The Best American Mystery Stories 2010

R. A. Allen The Emerald Coast from The Literary Review

There was no breeze. The Gulf’s blue-green surface was flat, and a haze — the waning vestige of a morning fog — hung above it. Listless waves slopped the tide line like a careless janitor. Waitron lit a cigarette and half-leaned half-sat on the wooden railing that enclosed the al fresco deck of Joe’s Crab Trap. It was the midafternoon lull: bartenders prepping fruit garnishes for happy hour, bus-boys sweeping up sandy French fries, and the wait staff trudging through the personally unprofitable side work demanded by management in order to save money by not actually hiring someone to clean mirrors, dust woodwork, polish stainless steel, and whatnot.

Because of the haze, the glare was diffuse and everywhere and it burned into Waitron’s retinae even in the shade of the deck’s canopy. The haze muffled the beach noises: children squealing, the thump of a volleyball, snatches of music, the shrieks of gulls. He scanned the long white shore from east to west for as far as he could see. How many females could he discern between the vanishing points of his sight? Three hundred? More than five hundred? Certainly less than there were in August.

The need within him was rising, building like steam, his need for sex-plus. Sex-plus was a fulfillment that, he knew, average men never dream of; but it was his ultimate gratification. It came at a price, though, and the price was the need itself — the wanting — which was like hunger and thirst and a drug craving rolled into one. It was time to mark this territory and move on. He was first out in the shift rotation tonight and would be packed up and headed for Colorado in a few days, disappearing back into the floating world of the seasonal waiter. The time was right, like planets aligning in his favor. He would have to find the right one. He would try tonight.

“Robert?”

It would be Holcomb, the day-shift manager; the only one who addressed him by his real name. Hands on hips, Holcomb was standing just inside the doorway. He said, “You think you might dust the paddle fans anytime soon?”

Because he was tall, this was one of Waitron’s side-work duties. He dead-eyed Holcomb for a beat or two. “When I finish this,” he said, ashing his cigarette on the plank floor.

Holcomb went back inside.

There was nothing else Holcomb could say and they both knew it — the season was ending. Waitron turned his attentions back to the beach. How many between the ages of twelve and twenty-four? How many with the correct hair? The right body?

Now a hammering noise broke his reverie — a man replacing shingles atop the main building of the restaurant. Waitron watched him with detachment. The roofer was one of those construction worker types that, a few seasons ago, were everywhere in Destin. Scruffy hair and beard, shirtless and tanned impossibly dark, one of the numberless rabble drawn from the rural areas of the Southeast by the building boom now fizzling out along the Emerald Coast of the Florida Panhandle. He was just under medium-sized, monkey-built, a creature of sinew and vein. He wore a tool belt over cutoff jeans and a pair of filthy tennis shoes. To Waitron, he was a perfect specimen of his class: a cracker, a variety of Georgia/northern-Florida white trash whose life revolved around semiskilled labor, cheap beer, and trailer park squabbles. It must be 120 degrees up there, Waitron mused — how does he stand it?

As if he could feel someone staring, the roofer stopped work and eased into a squatting position against the low slope of the roof, forearms resting on his knees, hammer dangling from one hand. He stared back at Waitron. The roofer had a crude tattoo — an eye — on his left triceps. A warning floated up from Waitron’s memory. The roofer continued to stare at him with pale eyes set in a hawkish face. Waitron turned away.

Oakley paced the balcony, grinding on the mood he was in. “They call us trailer trash,” he said. “And because the world has tarred us with this appellation, we are condemned to a brutish existence.”

“I reckon what we’re called is an accident of our births,” Sparrow responded mildly. “I don’t feel like trash.” He’d been pounding nails since five a.m. in the broiling heat. Now freshly showered and in clean clothing, all he wanted was to relax with this beer while the sun set on the beautiful Gulf below. “You read some Hobbes when you were up in Fountain?”

“Yeah, I read Leviathan. I read that copy of The Peloponnesian War you sent. I read a lot. Ain’t nothing changed: you do your forty-cent-an-hour job, you do your reps at the weight pile, you go to chow when they call you, and you sleep when it’s lights out. There’s still lotsa time left over to advance your education.”

“You didn’t go Mao-Marxist on me did you?” Sparrow joked.

“Nah. I’m just saying...”

Oakley had been out for three weeks. His doomed fascination with a jewelry store up in Dothan had bought him a stretch of two years and ten months.

Sparrow and Oakley had been best friends since grade school in a nameless, sun-struck tract of Section Eight housing on the outskirts of Mary Esther, Florida — itself a strip mall of a town that owed its existence to neighboring Eglin Air Force Base. They had shared the highs as well as the misery, looking out for each other in stir and out.

They were on the balcony of Oakley’s second-floor crash in the old Spindrift Motel, a fifties-era relic, now condemned — pilings washed out by a June hurricane had destabilized the western wing. By this time next year, the pastel high-rise depicted on the billboard out front would take its place. Oakley was living there on the sly through the beneficence of Two-Eleven, the Spindrift’s onetime handyman, now caretaker-cum-watchman pro tem and old jailing buddy to them both. It was no big deal to Two-Eleven, as he figured to be let go when the developer sent the dozers in — which might be any day now.

With two hundred feet of sand-covered extension cord, Oakley was stealing enough electricity from the absentee owners of the condo next door to power a refrigerator, a fifteen-gallon hot water heater, and a couple of lamps. There was no A/C, but it was late September, so the heat was tolerable for sleeping — just. Money for the necessities came in from day trips as a deckhand on the charter boats out of East Pass, baiting hooks for tourists, cleaning their catches, swabbing the decks and gunnels, lugging ice — the flunky work of a nautical factotum. But Oakley, not one to take direction in the first place and chafing at the dictatorial manner of the charter captains, was gaining a reputation as a malcontent on the marina. His other source of income, he’d told Sparrow, was “odd jobs.”

They watched a young couple stroll out to the water’s edge and settle onto a blanket. For Sparrow, the girl added a carload of black chips to the quality of the beachscape. She was a stunner, a corn-silk blonde not older than twenty. In defiance of a municipal ordinance laid down by the local guardians of social order, she was wearing a thong — coral in hue, a mere afterthought in terms of beachwear. Sparrow shivered. “You get laid since you got out?”

“Went and saw Amber a couple of times while that sheriff’s deputy she moved in with was on duty, but she’s turning into a candidate for Girls Gone Wild.”

Sparrow remembered the hot-and-haughty Amber. He emitted a dry laugh.

Oakley studied the thong girl for a moment and then looked away, as if the sight of her caused him pain. “I got money on my mind, bro. I lack funding. A man can’t be who he really is without money. Which brings up my next point: I need to find Davy Redstone.”

“Davy Redstone the fence?”

“Yeah. He owes me three dimes from that pawnshop B-and-E that I pulled before I went in. I heard he’s hanging out at a bar north of the 331 Bridge, a slop chute called the Owl’s Eye. I need you to go with me. I need you to watch my back.”

“That was four years ago. Redstone’s gonna balk on you.”

“I will stress to him that a debt is a debt. He gives me any shit, I’ll have to tune him up.”

Sparrow nodded. He did not doubt that the prospects for violencia were distinct, if not imminent. Along with the alpha-dog precepts of your seasoned convict, Oakley had the muscle and the martial portfolio to back up a volatile nature. Problem was: Redstone traveled with an entourage. If it came to a dustup, they would be bucking the law of superior numbers.

“He’ll have his homies cheek by jowl,” Sparrow said.

“I got no choice.”

“I’m there for you, bro.”

Watch my back was the undeniable — the unquestionable — call for support between them. And Sparrow’s response was gold-standard true, true at the risk of incarceration, true past the point of injury, true unto death. It was his duty to a bond forged out of old hard limes.

Duty. At one time, Sparrow would have greeted violent confrontation in service of this bond with gritty cheer. But he had turned thirty-three in March. Somewhere, Sparrow had read that thirty-three is an introspective watershed for even the thickest of men: they come to the sit-up-in-bed realization that times are flying. Like the tolling of a giant bell, it had been no different for him. He had been into some kind of criminality since the age of twelve — all of it larcenous, some of it violent, most of it with Oakley. But during his latest left-handed endeavor, Oakley had been behind bars. It was in collusion with an Atlanta-based counterfeiter — a former penitentiary colleague — that Sparrow spent two months passing bogus twenties in the Caribbean. The Feds were waiting for him at the gate at Miami International. On a half-dozen surveillance videos, he starred as the prosecution’s witness against himself.

The government confiscated everything they could find; what they couldn’t find, his lawyer wound up with. He’d bargained for thirty months and maxed it out at the Federal Correctional Institution in Marianna. It wasn’t that he couldn’t do the time; it was just that, in the joint, the judicial system is eating the front end off of your future.

Right after his release, he’d met, fallen in love, and moved in with Marlene, a clerical for a bail bondsman in Fort Walton. She had a four-year-old daughter who adored him for no reason whatsoever. So he had come to a conclusion: he didn’t care if he had to be a roofer or a ditch digger or a dishwasher for the rest of his life, he wasn’t going to do any more time. He had a duty to Marlene. And for little Jonquil, he was going to be the father she’d never known. Would Oakley understand his duty to them? Sparrow didn’t think so. Right now, he wished he were at home with them, watching TV. But Marlene was up in Waycross visiting her mama, which was why he now found himself here with Oakley. He hoped they wouldn’t find Redstone.

“When do you want to go?” Sparrow said.

“Now.”

“My truck is on empty.”

“We’ll take my car.”

“When did you get a car?”

“The other day. It’s parked over in the Hampton lot. Keeping it around here might draw attention to my living arrangements. Grab the rest of them beers. Let’s go.”

Sparrow gave the beach a wistful last look. The wind was picking up.

The Hampton Inn was a two-block walk east on Scenic 98 — the original beach-view part of Highway 98 — and two blocks north. There was no view of the Gulf from this Hampton, and it attracted the folks that couldn’t afford one — kids, mostly, or blue-collar families who scrimped to give their children a few days at the beach. From the rooftops, Sparrow would see them: mom, dad, and their youngsters, shuffling along in single file — serious as mourners — on the white gravel shoulders of the beach-access streets, wearing their sandals and bathing suits, loaded down with towels, coolers, floats, umbrellas, and other beach crap.

Oakley’s ride was a late model Taurus. Sparrow got in and took its measure. “You boosted a rental,” he said, checking the column.

“Yeah. But the plates are fresh.”

“Goddamn.”

Oakley was grinning like a dog eating cheese. “Don’t worry, bro. I’ll drive safe.”

“Hi, folks, I’ll be your waitron for your dining experience tonight,” he said — his standard icebreaker that generally evoked a smile from patrons. “Would you like to start with a cocktail?”

The party was comprised of two fortyish couples and a teenaged girl — a daughter, he supposed. The adults wanted cocktails. While they decided, Waitron eyed the girl. Her hair was all wrong — too long, too light.

Leaving with their drink order, he noticed a lone girl at the bar. She was correct: petite, shoulder-length brunette hair, early twenties. Her face was okay — a poor man’s Drew Barrymore. The glasses were an added attraction. By coming in here with that sluttish haircut, she was begging for sex-plus.

This was his last table. If the girl at the bar stayed until his checkout was over, it would be another sign.

She reminded him of number four, decomposing now for some two years in a hole fifty yards into a wooded area off of Highway 7 a few miles outside of Norwalk, Connecticut. Like the others, he had her GPS coordinates committed to memory: bargaining chips that would keep him off death row in case they caught him.

The sun went down. His table decided against dessert, but, to his annoyance, one of the women wanted coffee. He checked on the girl at the bar. She’d just ordered another margarita. His luck was holding.

After Waitron finished with his checkout, he marked time at the waiter’s station, rolling silverware in paper napkins and watching the girl. Finally she finished her drink and paid, leaving, not by the door to the lot that bordered Scenic 98, but down the steps to the beach. Perfect. Waitron felt his nostrils flare; felt his lungs fill to the bursting point. He counted to ten and exited by the front door. He jogged through the parking lot to his car, where he grabbed the sack that contained the things he needed and then walked around the outside of the building to the beach. Her white shorts made her easy to follow as she walked eastward, barefoot in the surf-dampened sand.

Oakley had the pedal flat on the floor on their way back across Choctawhatchee Bay, speedometer bumping 110. The Taurus was bucking like a jackhammer because, having whacked a parked truck on their gravel-slurring escape from the Owl’s Eye, the front end was out of alignment.

“Feels like we’re coming apart,” said Sparrow, gripping the armrest.

“We gotta get off this bridge,” Oakley said. “If they called the five-o’s, we could get bottled up.”

Sparrow thought his prayers had been answered when they walked into the Owl’s Eye to find that the fence was not there. They’d hung around for a while at the bar, casually pumping an evasive bartender about Redstone, and otherwise minding their own business.

Evening dissolved into night. The Owl’s Eye was a dive and it possessed that seething atmosphere that all dives have, but things remained peaceful until a girl who was all teased-up hair and quick movements came up and wanted to know about Oakley’s shamrock tattoo like it was some kind of message aimed at her from outer space.

Turns out: there was a narrow-minded boyfriend.

Oakley knocks boyfriend’s eye out of its socket with a back-handed blow from a two-pound beer mug.

Boyfriend’s friends materialize.

They fought a rearguard skirmish to the door, Sparrow swinging a barstool; Oakley brandishing the Spyderco folding knife that he kept clipped inside the waistband of his jeans.

The Taurus gained the causeway at the end of the 331 Bridge. A second later, they had to swerve to miss an SUV pulling out of a tourist trap called 3-Thirty-A.

Sparrow sucked his teeth. “Slow it down, willya.”

Oakley dropped it down a notch or two. He said, “Ninety-eight is only a mile away. We get there, we’ll be in good shape.”

Sparrow wasn’t so sure. Their remaining headlight was beaming off at a crazy angle, and they were trailing smoke like a crop-duster. “We’re gonna have to ditch this vehicle PDQ,” he said.

“Wonder where that fucking Redstone was,” said Oakley.

When they got to Highway 98, they headed west into sparse traffic. Just east of Sandestin they passed a Florida Highway Patrol cruiser on the opposite side of the highway. The patrolie’s head snapped in their direction as he went by. Sparrow turned around and saw the cruiser’s roof lights come alive. “We got an audience,” he said.

Oakley made a U-turn at the next opening in the median just as the cop was doing the mirror-image same 1,500 feet behind them. With his shirttail, Sparrow started wiping down the armrest and everything else he could remember touching.

“Damn,” said Oakley. He slammed to a stop in the emergency lane. “Good-bye, Taurus.”

They sprinted down a weedy embankment and vaulted a three-strand barbwire fence. Beyond the fence, they were quickly swallowed by the dense ground cover of a pine savanna. Branches whipping their faces, wiregrass snagging their feet, they crashed through. The highway, pulsing with blue light and echoing the squawk of a radio, faded behind. Saw palmetto spines stabbed through their jeans. Overhead, the slash pines cast bottlebrush silhouettes against a pumpkin moon.

Simultaneously, they tripped over a fallen log.

“What place is this?” Oakley puffed.

“Topsail Hill Park. It’s a nature preserve,” said Sparrow. “If we can get through it, we’ll come out on deserted beach.”

“How do you know?”

“I reroofed the park office and the pavilions in April. I read their brochures at lunchtime. The wind is blowing in off the Gulf. All’s we gotta do is keep the breeze in our faces.”

The sandy soil turned mucky, and suddenly they were chest high in cattails, and next, in water up to their waists. They backed out, lily pads clinging to them like greasy bandages.

“What now?” Oakley wanted to know.

“We stumbled into Morris Lake. If we work our way to the left, we’ll run into a tidal marsh that drains it into the Gulf. We can follow it to the beach.”

Twenty minutes later, they found Morris Lake’s outfall; they felt their way along its edge, aided by lightning flashes from a storm percolating out over the Gulf.

“Yow! Shit!” Oakley yelped. “Something bit my leg.”

“You see what was it?”

“Too dark. Them brochures mention snakes?”

“Yeah, got cottonmouth and rattlers, but a bunch of nonpoisonous ones too.”

They could hear the surf now. A few minutes later, the scrub broke onto a twenty-five-foot sand dune crested by sea oats. The outfall creek, brimming with tannin-blackened water, cut through the dune and became an estuary flowing through the beach and into the Gulf. They clambered up the dune. Cloud-to-cloud lightning and intermittent moonlight delivered the blessed sight of the beach below them. A constant, storm-driven sea breeze drove the waves onto the shore with the intensity of a cymbal roll; salt spray stung their faces. Oakley tried to roll up the leg of his jeans to inspect his wound, but his calf was too swollen. “Pretty sure it was a snake,” he said. “My leg’s gettin’ stiff on me.”

Sparrow said, “We gotta walk two miles of this beach to Sandestin. We get there, we’ll get you into the emergency room at Sacred Heart.”

Mushing through the soft sand atop the dune, it quickly became apparent that their best time would be made on the more compact surface of the beach. They slid down the face of the dune. They could taste the storm’s ozonic breath. An in-rushing cloudbank canceled the moonlight.

They walked along the base of the dunes, pushing west toward the lights of Sandestin’s high-rise condos. The wind sheared their faces like a belt sander, and, more rapidly now, lightning fluxed cloud-to-cloud and into the water at the horizon.

“I thought you said this beach was deserted,” Oakley said, pointing toward the water’s edge.

The next lightning flash revealed two figures in copulation — a man was taking a woman from behind. They were facing the sea. The lightning bleached their skin a cadaverous white.

“Haw,” said Oakley. “It’s the doggy-style remake of Burt Lancaster and Deborah whatsherface on the beach in From Here to Eternity.”

It went dark.

Came another long flicker.

“Something ain’t right about this frame,” Sparrow said.

“True that. Let us file for discovery.”

They strode closer, their approach masked by the roar of the elements. The man had something twisted around the woman’s neck — a rope or belt — and her arms flopped like those of a rag doll with each thrust. In a voice loud enough to be heard above the combers, Oakley said, “Well, well, if it ain’t Chester the Molester. In the slam, we got a cure for you rape-o motherfuckers: it’s called sticking my pecker up your comic-opera rectum.”

He was skinny and basketball tall and he leapt away from the girl like he’d stepped on a third rail. The girl collapsed face forward onto the sand. Sparrow noted that her back was cut to shreds.

The guy got his pants up and lunged toward something metallic — a bowie knife — that was sticking out of the sand.

“He’s got a banger!” Sparrow yelled as the man swept the foot-long blade in a wide arc toward Oakley’s face.

Like an exercise-yard assassination, they split to either side of him. Sparrow heard Oakley’s Spyderco snap into locked position. The man feinted at Oakley a second time. Oakley tripped backwards into the sand; the man moved in on him, bowie knife poised to plunge. Sparrow snagged the man’s elbow, clutching it just long enough to keep him from stabbing Oakley. The man rounded on Sparrow. Sparrow threw a fistful of sand in his face.

The man made a noise in his throat and reeled backwards, clawing at his eyes. Oakley was on his feet again. “Eat this, Chester,” he said as he jabbed his blade into the guy’s midsection and then ducked beneath the reflexive chop of the big knife. Taking advantage of his opponent’s blindness, Oakley cut the man repeatedly with his own blade, slashing and pinking, a quick gash across the forearm, one that missed the groin to strike the man’s upper thigh. Sparrow thrust-kicked at the man’s knees, trying to take him off of his feet, but either missed or landed glancing blows.

Oakley’s hit count mounted, but three-inch wounds to the torso of a man whose bloodstream is blazing with adrenaline are hardly felt, much less immediately fatal.

At the water’s edge, they spun in a death dance played out in total darkness punctuated by the blinding strobe of the lightning. Finally, Oakley managed to sink the full length of his pocketknife’s blade into the man’s lower rib cage; the man gasped. Sparrow tripped him, but as he fell, his blind thrashing with the heavy-bladed hunting knife caught Oakley across the belly as he was rushing in. While the man was trying to get back up, Sparrow kicked him in the temple and then again at the base of his ear. The man’s grip on his knife went slack. Sparrow wrenched it free from his grasp and, with his left forearm pinning the man’s throat, plunged the blade in and up through the man’s solar plexus. Blood geysered into Sparrow’s face. The man convulsed orgasmically for five seconds and lapsed into shock. Twenty seconds later he was dead.

Oakley was lying on his back in the sand, the front of his shirt soaked with blood. Sparrow bent over him and said, “Hey, bro. You okay?”

Oakley’s eyeballs were rolled up. “Between the river and the steep came... serpents,” he mumbled.

Sparrow shook him. “What? What’s that mean?” He tried blowing into Oakley’s mouth, but Oakley remained incoherent. Sparrow went over to the naked girl and rolled her over. She was limper than a boned capon. He splashed seawater on her; she made a noise. She was alive — for now.

Far down the beach, he saw headlights coming toward him. Sparrow rubbed a handful of sand on the handle of the bowie knife sticking out of the man’s chest. To wash out his tracks, he sprinted along the edge of the surf; back to the natural ditch that Morris Lake’s outfall made in the beach and waded up its dark waters until he was safely back among the pines.

Soon, the airspace above the shoreline lit up with beams and flashes of light — red, yellow, blue, and blue-white. Sparrow heard the helicopter and then saw the probe and sweep of its searchlight, the angry finger of society’s god. He crawled beneath a gallberry bush. It was starting to rain.

Sparrow spent Friday night in the preserve. The rainfall varied from blinding sheets to drizzle. During the drizzle, he worked his way west through the brush until his terror of stepping upon an alligator or a snake in the darkness finally made him stay put in a thicket of swamp sweetbells.

Saturday blossomed hot, and the sun reached across ninety-three million miles to beat him like a child. He fell asleep from exhaustion in the middling shade of a scrub oak, but, an hour later, awoke in a panic of hot needle stings that were everywhere. Ants! He was covered in them. They were biting his face; they were in the crotch of his jeans; their mandibles clung to the dried blood of his many cuts and scratches. He hurdled through the shrubs to the blackwater depths of Morris Lake and — gators and snakes be damned! — plunged in. For the rest of the day, he holed up in a fetterbush in the lee of a dune. No one came in after him.

Well after dark on Saturday, he emerged from the bush — famished, dehydrated, mud-slaked, bug-bitten, and now ravaged by poison ivy — to make his way up ten miles of beach to Destin. If he came across late-night beach strollers or kids out crabbing, he would hide in the surf up to his chin and wait until they had passed.

Around three o’clock Sunday morning, Sparrow reached his truck.

The Sunday evening TV news said Oakley was in the ICU in a coma and that some waiter identified as Robert something-or-other was dead (good riddance) and that a girl — apparently a victim of a violent assault — was in critical-but-stable condition and was expected to recover but couldn’t remember anything about what had happened. There was no mention of a fourth party, but Sparrow knew that the cops don’t release the full story.

They’d come for him or they wouldn’t. Oakley would live or he would die. Sparrow could accept that. Life was bigger and more agile than he was.

Around nine o’clock, Sparrow heard a car door slam and then footsteps on the iron steps that led up from the driveway slab to the kitchen door of their mobile home. Marlene and little Jonquil were back from Waycross. Sparrow, slathered in Neosporin and hydrocortisone cream, was sprawled on the couch in a pair of boxers.

Marlene dropped her suitcase when she saw him. “John,” she cried, “what happened to you?”

“Nothing.”

Hesitantly, she asked, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

Jonquil came in behind Marlene and clutched her mother’s leg. “Is Daddy John hurt, Mama?”

“No, darling, he’s okay. Go put your things in your room. Mama will fix you some supper when she gets unpacked,” Marlene told her daughter, turning the child toward the rear of the trailer. “You want another beer, John?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re sure about ‘nothing’ happening to you?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“Okay, then,” she said as she headed for the kitchen.

Sparrow looked at the TV but it wasn’t much in the front of his mind. Marlene wouldn’t ask about it again. This was the way it was among their kind.