Ann clenched her fists, then fumbled in her purse for her keys. The day hadn’t even started yet and already she was fighting the pain. She found the keys, then took J.P. by the hand, looked both ways, threw a quick glance behind and caught Rick looking, as she knew she would.
“ He always watches when you walk, doesn’t he?” J.P. tugged on her hand.
“ Yeah, he does,” she said. The group had decided she would take J.P. home, while Rick and his mother answered more of the sheriff’s questions.
“ Why?” J.P. pulled her into the street, toward the Jeep parked on the other side.
“ He likes the way I walk.” She opened her door, but J.P. climbed over.
She heard the distant blast of a fog horn.
“ Can we go?” he asked. “You’ve never been, Mom and Rick take me all the time and they like it. I bet you would too.”
The single blast of the foghorn told the town that it was 9:00 and that the Seawolf was docking at the pier, like she did every morning, rain or snow. Holiday anglers didn’t like going out too early and they didn’t like coming in too late.
J.P. loved the Seawolf and Captain Wolfe Stewart. He’d been out so many times that the bearded captain thought of J.P. as his lucky charm. Lately the boy had been having breakfast three or four times a week in the ship’s galley. If his mother didn’t want to go, Rick did.
The ship’s cook, under captain’s orders, had bacon sizzling every morning when they docked, just in case J.P. showed up for breakfast. He had become the ship’s unofficial mascot, and both crew and boy enjoyed the arrangement.
Ann waved to Rick, bit back the pain, let out the clutch and sped away. Soon she wouldn’t be able to conceal it anymore, but every minute of happiness she could give him, before the awful truth surfaced, was a minute worth fighting for, and she was a fighter.
“ Of course, the Seawolf,” she said. “I should have known.” She knew he loved the bacon and egg burgers and told herself she probably would, too. A few weeks ago she would have shuddered at the thought of so much grease and fat. She always ate healthy. Low fat, high fiber for her, exercise for her, aerobics for her, vitamins for her, she wasn’t going to get the big C, no sirree. Well she did, so this morning she was going to have a bacon and egg burger, maybe two, grease, fat, cholesterol and all.
She sat back in the seat and ran her hands over the leather steering wheel cover. Thank God she was still fairly fit, but soon she would start to lose her strength and she wouldn’t be able to hide it from Rick any longer.
“ Are you thinking?” J.P. broke her train of thought.
“ Yes, I was thinking, remembering actually.”
“ About what?”
“ I was remembering the time I gave Rick this old steering wheel cover.”
“ Why?”
“ Because sometimes it’s the little things that are the most important.”
“ And it’s important that you gave that to Rick?”
“ No, it’s important that he kept it.”
“ I don’t understand?”
“ It’s a symbol, it means he loves me. He says he only keeps it for luck, but I know better. Every time we get a new car-or in the case of this Jeep, an older one-he takes this old leather cover off the old one and puts it on the new one. This cover is important to him.”
“ Why?”
“ Because I gave it to him and he loves me.”
“ Oh.” Then a few seconds later he asked, “Did he keep everything you gave him?”
“ Every lickin’ stickin’ thing.”
“ He must love you a lot.”
“ He loves me very much. So much that it’s sad.”
“ How could that be sad?”
“ It’s sad because if something happens to me, Rick will be all alone, and I think he loves me too much to be alone.”
“ That’s a lot of love,” J.P. said.
“ Yeah, Rick and I couldn’t have any children, so we only have each other.”
“ That’s Susan Spencer’s car. She goes out on the boat. You can park behind it,” J.P. said, changing the subject.
Ann parked behind a yellow Ford Courier and smiled when she read the bumper sticker on its tailgate. Fishermen do it deeper. She knew Susan, she owned the Tampico Diner, but Ann hadn’t known she was into deep sea fishing. She shut off the ignition, leaving the car in gear, and put on the parking brake. “Short drive,” she said.
“ We could’ve walked.”
“ We could have, but I felt like driving.”
“ Just a few blocks?”
“ I don’t get to drive the Jeep very much. Rick likes to have all the fun.”
“ Really?”
“ He thinks he’s a rally driver. He turns into a little kid when he gets behind the wheel of anything that has four wheel drive.” Judy opened her door and J.P. jumped out of the back. They were both too preoccupied with their own thoughts to notice the aging brown Ford Granada that pulled up and parked behind them. “Come on,” J.P. said, “we don’t have much time.”
“ I’m coming.” Ann followed J.P. across the parking lot. By the time she reached the pier, he was halfway toward the end and the waiting fishing boat. He looked so small compared to the big men fishing along the wooden pier, who all seemed to know him. This was a part of his life she knew little about.
J.P. turned when he reached the ramp and waved. “Hurry, Ann,” he hollered. Ann quickened her pace. She was almost to the ramp when she slipped on the wet wood and started to fall. Strong hands saved her from an embarrassing spill.
“ Thank you,” Ann said, looking up to see her savior.
“ Don’t mention it.” The man had a rugged outdoor tan and he had a Bowie knife in a scabbard strapped to his right leg.
“ You’re Captain Wolfe.”
“ At your service.”
“ Has anyone ever told you that you’re a brown-eyed handsome man?”
“ Not for a lot of years, but I’m glad to hear a pretty lady talk about these old bones in that light.”
“ You’re not so old and I’m not so pretty.” She smiled, becoming lost in his eyes.
“ I’m sixty-seven. Where I come from that’s old and you’re very pretty. On that I won’t be argued with.”
“ Okay, you’re old and I’m pretty. I’m also Ann, a friend of J.P.’s.”
“ You’re Rick’s wife?”
“ That’s me.”
“ Annie, tell him about the murders,” J.P. chimed in, interrupting.
“ Murders?” the captain questioned.
“ I’ll tell you all about it over one of those famous bacon and egg burgers I’ve heard so much about.”
“ I’ll show you to the galley,” the captain said.
Ann had never been on a sport fishing boat before and the notion that one would have a galley that resembled the inside of a roadside diner had never dawned on her. She wondered if the captain and Susan Spencer had something going. The decor in his galley wasn’t that much different than the decor in her diner.
Captain Wolfe yelled for the cook, then he apologized to Ann. “The galley is usually empty till we get out to sea, unless of course our good luck mascot comes on board.” He ruffled J.P.’s hair and the boy grinned wide. He would never need braces, Ann thought.
They watched the cook throw the extra bacon on the griddle and J.P. wiggled with anticipation when he heard the expectant sizzle the cold meat made against the hot surface.
“ God knows why, but he really loves our Seawolf breakfast burgers.” The captain smiled before shifting the subject, “Now, you were talking about murder?” As suddenly as it was there, the smile was gone.
“ Two of ’em,” J.P. said.
“ Let the lady tell it,” the captain softly said.
And Ann told him. She told him how Rick ran down the bum that had tried to kill J.P.’s mother, then she told him about the other one that had attacked Rick in the bait shop.
“ In your honest opinion, could your husband have done anything else than act the way he did?” the captain asked, when she finished with the story.
“ Not and have left Judy alive.”
“ How about after, in the store?”
“ I don’t think so. He wasn’t trying to kill the man. He was defending himself.”
“ Do you think he could have defended himself without hitting the man on the head?”
“ I don’t know, maybe, but he didn’t do it on purpose. Rick would never hurt anybody on purpose.”
“ He was in Vietnam,” J.P. said. “That bum picked on the wrong guy to mess with.”
“ Your husband was in Nam? He can’t be old enough.”
“ He’s fifty-seven.”
“ He doesn’t look much older than you,” the captain said, “and you can’t be a day over thirty.”
“ Off by fifteen years, but I love you for saying it.”
“ So not only is your husband a combat veteran, he’s also apparently in pretty good shape. That explains his quick reflexes and why he killed the man that attacked him. I would have acted the same.”
“ Really?” Ann said.
“ Yeah,” J.P. said, “Captain Wolfe was in Vietnam too. You don’t mess with guys like him and Rick.”
“ It that so?” Ann said to J.P., but it was Wolfe Stewart who answered.
“ When you’ve been in combat, you learn that when somebody is trying to kill you, you try and kill him first. If you live, it’s something you never forget.”
“ Can I go on deck and talk to the guys?” J.P. asked.
“ Sure, go ahead, we won’t be leaving right away. Take all the time you want.”
The boy scurried up the stairs to greet the fishermen on the deck above.
“ You’re not hanging around longer than usual on my account?” Ann asked the captain after J.P. was out of the galley.
“ You bet I am. It’s not everyday when a lady pretty as you, with a tale of murder on her lips and a pain in her eyes like I’ve never seen, takes the time to talk to old Wolfe Stewart.”
“ I’m glad my husband isn’t as perceptive as you.”
“ You want to tell me about it?”
“ I have cancer.”
“ How long?”
“ A few weeks, two months if I’m lucky.”
The captain rose from the table and shouted at the cook. “When J.P. comes back, feed him and tell him to wait, I’m taking the lady up on the bridge for a bit.”
For reasons Ann was unable to fathom, she felt a bond with the captain. He was loud, blusterous and lovable, all at the same time. She also couldn’t help notice that he was a man used to getting his way and, although he was a big man, he didn’t throw his weight around. People did what this man asked because they wanted to.
She followed him up to the bridge.
“ Careful going up,” he told her. “It can be slippery.” She felt him behind her as she went up the steep steps. When she reached the top, he showed her through a door that opened onto the bridge.
“ From up here you can see over the dunes.” She pointed. “That’s where Rick ran down the man that was after Judy.” She was able to see the spot down the beach where a small crowd surrounded the body, including two of the sheriff’s three deputies. “And that’s the store where that second wino attacked us.” She pointed to Singh’s Bait and Convenience Store.
They looked over the dunes for a few seconds, then she asked, “Why did you bring me up here?”
“ I wanted to show you this.” He showed her a framed photograph that was fixed to the bulkhead.
“ She’s very pretty.”
“ Was very pretty.”
“ I’m sorry.”
“ She’s been gone ten years now. She had cancer, like you, and like you she kept it from me. She wanted to spare me what she was going through and she managed to do it almost right up to the end.”
“ Why are you telling me this? You don’t even know me.”
“ I want to spare your husband the pain I suffered. I want to help you not to make the same mistake my wife made.”
“ I don’t understand,” she said, but she was beginning to.
“ It broke my heart when my wife died. It hurt more that she didn’t share it with me. We were a team, but she didn’t let me be there for her. It took me years to forgive her. Can you imagine that? She was dead and I couldn’t forgive her. If you love your husband and he loves you, tell him. Don’t let him waste time by going to a movie alone, or to a friend’s for a card game, or even out to buy a paper, when you should be spending what precious little time you have left together. That was the hardest to forgive, the time we missed, because she kept her illness from me.”
“ Captain Wolfe Stewart, you’re a perceptive man. You saw the pain in my eyes and knew I was hurting. How is it you didn’t see it in your wife?”
“ I don’t know. I suspect she worked very hard to conceal it from me, like you probably do to conceal it from your husband.”
“ That’s true. I don’t let down my guard for a second, for fear he’ll see through me.”
“ Tell him and you won’t have that problem.”
“ Thank you, Captain, I’ll think about it,” but she already knew she was going to tell Rick as soon as possible.
“ I like Rick. Why don’t you bring him fishing sometime, on me.”
“ Why thank you again, that would be nice, we’ll do it.”
After they left Wolfe Stewart and his boat, they came straight up the hill, even though Ann desperately wanted to go by the bait shop and find out what was going on, but she didn’t want to be responsible for dragging J.P. into any more unpleasantness than was necessary. He had already, in a space of a few hours, seen more than most see in a lifetime. If there was more evil afoot, she wanted to keep him out of it if she could.
Home, she shut off the Jeep, went over to Judy’s front porch and sat on the front steps. It seemed too nice a day to waste it away inside. J.P. sat beside her and was unusually quiet for about a minute.
“ Wanna watch television?” he said
“ Not really.”
“ Wanna take a walk?”
“ Yeah,” she said, “it’s a good day for it.”
She had to do something, she couldn’t just sit on the porch with a seven-year-old boy on a nice day and expect him to be still, though it amazed her how little he’d been affected by what had happened earlier.
“ Let’s walk down to the park and back,” J.P. said.
“ My brother and I had pigeons when I was a kid,” Ann said, making conversation as they walked side by side down the shady road.
“ What kind?”
“ Tumblers, rollers, fantails, helmets.”
“ Wuss birds!”
“ Wuss birds?”
“ Show birds are wuss birds, you know pussy birds, real men have racers, my dad said.”
“ Well, I didn’t know.”
The half mile walk to the park took about fifteen minutes with J.P. blasting rapid fire questions the whole way, as usual, and Ann doing her best, as usual, to field them.
He seemed to run out of questions as they reached the park and turned left to cross Seaview Avenue and just as Ann thought she was going to get a breather, a stab of white hot pain ricocheted through the back of her head. A pain that had nothing to do with the cancer that was ravaging her body.
“ There’s something bad over there.” She pointed toward the dunes.
“ How do you know?” J.P. said.
“ I don’t know, but I know.”
“ The park,” J.P. said.
“ Okay.”
They turned, sprinted to the park and dropped in front of the backstop, sharing their hiding place with two empty bottles of Red Dog wine. Ann felt a little better once J.P. was shielded from what or whoever was over there.
“ Wait here, I’m going over to take a look.”
“ Don’t leave me here by myself,” J.P. said.
“ Don’t worry, I won’t leave your sight and I’ll be right back.” She got up and jogged across the street to the beach. At the sand, she crawled on her belly up the dune and peered over the top and saw him. It was the man from the bait shop, only now he reminded her of the Ragged Man from the outback and he was headed in her direction. She slid down the dune and ran back to the backstop.
“ Just in time,” J.P. said with his eye to a knot hole.
“ Let me see,” Ann said, replacing his eye with hers. “It’s the man from the store.”
The man sat on the dune and studied the beach.
“ It doesn’t look like he’s gonna move for awhile,” Ann said. Then she added, “He reminds me of the Ragged Man.”
“ What’s the Ragged Man?”
“ I met him once in Australia.”
“ Are you afraid of him?”
“ Yes. He’s very bad, very evil.”
“ The town,” J.P. said.
“ Let’s go.”
Keeping the backstop between them and the man across the street, Ann and J.P. walked across the baseball diamond, where the Tampico Pirates played, then the football field, where the Tampico Bullets played. Then they went into the Elm’s section of the park, where the high schoolers went to make out. Exiting the Elms, they found themselves at the corner of Kennedy and Second Avenue.
“ Let’s go by Ken and Dub’s Records and see if they got the new Dylan CD in yet,” J.P. said.
“ I don’t think it’s open.”
“ We could look in the window,” he said.
“ Since when did you start liking Dylan?”
“ I don’t, really,” J.P. said, “but I was gonna buy it for Rick. I’ve been saving up.”
Ann smiled and they started out for the used record store that catered to a diminishing group of people who still preferred vinyl, but they didn’t get far, because J.P. turned for a look behind.
“ Look, he’s coming,” he said. “Over there, by the corner. I don’t think he’s seen us.”
Ann grabbed him by the hand and pulled him into Susan Spencer’s Diner. The only other soul in the restaurant was Jesse Hernandez, the morning cook. He was dressed in kitchen whites, long hair in a bun under a cook’s hat and headphones, his back was facing the door and he was singing at the top of his lungs about being dazed and confused.
Like spies in the night, they walked through the diner, past booths with blood red Naugahyde and into the corridor that led to the back exit, past the women’s, past the men’s, past the pay phone, and out through the open door in back as Lola, the morning waitress, exited the woman’s restroom, never knowing that Ann and J.P. had passed by.
Ann looked left, then right. They were in the alley between First and Second Avenues. The east side was dotted with dumpsters and trash cans situated near the rear doors of Second Avenue’s merchants. The west side fronted on the garages and fenced backyards of the modest homes on First.
“ Is he still coming?” J.P. asked.
“ I think so,” Ann said.
Then they heard the front door of the diner crash open.
“ Is there anybody here?” Someone yelled in a raspy voice.
“ Nobody’s been here for the last half hour,” Lola answered.
“ Are you sure?” The raspy voice boomed loud.
“ We’re going over,” Ann whispered. She hoisted J.P. up to the top of a five foot brick fence. He grabbed on, rolled over the top and dropped into the yard on the other side with Ann right behind him.
Ann took J.P. by the hand and led him across the backyard to the back door of a two story house. Checking the door, she found it unlocked and they quietly went inside. Ann locked the door behind them. They heard the sound of a shower and a woman’s voice humming a tune Ann wasn’t familiar with. Putting her index finger to her lips, indicating to J.P. to be quiet, Ann looked through flower print curtains and saw the man coming over the fence.
“ He’s still coming,” she whispered, taking J.P.’s hand again and leading him through a modern kitchen, then a dining room, then a sitting room, then an entrance way and finally out the front door as they heard the man banging on the back.
Once they were out the front they turned left and sprinted down First. Without slowing, they crossed Kennedy, back into the Elms, back across the football field and the baseball diamond, back onto Seaview Avenue, and back up the hill toward home.
Once they were back at Judy’s Ann felt safe, at least for a few minutes, she told herself. She was exhausted, the cancer stealing her strength. She had to lay down, just for a few seconds. She literally fell on the sofa.
“ Are you all right?” J.P. asked.
“ I’m fine, I just need a little rest.”
“ Okay.
J.P. settled back in his mother’s favorite chair, remote in hand, and channel surfed, changing channels at least three times a minute, but he couldn’t get that Ragged Man out of his mind. How could Ann rest at a time like this? She must really be tired. He didn’t want to think about it, so he decided to get something to eat, but before he got to the refrigerator, he heard an animal sound from outside. He pulled a kitchen chair over to the sink, climbed up and looked out the window and saw the black shape of a big dog slide into the bushes that grew between the garage and the house.
J.P. loved to play in there.
Like a flash he was off the chair and through the kitchen to tell Ann. Halfway to the sofa he heard the scratching at the front door and screamed, “Annie, something’s outside!”
“ What?” she said, nerves taught.
“ Listen,” he whispered.
Ann heard the scratching at the door.
“ It’s the Ghost Dog,” she said. “It belongs to the Ragged Man.”
“ What are we gonna do?”
“ Sit tight for a second,” she said.
For the longest minute in her life, Ann sat, J.P. by her side, listening to the scratching and scraping at the door. Then whatever was out there growled a low rattling, rasping whisper, barely heard by the duo inside. “Smell-your-fear.” A hideous phlegm-filled gurgle.
“ That’s the Ragged Man,” Ann whispered.
J.P. shuddered.
Ann’s adrenaline was flowing before her feet hit the carpet, her racing mind taking her back to the night with the dingoes in Australia. She was afraid then and she was now, afraid that fear meant death and she wasn’t ready.
“ Are you okay, Annie?”
She couldn’t answer, because she wasn’t okay, her hands were trembling, her skin was clammy with sweat and a searing pain was ripping through her chest.
She knew the end was near. She wished she could see Rick and his beautiful smile one last time, but instead all she saw was the glint of the summer sun reflected into her eyes from the silver, shiny blade of the Jim Bowie knife the Ragged Man was holding up for her to see, just outside the window.
J.P. picked up the phone. “Annie, the phone doesn’t work,” he whispered and she heard the fear in his voice. “Someone cut the line.” He looked Ann in the eyes and she saw the boy fight the fear away. “I’m going for help.” He dashed to the door, slid the bolt and screamed when he saw the Bowie knife sitting on the front porch. Then he jumped over it and ran.
Jaspinder Singh watched as Sheriff Sturgees cradled the phone, then turned to Rick Gordon and Judy Donovan. The phone call had done something to him. The straight shoulders now sagged. The hard set of his jaw was gone. His glaring eyes were now dim. In thirty seconds the call had transformed him from a steaming battleship to a lumbering barge. He started to say something, then stopped. He turned away from Judy as he fished out some bills from a shirt pocket and faced Jaspinder Singh behind the counter.
“ Can I have a pack of Camels?” he asked, handing over the money.
“ It’s that bad?” Singh knew the sheriff only smoked when he was severely upset.
“ It can’t get any worse, Mr. Singh,” the sheriff said. It was plain for them all to see that the Sheriff was suffering some kind of mental anguish. He was fighting hard to control the tremor running through his hands and it took him a few seconds to get the pack open, and a few more to get a cigarette from the pack to his mouth, and still a few more to get it lit.
“ They’re here,” he said, exhaling a cloud of blue-gray smoke as an ambulance was parking out front.
“ Isn’t it a little late for that?” Rick said.
“ We don’t have an undertaker, don’t even have a morgue. They’ll transport both bodies to old Doc Willets in Palma. Doc will do the autopsies and sign the death certificates.”
They watched as the two attendants rolled Gundry’s body onto a stretcher with no more concern for his earthly remains than they’d have for a dog in the gutter.
After they were gone and it was just the four of them again, the Sheriff again looked like he’d swallowed something bad, then Jaspinder Singh thought he’d cry and he fought the tears as he listened to the Sheriff tell Judy Donovan that her brother-in-law, his wife and daughter had been found dead in the Wetlands.
As soon as he’d finished the horrible telling, the phone rang again. This time it was the boy, J.P. Donovan. He was out of breath, wanted to talk to the Sheriff and Jaspinder Singh knew, as he handed the phone over, that it was more bad news, so he wasn’t surprised when the Sheriff said, “It’s J.P. He’s calling from your house, Mr. Gordon. He had to break a window to get in. Seems like there’s trouble up there.”
Rick jumped from the police car and ran into the house. Ann was stretched out on the sofa, looking ashen. “I’m here, Annie,” he said, brushing the damp hair from her face.
“ Judy,” Ann whispered. She was fading fast and she knew it.
“ I’m here,” Judy said.
Ann struggled, held out her hand.
Judy took it and gave her a gentle squeeze.
“ Thank you.” Ann sighed as she took her hand back. Everything was going to be all right now.
“ Annie, what’s wrong?” Rick said.
“ Come closer, Flash.” She reached out, rubbed her husband’s cheek. “Give me your scar,” she whispered, barely loud enough for him to hear. He bent his head low, offering the scar under his ear and she ran her tongue along it. “Smile for me one last time.”
He did and she died.