Vacant Shore Read online

  Abby came up beside Ellie and spoke softly. “Thank you for your help outside,” she said quietly.

  “Of course,” she smiled. “We girls have to stick together.”

  The man finished writing on the chart and told the second group to follow him. Abby fell in line, and they disappeared around a cluster of parked forklifts. A couple of people walked toward the brooms with a confident gait that told Ellie they had done this before. Ellie followed them over and grabbed one.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Virgil stared groggily at the ceiling tiles. Two of them, both near the television mount, held brownish water stains. The nurse had just left, saying she would return with a doctor. Her perfume lingered behind. The scent of crushed gardenias caused the ceiling tiles to dissolve into vivid images of Panama and Lupita: she with her hair, black as a crow’s feather, cascading around her neck and her shoulders and her breasts. He could feel the crown of her head tucked beneath his chin, the warmth of her body against his as they sat in the grass and watched the sun disappear behind the canistel trees and the sandbox trees and the wild cashews. Virgil could see her hand on his thigh and the ring that she had let him slip onto her finger. He could see her in the kitchen, her black eyes glistening like polished ore as she held up the white veil her mother had stitched for the upcoming ceremony.

  The door to his room opened and Lupita vanished. Two doctors entered, followed by his nurse. They approached his bed and one of the doctors introduced himself as Dr. Jensen. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  Virgil smiled. “First time I’ve ever fallen off a moving golf cart.”

  “A jokester. That’s a good sign. Well, we want to give you an update on your situation. Are you up for that?”

  An extreme drowsiness suddenly rolled over Virgil. He responded with a half-nod.

  The doctor handed his clipboard to the nurse. “A hiker found you out near Flagstaff early this morning. You were in a bad auto accident and…” The doctor drew a pause. “You were also shot in two areas, three times. Before the accident, it seems. Do you remember any of that?”

  “I do.”

  “The doctors watched him as if they expected him to say more. When Virgil said nothing else, he went on. “After you were airlifted here to Phoenix we had you in surgery for nearly three hours. We stitched your shoulder up and your collarbone. We screwed in a clavicle plate and have you set up to receive bone grafts.”

  “And my knee?” Virgil asked.

  “To be frank, your knee is the worst off. We have you scheduled for a knee replacement early tomorrow afternoon.”

  Virgil nodded, sighed, and stared at the end of the bed.

  “As you can see, we have your left arm in the sling. It’s snug to prevent any jostling. Your left knee is in a ROM brace to keep it immobile.”

  “Do you have any questions?” the other doctor asked.

  “No. I don’t suppose I do. Thank you for the update.”

  “I’m sure you’ll have some later. Just ask your nurse.”

  Virgil suddenly felt like he could not stay awake any longer. His eyelids closed halfway, popped open, and drooped again, like they were bobbing on a wild ocean. “The morphine will help you sleep,” Dr. Jensen said. “Before we leave, we do need to get some information from you.” The nurse handed him back his clipboard. “What is your name?” Dr. Jensen asked.

  Here we go. Virgil forced his eyes open. “I can’t give you that.”

  The doctors exchanged curious glances. “I’m sorry, you...can’t give us your name?”

  “Correct.”

  “And why is that?”

  “I can’t say.”

  Dr. Jensen’s brows lowered. “Sir, we’re doing our best to help you here. But we’re going to need some personal information from you.”

  “Not allergic to any meds. History of diabetes on my dad’s side of the family. But he doesn’t have it and neither...neither...do I.”

  Then, like someone had thrown a switch, Virgil’s eyes closed, and drowsiness lured him back into sleep.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Dark gray clouds had formed overhead, blocking out large portions of the sun and creating grayish patches across the surface of the water. But the clouds were false in that they held no rain.

  Quinton stood behind the wheel of his Stingray as he ran it up through Pine Island Sound at fifteen knots. He breathed in deeply, filling his lungs with air that was ripe with salt, and felt as though an electric current was charging his veins. He was at home on the water and had recently concluded that spending months away from the ocean was just plain unhealthy.

  He passed up Captiva Rocks before arriving at the fishing shack. Of the eight shacks still in existence, just two remained in private hands. Quinton’s grandfather—the only one who had not been married to a liquor bottle—happened to inherit one of them years ago. Before he died he deeded it over to Quinton, his only grandchild who had done something with his life. The shack was not the most practical of endowments, but he and Katrina would come out a few times a year and fish off the deck or camp out over a weekend. Earlier this year Quinton had decided to make an effort at overdue repairs. Most of the floorboards were soft and rotted out from years of imbibing the thick moisture coming off the water below. He replaced corrugated steel panels that had rusted out and begun to let the rain waters in. The door hinges had rusted out, and one of the small window panes had shattered. Just how, he didn’t know, but the odds favored an unfortunate seagull.

  Quinton shut off the engine and tied off on the short dock. Using both hands he lifted the heavy air compressor/power generator and heaved it onto the dock. He didn’t have a lock on the door. He never had seen a need for one. Only a couple times had he found a few empty beer cans laying inside, but no one had ever damaged the place. He opened the door and walked the compressor inside, set it down on the sturdiest floor board. He surveyed the small space and was pleased with the condition in which he had left it. All that was left to do was to repair the floor planks. He walked cautiously to the other end of the room, careful to avoid the weaker planks and soft spots so his foot didn’t fall through and take him down with it. He ran his fingers across an old gray 2x6 that stood out against the newer ones. This one would always remain. Katrina had carved her initials into it, and it seemed to fill the space like a tombstone created before its time.

  Quinton was twenty-seven when Mary-Anne got pregnant, and that late July evening when he found out, he would have hugged her, or kissed her, or taken her out for dinner, but she ruined such a possibility by throwing a still-wet pregnancy test at him when he was on the couch, clutching a Milwaukee's Best and watching South Park. There he was, growing more anxious by the minute, wondering if the end of the world was upon them and if he shouldn't think about stockpiling water and food and guns, when the pregnancy test nailed him in the cheek and clattered to the floor. He was rearing up to scream at Mary-Anne when his eyes caught the test strip straddling the aluminum strip that formed the edge of the living room carpet and the kitchen linoleum.

  “Mary-Anne?” His voice was soft. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “Well, you’re damn right it is! It sure ain’t a popsicle stick.”

  He reached down and picked it up while wiping Mary-Anne’s urine off his cheek with the back of his other hand. He held it in front of him and when he squinted he saw two blue lines. He didn’t know if it was one line or two that meant that there were now millions of diapers in his future, but given Mary-Anne’s current state of agitation, he went on ahead and assumed it was two.

  He slowly sank back into the couch, still holding the plastic stick, his heart thumping, his eyes dilated with a strange combination of both terror and exuberance. Mary-Anne had been on the pill. Quinton had never really entertained the idea of being a parent. “A father,” he whispered, almost reverentially.

  And it was in that defining moment that he felt a sudden urge to grow up. To quit being lazy and addicted and irresponsible. He bli
nked, and suddenly he discovered that he wanted to be the kind of man that could raise a child who wouldn’t flunk out on life. Quinton’s pedigree boasted a long line of what the bourgeois masses liked to label “white trash”; that social strata which conjured up images of Confederate flags, missing teeth, mullet haircuts, and run-down trailer parks. He couldn’t have picked out two men on either side of the family who weren’t drunks or on welfare, and any sociologist or geneticist would have pegged Quinton as a textbook case of what it looked like to repeat the cycle.

  But the fates were stirred the night he got whacked in the face with a pregnancy test.

  Mary-Anne was screaming at him like a crazed witch, and years later, whenever he would think back on that night, Quinton could never remember what it was she had said. All he could see were her raging eyes, an accusatory finger wagging fiercely at him, her voice shrill like the cry of a captured whale.

  He spent the next eight months listening to Mary-Anne gripe and moan and complain. But nearly halfway through the pregnancy, when they found out it was a girl, Quinton wept. He actually wept. His girl was making him a better man, and she wasn’t even born yet.

  In the end, four months after the birth, when Katrina was wailing at two in the morning, Mary-Anne kicked the covers off, packed a bag, and was gone. She never called, never came by, and never saw either one of them again. Quinton picked up his screaming infant and leaned back against his bed’s headboard, rocking her, telling her with scared tears running down his face that everything was going to be all right. He even sang it to her in his best Jamaican accent—Ev’ry little ting's gonna be all right—and it worked. Katrina stopped her screaming, stared wide-eyed into the dark, and finally fell asleep in her daddy’s arms.

  Soon after, he opened up the bait shop off Monroe Canal and made something of himself. He didn’t earn much, but it was theirs, and it paid the bills. He wasn’t a bum anymore.

  When Katrina died right in front of her father, it had unmade him. It left him diminished. He had always thought that a parent losing a child was the kind of thing that happened to nameless people on page three of the newspaper. It was supposed to happen to someone else. Always someone else.

  Those first few months after the funeral everyone was kind and understanding. They would ask him how he was, if there was anything they could do to help. But quickly, all that blew out to sea. Everyone got back to their lives and seemed to suppose that he had too. The raw slap of that first year of grief had been the unexpected experience of everyone else moving on. Her death had left him to live a life with no exclamation marks left in it.

  But then Warren Hall had come to him and told him about a new business he had been working on. A business that they could work on together. A business that would allow them to save children’s lives. And that was when Quinton decided to continue living. You either died choking on the ashes of your grief or, like a phoenix, you rose up out of them to become something new entirely. The catch—and there was a catch—was that, unlike the fabled phoenix, Quinton had risen up only to realize that he now had something more akin to scales instead of feathers.

  At Quinton’s suggestion, Warren had taken the name Ringo. Warren had introduced Kat to The Beatles when she was a young thing, and she fell in love with them. Ringo Starr was her favorite, and she never got tired of watching Warren play the drums in his upstairs bedroom. He’d put an overstuffed bean bag in the corner where she would sit observing and giggling when he tried throwing a drum stick in the air and missed the catch.

  It was in the midst of those carefree years when Kat, as she watched the Cubs, looked over at her father and proposed, in that eternally optimistic way that seven-year-olds do, that they go away for a few weeks that summer and see a few games in person.

  So they did. And along the way they decided to skip Wrigley Field, do another six stadiums next summer, and repeat the cycle until they visited all thirty ballparks, saving Wrigley for last. Every summer they stole away for six weeks and drove across the country until they were down to the final six ballparks.

  And then Kat fell ill. Two months later she was dead.

  But he had finally fulfilled his promise, and it was every bit as difficult as he thought it would be. Walking up to Wrigley Field he thought he would have to turn around and find a gutter to throw up in. But he didn’t. He walked through the metal detectors and the turnstyles and found his seat in center field. The seat next to him sat empty, its ticket stub in his pocket. When it was all over and he was walking back to his hotel, he discovered that he was happy, like a pair of rusty manacles had fallen from his wrists, or some overworn burden from his back. His soul didn’t feel bent over any longer. He decided that he wanted to stay, that he wanted to return for tomorrow’s ball game.

  And it was that very next day, the day he met Zeke Beaker, that everything started to change. Before he left on his trip, Quinton would have never entertained the ideas that were proposed to him while he was in Chicago. Looking back now he could see what the fertilizer had been, what had helped to bring him to a such a radical decision. And he supposed that in some way he had his friend Chewy to thank for it.

  Five months ago, after he was all packed for his trip, Quinton had gone to the mansion to say his goodbyes. That afternoon, Quinton had been in the kitchen, sipping a Pepsi and eating a BLT, when Chewy walked in and tossed something into the trash. It looked like a plastic CD cover, and it was just sitting there on top, so Quinton grabbed it up and, while working at his sandwich, evaluated it.

  “Larry Lawrence Live in Salt Lake City,” he said aloud, in between bites. The album cover featured a large man with unnaturally blonde hair. He was wearing a purple suit and smiling like he had a delicious secret. A yellow starburst covered half of Larry’s right leg, inset with the words ‘Don’t Delay, Listen Today!’

  “Why are you throwing this out?” Quinton asked. “I thought you liked all these guys. Prophets of personal power. That’s what you call them, isn’t it?”

  Chewy’s deep voice boomed across the room, bouncing off the exposed rafters high above. “Larry Lawrence is poison.”

  “How so?”

  Chewy pulled up a chair and sat down. “Larry Lawrence is the used car salesman of personal power. If he were a movie actor, he would be at the bottom of the B list.”

  “So he’s corny? I can tell that by the cover. But that doesn’t mean he’s poison. Right?”

  Chewy shook his head like a frustrated teacher. He drummed his fingers on the table top, seemingly in no hurry to answer. After a long minute Quinton thought maybe he wasn’t going to. But finally, “The key to personal power is taking responsibility, choosing to stop blaming your present reality on circumstances or other people. Larry Lawrence has gained a following by preaching that other people owe you a debt, that society is to blame.” He motioned toward the CD case sitting on the table. “He says on there that we owe no one anything. He says to go out and get what we want, however we want. That kind of thinking incubates irresponsibility and hate. And irresponsibility and hate are destructive.”

  A few minutes later, after Chewy left the kitchen, Quinton slipped the CD into the travel bag sitting at his feet.

  Surely Larry Lawrence wasn’t all bad.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Virgil had woken a half hour ago. The clock on the wall showed 11:10 in the morning. His nurse informed him that investigators from downtown had been notified and that they would be arriving soon. Then she proceeded to ask him the same question the doctor had posed to him the night before. “Can I get your name?”

  “No. I can’t give you that.”

  Her expression said she was none too amused. “They said you might be like this.”

  “I’m not trying to be difficult. I promise.”

  “Well, honey, you don’t have to try. I’ve been here all night and the first time we speak you won’t even give me your name.”

  He managed a weak smile and a solid wink. “I like your hair, Linda.”

>   “Won’t give me his name but finds enough words to flirt with his nurse,” she said to her clipboard. But there was a smile behind her eyes. “I’ll be back in a bit to check on you.”

  “Thanks, Linda.”

  When he closed his eyes again he saw Faraday staring back at him with that empty, soulless gaze that made his insides shudder. He opened his eyes and found himself staring at the ceiling again. He found a third water-stained tile.

  He couldn’t stay here. Whoever had commissioned Faraday would not drag their feet in sending someone else to finish what she started. They would come for him. Soon.

  He looked over where the phone should be. The hospital staff had removed it from his room, stating that hospital policy forbid forensic patients access to communication during their stay. Two contract security guards were stationed outside his door, and whenever he moved his right foot the cuff chain rattled.

  A dizzy spell spun his thoughts, and he focused on the wall in front of him. He kept seeing her face: Faraday's callused expression and those empty eyes. All of the king’s men put me back together again. Is that what she had said? That someone had paid a ransom for her? But what had they done to her? The person he killed out on that dusty mountain road wasn’t the Faraday he remembered at all. The old Faraday had been light-hearted and carefree. Virgil had trained and worked alongside her for years. She and Pascal—Ellie—had been like his own sisters. What he had seen two nights ago resembled more brainwashed machine than human. Someone had gotten into Faraday's head. If he couldn’t find a way out of here then they would get him too. And all the rest of them.