Authors: J. A. Kerley
But Scaler had already handed the microphone back to the assistant and resumed his look of distraction. Tutweiler cleared his throat and continued his platitudes. The camera cut to a reporter from a local affiliate, a sturdy young woman with the distinctly un-Southern name of Jonna Arnbjorg.
“And that’s the news from the groundbreaking ceremony for the new library and dormitory at Kingdom College here in West Mobile. Most of today’s events featured Jeffords Tutweiler, Dean of the college, with only a few puzzling remarks from
the often-controversial Reverend Richard Scaler, blaming an eye affliction for the uncharacteristic brevity of his input.”
“If Scaler has an eye problem,” Harry groused, thumbing the TV off, “he got it from four decades of wearing blinders.”
But, truth be told, Richard Scaler’s narrow field of vision appealed to a great many people. In a Bible Belt state like Alabama, few in office dared to challenge the uncompromising views of the Reverend Richard Scaler, knowing it could mean fast passage to another line of work.
Outside the sun was rising and would soon transform the air to hot syrup and the sand to a griddle hot enough to sear the soles of your feet. A Dauphin Island copmobile was approaching, Jimmy Gentry’s face behind the wheel. He continued to the end of the street where the asphalt crumbled into the sand, exited and walked to the beach, hands in his pockets. He stood in the wet sand at the water’s edge and looked seaward.
Harry and I wandered out. “S’up, Jimmy?” Harry called before Jimmy saw us approaching. “Expecting twins?”
Jimmy dipped his finger in the foam of a broken wave and held it aloft in the breeze, discovering what my face had noted: a southwest wind, the basic rule this time of year. He plucked a foot-long piece of driftwood from the sand, a spar bleached by salt and sun. He chucked
it out a couple dozen yards, watched it bob eastward.
“You know tides better than me, Carson,” he said. “Where you think the boat came from?”
“West somewhere. If the boat was launched on an ebb tide, it would have floated out into the Gulf, reversed on the incoming. There’s a lateral drift because of current and the west wind.”
Jimmy said, “Or the kid could have come from a boat way out on the water. Someone dropped her in the rowboat, kicked it away.”
Jimmy’s words flashed pictures into my head. A blur of faces, one small and utterly helpless. A horizon of gray water in all directions. A tiny boat rocking alone on pitching waves.
Though I’d seen every form of human cruelty and thought myself professionally inured to emotion, the pictures kicked the breath from my lungs. I felt my knees loosen and my eyes dampen at the thought of human hands placing a baby in a boat, human eyes watching it float away. I took a deep breath, blanked my mind of the images, and slipped my shades over wet eyes, as though the sun was bothersome. I turned back to my companions.
“Coast Guard know anything?” Harry was asking Jimmy.
“They’re gonna check suspicious-looking boats out on the water. But they figure anyone doing that kind of thing would be long gone.” Jimmy
shook his head. “Of course, you guys would be zeroed-in on that kind of mentality.”
Jimmy was referring to Harry and my participation in a special unit in the Mobile Police Department, the Psychopathological and Socio-pathological Investigate Team, or PSIT. We were the sole members of the unit, laughingly called
Piss-it
by everyone in the department. If a case showed signs of involving a seriously damaged mind, it landed on our desks, generally superseding our normal caseload of shootings, stabbings, and the like. The PSIT reviewed over a dozen cases a year, with only one or two that truly fit the psychological parameters. I learned something from every case, generally something I didn’t want to know.
“I don’t envy the DI cops,” Harry said as we crunched back across the sand to my home. “How would anyone figure where the kid’s journey started?”
I grunted my sympathy. The Dauphin Island Police Department was made up of ten full-time cops and five volunteers handling a mainly upscale resort community. Petty theft, drunkenness and speeding were the major crimes. However that kid came to be in that boat, it would be sad and strange and probably ugly beyond anything the normal mind could conceive.
Turning back to the sea, I tried to imagine it from jet height, the blue of the water and the green and white of the island and mainland. If I knew
enough, I could superimpose arrows over the image: the direction of last night’s currents and wind.
I didn’t have those arrows. But I knew someone who might.
Dr Kurt Matthias was on the hunt, walking with a slight list through the Hong Kong market, the bag slung over his brown-jacketed shoulder tipping him a few degrees to his left. The bag’s interior rattled with his footsteps, glass tubes clicking together like ice.
The air brought Matthias’s nose the smells of incense and soya, fried eel and garlic. When the air shifted, it brought the scent of sea water, some dockage only a few blocks distant, the babble of the market occasionally broken by the blast of a freighter’s horn. In the maze of booths, melons vied for space among spices, clothing, and jade carvings. Smoke wafted from charcoal burners, and heat from the coals joined the heat rising from thousands of bodies in the market. A hodgepodge of languages and dialects mixed with the screech of parrots and the cackling of caged chickens.
Matthias’s eyes sought faces as if they were quarry. He criss-crossed through the stalls, watching,
measuring, gauging nose structures, distances between eyes, the size of ear lobes and lips, chins and chests.
There
: in an oily mariner’s uniform, a man with pan-flat Mongol cheeks and forehead, the nose not the Central Asian button, but hooked, a magnificent beak of a nose – Indian? Arabic? In that same face: ice-blue eyes and jutting chin of some Nordic race. His waist was slender, his shoulders hard and broad. He was a head taller than most in the crowd, their fully Asian genes never having traveled more than a few hundred miles. The man was leaning against a wall and smoking a filter-less cigarette, hands in the pockets of his jeans, cold blue eyes scanning the crowd as if weighing options. Matthias studied the man and gave his thoughts free rein…
A Viking tribe rages through English countryside. Rape and pillage and children with Nordic eyes set loose like spores through the Anglo-Saxon population. Centuries later a spore sets adventurous sail to Calcutta, emissary and conqueror. Ships and ports and lighthouses through the human dark. Blue Aryan eyes in a Hong Kong marketplace.
Matthias crossed the street to the man. Eyes turned his way like pinpoint jets of flame.
“You know English?” Matthias asked.
The man ran his hands through his hair, not the coal black of the Orient, but shaded to auburn. He pinched his fingers an inch apart; the gesture saying,
I speak English this much.
Matthias noted
the man’s hands were overly large for an Asian, the fingertips spatulate.
“I have money for you.” Matthias pulled crumpled bills from his pocket and gestured the blue-eyed man from the swirling crowd of bargainers.
Curiosity overcoming confusion, the man pinched the wet stub of cigarette from his mouth and threw it to the street. He shadowed Matthias to a darkened alley stinking of lust and urine and the spoor of rats. When a drunken man and woman coupling against a damp wall saw the pair approaching, they cursed and staggered away.
Matthias set his bag on the alley cobbles. He leaned against the wall where the couple had been fornicating, opened his bag, and explained his strange needs to the blue-eyed Asian.
Larry Hayward blinked at Harry and me through half-glasses and spun a dried starfish on his desktop. Larry was an independent marine biologist who had retired from the Eighth District of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He’d spent so much time in scuba gear he’d been dubbed Merman by his colleagues.
Now retired and in his early fifties, Larry ran a consultation service from his home on Dauphin Island, a three-tiered white building – four, if you counted the pilings holding the structure above the sand – the tiers growing smaller toward the top,
so that the house resembled a wedding cake on stilts. His office walls were covered with charts. His window peered across the mouth of Mobile Bay, Fort Morgan visible across the eight-mile stretch of blue.
“NOAA has tidal data we can use,” Larry said, considering my question on currents. “I just have to access their mainframe.”
We followed Larry’s flapping sandals to a room of instruments and computer monitors. A fifty-gallon saltwater aquarium was in the corner, a dozen gray commas flicking within. I recognized the critters, almost.
“What kind of shrimp you got here, Larry?” I asked. “They look like Gulf models, but not quite.”
“Good eye. They’re hybrids. I’ll spare you the Linnaean nomenclature and just say they’re Gulf shrimp bred with a species of Chinese shrimp.”
“They come already marinated in soy sauce?” Harry mused.
“There’s a nasty virus potentially endangering Gulf shrimp. It’s common in Chinese waters and the Oriental shrimp are resistant. They’ve dealt with the virus for hundreds of years, evolved defenses. I’m studying how the hybrids fare against the infection.”
We turned from the shrimp experiment as Larry sat down before a large screen, talking half to us, half to himself as he pulled a keyboard to his Hawaiian-print chest.
“What was the time of day, as near as you remember?”
Harry said, “Four fifty-two in the a.m.”
“You hooked into the atomic clock in Denver, Harry?”
“I’d just looked at my watch, amazed Carson had me up so early.”
“Four fifty-two it is, then. Let’s see…an eastward drift of three knots per hour. Add a tide just past slack and starting to flow. I won’t go into the hydraulics, but if the boat was launched from shore it needed to have been drawn sufficiently seaward by an ebb tide to avoid beaching near the launch site.”
I saw the screen reflected in Larry’s glasses: charts, graphs, columns of numbers. A coastal map began building on the monitor. Larry leaned back and tapped his chin.
“There are all sorts of influences and permutations. But the wind was calm that night. That’s good because it’s a non-factor; shifting wind might have made this a moot exercise.”
“You’re getting somewhere, I take it?” Harry said.
“Halfway. I’ve got the current-drift models in place. Now we run things in reverse. The boat was spotted here, right?” Larry tapped my stretch of beach on Dauphin Island.
I nodded. “Just outside the sandbar, a couple hundred feet.”
Larry ticked numbers into the computer, lost in an ebb and flow of time and tide. Ten seconds passed and the computer made a
bong!
sound.
I saw a section of coastline change from dark brown to vibrant pulsing orange.
Larry jabbed a finger at the highlighted section. “The craft was most likely launched from somewhere within three hundred yards of beach centered here. Sorry to be imprecise, but there are a lot of variables.”
Harry leaned close to study the marshes and estuaries and patches of sand abutting the blue Gulf. I looked over his shoulder.
“Where are you pointing, Doc?” Harry asked.
“A bit southwest of Coden. A marshy estuarine with a few small inlets from the Gulf. Not much there any more – the area got redesigned by Katrina.”
I said, “I’ll pass the info to Jimmy Gentry. He can do with it what he will.”
Harry studied the monitor again. Turned to me. “I’m up for a nice little drive. Somewhere a bit south of Coden. How ’bout you, Carson?”
I shook my head. “It’s not our case. We’ve already got two deskloads of death and weirdness.”
“It might be a chance to do some good.”
I started to respond, but found no words. I shrugged and stared at the ragged stretch of coast, feeling a strange chill at the base of my spine.
Harry and I picked up chow at a po’boy joint on the DI Expressway before we turned west. Harry ate as he drove, brushing crumbs and lettuce from his chest to the floorboards. We pulled off I-10 and dropped southwest toward the coast, not the white sand shores of tourist Alabama, but land with dense expanses of brush and sea grasses. The road was an armadillo graveyard, the car-struck beasts studding the tarmac like scaley mines.
I heard a passing vehicle at our backs and saw Harry shoot a glance into the rear-view mirror as his hand tensed on the wheel.
“Check this out,” he said quietly.
I looked up as a large black pickup truck passed, three males jammed in the front, another in the bed. They were in their twenties and thirties, shirtless, heavily tatted, crosses and swastikas and lightning bolts. The driver was wearing a plastic Nazi-style helmet and drinking from a can of Miller. They stared at us as they passed, not a
happy look. A Harley-Davidson logo filled the rear window. Celtic runes decorated the bumper, book-ended by Confederate battle flags.
Though no one was in the oncoming lane, the truck swerved in front of us. Harry jammed the brake as I slapped my hand to the dash. The pudgy guy in the bed grinned like a Jack-o’-lantern, turned for a one-handed grab of the chrome light bar atop the cab, and dropped his pants, showing us his hairy white ass.
The driver hit the accelerator and I heard the roar of a V-8 as the truck blew away at what had to be a hundred ten.
“Man,” Harry said, “I can smell the ugly.”
We drove another few miles, turned hard south. The Merman had printed out a satellite shot of the area in question. We angled down a few sand-and-shell roads that led to shattered boats and the mason-block foundations of houses reduced to driftwood and termite fodder.
“I don’t see anything,” Harry said, staring into scrub pine and land as flat as a billiard table. “Not that I know what I’m looking for.”
“Check over there,” I pointed. “A dune where a stretch of pine got blown away.”