I washed my face, ate a few bites of a hard aged croissant from Susan's refrigerator, and stuck out along the bright morning beach in the direction of my pastel palace. Purcell had returned my Jeep to the parking s.p.a.ce beneath the house. Inside, I half expected the place to be stained somehow with Purcell's intrusion, but everything was the way it had been since I arrived. I changed out of Bird's clothes and into a pair of jeans and a faded red pullover. I traded sandy running shoes for New Balance cross trainers, packed up, and left. My plan was to drive over to East-point and look for Peety Boy's friend Billy Teeter.

I tossed my duffel in the backseat. The keys were in the ignition, and an envelope had been snapped under the windshield wiper like a parking ticket I was inside the Jeep when I saw it. Stepping out, I pulled up the wiper and lifted out a white business envelope gone floppy with salt spray from a night facing the waves. The moist envelope tore easily and unevenly. It held a single sheet of copy paper.

Report on Carli Monroe (alias) Name: Carli Poultrez Age: 15 Hair: Black Eyes: Brown Approx: 5'4", 110 lbs.

Poultrez is a runaway minor from Gloucester, Ma.s.sachusetts. (Address: 2128 Cleaverhead Road.) She has a record going back three years as a repeat runaway. Her father, Russell (Rus) Poultrez, owns and operates a fishing vessel out of Gloucester.

Rus Poultrez Contact Report That was it. Before making the copy, someone had placed two large Post-it notes over the rest of the page, including, I guessed, the name and signature of the investigator. Also, I could see the outline of a smaller Post-it at the top covering a letterhead.

I removed my keys from the ignition and went back inside to call Susan with more bad news. When she answered, she sounded a little better than she had the night before.

I asked, "How's Carli?"

Susan said, "She seems fine. But then, she always does. This has to be wearing on her, though."

"How are you?"

"A lot better. Thanks. I'd kind of like to see you, even though I know that's not really in the cards right now. But I wanted you to know that I want to. Losing 'Scattered Sh.e.l.ls' was difficult for me because I'll always love Bird. But that doesn't mean I'm not ready to see you and enjoy being with you." She hesitated. "Unless I'm taking too much for granted."

"You're not." And she wasn't, but, for some reason, she was making me uncomfortable. I retreated into the business at hand. "I'm sorry to do this to you, but I'm afraid I have some more disturbing news. Purcell knows who Carli is."

"Yes, you told me that last night. You said he's looking for both of us."

"No. You don't understand. He knows who Carli really is." I told her what the report said. I also suggested that I'd rather deliver the news to Carli in person, so I could advise her on how to proceed.

"Are you coming back then?"

"Probably tomorrow. Today, I've got to go find an old shrimper named Billy Teeter."

"There's a seafood shack over in Eastpoint called Teeter's."

"That's the guy."

"You may as well go get some breakfast then. The places over there that open on Sunday don't open until one. You know. Church."

I told Susan again I'd see her Monday or Tuesday, and hung up.

The island had five restaurant-slash-bars, and they all had signs advertising Sunday brunch. I chose the Pelican's Roost, where Carli had worked. Susan said it was good, and I thought that I probably needed to look around the place sooner or later anyway. So I turned in and parked in the gravel lot and stepped back out into the warm morning air.

A pair of plategla.s.s windows stared blankly out at the parking lot from either side of the front door. I turned the k.n.o.b and stepped inside. The waiting area was the bar, but there was no wait. Another nut-brown waitressa"this one with long brown hair and crow's feeta"led me up narrow steps to the second floor, which was furnished with a dozen or so round tables and two long picnic benches hidden beneath plastic, red-and-white-checked tablecloths. Wide, crank-out windows lined both long walls, and a door in the short front wall led out onto a small balcony or deck overlooking the parking lot and a crowded queue of beach houses across the way. Ocean breeze wafted in through open windows on one wall and out through matching windows on the opposite wall.

All in all, the place was simple and more pleasant than it sounds.

Seven or eight people were scattered among the tables. My suntanned waitress smiled and patted my back in a mildly flirtatious way and suggested that I might want to eat out on the deck. I said okay, and she led me out and deposited me near the right front corner where I had a narrow view of the water between two rows of anorectic, architecturally strident sliver-houses.

After she left, I looked out at the distant wedge of water for a while. I moved on to an examination of the skinny vacation houses and the mostly deserted street. I watched a bouncing, tube-topped jogger until she was out of sight. Finally, I glanced down at the parking lot.

This was not going to be an enjoyable meal. There, in the driver's seat of a Cobra convertible, sat gun-toting, knife-poking, paint-dribbling Sonny. And he was watching me with those jittery, psychotic eyes of his.

chapter fourteen.

Either Sonny was scaling new heights of incompetency, or I was supposed to know he was following me. The Cobra's top was down, and he had parked only ten or twelve feet from my Jeep in an otherwise empty section of the lot. So, considering how rattled I guessed I was supposed to be by Sonny's blatant disrespect for my privacy, I had three obvious alternatives. One, I could get mad and beat him about the head and shoulders, which would net me either an arrest or an a.s.s whipping. Two, I could respect his wishes and panic, which was what Purcell was counting on. Or, three, I could decide to mess with him.

Sonny may have been a professional thug, but he still looked like a dumba.s.s to me.

When my waitress returned, I ordered steak and eggs with an English m.u.f.fin and a double order of cheese grits on the side. Contrary to popular belief outside the South, if properly prepared and eaten while steaming hot, cheese grits are actually pretty d.a.m.n good and almost identical to polenta, which every pseudo-sophisticate in the country likes to see piled next to grilled medallions of veal. But in this instance, I didn't much care whether the grits were well made, and I purposely let them chill into a thick glutenous ma.s.s while I forked beef and eggs into my mouth.

I was full. Time to make grit bombs. I pulled four paper napkins from the dispenser on my table and put three large dollops of cheese grits on each napkin. My waitress came out and gave me a concerned look. I said, "Saving them for later." She smiled the way people smile at paranoid schizophrenics in Central Park and went back inside.

As I pulled the napkins' four corners up and around each grit wad and twisted the ends together, Sonny looked up and gave me a self-satisfied grin, and, for the first time, I noticed the blurry prison tattoo Joey had described. On Sonny's left arm was a large, deep-blue dagger with three letters above its handle and three more beneath its point. I couldn't make out the initials, but they had to be the R.I.P. and R.E.T. Joey had seen on Hayc.o.c.k's partner that violent night in the parking lot of Mother's Milk in Apalachicola.

I smiled back at him. Good to see you too, a.s.shole. Something seemed to catch the corner of Sonny's eye, and he turned toward the bike path running next to the street to check out a plump blonde in a thong. As he turned away, I completed my first package by dunking it in ice water just before I stood, took aim, and literally creamed him behind his left ear.

The man said some really bad words.

While he screamed, I dunked the second grit ball. He ducked. This, I thought, is fun. I let him duck. This sticky handful was headed for the center of his shiny black hood. It hit with a deeply satisfying thud and splattered like a baseball-sized wad of pelican droppings. Sonny jumped up from behind the dash to see what had happened. I was waiting. d.a.m.n. I missed him and sent a thick schmear of cheese grits across his leather seats.

Sonny went nuts. The car door flew open, and he jumped out onto the gravel parking lot, screaming, flailing his arms, and generally cussing a lot. His sentences were liberally sprinkled, I noticed, with the words "kill" and "dead" and seemed to be directed at me and those I hold dear. I dunked the last grit ball and let it fly. He tried to catch ita"no doubt intending to send it back my waya"but you can't really catch a wet paper napkin full of grit paste. It exploded in his hand, splattering a nicely formed pattern of cheese grits across his face, neck, and chest. That just about did it. Sonny charged the restaurant through the front door downstairs.

I had already dropped twenty dollars on the table. No reason to stick around now. I picked up my steak knife, stepped over the railing, and carefully dropped eight or nine feet to the ground. My knees would pay later, but now I was too pumped to care.

Pulling keys from my pocket, I sprinted over to Sonny's forty-thousand-dollar Mustang, plunged the serrated steak knife into the side of his tire, twisted with all my strength, and left it there. I had turned back toward the Jeep and had just shot the doors open with the remote when I heard a murderous yell from the restaurant deck. I caught a blur of Sonny jumping as I scrambled into the Jeep and jammed the key in the ignition. Good Jeep. It cranked and, flooring the gas even before I found reverse, I spewed a dusty semicircle of bleached gravel and broken sh.e.l.ls across the parking lot. As I dropped the transmission into drive, I hazarded a glance at what I was sure would be Sonny crouched in a shooter's stance, unloading a full clip in my direction. What I saw instead was Sonny rolling on his back in sand and gravel, holding his left knee in the air and gripping it with both hands. His mouth gaped open, his face burned red, and tendons strained beneath the thin skin on his neck. He seemed to be screaming, but by then I was gone.

I was looking at maybe forty-five minutes to an hour before Sonny reported my escape to Purcell. First, the pain and the anger would have to subside to a point that would allow rational thought, or whatever Sonny used instead. Then Sonny would have to think of a way to explain to his boss that I got away by attacking him with an a.r.s.enal of cheese grits.

h.e.l.l, it might take more than an hour.

Only a hundred yards down, I swerved right onto the causeway and backed off on the gas. I didn't think Sonny would or even could follow, but, whether he could or not, a two-lane road with deep, choppy water on each side is no place to play chase. Better to be caught, I thought, than wind up breathing salt water with my headlights buried in the sandy bottom.

But he didn't catch me or, as far as I could see, even try, and after four miles of glancing back and forth from the wide pavement ahead to the narrow strip of blacktop in my rearview mirror, I rolled onto the mainlanda"tailless. Less than a quarter mile in, a county road angled off to the right. I followed it through stands of scruffy coastal pines into the quintessential shrimping village of Eastpoint.

The right side of the road was perfecta"jumbled, rusting, ramshackle, and everything a seafaring town should be. Tinroofed seafood shacks and shrimp-processing plants fronted the street and backed up to long, concrete docks that reached out into Apalachicola Bay like gray fingers separated by oily water and a scattering of white shrimp boats with red and blue trim.

Unfortunately, across the road from the local shrimp entrepreneurs, the place got ugly fast. A plastic orange Citgo station squatted next to a new brick-and-plategla.s.s Piggly Wiggly, which led to a blue plastic gas station that offered a free car wash with each fill-up. I decided Peety Boy's friend Billy Teeter would have a place on the watera"as much because that's the direction I wanted to look as anythinga"so that's where I concentrated my search. Although, considering that one can drive completely through Eastpoint in less than five minutes, "search" may be a more impressive description than the process warranted.

Maybe two minutes after leaving the causeway, Teeter's came up on the right. I wasn't much worried now about Sonny. Even if he had recovered from his hurt knee and stabbed tire, he would a.s.sume I had turned west toward Apalachicola, Panama City, and Mobile. Just to be sure, though, I checked the mirror once more for his psychotic presence before pulling up onto a sandy parking area just deep enough to hold the Jeep without donating a b.u.mper to pa.s.sing traffic.

Teeter's seafood shack was just thata"unpainted, weathered boards beneath a rusted tin roof and a sagging front porch made for sitting. Two aluminum patio chairs flanked the door. A youngish woman sat in one. An old man suitable for casting in Captains Courageous lounged in the other.

With miles of sapphire waters, distant islands, and endless blue skies stretched out behind them, these locals spent their days watching traffic pa.s.s in front of a Citgo station.

I cut the engine, stepped out onto the sandy yard, and walked two steps to the bottom of Teeter's three wooden steps. The woman spoke. "How you doin' today?"

I told her I was just fine, and that seemed to genuinely please her. I said, "Peety Boy sent me over here."

The old man perked up. "Me and Peety Boy grew up together." He smiled, and a mouthful of tobacco-stained teeth peeked out shyly from the thick brown and gray brush that obscured his face from the nostrils and cheekbones down.

I asked, "Are you Billy Teeter?"

"Yessir, that I am."

The young woman said, "You got the right place. Peety Boy sends folks over all the time when he ain't got something they want. You just come on inside, we got fresh shrimp off the boat this morning. Fresh oysters. Crabs. Crab legs. And we got some frozen crab cakes that taste like something you got off the menu at a restaurant."

I smiled. The old man looked happy to sit and talk, but this young one was looking for a sale. I said, "I might be interested in looking at that in a minute, but Peety Boy sent me over here because I need some information about who might have been out on the bay the other night. He said Billy Teeter would be able to help if anyone could."

The old man looked at the younger woman and said, "Go on in and shuck some of them oysters. We're gonna have plenty of folks coming by after church." But, before he had even spoken, the woman was on her feet and headed inside. I couldn't decide whether she intended to confer privately or just didn't want to be part of what we were going to talk about. The old man said, "What'd Peety Boy volunteer me for?" As he spoke, Billy Teeter sat forward in his chipped metal chair, pulled off his Bubba Gump Shrimp cap, slicked a few long strands of gray hair back over his spotted bald pate, and resettled the cap.

"Mr. Teeter, Peety Boy didn't volunteer you. He just said you were somebody I could ask about boats in Apalachicola Bay without getting into trouble for asking.

"My name is Tom McInnes, and I'm from Mobile. I'm trying to find out if any boats just up from Central or South America might have been laying off Dog Island one night last week." Teeter harrumphed. I've always read about people harrumphing, but never knew exactly what that was until that old shrimper did it. I was losing him. When I had become nothing but a memory for the old man, he would have to go on living there on the Gulf. He would have to keep living among men and women who might work in a little contraband when the fishing got slow and who wouldn't appreciate Teeter discussing that embarra.s.sing sideline with an outsider. From his viewpoint, there was no reason on earth to tell some rich-looking city guy about things that weren't anybody's business. I decided to get very honest. "Peety Boy sent me because I'm trying to help a young girl in trouble. Leroy Purcell's mixed up in it, and he's got some crazy-looking sonofab.i.t.c.h named Sonny following me around. Now, I know all that sounds like a really good reason to go inside your place there and leave me alone, but I need help. I can take care of myself, but there's a teenage girl in a world of trouble, and I don't know how else to get her out of it but to figure out what's going on down here."

Billy Teeter leaned back in his chair and studied me. I shut up and let him.

Teeter shifted his weight to one hip and fished a mashed pack of Kools out of the back pocket of his khakis. He shook two brown filters out of the pack with a practiced flip of his wrist and extracted one with small nicotined teeth. Then he winked at me and motioned with his hand at the door the young woman had gone through. "Julie don't like me to smoke these." Teeter paused to fire the end with an old-fashioned chrome flip lighter. As he clicked the lighter shut and pushed it down inside his hip pocket, I glanced at a worn bra.s.s Marine Corps globe-and-eagle insignia on its side. He said, "What she don't know ain't gonna hurt her, is it?"

I thought about the absurdity of a still hard-as-nails World War II marine having to sneak a smoke on his porch, and, without really wanting to, I thought some about getting old in America. Oddly, I thought about it quite a lot in one of those autopilot flashes of connected thoughts that race through the brain in the midst of doing other things.

I agreed with him. "It won't hurt her a bit."

He asked, "What night?"

"Last Thursday."

"Off Dog Island, you say?" I nodded, and he thought some. "No way to know where somebody's coming from. See a fancy yacht anch.o.r.ed out there, you don't know if it's coming from Tampa or Timbuktu. So, there ain't no way to know if a vessel that might've been out there come in from where you're talking about." Teeter put the soles of his salt-crusted work boots up on the two-by-four railing and rocked up onto the back legs of his chair. He was killing the flattened Kool a quarter inch at a time, pulling thick lung-fulls of menthol smoke down into his chest and shooting them out through his mouth and nostrils. "Yessir, I was out on Thursday, and there was one of them fancy fibergla.s.s motor yachts out off Dog Island. Couldn't tell you where it come from, and it didn't have no name that you could see."

I was quickly becoming a big Billy Teeter fan. I motioned at the empty chair on the porch and said, "Mind if I sit down?"

"Don't mind a bit. Take a load off." Teeter lowered his voice to a conspiratorial level. "Want a cigarette?"

I smiled. "No. Thank you." Then I asked, "How can you remember so much about a no-name yacht you just happened to see one night last week?"

" 'Cause of just what you said. It didn't have no name. My grandboy, Willie, named for me, he seen this h.e.l.lacious big motor yacht laying up off Dog Island when we was out last Thursday. We had pretty much called it a night. So me and Willie made up our minds to cut over close to the thing and get a good look at it. You don't see many like that around here. Down around Tampa and Miami, sure. h.e.l.l yeah, you see 'em all the time. But not too many up this way, if you see what I'm saying. Anyway, we cruise over thinking maybe we'll look her over, maybe see some rich guy drinking champagne and lookin' at the stars." Lowering his voice again, now. "Willie, he's only nineteen, he thinks he might see some little rich girls in bikinis, you know. I told him it was too cold, but hope springs eternal, as they say." Now, Teeter raised his voice back to its normal level. "Anyhow, me and Willie pull up pretty close alongside, and, once Willie figures out there ain't no half-naked girls running around the deck, he sees that the vessel ain't got no name painted on it. I look, and he's almost right. Now, what it was was that somebody had taped a sheet of white plastic or something over the name."

Billy Teeter flipped the b.u.t.t of his Kool out into the sand. Then he looked back over his shoulder at the door, and whispered, "Reckon I'll smoke one more."

I waited while he got it going. "You said the yacht had its name covered?"

"Yep. That's right. Had it covered right up. So, you know, we figure they're up to no good, and Willie says we better get out of there. So, I take a turn around the thing and head home."

I was thinking this was all a little too neat. I said, "I guess Peety Boy sent me to the right place."

Teeter pulled hard at his Kool and let the heavy smoke puff out of his mouth and nose as he spoke. "Peety Boy already knew all this. Him and me talked about it last week the morning I got in. I reckon he just didn't figure it was his business to be telling you about it. He done the right thing by sending you over here, though."

"Mr. Teeter, I appreciate your telling me this. I don't know how it'll help my young friend yet, but every little bit helps." I stopped to think and said, "Can you describe the boat to me? I know it'd be a long shot, but I need to try to identify it if I can."

He smiled. "Sure. I can do that, but it ain't really necessary. What with the name covered up and all, I copied the registration number off the hull." He motioned inside. "I got it in the back there with the records of the catch that night."

I said, "You're kidding."

"No, sir."

I asked, "Why on G.o.d's green earth would someone cover a boat's name and not its registration numbers?"

" 'Cause of the Coast Guard." Teeter said, "Everybody names boats, but you don't have to. It ain't a law. People just do it. But you gotta register a boat, and you gotta have its registration numbers prominently displayed, as they say, on the hull. That's the law. So, a fella could get by with covering over the name, if that's what he wanted to do. But you cover over the registration numbers, and you're pretty much gonna get yourself boarded by the Coast Guard, if the ATF or the immigration folks don't get to you first."

"Will you give me the number?"

"I reckon. But listen, I know you say you're helping a little girl, and I believe you and all. But it wouldn't hurt my feelings none if you thought that number was worth a few dollars."

Strange. Peety Boy wouldn't take money when I offered it, and Billy Teeter had come right out and asked for it. But, if pressed, I couldn't tell you which was the better man. Different people have different rules and different needs. I pulled out my wallet and found a fifty-dollar bill. Teeter put his calloused hand out, and I pressed it into his palm. He said, "I appreciate it." Then he stood and walked inside. When he came back, he handed me a sc.r.a.p of brown wrapping paper with a dozen numbers and letters written on it in ballpoint pen. He said, "I copied it off for you. I need to hold on to the paper I wrote it on the other night. Got other stuff on it I need."

"How much money do you make in a good night on the water?"

Teeter looked guarded, but not offended. All he said was, "Depends."

I said, "If I paid you, say, two hundred dollars, would that be enough to get you to lay off shrimping for a night and take me out?"

"It'd be enough, depending on what you wanted to do when you got out there."

"Same thing you did last week. Just get a look at whoever's out there."

Teeter's eyes narrowed. "Two fifty."

I laughed out loud and walked over to shake his hand. "It's a deal. I'll give you as much notice as I can, but it may be a last-minute thing."

Teeter took the brown paper from my hand, pulled a ballpoint out of his shirt pocket, and jotted down a phone number. He said, "Just call me. If I'm here, I'll do it. If I ain't, that means I'm probably out working, and you'll have to get up with me when I get back in."

I thanked him again and trotted down the three wooden steps to my Jeep. As I pulled open the door, Teeter called out. "Mr. McInnes!" I stopped and looked at him. "You said a couple of names when you first got here."

"Leroy Purcell and Sonny?"

He nodded. "I don't mean to be talking out of school. But you be careful of them two. You hear me? You're messing around with people who'll cut your throat for looking at 'em wrong. And if you're getting in their business, you're asking for a heap of trouble."

"Why are you helping me then? Aren't you scared of them?"

Billy Teetera"seventy-something ex-Marine and secret menthol cigarette smokera"smiled the smile of the toughest kid in the Franklin County cla.s.s of '42 and made two knowing syllables of one short word. "She-it."

The drive to Mobile was excruciatingly, perhaps unnecessarily, long. Visions of Sonny lying in wait along the Panhandle's famous Highway 98, holdinga"in my imaginationa"a scoped sniper's rifle, encouraged me to find my way home along a network of interconnected county and state roads until I was out of Florida. Pelting Sonny with grit bombs had been stupid, but fun.

This scurrying along back country roads to avoid his wrath was even dumber, no fun at all, and more than a little humiliating.

It was nearly nine when I finally parked beneath a thick-branched water oak on Monterey Street next to Loutie's brick walkway. Stepping out into the spring night, I breathed in the old neighborhood smells of azaleas, bougainvillaea, wisteria, and the first gra.s.s clippings of the season. Aromatherapy. All thoughts of Leroy Purcell and psychotic Sonny dissolved and floated away on the soft mix of nostalgic scents as I walked across the bricks to the front door and rang the bell. I felt wonderful, right up until I felt the metallic press of a gun barrel in the small of my back.