Detective Carson Ryder Thriller Series Books 1–3: The Hundredth Man, The Death Collectors, The Broken Souls. J. Kerley A.
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Promise again.”
“I promise.”
“Don’t fib to me, Carson. I know phones: the tongue gets in front of the mouthpiece and just lies there.”
“I said I’d come see you, Jeremy. I goddamn well meant it!”
“Ahh,” he cooed. “A spike of emotion. Yes. I believe I’ll see you. Almost on the anniversary of our last little escapade. You’ll have to talk to Mademoiselle Prussy. Tell her to reserve you lots and lots of time alone with your brother.” He cupped his hand over the phone. “Oh, this is so exciting, Mama, our boy’s coming ho—”
I hung up and almost bolted out the door but stopped. First dictate of fishing: Fish where the fish are. Second dictate: If you don’t know where the fish are, get a guide.
I called Bear again.
Ava stumbling across Bienville Boulevard, a car full of partying teens racing down the street, distracted…
“Yo, Cars, what can I do for you, brother? How’s that problem with—”
“She rabbited before I got home, Bear. Probably not long ago. What kind of place would she look for to go drinking? She’s whitecollar professional…”
“The first place she finds. She’s not looking for conversation among her social equals, Carson, she’s looking to stop the pain. She know the neighborhood?”
“No.”
Ava taking a drunken walk on the beach, deciding to swim, a rip current sucking her far past the breakers…
“Did she pass any bars or package shops on her way in last night?”
“A couple. But she was sozzled.”
“Was she conscious? Able to make some conversation?”
“Yes.”
“Alkys’ eyes pick up drinking holes like owls scope out mice. She’ll have crawled to one if she had to. She gets a couple drinks in her she’ll relax and maybe look for ambience.”
“Thanks, Bear.”
“Like I said, I got a chair for your friend over here, Cars. It’s in a real safe place.”
“Here’s hoping, Bear. Later.”
I started out the door and remembered her clothes. They were in my dryer. What was she wearing?
Like every nautically themed bar from Boston to Boise, the Wharf Bar & Grille had nets strung from the ceiling, life rings on the walls, and false pilings lashed with sisal. The waitstaff wore pirate hats. Owner and barkeep Solly Vincenza smiled and ambled over.
“I’m looking for a woman, Sol. Brown hair, slender, maybe five seven—”
“Wearing a big-ass T-shirt saying ‘Laissez les bons temps rouler’ and probably nothing on under it? And a ball cap says Orvis?”
My shirt. My hat. “That’s my girl.”
Solly wagged his Etruscan head. “Came in an hour ago, said, ‘Double vodka and grapefruit juice.’ She grabbed it with both hands, banged it down in about five seconds, and called for another. That’s when I saw her eyes, them bad, haunted ones. I said, ‘That’s the last one, lady, I think you’d be better off at home.’ She called me a name or two, tossed some bucks on the bar, and rubber-legged out. Having some problems, Cars?”
“Not a night I’m gonna frame, Sol,” I said. “Where’d she go?”
The sad head again. “Last I saw her she was heading down toward the inlet past the marina.”
The closest bar to the inlet was a dive frequented by blue-collar locals, service people, charter-boat crewmen, and the like. It reminded me of the beery, atmosphere-deficient places my snitches preferred. Inside it was chilled to the point of condensing breath without freezing out the stench of stale beer and vomit. The barkeep was a heavyset guy with hooded eyes, razor burn, and a blue chain tattooed around his neck. If he’d been a bulldog, I’d have named him Spike. Spike was counting cash into the register and talking to the only patrons, three roofers, judging by the tar on their clothes and shoes.
“I’m looking for a woman—” I called over the jukebox spew of eighties heavy metal, theme music for the lobotomized.
“Ain’t we all, sport,” Spike interrupted.
I smiled. “She’s five seven or so, slender, brown hair, T-shirt…”
“Like a vir-gin,” one of the roofers sang as his buddies hooted. The place was a regular comedy club.
“It’s important,” I said. “She might be in trouble.”
“If you’re her boyfriend, sport, I’d say she is,” Spike said.
It takes me a while to catch on, but I do. Since I’d started my day with Clair, I’d dressed up, tie and light suit. I’d sparked a touch of class consciousness with the mokes in the bar. You don’t often see it on an island catering to the wealthy, but when it breaks through, it can be ugly. You can fight it or roll with it and I figured rolling was faster. I pulled out my wallet and flipped a fifty on the bar. I put my finger on the bill.
I smiled self-consciously. “Aw, c’mon, guys. This is important. You know how it is, we had a little argument and if you can lead me in the right direction I’ll pick up the drinks tonight.”
Suddenly, they had a choice: continue the taunts and lose the fifty, or get skunk drunk on found money. Spike eye’d that money hard, since it would all end up in his till.
He said, “She had a few, then took off. Feeling damn feisty too.”
“Which way’d she go?”
“Went off with the Gast brothers. They got a boat down on the—”
“I know where it is,” I said, heading for the door as the roofers started calling out their drink orders. I heard Spike’s happy voice as the door slammed shut. “You don’t want to mess with them brothers, sport. They’ll rip your face off and shit in it.”
For two hundred bucks and up depending on the season, you can get a private or semiprivate fishing charter for a half day. Your money buys a competent captain who knows tides and currents and where the fish are running. Forty to sixty bucks buys you space on a “party boat,” standing shoulder to shoulder with a hundred others and crossing lines for four hours. Twenty percent of the customers will be beered up and get violently seasick. They’ll be the ones standing next to you.
The Gast brothers ran the Drunken Sailor, a slum with scuppers and the ugliest reputation of all the party boats on the island. Tourists didn’t know this, so the Gasts scratched a living out of puttering a few miles out and handing customers a fishing rig guaranteed to jam, backlash, or flat-out disintegrate. If a mark wanted to keep his catch, the Gasts charged a usurious fee to toss a couple of ice cubes over it, and a buck for a plastic bag to put it in. The Coast Guard was always hauling the Gast brothers’ boat back to the dock and I figured they planned it that way to save on fuel. No one sailed the Drunken Sailor twice.
The Gasts were even dirtier and uglier than their boat, white trash on water, as amoral as sharks. They lived in a cinder-block sweat haven on the mainland and only crossed to Dauphin to run their ratass enterprise.
The Drunken Sailor bobbed against pilings. Shoreside was a small picnic area with figures moving in the semidark, lit by a sputtering yellow light on a phone pole. The air was thick with the smell of rotting fish. I cut the headlamps and parked on the crumbled macadam and jogged the hundred feet to the picnic area. Ava was sitting on a picnic table and sucking from a quart of Dark Eyes. My shirt wasn’t doing a good job covering her. Johnny Lee Gast, about two hundred twenty pounds of tall white trash, had a grubby paw on Ava’s thigh. Earl, a loudmouthed runt, was leaning against her, laughing and sucking a beer so