The Edge of the Gulf (18 page)

Chapter 25

Terry watched the highway intently. They were driving through the deluge in tarry blackness. Michael kept his eyes on the road, too, as though he were deciphering Terry’s instructions on a watery grid in front of the headlights. Terry spoke slowly and distinctly as the torrents slashed noisily around them.

“The people who are staying at his house will be out of town a week from Sunday. He usually goes out for dinner and gets home between eleven and eleven-thirty. He’s always up in the bedroom by midnight and asleep by twelve-thirty.”

Occasionally he would make a point by turning for a moment toward Michael, inviting a quick return glance.

“You have the gun?”

“Yes. I hid it like you told me to when you gave it to me.”

“You’re sure you’re comfortable with it?”

“Oh, yeah. I had it out in the woods just that once to fool around with a little bit. If you grow up in the hills of South Carolina, you gonna grow up with guns.”

“Okay. Good.” They drove along 98 in silence for a long time, the rain billowing in concentric waves against the truck as the storm rotated around them and moved off toward the east. About three miles east of the 26-A cutoff to Rosemary Beach, Terry pulled off into a gravel and shell lane that led into a small stand of pines, coming to a halt just behind another pickup off on the right side. He cut the engine and turned slightly toward Michael, reaching out and laying his hand on his shoulder.

“Michael. Like Miss Rachel said, the Lord is waiting for you now, and we are all with you. I will get a copy of the key to you next week and I will have tried it to make certain that it works smoothly. And I will have the alarm code. We have thought of everything. Taken care of everything. All will be well for you to carry out God’s justice as he has called you to do. And to leave the letter exposing this evil to the world.” Michael looked over his shoulder into the backseat, at the two videos he had brought back to Terry when they’d met to go to the pier. He shook his head, and he looked at Terry with barely suppressed disgust.

Terry said, “I know. It’s sickening and it’s the very face of evil. I could only watch part of one and it made me throw up. But Michael, I wanted you to watch them again for a reason. I wanted you to look one more time on the work of this monster and to think again about what he did—and what he will continue to do, unless you help God make an example of his evil. He recruited the Reverend’s and Miss Rachel’s little brother into that world of drugs and sodomy and sadomasochistic evil and that poor eighteen-year-old boy was innocent. That boy is dead of AIDS now, and dozens like him, and that monster goes on, making more of these films, this devil’s work, and it is up to us to stop him. To let the sodomites know just as we are letting the abortionists know that God-fearing people are rising up in the army of the Lord and bringing our nation back to Him.”

“It’s hard to believe people doing that stuff.” Michael shifted in his seat and scratched his shaggy beard.

“Recruiting young people and converting them to their ways and then using them like you wouldn’t use a yard dog. Timothy is dead because of this man. But because God has sent you for this mission, he won’t be seducing any more young people into sodomy and evil and death! While he makes his secret money off their innocent flesh and his despicable perversion. And lives in his big house and acts like some big-shot pillar of the community, while his hired devils churn out this satanic filth in some back alley studio in New Orleans.” He paused. “Are you ready to serve the Lord and do his holy work, Michael? To send this Charlie Brompton to meet his Maker?”

“Yes.” Michael stared at Terry in the dim light from the dashboard. Then he turned and opened the door into the hot, heavy rain. As he climbed down into the darkness, he looked back once more at Terry, his eyes glowing, wide open in the sluicing water. “Yes. I am.”

Terry waited for the other truck to pull away, and then turned around and began the drive toward his cabin in Blue Mountain. He reached one arm back and grabbed the two videos—truly creepy things, one titled “Dungeon” and the other something like “Boot Camp II”—that he had found in Panama City. When he passed the next large condo complex, he pulled up to a large commercial dumpster wedged between a row of palmettos and a low wall, and, lifting the top, threw the videos in. As he drove away, he nuzzled into his damp pants pocket, pulled out the pack of cigarettes, and lit one. He exhaled deeply, cracking the two front windows about half an inch. He hated for the truck to smell like stale smoke.

***

Terry navigated carefully through the slackening shafts of rain, but though his eyes were riveted on the two-lane highway and his hands clenched on the wheel for any sudden reaction, it was as though he drove unconsciously. His thoughts kept crawling around the events of the past few days.…

He had picked them up as planned near the bridge across Western Lake that leads into the new resort.

He had then pulled over on the north side of the highway into a small turn-out fishermen sometimes used.

After Chaz apologized—“You understand, of course…”— insisting they step back into the trees to search Terry for any sort of recording device and Terry, in turn, did likewise with them, they emerged back onto the turnout and conferred very reasonably for nearly half an hour. Occasionally Terry gestured here and there as if indicating points of interest to them.

In the first five minutes, he had read the letter which Sydney handed him in a book of maps. He asked them how he could possibly know whether the letter were even genuine, and Chaz said that he couldn’t except that they had absolutely no reason to make it up. Over the next ten minutes, they agreed that the only thing keeping all of them from getting what they deserved was Charlie Brompton.

Finally, Sydney heard Chaz say—as scripted and yet with an unexpected pleasure that she found terrifying and exhilarating and oddly erotic—quite coolly, his large eyes locked on Terry’s: “I want that land.” He added, “If you’ll help us get it, you’ll not only get the Blue Bar, you’ll get five million dollars.”

Sydney thought Terry looked a bit stunned, but he rolled his eyes and gave a little snort. “One, how? Two, why me?”

For the next fifteen minutes, Chaz and Sydney outlined the situation.

Charlie needed to die before making changes to his will at the end of July. Although it was no secret that Charlie owned the tract (he’d regularly been approached by potential buyers and developers over the years) he’d made a real point of never talking about it. His friends didn’t ask (many assumed he’d use his retirement to plan some low-development project), and Charlie didn’t tell (even his attorney didn’t yet know he’d seriously decided on the wilderness trust idea). Having the inheritance pass from Charlie’s unexpectedly predeceased heir to his son, as the will now stood, should come as no particular surprise to anyone.

Terry interrupted. “How can you know that? About not even his lawyer knowing yet? Or believe anything your father said they’d talked about?”

Without missing a beat Sydney answered, “Because in March, in his emotionally distraught state over his cousin’s death, he told Chaz so. And other than this rather sad exception of secretly taking sixty million out from under our noses, for his newly beloved Chaz’s own good, he is apparently congenitally honest. A man, though it chokes me to say it, of integrity. All that stuff Chaz told you was, we now confess, to get you to open up. We knew you’d been shafted, too. We just didn’t know how irritated you were about it.”

Terry could do nothing but lean his head slightly to one side, as if in court, nodding, a faint smile tensing on his lips.

“And number two,” said Chaz, “why you? Because, Terry, we have much in common here. This well-meaning, generally kind and generous man seems not to be giving you a fair shake any more than he is me.”

“You would think a gay man would have some special empathy for black sheep trying to go straight, wouldn’t you?” asked Sydney, with a playful smile.

“You know about my past.”

“Bingo,” said Chaz.

“How?”

“Doesn’t really matter,” said Chaz. “Old Southern gossip, you know. From a friend of a friend of a second cousin who, I believe, was your former wife.”

“I hope you aren’t thinking of blackmail. No way it could work. That family will never say a word. They didn’t want it public then and they wouldn’t want it public now. You think you can blackmail them? Over less than two hundred fucking thousand dollars that they immediately covered eight years ago?”

“Yes,” said Sydney. “Because, Terry, it’s a public company with ties to the nursing home business, and your former father-in-law is running for a city council seat this fall. The media love gothic family squalor and are at least mildly interested in a political candidate’s having cooked his books, especially if it had anything whatever to do with senior citizens on limited incomes. Even in New Orleans.”

Sydney saw Terry stiffen, though all he said was, “You have no evidence, and believe me, whatever there was is history.”

Chaz said, “Terry, they despise you. And you know how sensation-hungry the media is these days. If it comes to allegations in the press, which choice do you think your in-laws will make? Living through a whisper campaign that’ll run right through the primary about him being a questionable manager of the public trust, or a story that focuses on you, a criminal and a moral sleazeball who stole from his wife’s family and walked out on his seven-year-old daughter? The good people of New Orleans would forgive and forget his justifiable error. You, on the other hand, would get no less than four to six years, even with parole.”

Sydney added, companionably, “But we don’t have to be wasting time thinking about this stuff. We have plans to make and business to take care of, and we have very little time in which to be successful.”

“This is ridiculous. You folks are crazy.”

“Far, far from it, Terry,” Chaz said. “I think you can already see that. And within, oh, let’s say, no more than one calendar year, you’ll be perfectly certain of it. When you have both your bar and a previously undreamed of five million dollars.”

“You think you’re going to coerce me into…”

“No. There’s no way we could possibly do that and we have no particular interest in trying to. The bar that should rightfully be yours anyway and the five million we’re giving you from the sale of land that should rightfully be mine are simple motivation, Terry. We simply see your shady past as some insurance for us that you’ll hold up your end of any bargain we strike.”

“But I’m not a…”

Chaz didn’t blink an eye and said as calmly as if he were discussing some theory about the weather: “We don’t know what you are or what you’ll do for five million dollars, Terry. We just know what needs to happen and we know what role we’re willing to take in it and what role we’re not willing to take in it. And we just don’t happen to count any mafia folk among our acquaintances.”

“Look, I made one mistake. Once. A long time ago. That’s history.”

“We know that!” Chaz said with conviction. “Believe me, I know what you mean. That’s why we’re here. That’s what this is about. Charlie may have been a nice guy to some people but he’s screwed you out of something you’ve earned and he’s about to screw us out of ours!”

“For your information,” Terry almost sniffed, “I don’t happen to have close and regular ties with the underworld either. I’m not a thug.”

“We know that,” said Sydney soothingly. “We just know that you were a lawyer and that even though you got caught once, you’re pretty sharp. And, to use a word that popped up here and there in our research, ‘tough.’ We know that you really did come out to the coast to ease back and settle down, and we know that most folks think you’re a pretty decent guy, so long as you’re not crossed and though you do seem to keep to yourself pretty much. And we believe that your designs on the Blue Bar have been relatively modest and relatively honest.”

“In other words,” said Chaz, “we felt you probably weren’t so very different from us. Differences in degrees, sure, but similar situations, similar feelings, similar motivations. And, now, I hope you’re beginning to see, a similar belief that we can correct what’s wrong and make it right for ourselves. We can do this.”

Sydney looked at her watch. “We probably shouldn’t be standing here much longer.”

She aimed a cool but reassuring smile at Terry and said casually, “All you have to do now is think about it. Take two or three days. If not, somehow, you—then who? Give us a pay phone number and a time and we’ll call. No details over the phone. Just yes, let’s arrange a meeting and proceed with the next step, or no, you’re out. Consider what’s at stake, Terry. Consider possibilities. Options. ”

As Terry adjusted his sunglasses and his short reddish beard rose into a sudden, rather strange smile, Sydney, for the first time in the interview, drew a blank. She couldn’t read what was happening behind the black wire-rims, as Terry, almost familiarly, leaned close to her.

“The most bizarre thing of all, in this already bizarre little encounter, has just occurred. I actually may have an idea. It’s a long shot, but…” He looked up into the dazzling sunshine and shook his head with a little bark of a laugh. “It’s all I’ve got, but—just maybe.” He added mysteriously, “Something I saw just this morning, in the post office, as a matter fact.”

Chaz put his arm around Sydney. “Leave a time and a number for our call Wednesday on a pack of matches and leave it under the real estate newspaper stand outside the bar tomorrow morning by nine. When I jog, I’ll come around and get it.”

Terry had lifted a hand in brief salute and turned toward his Jeep. The smile had vanished but Sydney thought he still wore an expression of animated bemusement, like someone who has suddenly wakened, not yet fully alert but deeply refreshed, from sleep.

***

The young man called Joseph waited, looking around the mini-market gas station, his finger pulsing on the radio’s search button. A succession of country-and-western, bland oldies, and ranting demagogues filled the rental Jetta, competing with the diminishing slaps of rain on the windows. Although the storm was beginning to let up, only a few cars pulled in and out, and a couple of kids, their bikes leaning against the wall, hung around inside, eating junk and talking to the young man at the counter. Four big trucks dozed on either side of the small building, their drivers either sipping coffee or perhaps napping out the downpour.