Soundkeeper (26 page)

He crawled back to the motor and tilted it out of the water to see what was wrong. When the propeller came out of the water he saw it was choked with weeds, and he was grateful it was such a minor problem. He began to pull the weeds and grass away from the propeller and cut his finger on one of the knife-sharp blades. Just as he got the last of the grass off of the propeller, a wave rolled into the back of the boat and drenched him.

The anchor wasn’t holding and the boat was taking the waves against her stern, the lowest part of the boat. Gallons of heavy water rushed in and Hall knew the boat would swamp if he took many more waves like that one. Another wave came into the boat and Hall tilted the motor back into the water and turned the key. The battery was strong and the engine turned over willingly but would not start. Hall looked at his depth gauge and watched the water get deeper and deeper. He was being pushed out into Port Royal Sound toward the open Atlantic Ocean.

Gale saw the lightning flash and without thought began counting. The storm was getting closer, and she wondered in which direction it was headed. There was no wind flowing into the stagnant pilothouse of the barge, and Gale reasoned the storm was behind them and believed it would soon overtake the slow barge on its path to the sea. Gale knew Blondie was getting ready to do something when he began to look around in every direction. She knew it was time.

“Stand up,” Blondie ordered.

She stood and stretched her arms and legs. Arnold’s blood stained her warm up suit and her running shoes. She looked out the window and saw she had been right about the storm. It was going to catch them. A slight breeze came through the open door, and she smelled rain on the wind. The smell of rain always brought a smile to her face. She inhaled deeply through her nose and closed her eyes.

Blondie had a greasy crescent wrench in his hand and hit Gale on the back of her head as hard as he could. She fell against a window and her lip burst against the glass, smearing it with blood. She landed in an awkward jumble on the steel deck with blood pouring from her scalp. He drew back with the wrench to hit her again, but stopped. He remembered the blood from Arnold, all over the bedroom and all over him. He didn’t bring a change of clothes on the boat.

After unfastening the chain from the pipe, Blondie dragged Gale’s limp body from the wheelhouse and threw her down into the hopper area of the boat, on top of the last load of dirt. He took the blue plastic tarp and pulled it over her body just as the rain and hail began to fall.

Panic began to rise in Hall’s throat. The waves were getting stronger and pounded the small craft so hard Hall kept getting knocked to his knees. He tightened the straps on his life preserver and reached for the marine radio.

“Any station, any station, any station. This is Foxtrot-Whiskey-Sierra 3-4-9 requesting assistance.”

Hall un-keyed the microphone and waited for a response. The Coast Guard, Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office, and dozens of commercial and private craft monitored the emergency channel day and night, but no one responded. Hall tried his broadcast several more times, forgetting that he had folded down his antenna in preparation for the storm. As a result his radio signal was only traveling a few yards from his boat.

When Hall finally realized no one heard his calls for help he began to calm down. He assessed his situation, starting with the worst case scenario: capsizing or swamping. The water temperature was in the mid-seventies, so hypothermia would be hours away. The wind was pushing him east, into the ocean, but the tide was stemming his progress somewhat. There was enough foam floatation under the bow and console of the boat to keep it from sinking even if it was upside-down. He crawled to the bow locker and took a dock line out of it. If the boat did go over, he wanted to stay with it. A boat was a lot easier to find than a single small human being, bobbing in the waves. He tied the line to the seat post and coiled the rest of it on the deck next to him, ready to grab if he needed to.

After ten minutes Hall began to wonder how big the storm was. He was still being stung by wind and hail, and the waves were still steep and large. Then he saw the edge of the storm, a faint line of light underneath the black clouds. But the edge of the storm never moved closer, and he realized he was caught in the storm and was moving with it out to sea. He was at its mercy until it ran out of energy.

Chapter Forty-Three

Blondie was going to beat the storm. The engine on the old barge was running smoothly, and he was going to make it out of Port Royal Sound and into the Atlantic before the wind picked up to any degree. Since the storm was coming from inland, he planned to turn south and let the land mass of Hilton Head Island shelter him from the brunt of the storm. This was his last load and he would wait an hour or so, until twilight, and dump his cargo just off the beach. The dirt and chemicals would foul the beach, and he wondered what early rising beachcomber would find the body.

With the exception of his horribly swollen testicles and bruised face, everything was going well. He had almost fifty grand in cash, and his Trans Am was stashed at a hotel in Savannah. He didn’t have a partner to split the proceeds with any longer, and as soon as the load was gone he would take the barge to a broker in Beaufort and wait for a check to arrive in his post office box. There was nothing at the trailer that led back to him except for the stripper who ran away, but she had no idea who he really was. Wherever he ended up he would use another name, become someone else, hang out at topless clubs and wait for opportunity to come knocking. It always did. There were always people out there who needed someone else to do their dirty work for them.

Blondie had made the trip out of the sound several times with Arnold, and even though he had never piloted the boat he paid attention just in case he ever got pissed off enough to actually throw Arnold overboard. That was paying off now. He saw the edge of the island to his right and waited until he was far enough past the beach to begin his turn. Arnold always followed the line of buoys out to sea, but there was no need for him to do that now. He wanted to drop the load in close to shore, drop off the boat, and get out of town.

As the boat began to swing around, Blondie noticed the motion of the waves for the first time. He attributed it to the wind from the storm, but he was wrong. By not following the marked channel out into the ocean he was cutting across Joiner Banks. Five hours from now, when the tide was full, there would be ten feet of water over the shoals. Since the barge only needed six feet of water to float, he would have slipped right over the shallow bottom without any problem at all. But now there was only two feet of water above the sandbar and the bottom of the barge plowed into the sand and mud.

With the wind, the current, and waves Blondie didn’t immediately realize he was in trouble. Since the engine was still engaged, the energy from the prop pushed the stern of the barge to the left and it wasn’t until Blondie saw the beach houses of Port Royal Plantation directly ahead that he realized something was wrong.

Unlike an outboard or stern-drive boat, on which the propeller actually moved left and right to steer a boat, the barge had a fixed propeller directly in front of a large rudder. Steerage was accomplished by deflecting the flow of the water against the blade of the rudder. Since the barge was aground there was no flow of water past the rudder and turning the wheel had no effect at all. When he realized that the barge wasn’t responding to the wheel, Blondie redlined the engine and pushed himself further on the sandbar. By the time he thought to reverse the engine he was already stuck fast.

He put the engine in neutral, stepped out of the pilothouse and realized what he had done. His curse was drowned out by a tremendous peal of thunder. The lightning was so close when Blondie finally caught his breath from the scare he could smell the ozone in the air.

He was more angry than scared. There wasn’t enough water to float his barge, much less sink it. He was only two-hundred yards from shore, and by the looks of things he could have walked to the beach and not gotten his shoulders wet. But he couldn’t abandon ship because he didn’t want anyone to put the contaminated soil, the dead bitch, and the barge all together. Too many people had seen him on the boat when they fueled it up or when they docked in Beaufort for repairs. The cops might look for him for a little while for abandoning a boat and dumping some contaminated dirt, but they would look a lot harder and longer for a murder suspect.

He had no idea if the tide was rising or falling or what the wind from the impending storm might do. He only knew he had to move the boat soon, before some nosey do-gooder on the beach reported a boat stranded on the shoals. Wouldn’t those crew-cut young Coasties get a big kick out of finding him with a dead body when they boarded the barge to help him out? He reached for the throttle to try and reverse off of the sandbar one more time, but his hand brushed the hydraulic lever for the hopper and he knew how to make his boat float once again.

Every time they had dumped a load of contaminated soil Blondie had noticed the barge shuddered and shook as the dirt fell out of the bottom of the hopper. One day when he had loaded soil onto the barge he noticed how much lower the boat rode in the water when it was full of dirt. It was a significant difference. All he had to do was release the load now, and he could float back into the sound. The way the storm looked no one would be out on the beach to find the body until morning anyway.

Blondie nudged the boat into reverse, but kept the throttle at idle speed. When he floated free he wanted just enough speed to clear the sandbar. He grabbed the hopper control and moved it to “release”, but the barge didn’t shudder or shake or float off of the sandbar. The only thing he noticed was the hissing sound coming from below decks: The hydraulic fitting had failed again. Blondie unleashed a torrent of curses and picked up the bloody wrench from the deck. He opened the hatch to the engine room and climbed down into the dingy, dark compartment.

Hall continued to move with the storm at about fifteen knots, headed due east. In front of him he could see nothing but black sky. Behind him he saw an occasional glimpse of light gray. He didn’t think he was out of the sound and into the ocean yet, but knew he had to be close. A hailstone had fractured the screen of his depth finder, so now that reference was gone as well. While he drifted, the boat stayed mostly bow-to the wind thanks to the drag from the dangling anchor, and he tried several more times to start the motor without success. Hall sat on the deck behind the console and was shielded from the worst of the rain and hail while he looked and prayed for the break in the storm he knew would eventually come.

When his boat slammed into the stranded barge he flew sideways and smashed his nose against the engine cowling. His blood tasted coppery on his tongue. When his eyes focused he turned to see what he’d struck and saw a black and rusty metal wall towering above his boat. Although he wasn’t sure what happened he scrambled to his feet and grabbed the line from beside him on the deck. It appeared he had blown into an anchored boat, and he wanted to tie his patrol boat to it before the wind pushed him away. The rails on the barge were too high for him to reach, and there was nothing else on the side of the boat to secure his line to. The wind was pushing him along the side of the anchored boat, slamming it hard enough that Hall heard the fiberglass hull of his boat crack and pop every time they came together. In a few seconds he would scrape past the end of the boat and would be adrift again. He had to do something right now.

Chapter Forty-Four

Blondie heard a thump against the barge, but the thick steel hull and several tons of dirt muffled the sound, and he was too occupied with the stubborn fitting to worry about what the noise was. Finally, after scraping his knuckles and rounding off one of the bolts that secured the hydraulic hose, he thought he had fixed it.

He crawled out of the hatch and was surprised by how cold the rain was and how much the small hailstones hurt. He could no longer see the shore and could barely see the bow of the boat, only forty-odd feet from the pilothouse. This time he heard and felt the noise at the same time. He looked forward, and halfway to the front of the boat someone in a bright yellow rain coat was pulling himself onto the barge. The person was tying a rope to the railing and when a gust of wind blew his raincoat open, Blondie saw a gun and a badge.

The barge wasn’t pitching and rolling like his patrol boat had been, but it still took Hall a moment to adjust to the rocking of the larger vessel. He scanned the deck and all he saw was a large blue plastic tarp and the pilot house aft. Several parts of the tarp were loose and the wind was threatening to rip the entire covering loose. Hall started to walk across the tarp and lost his footing on the slick and uneven surface. He began to fall and braced himself for a hard landing. His knees hit first, but instead of a hard jolt he was relieved to find a cushioned landing. A strong chemical odor caught in his nose.

Hall stood up, only to fall again, and decided to crawl the rest of the way to the pilothouse. He got ready to climb up to the raised portion of the boat and the tarp in front of him tore loose in the wind and began to attack him. The metal grommet in the tarp stung his face and hands, and he struggled to crawl past it. The weight of his body finally subdued the errant tarp and he crawled over the edge of it into the muddy dirt it had been covering.

With perfect clarity Hall knew this was the barge he had been searching for. They must have anchored the boat here and abandoned it, even if he didn’t know where “here” was. As soon as the storm cleared he would call for help and find out who owned the boat. He had them now! His feelings of triumph vanished when the wind picked up the tarp again, and he saw a bloody human head lying in the dirt.