Riptide (2 page)

“If it was me, I’d start lookin’ around town for somebody with a peg leg,” Axel offered.

Maggie and Wyatt both shot him a look, then Maggie stood up and pulled off her gloves.

“Well, Larry will be here in a few minutes to have a look,” she said, referring to the elderly medical examiner. “Dwight’s bringing him out.”

She looked back toward St. George Island and saw a speedboat off near the tip. “There they are.”

She pulled her digital camera out of her case, dropped her gloves on the deck, and handed the camera to Wyatt. “Here, you take better pictures than I do.”

“That’s because I have an artistic eye,” he said.

He squatted down and started taking shots of the foot, while Maggie walked over to Axel.

“Give me a sip of that coffee. You woke me up.”

Axel smiled and handed her the travel mug. She turned it up and took a drink, then choked a bit before swallowing.

“Bourbon, Axel?”

“Hey, this is my happy hour, Maggie. Except I’m not especially happy.”

Maggie nodded and looked at the pile of shrimp. “I’m sorry, Axel. You know you’re gonna have to throw them all back.”

“I don’t know why,” he answered. “This is my golden hole, Maggie. You know I’ll probably catch half of ’em again tomorrow night.”

“Yeah, I know. But we won’t know that for sure.”

“I’ll be honest with you, I was within a gnat’s ass of throwing that thing back over the side. This is a pretty nice haul.”

Maggie nodded again as she watched Wyatt get some pictures from the other side of the foot.

“I know. I don’t blame you,” she said.

A few minutes later, Wyatt helped Larry Wainwright, white-haired and crane-like, board the
Ocean Bounty,
as Deputy Dwight Shultz held his black leather case for him.

“Well, well,” Larry said, as he peered at the foot over his bifocals. He grabbed Wyatt’s hand to hold himself steady as he gingerly knelt down.

They watched him lean in and stare at it up close for a minute.

“What do you think, Larry?” Wyatt asked.

Larry looked over his shoulder and craned his neck to look up at Wyatt. “Well, it’s not a good candidate for reattachment, I can tell you that.”

A
fter taking the
statements of Axel and his crew, Maggie and Wyatt took the department boat back to the dock the SO used in Apalachicola, just next to Sea-Fair, Bennett Boudreaux’s seafood processing business.

The Franklin County Sheriff’s Office was located in Eastpoint, connected to Apalachicola on one side by the John Gorrie Memorial Bridge and to St. George Island on the other by Hwy 300 or the causeway.
 

Apalachicola was a throwback to an earlier time, and looked more like coastal Connecticut than most people’s visions of Florida. Located in the Panhandle, about an hour southwest of Tallahassee, it was primarily a fishing town, famous for its Apalachicola oysters and Gulf shrimp. Like nearby Gulf towns in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, Apalach had been hit hard by disasters both natural and oil-made, but it had a small tourist trade that managed to keep it afloat when fishing and oystering got hard.

Tourists came for the oysters, the fishing, the beaches of St. George Island, and the nine hundred historic buildings turned into gift shops, nautical art galleries, and restaurants. The town had one traffic light, a passing acquaintance with severe weather, and fewer than three thousand residents. It had been Maggie’s home her entire life and she loved it, and the people in it, fiercely.

After getting the boat stowed away, Maggie and Wyatt walked across the oyster shell parking lot toward their cars. Maggie was just under five-foot three, and with her slight frame and long, dark brown hair, she looked younger than her thirty-seven years, especially walking next to Wyatt. Wyatt was eleven years her senior and stood more than a foot taller. His moustache was also quite a bit more impressive than Maggie’s, and the tinge of gray in his thick brown hair lent him an air of dignity that his dimples and occasional goofiness tended to ruin. But, while he had a knack for one-liners and a laid-back demeanor, he was sharp, dedicated, and occasionally intimidating.

He and Maggie approached their cars, his department cruiser and her ten-year old black Jeep Cherokee, and Wyatt took off his SO cap, and ran a hand through his damp hair before putting the hat back on.

“So what do you think?” he asked.

“You got me,” Maggie answered. “It looked a little too neat for a propeller.”

“Yeah. I didn’t see anything that looked like a nick on the rest of the leg bone there.”

“I don’t know,” Maggie said. “Drug deal gone bad?”

“Maybe.” Wyatt leaned up against his door. “So, I’ve been thinking about our first date.”

“Yeah? Did we have fun?” Maggie asked, smiling.

“You’re precious. No, I was thinking that we should have one.”

Last week, after several months of occasional light flirtation punctuated by the odd mutual stare, Maggie and Wyatt had had what Wyatt now called “The Test Kiss”. The test, on Wyatt’s part, was whether Maggie was genuinely interested in him. On Maggie’s part, it was an experiment to see if she could be comfortable kissing anyone other than the ex-husband that she had loved and been best friends with since fifth grade.
 

They both passed, but a Sheriff dating one of his two investigative officers would not go over very well, although if he were dating Terry Coyle, it would be even less well-received, especially by Terry’s wife.

“Well, I’m okay with that,” Maggie said. She opened her cargo door and put her crime scene case inside.

“Good. I was thinking you should come to my house for dinner.”

“You want me to come to your house for our first date?”

“Well, it is more fun if we’re both in attendance.”

“Isn’t that a little more questionable than being seen out in public?”

“People see us eating out together all the time,” Wyatt said.

“Yeah, with guns on, in broad daylight.”

“The Jorgensen’s are in bed by seven and the guy that lives on the other side of me has an illegal cable hookup, so I don’t think he’s going to be a problem.”

Maggie smiled at him. “Do you cook?”

“I am a man, as an investigator of your caliber has probably noted. I grill.”

“David cooked on the stove, too.”

“David is a pantywaist,” Wyatt said mildly. “Do you want to come?”

“Yeah, of course I do.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do. Tomorrow night okay?”

“Okay.”

“Okay.” He stared at Maggie, as though he wasn’t sure what to say next.
 

“Do you need me to sign something?” she asked, grinning.

“Or we could skip it.”

“I’m kidding. Yeesh.”
 

Wyatt grinned at her and pulled his keys out of his pocket, opened his door.

Maggie opened her own door. “Hey, we still have some time before Woody goes to press,” she said, speaking of the editor of the town’s weekly paper. “I think we should give this to him, see if he’ll find room for it.”

“Well, he’d probably have to ruffle some feathers over at the Junior League, boot the coverage of their bi-monthly meeting.”

“Maybe some oysterman or shrimper saw something out on the Bay that he doesn’t know he saw yet.”

Wyatt nodded. “Maybe. Why don’t you run over there and ask him?”

“I can’t. He’s still pissed at me.”
 

“Oh, yeah,” Wyatt said.

In last week’s edition, he’d referred to Grace Carpenter, the young girl who’d jumped from the bridge, as ‘a drug dealer’s teenaged girlfriend’. She’d been much more than that, and Maggie had confronted him more loudly than she’d intended at Delores’s Sweet Shoppe. It had ruined his appreciation of his morning cinnamon roll, and he hadn’t spoken to her last Saturday when they’d seen each other at Battery Park.
 

 
“Never mind, I’ll go,” Wyatt said. “Why don’t you go back to the office and see if we missed a missing person.”

“Okay. I’ll see you later.”

They both got into their cars, and Wyatt let Maggie pull out first. She stopped halfway out and rolled down her passenger window.

“Maybe you should take him some cinnamon rolls,” she said.

Wyatt put his car in gear and rolled his eyes at her. “Don’t tell me how to do sheriff-y stuff.”

Maggie was stopped at the one red light downtown, on Hwy 98, when she decided to make a right, rather than a left.
 

Apalachicola wasn’t like other places on either of Florida’s coasts. It didn’t have any suburbs or McDonalds or even a Walmart, something of which the residents were quite proud. There was no sprawl; there was just downtown and not downtown. What Apalach lacked in square miles, it made up for with historic ambience. What it lacked in big commerce, it made up for with an actual soda shop and more than its fair share of good raw bars, in a per capita sort of way.

It was only a few blocks from the traffic light to the Apalachicola City Cemetery.

Maggie drove in, parked her Jeep, and walked between the graves and the palms and the live oaks. The sun was already blistering and its light was so harsh and so white that it faded what color there was in the old cemetery. Green became gray, gray became white and white just disappeared.
 

Although rare for the end of June, there was no rain in the forecast other than the usual summer shower, which arrived somewhere around three in the afternoon every day and evaporated by three-thirty. Maggie sucked a hot lungful of the morning air and wished for a tropical depression.

Maggie looked at the small, simple headstone, which said only
Grace Carpenter
, and below that
1996-2015
. Maggie and her parents had paid for the headstone, and Maggie had wanted it to say something more. Maybe to say that she was a good mother. But Grace had had her newborn taken away, as well as the two little children belonging to her now dead boyfriend, meth dealer Richard Alessi, because she’d been foolish and lonely and plain enough to fall in with a man like Ricky.
 

It hadn’t mattered that Grace, bony and small and brave, had, of her own volition, put herself in danger by trying to help Maggie to arrest Alessi. It hadn’t mattered that she’d done it to give her child, and his children, a better life.
 

Grace had known she wouldn’t get her kids back, even though Maggie had promised to find help. Grace had known the workings of Children’s Services better than Maggie did, and she’d driven to the bridge. It just didn’t seem right to Maggie to mention on the headstone that she’d loved her children.

But the guys from the Sheriff’s office and the Apalachicola PD had known, and they’d all chipped in to pay for the plot. It had been a small service, just Maggie and Wyatt and a few of the officers who had worked the Alessi case. Maggie had gotten her ex-husband, David, to come, and they’d stood under a tin-colored sky while he played
Wayfaring Stranger
on his guitar. Then they’d all walked away and left her as alone as she’d been most of her short life.

Oddly, the casket had been paid for by Bennett Boudreaux.
 

Boudreaux was Apalachicola’s version of a crime boss or head of a Mafia family, though he’d never been convicted of a crime and was Cajun by birth rather than Italian. He owned several seafood-related businesses in town and several in his home state of Louisiana. He sponsored community events, had his picture taken with local politicians, and his son Patrick was the Assistant State’s Attorney for Franklin County. It was all very cozy and polite, but a lot of people were afraid of Boudreaux and most of them had a reason to be.

But Boudreaux had actually tried to use his influence to help Grace, at Maggie’s request. It just hadn’t come through in time.

Maggie squinted up at the sun and sighed. Then she kissed a finger, touched it to the headstone, and turned and walked away.