In the Blood Read online

  In the Blood

  J.A. Kerley

  To Janine and Duane Eby, always beautifully there

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by J.A. Kerley

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  “It’s almost midnight, Anak. Would you stop throwing that goddamn harpoon?” Rebecca Ahn stood on the porch of the tiny, weatherbeaten house, glaring at Anak Jackson.

  “I’m bored,” Jackson said. “What else is there to do here?”

  Bathed in the thin illumination of a lone light on the side of the house, Jackson crunched across the sand to yank the six-foot lance from the scrubby palmetto doubling as his target.

  “Dr Matthias said to keep a low profile, Anak,” Rebecca said. “Not get noticed. Not yet.”

  Jackson stared into the surrounding blackness. There wasn’t another dwelling for a half-mile.

  “Who’s gonna complain, Bec? The moon?”

  Jackson returned to his former position, lifted the spear to his broad shoulder. He had used true harpoons in his youth, for seals mainly, throwing with respectable accuracy according to the Inuit elders on his mother’s side. And wasn’t spear-chucker a derogatory term for blacks? He was doubly blessed. Or cursed.

  The spear sliced through thirty feet of sultry night air to thwock into the base of the tree.

  Ahn said, “At least throw that thing during the day.”

  “It’s too freakin’ hot,” Jackson complained. But he went inside and returned the lance to a corner of the living room, a display of cheap furniture and mildewed walls. He walked a short hall to a bedroom, tiptoed inside. He returned seconds later.

  “Is everything OK back there, Rebec? Have you handled the fee—”

  Rebecca pointed to a damp spot on her T-shirt. Jackson smiled and pushed his hand into his jeans pocket, pulling out a candy tin. He popped it open and produced a half-smoked joint. He lit, inhaled deeply and let the smoke dribble out through his nose as he spoke.

  “This doing-nothing shit is making me stir-crazy, babe. The doc promised he’d find us decent jobs, a place to stay in Mobile, right? Then he runs off to the other side of the world to – what did he say? – ‘descend staircases’. What the hell does descend staircases mean?”

  “Dr Matthias will do everything he said when he gets back, Anak, he always has.”

  “You’re too trusting, Rebec. We’ve known Matthias for maybe three months. He’s spooky, too freakin’ weird for me. And if he sticks that goddamn needle in my arm one more time, I’ll…”

  “I trust him. Be patient. And don’t smoke inside. It’s not good.”

  Jackson started to argue; caught himself. “My bad. Sorry.”

  He rattled open the screen door and stepped into the night. The air smelled of the estuary behind the house, the Gulf’s falling tide exposing dead fish, broken clams, clots of seaweed. The erstwhile neighborhood had been home to shrimpers, but that was before hurricanes shattered the houses and grounded the boats hundreds of yards inland. The house was the sole dwelling standing on jigsaw-cut channels separated by marsh grass and hummocks. Built in the forties of oak and cypress and hand-hewn joists, it survived the winds and water while the shacks and trailers had been blown as far west as Galveston Bay.

  Anak took a final hit off the roach. He scratched at his full-face black beard, what Rebecca laughingly called his Rasputin beard, a reminder his blood had once lived in Russia. When they were stoned, Ahn made up fabulous stories about their distant forebears’ bloodlines traveling the earth to meet, Anak’s originating deep in Russia, taking centuries to cross eastward to China, north to the Bering Strait, into Alaskan Inuit tribes – where it met another traveling strain that had originated in Africa! It was like magic.

  Rebecca’s blood, as she told it, her storytelling voice sweet and musical after she’d smoked weed, had its genesis in the Middle East, moving through Europe to the US, pausing in the Swede-land of Minnesota, then pushing into Canada. Rebecca joked that Anak carried half the world in his veins, she carried the other half in hers.

  Pretty little fairy tales that disappeared at dawn.

  A light drew Anak’s eye toward the distant road. The lane to the shack was a hundred yards distant, the turn-off obscured by scrub trees and kudzu. Two sets of lights, two vehicles. The lights stopped by the gate. Went black.

  Anak brushed mosquitoes from his eyes and stepped down to the sand. He was jogging up the drive for a closer look when a spotlight blazed from a vehicle. Anak dropped to the ground and watched the stark white beam of a searchlight sweeping the trees, the kind of high-intensity lamp mounted on cop cars, or used by poachers to jacklight deer, freezing them in light to await the bullet.

  The searchlight died. Anak listened into the dark. Someone had passed the gate, someone else was creeping through the trees. Anak realized the road through the gate was the only easy way off the marshland edging the Gulf of Mexico.

  A hunter all his life, Anak saw the pattern of a trap. He pushed from the ground and ran to the house. He snapped off the living-room light, the only remaining illumination coming from the bedroom down the hall.

  “What is it?” Rebecca said. “What are you doing?”

  “Someone’s coming.”

  “Jesus! Who?”

  “Thieves, maybe.”

  Rebecca looked toward the bedroom. “Remember the doctor’s warning? That some people would see us as dangerous? We’ve got to hide the –”

  Anak waved her silent. “Get to the rowboat. Cross the channel and hide. There’s a paddle inside. Don’t use the oars, they creak.”

  “You’re coming too,” Rebecca said.

  Anak looked to the old shark lance in the corner shadows.

  “Anak!” Rebecca hissed. “Come on.”

  Anak spun to her, blue eyes blazing. “Get out!”

  The back door opened and Rebecca slid her slender body through the gap of a broken deck rail and jumped to the sand. She ran toward the water clutching a tight bundle, then crept to the end of the fifty-foot pier where a small green boat rocked.

  Voices!

  Not from the house or drive. From the water. Rebecca flattened against the pier, watching a searchlight’s beam hit the shack, f
lick off. Someone had confirmed the shack’s location.

  Trapped.

  Rebecca held the bundle tight. She heard the electric whine of a trolling motor as the boat moved closer. Heart pounding, she knelt on the salt-crusted pier, seeing a folded tarp in the rowboat. She wrapped the bundle in the tarp, tucking it beneath the middle seat. She loosened the boat’s ropes to swing it beneath the pier. There were a few inches between the boat’s top and the dock’s underside. She’d crouch in the boat and hope the intruders would pass over above her.

  A voice from the water said, “Something’s moving over there!”

  The light snapped on, trapping Rebecca in white clarity. Behind her, from the house, came the sound of breaking wood, a door kicked in. A few seconds of breathless silence…

  Replaced by a scream and the sound of gunfire.

  Rebecca spun toward the house and began running. Get away from the dock! her mind screamed. Lead them away from the dock.

  She was a dozen feet from the house when the back door exploded open and a hideous image appeared on the deck: a man with eyes impossibly wide, his mouth frozen in a soundless scream…

  And a harpoon bobbing from his abdomen.

  Rebecca froze. The man’s hands clutched at his gut. He vomited blood down his shirt, staggered through the rotten deck rail, and dropped into the sand in front of Rebecca.

  A pop of gunfire. Pain seared Rebecca’s head. She felt sand rush to her face, grit slide into her mouth. Voices screamed all around. More popping sounds. Someone yelled, “I can’t find it…”

  The world spun into hazy colors. A thousand miles away, Rebecca heard footsteps on the dock. As the feet approached she turned away, drawn to a strange scene before her eyes, like a movie she could enter at will: a young woman naked on a beach with multi-stranded light arcing from her belly to the sky. The arc glittered like the Northern lights, bands of color pulsing like heartbeats.

  The woman on the beach was her.

  What Dr Matthias said was true, Rebecca thought as she spun into darkness. I have a rainbow inside me.

  Chapter 2

  “People should be sleeping at this hour,” Harry Nautilus muttered.

  Beside me, I heard the metallic click of his fishing reel. To the east, the horizon held the blue glow of approaching dawn.

  “It’s the best time to fish,” I countered, whipping my lure into the low waves of the Gulf of Mexico.

  “Fish should be sleeping at this hour.”

  Harry’d stayed in my guest room last night, expecting to fish today. I’d not planned to awaken so early, but hadn’t been sleeping much lately, kept awake by the files on my desk at the Mobile Police Department, a dozen mean and horrific homicides in the past two months. When I’d looked at my clock – 4.37 a.m. – I figured we’d catch the early-shift fish.

  “Coffee, bro?” I said.

  “Don’t ask, just pour.”

  I reeled in my line, set the rod in a tubular spike in the sand. I pulled a thermos of homebrew from my tackle bag, half cheap-ass Mexican espresso, half New Orleans-style coffee with chickory. I’d filled the thermos three-quarters full, topped it with scalded milk, added a quarter-cup of demerara sugar and a tot of Kentucky bourbon. Liquid zip-a-dee-do-dah with a jolt of my-oh-my.

  “Crap,” I said, rifling through the bag.

  “What?”

  “I forgot mugs. Be right back.”

  I started jogging to my stilt-standing beachfront home a hundred yards away, across dunes bristling with sea oats. I live on Dauphin Island, thirty miles south of Mobile. It’s my second home on the site, the first having been knocked cockeyed by Hurricane Katrina.

  “Wait a sec, Carson,” Harry called from behind me. “There’s something out on the water.”

  I turned and wandered back to Harry’s side. Squinting into the dark, I saw a small craft out thirty yards or so, an aluminum rowboat rocking in the waves. It was nearly swamped, water licking its gunnels, the side-slipping tide pulling it parallel to the beach. It was a ghostly sight, like a lifeboat from the Flying Dutchman.

  “Jeez,” Harry said, frowning at the empty boat. “You think someone got knocked overboard?”

  I sighed and pulled off my T-shirt. “More likely it slipped its moorings. I’ll swim out and grab it.”

  “It’ll beach soon enough,” Harry grunted. “Get the mugs. I need coffee.”

  I glanced east. A half-mile away lay the wide mouth of Mobile Bay. The tide would draw the boat into the path of watercraft soon to pour from the bay into the Gulf.

  “The damn thing’s a navigation hazard,” I said, kicking off my moccasins. Harry rolled his eyes as I sloshed waist-deep in my tattered shorts, threw my hands in front of me and dove. I set my bearings on the boat and pulled a lazy freestyle in that direction.

  It took a half a minute to reach the craft. I grabbed a trailing painter, the bow rope, which suggested someone’s knot hadn’t held the boat to the dock. The sloshing craft was too unstable to board, so I put my hands on the gunnel and kicked high enough to glance inside, seeing only a cheap plastic tarp floating on trapped air. I pulled it toward me, planning to jam it under a seat so it wouldn’t drift away and foul someone’s propeller.

  The tarp began unfolding. I felt something wrapped in the plastic. With my legs kicking in the water and my biceps on the gunnels, I unwrapped the tarp. A second package dropped out and floated in the water. A pink insulated bundle…

  Topped with a baby’s face.

  A wave crashed over me, not water, but horror.

  Chapter 3

  The furious downdraft of the approaching medical helicopter created a sandstorm on the beach. I felt its roar against my back as Harry knelt over the baby and performed rescue breathing. He’d grabbed the infant when I was splashing wildly in shoulder-deep water, simultaneously trying to back-swim to the shore and keep the kid high and dry. Harry had 911’d the Dauphin Island paramedics, who’d sent the medivac chopper.

  “I’m not feeling any breathing,” Harry yelled. Jimmy Gentry of the Dauphin Island cops had arrived two minutes back and was using a flashlight to wave the ‘copter toward the sea side of the dunes. The flashers on his cruiser strobed blue and white across my partner’s face. Harry looked terrified.

  “Keep going, brother,” I said. “The cavalry’s almost here.”

  Harry pinched the tiny nose and tried to puff air into the baby’s mouth. I hunched over the pair and held my opened shirt wide to block some of the sand. The helicopter yawed above our heads.

  When the chopper’s rails were still wavering above the sand, two people vaulted from its innards. It was bright enough to make out a guy in his twenties and a woman in her mid thirties. She had a medical bag in her hand and a serene expression on her face, like it was the third time she’d done this today. Despite the quiet expression she outsprinted the guy, skidded to her knees beside Harry, took the child. The woman was long-legged, her hair so blonde as to seem white. The blue eyes looked better suited to someone selling saunas in Stockholm than jumping from helicopters in South Alabama.

  “The kid was in the boat,” I told her, my words tumbling over one another. “Wrapped in a tarp. The boat was sinking, but the tarp was floating. I don’t know if it’s, if it’s…”

  She held the baby close and did a series of palpations and checks. Harry fell back on to the sand, gasping. The woman spoke quickly to her companion in medical jargon. He ran to the chopper, plucked a mic from the wall and began relaying instructions to the crew at the hospital.

  “Alive?” Harry asked the woman.

  “Barely,” she said. Baby cradled high against her bosom, the doc stood and retreated to the chopper. Her assistant was already in place and reached for the child. The blonde doc pulled herself into the craft. Seconds later it was roaring toward Mobile.

  Harry shook his head as the chopper disappeared into the sky. “I don’t know if I ever got a breath from the kid. It was too small for me to feel a pulse. I was afraid I’d break someth
ing.”

  “You guys did a great job,” Jimmy consoled. “We’ll know more when the kid gets to the ER. How it’s going to play out.”

  Jimmy meant brain damage. Out on the water, when I unrolled the tarp, the infant’s eyes – I’m sure it was under six months old – were closed with no sign of life. But its skin had been ruddy, not the blue of oxygen deprivation. Still, any brief stoppage of breath would start cells dying in the developing brain. Plus there was the aspect of exposure. And infection from aspirated sea water.

  I doubted the prognosis was good.

  Jimmy headed back to his office to set agencies and investigations in motion. I looked at Harry. He had picked up his rod and reel from the sand and was breaking it down.

  “You’re done fishing for the day?” I asked.

  He stared at me.

  “We just landed a baby, Carson. How can we top that?”

  We retreated to my place for long-awaited mugs of coffee. When I brought them to the living room, Harry had switched on the local morning news and was frowning at the tube. I saw a semi-familiar face on the idiot box: Jeffords Tutweiler, a tall, lean, middle-aged man with black hair gone gray at the temples, an almost-pretty face that reminded me of Roger Moore. He was at a lectern, thumbs atop, hands down the sides. He looked like he wanted to pick up the lectern and heave it at the reporters sitting in a row of folding chairs. Behind him, I saw a mound of dirt with a dozen shovels buried halfway up the blades.

  “I don’t think this is the proper venue for deliberately provocative questions,” Tutweiler was saying through tight-pursed lips. “Today is for celebrating enhanced educational opportunities across the South.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked Harry. “Some kind of groundbreaking ceremony?”

  “The endless expansion of Kingdom College,” he grunted.

  The camera panned to the left of the guy at the lectern, showing a dozen dignitary types, including Senator Hampton Custis and three state representatives. The camera passed Custis to highlight a face familiar to everyone who used the television for devotional purposes, and nearly anyone in America who watched the news: the Reverend Richard Bloessing Scaler. Scaler’s round, plump face was without mirth and, actually, without much activity at all, save for the occasional pursing of lips as if figuring out a puzzle in his head. He was so focused on the solution as to seem oblivious to both the hubbub a few dozen paces away and the political powers attending his ceremony.