Blood of Cain

5

By noon, I’d made the half-hour drive from my place on the river to Ponce Marina south of Daytona Beach. I’d called the marina boatyard before I left, and they’d begun the process of lowering Jupiter back into her slip. Max and I pulled into the gravel and oyster shell parking lot, the popcorn crack of shells snapping under the tires. The teasing smells of blackened grouper, garlic shrimp, and mesquite greeted us from the Tiki Bar, an open-air restaurant adjacent to the marina office. Max's eyes ignited. She was now more Pavlov's dog than mine, her eyes wide, pacing in her seat, her nostrils sucking in molecules of food scents. She uttered one of her half barks, now more of a command.

“Chill,” I said, lifting Max up, tucking her under one arm and carrying a bag of groceries in the other arm. “You mind your manners in the restaurant. No begging. If not, the board of health will hunt you down, the county will pass anti-dog laws, and it'll be plain dog food forevermore.” She glanced up at me, her brown eyes suspicious.

I was being generous referring to the Tiki Bar as a restaurant. They served food, but it was a secondary item on a menu that featured thirty different craft beers and twenty brands of rum, along with all the other adult beverages.

The restaurant was somewhere between rustic and rundown, but it had character. The rough-hewn wooden floors, made with railroad crossties, and long-since worn into a smooth finish, were stained with twenty-five years of bar graffiti, mixed from a palette of spilled beer, blood, sweat, and a few tears. The Tiki Bar was built on stilts, fifteen feet above the harbor water at high tide. It had no real windows. Most of the year its plastic isinglass siding was rolled up and tied off. The result was a cross-breeze that kept the flies to a minimum and allowed a maximum opportunity for the scent of grilled seafood to drift over a marina community of at least two hundred boats. That's marketing using all the senses. And it worked because the place was usually packed.

Max and I walked around a sunburned family for four standing at the entrance, debating items listed on a plastic menu stapled to a six-by-six beam, their Jersey shore accents getting as hot as their scorched skin. “Try the grilled pompano,” I said, smiling and stepping around them.

“Hey Miss Maxie!” said Kim Davis, the Tiki Bar day manager. She came out from behind the bar and greeted us, taking Max into her arms and cuddling her, Max licking Kim's brown cheeks. “Gimme kisses, sweetheart.” Kim was radiant, caramel-colored eyes animated. She was in her early forties, genuine smile, shoulder-length chestnut-brown hair, and flawless skin to match. She wore tight, faded jeans that accentuated her curvaceous hips, and a T-shirt with a graphic image of a doe-eyed, blushing oyster that read:

She said, “I saw Bobby and his crew putting your boat back in the water.” She glanced through the open isinglass and smiled. “Looks like Jupiter's still floating. Nick, whether they wanted his help or not, assisted or rather insisted on helping.” She set Max on the wooden floor and handed her a piece of cheese.

I said, “You're one of the reasons she's turning her nose up at dog food.”

Kim smiled. “That's because she knows she's not a dog. She's a princess.”

“She's spoiled.”

“A girl needs to be spoiled from time to time. Makes her feel special.” Kim held her brown eyes on mine for a moment, a perfect eyebrow raised slightly over her right eye.

I nodded. “What can I say, Kimberly?”

“Sean, you know what a woman really wants. It's some-”

“Hey Kim, turn up the TV, will you?” A grizzled, retired charter boat captain, face whiskered and scarred from sun cancer surgeries, his forearms the color of saddle leather, sipped from a can of Bud and pointed to the television above the bar. “They got something on the TV ‘bout that killin' at the carnival.”

Kim picked the remote control off the bar and pressed the button for sound. The images were of a county fairground, parked police cruisers, flashing blue lights, emergency medics moving with no sense of urgency, carnies standing in the background, smoking and hiding their faces from cameras as the coroner loaded the body into a white van. The body was covered with a sheet, a baseball-sized dark red color in the chest area.

The picture cut to a TV reporter. “Police are saying that the man, whose identity is being withheld until his family is notified, was found dead with an ice pick in his chest. An autopsy will be performed. They say that no witnesses have come forth; however, one of the carnival workers said the deceased man was last seen with a young woman who also works for the carnival as a ticket taker.” A picture of a woman cut to the screen. The reporter continued, “Police are looking for nineteen-year-old Courtney Burke, who they say apparently left the scene sometime after the man was stabbed to death. They are not calling the young woman a suspect; they simply say she's a person of interest and are trying to find her for questioning. Authorities say the murder is the third in six months near carnival sites. So the question right now is this: do police have a serial killer, a carny killer, somewhere out there? And is nineteen-year-old Courtney Burke part of the equation? From the Volusia County Fairgrounds, Todd Guskin, Channel Two News.”

I stared at the screen, my mind flashing through every second of the dialogue I had with Courtney Burke, the blood on her T-shirt, Celtic necklace she wore, the way she pushed her dark hair behind her ears, and those compelling and frightened eyes. Even in the picture of her on the television screen, her eyes drew you in to them. Kim looked at me, lifting her eyebrows, her face filled with questions. “Sean, do you know her, the girl they're looking for in connection with that murder of murders?”

“I don't really know her.”

“Oh my God. But you’ve met her?”

“Yes.”

“Where? What happened? Maybe I don't want to know.”