South Of Hell

Chapter Two

They had been down this road before. They had been down it so many times that even with the night as dark as it was, even without the blue wash of a moon above or the yellow glow from a house nearby to help light their way, they knew where they were going.

Still, Louis had the feeling something was different this time.

“You okay?” he asked.

The tall man walking by his side didn’t answer.

“Mel?”

“Yeah.” A clearing of his throat, like the crunching of the gravel under their shoes. “Yeah… yeah. I’m fine.”

Louis didn’t look over at his friend, didn’t have to. He knew Mel Landeta was lying. Something had been bothering him all night. Louis sensed it from the moment they sat down to eat at Timmy’s Nook. The talk over grouper sandwiches and beer had been of the usual stuff: the Miami Heat’s seven-game skid, cop gossip from O’Sullivan’s, and how Louis had spent the last week sitting outside a Fort Myers motel so some guy could prove his wife was cheating on him.

When the small talk and beers had run out, Mel had gone mute. And now, as they walked the dark stretch of road back to Louis’s cottage, his quiet hung heavy in the cool April air.

“Mel, what’s on your mind?” Louis asked finally.

A long pause. “Lizards,” he said.

“What?”

“You heard me, lizards.”

“Mel, if you don’t want to talk-”

“I’m serious. I was thinking about the lizard I saw out on your porch. It had no tail.”

“The cat probably got it,” Louis said.

Mel was quiet for a moment. “Lizards can grow their tails back. Do you know that?”

Louis shook his head slowly, knowing Mel couldn’t see it.

“Lizards, sponges, starfish, even worms. They can all regrow their body parts,” Mel said.

They walked on, slowly.

“And newts,” Mel said. “You poke out a newt’s eye, and you know what happens? He grows a new eye. So that’s what I have been thinking about. How come a fucking newt can grow a new eye and fucking scientists can’t figure out why a fucking human being can’t?”

A car rounded the bend ahead of them, and Louis blinked in the glare of the headlights. They waited on the sandy shoulder until it passed.

“How about one more beer before I drive you back?” Louis said.

“I guess one more won’t kill me,” Mel said.

When they got to the low dune that fronted the cottage, Louis put a hand on Mel’s arm and guided him across the dark yard. Mel stood on the screened-in porch until Louis flicked a light on in the living room.

“You live like a pig, Kincaid,” Mel said.

“I just cleaned this morning,” Louis said, going to the refrigerator.

“Dirty socks and cat poop. Get some air freshener.”

Louis brought two Heinekens back. Mel took one and folded his long body down onto the sofa. Louis flopped into the chair opposite, watching Mel. He hadn’t seen him in a couple of weeks. Still, theirs was an old-marriage kind of friendship, where long pauses in conversation were left unfilled and long times apart needed no rebuilt bridges. It was the kind of friendship where one man knew when to walk a wide berth around the other. But this, Louis sensed, was not one of those times.

“Your eyes bothering you?” Louis asked.

Mel was holding the beer bottle against his forehead. “I already gave up driving. Maybe I’ll give up walking next.”

Louis took a long pull from the beer. The silence lengthened. Finally, Louis picked up the remote and flicked on the TV but kept the volume off. Miami Vice was on. Louis watched Sonny steer a speeding Cigarette boat down the Intracoastal, the boat’s fishtail wake sparkling against the pastel blur of hotels. Louis noticed Mel was staring at the TV, but he knew his friend couldn’t make out any of the details. Mel had been battling retinitis pigmentosa for almost ten years now, and he saw life as if through a plastic shower curtain. That was how Mel once described it — when he talked about it, which wasn’t often.

“Do you ever think about past lives?” Mel said.

Louis looked over at him. “What do you mean?”

“What your life might have been like if you had done things differently.”

Louis took a drink of beer. “No.”

“I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately,” Mel went on. “Thinking about my life before I hit that kid.”

Mel had told him the story. How when his failing eyesight first set in, Mel had refused to acknowledge it, refused to tell his chief that he no longer had any business being behind the wheel of a police cruiser. Then one night in Miami, a couple of years ago, Mel broadsided a car he hadn’t seen coming. The seventeen-year-old kid driving the car spent a year in physical therapy. Mel had been forced to resign quietly but had talked his way into a detective’s job on the smaller Fort Myers PD — until he finally turned in his badge on his own. He’d been living on disability ever since, sometimes helping Louis with his PI cases.

“I think we live many lives inside this one,” Mel said. “Lives that begin and end in an instant, like the eight seconds it took me to hit that kid. Or the minute or so it takes to tell someone you don’t love them anymore.”

Louis looked down at the beer bottle, wiping the condensation with his thumb and wishing Mel would shut up. He was dangerously close to wandering into something he and Louis had never talked about: Mel’s long-ago relationship with Joe, Louis’s girlfriend.

“Fuck, I’m sorry,” Mel said. “I’m done ruminating. But I’m not done drinking. Get me another, would you?”

Louis went to the kitchen, grabbing another beer for himself, too, figuring Mel was about fifteen minutes away from falling asleep on the sofa, saving Louis the long drive back over the causeway to Fort Myers.

On the way back to the living room, he noticed the red message light was blinking on his answering machine. He was tempted to let it go until morning, but it might be a new job offer. Or a message from Joe.

He hadn’t talked to her in a week. It had been three months since she moved to northern Michigan to take the job as undersheriff of Leelanau County. He missed her. Missed the sound of her voice, the feel of her skin against his, the smell of Jean Nate in his sheets.

He hit the button.

But the voice that came from the machine was male. Deep, with a flat southern Michigan timbre.

“Hello… uh… this message is for Louis Kincaid. The PI? You probably won’t remember me, but my name is Jake Shockey, and I’m a homicide investigator with the Ann Arbor PD.”

Louis set the beers down and turned up the machine’s volume.

“You were the responding officer on a missing persons case back in 1980,” the voice went on. “It’s still unsolved, but a few new leads have surfaced, and when I was reviewing your report, a couple of things jumped out at me I’d like to ask you about. You know, the kinds of things we don’t always think were important at the time. So-”

The tape cut off. Louis immediately hit the button for the next message. For a few seconds, there was only the shuffling of papers and the impatient slam of drawers. Then Shockey’s voice again.

“Damn machines,” he said. “Anyway, this is Shockey again. What I was saying was, I would appreciate it if you’d consider coming up to Ann Arbor to help me light a new fire under this case. We’re willing to cough up the airfare and lodging. So, if you could spare the time off from whatever it is you do down there as a PI, let me know. Call me when you get in. Thanks.”

Shockey left his home number and clicked off.

Louis waited, hoping for a message from Joe, but there was nothing else. He walked back to the living room and handed Mel his beer, then dropped back into the chair.

“He sounds like a real charmer,” Mel said.

“Can’t say. I don’t remember him.”

“You remember the case?”

“Not a clue.”

They were quiet. Louis’s eyes went to the muted television again. Now Sonny had some dirtbag in a pink shirt smashed up against a turquoise wall.

“So, you going?” Mel asked.

When Louis didn’t answer, Mel let out a low burp and went on. “Sounds like a pretty good deal to me. Little paid vacation back to A Squared. Stroll around the campus, drink some beer, breathe in the sweet air of youth, relive those moments of reckless adventures and lustful indiscretions. I would give anything to feel twenty again. Wouldn’t you?”

“It was only nine years ago.”

“Right. But tell me it doesn’t feel like another life now,” Mel said.

Louis stood up and walked to the screen door, looking out. It was too dark to see the water, but he could hear the familiar heartbeat of the Gulf in the crashing of the waves, feel its breath in the tangy, salty breeze.

Six months, a year ago… maybe it wouldn’t have felt like another life. But it did now. He felt as if that young man back in Ann Arbor had faded away or even died. And this new man in his place? Far from perfect and riddled with spaces that still needed filling. Yet… this man, this newer him, this man was comfortable in his skin, had made a home for himself on this island. When had that changed? And what had caused it? The nearness of the people he had allowed into his life? Margaret and Sam Dodie, Mel. And Ben, of course, because maybe it took the love of a young boy to help make you grow up.

And Joe…

She was the one who had really saved him.

Louis heard a grunt and turned. Mel had stretched out on the sofa. He was asleep.

Louis took the beer from Mel’s hand and set it on the table. An old throw lay nearby, and Louis laid it across Mel’s legs, knowing he would want it in a few hours when the cooler breezes snuck into the old cottage.

He looked back to the answering machine. Something Shockey had said suddenly registered. Homicide detective. What was a homicide detective doing investigating an old routine missing persons case?

He replayed Shockey’s message, but there was no other information. He paused, then dialed Joe’s home number. For the third time in two days, the answering machine picked up. He listened to the crisp words in her low voice and waited for the beep.

“It’s me again,” he said. “I’m coming north.”