Bound for the Outer Banks (6 page)

“No, no,” Roz said in a comforting tone. “You’ll have the perfect neighbors. It’s the living you need to worry about.”

Roz was of course more right than she knew. “It was nice to meet you Roz,” Ella said with a genuine smile. “Thanks for the directions.”

“Call me Raz, everyone else does.”

“O.K. Raz. I’ll see you around,” said Ella.

“See you around, Belle,” answered Roz.

Ella let the door shut behind her. She was actually getting used to the name Belle, as if she’d had it her whole life.

“Go with it, Hon. Especially if it’s going to help save your life,” BeBe would have said.

“You’re right Momma,” Ella said under her breath as she freed Old Finnegan from her Huffy Roadster. She mounted the bike and flung Old Finnegan across the basket. She went down the next cross street and arrived at Cemetery Road which was only about a hundred yards long and was indeed bordered by an old cemetery down the entire length on the west side. The opposite side of the road was less foreboding with cutesy, one story coastal cottages with porches across the front, some screened, some not. The cottages were all painted bright, beachy colors with contrasting trim. There was a salmon bungalow with blue trim, a yellow one with periwinkle trim, and others with various happy colors. The next to the last house was painted beige with brown trim. Ella aimed her bike down Cemetery Road and headed for the tan bungalow without looking at the street numbers. She pedaled her bike up the little slope into the driveway and immediate saw the black, metal numbers 2-0 on the column closest to the front door.

“Bingo,” Ella said aloud. She had always been given drab houses to live in while she was hiding out. She assumed The Bureau thought the less attention the better. What they really didn’t understand was that this dreary looking cottage actually did stand out because it was neutral and bleak unlike every other cheery house that lined the street.

Ella did like the fact that her little house had a screened porch off the side. This would allow her to be outside more and not get eaten alive by the bugs. She didn’t like to be out much given the fact that she was being hunted at the moment. Most of her day was spent sketching dress designs, writing in her journal, and painting the occasional canvas. Since Ella couldn’t drag the canvases around with her she always left them as a gift for the new tenant. She did always, however, take photos of them and scan them into a flash drive so she’d have a picture of her work. Ella also did this with the smaller fashion sketches she drew and tinted with colored pencils.

Ella hoped to one day use her fashion design degree from SCAD, also known as the Savannah College of Art and Design, to snag a job in a fashion house in New York. She could hope at best to begin as an assistant designer and work her way up. She would have tried this immediately after she graduated but she couldn’t possibly make it on her own in the city pulling in thirteen to fifteen dollars an hour which was the going rate for assistants.

If BeBe had known what had happened to Ella after her death regarding Ella’s finances she would have leaped from her grave and literally raised all kinds of hell. When BeBe married Joseph Barrantine, she informed him that she would not raise a brat with a sense of entitlement. When Ella finally came along several years later, a trust was set up for her, but stipulations were made that Ella would not be able to touch the money until she was thirty years old and mature enough to handle it. It wasn’t a windfall but it would allow Ella to live comfortably for several years until she “found her place” as BeBe would put it. A sum was placed in a long term trust for Ella’s retirement years also.

One cold night during Ella’s junior year at Saint Stanislaus, BeBe and Joseph were returning from the grand opening of a friend’s new bistro in Connecticut. The car hit a patch of black ice in a curve and careened off the roadway, over a guard rail, and down a ravine. Although the Barrantines were wearing their seatbelts, they were killed instantly according to the coroner.

The headmaster of Saint Stanislaus, Mr. Kornegay, was called by the authorities. He summoned each of Ella’s teachers the next morning and asked them collectively who they thought Ella’s favorite teacher was. They unanimously agreed that it was Mrs. Lawrence, her theater teacher. Mrs. Lawrence had noticed Ella’s superb sketches during the class’s costuming unit and recruited Ella to design all the costumes for the musicals and one acts at Saint Stanislaus. She informed Ella that she could use her designs and experience in a portfolio and resume with her application to SCAD if she were truly interested in fashion design.

Ella became known as “the costume girl” and presented her designs and patterns to the seamstresses who volunteered for the theater department at the school. Some of the ladies were parents of students and some were just bored, retired women from the community who could sew.

Ella was given a budget for each show and allowed to buy all the fabric and embellishments herself. To stretch her budget, Ella shopped at thrift stores and bought old skirts, dresses, curtains, gowns, and anything else she could find to salvage fabric from. In the case of silks, sequins, and velvets, purchasing an item from the thrift store made of those fabrics was much less expensive than buying the fabric by the yard at a store.

Ella was convinced that possessing a portfolio where she had designed, purchased materials for, sewn, and had her creations photographed on a stage, was the reason that she had gotten both into SCAD and received a partial scholarship.

Ella would never forget the morning Mrs. Lawrence lightly knocked on Ella’s dorm door and asked Shelby, her roommate, to excuse them. Ella could tell Mrs. Lawrence had been crying and felt a knot tangle up inside her stomach. Mrs. Lawrence held Ella in her arms while Ella cried into her chest until the tears would not come any more.

Next were the business issues of her parents’ death to deal with. Ella could only sit and listen to her fate on the phone with the Barrantines’ attorney and family friend, Saul. “I’m sorry Ella. You know your mother was estranged from her entire family and that just left Joseph’s. His sister Madelyn is the trustee and I can only execute the documents that your parents signed.”

It turned out that Ella’s Aunt Madelyn who had despised BeBe was now in charge of Ella’s fate, financially anyway. Madelyn was jealous of Blythe Beatty Barrantine in every way. BeBe was beautiful and charismatic and people, especially men, were drawn to her. Madelyn tried to convince her brother, Joseph, that BeBe was a fly by night gold digger. Madelyn successfully turned BeBe’s in-laws against her, convincing them of the same thing. It took only ten years of marriage and the addition of little Eleanor to get the senior Barrantines warmed up to BeBe but by then she had grown used to not having a relationship with her in-laws and it stayed that way until they both died within days of each other five years later.

Joseph’s hands were tied and if something happened to both him and BeBe, there had to be an alternate trustee. Although they’d had their differences, Joseph felt that Madelyn would be fair with his daughter. Ella thanked God that the trust stipulated college tuition, room, board, and a small amount of spending money per month. Her financial woes, however, ensued after college when she was given five hundred dollars to carry her through the interim period after graduation and before finding a job in which she could support herself.

Ella worked up mock budgets and quickly realized that New York was out. Five hundred dollars wouldn’t even pay a deposit on most places plus she needed transportation from Savannah and utility deposits and grocery money until she landed a job and received her first paycheck.

The writing was on the wall for Ella. The Biloxi bungalow had been signed over to her and an escrow was put in place to pay the property taxes for around fifteen years. “If something happens to us,” BeBe would claim, “you might be a lot of things but you won’t be homeless.” Ella knew that none of them ever fathomed that Joseph and BeBe would die together, and that Aunt Madelyn would take out her ire against BeBe after her death by denying BeBe’s daughter access to her own money.

Chapter 7

Chogan Montauk sat at the bar picking at the label of his nonalcoholic beer. The bar, J. Flannigan’s in the Key Bridge Marriott in downtown D.C., was a popular hangout for agents. Just because Chogan never drank alcohol due to his Native American heritage, he didn’t let it keep him from attending what was known as “the cathartic church” among troubled FBI agents.

Because of his Algonquian Indian heritage, Chogan knew that he was predisposed for severe alcoholism unlike his fellow white agents. He’d read all the literature explaining that it was a possible lack of enzymes which metabolize alcohol or possibly just sociocultural variables. Chogan figured whatever the reason, he did not want to end up a staggering, inebriated resident of his former fishing village, whom the children would point to and taunt. He had vowed he would never end up like that.

Not only had Chogan Montauk not ended up an indigent drunk, he had catapulted himself out of his quaint Outer Banks fishing village, become one of the few Native Americans to ever graduate from West Point, and after a stellar decade in the U.S. Army he had been recruited to join the FBI as a special agent at the New York Bureau.

Using his chemistry degree from West Point, Chogan had become an officer in an Explosive Ordinance Disposal Unit. With the constant threat of terror organizations detonating bombs or suitcase nukes on American soil, the FBI needed more explosives experts. Chogan had been offered more money and benefits than he could have ever obtained in a military career, so he resigned from the Army and became a special agent. When working the scene of the detonation of a small pipe bomb outside a Jewish synagogue in New York, the agent in charge noticed than Chogan had almost a sixth sense with crime scene evaluations. He felt as if Chogan, whose nickname was “Chief” among his fellow agents, could be better utilized on more diverse types of cases as well as counterterrorism investigations. He wrote a special recommendation for Chogan and later that year he was transferred to the FBI’s headquarters in D.C.

After arriving at the FBI headquarters, the assistant director in charge saw that Chogan’s file included his nickname “Chief.” The director sent a memo to the agents instructing them to refrain from referring to Chogan as “Chief” as it was hardly politically correct. Chogan didn’t mind the nickname, he’d been called Chief since he was the quarterback of the Wanchese Lions his junior year. The team was comprised of half white kids and half Indians from the local Algonquian tribe. The nickname Chief had been given to him not as a racially derogatory term but because he was held in such high esteem among his teammates and after all, he had called the plays that led his tiny school in Wanchese to a state victory two years in a row.

Chogan was recruited by several schools, but finally decided on West Point. He’d never considered himself Native American but just American. He decided a military career would be something he’d pursue while getting away from tiny Wanchese on Roanoke Island, and seeing the rest of the world to the East and West of Roanoke Sound.

Chogan’s mother and father attended high school games when they were within driving distance of the island, but given his father’s demanding job as the tribal chairman, they didn’t get to see many of his games during Chogan’s four years at West Point. Chogan’s father, the Algonquian Nation Tribal Leader, was responsible for supervising the opening of The Palace Casino which provided excellent jobs on the coast just across from Roanoke Island for a population that was undereducated and underrepresented for jobs in a midlevel salary range. Chogan’s father’s job also included providing medical and dental insurance for the tribe’s members, maintaining a tribal cemetery, a home loan program, and managing a scholarship fund.

Hassun, Chogan’s father, was a huge football fan like most North Carolinians and greatly enjoyed attending the games, watching and silently analyzing every play. Chogan’s mother, Nuna, on the other hand, was fascinated with all the mascots on the field. At all of Chogan’s high school games she liked watching the big, furry costumed mascots’ antics.

The Wanchese Lion was an accomplished male gymnast who was strong enough to propel both him and the heavy costume in to front and back flips much to Nuna’s and the rest of the crowd’s delight. Aside from the home team’s lion, there was usually another mascot from the opposing team on the field if the athletic boosters had enough funds to transport the mascot and the cheerleaders to the game. They included mascots from the usual suspects, a wildcat, a panther, a bulldog, an eagle, or maybe even another lion, but West Point Military Academy was different.

Instead of just the school mascot, the mule, which stood for perseverance and strength, the sidelines were strewn with dozens of mascots, each representing the thirty six cadet companies on campus. Nuna loved watching the antics of so many mascots, but whenever Hassun jumped to his feet to cheer on their son for executing an excellent play, she did likewise.

The West Point company mascots included dragons, guppies, axmen, frogs, cowboys, and Elvis. The Elvis mascot, clad in a white polyester jumpsuit with bell bottoms, a red scarf, and a white cape would run up and down the sidelines stopping every twenty five yards or so to lunge and thrust his pelvis towards the stands. After every West Point touchdown, all thirty six cadet company mascots plus the live Army mule would take over the end zone and perform a short individual touch down dance. Nuna was so entranced by all this she usually didn’t know the score of the game until the very end.

For Chogan “Chief” Montauk, the days of West Point and fighting in the Middle East were far behind him. Today he could think of nothing but the director and deputy director of The Bureau deciding his fate in a meeting with his shrink and his investigative team members. Today they would decide if Chogan would be able to stay on the job as an agent or if he would be forced to go on paid administrative leave until they felt he had time to recover from the trauma he had witnessed days before.

The Bureau had been closing in on a member of the United Sacred Crown who was a suspect in a shooting six months earlier which had killed two agents. Chogan and his partner had been staking out the suspect’s home along with two other Bureau members. Someone had tipped off the organization and Chogan’s partner had been shot in an ambush.

The hit man had popped up and placed a .45 against the glass of the driver’s side window, shooting Chogan’s partner of two years and best friend, Brad Reilly, in the head. Chogan immediately reacted and shot the hit man through his forehead. Chief always kept his firearm on his lap with his finger stretched alongside the trigger guard, a habit he learned in Officer’s Candidate School before he deployed to the Middle East.

Only after his quick reaction to the threatening gunman did Chief notice the blood splatter, the soft gelatinous brain tissue, and shards of skull that he was now covered with. Brad Reilly’s body had slumped to the side toward Chief from the impact of the bullet. The exit wound from the bullet had left a large gaping hole where the right side of Brad’s skull had been.

Just like Jackie Kennedy, after a bullet had shredded her husband’s skull, Chogan’s first reaction was to try to put the pieces back together on what was formerly Brad Reilly’s intact head.

The other two agents on the stakeout stationed on the opposite corner of the street ran to Brad’s and Chogan’s vehicle. While one of the agents yelled into his surveillance communications face mike for an ambulance, the other agent gently took the brain tissue and pieces of shattered skull from Chogan’s trembling hands.

Two days after burying his partner and friend, the deputy director of The Bureau summoned Chief to his office to decide his fate. Chief was how everyone now addressed Chogan completely ignoring the memo on political correctness.

Chief walked the two blocks back to The Bureau on Pennsylvania Avenue after paying for his two nonalcoholic beers and tipping the bartender handsomely for not bothering him with meaningless small talk. Chief looked somewhat intimidating with his six foot three inch solid frame, shoulder length coarse black hair, and almond shaped black eyes.

As Chief entered the office both he and Flynn, the deputy director, wore solemn faces.

“The good news is that you are not being placed on leave. You will be staying on the job for now,” said Flynn.

Chief breathed a long sigh of relief. Every agent dreaded the thought of being placed on administrative leave without their firearm and badge, left to while away the days at “the cathartic church” with other people who were in the purgatory of being unemployed or having no particular place to go for whatever reason.

“You need to go home and pack, Montauk,” Flynn said in a very demanding manner. He knew he was going to get pushback from Chief, one of his finest agents.

“Why? You said I could stay on the job,” asked a confused Chief.

Flynn answered looking down at his desk, “I did but I didn’t say where. You’re bound for The Outer Banks, Roanoke Island specifically.”

“You’re sending me home?!” asked Chief in complete disbelief that The Bureau would not only make him sit out of his job until they deemed it appropriate for him to return to work, but to make him live in the tiny fishing village he was raised in along the edge of Roanoke Island seemed like cruel and unusual punishment.

“I’m not sending you home.” Flynn flung a folder down on the desk in front of Chief. “I’m sending you on an assignment.”

“You’ve got to be kidding. Did someone go over their shrimp quota? Did someone trawl without a Turtle Exclusion Device?” Chief said sarcastically.

“It involves the United Sacred Crown. Now are you interested?” asked Flynn.

Considering the United Sacred Crown had taken out three agents within the last six months, Flynn had definitely gotten Chief’s attention. “Why would any members of the Crown be on Roanoke? That’s insane.”

“They’re not,” Flynn replied. “That’s why we’ve sent our star witness against Dante Vitali there, and you’re going to protect her.”

“I’m not a babysitter. That’s low level shit. Get a newbie to do it,” Chief said, shaking his head from side to side.

“She’s no baby,” Flynn said smugly. He flipped the folder open revealing an eight by ten black and white glossy photo of Eleanor Augusta Barrantine sitting in a conference room in the American Embassy in Berlin. Her lanky legs were crossed and she was wearing a pair of gray cowboy boots and a short ruffled black mini dress.

Chief was taken aback by the natural beauty of the woman in the photo. “You’re right about that. Dante has good taste.”

“It’s this or paper pushing for the next three months. You decide,” Flynn stated matter of factly.

This decision was a no brainer and Flynn knew it. Desk work was a field agent’s own personal version of Hell. He’d basically given Chief no choice. In Flynn’s eyes it was the most symbiotic scenario he could come up with. Chief needed a quiet place away from the sounds of the street, away from Brad Reilly’s empty desk, and away from The Bureau itself. Flynn wanted to make sure Chief came back in a good frame of mind with no crazed vigilante justice on his mind which could foil the entire operation against key members of the United Sacred Crown.

Eleanor Augusta Barrantine needed protection. There had been more chatter than ever regarding “Dante’s girl” and “the goods.”

Ella had been interrogated so many times she had memorized the questions and each time she was called in to a secret location to be questioned about Dante and “the goods” she would start questioning herself, turning in the chair toward one direction to ask the question and then shifting in the chair to face a different direction to provide an answer. She had no idea what the goods were that Dante and the others were referring to. The agents had searched all of her belongings going so far as to push the tampons out of the applicators to see if she was hiding anything.