Oil Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 4) (3 page)

There were no birds to be seen.

It took her two minutes to reach the jetty.

For some reason she had begun to walk faster. The only reason for this that she could imagine was that she wanted to meet the storm on its own ground and would have felt remiss had it found her on shore.

She clambered up onto the jetty, her sneakers slipping comfortingly as they always did, and her eyes falling on translucent shrimp shells and cast-off fishing bobbers.

It was a fine place to be.

The spray of the big waves, the fresh breeze that was getting stronger and wetter as she bent to walk into it, the straight road of fixed rock and concrete that extended unthinkingly before her, the lines of lightning that traced marquee lights in the ink behind them, the hulk of a great ponderous tanker that inched its way along some half mile from shore and thus now found itself just being rendered invisible by clouds and rain…

…all of these things were just impressions.

They kept her senses completely glutted.

She could smell and hear and taste and shudder at and celebrate them.

There was no room in her brain for anything else.

Nothing else at all.

Seeing was not remembering.

Tasting—and, yes, she could taste salt in the air and wind—was not remembering.

There was in her mind no place for a corp—

BOOM!

Yes, good thunder! Keep at it thunder!

BOOM!
 
BOOM!

The rain began spattering on her now; she could see its pellets dotting the water on either side of her and creating a filmy spray on the jetty in front of her.

BRRRRRROOOOOOM!

Better thunder, with a kind of consonant quality to it, a deep ‘rrrrr’ that added drama and discipline to what had been rather a perfunctory vowel performance that nature could easily have beaten, if it had tried.

It was trying now.

BROOOOOOOOM! BRRRRRRRROOOOOOM DAMN YOU!”

Yes. This was perfectly satisfactory thunder, playoff thunder, going all out on defense as well as offense, executing, seeing the whole field, raising its intensity level.

Then the rain hit for real.

It poured down on her from buckets. It drenched her.
 

There was no sound that she could think of that in any way imitated fierce rain, rain that came from some celestial fireman’s hose pointed directly down at the earth.

The closest thing she could come up with was a cross between a roar and a hiss; but since everything else was roaring and hissing—the huge breakers, the tanker’s claxon horn, the surging swells out in the channel, the relentless thunder—she gave up all attempts to subdivide whatever was going on around her, and decided it was time to go crabbing.

She was not really going crabbing, for she had with her only bait and not the apparatus: string, meat-piercer, etc.

But she had no desire to catch crabs, only to watch them—and so the rest was not necessary.

She could hardly see now, the world having transformed itself into a filmy gray scrim though which all objects appeared as either moving or fixed zombies—but she knew enough about where she was to remember a small niche in the boulders, a place where she could stand on flat surface, lean against a forty-five degree angled wall of rock, peer down into a natural pool, which emptied slightly and flooded and then emptied again with coming and going surges in the swells.

Where was it?

Aha. There.

She clambered down off the jetty and stood on the surface of the great rock, her canvass shoes soaked like washrags now, water pouring off her hooded visor, the spray from crashing waves drenching her down to up even as the rain drenched her up to down.

She squatted down and opened the carton of chicken livers.

BRRRRRROOOOOOMMM!

HISSSSSSSSSWSSSSSSSSSS!

TAKE THAT, YOU DRY LAND, YOU!

WANT TO MESS WITH THE OCEAN, DO YOU?

AND BRRRRROOOOM AGAIN!

AND HISSSSSSSSSSS AGAIN!

She let the fatty chicken liver drop into the natural pool beneath her, watching as it floated for an instant and then began sinking, an amorphous whitish blob of tissue that had once regulated matters of fowl waste excretion, but that now had nothing to do in the universe except sink.

Which it did.

Slowly, in water perhaps two feet deep, extraordinarily clear.

Sink.

Sink.

Moving back and forth as the whole hole that was a pool shuddered, and the waves crashed against the massive boulders protecting it.

There.

It was on the bottom now.

Being watched by unseen eyes, hidden behind crevices and jagged outpiercings underwater.

She continued to watch.

Nothing.

But nothing was going on in her brain, either.

She was only feeling: cold, wind blown, wet, soaked, feet drenched, eyes filmed over with spray, ears inundated by the cacophony of storm surge and downpour, palms scraping on jagged granite ridges…

…there.

There!

A dark shadow moved out from the rocks below the water’s surface.

It was a black hand inching its way forward, invisible fingers acting like feet to walk it as imperceptibly as moon tide toward the white patch that lured it.

A foot and a half away.

Six inches away.

And then it lurched forward, grasping the meat in what could now be recognized as claws, and ripping off shards of tissue which it began stuffing into its mouth.

There. She could see the whole crab.

Now that it was opening itself up, the yellow and blue of its legs and inner shell glimmered up from the water.

But here—on the other side of the pool’s bottom, appeared a second shadow.
 

Then another.

Then another.

She reached into the package, grasped a cool slimy chicken liver, and tossed it down into the rapidly enclosing circle of shells and claws beneath her.

Chomp.

Rip.

There was no caution at all in the eatery below her hand now. Just tearing and grasping and engorging and tearing more and ripping, and white shards of floating chicken flesh hanging in the pool water and buoying upward until grabbed by the pincers below, which were now waving in the dark sea like machetes.

And so were more sights and sounds added to the mix.

BRRRRROOOOOOOM!

HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!

RRRRRRIIPPPPPPPP!

CHOMPPPPPP!

God, wasn’t nature wonderful?

And so she simply sat for a time, until her package of bait was empty, and her new found friends, her small crusty pets, had given up finding anything more and had secreted themselves once again into the one bedroom, or two bedroom, or perhaps efficiency in-rock apartments they were short term leasing.

She looked up, having been thankfully oblivious even to the storm for the last ten minutes or so.

It was all changing now.

The light was different.

Rain still spattered down and pelleted the ocean, but the storm had passed and blue was beginning to replace purple.

Roar and hiss were beginning to give way to brooding moan that was the natural state of sea sound.

There. There was the sun.

It shone in morning brilliance on the eddying swells, glistening on the scudding whitecaps that were beginning to resume their normal attack on the granite rocks beside her.

And after five minutes it was all over.

A normal, summer, luscious as cream, sea gull screeching morning in Bay St. Lucy.

She made her way out of the small niche that had done her well for this orgy of feast watching, and up onto the jetty once again.

It was more drenched than ever of course, and she had to be even more careful than ever as she made her way back to shore.

Where she would do…what?

Surely there were more things that might take the place of remembering or thinking.

About corpses.

Damn.

There it was.

Why could one not sit huddled in storms, protected by granite boulders, watching animals tear apart and devour each other, forever?

Why did one have to return to unpleasant things?

Why…

“Nina!”

She looked up.

Had she been looking down?

Apparently, for she had not seen the figure that was striding out toward her, and now she did.

“Nina!”

Jackson Bennett.

What the hell was he doing here?

“Jackson!”

But here he was, or must have been, her greeting clearly having confirmed that fact.

And now here he was standing right before her, all six feet four of him, his great body at least two sizes two big for the London Fog trench coat that he wore.

“Nina, what are you doing out here?”

“Crabbing,” she said.

“In the storm?”

“Best time.”

“Are you all right?”

“Everybody,” she said, “seems to be asking me that these days.”

“Nina, I heard about this morning.”

“Yeah.”

“Moon called me. He asked me maybe to come out and check on you.”

“Thank you, Jackson. Thank you a lot.”

“Don’t think anything about it. It’s just…well, it must have been tough on you, finding that thing.”

“It’s my own fault. I shouldn’t go running.”

He shook his head.

“No, I guess you shouldn’t. But Nina…”

“Yes?”

“There’s something that you probably need to know.”

“All right. What is it, Jackson?”

“Nina, they’ve identified the body that you discovered.”

“Who is it?”

A voice within her said, ‘It’s no one now.’

But she ignored it.

Jackson said:

“It’s Edgar Ramirez, Nina.”

“What?”

“Edgar Ramirez.”

“Oh my God.”

“Yes. We’re all pretty shocked.”

“Sonia’s brother.”

“That’s him. The engineering student.”

“Jackson, what happened to him? Did he slip, or did a car…”

“Nobody knows.”

“Jackson…Sonia was on the basketball team. I coached her. And her younger brother has been out to my bungalow. He’s done some work for me.”

“I know, Nina.”

“But, but…where was Edgar working?”

“Apprenticing out on one of the deep sea rigs, apparently. I think it’s called The Aquatica. It’s more than ten miles out.”

“What was he doing in town?”

“No one knows.”

“Mrs. Ramirez…”

“Moon and several other people have been over there, and are there with her now.”

‘I’ll have to go. I’ll…I’ll bring her something.”

“She would appreciate that, I’m sure.”