Brigands Key Read online

  Cover blown. Charley pretended not to hear.

  He followed Professor Dude out, hanging back a dozen yards, wondering what he was doing, playing cop. No other choice, he told himself. The Mayberry cops were rubes, only with Barney Fife in charge instead of Andy. They couldn’t catch a cold with a plague going around.

  Plague?

  The bug everybody was catching was not unusual. Was it? Maybe his subconscious was speaking to him. Did Roscoe catch something and die?

  Professor Dude was nowhere in sight. Charley glanced north and south along Main. Grant must’ve slipped into someplace next door. To the right was the post office, to the left was Carla’s. It being Saturday, the post office was closed, but Carla’s was open for breakfast, the smell of pancakes and bacon drifting on the breeze. That would be where Grant went.

  He hurried toward the restaurant.

  As he cleared the corner of the drugstore, an arm reached out and collared him, pulled him into the alley, and pinned him against the wall.

  “Okay, son,” Grant said, releasing him. “I’m the suspicious stranger in town and one yelp from you will land me in real hot water, so I’ll not lay another hand on you. Why are you following me?”

  “I’m not.”

  “You were watching my room for an hour before I came out. You’ve got to be the world’s worst spy.”

  “I was just looking for something at the drugstore. For my dad’s cold.”

  “You’re a worse liar than you are a spy.” Grant shook his head. “I’m going back to my room to throw up some more. Don’t follow me.” He turned and started away.

  “You’re sick, too? You haven’t been out much. Bet you didn’t know half the town is sick.”

  “People get sick.”

  “And some die. Maybe you brought a plague to Brigands Key.”

  Grant turned and looked at him, incredulity in his eyes. “That what you think? I’m some kind of Typhoid Mary, spreading filth and pestilence wherever I go?”

  “Not what I think. Others do.”

  “This is entertaining but I’m going now.”

  “Did you kill that guy? For the treasure?”

  Again Grant turned. “Treasure? I’m an archaeologist. It’s my fate to be impoverished.”

  “My boss thinks you killed him.”

  “Who’s your boss?”

  Charley hesitated.

  “Spit it out, kid.”

  “Roscoe.”

  “Look, I’m not from your little hamlet. Give me the whole name.”

  “Roscoe Nobles. I work on his fishing boat.”

  “Should I talk to Mr. Nobles about slander?”

  “If you could find him. He’s been missing three days. Maybe you killed him, too.”

  “Ah, so that’s why you’re skulking about. Listen. I don’t know you or your boss. Why would I kill him?”

  “For the treasure.”

  “Paleo-Indian artifacts are a treasure, an intellectual one. You wouldn’t get rich selling them.” Grant paused. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “A stranger shows up in town, a dead guy shows up, Roscoe goes missing, everyone gets sick. I guarantee you the mayor and Chief Sanborn are talking about it.”

  “What’s your name, kid?”

  “Charley Fawcett.”

  “Charley, I’m Carson Grant.”

  “Yeah, I know. Ex-Professor Grant. Discredited and disowned archeologist. Doing independent research now.”

  Grant laughed. “Kid, you’re a piece of work. You’ve been checking up.”

  “Piece of cake in the information age.”

  “Computer geek, huh? Beneath a salty man of the sea exterior. I’d never have guessed.”

  Charley’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “No need for sarcasm, sir.”

  “What, the geek thing? Sorry.”

  “No, not that.”

  “What then?”

  “No one’s called me a man before.”

  “Aren’t you a man, Charley?”

  Charley studied him. “I got to get home now.”

  Grant stepped aside. Charley edged past him back onto the sidewalk on Main.

  “Charley, keep me posted, okay? About your boss.”

  Charley quickened his pace.

  * * *

  Other eyes watched Grant and Charley from the bakery across the street. The watcher scribbled a few notes on a PalmPilot and noted the time and date.

  Grant and the kid were probably the smartest two people in town. That was obvious. Therefore they were about the only two that could screw everything up. They weren’t yet at that point, but you never underestimate smart, resourceful people. Grant struck him that way. The kid, too, but why was a mystery. The kid was a snot-nosed know-it-all, the kind you beat up and stuff into a locker for kicks. This kid had a depth to him, though.

  “One croissant to go,” Myles the baker said, pronouncing it “kroy sant.”

  The watcher snapped shut the PalmPilot, took the croissant, slipped out of the bakery, strolled down the block, and opened the bakery bag. Smelled okay, but that was an illusion. The watcher unwrapped the croissant and took a bite.

  Cardboard, stuffed with sawdust. Yummy.

  Disgusted, the watcher tossed the pastry into a trash can. Inedible, like most food here. It would be nice to be done with Hicksville once and for all.

  * * *

  Randy Sanborn rapped sharply on the medical examiner’s door.

  “It’s open,” came the response.

  City Hall was quiet as a tomb but Hammond was there, working on a Saturday. John Doe had a lot of people working long hours. Sanborn let himself in and eased the door shut. Hammond sat at the corner desk, peering at a transparent plastic bag. He waved Sanborn over. “You washed up, I hope.”

  Sanborn dragged a chair close and took a seat. “Any progress on John Doe?”

  Hammond picked up the plastic bag and waved it. In it was a tooth. “Got some interesting things to report.”

  “A dental match?”

  “Nope. Florida Department of Law Enforcement search comes up negative, no matches.”

  “FBI?”

  “No luck there either. Trying to match dental records is a crapshoot anyway. John Doe or his murderer would have to be a convicted felon for them to have a record of either.”

  “What then?”

  “I had a hunch about this guy so I drove down to Tampa to meet with Aaron Calder. He’s the top dental forensics expert in the whole country, a real historian of dentistry.” Hammond placed the tooth on a black felt pad and swung a magnifier over it. “Remember, the tooth was broken out violently. Look closely at the filling.”

  “Looks like a regular tooth to me,” Sanborn said.

  “Ah, but it’s a front tooth, an upper incisor. Appearance is important. You don’t want an ugly amalgam in the front for the world to see. This cavity was filled with a silicate cement, designed to mimic the natural tooth. Very common practice.”

  “So that proves nothing.”

  “Calder x-rayed the tooth. Take a look.” Hammond opened a manila folder and withdrew two x-ray mylars. “The one on the left is of a patient of Calder’s. The patient had a silicate cement filling put in a month ago and he talked her into a follow-up x-ray. See how clean the bond between tooth and filling is? Now look at this x-ray of John Doe’s murderer’s tooth.”

  “It’s got a line or smudge between the tooth and filling.”

  “Exactly. Good workmanship, though, for its time. They’ve just gotten better at it.”

  “What are you getting at? Dental work a few years old?”

  “Seventy years old.”

  Sanborn set the tooth aside. “Jerry, I'm getting tired of this. On Wednesday you said the guy had been dead a day. Then you said it was a few weeks, tops.”

  “I’ve been telling you all along there was something screwy with the time of death. The enzymic decomposition, the body’s sterility... it’s all wrong. This tooth amplifies it a hundred times.”


  “Maybe the murderer's dentist was a hack.”

  “Calder also ran some mass spectrometry and an old-fashioned touch test.” Hammond opened a small case to reveal ten teeth. “Calder gave me these on loan. These are anterior teeth from around North America, South America, and Europe. Go ahead, pick each one up, feel the silicate cement on each.”

  Sanborn did so.

  “Now feel the mystery tooth.”

  “It feels different,” Sanborn said.

  “It was hand-molded in place. That hasn’t been done in decades. Here’s the good part: Calder’s tests identified the material as a porcelain enamel from the thirties.”

  “He made a mistake. Or the murderer got his dental work in a third world shit-hole somewhere. Maybe he’s Eastern European, maybe he got it in an Eastern bloc backwater before the Soviet Union collapsed. Albania, Bulgaria... those places are fifty years behind the times, maybe a hundred in the countryside.”

  Hammond shook his head. “Randy, listen. This stuff hasn’t even been manufactured in seventy years.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Yet here it is. I’ve got a pet theory. The body was frozen for decades, thawed, and placed in Grant’s little spring within the past week. The long freeze sterilized the body; placement in a fairly germ-free environment protected it even further, and so internal enzymes worked before bacteria could gain a foothold.”

  Sanborn slapped the desktop. “That’s a damned puzzle-book solution! What are the chances of the body being placed in a spring just days before the spring is even discovered?”

  “Slim to none. But there’s no other explanation.”

  “Wrong. This filling material is produced somewhere in this world that your dental historian doesn’t know about, and that’s a good thing. If the places these bad boys are produced are that rare, once we find them we’ll have a clue to Mr. Doe’s killer.”

  “You going to help with this search? I kind of have my hands full, being a godlike healer of the sick and all.”

  “I’ll make some calls. Someone knows where this came from.”

  * * *

  ON the EDGE, with Charley Eff

  Spooky weirdness in Hooterville! There’s this strange sickness going around. People getting sick left and right. Walking around, listless, dull... no wait, that’s every day. But this time there seems to be a good excuse.

  My Old Man lays in his skivvies in bed all day, groaning, getting up to piss and puke. Won’t go out. Won’t hit me. Small blessings.

  Roscoe’s still missing. I can feel it in my bones: he’s dead.

  Professor Dude collared me. I’m such a pussy. Guy’s like forty years old, but he manhandled me like a baby. Don’t get me wrong. He’s not a perv (I don’t think). I tail him and get nabbed. He should have beaten the shit out of me. I would have, but like I said, I’m such a puss. Professor lets me go instead. He’s not so bad. Next to me, he’s the smartest guy in town by a wide margin. But that’s not saying much.

  We got a murder victim and now we got three people dead of flu. Storms are brewing. One way out on the ocean, one here on the island.

  Later, Charley Eff.

  * * *

  Charley logged off his blog and stretched in his creaky desk chair, its broken spring protesting and sagging under his weight. It was early still; lunchtime. He grabbed the half-eaten bag of corn chips and stuffed a handful into his mouth. A bit stale, but tasty. He wiped the rim of his Mountain Dew and washed the chips down.

  He browsed the Internet a little longer, pulling up some old comic book web pages. Iron Man. Silver Surfer. Good stuff. And his favorite, Vampirella.

  God, what a loser I am, he thought.

  He closed Vampirella and tried to get interested in the news on CNN. Failing that, he drummed idly for a minute.

  He had to do something. Roscoe was missing. Something bad was afoot.

  He opened the Brigands Key municipal homepage. It came up slowly. What a shock. The site was a mealy-mouthed pile of tripe when it finally did. Mayor’s Welcome. Brigands Key Happenings. Things to Do in Brigands Key. Now that was a short list.

  Fluff and nonsense. Nary a mention of John Doe or rampaging illness. See no evil, speak no evil, post no evil on municipal website.

  He scrolled down the menu list of departments and came to the police department. Not much info, just staff names, office location, and bragging about a new patrol car.

  That sparked an idea. Charley found Mayor Johnson’s email address and tried it. He could send messages to it, of course, but there was no archive of emails.

  He knew a bit about Florida law, the one they called sunshine law. All government documents, including electronic ones, were public record. He doubted that bit of enlightenment had seeped into Brigands Key and he was sure the mayor would not willingly let his emails see the sunshine.

  Charley settled back and assaulted the mayor’s email archives. They were secured and blocked, as expected. No problem. The mayor wasn’t smart enough and the city wasn’t sophisticated enough to keep a good hacker down. In a shade under an hour, the mayor’s archived messages suddenly opened and stretched out in a long list.

  Charley selected the most recent. Something about ordering a new desk set. Garbage. Charley opened the next couple of messages. More garbage. The fifth was a message from Chief Sanborn:

  Mayor, I know you’re anxious but we’re having difficulty identifying the unknown person. Time of death is problematic. Hammond has good data and more questions, as do I. We’ll get back with you as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience.

  Charley reread the message. It was innocuous, but Sanborn had inserted a giveaway. Time of death is problematic. Government-speak. Sanborn was reporting without really saying anything. The mayor was technically “informed.”

  Charley spent the next hour reading dozens of the mayor’s emails, his faith in government eroding by the minute. The guy was a boob. How’d he manage to get elected in the first place, let alone reelected six times?

  Historians complained that the digital age was making their jobs impossible. Men and women of influence no longer put their thoughts on paper, to be collected and preserved by historians, shining a light on the times. Electronic messages were ephemeral, vanishing at a keystroke, leaving nothing for history. Made sense, but Charley wondered if maybe the world wouldn’t be a better place if no one was forced to wade through the doodlings of morons. Whatever, Johnson’s correspondence would not be missed by historians. Hell, probably no one read it even now.

  Charley selected what seemed to be the most important messages and deleted them, grinning. He’d done his good deed for the day.

  He scrolled the list of city employees and found Dr. Gerald Hammond. He hesitated; Doc was everyone’s pal and his stuff actually should remain private.

  But Charley was already in deep. He opened Hammond’s email account.

  The account was not as stuffed with messages as Johnson’s but then Hammond was a city employee only in the loosest sense. What caught Charley’s eye was the number passed between Hammond and Sanborn over the past two days. There were dozens.

  Charley selected the most recent and opened it.

  Hammond: Thought any more about what I told you?

  Sanborn: There’s a better explanation somewhere.

  Hammond: There’s not.

  Sanborn: Find me something I can work with, Jerry. I’ll bet my life John Doe or his murderer was from rural Eastern Europe.

  Hammond: You can look, but I’m telling you, John Doe has been dead sixty, seventy years.

  Sanborn: I’m taking this conversation offline.

  Charley quickly found and opened Sanborn’s email archive. That whole back and forth with Hammond had been deleted. Sanborn was nervous about the exchange. Silly man. Anything could be resurrected by the right hacker.

  Charley read the remaining emails and printed them. He took a drink of Mountain Dew, his mind racing with possibilities. He opened the Vampirella w
ebsite again and studied the pics. Holy shit, he thought.

  He tabbed open his blog and began typing furiously.

  * * *

  ON the EDGE, with Charley Eff

  Curiouser and Curiouser.

  People get sick. People die. Dead strangers turn up. Happens every day, right?

  Not in Hooterville.

  Place was always a little weird, populated by inbred island folk and all. But this is off-the-charts.

  Barney Fife and Doc Holliday are keeping stuff from the hicks, even from the mayor (okay, can’t fault ’em there).

  You, Dear Readers, have been getting off on my postcards from the edge. All six of you. (Ha ha.) I told you about John Doe. I told you about the Great Plague of Brigands Key. Thought I knew a thing or two.

  I didn’t know shit.

  John Doe is dead but fresh. Way dead. Way fresh. How dead? A few days, tops? Nope. A week? Nope. Month? Keep going. John Doe is like decades old. Doc swears to it.

  People are sick. Looking like crap, pale skin, sunken eyes. People dying. Virus is the official word.

  Bullshit.

  I’ve seen this before. But that was just TV, just movies.

  What did that Euro director call it? Nosferatu. Undead. Max Schreck was scary as hell in it, but this is for real.

  Maybe it’s time to pack up and get outta Dodge. The smart remaining few in ‘Salem’s Lot got out.

  There is no God. Nevertheless, I’m hanging a cross on my door tonight. Meanwhile, I gotta check on the Old Man. He’s sick. Drunk, I figured. That was back when I didn’t know.

  Now I want to see his neck.

  Yours, Dusk ’til Dawn,

  Charley Eff

  Chapter Eight

  Sunday morning, Grant lingered in a hot shower, hoping the steamy water would cure him. For a moment he thought it had. It hadn’t. His stomach knotted painfully, then eased. His nausea passed. He glanced at his bed and contemplated crawling back into it. No, get going, he told himself. Get some food in you.

  He dressed and headed out the door.