Chasing the Lost (6 page)

“Listen,” Chase said. “We need to get moving. We need to get Cole.”

Sarah let got of his arm. “Thank you.”

Chase drove back to Hilton Head, the cool wind whistling around him, and a dark storm brewing inside him. He reflected that on some levels, combat was easier than dealing with people on personal levels.

Coming onto the island, he tapped his brakes, causing the person behind him to slam on his horn in irritation.

“There used to be a museum here,” Chase said, pulling into a deserted parking lot. A faded sign read
Coastal Discovery Museum
.

“It’s moved,” Sarah said, pointing at a smaller sign bolted on the building. She pulled out her phone and pushed a button. “Coastal Discovery Museum, Hilton Head Island.”

There was a short pause, then the machine responded:
“Okay, here’s a hotel matching Hilton. It’s not far from you.”

Chase laughed as he got out of the Jeep. “There are limits to technology.”

The sign directed him to Honey Horn Plantation Drive, which wasn’t far away. Chase drove there and found a mostly-empty parking lot. A handful of cars were near the entrance, and in the distance he could see a cluster of tourists preparing for a kayak expedition, being instructed on how to wear a life vest.

There was a shack next to the entrance to a long dock, and an old black man sat outside of it on a bench. “Give me a minute,” Chase said.

The old black man’s gnarled hands were weaving a casting net out of thin rope. He didn’t look as Chase walked up.

“Good day,” Chase said.

The Gullah were descendants of freed slaves, who lived on the barrier islands of northern Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina for generations. Their language had its roots in Sierra Leone, morphed by English. It was a dying culture, as more and more of the space between ocean and land fell to civilization.

The old man deigned to look up. He raked his eyes from Chase’s worn boots, his khaki pants, and the bulge under his loose shirt, to his face.

“Fr’un’ Kono,” Chase said, throwing his entire repertoire of the man’s language on the table, while pointing out at the tidal flats.

The old man blinked in surprise, either at this
buckra
daring to speak a Gullah word, or the name, Chase couldn’t tell.

“How you be knowing Kono?”

“My mother lived in Doc Cleary’s house,” Chase said. “I came here when I was a child. Kono and I spent time together on the water.”

“Doc Cleary gone,” the old man said. He nodded toward the right, the ocean. “Long gone sail.”

“I need help from Kono,” Chase said.

The old man laughed. “Kono helps only ‘self and a few bad fella he run with. Maybe that mean you a bad fella.” But he reached into a deep pocket on his faded coveralls, and pulled out the latest edition of the iPhone. He tapped the screen several times, then put the phone to his ear.

It was answered and the old man spoke in Gullah, so low that even if he were fluent in the language, Chase wouldn’t have been able listen in.

The old man glanced at Chase a couple of times as he spoke, and Chase knew he was being described.

The old man held the phone away from his head and nodded toward Chase, while turning the face of the phone toward him. “Name?”

“Horace Chase.”

The old man put the phone back to his ear, listened, then turned it off.

“Wait,” he said, sitting back down and going back to work on his net.

The sun was finally starting to beat back the mist that had lingered all morning over the island, sending warm fingers to the wide beach left exposed by the inevitable cycle of the tide. The sounds of the thick swamp beyond the beach had shifted hours ago from the occasional outbursts of predators and prey to the more serene symphony of daytime activity. Palmettos, old oaks gray-bearded with Spanish moss, and tall pines rose high, competing for the sunlight.

Between swamp and beach was a thin stretch of grass-covered sand-dunes where storms had heaped all they picked up as they thundered toward the coast, and the ocean in calmer weather could never quite reach to pull away unless it was a storm in concert with a high-high tide, a surge to take away the debris.

It was a long way from the Bronx, and Dave Riley had taken a winding, circuitous route to end up on Dafuskie Island. A career in the Army, mostly in Special Forces, some security and consulting work after retiring, and finally he’d decided he was done traveling. Actually, if he really thought about it, which he rarely did, he’d just gotten tired. He’d started turning down the security gigs because they usually meant traveling to some disease-infested shithole, guarding engineering contractors raping the land, or someplace like L.A., and dealing with some shithead movie star, and then eventually there were no more offers. And then he was done with it. A slippery slope into his present reality.

Resting in a storage unit on the mainland, he had a cardboard box full of plaques and medals, and the handful of photos every Spec Ops guy has of rough-looking men brandishing weapons in front of helicopters, in less-than-exotic but usually distant locales. He got a monthly check from the government for services rendered. He had memories, some good, most suppressed, a handful causing him to wake in the middle of the night in a cold sweat.

Dafuskie Island was west and south of Hilton Head, on the landward side of the Intracoastal. Five miles long, and at its widest only two and a half, it was a bit schizophrenic in its population dispersal. On the northeast side was a private, residential community with a little over a hundred year-round residents and over two hundred homes. Then, south of that, along the Intracoastal and across from Hilton Head’s South Beach, was the high-class Dafuskie Resort with its golf course. Then things went less formal with Oak Ridge, a small community of locals. Finally, at the southern tip, was Bloody Point, which was Riley’s current and favorite spot. Like several other locales along the east coast of Georgia and South Carolina, the English and the Spanish and their various Indian allies had battled it out for control of the southeastern seaboard of what would eventually become the United States. Bloody Point had earned its name from several skirmishes between settlers and the Native Americans.

Like much of the land in the low country, in the past fifty years it had been developed, and two golf courses put in.

Both failed, much to Riley’s secret delight. The word was that the two now-overgrown expanses had just been purchased by a new development group, but so far, Riley had yet to see any action.

Besides being part of a Jimmy Buffet song,
The Prince of Tides
, and bemoaning development, Dafuskie was the locale Pat Conroy had used in his novel
The Water is Wide
, and some still remembered when a young Pat Conroy taught in the small school on the island. Thinking of that made Riley think of something else.

“Giannini!” Riley screamed the name across the low country, the grasslands and marshes taking the word and consuming it.

Riley was exhausted. No one had told him how tiresome getting older would be. He’d turned fifty last year, and while most didn’t consider that ‘old,’ his body bore the wear and tear that might be expected of a professional football player. He had the aches and pains of the wounds he’d accumulated over the years. Purple Hearts didn’t make your body feel any better.

Over twenty years in Special Operations had also led to having both knees replaced, and rotator cuff surgery. The latter pained him the most, especially in the cold, one reason he’d moved to South Carolina, among others. He’d also had no other anchor, no other family than here, and even that was a stretch as he’d never been particularly close to his Uncle Xavier.

Riley glanced at his watch. Not yet noon, but it was five o’clock somewhere. He took another deep draw on the bottle of beer. He had two six-packs of bottles in the sand next to him, the three empties neatly arrayed back in their slots. He might be tired, but he would not litter.

He tried to draw up the energy to yell her name again, but knew it was futile. “Fuck the Prince of Tides,” Riley muttered. Screaming the name of
the
woman from your past did no good. Giannini was dead, long dead, and that was that. He’d had a chance, but he’d been too busy fighting for his country to see there was any other way. She’d been too busy defending the streets of Chicago as a cop that it took her life in a bank robbery before either of them truly appreciated that golden opportunity they’d been presented with in each other.

Riley’s cell phone buzzed and he checked the text message.

Back to work.

If you wanted to call it that.

He took the beers, empty and full, with him, and placed them on the back of the old golf cart. He drove along the sandy road, through a tunnel underneath broad trees draped with Spanish moss. Even though he was going the length of the island, it wasn’t exactly a marathon. There were only a couple of cars on Dafuskie, the primary mode of transportation being golf cart, since the island wasn’t connected to the mainland by a bridge, and the ferry only carried people, no vehicles. There were three golf courses on the island, and Riley could totally understand how two of the three had failed. Hitting a little ball in a tiny hole. What was the point? What was the challenge? Wasn’t like the ball would explode in your face if you didn’t do it right. You just missed.

A green from the one that still survived spread out to his right between the trees and the beach. No one was in sight.

Riley took a turn, and a rambling “shack” overlooking a modern dock was ahead of him on the left. As much as anything in the low country could “overlook,” given the entire island was a flood zone, and the highest point was just twelve feet above sea level. Swampside looked archaic and rustic, which was part of the “charm,” which Riley also didn’t get. It was closed for the season; while winter might be Florida’s in-season, it was off-season in South Carolina.

Riley saw that the large catamaran ferry from Hilton Head was docked. It was on half-schedule during the winter also, as everything slowed down to a quarter-beat from the half-beat that was the usual rhythm of the area.

Riley parked the golf cart behind the Shack. A suit paced back and forth anxiously, fresh off the ferry, akin to fresh off the turnip cart. Riley got out of the cart and sighed, anticipating what was going to play out. He took his sunglasses off, and slid them into the breast pocket on the jacket he wore. He wore jeans that had seen better days, and a gray T-shirt inside his denim jacket. A pair of scuffed-up jungle boots completed his swamp-country attire. It wouldn’t make GQ or Esquire, but might rate in Maxim. He walked up, waving the man to silence as he began to babble excuses. Riley sat down in a lone, large wicker chair facing the water, leaving the suit’s scuffed dress shoes mired in the sand.

Physically, Riley didn’t present an immediate threat. Five-seven, one hundred and seventy pounds after a few beers, he was a bit heavier than his Special Ops fighting weight, but a long way from the Hulk.

It wasn’t his body that made the suit nervous. It was his aura. Dark-skinned, with finely honed features, his piercing black eyes reflected his training and decades of experience in the world of covert operations. Riley had briefly met his Irish father many years ago as a young child, a fleeting visit after his Puerto Rican mother’s brief marriage and long divorce. The man had never come back again and his mother never mentioned him. She’d passed several years ago, and Riley had no idea of the fate of his father, and he saw no reason to have any interest in it.

Riley pointed at a tip jar on the outdoor bar.

The suit’s tongue snaked across his lips, a tell Riley was all-too-familiar with. Like the twitches, the sweating, the tics, all of the signs of a man gone wrong were a cacophony of desperation that Riley was growing weary of. He used to like the excitement, the energy, but in the past year that had faded, supplanted by the air of despair and failure most clients eventually exuded.

“You know I can get it together, Mister Riley,” the suit pleaded.

“What
‘it’
are you referring to?” Riley asked. “The money you owe me, or your various addictions?”

“The money.”

“If you could, you would have,” Riley reasoned. “But here you are, and
it
isn’t. So your statement fails in the face of the present situation.”

“I just need time,” the suit said.

“We all need time,” Riley replied. “Time is more valuable than money, and you are wasting mine. I was enjoying a pleasant, solitary morning, and now you’ve disturbed it for no reason other than to report failure to comply. So on top of the five large you owe me, you owe me time. How will you repay that?”

Riley had been bored from the moment he walked up, although his face didn’t show it. His face rarely registered emotion. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught movement on the Intracoastal. He pulled his sunglasses out and slid them on, so he could shift his eyes without the suit being aware he wasn’t getting the total treatment.

The suit, as suits do, mistook the movement as a threat.

He fumbled into his pocket and pulled out a roll. “I’ve got one.”

Riley cocked his head as if perplexed. “But you didn’t offer the money initially. So that will be the payment for my time which you’ve wasted today.”

The suit’s mouth opened to protest, but snapped shut as the smarter part of his brain put a stranglehold on the stupid part. He stepped forward to hand it to Riley, but Riley waved a hand. “A donation.” He pointed at the tip jar on the outdoor bar. The suit scurried over and deposited the money.

Riley noted all that off-center. The incoming boat had his attention. It was old, painted a spotty, dirty, flat black, and moved slow, the engine sounding a beat off.

All that was a show. Riley knew the boat and who was driving it. Who he
didn’t
know were the man and woman next to the driver. And that man emanated the same kind of potential trouble Riley reflected.

“Go,” Riley said to the suit. “Three days. All of it plus the vig. Or the title to your Range Rover.”

The man’s jaw dropped and his mouth flapped.

“I know you bought a used one two weeks ago,” Riley said, “and I should hurt you for all the lies you’ve told and done. No more. And nothing on the Super Bowl,” Riley warned. “I’ll know if you lay action anywhere on it. You pay me before you place another bet. And that bet will never again be with me.”

Stupid won this tussle in the suit’s brain. “But it’s the
Super Bowl!
Tomorrow!”

Riley got to his feet, really to see the boat and its passenger better, but it served a dual purpose. The suit backed up, hands held up in defeat. “Yes, sir. Three days.” He paused. “I know some people who need to lay some action, if you’re interested. Maybe get a finder’s fee? Cut back on my vig some?”

“‘People?’”

The suit shifted his feet uncomfortably, not meeting Riley’s sunglasses. “They usually do their action online, but they’re worried.”

“SAS?” Riley asked.

The suit nodded. “Went wonky during the conference championships. Some bets were lost, and some people were really pissed.”

Only the ones who had bet correctly, Riley knew. Those who’d missed the numbers were relieved their wager was lost in cyberspace. “I’ll pass,” Riley said. “After all, if they’re friends of yours, and you’re an indication of what they’re like, it wouldn’t be a prudent business move, would it?”

The logic of that struck home, and the suit nodded. “I’ll get the money.”

“Yeah,” Riley said. “You know, you ever think of stopping? You do know the house always ultimately wins, right?”

The suit seemed puzzled that he’d even suggest that; a dealer telling an addict to get clean.

“Get out of here,” Riley said.

He scurried toward the dock.

Riley tried to figure what he was going to do with a Range Rover on an island that didn’t allow cars as he watched the old boat slide up to the dock, so smoothly it came to a stop less than two inches away from the bumper. Riley knew the appearance of the boat and even the sound of the muffler was a façade. It was one of the fastest boats in the low country and the twin engines underneath the wood deck were in mint condition, in better shape than when they shipped from the factory. The hull meeting the water under the surface was smooth as a baby’s ass, able to cut through water like a knife. The muffler was warped to produce that stutter, but the rumble from the engine was a sonata to an expert mechanic.

“Don’t poke the crazy person,” Riley said to himself, a habit he was falling into more and more. It was the advice his uncle had given him when he was fourteen, and heading off to commute to high school in the Bronx via the subway. He was here on Dafuskie because of that uncle, his mother’s brother, Xavier. The old man had been the only family Riley had left when he finally decided to stop traveling around the world and shooting at other people. That wasn’t the irksome part; it was that those people often shot back that had begun getting old. A man can think he’s invincible, but Father Time has a way of putting him in his place.

Xavier had lasted a year after Riley arrived before succumbing to cancer. Enough time to teach Riley his business. Riley hadn’t made a conscious decision to take over his uncle’s booking; it just seemed to flow, and there were times he wondered when he’d made his last conscious decision. Riley did enjoy doing the numbers in his head, the odds, the over and under, who owed what. He’d never gambled in his life and he found those that did interesting, or at least he used to. It was as close as most of them would ever get to a real adrenaline rush, watching the scoreboard, knowing how much they had riding on a result they had absolutely no control over. The latter was the part Riley didn’t understand, although he knew many clients believed their knowledge of the game, whatever game it was, gave them some control, but Riley knew there was a huge difference between knowledge and control.