Soundkeeper (22 page)

“Can you send me a copy of your report when you’re finished?” Hall asked. The sergeant said he would. Hall knew a judge and an attorney he was going to send it to.

Hall stayed at the scene of the accident until daybreak. A news crew from Charleston was in the parking lot, and the reporter tried to get Hall to talk to her. She was attractive and made him feel important when she flirted with him but he referred her to the investigating sergeant.

Instead of going through Skull Creek, Hall took the long way home around the back of Pinckney Island. He didn’t care to see the ferry boat or what was left of the jet ski again. He absently tied his boat to the dock and walked up to the house, let Belker out, and pulled the water hose down to the dock. He didn’t want to splash bleach on his uniform, so he took off his shirt and pants and started cleaning his boat in his boxers and rubber boots.

He poured a healthy amount of bleach into a five-gallon bucket and diluted it with water. The long handled scrub brush kept him from having to get on his hands and knees, but the dried blood was difficult to remove from the non-skid surface of the deck. He knew it would hang around in other places for a long time.

The sun was above the trees by the time he was finished, and his body was covered with sweat. His face, neck, and his arms below his elbows were coppery brown, colored by the sun and the wind and the salt. The rest of his body was pale white and tired. He lay down on his back next to Belker on the dock and drifted off to sleep.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Arnold left without saying anything to Gale and was gone for several hours. He returned and found Gale sleeping, the same thing most prisoners did to pass the time.

“We’ve got to leave,” Arnold said.

Gale was excited and scared, but she couldn’t figure out what was going on. She wondered what had finally given Arnold the guts to leave Blondie.

“What about your partner?” she asked.

“It’s his idea. He’s worried about the guy who was snooping ‘round here last night,” Arnold said. She was disappointed to learn Arnold wasn’t splitting from Blondie, but at least she knew what happened last night.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

Arnold didn’t answer, and Gale decided not to ask any more questions.

Instead of taking the handcuff off of her ankle he used a pair of bolt cutters to cut the chain from the iron girder in the ceiling and it fell to the floor. She knew she could not swim away with the heavy chain shackled to her ankle, even if Arnold wasn’t holding on to it.

“Get your stuff,” he said without looking at her.

The chained dragged behind her while Gale grabbed her bedroll, sweat suit, and the bag of provisions Arnold had given to her. He led her outside where the sun was so bright it hurt her eyes. She looked around at the green marsh grass, the puffy white cumulous clouds, and the calm, dark water and realized she had never been indoors for so long in her entire life. This thought almost made her cry, but she was determined not to.

The old barge was at the end of the dock, and they climbed on board. The cargo bay was full of dirt, and Gale wondered how much poison the pair had already dumped into the sea. Arnold padlocked her chain to a pipe in the pilothouse and told her to sit on the floor. After he started the engine and went back to get his lawn chair and cooler, she stood up and peeked at her prison from the outside. She wanted to be able to identify where she had been held if she ever got a chance to tell anyone. It looked a lot smaller from the outside and like no one had been there in years. The fear of the unknown made her wish she wasn’t going anywhere.

They cast off from the old rickety dock, and Gale heard a piling scrape the barge all the way down its side as Arnold tried to control the old boat. Gale made an educated guess that they were headed south based on the position of the sun and the shadows as they played across the boat. She knew they had entered a larger body of water when the boat began to rock with the swells. They had to be in Port Royal Sound, she deduced, but they were headed west and inland, not out to sea. She did not understand where they could be going. The Intracoastal Waterway ran closer to the ocean, up the river and north to Beaufort, south to Savannah. The rivers just got shallower and narrow the further upstream they went. Her dead reckoning was proved correct when she recognized the Broad River Bridge they were passing underneath.

A few minutes later Arnold slowed the barge and his frantic movements with the wheel and the throttle were rewarded by a solid bump against a dock that groaned in protest. Gale knew where she was. The only marina this close to the bridge was on Lemon Island, an old and small establishment that catered mostly to crabbers and their small boats and a few recreational fishermen. She remembered that every time she had passed by, the docks here were piled high with crab traps and marker buoys and there was always a lot of activity around the place.

“Don’t move,” Arnold told her after he tied the barge to the dock. Since she already knew where she was, she didn’t want to risk his anger so she sat on the grimy floor of the boat and began to formulate a plan.

If she started screaming and yelling for help right now, she felt there was a good chance someone would hear her, but she couldn’t be certain. Most commercial fishermen left the dock early and came back late, and since it was just after two in the afternoon, there was a chance no one was around. She didn’t want to risk yelling for help until she knew someone would hear her. She could wait until she heard another boat approach, but then a sudden realization disrupted her thoughts.

Blondie was coming back. That meant that Arnold couldn’t leave her on the boat. Where would her next prison be?

Arnold came back on board before she had any time to consider the possibilities. He unlocked the chain from the pipe and looked around just like the bad guys always did in the movies. Then he told her to stand up and wrapped the other end of the chain around his hand.

He led her off of the boat and down the narrow dock where an old pick-up truck was parked. She looked for someone, anyone, but there was no one around and no other cars were in the parking lot. He made her get in the truck first and told her to sit down on the floor. Through a hole in the floorboard where the rust had eaten away the sheet metal she watched the road change from sand to pavement and back to sand again. When they stopped she checked her watch and knew they were fifteen minutes from the marina. A fifteen-minute drive meant she was between ten and twelve miles from Lemon Island, but she had no way of knowing which direction they had gone.

The mobile home he had driven to was surrounded by tall pine trees and was as rusty and decrepit as the old barge. She could not smell the marsh or the sea. An old car with no wheels was sitting in the sand in front of the trailer. Gale saw bullet holes in the side of the junked car. The sparse grass grew in scattered patches and was long and bent over, looking like a bad, green comb-over. There were no other houses in sight, and Arnold gripped her chain in his hand and made her slide out of the driver’s door beside him. Then he took a key out of his pocket to unlock the door to the trailer, but the doorknob had been broken off. He pushed open the door and reached in for a light switch.

Gale screamed when the light came on. Two people were sitting at the kitchen table. One was a skinny girl with big fake boobs and heavy make up. The other, a bleached-blond, was holding a bottle of liquor in one hand and a switchblade in the other.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Hall woke from his nap at the time he would have normally gone to bed, and it felt like he may have gotten a little too much sun on his pale torso. He was starting to understand there was no longer such a thing as a normal schedule for him. After tidying the kitchen and sweeping the small den, he gave Belker a bath out on the back porch. He picked up the t-shirt he’d been wearing when he’d gotten into the fight and looked at the slash in it once again. The knife had been razor sharp and would have slit his belly just as easily, he realized. He threw the shirt in the trash. At two a.m. he decided to catch up on his paperwork. The report detailing his assistance in the boating double-fatality was two pages long. He had to fill out a separate piece of paper for every day he worked, and this form was broken down into two-hour increments. Jimmy never complained about the paperwork and told Hall it was just part of the job, but Hall felt if he could be trusted with a gun and a badge, he shouldn’t have to account for every waking moment of his life.

No matter how many times he had scrubbed his hands they still smelled like bleach, and he kept checking as he typed to make sure he didn’t have any blood under his fingernails. He hoped he would never have to touch another body, but hoped he remembered to put on gloves if there was a next time.

There were invoices for gasoline and the electric bill for his cottage in his collection of paperwork. A mileage report for his work truck and a form for the hours he put on the outboard motor on his patrol boat. There were no spaces on any of the reports asking him how it made him feel to recover a body, get beat up, or lose a friend at sea.

Belker needed to go outside, and Hall walked with him out the dock and checked the lines on his patrol boat while Belker peed on his favorite bush. The moon had already set and the stars started at the horizon far out over Port Royal Sound and disappeared behind him in the limbs of the oaks and pines. The lights of Hilton Head glowed dully in the distance, and the surface of the water was so still and calm he wondered when he threw a sea shell into the water if the ripples would reach all the way to the ocean. He was sore and embarrassed from the fight he had gotten into. The fight he’d lost. The picture Detective Varnum emailed to him was the guy that had assaulted him. They were working on the same case and didn’t even realize it until they met.

Long after sunrise he was still working on paperwork at his kitchen table when Varnum drove up in his unmarked police car. The detective suggested Hall’s truck might attract less attention than his unmarked car, so Hall removed the magnetic USFWS emblems from the doors of his truck and put them under the driver’s seat. Hall knew most people wouldn’t notice the blue strobe lights concealed in the grille, and the tinted windows hid the equipment inside the cab.

“Expecting trouble?” Varnum asked when he saw the assault rifle locked in the gun rack.

“They issued it to me. I’d feel pretty stupid if I needed it out in the field and it was locked up in the safe in my house.”

Varnum agreed and asked Hall to show him where the key to the gun rack was hidden before they left. Without asking he rolled down his window and lit a cigarette as they drove under the Spanish moss and live oaks, leaving Pinckney Island and heading inland.

“Don’t you think this guy will recognize me?” Hall asked the detective. He noticed when Varnum finished his cigarette he held it out the window and crumbled it between his fingers until all of the tobacco fell out and he put the filter in the pocket of his sport coat.

“I don’t think he will. When you’re in uniform that’s all most people notice. I arrested someone who swore they’d kill me the next time they saw me and two days later I stood behind him in line at Wal Mart and he didn’t remember me,” Varnum said.

“What would you have done if he had?” Hall asked.

“I was wearing a sweat shirt and a pair of jeans with a .38 in my pocket. If I go past my mailbox I’ve got a gun close by,” Varnum answered. “Just in case. How many refuge officers are there on Pinckney Island?”

“Just one, and he’s pretty new,” Hall said with a smile.

Varnum thought about that as they rode along together. A good cop never stopped learning. After he had finished the academy and rode with a coach for twelve weeks, he went to third shift and worked with a dozen other deputies who’d been on the job anywhere from two to twenty years. All of them had taught him something; sometimes it was what not to do, but he learned a lot from all of them. This kid was on his own.

“I’ve got a sample of the dirt from the construction site,” Varnum said. He handed a plastic jar sealed with evidence tape to Hall.

“How did you do that?” Hall asked.

“A lot of dirt had spilled out of the dump truck onto the sidewalk and street. I stopped by and scraped up a little of it on my way over here.”

Hall smiled in admiration and resolved to remember that there was usually more than one way to solve a problem.

“You never told me why you were looking for this guy,” Hall said.

“An informant told me our suspect was coming into some big money, but she didn’t know why. When I was checking him out I found a connection between him and a county inspector that was living beyond his means, and that led me to the construction site.”

They passed Lemon Island and drove across the Broad River. Both men admired the view from the top of the bridge, the tallest vantage point in Beaufort County. They discussed their cases further, and Hall said he would check with the U.S. Attorney and see what federal charges could be brought against the developer and the county inspector. Varnum speculated that the driver of the black Trans Am would likely testify against the others in exchange for a lighter sentence.

“The barge and old warehouse are just down this road,” Hall said.

They turned off the highway, and Hall showed Varnum where he’d hidden his truck the night before. Hall could feel his heart rate increase and wondered if he’d get another chance with the blond suspect. In a fair fight he knew he could whip him. The two officers didn’t talk as they drove down the dusty road.