The Empty Copper Sea (26 page)

"Now because it has Hub Lawless in the picture, it could be like thousands of other slides and prints that have come through here with the Lawless family on them. They talk about other people having a hard time on account of Hub taking off the way he did-I am the one really hurting. I can't even guess the thousands and thousands of feet of Super Eight movie film he took of those girls and his wife. And every time Hub went off hunting or fishing or cruising, he'd be back in with a dozen rolls of color to be developed. And he was gadgethappy. I must have sold him forty different cameras over the years. And lenses and tripods and monopods. Flash attachments, viewers, projectors, screens. Name it and he'd buy it. I took back a lot in trade, of course, but I can tell you Julia had a lot left out there for that garage sale. I went out and helped her price it out to move it, and I hear they did well getting rid of it at the prices I suggested."

"Did John Tuckerman ever bring the film in and pick it up?" the Sheriff asked.

"John? Sure. He was Hub's errand boy. It would be more often John than Hub when it came to picking up film."

"Did John take any of his own?"

"You know, I don't think he owned a camera. I know he used to take some pictures sometimes, for Hub, when Hub wanted himself in the picture, like with a big fish, something like that.

Snapshots. Aim and fire. Maybe he owned a camera. Maybe Hub gave him one. But John never seemed much interested."

"Did John pick up any film after Hub disappeared?"

"No. There wasn't any here. Hub stuck me for a hundred and something dollars on the books, an open account, when he took off."

"Did Hub get his pictures developed soon after he took them?"

Ben laughed. "Nearly always. But the man had too many cameras. And he had a habit of leaving exposed film in the cameras and forgetting what it was taken of. You can't do that with professional film and expect to get much. But you can leave amateur color film in a long time and not lose much. They know people tend to leave film in their cameras. They build it to last."

"So this slide here, developed in April, that could be a picture taken in February?"

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"Or even last year sometime. I can tell you this wouldn't have come through my store here, seeing as how it is April, and assuming it was Hub's. It wouldn't have to go through any retail store, you know. A person can buy a slide mailer and send it to Kodak and get the slides back in the mail."

"Did Hub use those mailers?"

"Sometimes he bought some, when he was going to be away awhile. He'd mail in the film and then the slides would be waiting at home for him when he got home."

The Sheriff drove me back to the courthouse, where I had parked. I sat in his car with him for a few minutes. "What we've got so far, based on too damn many assumptions," he said, "we've got Hub in Guadalajara in early February, with John Tuckerman. We know they went down there hunting cat, but we didn't know they went to Guadalajara. We got Hub asking John to take a picture of the street there, with Hub over to the left. He isn't even looking into the camera, like a man does when his picture is being taken. What would make John want to sneak a picture way back then?"

"Maybe in the next slide, number twelve, Hub Lawless is smiling into the camera. Maybe John took it too soon."

"Why would there be any picture taking anyway?" "You mean if they-if Hub-was planning the escape route, setting up the clinic appointment, and all? I suppose he was trying to stick with his normal routines. He always took pictures. He always came home from trips with pictures."

"Maybe Tuckerman got it developed and managed to mail one print from Orlando. Too much, McGee. Too damned thin. Too damned improbable. And why the hell would John Tuckerman want to screw up Hub's plans after helping him carry them out?"

"Because he didn't like getting the short end."

"You're getting along with him all right?"

"Pretty good."

"Maybe you could see if he wants to talk any photography or if he acts funny. Just to satisfy your own curiosity?"

"Not yours?"

"No. If I wanted to learn anything about anything, all I have to do is have Deputy Fletcher saddle up and ride. Besides, I'm not permitted to deputize anybody unless we have a declared state of emergency."

"Sheriff, if I happen to find out anything I think you might want to know, I might want to tell you about it." I had my hand on the car door, ready to get out.

"Set quiet one minute longer, McGee."

"Yes, sir!"

"You could aggravate me pretty good if you put your mind to it, McGee. Be that as it may. I dropped by to see a man this morning, and he swore up and down you told him you were a lawyer."

"No way!"

"Stanley Moran."

"Oh. I told him I'd lay a subpoena on him if he didn't behave. I didn't pretend to be a lawyer. He asked me if I was a lawyer. I didn't answer the question."

"It bothers me, too, the way that architect lady up and left so sudden. Looked like she packed up and left and drove over to Orlando and flew out, never to come back. Meant to look like that, you think?"

"I don't know exactly what you mean."

"This morning I looked at the stuff she left behind. I wondered if it was anything worth taking with her. I borrowed the painting she left. Only so big. Hardly bigger than a legal-size piece of paper. Frame is light. It had the name of a gallery down in Clearwater on it, on the back. Can't pronounce the name of the artist. The title was Tide Watch. I phoned the gallery about it and they said it was purchased by a Miss Petersen in January of this year for seven hundred and fifty
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dollars, plus tax. It would fit in a suitcase easy, between clothes. A fifty-dollar painting, a hundred-dollar painting, a person could be so absentminded on account of wanting to leave in a hurry, they could overlook it. But seven hundred and fifty dollars?"

"And a person could pack her stuff, put it in her car, drive to Orlando, buy a cheap ticket, check the stuff aboard, leave the car at the airport, miss the flight, take a bus to practically anyplace, and the luggage would end up in an airline warehouse somewhere."

"Which fits nice with the information she hasn't touched her checking account since before the twenty-second of March, over two months."

"Or, if you are in a rush and traveling light, why bother with a seven-hundred-and-fifty-dollar painting when you are on the run with eight hundred thousand or so?"

"If somebody knew the entire scam, McGee, if they intercepted Hub and his new lady, took the money, buried them deep, then pulled that picture trick to steer everybody toward Mexico . . ."

"Somebody like?"

"I know. I know. Not like Tuckerman. Certainly not Julia Lawless."

For a moment, for one moment, I was tempted to tell him what I had learned from Gretel and John about the whole scheme as devised by Hub, and about the heart attack the yellow jeep, the message John took to Kristin Petersen. But Gretel had trusted me, and she had induced John to trust me. If my luck ran really bad, one day this dusty dangerous little man would find out what I had held back and find out I had held it back. In a perfectly ordinary manner, with his ordinary face and gestures and tone of voice, he had a knack of creating a respect that bordered on dread.

In late afternoon I aimed the gray Dodge Dart southward, pretending I was intent on my mission of involving John Tuckerman in some small talk about photography. But Gretel filled my head, and I leafed through the hundred pictures of her, taken by a personal invisible camera which had produced instant three-dimensional colored shots,. vivid, never fading. I whistled. I decided that the unraveling of the Hubbard Lawless mystery was just a nervous reflex on my part. None of my business. Van Harder would be absolved and relicensed. The Sheriff was willing to arrange that without much further urging.

For all of me, the whole area could strangle in angel dust. All I wanted to do was find some way to pick up my woman and run, preferably in the Busted Flush, once Van Harder had turned her back over to me.

I steered around the deeper potholes. The sun was sliding down the sky, off to my right. A rabbit sat up and stopped munching as I drove slowly by. There was a small hawk perched on the mailbox, and it went arrowing off as I turned in. Soon the stilt house was in view, with the square green Fiat still parked under it. I popped the horn ring a couple of times as I drove into the yard. I got out and looked up, expecting to see her come out onto the veranda. Empfiy.

There was not the slightest breath of a breeze. There was not the slightest stir of leaves or grass.

Nor any bird sound.

The creak of the weathered stairs seemed loud as I went quickly up to the veranda deck.

"Hallo? Hey! Gretel? John?" Nothing.

I walked around to the Gulf side of the deck, looking in the windows as I passed them. I tried the screen door and it opened. The table was set for two. There was driftwood and paper in the fireplace, ready to light against the possible evening chill.

"Hallo?"

I noticed the old ten-power binoculars. They were on the deck, looking as if they had fallen from the rough railing. I picked them up, thinking that probably Gretel and her brother were somewhere along the beach and I would be able to spot them. When I tried to look through them, it felt as if my left eye was being pulled out of the socket. Apparently they had fallen, and the prisms inside the left half had been knocked a little out of line.

There were clouds on the horizon, the sun moving down toward them. Squinting against the sun, I looked through the right half, adjusting it to my vi sion. I swept the beach off to the right and
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saw no one. I swept around to the left, looking south, and saw no one. I saw something against the concave seaward slope of a dune where the beach swung slightly westward. The sun made a bright glare against that angle of sand. I braced the binoculars against one of the uprights that supported the overhanging roof, made an additional adjustment to the focus, lost the object, found it again, and suddenly saw that it was a figure flattened against the sand, face down. It was a female, I thought. It was Gretel. It was too far away for anybody to be sure it was even female.

I would have needed a forty-power spotting scope on a tripod to make it out properly. It could not be Gretel. But I was over the dune and on the beach and running hard on the packed sand, groaning as I ran, still telling myself it was not Gretel, running with no clear memory of ever having left the veranda.

It is curious how many things can go on in your mind simultaneously. If it was Gretel, she was sunbathing. She was upslope to present a better angle to the late sun. Of course. She would laugh when I came running at her like a maniac. (But she had looked too flat and too still.) A person can fall asleep in the sun. (Face down in the sand?)

When I was fifty yards from her, I heard that flat, sharp, lathe-snapping noise which a small-caliber high-velocity rifle shot makes in the open air. I had the general impression it was fired from somewhere in front of me, somewhere beyond where Gretel lay. I made two more long running strides before, simultaneously with the second crisp, abrupt sound, something tugged at the short sleeve of my sport shirt and burned my upper right arm.

I plunged through soft sand, away from the wet packed beach sand, running as I had been taught long ago, moving without pattern from side to side, keeping low, and feeling once again that area of belly-coldness which seems to mark the spot where the whistling slug will impact. I dived and scrambled the last twenty feet, rolling fast to end up close to Gretel. There had been nobody on the beach, nobody visible on the dunes. The rifleman had to be up on the crest, just over the crest, peering over to aim and fire. Here the slope was so steep that when I looked up I could not see the crest, only a smooth round of sand partway up the slope.

Her dark hair was matted to a chocolate thickness at the crown of her head. Two green-bellied flies walked on her hair. Her face was turned slightly away from me. Her fingers were stubbed into the sand as though she had been trying to pull herself up the slope. She wore rust-colored shorts and a white T-shirt, dappled on the back with the brownish spots of dried blood. She wore one white boat shoe. On the left foot.

A great desolation chilled my heart. It was an emptiness stretching from here to infinity, from now to eternity.

Slowly, slowly the whole world was suffused with that strange orange glow which happens rarely toward sunset. The clouds turned to gold as the sun moved behind them, and the reflection of the clouds colored the earth. I have never seen the Gulf so quiet. There were no ripples, no birds, no sign of feeding fish, no offshore vessels moving across the horizon. I had seen this strange coppery light in Tahiti, in Ceylon (before it became Sri Lanka), and in Granada and the Grenadines. The world must have looked like that before the first creatures came crawling out of the salt water to spawn on the empty land. I turned my head and saw, beyond the shoulder of my beloved, the empty copper sea, hushed and waiting, as if the world had paused between breaths. Perhaps it was like this in the beginning, and will be like this again, after man has slain every living thing. Sand, heat, and water. And death.

A lone gull came winging in across the water, angling in, at a height just sufficient for him to clear the ridge of the dune.

The gull would have crossed the crest about two hundred feet ahead of me and to my right.

When he neared the crest he suddenly squawked alarm and veered to the left of his line of flight and sharply upward before flying on.

So there he was. X. For unknown. The rifleman. I raised up very quickly and dropped flat again.

If you lift slowly, you give them time to put a third eye in the center of your forehead. I retained the afterimage of the empty crest. Nothing. No glint of metal. No round shape of head or bulk
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of shoulders. Just the wind-smoothed tan sand. I took another look. And another. Nothing at all.