Soundkeeper (27 page)

It was Gale! How could it be? He tried to find her pulse at the carotid artery in her neck but felt nothing. She was cold and gray, and he was afraid she was dead. There was a gash on the back of her head where her scalp was torn, and he noticed with relief that it was bleeding, but in slow, irregular pulses. He rolled her on her side and air rushed out of her lungs. He thought she was close to bleeding to death, by the amount of blood on her shirt and pants. With nothing else available, Hall took his life jacket off and quickly used his pocketknife to cut off one of the sleeves of his raincoat. He cut it into strips and tied it around her head as tightly as he could.

Lightning flashed again, and he knew whoever did this to Gale had to still be on board. He looked around, and decided to get Gale to a safer location before investigating further. Her body was completely limp, and he struggled to lift her out of the hopper and up onto the deck. He was still standing in the mud when he realized he was sinking.

Blondie was in the pilothouse, peeking over the wheel and out the window. When he saw the cop start to walk across the tarp, he laughed and pulled the release lever again. The crabs would get to eat twice as much tonight, he thought, but the barge didn’t shudder and drop the dirt as he expected. He felt the boat bump up and down on the sandbar and realized it was keeping the hopper doors from swinging open. He increased the throttle and peered out the window again.

Hall decided he was imagining things, that his feet must have slipped deeper into the mud. He hoisted himself up onto the deck next to Gale and drew his gun, heavy and awkward in his hand. Within a few seconds his forearm began to ache and he realized he was squeezing the pistol too hard. He forced himself to relax his gun hand. The rain continued to fall at a sharp angle and felt like sand as it stung his arms and face. He felt chilled without his raincoat, but he shivered from the adrenaline, not the cold.

Step by step he worked his way closer to the pilothouse. The barrel of the pistol was his third eye, leading him as he scanned with it and searched for suspects. The small pilothouse was the only place on the boat someone could be unless they were down in the engine room. Just as he reached for the door handle it was sucked away and someone jumped out in front of him. Hall stumbled backward in surprise.

“Don’t shoot!” Blondie yelled.

He startled Hall so badly that he would have shot him if his finger had been on the trigger. He caught himself hyperventilating.

“Hands up!” Hall yelled back into the wind.

It was a stupid thing to say. The man’s hands were already stretched high above his head. He was walking toward him and almost seemed to be crying. Hall understood bits and pieces of what he said as the wind snatched away the rest

“Highjacked…..beaten……….killed that poor girl.”

The man was walking toward him and still had his hands in the air. He was sobbing now. The blond-headed man did look like he’d been in a fight. One of his eyes had a bluish-black crescent under it and his face was scratched and swollen. He was limping and had blood on his clothing.

“Help me,” the man said. Hall was close enough to understand him now and recognized the man he’d fought with a few days ago.

Hall was not ready for the sudden move, and he froze. Blondie grabbed the gun with both of his hands and drove his forehead into the bridge of Hall’s already injured nose. Hall felt the cartilage in his nose crack and gripped his gun as hard as he could with both of his hands.

The fight started hard from the beginning. There was no foreplay of pushing and shoving, no threats or posturing. They both knew only one of them would live to see the end of the storm. On the defensive from the beginning, all Hall could do was concentrate on holding onto his gun. A sudden wave made the barge lurch sideways and they were both thrown hard against the metal railing. Blondie slammed his head into Hall’s face again and tried to do it a third time but Hall moved to the side just in time. Hall tasted more blood but felt no pain. He put his head down and pushed against Blondie’s chest like a boxer and watched the barrel of the gun swing wildly back and forth as they both struggled for control. The front sight played across Hall’s leg, across the deck and over Blondie’s foot. When the front sight was lined up with the pair of sneakers again, Hall pulled the trigger three times as fast as he could.

Blondie screamed with pain but didn’t let go. One of the bullets entered his right shin just below his knee and traveled down his leg, shattering the bone as it went. Blondie didn’t loosen his grip on the gun, but the bone structure to support his weight was no longer there. He began to fall and pulled Hall down with him. Together they tumbled over the railing and into the mud and sand in the hopper. When Hall fell he saw Gale lying in the rain on the deck and knew he was fighting for her life as well.

Hall landed on top of Blondie. Four hands fought for the gun. Taking a chance, Hall let go with his left hand and began to punch Blondie as hard as he could in the face and throat and then in the ribs. When his hand hurt from punching he used his elbow like a hammer. He was hitting Blondie so hard that he felt the man’s ribs crack as he pummeled away, and it seemed to be working. Blondie seemed to get weaker. Hall quit hitting him and wrapped his free hand around Blondie’s throat and squeezed as hard as he could.

The effect was instantaneous. Blondie released one of his hands from the pistol and tried to peel Hall’s fingers from his neck. Within another few seconds he quit fighting for the gun altogether and was trying with both hands to get loose from the death-grip on his neck. When the gun was free Hall put the barrel in Blondie’s side and tried to pull the trigger, but nothing happened. He glanced down at the gun and saw the trigger guard caked with mud. He dropped the useless tool and used both hands to strangle Blondie. He heard one man roar with anger and another man gasp for his final breath. He didn’t stop when he crushed his windpipe and he didn’t stop when Blondie began to violently convulse and heave. He squeezed and squeezed as hard as he could for a long time after Blondie quit moving.

Hall stood over Blondie and felt a rage he had never felt before. He knew he had to get past his anger and the questions he had if he wanted to save Gale. There was much less light now as twilight approached. The worst of the storm had passed, and Hall stood up to look for Gale. She was still lying on the steel deck beside the pilot house, and he started to walk toward her across the uneven soil in the hopper. Just then the moon pushed the tide inland. Only a fraction of an inch, just enough to clear the barge from the sandbar and into deeper water. Hall felt the barge shudder and then the ground was sucked out from underneath him. Everything went black.

Chapter Forty-Five

As she struggled to breathe she realized she was going to die. A man in a uniform lay near her on the muddy sandbar, and she wondered if he was dead already. She had tried to save him. She knew it would be six more hours before the tide would rise again. Too late.

She had lived her life by the tides for as long as she could remember. The water flowed higher and swifter during the full and new moons, slower and softer during the quarters. The rhythm of her life. The moon illuminated both of them, lying together near the waters edge. Her gray, bare body shivered from hypothermia and she died as the moon rose over Pinckney Island.

The Palmetto Room in the governor’s mansion was one of the smaller rooms in the enormous structure. It was considered part of the residence, and as such was not commonly used for official business. The mahogany-paneled walls, wildlife prints and brick fireplace gave the room the feel of a southern gentleman’s study. Outside the temperature on the first day of summer topped the century mark. The governor, wearing khakis and a denim shirt, entered the room with one of his aides.

“My job is to help the people of South Carolina. Better education. Smarter laws. A higher standard of living. Everything I do to accomplish those ideals takes place in safe, air-conditioned buildings. Like most of our citizens, I take our clean air and pristine waters for granted. My family and I are able to enjoy the natural beauty of our state thanks to men and women who protect the environment from dangers we could never imagine. Gale Pickens is one of our protectors,” he said.

Gale slipped her hand out of Hall’s and stood next to the governor. Most of the bruising was gone from her face, but her left eye had a few broken blood vessels that refused to heal quickly. The marks on her ankle were only visible when she wasn’t wearing socks and her thick hair covered the scar on the side of her head. The unseen scars were healing too.

The body of Linwood Thompkins was never found. Detective Varnum had been able to identify Blondie from fingerprints he left on the barge and in his car. Hall wanted the closure seeing the body for himself and for Gale, but was satisfied that the very environment he had been poisoning would be his final resting place. Harold Peterson and Mark Lancaster were both in the Beaufort County Detention Center, and Hall was under subpoena to testify in the upcoming trial.

Gale’s brother Silas, Ted and Rebecca Barnwell, and Hall’s boss Susan Charles were at the ceremony. Ted gave Hall an approving nod and smile when they looked at each other. As far as Hall was concerned, that was better than an award from any politician.

The governor rattled on for a few minutes about the history of the Order of the Palmetto, remembering previous recipients and their accomplishments.

“Gale has dedicated her life to preserving our coastal waters, making sure they are protected for future generations….”

On the southeastern side of Dawes Island, in the middle of Port Royal Sound, is a beach of beautiful white sand. It is ringed with oyster bars and spartina grass, and the live oaks and palmettos break the ocean breezes. Tonight there was a group of people on the normally deserted strip of sand.

Two small boats were beached nearby, a fishing skiff and a center console with Soundkeeper scripted on her bright yellow hull. Gale and Carl Varnum were seated on blankets around a huge picnic basket, and plates and cups were scattered around a dying driftwood campfire. Further up the island two men and a young Labrador retriever were walking slowly toward the moon that looked like it was rising out of the ocean. When they reached the water’s edge, one of them spoke.

“I wanted to bring you here to show you this.”

Silas opened the burlap oyster bag he was carrying. He reached inside and pulled out the skull of an animal. Hall recognized it as the skull of a bottle nosed dolphin.

“Take off your shirt,” Silas said.

Hall pulled his T-shirt over his heard. The scabs on his shoulder were all gone and the dozen small pink dots would be scars soon. Silas opened the jaw of the skull he was holding and put Hall’s shoulder inside of it. The teeth matched up perfectly with the marks on his arm.

Hall took the skull from Silas and held it against his arm. Each tooth matched up with another set of marks on his arm. There was a spot on the upper jaw where two teeth were missing and a corresponding space on his bicep where there was no scar.

“Where did you find this?” Hall asked.

“The day after they found you here, I came to the point. You weren’t wearing a life preserver and no one could figure out how you’d gotten this far from the barge without drowning. You couldn’t tell us, and I couldn’t understand it either.”

Hall tossed a piece of driftwood into the water and watched Belker jump in after it.

“Just over there,” Silas said as he pointed, “I found a large female dolphin beached on the oyster bar. She hadn’t been dead very long and there were no fresh injuries on her body, just an old scar near her pectoral fin. I towed her up to the Waddell Center and asked one of the biologists to see if he could find out what had killed her. When he was finished I asked him if I could have the skull. He cleaned it and bleached it so Gale could put it in her office.”

Hall handed the skull back to Silas.

“How did you know?” Hall asked.

“I didn’t have any idea until a few days ago. I ran into the biologist when I turned in my tagging log for this year. He told me the dolphin had died from the same chemicals as the fish you and Gale had collected, the same stuff that was on the barge.”

Hall thought about the dolphin that used to greet him when he pulled his boat away from his dock. The same one Belker barked at and, he was sure, that Silas had freed from the abandoned fishing net. It all seemed like a long time ago.

“Have you seen the dolphin in the channel going to my house?” Hall asked Silas.

“Not since the storm. I think you should keep it,” Silas said of the skull. “It will make for a heck of a story someday when your children ask about it.”

Hall agreed.

“I’ll bring them here to tell them. It will only take a few minutes to get here from our home on Pinckney Island.”

THE END

Acknowledgements

Writing Soundkeeper has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. It is the realization of years of dreaming and planning, and the result of many hours at the keyboard. I hope I managed to keep you entertained for at least a little while.

This book would not have been possible without the help and assistance of many others. Any mistakes in the book are the result of my clumsiness and should not reflect poorly on those acknowledged here.