Dog Days & Deadly Passage

  Dog Days

  JournalStone’s DoubleDown Series, Book III

  By

  Joe McKinney

  JournalStone

  San Francisco

  Copyright © 2013 by Joe McKinney

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  JournalStone books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

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  The views expressed in this work are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  ISBN: 978-1-940161-12-9 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-940161-29-7 (hc – limited edition)

  ISBN: 978-1-940161-13-6 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013951062

  Printed in the United States of America

  JournalStone rev. date: December 6, 2013

  Cover Design: Paul Vaughn

  Cover Art: Alfredo Lopez Jr.

  Edited by: Elizabeth Reuter

  This one is for Jeff, Mark and Ralph

  Who lived it with me back in 1983

  Dog Days

  “It must be a wild place.”

  “Yes, the setting is a worthy one. If the devil did desire to have a hand in the affairs of men –”

  “Then you are yourself inclining to the supernatural explanation.”

  “The devil’s agents may be of flesh and blood, may they not?”

  From an exchange between Holmes and Watson in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles”

  Dog Days

  My dad had me pinned to the floor. He put a finger to his lips and said, “Shhh, you’ll wake your mother.”

  I had lurched out of sleep so suddenly, with the storm still roaring in my head, that it took me a moment to realize where I was.

  “You’re alright,” he whispered. “It’s over. Stop fighting.”

  I blinked at him. He was kneeling next to me, our dog Max sitting behind him, his yellow eyes focused on me, tail wagging a million miles an hour. The poor dog was so excited he could barely contain himself. Probably happy to be alive, I thought. I knew I was, because there’d come a point during the night when I seriously doubted I’d see the morning. But the fear I’d felt then was rapidly shrinking.

  I looked around, took stock. The house behind my dad was dark. The air was hot and humid. I couldn’t hear the hum of the air conditioners. I heard nothing but Max’s impatient breathing and the sweep of his tail across the floor. I let myself go slack, all the tension fading.

  “What’s going on?” I asked in a whisper. “Is the power out?”

  “Yes, the power’s out. The water too. Probably will be for a few days. Come with me. I want to show you something.”

  I sat up and rubbed my arms. Hurricane Alexis had made landfall the night before, and when the wind and the rain got really bad—bad enough that the house started to shake and I honestly thought the roof would tear away and go sailing off like a kite cut from its string—my family had gone into our walk-in hall closet for shelter. It was where we stashed everything. My parents loved to throw dinner parties, and that closet was where we kept all the extra tables and chairs and fondue kits and everything else. But it was the only room downstairs that didn’t have an exterior wall. My dad said we’d be safest there. So we took out all the tables and chairs, made a bed out of coats and old sweaters, and hunkered down for the storm. My mom put her arms around me and hugged me so tightly she left finger-shaped bruises on my skin.

  But that was over now. The storm had passed, and we had made it through.

  Moving slowly, so as not to disturb my mom, I got up and followed my dad through the hall and out to the living room, Max trotting along at my side.

  “Are we gonna take down the boards?” I asked.

  The day before, when the weatherman said that the storm was definitely going to make landfall at Galveston, my dad and I went around the house nailing sheets of plywood over the windows. Good thing too because the wind had snapped off one of the branches from the pecan tree in our front yard and sent it crashing into the big bay window in my mom’s office. We went into the closet shortly after that. All the other boards had held though. White lines of light glowed from the edges of the windows on the front of the house, and I took that as a good sign. Daylight had come, and I’d had enough rain for a long while.

  “Later,” my dad said. “First, I want you to see this.”

  He led me to the front door, opened it, and then stood off to one side so I could look out.

  “Whoa!” I said.

  His smile was wide. “I know. Cool, right?”

  I turned back to the doorway, stunned. We lived in a neighborhood called Brook Forest, one of the wealthier parts of Clear Lake, a little bedroom community about midway between Houston and Galveston. My dad was a sergeant in the Houston police, but my mom was a pediatrician, and because of her we were able to live in one of the nicest homes in a neighborhood made up of nothing but nice homes. Now those gorgeously huge houses looked like islands in a sea of caramel-colored water. There was water everywhere. It came right up to the front door. We had a big brick mailbox down at the curb, but I couldn’t even see it. The water was that deep. Across the street, near where his mailbox should have been, was Mr. Matheson’s blue pickup truck. Except only the top two or three inches near the roof were visible above the waterline.

  As I watched, a water moccasin glided by, a long black ribbon on the brown water.

  Then I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and looked down. Our lawn sloped away from the house to meet the street, and so the water up near the porch was only a few inches deep. There, hundreds of red crawdads were waving their pinchers in the air, as though outraged and confused by the way they’d been uprooted from their home in the bayou down at the end of my street.

  “Dad, look!”

  His smile broadened. “I thought you’d like that.”

  We stepped out onto the porch together and Max followed along. When he saw the crawdads he jumped from the porch and splashed around in the shallow water, his mouth open and teeth bared as he tried to bite them. I noticed he kept his nose high and his tongue pulled into the back of his mouth, though. He’d dealt with crawdads before. He knew those pinchers could hurt.

  One of the crawdads grabbed hold of Max’s teeth and, startled, Max shook his head until it went flying off, landing with a small splash halfway across the yard. Max barked at it, and my dad and I laughed. I looked up at him and he smiled down at me, and for a moment, I thought we were fine. It felt good, standing there together in the middle of the flood, realizing that we’d come through okay. But then his smile faded and his expression turned sad and I knew that even this new adventure wasn’t enough to allow him to forgive me.

  Luckily neither one of us got a chance to discuss it, for just then Mr. Moore pulled up to our porch in a little aluminum boat. Mr. Moore lived down at the corner of our block in a house that looked like an old Louisiana plantation. On school days, I caught the bus at the corner under the shade of an enormous pecan tree he had in his front yard. He was kind of fat and really pale and going bald, and he looked ridiculous
sitting in the boat in his white t-shirt and baby blue shorts and black socks.

  “Morning, Wes,” he said to my dad. “You and Meredith make it through okay?”

  “Morning, Tom. I haven’t had a chance to look at the roof yet, but I think we did all right. How about you and Eleanor? You guys good?”

  Mr. Moore was wearing an Astros baseball hat. He took it off and wiped his bald head before answering. “Well, actually, I got a bit of a problem I was wondering if you could help with.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s up?”

  Mr. Moore looked back toward his house, and when he turned back to us, I could see he was scared.

  I think my dad noticed it too.

  “What’s wrong, Tom?”

  “Um, can you…can you see my house from there?”

  We couldn’t. There were trees in the way. My dad stepped off the porch and walked into the yard until he was up to his knees in the floodwater.

  “Oh my God,” he said.

  I jumped off the porch and ran to his side. And looking down the street toward Mr. Moore’s house I got my second shock of the day.

  “Is that a shrimp boat?” I asked.

  My dad nodded.

  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. We were seven miles from the shrimp and oyster camps down in Kemah, but somehow the storm had carried one of those shrimp boats all the way from down in Kemah to the corner of my block, where it now rested in the branches of Mr. Moore’s pecan tree. The tree looked like a giant trying to pull a toy boat out of the water.

  “How is that even possible?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” my dad said. “Storm surge must have carried it here. Had to have been seven or eight feet of surge to cause this kind of flooding. I guess it could’ve carried a boat.”

  My dad turned to Mr. Moore and shrugged. “I don’t know if I can do anything about that, Tom. I guess you’ll just need to call your homeowner’s insurance once the phones come back up. You’re probably gonna need a crane to get that thing out of there.”

  “Huh?” Mr. Moore said. “Oh, yeah, I guess you’re right.”

  “What’s wrong, Tom?” my dad asked. “You look spooked.”

  Spooked was one way of putting it, I thought. Actually, Mr. Moore looked like he didn’t quite have the words to say what he needed to say. He opened his mouth to speak, then stopped, looked at me, and then at my dad, and tried again. “Can you…would you come with me, Wes. Please.”

  “Well, sure,” my dad said. “Just tell me what’s wrong.”

  “It’s…” He took a deep breath. “There’s a bad smell, Wes. You know what I mean? It’s real bad.”

  “Oh,” my dad said. “Oh, okay. Come closer. Let me get onboard.”

  Mr. Moore turned the motor back on and coasted up to our porch. My dad climbed aboard and I tried to follow.

  “Um,” Mr. Moore said, holding up a hand to stop me. “I think, Mark, it’d be best if it was just your dad.”

  “But I want to see the boat,” I said.

  “No,” my dad said, and right away I recognized the bark of command in his voice. It was what my mom called his cop voice. “You stay here. Take Max inside and help your mother. I’ll be back in a bit.”

  “But Dad…”

  “I said no. Now go on. Take Max inside.”

  Before I could say more they backed the boat up and powered off, leaving Max and me on the porch. He looked up at me and whined.

  “Figures,” I said. “Come on, Max. This summer’s gonna suck.”

  I walked back inside and closed the door and sat on the stairs. Max put his head in my lap and I scratched him behind the ears, but not even he could pull me out of the misery I felt. Biggest adventure of my life and I was sitting on the sidelines.

  But then there came a knock at the back door.

  One I knew very well.

  Max raised his head, perked his ears up, then let out a series of deep, booming barks as he ran for the back door.

  I followed him through the kitchen and into the mudroom. Once there, I opened the door to see my best friend, Jeff Hefke. Behind him, tied off to the corner of my garage, was a bright orange canoe.

  “Dude, is he gone?”

  He meant my dad. “Yeah, he went down the street with Mr. Moore.”

  “That’s crazy, right? You saw that?”

  “The shrimp boat. Yeah, I saw it.”

  “Well, come on, let’s go.” He pointed over his shoulder at the canoe.

  “Dude, I can’t. My dad told me to stay here.”

  “Oh come on,” he said. “There’s a shrimp boat up a tree. How many times are you gonna get to see that?”

  I laughed. He was right, of course. He usually was. Of course, him being right usually got me in trouble.

  Jeff and I got in his canoe and paddled down my driveway to the street. Now that I was out in it, I really got a sense for the destruction the storm had left behind. The weatherman said that we were going to catch the dirty side of the storm, the side where the winds were strongest and the damage was usually the worst. I could believe it, looking at all this. My neighborhood had a bunch of huge trees, pines and pecan and oak and dozens others that I didn’t know the name of, and nearly all of them looked like they’d lost limbs to the wind. Power lines were down. The Matheson’s place, directly across the street from ours, had thousands of bright green pecan leaves plastered to its surface. And garbage of every sort, from Styrofoam cups to Coke cans to unnamable bits of plastic, floated in the current. I heard a nasty sounding metal-on-metal grinding and looked down to see that the bottom of our canoe had just scratched up the roof of Mrs. Matheson’s Mercedes.

  “Oh shit,” I said.

  “Man, we used to play kickball in this street. Can you believe it?”

  “The water should drain away in a few days.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know if I can ever look at this place the same way again, you know?”

  I did. I got it. Though I was only fourteen, I still realized that I had it pretty good growing up. I was, by any reasonable way you want to measure it, growing up rich. My neighborhood, hell, everything about my life, had always been comfortable and safe and secure. But now I was looking at that security sacked. My comfortable upbringing had just gotten bitch slapped by the Gulf of Mexico, and there I was, floating around in a canoe in the ruins of everything I thought I knew of the world.

  Jeff used his paddle to push us off Mrs. Matheson’s Mercedes and we got moving again. A few neighbors were outside on their front porches, most of them with stunned expressions on their faces.

  I waved and a few of them waved back.

  Jeff said, “What do you think the Swamp looks like?”

  The Swamp was a vast expanse of undeveloped marshland at the edges of our subdivision. My friends and I spent our summer days there, our dogs at our side, our pellet guns gripped by the breach like we were Marines in the Asian jungles of World War II.

  I thought of Jeff’s question. What would it look like right now? The answer seemed obvious to me. It would be a sheet of brown water, punctuated here and there by clusters of trees.

  Like the rest of my mental map of the world, it was in the process of reconstruction.

  “You know what,” Jeff said. “I bet the alligators are loving this.”

  I stopped paddling. I put the paddle across my lap and stared daggers into his back.

  “Dude, really? You think that’s funny?”

  “Oh come on, Mark. It’s not that big of a deal.”

  “Maybe not to you.”

  “Whatever. You can be a real pansy sometimes.”

  “Screw you, Jeff.”

  “You wish.”

  He laughed and went back to rowing. I did too.

  We’d completed the 8th grade two weeks before and this summer was supposed to be our gateway to the Promised Land. In about ninety days we’d start high school. We were about to enter an undiscovered country of girls who actually had tits, and would probably be willing to s
how them to us. God help us, there was a chance we might actually get laid.

  That was looming in our future.

  As a reward Jeff suggested we get my dad’s pistol and go out for a bit of target practice.

  My dad is a cop, like I’ve said, and he has a lot of guns. His gun safe is one of those floor-to-ceiling jobs, with a safety lock. He thought he’d done a pretty good job of hiding the key, but I was a teenager, and of course I knew exactly where it was.

  So, that first Monday of our vacation, my dad had one of those police-for-charity golf tournaments he was always doing. He was going to be gone from 6 a.m. to sometime in the late afternoon. And of course my mom was gone, working at her practice. I was left all on my own, with nothing but a key to my dad’s private gun stash to entertain me.

  I did what any teenage boy would do. I called over my best friend and unlocked the gun cabinet and gloated as he stood amazed at the weapons before him.

  There were machine guns and long rifles and combat shotguns and even vintage military pistols spread out there before us; but what caught both our gazes, what held us transfixed, was the .357 Smith & Wesson revolver with the blued barrel and the walnut grips. Along its four-inch barrel an inscription read HOUSTON POLICE DEPARTMENT, and above the trigger the weapon’s serial number read SW0191HPD, my father’s badge number.

  That was the Holy Grail of the gun chest.

  It was a long moment before I finally reached out and took it.

  “He won’t know?” Jeff asked.

  “He’ll never have a clue,” I said. “We’ll have time to replace any ammunition we use.”

  Jeff nodded. I wrapped the gun up in a dishtowel and put it into my backpack. Then we went to the Swamp and wandered around looking for something to shoot at when we came across a ten-foot-long alligator sunning itself next to a pond that was scummed over with bright green algae.