We stopped and got out. The sun was climbing toward noon and the air was close enough to induce claustrophobia. Insect sounds rose in waves from the stunted trees. We swatted biting flies from our faces. Harry ramped a hand over his eyes and studied the trees.

“There. Something’s not right.”

I followed to a sand-drifted stretch of road. Uprooted brush covered a metal gate. The gate blocked a slender lane, barely more than a scattering of broken shells in the hard sand. Since storm-uprooted trees were everywhere, the camouflage was effective.

We tugged away brush, sweating like stevedores, then drove down the lane, branches screeching against the car doors. Six hundred feet later the lane terminated in a webwork of marshy channels. I saw the hulks of shrimp boats in the sand, prows pointing upward like they were sailing out of hell. In the distance were a few tumbled houses, once home to shrimpers, now rotting wood and rusting metal. We saw a house trailer half-flattened and blown over on its side. It looked like a shoebox someone had kicked down the road.

“Over there,” Harry pointed. “I see a dock.”

We jogged to a rickety pier extending into the marshy channel. Harry passed me, stepping carefully to the end of the dock, boards creaking beneath his feet. He dropped to his knees and studied one of three old tires nailed to the sideboards of the dock, the bargain version of boat bumpers.

“Check out the tires, brother,” Harry said.

I knelt and studied the surface of the rotting rubber. Saw streaks of paint worn into the now-gray whitewalls. It seemed to match the bilious green of the rowboat. But green was a popular color for boats.

I nodded. “There’s a chance the kid got launched from here.”

“Cars, check behind the trees.”

Harry pointed to the far side of a stand of short trees. I saw truncated pilings, ragged black spikes pointing at the sky. We pushed through brush and found the burned-down house once supported by the short pilings, a tumbled pile of blackened wood and sheet-metal roofing.

“It burned recently,” I said, squatting to puff at a soft pile of soot. “Otherwise rain would have pounded away the softer ash.” I walked the edge of the debris pile, seeing burned and broken supports, a fried chair and couch, a blackened toaster.

“Uh, Cars…” Harry said. “Step over here. Carefully. I’ve got something.”

I walked over and looked down to see several feet of twisted cinder with a bulb on top, a former human being. I’d seen this phenomenon a half-dozen times after structure fires.

“Oh shit, a dead body.” I pulled out my cell. “I’ll call it into the county police.”

Harry tugged my sleeve. “You’re missing the interesting part. Look closer. Down by the belly.”

I crouched close. Details congealed in the shadows and I saw an object emerging from the charred abdominal area: four feet of scorched steel rod entering a blackened shaft of scorched hardwood. What was left of the corpse’s hands were clutching at the shaft.

“That what I think it is?” Harry whispered.

I stared at the pierced corpse. “If you’re thinking harpoon, I’m thinking you’re right.”

Chapter 6

“I ain’t surprised at a dead body. More’n one came outta this neighborhood over the past few years.”

Sergeant Elvin Briscoe of the local constabulary spit tobacco juice on the ground and leaned against his dusty cruiser with thick arms crossed and his mirrored shades low on a gin-blossomed nose. He was a barrel-bodied man in his mid forties with a ruddy face and equine teeth stained with tobacco.

A dozen feet away, two techs from the Medical Examiner’s office photographed the torso prior to pulling it from the debris. Behind them, the forensics team scoured the surrounding land for evidence.

“This was a violent community?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Got worse once the white folks left.”

“White folks?” Harry said.

Briscoe looked at me. “Used to be a shrimper’s community, white people mainly, until a few years back. Then the Vietnamese pushed in and the whites moved out.”

“Why’d they move?” Harry said, knowing the answer, just wanting to hear it confirmed.

Briscoe shrugged and spat a second strand of tobacco juice into the weeds. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, looked at a hawk circling above, a black dot in a blue sky.

I thought maybe Briscoe didn’t hear. “Why’d the Caucasians leave?” I asked.

Briscoe turned his gaze from the sky to my face. “Guess the whites wanted to be with their own kind. Plus most of the, uh, Orientals didn’t speak English. Just jabbered monkey-speak.”

Harry said, “And all these years I thought they spoke Vietnamese.”

Briscoe turned away and spat juice. Rubbed it into the sand with his boot.

“This fire happened recently,” I said. “Since last Friday.”

“No way you can know that,” Briscoe scoffed.

I nodded downward and kicked a pile of ash. Watched a plume float away on the breeze.

“Friday’s when it last rained. The ashes are unsettled.”

Briscoe feigned a yawn. “Guess that’s why you’re a detective, Detective.”

“You know who lived here?”

“We never patrol back here cuz no one lives here any more. Or I didn’t think so.”

“You never got a call about a fire?” Harry asked.

Briscoe gazed with amusement at the surrounding desolation. “Who would call one in?” he said, like talking to himself. He belched and looked at me. “You were saying something about a kid found in a boat?”

“Launched from here, maybe. That pier.”

“How about you move your ass a couple feet?” someone said behind us.

“How about you fuck yourself?” came the response.

We turned our heads to the voices. A chunky, fiftyish guy from the Alabama Bureau of Forensics was jabbing a finger at the deputy who’d arrived with Briscoe, a hard-muscled man in his early thirties wearing a too-tight uniform shirt to emphasize the swollen biceps. The deputy slapped the finger away.

“Whoa,” I yelled, spinning from Briscoe and running to the altercation. “What’s the beef?”

The red-faced guy from forensics, Al Bustamente, pointed at the deputy’s spit-shined black Wellingtons. “Bubba here’s standing in the middle of what appear to be footprints. I guess no one told him that professionals don’t put their feet in evidence.”

I saw the county cop’s eyes tighten. “What are you saying?”

The cop was a collection of granite muscles, but Bustamente had a fast fuse and hot mouth. And as a member of the state’s department of forensics, he also had jurisdiction. “I’m saying I don’t give a rat’s ass if you’re ignorant, all I want is to make a cast of the prints. Is that too tough to understand, you hick moron?”

I saw the deputy’s jaw clench and his arms ripple, the punch cock. I jumped in front of him, knocked the punch aside with my forearm, like blocking an incoming missile. I was left staring into the deputy’s eyes from a foot away.

“Get outta my way,” he snarled. His words smelled like unwashed teeth. His breathing was shallow. Veins bulged on his forehead and he seemed dangerously close to unhinged.

“Get hold of yourself,” I said. “A man’s been killed here.”

“I don’t give a fuck if –”

“Baker!” Briscoe’s voice from behind me. “Git to the car and you git calm. Now!”

I stepped aside, made an effort to keep from massaging my forearm, aching from the deputy’s sledgehammer blow. The guy mouthed something at Bustamente, turned and walked to the cruiser like a programmed robot. Bustamente shook his head, knelt, commenced pouring compound into one of the footprints he’d spotted. Crisis averted. I returned to Briscoe. He was picking his teeth with a thumbnail.

“Your man always such a pain in the ass?” I asked.

Briscoe nodded toward Bustamente. “Seems lardass over there called Baker ignorant, a hick and a moron. You take that kind of talk yourself?”