Kiss of the Sun (7 page)

“What is it you want to tell us?” Jarrell asked.

“For starters, I'd like to have a look at that amulet you found.”

Martha pulled the folded paper from her handbag and passed it to him. The lieutenant opened it and looked at the medallion, tilting it one way and then the other, catching different angles of light. Then he folded the paper and tucked it into the pocket inside his windbreaker.

“Did you see anyone else in the area when you were down in Lineville?”

“Not a soul,” Jarrell said. “The place was deserted.”

“Can you tell us what this symbol means?” Martha asked.

Somis took a pull on the Camel and gazed toward the field of kudzu. “I don't know yet. But I can tell you that I've seen it before. There's only a certain amount I can tell you, and I need to trust you to keep this quiet. I have to tell you just enough so that you'll understand what you need to do.”

“What do you want us to do?” Jarrell asked.

“I'd like for you to leave town for a couple of days. Both of you.”

“What's going on?” Martha asked. “Are we in some kind of danger?”

Somis turned in his seat slightly and looked at Martha. “At the fundraiser last night, when you drew that symbol on the napkin, I thought that it seemed familiar to me, but I just couldn't quite make the connection. Not at first. Then when you sent me the photo of the amulet, I had a flash. Something came back to me.”

“You'd seen it before?” Jarrell asked.

Somis nodded. “Yes. I remembered that I'd seen that symbol, or something similar to it, tattooed on the wrist of a murder suspect last year. I went back to the case file to make sure I was right. We photographed each of his tattoos individually. It's standard practice, because tattoos can be used as identifiers. I still might not have remembered that particular detail if that had been just any case, but this was one that nearly cost me my career. I've been rehashing it ever since.”

Martha heard tires crunching on dirt behind them, and Somis looked in the rearview mirror. A dark sedan with tinted windows moved along the road behind them, slowed as it passed, then continued on, following the dirt road around the bend, toward the park exit. She turned and watched it, squinting. Had it been another Lexus? Or the same one?

“Things have been happening over the past year that…” Somis took a puff on the Camel, stared off into the distance.

“You were talking about a case,” Jarrell said. “You said there was a suspect who had a tattoo like the amulet.”

And like Peavy's drawing,
Martha thought. And her vision from the dream, that apocalyptic ring of fire…

“Right,” Somis continued. “It should have been open-and-shut. An elderly couple were murdered during the night in their house in Smyrna. Both had their throats cut with a steak knife that was taken from the kitchen. The suspect was a skinhead, lots of tattoos and piercings. Someone on night patrol pulled this punk over for a bad taillight just five miles from the murder house. It was about three
A.M.
No one knew about the murder yet, so the stop was just pure dumb luck. The officer ran a check on his plates and found out he had an outstanding misdemeanor charge for disorderly conduct. So he took the punk in. The next morning, the slain couple was discovered, and there was DNA material on the knife that matched the suspect. Like I said, it should have been an open-and-shut conviction: home invasion, attempted burglary, murder. But two months later, the DA released him. The skinhead walked.”

“How did he get off?” Jarrell asked.

“The DA threw out our DNA evidence because it was contaminated. They said my team failed to follow proper procedures in processing the evidence, so the DNA on the knife could have been from other assets in the lab. It could have been from the skin cells we'd collected from the suspect's car. But that was a lie. I was supervising the case, I've handled evidence like this for twenty years, and I know the correct procedures were followed. Someone tampered with the evidence and altered the lab report. It had to be someone on the inside.”

“Why would someone do that?” Jarrell asked.

“I've never figured it out. This guy was a punk, a common hoodlum with a criminal record. There were no family connections that I could turn up. I just couldn't figure out why someone in our department would stick his neck out for a guy like that.” Somis tapped his cigarette into a flip-out ashtray in the dashboard. “So I was written up for this egregious mishandling of the evidence and put on administrative leave. But I wouldn't make a mistake like that. I followed procedure.”

“That doesn't explain why you think we're in danger,” Jarrell said. “What does this symbol represent?”

“I'm not saying you're in immediate danger. It's just that I can't guarantee your safety.” Somis twisted again in the bucket seat. “Listen, I've been quietly making observations for the past year. Other strange things have happened in the department ever since Jimmy Lawrence was appointed police commissioner. I've got an accordion folder full of material in my trunk. I've been recording irregularities. I think the symbol on this pendant might be an emblem. As I follow the trail, it keeps leading upward. I think there may be some powerful people connected to it, including Atlanta's new police commissioner.”

“Have you seen that symbol anywhere else besides the tattoo?” Jarrell asked.

Somis took a long pull on the Camel, blew the smoke out the window, and placed his hands on the steering wheel. Martha noticed they were shaking a little. “The professor. The man who was killed last week. He had a website—”

Somis glanced in the rearview mirror, then tossed his cigarette butt out the window. He started the ignition and put the car into gear. “Listen, I don't have time to tell you any more, and I don't think it would be a good idea, anyway. I've only told you this much so you'll follow my advice. Pack up and leave town for a couple of days. Stay off the grid, if you can.” He glanced in the rearview mirror again as he eased the Forester back down the sloped gravel roadway.

Martha looked back. A black car appeared on the road behind them. Martha felt a sharp electric twinge move up her backbone. A ball of light was pulsing in the periphery of her consciousness, getting slowly closer.

“Don't tell anyone about what you found, or what I've told you,” Somis continued. “Don't even use your cellphone. I'm on my way out of town myself tonight. I'm taking my folder to the feds, and then I'm going up to my hunting cabin in Dillard for a few days until I hear something back. In the meantime, I can't guarantee your safety.”

The ball of light was getting closer, growing larger in her mind. It meant something—it was approaching for a reason—

“If we do take your advice and leave, how will we know when it's okay to return?” Jarrell asked.

“I've got your email. I'll send you a message. Check just once per day, but otherwise keep your cellphone powered off. Is there a place—”

“Jarrell! Get down!”
Martha screamed.

Her words were followed by a sudden, concussive report, a squeal of shattering glass.

Martha jerked her head in the direction of the noise. She saw a jagged hole in the rear window, the rest of the glass now a spiderweb of cracks, fragmented sections held together by a connective film.

She dove for the floorboard and heard another concussion, saw glass fragments raining around her.

“Jarrell!” she yelled. She looked up and saw Somis slumped against the steering wheel, the windshield and dashboard in front of him splattered with blood and brain tissue.

Martha sensed that the entire vehicle was still in motion, juddering and jouncing as it picked up momentum, rumbling down the embankment.

Somis toppled sideways, colliding with Martha as she tried to clamber back up from the floorboard, and she could hear the hissing and scraping of vines and branches against the sides of the vehicle. Seconds later, a sudden jolt sent her slamming against the glove compartment.

“Jarrell!” she called out again, scrambling back up onto the seat, squeezing herself past Somis's body. She whirled her head around, scanning the windows for the gunman who'd fired on them, but outside she could see only a green jungle. She saw Jarrell working his way through the partially open back door, tearing vines out of the way. She grabbed her own door handle and pushed. It was pinned by a sapling.

“Martha—” Jarrell's face appeared outside her window, pulling at the slender tree trunk and wrenching it aside. He got the door partway open, grabbed her by the upper arm, and pulled her through. She tumbled out and onto the dark earth, then pulled herself up, holding on to him by the shoulders.

“Martha—are you all right?”

The Forester sat nosed against a pine tree, steam rising from the crumpled hood.

“Yeah, I'm fine. Are you okay?”

“I think so, but Somis—”

Jarrell wrenched the Forester's door fully open and looked at the lieutenant. He lay sprawled, belly-down, across the gearshift. Blood dripped from the crater in the back of his head. Martha put her hand over her mouth. Jarrell lifted Somis's arm, felt his wrist, dropped it. He shook his head.

Martha heard the sound of a car motor above them, a grind of gravel. She looked up at a tangle of ripped vines and bent saplings, the path the Forester had taken. A pair of headlights shone into the underbrush. “Jarrell, someone's up there!”

“I'm going to try to get the accordion folder,” Jarrell said. He reached over Somis's body, grabbed the Forester's keys, then made his way around to the back of the vehicle. The hatch was snared in a jumble of vines and brush. He tore at them, trying to reach the latch.

Martha watched the top of the embankment, saw the brush moving, saw a dark shape pass in front of the headlights.

“Jarrell, there isn't time—”

He looked up, let go of the vines. “All right, let's move.”

The ground was damp and muddy as they pushed through brush and charged deeper into the forest, kicking through fallen branches and stepping over gullies. A few hundred yards later, out of breath, they came to a clearing and a developed trail that ran alongside a creek. Out of breath, Martha looked up and down the trail, then back toward the woods.

“Oh God, Jarrell, do you think they're following us?” She was panting, her heart hammering from fear and exertion.

“No, I don't,” Jarrell said, glancing behind them, “but we need to keep going…we need to get back to my car.”

Martha spotted an iron sign a few yards up the trail, pointed to it. The sign said
RIM TRAIL
, with an arrow pointing leftward, and
VISITOR'S CENTER
, with an arrow pointing to the right.

They followed the path and, five minutes later, reached the backside of the visitor's center. A cement walkway led around to the parking lot. Jarrell held up his hand, signaling for her to pause. He scanned the area. In the dim light of dusk, the lot appeared to be empty. Only the Monte Carlo remained.

They made a dash for the car and got in, and Jarrell gunned it toward the park exit. As they pulled onto Highway 155, a vehicle emerged from a gravel road to their left and followed them at a distance, headlights on. Martha kept her eyes on the car as Jarrell sped into the gathering dusk, following the rural highway south, toward McDonough.

Less than a mile later, the other car was gone.

They continued south toward Macon, following rural routes that led them through rustic communities and town squares. Jarrell drove with a relentless, steely focus, taking care to stay close to the speed limit, skirting major highways, sometimes taking random detours, and constantly glancing in the rearview mirror.

“Do you think anyone followed us?” Martha asked when she finally found her tongue, which felt as if it had been cemented to the roof of her mouth. She realized she had been gripped by a kind of paralysis since they'd left the park, and as it thawed, her eyes began to moisten and her emotions started to roil.

“I don't think so,” Jarrell said. “I've been keeping my eye on every car behind us. No one has stayed with us. But the biggest question in my mind now is, why not? We were the only car leaving the state park at that hour. It wouldn't have been hard for the shooter to find us.”

“Who do you think it was?”

“I don't know. I also don't know why they didn't take a shot at us back there in the woods. They easily could have.”

Martha forced herself to breathe slowly. “Should we go to the police? Maybe the FBI, some other agency?”

“The lieutenant said to call no one. For now, I think it's best we follow his final words of advice, at least until we can figure out who to trust. I've got a nearly full tank, so I'm going to put a lot of miles between us and Atlanta. I know a place we can go that's safe, off the grid. There's a guy I know there who might be able to help us with this.”

Martha looked down at her beige blouse, which was marred with dark streaks—mud, and probably some of the lieutenant's blood. She wondered if his blood might also be in her hair.

They skirted the city limits of Macon and picked up old State Highway 81, toward Savannah.

Around 5
A.M.
they came into the small town of Metter. Jarrell pulled into an all-night gas station called Jay's Fuel Stop. Jarrell nodded toward the restroom sign, which pointed toward the rear of the station. “Want to go in there and get cleaned up?”

Martha took a fresh shirt and comb from her suitcase in the backseat, grabbed her handbag with her plastic pill vial, then went inside to borrow the restroom key from the cashier. The thin, pasty-looking attendant seemed to take little notice of her disheveled appearance as he glanced up from his magazine and pointed to the key, which hung on a wall hook, attached by a lanyard to a sawed-off broom handle.

She went into the smelly, closet-sized facility and turned the deadbolt. She pulled the stained blouse over her head, stretching it outward to avoid contact with her face, then balled it and pushed it through the swinging lid of the trash bin. She looked at herself in the mirror over the sink, standing there in her bra. Reddish-brown mud, and perhaps blood, had penetrated the blouse and gotten onto her skin. She pulled three paper towels from the metal dispenser, wet them, and cleaned herself.

A faint voice whispered through the hum of an air vent on the wall, watery and thin.
What have you done, Lovie? What have you started?

Martha felt the hair on the back of her neck standing up. It was the voice of Lenny—her constant, hallucinatory companion during her psychotic break. A voice long silenced by medication, therapy, her sedate island lifestyle.

She counted slowly to five, practicing her controlled breathing. “No,” she told her reflection in the mirror. “He will not come back. I will keep myself together. I have to do this, for Jarrell.”

She pulled out two more of the rough brown towels from the dispenser, dried herself, then tugged the fresh shirt over her head. She adjusted her hair, washed her hands, then tapped out one of the small olive-green clozapine pills from her vial and swallowed it.

He needs you.

The last voice had arisen from a different place—from her own thoughts, or perhaps the words of Lady Albertha, recalled from her dream. But now the words seemed ambiguous—had Albertha actually meant Peavy, or Jarrell?

Martha combed her hair and put her things away, then opened the deadbolt and stepped back onto the asphalt behind the gas station. She glanced across the parking lot and could see the rectangular façades of the town square—a drugstore, an antiques dealer. To the right, a perpendicular street with a few maple trees visible in the glow of streetlights. And, parked at the curb, a black Lexus.

Martha's spine turned to ice. She got back to the Monte Carlo just as Jarrell was hanging up the fuel pump.

“What's up?” he asked as they got in.

“Jarrell, we need to go. There's a car over there, along the curb—a black Lexus.”

Jarrell let out a long breath. “It can't be the same one. I've been watching behind us all the way here. I'm sure we haven't been followed.”

He started the car and pulled around to the back exit to catch a view of the car as they left the station.

Martha gripped the seatback and gazed through the rear window as they followed the surface road back toward the town limits.

“Did they follow?” Jarrell asked.

“No,” Martha said, sinking back into her seat with relief.

“I think we're okay. There are a lot of Lexuses on the road,” Jarrell said as they pulled onto State Route 46.

Over the next hour, color began to return to the landscape. They had driven through the night, and the country was gradually flattening, the pine trees and pastures giving way to sandy lots and palmetto plants. Martha could smell the sulfurous aroma of a paper mill through the car vents. A short causeway over marshland announced their arrival at Georgia's coastal low country. Martha gazed out the window at the meandering creeks and marshland, gilded by the rising sun. The tide was low, exposing the rich, glistening mud and clusters of oyster shells. A crane stilted slowly across the mud, scanning the shallow water for morsels. The view soothed her.

“Well, we made it,” Jarrell said. “Good to be home again.”

They came into the small town of St. Marys and stopped at a hardware store to pick up a few supplies. Martha waited in the car while Jarrell went inside. She looked around the parking lot and across the street, where there was a diner with a portable sign advertising specials from the night before:
SUNDAY ALL YOU CAN EAT CATFISH COLESLAW HUSHPUPPIES $4.99.
Both lots were mostly empty—just a couple of old beater pickup trucks, a Volkswagen, a couple of sedans. There was no sign of a Lexus.

Jarrell returned with some rope and a red plastic gasoline can, and they continued on their way.

They crossed an arched bridge and reached a small village along the sound. Shrimp boats and trawlers were moored at an industrial marina. They entered a community of modest clapboard and cinder-block homes, each with its own ramshackle wooden pier and fishing boat. Jarrell pulled into the gravel driveway of one of the white shotgun-style cottages and got out. “Let's see if Darius is home,” he said.

A gray-whiskered man in coveralls came to the door when they knocked. When he saw Jarrell he beamed, exposing a gold tooth, and next to it a gap where a tooth was missing.

“Jarrell Humphries. I thought you was off at college, getting yourself ready for a fancy law degree.”

“Just taking a break, Darius. Got some business to attend to. This is my friend Martha.”

Darius took her hand. “Pleasure to meet you. Want to come in? I'll make some fresh coffee and warm up some crab cakes. Won't take but a few minutes.”

“We'd love to, Darius, but we're in kind of a hurry. I need to get my boat out.”

The smile faded from Darius's mouth and his eyes narrowed. “Everything all right, Jarrell?”

“We've run into a little bit of trouble, but we'll get it straightened out. We just don't have a whole lot of time right now.”

Darius pulled a red bandana from his back pocket, wiped his hands, and took a key ring from a hook just inside the door. “All right, let's go and get her.”

He led them around back to a padlocked shed and opened the double doors. The sunlight fell on a push lawnmower, gas cans, nets, and tools. On one side of the shed, sitting up on cement blocks and two-by-fours, was a sight Martha recognized: Jarrell's sleek wooden skiff, with its gray runners and silver outboard motor. She remembered lying on a tarp in the hull more than a year ago, semi-conscious, watching mossy limbs pass overhead.

“She's in good shape,” Darius said, running his bandana along the gunwale. “I took her out just last month. Engine still purrs like a kitten.”

“She looks good,” Jarrell said. He stepped around the boat and squatted to look at the engine. He fingered the blade of the propeller.

Darius turned to Martha. “They built this boat by hand, you know. Jarrell and his old man.”

Martha nodded. “Yes, he told me.”

“Darius, I need to buy some gas off you, too, if you can spare it.”

They lugged a metal cylinder from the garage and filled the boat's gas tank as well as the red plastic gas can, then carried the boat across the crabgrass and down to the river's edge. They loaded Martha's suitcase, Jarrell's backpack, a toolbox, and the red gas container into the square stern of the skiff. They parked the Monte Carlo in a stand of pines next to a weedy field scattered with parts of old boat trailers, stacks of pipes, and fencing. They covered the car with the tarp from the hardware store, then returned to Darius's cabin.

“I'm going to leave the car over there by the boneyard for a few days, okay, Darius?”

“Don't worry,” Darius said. “I'll let folks know, and we'll keep an eye on it.”

As they lashed their supplies into the boat, Darius went into the house and returned with a pie plate covered with tin foil. “Here's a few of those crab cakes I was telling you about. You can take them with you. Y'all look pretty hungry.”

They motored slowly along the waterway in a haze of light morning fog, the skiff sitting low in the water with its passengers and cargo of supplies.

“Hey, will you hand me the pliers from the toolbox in the back?” Jarrell asked.

Martha lifted a pair of pliers from a rust-stained metal box and Jarrell used them to adjust a nut on the side of the engine. The motor throttled down to a smooth purr. As he handed the pliers back, Martha noticed a pair of initials engraved on the side—
J.H.
She touched the lettering.

“I do that to all my tools,” Jarrell said. “I guess I'm a little OCD when it comes to hardware.”

They meandered past piers and through canyons of sawgrass. The tide was coming in now, the creeks infilling, the eternal cycle repeating itself. The scene was tranquil, and the horror they'd just encountered in Atlanta seemed a world away. A bad dream.

They rounded a bend of a low, uninhabited peninsula, dense with pines, water oaks, and scrub, and came into an open marshland where the river widened and shallowed.

The hulls and masts of a group of watercraft emerged from the morning fog. Martha at first thought they were approaching a marina, but as they drew closer she saw that there were no service buildings, and no shoreline to speak of. It was just a gathering of derelict watercraft—rusting shrimpers, cruisers with staved-in hulls and peeling paint, and crumbling houseboats. All were moored around a wide, planked platform that floated on oil drums. A rickety wooden pier connected the conglomeration to the low, marshy peninsula.

Jarrell sounded a horn on the front of the skiff and they nosed up to the pier, where several smaller boats were parked and tied off. Jarrell killed the engine and hitched a rope over a mooring.

“What is this place?” Martha asked.

“This is the place I was telling you about. It's off the grid. You'll see.”

They climbed a ladder onto the dock and followed the narrow pier toward the central barge. Lights were strung on poles that surrounded the platform. On one of the poles, a warped plywood sign announced the name of the establishment:
SLINKY'S SHANGRI-LA.

Martha spotted a hammock strung between elms and distended by the weight of its occupant. Beyond that, several young men sat on chairs in the shade, playing cards on a sawed-off barrel. “The patch of land over there is unofficially known as Scrub Island,” Jarrell said. “Slinky inherited it from his folks, but it's pretty useless.”

“Who is Slinky?” Martha asked.

“Old friend of mine from the islands,” Jarrell said. “We go way back. This place he inherited is marshy and floods several times a year. So Slinky started towing these old wrecks out here and roping them together. He's turned it into a secret resort. Nobody comes out here unless they hear about it through the grapevine.”

“The land may be worthless, but your friend sure inherited a beautiful spot,” Martha said, surveying the surrounding forest and creeks.

“That's the kind of guy Slinky is. When life hands him lemons, he makes limoncello.” Jarrell pulled the string on an iron bell that hung from one of the poles, giving it a single clang.

A glass door slid open on one of the houseboats and one of the largest young men Martha had ever seen sauntered onto the port deck. He was shaped like a pear and wore a black, red, and green knit cap and large, round sunglasses. He crossed a gangway onto the central platform, causing it to tip slightly.

“Jarrell Humphries?” The giant smiled, revealing bright white teeth that contrasted with his dark skin as he lumbered toward them. He extended his arm, fist closed. A big gold ring gleamed on his second finger.

Jarrell held his own fist forward, and they knuckle-bumped. “Slink. Long time, brother.”

“Good to see you, man.” Slinky's voice was like the croak of a bullfrog inside a catacomb. “Welcome back to my humble establishment. What a pleasant surprise.”

“Let me introduce my friend Martha,” Jarrell said.

“Welcome to Shangri-la,” Slinky said. “Any friend of Jarrell's is a friend of mine. He's a local legend around these parts, you know.”