Tom Lowe - The Black Bullet

“Excuse me?”

“The kind of story you could ride to the network.”

“This is your third day as an intern and you think you have a story of national significance?”

“I think it’s of international significance, and I’ll share it … if-”

“If what?”

“If, wherever you’re going, you promise to get me hired, too.”

O’Brien sipped a cup of coffee on his back porch and listened to Abby Lawson. She said, “My grandmother used to talk about what Florida was like in the days before, during and after the war. She said it was in the summer of ‘42 when the man who would become my grandfather decided to join the Army. He made the decision when he and my grandmother, and dozens of other people, witnessed a German U-boat blow up an American tanker a few miles off the coast of Jacksonville Beach. Right, grandma?”

Glenda Lawson smiled. “Right, honey. I’ll never forget that night.” Her white hair was combed neatly, parted off center and pulled back. Her face was pale, eyes the color of a budding leaf, pastel skin smooth for a woman in her eighties. She wore a trace of rose-colored lipstick. O’Brien thought she possessed a quiet dignity, and yet a sadness as faint as the small blue veins beneath her opaque forehead.

“Grandma told me it was horrible, bodies floated in with the oil slicks, right here on Florida beaches. It wasn’t long after Pearl Harbor was bombed. A lot of people don’t even know that kind of thing was going on so close to our shores until the Navy put a stop to it. The irony is that my grandfather went to war in Europe because of what he saw close to American shores. It infuriated him that the Germans had taken out some of our ships. He went over there, fought them, got shot, and came back here to see a U-boat in the summer of ‘45.”

O’Brien asked, “Why’d the authorities think he’d been killed in a mugging?”

“We don’t know,” Abby said. “They say they found him with his wallet scattered. What little money he had, gone. Or so their reports said. And this was after my grandmother told them everything he told her before his death.”

“If it was some kind of cover up, what would have been the reason?”

“We don’t know that either. It could have something to do with that mystery man who met the men from the submarine. Maybe it’s because they never caught the Japanese. Or maybe it’s because they did catch the Japanese.”

“I wonder what two Japanese men were doing riding in a German sub. Why didn’t they return to the sub?”

“Those are all good questions, Mr. O’Brien-”

“Please, call me Sean. What did the Germans and Japanese bury?”

“We don’t know that, either? Grandma, tell Sean what granddaddy told you.”

The old woman folded her hands, took a deep breath and said, “Billy told me they dug near the fort … you know … Matanzas.”

O’Brien nodded. “Yes, I fished there as a kid.”

She slightly smiled and continued. “He said it was when the light from the St. Augustine lighthouse comes across the fort’s tower, it shines through an opening, makes a line. Billy said they buried some cylinders in the path of that line of light.”

O’Brien said, “The lighthouse is about twenty miles from the old fort.”

Glenda Lawson smiled and said, “Yes sir, it is.”

“Today,” said O’Brien, “the area of Matanzas Pass is a national park. There hasn’t been development. Did the authorities find what was buried?”

Glenda Lawson’s eyes grew wide and she leaned forward. “If they did, nobody bothered to tell me! I asked and they said they’d dug up dozens of sea turtle nests and could never find the hole Billy said was covered up.” She reached in her purse, her hand trembling, blue veins visible under milky skin. She retrieved a folded piece of newspaper, faded yellow. She carefully unfolded it and handed the paper to O’Brien. “They printed this the day after Billy died. There were a few other stories, but they stopped writing when police found nothing.”

O’Brien scanned the story. The sound of a boat came from the river and mixed with the full throttle of a mockingbird in a live oak. “Glenda, the night your husband called you, when he was shot … how many gunshots did you hear?”

“Three.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely. I’ve heard those shots fire in my nightmares for many, many years, sir. It’s something I will never forget.”

“This story quotes a deputy sheriff saying Billy was shot once.”

O’Brien’s cell rang. “Excuse me,” he said to Glenda and Abby Lawson. It was Nick Cronus. “Sean, I got a call from some guy who said he’d give me a million dollars for the GPS numbers to the wreck. This is gettin’ more crazy by the minute-”

“Nick, I’ll call you in a minute. Keep the return number of the caller.”

“Can’t. Came in as an unknown number. Not traceable.”

O’Brien said nothing.

“Another guy called and said I looked like a towel head on TV, a terrorist.”

“I’ll get back with you in a few minutes, Nick.” O’Brien ended the call, looked at Glenda Lawson and, again, said, “The newspaper story indicates one bullet fired.”

“They were wrong.”

“Did they do an autopsy on your husband?”

“No, sir. I don’t know why.”

“Did your husband … did Billy have a gun?”

“He carried a pistol when he came back from the war. The war changed him.”

“Wars can do that. Do you know if his gun was fired that night? Did you hear him return fire, or did someone take his gun and use it to kill him?”

The old woman looked out the screen porch, her eyes falling on the river, her thoughts flowing through decades lost without the one she had loved. “All three gunshots sounded the same … and I’d heard Billy shooting lots of times at cans he’d set up in our backyard. His gun didn’t sound like the shots I heard that awful night.”

“Who investigated your husband’s death? And can you remember what was said?”

Glenda watched Max sleeping on a rocking chair. “I had a dachshund once,” she said softly. “She was such a fine little dog. Slept in my bed. Does your dog sleep in your bed?”

“She’s a bed hog,” O’Brien said, letting the old woman take her time.

“So was mine … you asked me who investigated Billy’s death, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, let me see. The sheriff, at least his deputies did … then there was a fella from the FBI … and some men from the Navy, and one from the Army because Billy was still enlisted, but on disability ‘till his leg was properly healed.”

“And they told you Billy died in a robbery … a mugging?”

“That’s what I was told.”

“Did the sheriff tell you that?”

“Yes, at least the deputy assigned to the case. An FBI agent told me that, too. Even after I insisted it wasn’t a mugging … not after what Billy told me. But the police, especially the FBI fella, didn’t pay me any mind. Billy wasn’t mugged. He was murdered.”

“Your husband was fishing that night. How much money could a twenty-one-year-old fisherman have on him to get him killed?”

Abby said, “Exactly. My grandfather might have had a couple of dollars on him. Who would kill a man for that, steal his truck, and then abandon it?”

“Strange,” O’Brien said. “No one was ever arrested or even questioned, right?”

“Right,” said Glenda. “His killer, or killers, walked free.”

“Maybe not,” O’Brien said. “Not if your husband was killed by one of the Germans, and it was their submarine sunk that night.”

“Oh dear.”