Bunker 01 - Slipknot (2 page)

I repositioned myself to photograph the entire wharf, stepping over the body as comfortably as if I were straddling a length of driftwood left by the last ebbing tide. Cal spoke softly and fondly of Nick, clearly having trouble referring to him in the past tense. As I jotted a few notes and numbers on the first page of a fresh legal pad, I heard hurried footsteps
thunk
ing along the weathered planks of the dock above: at first faint, then close until stopping.

“Is everything all right down there?” The voice was as nervous as the approaching treads had been. I held the legal pad in a salute, shading the rising sun, and took a long look at Ginny Turner while waiting for Cal to answer the query I supposed was meant for him. Clearly not the most complimentary angle for a woman of such girth, I thought as I silently counted the rolls of lard like the rungs of the ladder.

Ginny Turner was immense—even her forehead was fat. It was impossible to discern where the chins stopped and the chest began. My mental tally was interrupted at seven when Ginny announced in exasperation, “Oh, Gawd! Here comes Clydie! Of all people . . . Where is the fire department? I s l i p k n o t

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called 911 twenty minutes ago. Glad my house isn’t on fire.

Did you have to leave him right there, Cal? Can’t you tuck his arm in? It looks like he died reaching for the ladder. Why did he have to die here?” Off she went, quicker and more gracefully than her aerodynamics suggested, presumably to make another call for help.

“Who’s Clydie?” I asked Cal before the man now clam-bering over the ledges toward us could hear.

“Clyde Leeman, otherwise known as the harbormaster, is the town busybody. He ain’t quite right in the head—a simple-ton. He’s harmless. Loves to complain and gossip, like a woman. No offense intended.”

“None taken. In my experience,
all
harbormasters are simple.” I was delighted to think this absence of intellect was a prerequisite for the position I had tangled with in every major port south of Charleston, South Carolina.

“He ain’t really the harbormaster, although he acts like it.

Clydie lives on top of the hill overlooking the whole harbor and a good part of the town. He likes to talk, and loves to put the stick in the hornets’ nest.”

I could think of several people fitting that same description, and knowing it was best to avoid one whose life’s ambi-tion was to cause trouble, I made my way under the pier, over a ledge, and up a ladder on the opposite side before Clyde reached the beach now below me.

“Well, well, well, what have we here? I came down as soon as I heared the report on my police scanner. Oh, no. Oh, dear. Poor Nick Dow. I knowed it was him by that purple sweatshirt. Did you find him, Cal?” Clyde asked from under

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a chocolate-brown cowboy hat that looked more out of place than the body in the kelp.

“No. Ginny did. Speaking of Ginny, you know she don’t want you on her property,” Cal said as nicely as he could, considering the message was “no trespassing.”

Clyde pushed black-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose and took a deep breath. Bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet, agitated, he exhaled. “I come all the way around the fence! I’m below the high-water mark! This ain’t her property.

The old bitch! She had no reason to fire me. I got a lawyer. He says I got a case. The money don’t mean nothing to me. I don’t care, but, but, but . . .” Clyde was sputtering like an outboard motor with water in the gas. I thought I saw him wipe a tear from under his glasses. Clyde continued a bit louder and faster. “I wouldn’t work here again if they begged me. They said my eyesight was bad. Didn’t trust me with the forklift no more. Well, I had my eyes checked and got a certificate says I’m fine. My lawyer says I got a good case to sue her ass. I don’t want no money. It don’t mean nothing to me. It’s just the principle of the thing, Cal.”

Before Clyde could draw another breath and resume the verbal pounding of his former employer, a siren could be heard coming from the direction of the center of the village.

The siren served as fodder for Clyde’s next thought, which he was quick to share. “Here come the Cellar Savers! Green Haven’s finest! I ran for fire chief last election, and would have won, too, if that bitch hadn’t turned the whole plant against me. If I was chief, I would have been down here today before
me
!”

s l i p k n o t

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Clenching my teeth to contain a chuckle, I inspected the plank decking on the top of the wharf. Clyde turned up the volume another notch to be heard over the nearing siren.

“Who’s that girl?” he asked. Cal explained that I was a marine investigator doing some work for an insurance company, to which Clyde gleefully exclaimed, “Oh, yes indeedy! She’s going to sue Turners’, too! Wrongful death due to negligence and lack of maintenance around this dump. Hey, girlie, look at them spikes, heads all stuck up proud like that. Anybody could trip on one and fall down here and smash his foolish head wide open. No railings! Did you get pictures of this ladder? How do you expect a man to climb out of the water with his head all stove in when he can’t even reach the bottom rung?”

I did my best to ignore Clyde. Cal didn’t bother explaining to Clyde that the “girlie” was ultimately on the side of Turners’, whose insurance company would be on the defense in any lawsuit, should there ever be one, which, if Cal was right about the possible scenario, would never be filed. I was only doing my job, just in case.

Forgetting or ignoring the fact that he was no longer welcome on the premises, Clyde diligently made his way to the top of the dock, where he became busy shouting directions at the man behind the wheel of the ambulance. With the way his shouted instructions and hand signals diametrically opposed each other, it was purely coincidental that the con-verted bakery delivery van negotiated the tight three-point turn without meeting the demise suffered by Nick Dow. The makeshift ambulance came to a stop, followed closely by a

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police car sporting bold lettering—hancock county sheriff.

Two teenagers, one in fisherman’s boots and the other in styl-ish athletic shoes, stepped out of either side of the ersatz ambulance. Cal said hello to them, calling them by the names Eddie and Alex. Eddie, in the boots, had frizzy blond hair and eyes that had that puffy pot smoker’s look; Alex was clean and alert, with black hair and eyes that flashed with what I discerned as sheer irritation. I was certain Alex was the young man who had been humiliated in front of the entire town last night.

Visibly uncomfortable with the task at hand, Eddie and Alex stood waiting for someone, anyone, to tell them what to do next. A uniformed officer emerged from the police vehicle. He stood erect and ceremoniously placed a wide-brimmed hat identical to the one worn by Clydie upon his flat-topped head, prompting the first greeting. “Howdy, partner.” Clyde swaggered closer. “I’ll bet you wish you’d depu-tized me when you had the chance. Could have saved you a trip today.”

The sheriff dismissed the overzealous Clyde with what could have been interpreted as a nod but could as easily have been a nervous twitch with no intended significance. Clyde shadowed the sheriff as he conducted a thoughtful and methodical surveillance of the area, looking everywhere but at the body by Cal’s feet. The two ambulance attendants, still awkwardly awaiting instruction, stood dumbfounded, with their hands shoved deep into their dungaree pockets. Eddie’s jeans were well worn and ragged at the cuffs, which dragged on the ground. Alex’s Levi’s appeared to be new and had s l i p k n o t

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crisp creases that ran the length of his lanky legs. Amused and intrigued, I found their unfamiliarity with this scene of death strangely refreshing.

My presence was so conspicuous that the newcomers on the dock must have assumed I had a very good reason for being there—although all three waited for a clue to my identity rather than risk a question they figured even Clydie knew the answer to. I began double-checking all measurements and digital images I had captured thus far. The sheriff donned mirrored trooper glasses so that he could more discreetly watch my actions. Clydie patted his own breast pockets for sun-glasses and disappointedly came up empty. “Will you gentlemen please help me with Nick before the tide reclaims him?”

Cal sternly yet politely interjected into the confused silence.

“Sorry it took us so long to get here, Cal,” said Eddie, who, on closer inspection, indeed appeared to be stoned. He opened the back door of the van. “We were about to leave the dock at the sound of the cannon when Ginny called on the VHF and asked if we could help out by driving the bakery truck—um, ambulance. I was hoping we could get an EMT to come over, but I guess they’re both racing to get offshore for the new season, too.” Alex remained silent as he shot Eddie a look of disgust that I assumed was prompted by impatience with his partner’s apologies and explanations to the group of adults with whom Alex clearly had zero interest. The young men worked mostly against each other but finally managed to wrestle the stretcher from the back of the ambulance while Cal explained that it was too late for an EMT and that they needed only to deliver Nick to Boyce’s funeral parlor.

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“Twenty minutes till the shot of the cannon!” Clydie enthusiastically announced, holding his wristwatch a mere inch from his face. “Eleven boats all fighting for next year’s quota. The newspaper says it will be like
Survivor
,
The
Amazing Race
, and
Deadliest Catch
all rolled into one. The government’s really gone and done it this time. A lot of folks will be pretty upset about Nick’s pool, too. Hell, I put a ten-spot on the
Sea Hunter
myself. Guess I can kiss that farewell, to judge by the status of my bookie.” On and on Clydie rattled. The men, accustomed to his prattle, paid little attention while I discreetly took a few more notes. “Hey, his back pocket looks empty! Cal, did you take his black book? I sure would like to have my ten bucks back. Maybe the book and all of that money is drifting around the harbor!”

The parking lot adjacent to Turners’ Fish Plant was quickly filling with cars and pickup trucks and a steady stream of employees. Women in hairnets, and men in the rubber boots that I had just now overheard referred to as Green Haven wing tips, trickled down the wharf and formed human puddles around the van they had come to know as the ambulance. Shallow gasps of scared surprise and sighs of sadness escaped the growing crowd of townspeople and plant workers as they realized the source of this highly unusual activity involving the county sheriff. The sheriff, clearly appreciating an audience, had scrambled down the ledge to join Cal, who had remained stoically by the body. With Clyde Leeman by his side, the sheriff tried in vain to appear at ease this close to a dead body in a town where, I couldn’t help but notice, the law was unwelcome. Except for Clyde, the Green Haveners s l i p k n o t

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moved away from the sheriff as he passed. Some shot dirty looks in his direction. In an attempt to justify his badge, the sheriff began directing the young men carrying the stretcher.

“Lug that thing down here. Give them some room, folks.

That’s it.”

Amazed and intrigued with the notion that perhaps nobody at the location—with the exception of me—had ever seen a corpse outside a silk-lined casket, I tucked my notebook into my messenger bag and closed my jacket over my camera. With hair that was neither long nor short, not really dark or light, and a build that could best be described as average, I had always been good at disappearing in a crowd. I wondered as I glanced offshore at the island that loomed in the distance, interrupting an otherwise pristine horizon, how my life would have been different had my mother not plucked me away from my island birthplace and planted me in South Florida. Yes, I thought, that must be the Acadia Island I had wondered and fantasized about. If I had been raised there, I wondered, would I be here now as a real member of this assembly? I must still have family there.

Florida had been the most exotic and faraway place my mother could imagine when she decided to escape Maine with her two children; my brother, Wally, was just an infant. I thought the three of us were moving to another country by the time the Ford LTD station wagon rattled over the border of Georgia and into the state that would become our new home. Nearly thirty-eight years later, I could still hear the whoop my mother let out when she read the sign welcoming us to Jacksonville, as clearly as I had from my cozy nest of

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blankets in the backseat of that old car. As if we had been chased the length of the eastern seaboard by something that couldn’t penetrate the northern border of the Sunshine State, my mother declared us free. So at the age of four, I decided that my mother was different from other mothers.

My familiar stroll down this well-worn path of imaginative memory was cut short by a high-pitched screech and a flood of tears from a woman right beside me. Too well dressed to belong in the scene, I thought, the screamer stood out in the sea of long white lab coats—the plant’s traditional uniform.

This woman’s reaction to the sight of Nick Dow’s lifeless body was telling. Perhaps they had been lovers. Except for this one outburst of emotion and a few gasps that had slipped from behind hands trying to contain them, this body had been viewed nearly as casually as an abandoned shell that once housed a hermit crab. I was struck by how different this scene was from the many I had witnessed in Dade County.

Maybe this coolness was the Yankee way. Or maybe no one had liked Dow much. Ginny Turner’s reaction was significantly different. Ginny was quite dismayed at her own misfor-tune of a delayed start to this morning’s schedule. If this had occurred on one of Florida’s beaches, a southern Ginny would have closed up shop for the week and been home bak-ing for the funeral festivities. There would be a lot of crying and carrying on. Someone would have thrown him- or herself on top of the body by now. These northerners were quite different. My mother had never meshed with Floridians. I was beginning to understand that the difference was in-grained. Although I had never known exactly what my mother s l i p k n o t