The Shoal of Time Read online

  “Great! I knew we could count on you.” We agreed to meet at their hotel.

  Job. It’s just a job, Micky, I told myself. But she did seem to want to see me again and even if it was only professionally, I had a productive, moneymaking way to fill otherwise empty hours.

  Morning on a weekday wasn’t so crazy by her hotel. Evidently, the car split was our standard operating procedure—she was waiting out front and joined me in the passenger seat of my car.

  “We’re going out in the sticks,” she said without even saying hello. “I think the boys are afraid of snakes.”

  “Probably still too cold. Sticks as in where?”

  She showed me on her phone.

  “Might want to write that down,” I suggested. “Not likely to have cell reception out there.” It was out in the boonies, past Jean Lafitte Park, on the other bank of the Mississippi.

  The big black SUV roared up behind me as if to say we’re here, let’s go. I don’t like big metal things kissing my bumper, so I took off, not even bothering to make sure the traffic gap was big enough for both of us to get out.

  “Should I use my GPS to get us there?” Ashley asked.

  “You can if you want, but I know the area.”

  Her cell rang. Her end of the conversation was “uh-huh,” and “yeah.”

  When she finished, she said, “John wants us to take the back roads. Avoid tolls, things like that.”

  “Nice to know, but there aren’t too many back roads across the river. I was going to go over the Crescent City Connection, it’s a toll bridge, but we don’t pay a toll on the way out, only on the way back.”

  She got on the phone.

  “And he needs to decide quickly as we’ll be there in a few minutes,” I added.

  Ashley rendered the verdict. “He wants to avoid that. Is there any way around?”

  “Yeah,” I muttered, mentally rerouting. “But it’s a long way around.”

  “Long’s okay,” she verified.

  “Hope they gassed up recently.” I took that to mean they wanted to avoid 1-10. Which was fine with me as I usually avoid it as well—it’s either bumper-to-bumper going eighty miles an hour or bumper-to-bumper going nowhere, and both of those are rarely worth the frustration.

  The Mississippi down here in New Orleans is a big-ass river. For a long time there were no bridges over it. The swift currents, depth of the river, and how wide it was all made it hard to span. Finally in the 1930s, the first bridge in Louisiana was erected, the Huey P. Long Bridge, so named because he was assassinated shortly before it opened. That would be our crossing. It had been an old, narrow bridge, but was now cluttered with road work as it was being widened. The old lanes were nine feet across, add in workers and machinery and that made it tight for a big SUV.

  But they wanted no tolls, so they would get no tolls.

  “Where are we?” Ashley asked after we left the safe confines of the CBD.

  “The back roads. More or less.” They got to see some more of the New Orleans the tourists don’t see, roads that took us through either poor neighborhoods or industrial areas. So not a scenic route.

  Ashley didn’t say much; she seemed to be checking messages on her phone. Or maybe she just found the scenery too uninteresting to bother.

  The Huey Long Bridge is not in New Orleans proper, but out in the suburbs of the city. It took us a good twenty minutes to get there.

  As we started to go up its steep ramp, Ashley looked up from her phone. “Oh, this is an old bridge.” I was paying attention to traffic and could only briefly glance her way, but she looked pale. I heard her take a deep, steadying breath. All the construction and the railroad tracks in the center don’t make this a good bridge to go over in the best of times.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “The bridge isn’t very long.” Not really true, but she didn’t need to know that.

  “Why is it so high?” she said. I could hear her breathing.

  “River traffic. Some big boats have to go under here.”

  She reached over and put her hand on my forearm. “Is this okay? I’m not great with heights.”

  “Not a problem,” I said. It made shifting more difficult—she was holding on tightly, but that was probably better than her getting panicked or—worse—queasy.

  The SUV was hugging my bumper as if they were afraid to lose me. I hoped there were no sudden stops in my immediate future.

  “Close your eyes,” I told her. “Tell me about a favorite vacation.”

  “Think it’ll work?” she said with a shaky smile. But she did as she was instructed. “Hard to decide. Virgin Islands or Paris.”

  “Start with the beach.”

  We spent the rest of the bridge with her telling me about blue-green water and sandy shores.

  “We’re back to earth,” I said as the road met the ground.

  “Sorry,” she said with a rueful grin. “I should have asked. I’m okay if I’m prepared to be up in the air. And thinking of beaches helped.” She let go of my arm. “Hope I didn’t leave a bruise.”

  “My hide is tougher than that.” I changed the subject. “Tell me more about what you’re hoping to find. And are you all Border Patrol or are there other agencies involved?”

  “I can tell you, but I might have to kill you.” She said it with a smile, but her message got across—she couldn’t really talk about her mission.

  “Not in the mood to get killed today. Plus you need a navigator. Can you talk about how you got involved in law enforcement? Or is that a killing topic as well?”

  “I wish I could go into more details, but we’re on strict need-to-know orders. But I can talk about myself—one of my favorite topics.” She again smiled, but this time a friendly one. “Wow, how did I get started in law enforcement? My dad was a cop, two uncles were cops, so it was always on the what I wanted to be when I grew up list. I guess they thought it was cute and assumed that I’d grow out of it like the other girls. My dad wasn’t too happy when I decided to major in criminal justice at college. He kept telling me I’d never get a man that way. He liked it even less when I told I wasn’t interested in getting a man.”

  “Has he come around since then?”

  “No. Or he hadn’t when he died about a year later.”

  “That’s rough.”

  She said softly, “I’d like to think he would have…learned to keep loving me. But it’s hard to know.”

  “I’m sorry. I seem to be hitting all the bad subjects today. Maybe we should go back to tropical vacations.”

  “Even tropical waters have sharks in them.”

  “I’m bombing, why don’t you pick a topic?”

  “How did you get to be a PI?”

  “Couldn’t stand panty hose and nine-to-five.”

  “There has to be more to it than that. By the way, where are we? This doesn’t look like swampland.”

  “We went out of our way, remember? Not many bridges across the Mississippi and not many roads into the swamps. We’re paralleling the river, heading more or less south. So this is the populated area close to the riverbank. We’ll turn off into the swampland in a bit.”

  “Okay, so give me the more than twenty-five words version of how you became a PI.”

  “It really is about panty hose.”

  “So if you had to wear female undergarments, you’d be in another profession?”

  “If I had to do it every day, it’s possible.”

  “C’mon, if we’re going to spend time together, at least tell me part of your story.” She playfully punched me on the shoulder.

  “Okay, okay. I was young, probably foolish, but I don’t like to think that. Out of college, still trying to decide what I wanted to do with my life. Tried the usual so-called good career jobs, like working at a bank. Discovered I hated it. Capital H hated. Got a job as a security guard. It didn’t pay much, but I thought I’d have time to read.” I signaled to move into the right lane for the upcoming turn.

  She glanced back at the SU
V to make sure it was still following. “I’m guessing the reading didn’t work out so well.”

  “Did get some reading done. Made it through Middlemarch. But one of the managers was stealing office supplies and making it look like the low-level workers were to blame. I was suspicious; he was too friendly. So I tracked when he came in and out of the building after hours, got a few pictures of him loading stuff into his truck. Eventually put things together—he was always in the building after hours whenever stuff went missing.”

  “Your first case.”

  “I guess. Anyway, the head of the security firm was impressed and hired me as his assistant investigator. He taught me a lot, helped me get a license. I found I liked the work. I had to use my brain, work varied hours. After a while I decided I wanted to be on my own.” Blinker on for a right turn; we’d soon be leaving box stores and traffic behind.

  “Just like that? You went solo?”

  “He wanted more than a business partnership and I wasn’t interested. But he thought if he kept asking I’d eventually say yes. I knew that wasn’t going to happen.”

  “Was he a troll? Or was it something more fundamental?”

  “Both,” I said. “He got a little tipsy one night and told me that I needed to earn all the chances he’d given me. Plus, like you, I like men fine with their clothes on. Naked, not so much.”

  “Did you try telling him that?”

  “Oh, yeah. That was part of the troll behavior. He let me know that he’d be cool with me having a girlfriend, if he could watch.”

  “Yuck. Major troll.”

  “His final words to me were that I’d fail in less than six months.”

  “I’m betting that was a long time ago.”

  “Long, long time. He went under long before I did.”

  “You’re the better PI?”

  “Maybe, but I was careful with money and he liked to spend it. He wasn’t good at cutting back when things were sluggish.” I slowed for a stoplight. “Your turn to talk. Where did you grow up?”

  “Me? All over, bit of a military brat.”

  “Thought you said your dad was a cop.”

  “Oh, yeah. He was military police until I was about fourteen. By then he’d put in his twenty years. He retired and took a regular cop job.”

  “Where was that?”

  “Ohio. Some small town outside of Cleveland.”

  “Interesting. I would have picked your accent as Mid-Atlantic.”

  “Really? And here I don’t think I have an accent.”

  “Not much of a one, but it’s there. I wouldn’t have picked Midwest.”

  “Spent a lot of time in New Jersey when I was young. Grandparents. We’d get left there whenever Dad and Mom moved—which was a lot when he was in the military. Hey, what kind of bird is that?”

  “Probably a snowy egret,” I said. I’d only seen a white blur on the side of the road. “They’re pretty common down here.”

  “How much further do we have to go?”

  “About ten, fifteen minutes. Depending on the alligator crossings. Why? Tired of my company?”

  “No, I like your company. It’s just—wait, you’re kidding about the alligator crossings, aren’t you? I am not good with green scaly things.”

  “Unless we’re going deep into the swamp, you don’t need to worry about alligators. And unless there’s an airboat packed in the back of your SUV, we’re not going deep in the swamp.”

  “Okay, good to know.”

  “What do you want me to do when we get there?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do I stay in my car? Be a lookout? Help check the place out?” The suburban houses had disappeared, a thick strand of trees on either side of the road and few intersections were out here.

  “Good question. You’d probably be most helpful with the search. You might notice things that we won’t. Like alligators.”

  “You get close enough, you’ll notice the alligator.”

  “That’s the point. I want you to spot them before I get close enough.”

  “I can probably do that.”

  “And snakes. Try to spot the snakes before I get close to them.”

  “Most snakes are harmless. And they’d prefer to stay away from us.”

  “For my sake, do your best to enforce that rule.”

  “I’ll do my most excellent snake wrangling.” We passed a sign that said “Swamp Tours” pointing in the direction we were going. “City cops, scared of a little harmless woodland creature.”

  “I don’t get along with any creature that has sharp teeth and might bite me.”

  I turned off onto a narrow two-lane road. On either side was a ditch, swollen with recent rain water, separated from the road by the barest wisp of a shoulder. The trees were lower, not the tall pines from earlier, but the truncated swamp trees, mixed with palmetto and grasses, some of the tree limbs draped in Spanish moss. They crowded against each other, a matted barrier of greens. We passed a rusted trailer; it looked abandoned. A beer can floating in the ditch was the only other sign people were here.

  “Your location is somewhere along this road, so you might want to be on the lookout for it,” I told Ashley.

  She punched in a number in her cell phone. “We’re pretty close,” she told what I guessed to be the trailing SUV. “Get ready to rock and roll.” She scanned the side of the road, her brow furrowed.

  In the twenty minutes since we’d left stoplights and fast-food joints, we’d traveled to a different world. Trees enclosed the road, and only the thin stretch of asphalt said that humans had passed this way and claimed the land. The sun had been struggling with clouds all day and just as we passed under the shade of an oak tree, the clouds won the battle, leaving us in shadow even as we passed the trees. Rain was likely on the way back.

  “Are you sure this is the right road?” Ashley asked as the trees remained unbroken.

  “Not too many roads out here. This is the right road if you gave me the right directions.”

  She flashed me a brief smile as apology for her churlishness.

  “Everything seems longer when you count the trees,” I said. “We are close.”

  “Don’t want to miss it.”

  “We can turn around. Not much traffic here,” I pointed out.

  “Not sure they could do a three-point turn,” she said, nodding back at the others. She was probably right. The road had no shoulder and the rain-filled ditches on either side left little room for error.

  I slowed even more. A fine scatter of mist hit my windshield and the clouds got darker.

  “Is that it?” I asked, seeing a notch in the trees.

  “Where?”

  “Up ahead, it’s a driveway.” I took my foot off the gas and let the car coast to the opening. The gap was barely wide enough for a small car, the gravel driveway rutted by rain and neglect. It curved around a dense thatch of trees; there was no way to see beyond the green and gray.

  “This should be it,” she said, glancing from her notes to her phone to the trees. She dialed the phone, listened for a moment, tried again and then again.

  “No signal out here,” I said.

  “Of course, you’re right.” She rolled down her window and did it the old-fashioned way by pointing.

  Once her arm was back in the car, I turned slowly onto the gravel driveway. The first hole almost swallowed my tire. Either this place was abandoned, or whoever came here had serious four-wheel drive. There was a patch of ground at the curve, barely enough for me to pull over.

  “My car is made for city driving,” I told Ashley. “I don’t like my chances of getting all the way up and back without damaging an axle.” This was not a place I wanted to wait for roadside assistance.

  “There’s not enough room for both of us,” she said, meaning the SUV.

  “That’s okay. I’ll walk. It can’t be that far.”

  “Okay,” she said, sliding out of the door, carefully scanning the ground. In case of alligators, I ass
umed.

  I got out and started up the road. The property was overgrown, weeds growing in the gravel, underbrush to waist height just off the road. I carefully picked my way along the edge of the track, where the gravel hadn’t been sprayed away by tires. I stepped as far as I could into the weeds as I heard the SUV come up behind me.

  As it passed me, I noticed what looked like a tire mark up ahead. But the SUV drove over it, obliterating what was there.

  Whoever was driving was going very slowly, barely faster than my walking—for good reason. There were deep holes filled with the recent rains, making it impossible to tell their depth until your tire rolled into it. Even with its much higher clearance, the SUV scraped bottom a few times.

  I stayed far enough behind to avoid getting sloshed when it sank into the mud holes. The curve took its time leading around the trees. It was a good fifty yards before I could begin to see a cleared area that told me something was beyond the leafy veil. Once around the turn, the SUV hit smoother ground and left me behind.

  As I came around the bend, I went on alert. Hidden in the trees was a large metal building, the area around it neatly cleared and mowed, with a nicely paved parking area in front. I could think of only one reason for the disparity; they wanted it hidden, as if whatever was back here was poor and ramshackle. Now I wished I’d had a chance to examine the tire track. In the glimpse I saw of it, it seemed new, but was it new in hours or in days?

  If it was just me, I would have turned around and left.

  But it wasn’t just me, so I trudged on, joining them at the SUV. Cara, the older woman, seemed to be in charge. Jack and John were listening to her as she talked in a low voice. Sandy was wandering around the cleared area.

  Ashley met me halfway down the paved area as if to keep me out of earshot of whatever the others were saying.

  “So, what do you think?” she asked.

  “Conveniently hidden. This patch is mowed to the nub and the gravel road is left to look like no one’s been here in years. I thought I saw a fairly recent tire track just before you drove past me.”

  “So you think someone might be here?”

  “Probably not. No vehicle and no reason to hide one once they’re back in here. But they might have been here in the last few days. Or even hours.”