Damaged (18 page)

“Yes, sir. The number is registered to Vince Coffland of Port St. Lucie, Florida.”

“Port St. Lucie?” Sheriff Clayton interrupted. “That’s over six hundred miles away. And it’s on the Atlantic side. How the hell did he end up in a cooler floating in the Gulf?”

“Any information on what happened to Mr. Coffland?” Tomich asked his diener.

“He’s been missing since July tenth. He disappeared after Hurricane Gaston.”

“Missing?”

“Disappeared.”

CHAPTER 37

Sometimes a corpse moved. Scott knew it was a fact that no one liked to talk about except at conferences after a few drinks. It’d never happened to Scott, but he’d heard stories of others who had experienced what they called “spontaneous movement.” A leg or a foot twitched. He couldn’t remember exactly what caused it. Some kind of biochemical reaction. But it usually occurred in the first ten to twelve hours after death. Maybe that’s all this was, but when Scott called Joe he opted for the extreme. After the morning he’d experienced, he couldn’t hide the stress.

“That stiff you left in my cooler is still alive.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He moved.”

Silence. Long enough that Scott second-guessed his approach. Would Joe think his partner prone to hysterics? That he couldn’t handle the extra business?

“Look man,” Joe finally said in his usual calm and cool manner, “it’s just your imagination playing tricks on you.” Then he added like a buddy, a friend, “Dude, you did have a lot to drink last night.”

There was something about Joe’s voice—his calling him “dude”—that made Scott relax … a little.

By the time Joe arrived half an hour later, Scott had almost convinced himself that it probably was just his imagination. His head still throbbed. Earlier his vision seemed blurred. He hadn’t gone back into the cooler and now he felt a bit ridiculous.

Scott tried to concentrate while he kept his employees busy in the funeral home preparing the memorial service for Uncle Mel, the reclusive bachelor whose family wanted him buried before the hurricane rolled in. Scott told the employees they couldn’t go to the back offices because he was fumigating the walkway. It seemed like an absurd excuse even to him. Why fumigate anything before a hurricane? But no one questioned him, which further validated his salesmanship. Damn, he was good. Even in a crisis with all the stress he could make up stuff to believable levels.

He had left Joe for twenty minutes, tops. As soon as Scott could, he sneaked back, going outside and avoiding the walkway. Joe was closing and latching the walk-in refrigerator.

“Hey Scott,” Joe said. “I have to tell you, man, I wish you could have heard your voice. ‘The stiff moved.’” He laughed as he slapped Scott between the shoulder blades.

“Yeah, probably too much Scotch.”

“Or not enough,” Joe said as he pulled out his money clip and started peeling off hundred-dollar bills. “I’ll have a few more specimens to add before the storm, if that’s okay,” he said as he placed the bills on the corner desk.

Scott couldn’t count and listen at the same time.

“I’ll come back tonight. Try and cut and package up as much as possible. Take less room that way.”

“Sure, no problem.” Scott found himself saying the words while he struggled to keep his eyes away from the pile of hundred-dollar bills.

“I’d offer to take you to dinner again, but I think you might need to rest,” Joe said with a grin, the kind that went along with terms like “dude.”

“I’ll see you later.”

Scott offered a smile and a nod, feeling better as he reminded himself that this was a good business arrangement and that he really liked Joe Black. He let out a sigh. But as he watched Joe leave, Scott noticed something on the side of Joe’s khaki pants. He started to point it out then stopped himself. It looked like blood. Bright red, not pink. Splattered red blood. Corpses didn’t splatter blood.

CHAPTER 38

This would have been a day off for Liz Bailey if it wasn’t for Isaac churning a path directly at the Florida Panhandle. New projections had the storm making landfall sooner than what was earlier predicted. The wind and waves suggested the new projections were accurate.

Liz was accustomed to being out in winds like this. She wondered just how used to it Lieutenant Commander Wilson was. He tight-fisted the controls and fought against each gust. It felt like being in a car with the driver constantly accelerating, braking, and accelerating again, combined with an occasional roller-coaster plunge.

Kesnick looked at her. With his back safely to Wilson and Ellis, he rolled his eyes. She held back a smile.

From above they watched boaters coming in early, heeding the weather advisories. All the marinas were full, with lines of crafts waiting to tie up. There was no surefire protection outside of pulling your boat out of the water and hauling it as far north as possible. Some people were trying to do that by motoring up rivers and paying to dock their boats in places out of the storm’s path.

They were seeing an early surge. Waves already pounded seawalls and crashed up the beach, reaching the sand dunes. Surfers
dotted in between the waves, bright spots of color bobbing up and down, disappearing and springing back into sight.

In the helicopter, Liz kept reminding herself to take it all in and remember how everything looked before Isaac hit. In 2004 Hurricane Ivan had decimated the area, ripping apart and chewing up everything in its path. The Florida Panhandle was where pine trees met palm trees, and the national forests that covered acres of land became shredded sticks, many snapped in two. Four-lane highways looked like a monster had taken a bite out of the asphalt, chewed it up, and spit it out. The massive live oaks, hundreds of years old, that lined Santa Rosa Sound were blown over, their tangled roots two stories high.

Pensacola Beach is about eight miles long and only a quarter mile at its widest, a peninsula with Santa Rosa Sound on one side and the Gulf of Mexico on the other. During Ivan the two bodies of water looked like one, meeting in the middle.

Liz remembered that it had taken years to sift and separate the debris from the sand. Huge machines had occupied the coastline. Cranes became a part of the skyline. Blue-tarped rooftops were seen in every neighborhood. Hurricanes never discriminated.

The three-mile I-10 bridge between Escambia County and Santa Rosa County had taken three years to repair. It had been crippling for a community connected by bridges to have all four major ones compromised in some way by the storm’s massive surge.

Liz hadn’t been here for Ivan, only for the aftermath. She had just finished training in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. For some reason she always regretted missing the actual storm. Silly. Not like she could have made a difference. It was probably some form of survivor’s guilt. Perhaps she would be able to make a difference this time.

CHAPTER 39

Walter Bailey decided to close up for the day despite the steady stream of customers. He didn’t like the way the wind had started to rock the canteen back and forth. He’d bought the mobile unit at the navy commissary three years ago, not looking for a business but rather for something to do. He and his wife, Emilie, had looked forward to his early retirement. After all those years of six-month cruises and being apart, the two of them had a long list of plans, things they’d never been able to do between assignments. Emilie died before they’d even gotten started.

Within the first year of her absence, Walter realized that all his new hobbies seemed to be things other people called addictions. He had to come to terms with the simple fact that nothing would stop the ache. There were certain losses, certain voids that could never be filled with anything other than that which left the void in the first place.

These days he just wanted to stay busy. That’s where the Coney Island Canteen came in. The mobile canteen had been in sad shape when Walter bought it, weathered and rusted but still in good working condition. He’d scraped and cleaned and polished the stainless-steel inside, painted the outside red, white, and blue, hung curtains
with stars and stripes, and named it after one of his favorite boyhood places. It had never been about making money. Instead it was something to occupy his time and keep him company so he wouldn’t think about the void, about that empty hole that was left in his heart.

“You packing up, Walter?”

He poked his head out the side door to find Charlotte Mills in her signature floppy hat and cat-eye sunglasses, the hat too big and the glasses too bright for her small, meek features. Her pants legs were rolled up and she wore a long-tailed white cotton shirt over a formfitting tank top. Yellow flip-flops accentuated bright-red toenails. Her pockets bulged with seashells. Before he had gotten to know her, he’d called her the beachcombing widow—but only in his mind.

“I have a couple of dogs still warm if you’re interested.”

“Only if you have time. Everyone seems in a hurry today.”

“Aren’t you packing up?”

“Humph.” She waved a birdlike hand at him. “I’ve gone through worse than what’s coming. Last time I left, they wouldn’t let us back on the beach for weeks.”

“If I remember correctly, the bridge was out.”

“Or so they said.”

Years ago Charlotte’s husband was killed in a plane crash, just days before he was to testify in a federal investigation against a state senator. There was never any evidence that the crash had been anything more than an unfortunate accident, but Charlotte believed otherwise. Walter wondered if she had always been prone to conspiracy theories because she saw them everywhere now.

“This storm’s gonna be bad.” Walter had slid the window back open and started pulling out condiments to prepare her hot dog. He
decided to fix himself one and join her. “If you need a place to stay, you’re welcome to come to my house. I’m well above the floodplain and about a quarter mile from Escambia Bay. It’ll just be me, my daughter, and maybe my son-in-law.”

“That’s so sweet, Walter. But no, I’m staying. Already got the plywood up. Plenty of batteries and the generator’s ready to go in the garage.”

“Now, Charlotte, remember how Ivan shoved water and sand right through most of these beach houses?”

“Mine’s cinder block. It made it through Ivan, I’m sure it’ll make it through this.”

“Hey, Mr. B.”

“Well, if it isn’t Phillip Norris’s son.”

Walter almost regretted remembering the name of the young man’s father. The look on Norris’s face was a combination of shock and embarrassment. It was obvious he hadn’t wanted Walter to remember.

He introduced Charlotte, giving the young man the opportunity to introduce himself only if he chose to. Walter was pleased, but surprised, when Norris held out his hand and told her, “I’m Joe Black.”

“I was just trying to convince Charlotte that she needed to leave the beach during the storm.”

“I have a nice, solid, two-story cinder-block house, one lot back from the water. I’ll be fine.”

“People disappear during hurricanes,” Joe said, and both Walter and Charlotte stared at him, startled at his bluntness. “There were more than three hundred people who went missing after Hurricane Ike hit Galveston, Texas. I’m just saying it happens. You really might want to reconsider.”