shaggy and ill-considered.  Probably strife about them at home.

But there was one angelic exception.  Impeccably combed.  Proper dress shirt.  Starched and buttoned to the neck.  A tie as well with a slender knot.

“Eric Finney Grimes,” Ned informed us. “They met junior year.  Texas.  Sugar Land.”

Then Bennett became far the better agent in my eyes.  He pointed at Eric Finney Grimes’ tie knot.  “Prince Albert,” he told us.  “What kind of kid ties that?”

“A neat one,” I said.

Ned and Bennett both nodded.

“Eric changed his name to Dabney,” Ned informed us.  “Finney to Flynn.”

Bennett advanced to a navy enlistment form.  The kid had served as a submariner.  Not much call for button downs and slender tie knots under the briny for weeks on end.

“Mustered out. Honorable.  Married.  Divorced.” Ned nodded Bennett’s way, and he brought up another photo.  Pretty kid.  A guy.  Twenty maybe in the picture.

“Lomax, Matthew Elsworth,” Ned told us.

Then we got a mugshot.  Still pretty but scuffed up.

“Assault,” Ned said.  “Solicitation.  Extortion . . . until the charges were dropped.”

Another photo.  Eric Dabney Finney Flynn Grimes.

“The victim,” Ned said.  “Pulled out of the case.”

“So it’s these three?” I said.  Otherwise we’d have been sitting there until dark.

“We think so.”  That from Bennett.

“How long have you thought so?” the colonel asked.  He beat Cutler to it by nanoseconds.

“Activities here have . . . firmed it up, but . . .”  Ned grimaced as best he was able and nodded.  They’d probably been sure for a bit.

“Activities?” Cutler started.  Cutler reminded Ned and Bennett about the giblets and the blood, the loss and the anguish, the senselessness of it all.  I’ll give them credit for tolerating him.  It was a community theatre sort of speech. Somebody was bound to give it. Cutler seemed the ideal choice.

Those boys nodded throughout and made sympathetic noises.  I was having to do some revising.  They weren’t dodgy and incompetent.  Unhelpfully officious. They didn’t appear determined to hinder and stymie us after all.  Just the opposite, in fact.  They were a new brand of fed.  Data benders — I’ll give them that. They’d found what they’d needed to find.  But for practical, compassionate purposes, they were slightly shy of decent.  A homicide’s never an activity, even behind closed station house doors. You always need to believe, for your humanity’s sake, that it’s something far, far worse.

The colonel threw in with Cutler and had a go at Ned and Bennett as well.  He declared he was offended by the callous tone.  By the brisk showmanship of it all.  The lack of respect for the mutilated.  Their bankrupt sense of decorum.  Cutler and the colonel made it plain they needed a show of empathy, and those fed boys served them up one.  It was brief, of course, and hollow but proved to be salve enough serve.

This was the future staring at us.  Guys in nice suits stringing facts together.  You didn’t need a heart to do it.  Hell, you barely needed a gun.

“Why?”  Meekins asked.  She couldn’t let it go?

“Excuse me?” That from Ned.  Chirpy but exasperated.

“What’s the point?  What are they after?”

Bennett gave her the grin equivalent of a pat on the head.

“Why are they hanging around here?” she wanted to know.  “Off season.  No people.  They must know they’ll stick out.”

“Haven’t yet.”  Bennett continued to grin as he said it.

Meekins grinned back.  The “Touche, fucknut” was implied.

“Got a plan?” I asked.  “Roaming around’s not working.”

Ned and Bennett had thought about that.

“The girl,” Ned said. “Ms. Akers.”

I could tell by his tone they wanted her staked out like a sacrificial goat.

“Sounded like a side thing for a couple of them,” I told him.

“You got something better?  It’s Taylor?” That Ned sure had a way with a dig.

I was about to allow I didn’t when Dennis threw open the door.  His hands were bloody.  His shirt was splattered.  He gave us all a wheezy, “Ngharln!”

34

Nobody else would have opened it.  Only Dennis.  The chinless boys had tried to make him wait, but somebody had written Kittens!! on the box lid.  That had proven enough for Dennis.

It was an LG dishwasher box.  A bit sad and crumpled at one corner.  It had been dropped in the lot in the handicapped space.  The top flaps sealed up with packing tape. The good kind.  The expensive kind.  The kind with fiber in it.

Meekins was the first to venture close.  The fed boys and the army were waiting for Lieutenant Browne to bring them gloves and booties.

“Hold on,” Ned told Meekins three or four times, but she ignored him and closed anyway.

“Kind of a big box for kittens,” she told Dennis mostly.

He allowed he could see that now.

Meekins lifted the flaps and had a look in.  I sidled up to join her.

“Hold on, Taylor.”

The box had a stout plastic liner.  An opaque sack.  We could see enough down the throat of the thing to tell it was a human all right.

Dennis had an awful thought and let it out.  “Ya’ll don’t think there are kittens in there too.”

Cutler called Doc-O out of habit, that or passive/aggressive resentment of the army’s forensic crew.  He’d been at the bait shop, so he rolled in without Janice, which meant he barked at all the rest of us singly and in turn. The fed boys tried to give him gloves.  They tried to give him booties.  He shook his head and lit a cigarette.  Went plundering like he was.

Doc-O made a bigger gap in the neck of the sack with his ball point pen.

“Head in there?” Cutler asked.

Doc-O went poking around with a twig. 

Ned and Bennett told him, “Wait.”

He was entirely deaf to them.  “Head,” Doc-O told us. “Thought you had this boy locked up.”

I stepped over for a look, half expecting Kenny Fulcher.  I got Nathan Donald Pettigrew instead.

The army crew came with a proper tent they set up around the box.  Bins as well for holding the stuff they fished out of the sack.  We were all invited to wait for the findings off and away in the open air.  It looked enough like a picnic to Betty to cause her to bring some Rice Crispy treats out.  How she fouled those up, I can’t quite say.  Hand lotion, of course, but they were brittle and tough as well. That didn’t stop Ned and Bennett, to the vast delight of Betty. She was used to seeing us pick and sniff at her stuff and then put it back.

Doc-O hung around long enough for Janice to finally arrive.  She’d been off getting a permanent on the advice of a cousin, she told us.  A cousin who must not have truly cared for Janice, given the results.  She had waves and curls in places where they didn’t begin to flatter.  Janice was handsome enough disheveled but looked sexually confused dolled up.

Doc-O, of course, knew just what to do as Janice approached from across the lot.  He removed the tattered straw trilby he always wore and shoved it Janice’s way as he told her, “Here.”

One of the army forensic guys emerged from the tent eventually.  He had a clipboard he consulted as he supplied us with details.  A plastic sack of personal effects as well.  Wallet.  Watch.  Eyeglasses.  A lone key.

He gave the sack to the colonel who passed it straightaway to Ned.  With a gloved hand, Ned fished out the wallet, checked the Texas license.

“Cause of death?”  That from the major.

“Gunshot.”  The guy put a finger to the side of his head.

A colleague came out of the tent with something in a bag.  A woman so togged up we could only see her eyes.  She tried to hand the thing to the guy with the clipboard, but he picked me out of the scrum and told her, “Him.”

So I got it instead.  An upper leg from the thigh joint to the knee.  It was heavy.  I hated to hug it close, but it was either that or drop it.

“Turn it over,” clipboard guy told me.

I shifted it around.  There was writing on the underside. Quite a lot of writing actually.       “What is that?” Meekins asked me. “Arrive where we started and . . .” Meekins couldn’t make out the rest.  It was smeared and blood spattered, but I knew what it was by then.

“Not a pack of English majors.” I’m sure I groaned and muttered.

The feds and the brass all closed on me.  Cutler too.  I got various versions of, “What?”

“The Wasteland,” I told them.  “T. S. fucking Eliot.” Every bad thing in this world comes down to poetry in the end.

They all wanted a look.  I set the sack on the ground and let them at it.  The more they shifted the hunk of leg, the bloodier the writing got. I’d wooed my ex wife with a chunk of that damn poem.  The hackneyed, high-mileage chunk it turned out. I could quote it, so I did.

“The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

“Well, Taylor . . .” Ned said with more than a little wonder in his voice.

“Used it on a girl once.”  And I pictured my ex when she was just that. Back before all the strife and the grinding down.  A delicate beauty she’d been with a weakness for shithead poseurs like me.

“What does it mean?”  Dennis, naturally.

“Whatever you want,” I told him.  “I was blind, but now I see.  Like that.”

“Down to two then,” Cutler said.  He sounded encouraged.  Even a little relieved.

“So maybe he wasn’t one of them after all,” the colonel suggested. 

“I’d check his hands for residue,” Meekins advised the Feds.

“Suicide?” Bennett asked her.

Meekins nodded.  “If it’s endgame time, then yeah.”

I was stuck still trying to decide what they’d killed him over, which meant I was making the error of giving them ordinary motives — rages, jealousies, tactical thinking —- the very sort of thinking I’d been warning Meekins against all along.

“So now they’re enlightened?” I asked her.

“Maybe they’re just done.”

“Spill,” the major said.

“Some kind of game,” Meekins told her.

I shared with them the variations we’d found among the murders.  Not escalation exactly, but details evolved and organized.

“Why are we just hearing this now?” the colonel wanted to know.

“Only a theory,” Meekins said.

The colonel stink-eyed her but good.

“So what are the rules?”  Ned waited.

Between us, me and Meekins dredged and revealed what little we’d put together.

“Feels like it ends here,” I said as a capper.

“Where here?” That was more in the way of a rhetorical question from Bennett. Aimed at Ned.  Aimed at the brass.  Aimed at Cutler and us.

One of the forensic techs came out of the tent with Pettigrew’s hands in the sort of plastic tub you’d put leftovers in. She sealed it and marked it on the lid.  Put it in a cooler. 

“GSR,” Bennett told her.  “Both hands.”

She nodded.

“What about your party girl?” Ned asked. “Out of danger?  Different game?”

I couldn’t say.  I shrugged.

“We’ve got this.” Ned gestured to take in every significant thing.  “Go babysit her.”

It sure sounded like an order. We looked towards Cutler who nodded to release us and send us on our way. He had feds.  He had the army.  He had a dead doer.  This was beginning to look to Cutler like the sort of thing that might work out.

Of course, Natalie Akers had gone out with a client.

“He kind of insisted,” the tan girl told us.

“On?”

“Natalie,” she said to Meekins.  “Nobody else would do.”

“Describe him.”

“Good dresser,” she told me.  “Could have done something better with his hair.”

“So . . . neat?” Meekins asked.

The tan girl nodded.  She tapped her wrist.  “One of those five thousand dollar jobs.”

She gave us a Kitty Hawk address.  Between the highways, near the beach.  The driveway was empty, but the side door off the deck was standing open.  Wide open with a piece of board on the sill to keep it from blowing shut.

Meekins pulled her gun, and I let that be enough.  We mounted the steps and climbed to the deck.  She kept wanting to hang behind me.

“Uh uh,” I told her.  “Don’t want one in the back.”

So Meekins went in tense and crouched.  I followed more at ease since it seemed clear to me that the board on the sill was a brand of invitation. We might find gore, but I doubted we’d see the business end of a hatchet. Instead, we didn’t find much of anything for a while.  The usual hideous furnishings and pictures of Jesus.  He was consoling the afflicted in a water color by the TV.  Floating on a cloud and looking Christ-Almighty satisfied on a square of carpet hanging over the couch.

I went down the hallway and checked the bedrooms.  The place looked like a barracks.  There were beds everywhere one could fit. Nothing much otherwise.  Ugly lamps.  Knotty pine bureaus.  Closets with shower curtains instead of doors. Bathroom mirrors with enough toothpaste splooge on them to serve as armored edging.

“Anything?” I asked Meekins upon returning to the front of the house. It was the usual open, common space.  Dusty fan overhead.  Vaulted ceiling.

Meekins shook her head.  She opened and shut the final two kitchen drawers.  I had a poke around the main room.  This house had an actual fireplace.  A brick one instead of the prefab, sheet-steal boxes you often see.  Big cypress mantel piece with the sort of candlesticks on it you could brain a linebacker with.  Other stuff too.  Dusty nicknacks.  A mustard jar lid.  A knitting needle.  What looked like junky, plastic cereal box toys.  Everything gritty but for one thing that wasn’t — a brochure for the Hilton up the beach.

It was shiny.  No layer of dust like every other damn thing in the house.

“Hey.”  I held it up so Meekins could see it.  “For us?”

“Kenny?”

“Their game.  Their rules.”

Where else were we going to go?  Meekins nodded and said, “All right.”

The army guys were both in the lobby watching some gasbag on Fox News who was in the usual spittle-flecked rage.

The soldiers popped up when they saw us.  Scrabbled around for their guns.

Me and Meekins went straight for the elevator.  Those boys Sirred and Ma’amed us plenty, but the car was open and waiting, and the doors slid shut before they could race over and reach us.

We rode up with a lady who’d come to scope out seaside wedding venues.  She told us all about the son-of-a-bitch she’d married the first time around.

“In a place like the DMV,” she said, “in goddamn Alabama.”

She had something more magical in mind this time around.  Not the groom necessarily — he’d be what he was — but certainly the ceremony.

“Out on the beach,” she told us.  “Sun setting over the water.”

Then she got off and the doors shut.

“Think somebody’ll straighten her out about that whole sun thing?”

Meekins nodded.  “Son-of-a-bitch number two.”

Kenny’s room was the only one with a door that wasn’t latched.  It smelled like a stable and looked a little like one too.  No blood though.  No real signs of struggle.  Just evidence of shiftlessness.

The bathroom was little more than a towel bin. The deck was cigarette butts, beer bottles, and Pringles cans.

“Maybe he just left.”

“Or maybe somebody showed him a fifty dollar bill,” she said.

“To go where and do what?”  It was chiefly rhetorical question, and I asked it as I began to sift through Kenny’s leavings and junk.

That room at the Hilton was much worse than the Jesusy house because all of Kenny’s rubbish was fresher.  Socks and underwear all over the place.  Greasy napkins.  Stray chicken fingers.

“How long’s he been here?” Meekins asked with a half-empty jar of chow chow in her hand.

“Kenny must be one of those exponential messers.  A week’s worth of fuck-shit-up in a day.”

“Another brochure?”

I could hardly be certain.  “We’ll know it when we see it. Might be anything.”

There was a lot of work ahead of us.  A motel room full of trash and clutter. Food wrappers and boxes.  Sacks and condiment packets.  Menus and tour books.  Assorted magazines. A copy of the Bible Kenny looked to have torn up for rolling papers. Clothes and toiletries.  A bunch of pages from a real estate flyer scattered all over the place. Room service trays and encrusted dishes.  Mini bar contents everywhere I looked.

The army boys came in and did quite a lot of harrumphing before Meekins convinced them to throw in and help us instead of trying to dress us down.

We ended up putting every suspicious thing on the bed spread. The GIs didn’t truly get the program and so nominated a bunch of crap until me and Meekins shouted them down.  Then they got careful and gave the job some thought, and it was the ginger one who finally found what we were after.  It had been rolled up and shoved in a beer bottle that was out on the balcony.

“Ma’am,” he said and held the bottle up for Meekins.

It looked like a label to me, and Kenny sure seemed the sort who’d peel it off and stick it down the neck.

“I think it’s a picture,” he told us.

He gave the bottle to Meekins.  She was casting around for something she could fish the thing out with when I took the bottle from her and broke it on the door jamb.  What was a bit of shattered glass in that sty?

A Polaroid all right.  Damp from dregs and rolled tight.

“Who did you see come and go down there?” I asked those guys.  I handed the photo to Meekins.  I knew she’d handle it with more care than I could muster at that moment.

Those two soldiers eyed each other.  Ginger was the mouthpiece.  “A couple of black ladies.” He glanced at his buddy who snapped his fingers.  “FedEx.”

“Who else?” I asked.

They scratched and grew squinty.

“A girl,” ginger told us.  They both grinned.

“Describe her,” I said.

“Dark hair.  Half naked. Out there.” He pointed down towards the pool deck. 

“Panties.  Bra,” the other said.  “Not a damn thing else.”

“Kind of dancing,” Ginger told me.

“Show them,” I said to Meekins, and she fished out her phone and located a photo of Natalie Akers.

“Her?”

They nodded like a couple of circus seals.

“So she put on a show?”

“Yes, sir.” I got it in stereo.

“Kenny must have just gone with him,” Meekins said to me.

I nodded and rubbed my fingertips together in the universal gesture for stupid fucker with a mohawk.

Meekins swabbed the Polaroid on her pant leg. The beer had made it streaky, but as it dried, the details came back through the chemical murk. We didn’t need awful many of them to know what we were seeing. Big salt shaker.  The most conspicuous landmark around.

“Figures,” I said to Meekins.  “The one place I don’t want to go.”

35

“Call them all in?” Meekins asked on the way.

“For what?”

“You know.”  She checked her clip as she drove.  She was trying to anyway until I reached over and took her gun.

“Calm down.”

“I’m fine.”

She nearly rear ended a Chevy taking its time turning into the Hess.

“Breathe.”

“They’re going have hostages.”

“Could be we find another snapshot.  Or maybe Kenny in fourteen pieces.  Natalie in her underpants.  Maybe nothing.”

“You hope.”  Meekins lurched between lanes.

“Right now I’m just hoping we get there.”

Traffic thinned mightily once we’d passed the Lowe’s, and I could soon see the damn thing sitting on the knob of it’s hill. I could quote part of the inscription.  My father had made us memorize it.  Better to have that, I had to think, than T.S. Eliot in my head.

“‘In commemoration,’” I said, “‘of the conquest of the air.’”

Off season, the Wright Brothers Memorial Park closes at four o’clock or so.  We weren’t quite bumping up against that and so should have met with a ranger in the gatehouse, but nobody came to the window when we pulled up.

“Stay put.”  I climbed out and circled around.  Stuck my head in through the ticket window.  There was nobody anywhere.  I went over to where they parked and had a look in the Bronco there.  Empty as well.  There were four or five cars in the lot at the visitor’s center across the way. I climbed back into the Tahoe.

We toured the lot on a slow roll at first, paused by the plaza to have as good a look inside as we could manage.

“Hold here for a second.” I climbed out.

“Like I’m not coming,” she said and followed me up the steps to the stone landing. I pulled my Ruger and checked my load.  Rusty works.  Sandy, corroded bullets.  Ripe to go.

That building reminded me of my elementary school.  Long and low with lots of windows.  Institutional architecture from, like, 1958.  The sort of thing that was supposed to look modern some time or another but never quite did.

I pulled the door open, and Meekins slipped past me.

“Low,” I told her and she squatted down.  She still had the easy hinges for it. My knees and hips all meant that I’d take my trouble standing up.

It was all tiled floor and afternoon glare. Nobody was at the front desk, and the souvenir store looked empty.  We started over that way, finding cover where we could.  Of course, the boys we were after hadn’t yet used a gun.

Nobody in the store.  Nobody in the tiny stock room.  Post cards and books and origami gliders.  Wright Memorial tees and sweatshirts.  Orville and Wilbur ball caps.

Then it was back across the way past the front desk and into what they called the Flight Room.  It held a rudimentary hand-made wind tunnel about the size of a sideboard and two replicas — one of the glider, one of the powered flyer. There were chairs for tourists and panels of grainy photos. Mostly guys in suits shoving a plane down a rail. 

The glider had a mannequin at the controls.  Meekins started at the sight of him.  To her credit, she took aim but didn’t fire.

There were plenty of windows to see out of, and we had a look around the grounds.

“Who’s that?” I pointed.

A guy in a hat walking beside what looked like a walrus.

Meekins’ eyes were better than mine.  “Civilian,” she said.  “Think I know him.”

We tried to go straight out, but the flight room door was chained, so we were heading back the way we’d come when we heard the knocking.  Thumping really.  It would prove to be a lady in sneakers kicking at a solid oak door.  Once.  Twice.  One more time weakly.

We followed the racket down a brief hallway off to the side of the front desk.  A closet.  A couple of modest offices.  Another thump.  One of the office doors was closed. I tried the knob and then saw the bolt in the keeper. Double dead bolt. Meekins went back to the front desk and found a bunch of keys.

There was a fair bit of harrumphing from inside as we tried each key in the lock.  We finally landed on the right one and opened the door as far as it would go.  The office was small.  It held a desk and a book case.  Six stackable chairs in a corner, and three ladies and two male rangers all trussed up in packing tape.  The expensive kind, with fiber in it.

“I’m going slide you over,” I told the lady who’d been kicking the door as I swung it in far enough to make some room for me and Meekins.

We untaped mouths as Meekins asked the bunch of them, “Who did this?”

They all tried to tell her at once until Meekins picked out a ranger and designated him to speak.  Young guy, shy of thirty, gone a little plump from sitting in a gatehouse taking tickets.

“Two of them,” he said.  “Dressed, like, for church.”

“Coats and ties?” I asked him.

He shook his head.  “The ones on bikes.”

“Mormons?”

He nodded.

“How old?” Meekins asked.

“Like you.”

Then described a sedan I’d seen out in the lot.

“I’ll check it,” I told Meekins.  She kept on with the tape.

A silver Accura.  Nothing amiss inside.  Neat as could be.  I released the trunk lid and had a look.  Mostly carpet and storage space but for a hair clip I’d seen before. I picked it up for a closer look.  Bluish peacock finish.  Iridescent in shifting light.  I’d noticed it previously on the shelf of the medicine cabinet in the hallway bathroom at my house.  The one where Natalie Akers had left a heap of wet towels and taken a tub. It was too ugly to overlook.  Too hideous to forget.

The walrus turned out to be an overfed lab who came waddling my way with his owner.

“See anybody out there?” I asked him and gestured towards the open acreage with a couple of sheds and paved walkways that all led south to the big hill.  The one capped by the granite monument.  That looked to be where he was pointing.

“Who?”

His dog waddled over and drooled on my shoe.

“Odd bunch. Four of them.”

I waited.  He sneezed. I waited some more.  “Odd how?”

He gave that some thought.  “Didn’t match.”

I allowed him time for an enlargement.

“Two of them looked like . . .”  He went casting for the proper word.

“Mormons?”

That got me a finger snap.  More drool on my shoe.

“And the others?”

“Man and a woman.”  He raised his hand to his face and told me discreetly across his knuckles, “Trashy.”

“Brunette?”

He nodded.

“Mohawk?”

He snapped his fingers again.  “Wondered what he was shooting for.”

“Where?”

Before he could tell me, “On top of his head,” I pointed out towards the open spread of park.

“Up top.”  He pointed.  “By the monument. One of them had the big key in his hand.”

I must have looked suitably puzzled.

“Hollow inside,” he told me.  “There’s stairs that all the way up.  They give tours. I was in there once.”

There was a thing I was delighted my father never knew. I endured my usual shiver and imagined the oven-like July climb straight up to the beacon light.

Meekins came out.  “Feds are coming.”

“Hey, Candy,” the guy said.

“Phillip.  How’s the back?”

“Walking helps.”

“Walk on home then.”  She pulled her pistol as she said it. He seemed dead eager to move along after that. The man clicked his tongue his fat dog’s way like she was a palomino.

We headed up the walk towards the granite memorial. “Four of them. Going inside it, he says.”

We checked the old hanger and the workshop along the way just in case.  Nothing. There was no cover.  Just a sidewalk in an open field. If they were looking, they’d know we were coming.

“See anything?” I asked.

Meekins squinted towards the monument and shook her head.

We crossed the access road and reached the foot of the hill where the walk divided and swept off either side, ramping gently to the top.

Nobody anywhere.  I was close enough to see now for myself.

“Can you get blood out of granite?” I asked.

“That’s the spirit,” Meekins told me.

We took the path to the right.

“At least they don’t shoot, as a rule,” Meekins said.  She was bucking herself up, I have to think.

Of course, I didn’t shoot as a rule either, but I was prepared to make an exception.  So I wasn’t counting on cold steel. It was their game.  Their rules.  And they had the high ground after all.

There wasn’t even a nasty clump of wind-blown shrub to hide behind, and the footing on the unpaved ground was loose and not worth trying.  So we stayed on the walk, followed its gentle loop up towards the plaza at the monument’s base.

There are busts on the south side — Wilbur and Orville — and a recess for the pair of ornate nickel-plated doors leading in. Once we’d gained the plaza proper — a big, granite patio in the shape of a five-pointed star, I told Meekins, “You go around that way.  I’ll meet you at Wilbur.”

She nodded and checked her load for about the fiftieth time.

“Remember that storm box?”

I figured she’d key on the stink at least.

“Bullets bounce off shit like this.”

“Thanks, chuckles.”  I got Meekins' citrusy sneer as she went off the long way around.

I had about half as far to go and just kept spinning to check what was coming.  I’d decided, if those boys charged me, they’d do it like Comanches.  Shovel, lopper, machete, ax — and yelping all the way in.  I was ready to mow them down but couldn’t be sure my Ruger was. Gun oil.  I made a mental note.  Maybe swabs for the barrel as well. I decided about once every two weeks I’d fire a round into the ocean just to check the works.

When I got up onto the patio proper, I eased over to the corner where the west face of the monument met the south.  The bust of Orville was nearest to me.  Across a stretch of granite pavers sat an almost identical bust of Wilbur. I noticed those boys were wearing the same hat. In between on the stone I spied Kenny and Natalie in the midst of a godawful mess. They were splattered.  They were squirming.  They were trussed like the others had been. Same stout packing tape.  Same meticulous brand of wrapping. 

They’d been laid out on their stomachs, side by side.  As a measure of Kenny’s status as genuine coastal cracker trash, he was taking occasion to lean against Natalie Akers and reach blindly with his fingers for any kind of feel.

I imagined if I walked over and shot him dead, he’d keep groping the way a headless chicken will run or a halved snake will flail and strike. 

The double doors leading into the monument were standing a bit shy of half open.  Since the bowels of the place was something tourists rarely saw, those doors couldn’t have gotten a lot of action. Whoever had unlocked them had just shoved them wide enough to slip in through a crack.

I couldn’t see the entire source of the mess beyond what looked like a severed joint of a shoulder.  Somebody had been taken to pieces right there on the landing. Where Kenny and Natalie’s feet touched was as far as the blood had gone.

Meekins came around the corner barrel first.  I pointed out the particulars, but she looked to be seeing them well enough on her own. Hard to miss, given all the spillage.  I eased past Orville towards Natalie and Kenny.  I had my finger to my lips as I came, but that didn’t stop the pair of them from raising a substantial fuss.  In normal circumstances, you couldn’t tell either one anything.  Trussed up and blood splattered and fearing for their lives, a finger to my lips just wouldn’t do.

They squirmed.  They warbled as best they were able.  Kenny was particularly frantic.  Natalie Akers might have been a little drunk.  I pointed towards the doorway.  Natalie nodded.  I held up a lone finger, and she nodded again.

We didn’t know the dead guy, but he sure looked like he’d been neat.  His clothes were folded and stacked on a ledge, a kind of recess in the granite that was big enough to hold his trousers, his shirt, what looked like an honest-to-God cashmere sweater, and a splendid pair of shoes.  Alden bluchers.  Striped Paul Stewart socks. A fedora.

“Wearing a couple of thousand dollars,” I said to Meekins, but I think she hardly heard me.  She couldn’t stop looking at the corpse.  Ten pieces, organized like an unlit campfire.  All leaned together into a cone.  There was a head in the middle.  I could see the back of it through a gap between a forearm and a thigh.

“You good?” I asked Meekins and pointed towards the doorway.

She snorted like she had no hope of being good again. Then she checked her clip another time and gave me a nod.  I shouldered a door.

I could barely move it.  The thing was solid steel, and the salt air had corroded the hinges.  The door had sagged just enough to barely catch the floor.  I managed to shift it about three or four inches at most.  The gap was more than enough for Meekins, who slipped on in, and surely sufficient room for a neat guy to pass through.

I had to work to get inside and got jammed up for about a quarter minute.  It would have been a hell of a time to have a bush ax come my way.  I grunted and squirmed, finally raised my arms, sucked my gut, and squeezed on through.

It was dim in there.  There was sunlight from the top coming in through the lens of the beacon and light from the crack between the double doors. Bulbs here and there I couldn’t readily see a switch for.  The granite was pink and unadorned.  There was a steel spiral staircase that went straight up to the top.

We checked the recesses.  There were only a couple. Nothing to see until we moved to the staircase. Meekins found a pair of shoes on the bottom step. Again, pricey things.  Longwings.

From well up above us, a voice.  A slight echo.  “Elevens,” he said. “Ten U.K..”

It took us a while to find him up there.  He wasn’t looking down. Just had a hand resting on the rail. All we could see were his fingers.

“What was that?” Meekins called up.

“John Lobb. Help yourself.”

I had a closer look at the brogues on the step.  “I think he’s giving us his shoes.”

Meekins snorted.  Pure disgust.

“I’m a twelve and a half,” I called out to him.

“Pity.” His hand left the rail.  Was gone for a bit.  Then it came back.

“You coming down?” Meekins asked.

“Most certainly.”

“We’ve got . . . a few questions,” she said.

“One would imagine.” The accent was BBC by way of, maybe, Louisiana.

We waited.  The fingers stayed where they were.

“Don’t think he’s coming,” I told Meekins. “Mind if we come up?”

He told me back, “Don’t bother.”

“What now?” Meekins asked me.

I wasn’t quite sure.  He had nowhere to go.

“Maybe you can help us,” I shouted.

“About . . .?”

“People,” I said.  “In pieces.”

He made what I took for a noise in his neck.

We waited.  His hand left the rail and came back.

He dropped something.  It came fluttering down.  A fine, leather-bound pocket notebook that landed open on the stone floor. Meekins picked it up and had a quick look through it.  Sketches.  Notes.  Quotations (I had to think) in bold, gothic script. Some Polaroids too, taped neatly at the corners.  A few pages, here and there, torn out.

“Might need you to help us sort it,” I shouted.

“Pity,” he said one more time.

Then he came over the rail. Fell more than jumped, and not gracefully.  There wasn’t terribly much room between the spiral stair railing and the pink granite wall.  So he thumped and clattered our way, upended and head-first.

Me and Meekins backed up and watched him.  The falling seemed to take forever. He’d glance off the wall, hit the railing, and then find the wall again.  The collisions all slowed him enough that I half thought he might survive until he hit the stone floor on his cowlick and produced a racket I hope never to hear again.  A crack and thud all blended and married. A little wet.  A little brittle.  Nothing nice.

He was still kind of in there when we reached him.  His neck looked broken.  His skull was collapsed. He was all Brooks Brothers and Turnbull & Asser.  Bridal leather belt.  Tudor watch.  He’d tucked his trouser ends into his striped Paul Stewart socks.

Lomax, Matthew Elsworth.  Not much doubt about that.

He gulped air like a fish.  One eye open.  Meekins looked half tempted to try some sort of heroic life-saving technique.

“Why don’t you get them loose,” I said of Kenny and Natalie outside on the landing.

Meekins hesitated for the second but then took the chance to find the open air.  I stayed behind to watch him go.  It took a while.  People seem fragile in the scheme of things, but they’re harder to kill than you might think.  Easy enough to cripple and wound.  Pulverize and perforate.  But the heart can hang on longer than you’d expect.

His did.  I doubt he was conscious at all, but I had that one eye looking at me.  His lips barely parted.  His breath slow but steady.  Like a guppy in a tank.

I’d ended up with the notebook.  I flipped through it as I waited. After much study and consultation, we’d probably decide they were all nuts. What else could you do?  Crazy fits the paperwork a lot more readily than empty will.

I believe now he made a kind of noise when I shifted my gun.  He was just the sort to want me to shoot him. It was the type of thing a gentleman would ask a gentleman to do.  And a gentleman worth his standing would more than likely do it.

Unfortunately, I’d long since decided I was something else entirely.

“I’ll be out here,” I told him and fought my way into the sun.

36

The Feds and the army came together.  Cutler arrived just behind them.  Natalie was a little tipsy. It seemed like just the right thing to be.

Kenny complained.  Mostly to Meekins since she was handy for it, and for once he had a case to make and plenty to complain about.  The army had let him down.  The cops had let him down.  He felt personally free from blame entirely.

“I’d sue,” Meekins advised him.

That gave Kenny kind of a jolt.

“So you’ll witness for me?” he asked.

“No.”

He glanced my way.  I shook my head.

“Army’ll probably just give you money,” Meekins told him, “to make you go away.”

Kenny sure liked the sound of that.  “I can bother the shit out of people.”

Natalie burped.  Natalie said, “A-fucking-men.”

“Two dead dandies,” I told the major once she’d had a look around.

From up on the hilltop, we could see the trucks and four by fours rolling onto the grounds.  Doc-O and Janice.  The army bunch. A couple of rescue squad wagons.  A fire truck.  Dennis and chinless times two.  Everybody in the vicinity was coming for the carnage.  Even the group from the visitor center was walking up.

Meekins had retired to a semi-private spot and was looking through the pocket notebook. I walked over and sat on the ledge beside her.

“Before they take it,” she said.

“Finding out anything?”

“Look.”  She showed me an accomplished drawing of a flaccid penis. Then she flipped through stopping at various quotes and reading each out in turn. “Opportunities multiply as they are seized.” Two pages over.  “Live as if you were to die tomorrow; learn as if you were to live forever.”  Another couple of pages.  “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” She had to go almost to the back of the book for this one — “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.”

“I know that one,” Meekins said.

“Sounds a little like Jesus.”

“Close,” She told me.  “Dr. Seuss.”

She found a sketch of a man in profile and held it up for me to see.  A naked man with his hair hooked behind his ear.  And a flaccid penis.

We were still on that hilltop when the sun dipped into the sound. The spotlights came on, bright and hot, and lit the monument up.  The feds quizzed us a bit.  The major and the colonel quizzed us quite a lot.

Meekins had given the major the notebook by then.  She found a snatch of scripture and read it to the colonel. “Better a patient man than a warrior, a man who controls his temper than one who takes a city.”

“Proverbs,” I told them.

The major shoved the notebook into an evidence bag. “Look at you,” she said.

Me and Meekins were content to let everybody else try to draw sensible commentary out of Kenny and Natalie Akers. Kenny was building a case for reparations in his head and so proved to be distracted.  What was there to say anyway.  They’d plainly been brought along to watch.

Natalie burped her way through an account of how the guy on the landing got dead.  Strangled ritualistically.  That’s what it sounded like.  Then separated into pieces with some showmanship as well.

“Started at the knees,” Kenny said.  Then he ladled on a bunch of rubbish about the trauma he’d endured.

The major invoked Lieutenant Klein as a reminder to Kenny of what we all knew he’d been up to.

“Yeah, well, I was under . . .”  Kenny did such powerful thinking that I was waiting to see what might waft from ears and if we had a Pope.

“Duress?” the major finally suggested.

Kenny pointed and nodded.  “Shitload of it.”

“Did he say anything to you?” the colonel wanted to know.

Natalie remembered one item in particular.  “Ask me why I dressed like a whore.”

“What did you tell him?” That from Ned who’d wandered over for a listen.

Natalie shrugged.  Couldn’t be bothered to remember.  “Dead now, isn’t he?” She was just the sort of creature to take her satisfaction where she found it.

Most places you’d get news crews.  Maybe even a helicopter.  We got the same guy who’d been there earlier walking his obese labrador.

That was it.  Cutler would end up fielding half-dozen calls from reporters, but there wasn’t a lot he could tell them beyond people got dead and he didn’t know why.

Me and Meekins were obliged to sit through a week’s worth of after-action meetings.  Most of them conducted by Ned and Bennett with the help of a woman named Doris.  She’d come down from Alexandria where she hired out as a consulting shrink.

She’d been called in to decipher the notebook and draw some digestible conclusions from the entire murder spree.  And that’s exactly what it looked like once you’d managed to give up on a motive.  A traveling spasm of bloodletting, people in pieces in a half dozen states.

Doris had psychoanalyzed Pettigrew and them. She’d had decided Lomax and Flynn were lovers.  It fit in a scheme she had in her head, a template she’d settled on.  It was enough for me to know they’d all met and seen they were like minded. Plenty of nerve and no compunction, not even a morsel of it.  No use to speak of for life and living.  Not for you.  Not for me.  Not for them.

Dr. Doris went with psychopathy and narcissistic personality disorder, which she explained to no good end and at great length.

Nobody much cared.  That was the weird thing.  Or weird at first until you thought about it.  You expect some feverish voyeurism when you’ve got people hacked to pieces until you consider the pass we’ve come to.  Especially here in the US of A. People drown their children and kill their spouses.  Shoot up office parks and high schools and university campuses.  A dead roommate gets shoved in an attic for convenience’s sake instead of buried.  Uncle Harry goes in the freezer so his checks will keep coming to keep his relations afloat.

It’s all very ordinary anymore.  Regular.  Wearing. Hardly worthy of a snort.  These days the people bar is so low it’s nearly laying on the ground.

So Dr. Doris was just a way for the Feds to look like they were trying.  She stayed for five days.  She bored us but good.  Dennis, he had a night with her.

“Couldn’t shut her up,” he told me.

“Screamer?”

He shook his head.  “Giving directions. I was doing every damn thing wrong.”

We did get one piece of unsullied good news.  Betty found junior’s mother.  It turned out the boy belonged to the jumper’s brother’s neighbor in Tennessee.

“Snatched him out of the yard,” Betty informed us. She’d been tracking down the relatives of every dead human involved and had finally had a chat with Lomax’s brother and sister-in-law.  They’d thought the neighbor’s missing child was stray and unrelated, but Betty got a match on the ID.  That’s why Cutler let her bake and make awful hand-cream coffee. Whenever she bit got in her mouth, she pulled.

They let me and Meekins deliver him.  We had to take him to the Norfolk airport.  He’d been staying with a woman in Manteo, a foster mother with two more just like him.  So there was no teary leave-taking.

She came to the door with junior.  She told me and Meekins, “Here.”

He was talking by then.  Sort of.  He could say “no” and “look” and something we took to be “yogurt”.  He was given to tantrums and pouty fits.  We rode him up in the Tahoe strapped into a borrowed car seat that smelled like half-digested animal crackers.  Meekins drove. I made faces at junior for a while but couldn’t manage to keep him amused. He’d soon decided he’d rather be wailing and did that most of the way to the airport.

His mother had flown in with a social worker from Memphis. She had a breakdown in the terminal.  She’d given her son up for dead.  She blubbered.  He wailed.  Meekins and the social worker exchanged documents and witnessed each other’s signatures. 

Then, by way of leave-taking, junior told me and Meekins some variation on “Ngharln.”

On the way back down, we stopped at the Greenbrier Mall, a short hop off the beltway.  Meekins needed to buy some underthings.

“Can’t get shit,” she explained, “at the beach.”

I’d noticed that as well (not that I was too particular).  You could chiefly just find tourist crap at bloated tourist prices.  Meekins was looking for panties that didn’t have OBX in sparkly embroidery on the back.

She made me buy socks and a taco. She’d seen the top drawer of my bureau, and Meekins was one of those women who wouldn’t actually purchase crap food herself.  Somebody else had to buy it, and then she’d want “just a bite.”  A taco’s worth, as it turned out. Fine with me.  The thing was mostly orange grease, lettuce, and sour cream.

We talked about nothing on the way back south.  Stuff we’d see out the window.  Stuff that popped into our heads. I think Meekins had stopped believing by then that people did things for sound reasons.  She was probably on her way to doubting that people did much for reasons at all.  That was an entirely new religion for her, but Meekins was quick that way. Once the current was plainly running against her, she’d yield and head downstream.

“I think about them,” she said once we were nearly to the bridge.

I knew what she meant. I nodded.  I thought about them too.

“See pieces mostly,” she told me.  “Kind of hard to shake.”

We reached the Wright Memorial Bridge and rolled out over the water. 

“Yellow socks for me,” I confessed to Meekins.  “Most nights, about half-past two.”

The rhythm of the concrete joints. The wrinkled water beneath us. Gulls perched on the railing posts the way they do sometimes.  Ruffled by the breezed. Hunkered.  Looking more wicked with those black eyes than gulls were bound to be.

The army left without any ceremony to speak of or even proper goodbyes.  I half expected the major to come around and thrash me one last time, but she wasn’t sentimental that way.  She shook my hand in the PD parking lot.  We happened to meet out there by chance or she would have just driven off without a word.

“Fine work,” she told me.  “You’re good police.”

“You’re all right for a major.”

She was driving Pettigrew’s sedan back up and climbed in.  I hung at the door.

“I get up there sometimes,” I told her.  “Maybe I’ll give you a call.”

That earned me a tight smile. The “Look at you” was implied.

Me and Meekins worked a suicide that had looked like foul play at first blush.  A tourist, a woman from Roanoke, had gone into the water at the tip of the Avalon pier.  People had seen her struggling with a man.  It turned out he’d been trying to stop her.

“Got away,” he told us.  “Climbed over.  Said she was sick and all. Eat up. Couldn’t keep hold.”  That’s the thing that tortured him.  “Kept telling me to let her go.”

He somehow figured we’d arrest him.

“You didn’t do anything,” I told him.

I’ll long remember the look he gave me and the way he said, “Yeah,” back.

Mostly it was burglaries.  The occasional domestic.  Usually one of the six or eight local couples that simply couldn’t get on. Out of money.  Out of cocaine.  Out of vodka. Out of patience.  You pulled them apart.  You put them in programs.  They stopped showing up.  You got called out again.  Pretty soon knew everybody by name.  The couples.  The neighbors.  The children.  The firehouse boys who got summoned and then leaned against their truck.

You said the same things you’d said before. They all told you the same stuff back.

About mid-March, I found myself at the spot where I’d parked when I arrived.  I pulled into the same empty driveway. Went through a gap in the dunes to the beach. I walked south and shortly found myself at the spot I’d been before.

I recognized the newish, grander house.  The place where I’d found junior.  I located the path where he’d led me to the smaller, shabby place next door. I went up onto the deck and looked in through the door glass.  I gave the handle a tug, and the deck door slid right open.  I went in.

The furniture looked updated but still colossally unsightly.  Jesus was still riding his donkey alongside the front door. The man was standing next to his fish.  The TV looked a foot or two larger.

I don’t recall wanting to walk down the hallway, but I walked down it anyway.  I checked the first bedroom.  Stripped double mattress.  Pickled pine dresser. No gull. New tub and sink in the bathroom.  I turned the corner.  The back bedroom door was closed.

I eased it open. The room was sunny bright.  New bedstead.  No chifforobe.  Oriental-patterned rug on the floor too shiny to be wool. An Upper Room on the far bedside table.  A lamp made out of some kind of buoy. The place felt like home somehow.

I sat on the edge of the bed.  I bounced on the mattress.  Firm and decent for a beach house.  I kicked off my shoes and stretched out.

I listened to the slap and thump of the surf.  The catlike call of the gulls. The gusty west wind rattling the window sashes. I counted the pine knots in the bead board ceiling. I closed my eyes and went to sleep.

Table of Contents

Cry Me A River by T R Pearson

Blue Ridge by T R Pearson

Polar by T. R. Pearson

Warwolf by TR Pearson

Title Page Content

Roadmaster

1

2

3

4

5

Double Doug

1

2

3

4

Wayland’s Grant

1

2

3

4

Mrs. Shorty

1

2

3

4

Middle Mountain

1

2

3

First In Flight by TR Pearson