David Handler - The Blood Red Indian Summer

“Help me, Cee!” he cried out frantically. “Help me!”

“Man can’t swim!” Clarence roared as he dove in after him with all of his clothes on. “Here, cuz, I got ya! Don’t flail your big arms-you’ll drown us both! Relax, I got ya. You’re okay.”

He swam them away from the dredged dock area to shallower water where they could stand, water streaming from their clothes as they watched Rondell speed out into the middle of the choppy, mile-wide Connecticut River, the cigarette boat’s xenon running lights swiveling left-right, left-right as he steered frantically downriver toward Long Island Sound. There were no other boats out. Not in a storm like this.

“Call the Coast Guard,” Yolie ordered Toni. “We’ll need launches out in the Sound. And chopper support if they can fly in this. He can outrun whatever they’ve got but he can’t go forever.” To Tyrone she called out, “How much fuel have you got in that thing?”

“Maybe a quarter of a tank,” he called back, his eyes never leaving those swiveling lights. “Needed filling next time we took her out. He won’t get far.”

“He won’t get far is right,” Clarence said. “I swear, he’s going to flip that damned thing. Don’t know how to leave the wheel alone.”

Jamella joined them out there now. She wore some of her father’s blood on her yellow shift. And a strangely impassive expression on her face.

“You okay?” Des asked her, concerned that she might be in shock.

“I’m fine,” she answered quietly, shivering from the cold rain.

Des took off her hooded rain jacket and put it around her.

Tyrone rushed out of the water to her. “Girl, you got to go back inside in the house.”

“I don’t want to go inside,” she said in that same quiet voice. “I don’t want to be there with him.”

“But you’ll catch cold out here. That’s no good for you or the baby. Go back inside, okay? We’re okay.”

“We’re not okay. I’m so sorry, Tyrone.”

“What for? You got nothing to be sorry about.” He kissed her softly on the mouth, caressing her smooth cheek with the back of his battle-scarred hand. “We’ll get through this, I promise you. We just got to get that freaked-out little man back on dry land. He’ll be all right. He’s a respectable individual with a spotless record. Can plead temporary insanity or something. People will understand.”

“Where in the hell is that little dude going?” Clarence cried out.

Where indeed. Because Rondell was no longer streaking downriver toward the open water of the Sound. Instead, he was coming around in a wide arc that was sending him up the windswept river in the direction of the old stone railroad bridge and, beyond it, East Haddam and Hartford.

Toni, who’d just put out her distress call to the Coast Guard, said, “I’ll call them back and tell them him he’s changed course. And notify our own marine responders up the line. But I don’t get it, Loo. What’s he doing? Now he can’t get away.”

“Makes no sense,” Yolie agreed, watching him in bewilderment.

“Sure it does,” Mitch said. “Because he’s not trying to get away.”

The Deacon glanced sharply at Mitch before he turned to Yolie and said, “I agree. You can call off the pursuit, Lieutenant Snipes.”

“Call it off?” Tyrone protested angrily. “Why?”

“Because he’s not trying to get away,” Mitch said again.

“Man, what in the hell are you?…” Tyrone’s eyes widened. “Oh, Lord.” He no longer had to ask Mitch what he meant. It was obvious to him.

Obvious to all of them now that Rondell was headed straight upriver, letting Da Beast loose with a tremendous roar. The supercharged cigarette boat had to be going at least seventy-five miles per hour as he closed in on the railroad bridge, its running lights casting bright beams on the granite pilings that had been stoutly supporting the old bridge for more than a hundred years. The pilings were spaced wide enough apart to allow dredging barges and other big ships to pass on through. Each of the supports was marked with bright red warning lights that could be seen from miles away. There was no mistaking where the pilings were. Consequently, hardly anyone ever rammed a boat into one of them.

Not unless they really wanted to.

Rondell drove Da Beast directly into one of the bridge’s centermost granite support pilings. The boat exploded on impact. Its quarter-tank of fuel was plenty enough to set off a ball of fire that shot at least 500 feet into the rainy air. Witnesses later reported seeing it from as far as ten miles upriver. The explosion was felt by residents twice that far away.

“Call Amtrak,” Yolie ordered Toni. “Alert them that their bridge just took a major hit. They’ll have to shut down all of their trains between New York and Boston. I’ll call Homeland Security. They’ll probably be getting a hundred calls in the next sixty seconds from neighbors who think we just got attacked by Al Qaeda. Des, could you?…”

“On it.” Des got busy contacting the emergency marine responders who’d close off the river and deal with the burning wreckage.

The Deacon stood by quietly and observed. He did not interfere.

Tyrone, Jamella and Clarence could only huddle there together, hugging each other and sobbing.

“I’ll see you a little later,” Mitch said to Des somberly when she’d finished making her calls. He was profoundly shaken by what had happened. “I’m going to walk Winston home. The girls will be worried about him. And I want to check on my parents. The power was out when I left. I want to make sure they’re okay.”

“Tell them I’m sorry about dinner. We’ll try dinner some other night, okay?”

“Sure, I’ll tell them,” he said, his gaze fastened on the dock at their feet.

“You did good tonight.”

He looked up at her, his eyes searching hers. “Did I?”

“Hell, yes. You cracked the Plotka-Halperin killings wide open.”

“Des, I didn’t crack anything open. And now two more people are dead.”

“Calvin got what he deserved.”

“But Rondell didn’t. He was a nice guy. He didn’t deserve this.”

Des looked out at the flaming pieces of wreckage that were strewn across the oil-slicked water. Then she took his hand and squeezed it. “You’re absolutely right, he didn’t. Neither did Kinitra. Now you know why I sit up all night drawing portraits of victims until my fingers bleed.”

“No offense, but I wish I didn’t know these things.”

“So do I, boyfriend. Believe me, so do I.”

(TWO DAYS LATER)

The four violent deaths that occurred that stormy evening went 24/7 on the cable TV news channels, sports channels and Internet gossip sites. The public just couldn’t seem to get enough of the story. Not that the public actually knew the real story. Only the people who were actually there in Tyrone Grantham’s living room knew the real reason why Rondell shot Calvin. But they weren’t talking. And Kinitra certainly wasn’t. In fact, the name Kinitra Jameson was never so much as mentioned. The public only knew the version of the events that was fed to the media by Yolie-which was that Calvin had confessed to several Connecticut State Police officers, as well as members of his own family, that it was he who had murdered Stewart Plotka and Andrea Halperin. An enraged Rondell had shot Calvin and then taken his own life despite everyone’s best efforts to stop him.

The public wasn’t totally satisfied with this version. They wanted more. And got more. One authoritative cable TV talking head after another held forth in sonorous tones about what really happened. That Tyrone had really sent Calvin to White Sand Beach to scare Plotka and Halperin off and things got out of hand. Or that Calvin, who had a long criminal record, had really been taking money under the table from Andrea Halperin to feed her dirt on Tyrone and got found out. Or that straight-arrow Rondell, who really had a serious drug problem, had really brokered a settlement with Plotka without telling Tyrone. There was a ton of speculation, most of it outright fiction. Usually, the talking heads cited “friends close to the family,” which Des had learned from Mitch was reporter-speak for “ I’m totally making this shit up.” She already knew from her own personal experience that any time there was a violent family dispute involving black people, the media automatically assumed that drugs were involved.