Graveyard Fields Read online

  He shook his head and poured another sugar in his coffee.

  “I got eyes,” he said, stirring his coffee a second time. “I see things. I take notice.”

  I pointed at Skeeter’s aviators. “Are you telling me those are magic glasses?” I said. “Are you like that guy on Star Trek?”

  Skeeter snickered and placed his spoon on the counter.

  “You think I didn’t see you at Long Branch the other night?” he said. “Drinking with Dale, eating a quesadilla? Dale was gunning for that waitress, wasn’t he? He sure does have a type. What were you gunning for?”

  When I didn’t answer, Skeeter raised his eyebrows and took a long sip of his coffee. I didn’t much care for Skeeter knowing my business. I thought back to that night and how I’d spotted him at the bar. At some point he’d caught sight of me and I hadn’t noticed. It made me wonder how many of the adulterers and insurance frauds I’d staked out over the years had seen me before I’d seen them.

  “Mark my words, I’ll be sheriff here one day,” Skeeter said. “And I hope you’re still around to see it.”

  So Skeeter was an asshole with ambition. I’d always found that to be a dangerous mix.

  “You’re a dreamer, huh?” I said. “Got big plans?”

  Skeeter stared into his coffee as if it were a crystal ball. “You don’t know nothing about me.”

  “So what else do you dream about? Maybe finishing a crossword? Or reading a book?”

  Skeeter continued to grin, but I noticed his neck was turning a dazzling shade of red. Either he had eczema or I’d struck a nerve.

  “My book will be all words, so you probably wouldn’t enjoy it. But there are a lot of books with pictures in them. I’m sure there’s a children’s section in the library here.”

  “Shut up.”

  “But what I’m really curious about is why you’re called Skeeter. Is it ’cause you’re hung like a mosquito?”

  * * *

  That was the morning I got arrested. Fortunately, Dale was at the sheriff’s office when Skeeter dragged me in with my hands cuffed behind my back.

  “What the fuck did he do now?” Dale asked.

  “Disturbing the peace,” Skeeter said. “And resisting arrest.”

  I looked at Dale and shrugged. “Resisting arrest was a given.”

  Dale walked over and shoved Skeeter aside, then unlocked my cuffs and threw them on the nearest desk.

  “What the fuck happened?” Dale asked.

  “I made a joke, and Deputy Dickhead here got offended,” I said.

  “What kind of joke?”

  I looked at Skeeter and grinned. “Do you want to tell him or shall I?”

  Skeeter bit down on his toothpick. “He said my pecker was the size of a mosquito.”

  When Dale leaned back and laughed, his uniform shirt stretched so tight across his stomach I thought it might pop open at the seams like a tube of refrigerator biscuits.

  “Dammit, Skeeter,” Dale said, still laughing. “Is that all he did? Boy, you got to get yourself some thicker skin.”

  Skeeter pointed a finger just inches from my nose and gave me his best alpha-male routine.

  “I told you I got eyes,” he said. “And they are all over you.”

  With that, Skeeter picked up his cuffs from the desk and strutted out of the room.

  “That boy’s got more testosterone than a high school football team,” Dale said when Skeeter was gone.

  I looked around the squad room for my other archnemesis. “Can you give me a ride to my car? I don’t want Byrd to see me here.”

  Dale plopped down into his desk chair. “Why are you worried about Byrd?”

  “I’m persona non grata,” I said.

  Dale rolled his eyes. “Speak American, dickhead.”

  “After I talked to that couple yesterday, Byrd called me into his office to tell me a story about some murder he solved years ago. Then he told me he didn’t trust me. He thinks I’m up here looking for something.”

  “Looking for what?”

  Dale knew only half of the storage unit story. The half that didn’t include me finding cases of drugs or beating Greg. How much Byrd knew, I wasn’t sure. I needed to ask Perry about Byrd’s friend Emory, but until then I felt it best to stay out of Byrd’s sight. A part of me felt bad for keeping Dale in the dark about what had actually transpired down in Charleston, especially since we’d shared quite a few personal stories while sitting on the deck and drinking beer. But just like my plan to key Skeeter’s Mustang, some things weren’t Dale’s business.

  “I really don’t know,” I said. “Can you give me a lift or not?”

  * * *

  During the ride back to the Waffle House, I told Dale a little more about my conversation with Byrd, including Byrd’s self-professed ability to spot a liar.

  “Well, I tell you one thing,” Dale said. “I don’t play poker with the sheriff. Not no more, anyway. He can call a bluff better than anyone I’ve ever seen. I told him he should give up this bullshit and go to Vegas.”

  I wondered if Byrd would call my bluff and figure out I was the man responsible for my brother-in-law’s current condition. I hoped not. I didn’t need the local sheriff considering me a violent fugitive.

  * * *

  When we pulled into the Waffle House parking lot, I caught a whiff of the paper mill. I told Dale it smelled like rotten eggs covered in wet sawdust.

  “People ’round here says it smells like money,” he said.

  Dale parked his patrol car next to my Mercedes, then pressed the unlock button for the doors. I hesitated a moment.

  “So what happened with Floppy?”

  Dale’s nostrils flared. “I went by his trailer this morning, but he swears up and down he ain’t got them keys.”

  “And you believe him?”

  “Hell no. I don’t believe a word that skinny sumbitch says. I poked around the garage, but it’d be hard to find a brush fire in all that mess.”

  “But you’re convinced he has them?”

  “Fuck if I know. But if had to bet, I’d say if them keys ain’t in his garage, then they’s stuck in a drawer in his trailer somewhere. Man’s a pack rat, got shit everywhere, and half of it ain’t his.”

  I thought about Floppy’s body odor and how it could make the paper mill jealous.

  “Where’s his trailer?” I asked.

  “Out back of his garage.”

  “I didn’t notice it when I was there.”

  “That don’t surprise me. There’s so much shit stacked in front of it you can’t see the damn thing till you’re right up on it.”

  “You didn’t you go in and look for the keys?”

  Dale laughed. “Floppy don’t allow no one in his trailer, ’specially not me.”

  * * *

  I got out of the patrol car and walked over to my Mercedes. As I opened the door, I looked toward the Waffle House and saw several faces pressed against the window, staring back at me. When I gave them a thumbs-up, they all quickly disappeared. Persona non grata, I thought, was something I should probably get used to.

  26

  By noon I was back at the cabin sitting on the deck with a beer. The first pill of the day was flowing through my veins, and I could feel a pleasant numbness starting to blanket my brain. I stared at the blank legal pad and decided it was finally time to write something. I wrote the numeral 1 on the first line of the pad. Next to that I wrote Found Some Keys. From there I continued down the page, listing the events of previous few days. One beer later I wrote 25. Get Inside Floppy’s Trailer. I stared at the list and tried see if there were any dots I could connect. After twenty minutes I gave up. I’d never been a good detective.

  I went inside and sat down in front of the laptop. I reopened the email Diana had sent the previous day. I had to admit I liked her forward approach. It reminded me of what a womanizing friend of mine called the assumed close. “You don’t ask a woman if she’d like to go out,” he told me. “You ask if she
’d rather you pick her up at seven thirty or eight. You phrase it so it’s not a question of yes or no, it’s a question of when.” This was the same guy who’d told me about the cat and the string. I needed to give Dale his number.

  But Diana didn’t even give me the opportunity to pick the when. Her email made it very clear that she was in charge. Maybe that was just what I needed—a woman who would take control. Sure, I could engage in conversation and even make a woman laugh every now and then, sometimes intentionally, but I was temperamental, stubborn, moody, private, and generally tipsy. I wasn’t consistent enough at being consistent to drive any kind of relationship forward. But this was just a date. All I had to do was focus and not embarrass myself.

  I emailed Diana directions to the cabin, closed the laptop, and then considered riding up to Floppy’s garage to see if I could somehow get inside his trailer. But my breakfast had put me into a sort of grease-induced coma, and it was about all I could do to walk to the refrigerator for a third beer.

  Back at the table I thought about Diana slapping my ass and how it had made me feel. I needed Diana to take charge. I needed her to lead the way to wherever we were going. It’s what Dale had done to become my friend. I hadn’t invited him over; he’d just kept showing up whether I wanted him to or not. And I did want him to, even though I’d have to be waterboarded before admitting that fact in front of him.

  I opened the computer again and pulled up Facebook. I found Dale’s profile, clicked on the FRIENDS tab, and saw that he was connected with over three hundred people. I was connected to no one. I’d signed up for Facebook when I started dating Sarah, and for a while she was my only friend. Then Laura and I reconnected, and suddenly I had two Facebook friends. But they had both unfriended me, and I hadn’t bothered reaching out to anyone else since. I was a Facebook voyeur. I used the site to see what other people were doing rather than to share the experiences of my own life. It says a lot about your personality when you open Facebook only to be greeted with the announcement you have zero friends.

  Maybe it was time for me to stop being so closed off. I had no intention of going out and making new friends in the real world, but what could it hurt to reconnect with a few old friends in the virtual one? I clicked the ADD FRIEND button on Dale’s profile and then searched for Sarah’s and did the same. What the hell, I thought, she might like to hear I’d been shot. Then I thought of Perry. He was one of those friends you might not see or talk to very often but one you knew you could always count on. Since leaving the Charleston PD, I’d seen Perry only a handful of times. Before giving him my statement at the hospital, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him in person.

  I entered his name in the search field, and several profiles appeared. I narrowed the search by clicking on Charleston, South Carolina, and soon I was looking at his smiling face. Perry was now in his early sixties, but his salt-and-pepper hair was as thick and wavy as it had been the day I’d first met him soon after I graduated from the academy. At that time Perry was a field training officer. For fifteen weeks we worked side by side, him attempting to show me the ropes and me trying not to be an insubordinate asshole.

  At the end of my training, Perry reluctantly gave me his stamp of approval, and I was assigned to Team 7, Traffic Division, where I spent a month arguing with jaywalkers and cyclists. After it was reported that I shoved a guy who’d given me some guff about the expired meter ticket I’d placed on his truck, Perry invited me out for a beer. I’d come to respect Perry more than anyone else in the department. He was about the only person on the planet I’d actually listen to.

  Over that beer, Perry described the department as a living maze.

  “It’s almost impossible to maneuver,” he told me. “Just when you think you’re on the right path, a new wall suddenly appears in front of you. To survive, you have to be willing to climb over those walls, or dig under them. You’re not cut out for this, Davis. Go out on your own. Get your PI license and a camera with a long lens. You’ll probably make more money, and you won’t have a bureaucracy breathing down your neck.”

  I resigned the following day.

  Over the next few years, Perry and I occasionally met for a beer. I’d tell him about the most recent cheating spouse or insurance fraud I’d photographed, and he’d tell me about his golf handicap and the twenty-foot fishing boat he referred to as his mistress because he said that was about how expensive it was to maintain.

  During one of our meet-ups, he told me he’d been moved to the detective division. “No more dealing with blue flamers like you,” he said. Later I heard he’d become a senior detective. It hadn’t surprised me that Perry had learned to navigate the living maze of the department.

  I focused on Perry’s Facebook profile picture. He was on a golf course, smiling like a kid at an amusement park. I clicked ADD FRIEND and scrolled through Perry’s profile. The only public photos showed Perry hamming it up with some of his police buddies, and I was suddenly a bit jealous for the friendships I’d never been able to obtain, much less maintain. “You’re not cut out for this, Davis,” Perry had told me. I now wondered if he was talking about the bureaucracy of the department or the camaraderie required to be a member of the force.

  Then I considered that maybe Perry had been referring to something different altogether. What had he really meant when he talked about having to outmaneuver the walls of the department?

  I thought back to my conversation with Byrd at the sheriff’s department and how he’d brought up Perry. Byrd had said that a detective being put in charge of an investigation involving a good friend seemed like a conflict of interest. I’d never looked at it that way before. Perry was my friend, and he was protecting me. That’s what friends did. But Byrd was right. It was a conflict of interest. Actually, it was worse than that. Perry knew I was guilty of putting Greg in a coma, and he was breaking some major rules by looking the other way. Perry wasn’t just climbing over walls; he was smashing right through them.

  It made me wonder how far Perry was willing to go. I’d been surprised when Byrd said that his Charleston PD friend Emory hadn’t mentioned the IA investigation. But then again, those types of investigations weren’t exactly broadcast through the department. Byrd’s friend could be out of the loop—although Emory seemed to know who I was and enough about the storage unit incident to tell Byrd something wasn’t quite right about it and to keep an eye on me. If he knew that much, it seemed more than likely he’d know IA was on the case.

  But if Greg was being investigated by IA, why hadn’t they contacted me? I was the only witness in the storage unit fiasco. Perry would give them my statement, but that wouldn’t satisfy them. They would want me to recount my discussion with Greg word for word, and they’d want to hear it directly from me, and in person. But no one had contacted me. Had Perry broken more rules to keep me out of that mess? How would he be able to do that? It didn’t seem possible. It was as if there were no IA investigation at all. But if there wasn’t, why would Perry tell me there was?

  I pondered that question for a moment, despite the uncomfortable feeling it was giving me. I didn’t know if it was the angel or the devils whispering in my ears, but something was causing a tremor to run through my veins.

  I thought about that night in the storage unit and the figure silhouetted in front of headlights. The figure that slowly raised a hand and sent a bullet into my leg. Had a part of me recognized that figure? Had I somehow known all along who it was?

  I stood up and marched around the table in an attempt to outrun the flood of thoughts pouring into my brain. I was being ridiculous. Perry was my friend, my mentor, the one person other than Laura I completely trusted. It was stupid to think he would be involved with Greg’s drug hustle.

  But the more I tried to talk myself out of it, the more suspicious I became. The idea was firmly planted, and it was going to fester.

  I searched my memory, trying to pull up the times I’d talked to Perry over the years. Had he ever mentioned work
ing with Greg? Or any bad apples in the department? And what kind of car did Perry drive? I remembered meeting him at a bar on James Island and seeing him get out of some type of SUV, maybe a Jeep Cherokee or something similar. But that had been a couple of years ago.

  * * *

  I drove down to El Bacaratos and used the browser app on my phone to find the number for the Audi dealership in Charleston. When a chipper woman answered, I asked to be transferred to the service department. After suffering through a minute of “Hooked on a Feeling,” a service adviser finally picked up.

  “Service, this is Paul.”

  “I need to make an appointment,” I said.

  “Sure. Have you been here before?”

  “Yes. My name is Perry Long.”

  I heard a few keyboard clicks.

  “Okay, let’s see. Yes. Here we go—2017 Audi A6?”

  “Yeah,” I said frantically. “The gray one. It’s gray, right?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s gray.”

  27

  By the time I got back to the cabin, the devils were screaming and my temper had me looking around for something to break. Instead I put a pill under my tongue and began typing out an email.

  Hey Perry,

  I’m thinking about trading in my Mercedes for something smaller. Do you like your gray Audi? I need an answer ASAP.

  Davis

  I wanted Perry to know I’d found him out. He had told me I wasn’t cut out for the department, but I needed to show him that I could at least put two and two together. That I wasn’t so comfortably numb that I couldn’t figure out he was the one who’d been with Greg that night. When Greg had come back to the storage unit and found me poking around, I’d noticed him on the phone with someone. He must have been calling Perry to tell him to come back and help solve the problem at hand. That problem being me.

  Greg and Perry both knew me well. They knew I’d spill my guts to someone about what I’d seen in that storage unit. If not to the cops, then at least to Laura, and she’d definitely go to the authorities. Perry had no choice but to shoot me. It was a miracle he hadn’t killed me. Maybe shooting me in the leg was his way of being a friend.