The Eleventh Victim (22 page)

She prayed no one would be there to see her go. Dana’s office door was closed, thank God.

But the door to the dentists’ office on the first floor was propped open as the UPS guy wheeled in boxes of supplies. She could see them all…the waiting room full of patients, secretaries behind the counter, one of the dentists. They’d all know soon enough.

They stared at her as she passed, hands in front of her, wrists obviously shackled together. No one spoke. It was if they were characters in a silent movie, or those life-size cardboard cutouts of people…people who didn’t move or speak, just stared.

She tried her best to cover the cuffs with her coat so onlookers wouldn’t see. But she knew they could see.

They could see.

V
IRGINIA PULLED UP IN FRONT OF THE
7-
ELEVEN. SHE COULD SEE
Larry behind the counter, slumped between displays of chewing gums, Sweet-and-Sours, even ginseng root.

The cowbell hanging from the door clanged when she walked in, and Larry sat up. His eyes were bloodshot and his face was pale except for his nose, which was red.

He didn’t speak at first, just slid off the bar stool, walked to the Bunn-o-matic, and reached for the glass coffeepot. He poured coffee into a Styrofoam cup and topped it off with heavy cream before nuking the contents for exactly twenty-five seconds in the mini-microwave next to the Slurpee machine. In somber silence, he handed the Styrofoam cup to Virginia.

“Just like I like it. Thanks.”

“V.G., I’m not some nut, some obsessed freak.” He reclaimed the bar stool. “It’s just that he was a hero. You know, he came from nothin’ and nowhere, and he was king, V.G., king of the NASCAR.”

“I know, Larry.”

They sat in silence, Larry flipping through a NASCAR magazine, Virginia beside him sipping her coffee and looking out through the glass storefront at the parking lot.

A white pickup pulled up, and she watched a man in a blue uniform get out of the driver’s side and slam his door.

An officious-looking “crest,” reminiscent of Great Britain’s royal House of Windsor coat of arms, was proudly emblazoned on the driver’s side door. It was tacky, pompous, and fake.

It was the Palmetto Dunes Luxury Living logo.

The man in the uniform certainly was at work early this morning. So…they hadn’t given up after the attack…but why should they?

Why should a guerrilla foray onto the property scare away millions of dollars of backing and even more to rake in once the condos sold? Of course the developers weren’t giving up.

While the guerrillas had staged only one attack, word was they had at least slowed down the dune developers. After the assault, there had been no further attempt to re-pour the foundation. At least not yet.

The cowbell on the handle clanked as the man pushed open the glass door.

He looked vaguely familiar to Virginia, but she looked down instinctively when the cowbell sounded. Virginia noticed his navy uniform was already blotched dark with sweat.

“Hey, Larry.”

“Hey, Clyde. How’s it goin’?”

“Well, I went out there and got ’em ready to start up the construction again. Got the security cameras in place. Guess you heard about it already. Bet there won’t be any more kids tearing the place apart this time. And it’s a good thing, too. The boss out of Atlanta rolled some heads. Got the security guard so nervous, he’s poppin’ Tums like you wouldn’t believe. Near ’bout lost his job after that last time.”

He stopped dead center in front of Virginia and turned back to Larry. “Got the Coke with lime, Larry?”

“Nope. That company never could leave well enough alone. Seems they’d have learned something after the ‘New Coke.’ Remember that big mess?”

“Yep.” He kept talking with no instigation. “Yes, sir…these cameras’ll stop ’em. Got ’em all the way from some outfit in Atlanta. Damn, Toby McKissick and the whole County Commission’s in on it. They got their hands in everybody’s pocket, you know. Nothing new about that.”

He reached into a glassed-in refrigerated area, pulled out a Diet Coke, walked back to the counter, and put down a dollar. “’Course the work crew said it wasn’t kids…that it was a curse. You know, voodoo. Everybody’s always said the south beach was haunted. My aunt Rosa said it to me twenty-five years ago.”

“I always heard that, too. My grandmother told me,” Larry told him.

So had Virginia. The ghost stories surrounding the Island’s south beach, which dated back to before the Civil War, as far as anybody could tell, were about a burning slave boat that had landed on St. Simons’s southernmost shore. No such ship had ever been documented, but the lore continued.

Clyde pulled a cloth handkerchief out of his back pocket and ran it across his face. “
Damn
it’s hot out there. What time is it, for Pete’s sake?”

They all three turned to look at the clock plugged into the wall behind the register. Over the Coca-Cola logo, it read eight fifteen.

“Not even eight thirty in the morning! Whew!” Clyde exclaimed. “Got to be eighty-five degrees already. Thank God I finished up before it
really
heats up.”

“Musta been tough out there,” Larry said, alluding to the camera installation. “It’s like a jungle in some parts. Hot as hell.”

“Oh, yeah, and they wanted the damn cameras hidden out of the way so they can catch the kids. Don’t know why…prob’ly just a bunch of high-school kids having fun. It ain’t like it’s a federal case, ya know? Just kids. But you know folks out of Atlanta…ever’ thing’s got to be just so. They start up construction again tomorrow morning and had to have the cameras in place first, come hell or high water…whatever, I got paid.” He waved the dollar at Larry. “You gonna ring me out or what?”

“Hey, keep the dollar. The Coke’s on me. So where’d you finally end up puttin’ ’em?” Larry asked it without the slightest change of inflection in his voice.

“Put what?”

Damn this guy was slow. “The security cameras…this morning…remember?”

Virginia didn’t dare move a muscle, keeping her nose in Larry’s NASCAR magazine, specifically, a close-up of Dale Earnhardt getting Rookie of the Year back in 1979.

Clyde snorted. “Oh yeah…
them
. Put ’em up high on those two big pines just inside the guardhouse, one on either side, ’bout twenty feet in, just off the road. They’re kind of hidden behind the pine needles. You’d never notice ’em in a million years,” he added. The more he talked, the prouder he got of his job that morning.

“That was smart,” Larry kept it going. “Just two of ’em?”

“Yep. Two’ll do it. Look right down on the driveway into the site. I had to go in all the way to Brunswick and get a ladder special order to make it to the top. Damn Eddie over at the Georgia Power Company wouldn’t let me use one of their trucks. But don’t blame Eddie, it wasn’t his fault. It was the lawyers that said no.”

Larry nodded. “Yep…it’s always the lawyers.”

Not a word from Virginia.

“Thanks for the Coke, Larry.”

“Any time, Clyde.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Virginia watched Clyde go out through the glass doors and head to the pickup. But just as she opened her mouth to commend Larry on his detective work, Clyde stopped in mid-stride.

Now what?

They watched through the glass storefront as he threw his throat back and took a deep gulp of the ice-cold Coke.

“Good Lord,” Virginia muttered, shaking her head.

Neither Larry nor Virginia moved a hair sitting there on the bar stools behind the counter, watching as Clyde finally got into the truck, cranked up, and headed out of the parking lot.

Only when he’d eased out onto the highway and screeched off did Larry turn to Virginia.

“Man, V.G., you make me
nervous
! I gotta calm
down
. This whole morning’s giving me an aneurysm. I guess you wanna drive over there right now to check out the cameras.”

“I can go by myself. It’s okay.”

“Hell, no, you are not going by yourself. Anyway, I want to get a look at those cameras stuck up on a pine tree. Go wait in the El Camino while I close up. We’ll take my car. She’s unlocked. Better let the windows down. Might be hot.”

Virginia smiled. Larry always did the driving.

Virginia went ahead, sat in the El Camino’s passenger’s seat, and watched Larry lock up.

He climbed into the driver’s seat, flicked on the El Camino’s AC, and they headed out of the lot toward the Palmetto Dunes development site.

It was nearly 10 a.m. when they reached the area. The sun was just starting to heat up, burning the cool out of the air and off the road. Minute by minute, the damp, frosty feel in the air was giving way to another hot Island morning. In another half hour, heat waves would begin to snake up off the dark gray asphalt on the Georgia back roads.

Virginia and Larry traveled along several miles of bumpy access road. Keeping it casual, they eased past the entrance of Palmetto Dunes Luxury Living at about fifteen mph. He kept it in the road while Virginia surveyed the area.

“See anybody around?”

“No, but keep going straight a little bit. Just in case.”

He nodded and continued on toward the south beaches for about a mile, then U-turned and doubled back to the construction site.

“Wanna go in?”

“No other way to find out where the cameras are. Plus, you have tinted windows. They can’t see us, but we can see them.”

Larry turned in, inching down the private drive toward the plum spot picked for the high-rises.

“It’s the sweet spot, that’s for sure.” He was right. There at the cusp, where grassy, firm ground turned to pink-white sand under your feet, was the exact spot Palmetto Dunes planned to erect two grayish-red high-rises, twenty-four stories each.

The two of them leaned forward in the El Camino, looking up to the tops of a cluster of tall pines.

And there they were, two black security cameras perched high above Palmetto’s entrance, glinting down toward the guardhouse like computerized metal birds of prey, waiting to catch their victims on videotape

“Clyde was right,” she told Larry as they both still squinted upward. “No one would ever spot those cameras unless they knew just where to look.”

“Okay, so, now that we’ve seen ’em…” He pointed toward the guardhouse. “Let’s get out of here before Deputy Dog burps his coffee and turns around.”

The rest of the site looked exactly as it had before. From what they could see from inside Larry’s El Camino, not much more had changed since Virginia had led the second foray against Palmetto to destroy the construction ground work.

The guardhouse stood just as it had for weeks. Virginia could even make out the back of a head, resting against the glass…the
same head as before. It was the former security guard from the Brunswick Wal-Mart. He hadn’t been fired after all.

The window AC roared away right beside his head and, true to form, the guard sat oblivious to two spies thirty feet behind him. He was absorbed in his TV, same as before, but this time he was engrossed in
The View
.

Larry gently eased the El Camino into reverse and they backed out undetected.

When they were back on the main road, he glanced over at Virginia. “Well, what’d ya think?”

“We’ll just let them lay out the foundation again and then, the night before they’re ready to pour the concrete, we’ll tear it all up again.”

“Don’t tell
me.
I don’t know
nothin’ about nothing
! I’m just working reconnaissance here.”

“Right…you’re just a spy. So how can we get in without using the trail by the guardhouse?”

“Don’t know…lemme percolate.”

They headed back toward the 7-Eleven.

Virginia’s mind was spinning over the game of cat-and-mouse she was playing with some of the most high-powered financiers in the South. Could they possibly be outwitted a third time?

When she got back, she’d round up the guerrillas from their various daytime callings…the Radio Shack, the local high school, the Wal-Mart, and the Shrimp Boat Restaurant. Construction was under way again, and they had to be ready for action forty-eight hours from now.

Once the concrete was poured and set, destruction of the foundation would be almost impossible without the use of explosives. Time was of the essence. Millions of dollars were riding on the Palmetto Dunes high-rises. She learned a lot from the County Records Office. She wondered how long Eugene had been buying up the land….

Larry broke the silence with three words.

“Amphibious sneak attack.”

Virginia pulled her sunglasses down to the tip of her nose, just barely keeping them on, and looked at him over the rims. The look posed the obvious question.

“Clyde’s damn cameras cut you off from the main entrance.” He turned down the radio. “The only other path in is off the highway…too dangerous. Might get spotted. They’re on to us now…. They’ll be waiting up front for somebody to sneak in. So we got to go from another angle.”

“Another angle?” Virginia didn’t get it.

“V.G., didn’t you ever see
Caddyshack
? My God, it’s a classic.”

“Of course I saw
Caddyshack
, I haven’t been living in a cave, for Pete’s sake. But what does
Caddyshack
have to do with Palmetto Dunes?”

“V.G., you saw it, true. But I’ve seen it twelve times…minimum. If I only learned one thing from the movie…just one thing…it’s this. If you want to beat a varmint…you got to
think
like a varmint. These varmints are using the beach. So’ll we. We come in after dark by dinghy, shore at the south beach, and walk in. They’ll never suspect a rear attack.”

Brilliant.

“‘
We
’? So you’re in the foxhole with me?”

“I got to stand for something, V.G. I’ve let the Seven-Eleven take over my life. Running a convenience store takes on a life of its own…it’s sucking me dry, V.G. The deliveries, the gas pumps, the customers, the damn Slurpee machine. They’ve become my raison d’être.”

She didn’t want to interrupt, so she just nodded her head and kept looking straight ahead, watching the yellow line in the middle of the road as it flew under the front grille of the car, disappearing then popping up again behind them.

“It takes a toll, V.G. The grind of business. It’s robbed me of my purpose in life. The D reminded me of that. So, yeah. I’m in, V.G. I’m in the foxhole with you.”