Sand Sharks

CHAPTER

9

In cases of obscurity it is customary to consider what is more likely.

—Paulus (early AD 3rd century)

I sat up so abruptly that I banged my head on one of the umbrella’s wooden ribs.

“Allen? Is that really you under all that face fur? What the hell are you doing here?”

“Same as you, darlin’. Enjoying the beach. It belongs to us’ns in the Triad just as much as y’all in the Triangle.”

“Don’t call me darling,” I snapped.

“Aw now, you ain’t still mad at me, are you, Debbie?”

“And don’t call me Debbie,” I said, enunciating each word as forcefully as I could without actually snarling.

“Well, I’m sure as hell not gonna call you Your Honor. Not after all we’ve been to each other.”

He squatted down on his heels next to my towel and I saw that his arms and legs were as muscular as ever despite more flecks of gray in his thick brown hair and beard than when we’d last crossed paths. His white swim trunks and dark blue golf shirt were too loose for me to tell if he was still built like a brick outhouse. Too, his shirt sleeves were too long to see the full-color American flag tattooed high on one deltoid and the pair of black-and-white checkered flags on the other, but I figured they were probably still there. Once upon a brief time I had known his body almost as well as my own.

Ten or twelve years older than me, he had spent a lot of his boyhood at his uncle’s farm, a farm that touched our land on the southeast. The uncle was a roughneck shade-tree mechanic, but his wife had a kind heart for a boy who was being reared up by the scruff of the neck by a trashy woman who was more into men and booze than motherhood. When Allen got tired of being punched on by the string of “uncles” his mother kept bringing home, he would run away to his real uncle and stay as long as he could till he was hauled back to Charlotte, where he eventually grew big enough to punch back.

His talent for repairing car engines was greater than his talent for drag racing, although he scraped together a living doing both at some of the state’s smaller racetracks.

We had absolutely nothing in common, except that he was around the autumn after Mother died. I was mad with God that fall, mad with Daddy, not talking to eight of my brothers and six of my sisters-in-law, even mad with Mother for not finding a way to keep living. I quit college, ready to dance with the devil, and there was Allen Stancil, tapping his toe to the devil’s fiddle.

We stopped by a Martinsville magistrate’s office for a two-minute ceremony before going over to the racetrack where he was crewing for one of the drivers. I knew I’d made a stupid mistake before the magistrate’s signature was dry on the marriage certificate, but by then I was so high on pot and tequila, I really didn’t care. About a week later, Allen called me Debbie one time too many while I had a rusty butcher knife in my hand. The racing friends we were crashing with got him to the hospital before he bled to death, at which point I took a saltshaker and crawled into a tequila bottle, hunting for the worm.

Soon as I heard Allen was going to live, I headed north and stayed gone for two years. While I was “off,” Daddy and John Claude Lee, my cousin and eventual law partner, got the marriage annulled after paying Allen five thousand not to contest the action and to keep his mouth shut that it ever happened. When Allen turned up again two years ago, I learned that Daddy could have kept that money in his pocket. I was never legally married to him because he hadn’t bothered to divorce his second wife.

“I guess that little girl I’ve seen you with is… what was her name again? Brittany?” I said.

“Tiffany Jane,” he corrected me. “She’s a cutie, ain’t she? Gonna break a bunch of hearts some day.”

“And the little boy?”

“Tyler. And yeah, ’fore you ask, he was in the oven when me and Katie got married.”

“Did she get a DNA test?” I asked sweetly, remembering that the last time I’d seen him, he had gone to extraordinary (and illegal) lengths to get out of paying child support for little Tiffany Jane.

“Didn’t have to. Anybody can look at him and see he’s mine.”

“So you and Katie are still together?”

“Well, naw. Turns out she’s better at having babies than taking care of ’em. We split. Split legal, too. This time, I’m the one getting child support.”

“You got custody?”

“You don’t have to sound so damn surprised.”

“What’d you do?” I said coldly. “Bribe a judge?”

His laugh sounded hollow to me, but his words actually rang truthful when he said, “I didn’t want my kids growing up like I did. Besides, they ain’t got a Uncle Jap and Aunt Elsie to run to. I may not’ve done right by my first two young ’uns, but these here, they’re gonna have a daddy that takes care of ’em twenty-four/seven.”

“Yeah? How you going to raise them when you’re off racing or crewing every weekend?”

“I don’t do that no more. You’re looking a man on his way to being a millionaire.”

“Huh?”

“It’s the gospel truth, Deb. I—Ow!” A handful of sand hit him in the mouth and sent him sprawling. “What the hell? Why’d you do that?” he sputtered, pushing himself up to a sitting position.

“You call me Deb or Debbie one more time and you’re getting it in the eye,” I promised him. To show that there were no hard feelings, I handed him a bottle of water from my tote bag.

He brushed the sand from his mustache and beard and rinsed his mouth several times till he had spat out all the sand, then gave a rueful shake of his shaggy head. “You always did fight dirty.”

“And you were always a slow learner. So what’s this about getting rich?”

“I got me a gutter business,” he said proudly.

I was bewildered. “Street gutters?”

“Naw, seamless aluminum rain gutters. On houses.”

“What on earth do you know about rain gutters?”

“Right much these days. See, what happened was, remember when me and Adam drove up to Greensboro so I could marry Katie?”

I nodded. I might have been killed that night if he and my brother hadn’t come back to fetch Allen’s truck. They had both been too drunk to talk coherently, but their arrival had scared away my attacker. ^*

“Well, we got in a poker game the night before and I hit an inside straight flush. It was double or nothing. Adam’s new car against this peckerwood’s gutter machine.”

“Adam’s car was a rental,” I said.

“Well, that peckerwood did’n know it belonged to Hertz, now did he? He just saw a brand new car against his ol’ beat-up van with a gutter machine in the back. My boy Keith, he’d been working with a gutter guy and he knowed how to run it, so I took him on to help me and I went and talked to a developer I knowed, used to race at Rocking-ham. He was building a passel of new houses out between Greensboro and Burlington and I give him such a good price—well, the short of it is, I’ve got a whole fleet of vans now with a big roll of aluminum and what we call a seamless gutter extruder in every van. I’m putting gutters on houses from Hillsborough to Hickory.”

“I thought the housing market was slowing down.”

“Not from where I’m standing, darlin’. Money’s coming in faster’n I can spend it. Bought Sally a big fancy double-wide and—”

“Who’s Sally?”

“That’s the one I was married to when you and me run off together, Wendy Nicole’s mama. She keeps Tiffany Jane and Tyler for me during the week and I got Wendy Nicole learning to be an accountant so she can do the books for me. Keep it all in the family.”

“Does this mean you and Sally are back together?”

“Oh, hell, no. I learned that lesson. Three times was enough.” He grinned. “Four if I count you.”

“Don’t,” I said, even though I knew I was shoveling against the tide.

“And what about you? You still going out with that game warden?”

“No.”

His grin widened beneath that bushy mustache as he glanced at his watch. “I gotta go pick up the kids at the playroom in a few minutes, but how about we get together after lunch?”

“I don’t think so, Allen. Besides, there’s a police detective looking for you.”

The grin disappeared and his eyes narrowed. No doubt a reflex from the old days. “What for?”

“That judge you were talking to last night at Jonah’s.”

He made an involuntary move backward. “What about him?”

“You didn’t hear? He was murdered in the parking lot.”

“No shit! Pete Jeffreys?”

Enlightenment dawned like sunrise over a lighthouse. “Well, I’ll be damned. You did bribe a judge to get custody of your kids. You bribed Pete Jeffreys, didn’t you?”

He looked at me anxiously. “Now you ain’t gonna go saying stuff like that to the police, are you? Besides, it won’t that big a bribe. In fact, it won’t even a bribe. It was more like a campaign contribution. I knowed most judges would look at my record and just because I pulled some jail time for them piddling little things I done a time or two ’fore I was full grown, they’d say Katie’s a better mama than I am a daddy even though she’s into the hard stuff and all I do’s drink a beer when I get off work. So if a little money makes a judge do the right thing by my young’uns, what’s the harm in that, darlin’?”

“Don’t call me darling,” I said, and reached for a handful of sand.