Chasing the Son Read online

  “So there we were, bayonets at the ready, some of us down to a couple of rounds, some of us out. And the rest of my platoon, they came running. Three miles, gentlemen. Full gear. The gunners carrying the pigs, the M-60 machineguns, which weigh twenty-two pounds and each also had a basic load of ammo. Some of them were carrying over a hundred and fifty pounds of gear. And those sons-a-bitches ran three miles and rescued us.”

  He fell silent. As Preston opened his mouth to speak, Dillon cut him off.

  “And that, gentlemen is true loyalty. That is the bond that can never be broken. So I don’t know what little bullshit ceremony you all just did fist-bumping rings together, but I guarantee you, it can be broken, and I will break it if I have to.”

  “It appears you will not leave until we repeat what we’ve already said.” Preston folded his arms across his chest. “We had Wing and Jenrette in the Sinks. A sweat party. You remember those?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Raincoats in the showers in the summer. Water turned full hot. Making them spout off rat poop. You remember, don’t you?”

  Dillon didn’t respond.

  “Everything would have been all right, except Brannigan showed up,” Preston said.

  “With a bayonet,” Dillon said.

  “No.” Preston shook his head. “We had the bayonets. It was Wing’s. We had him bring it. Along with his M-14. Jenrette had his too. We had them do close-order drill before turning on the showers. A warm-up, so to speak.”

  “Speaking of speaking.” Dillon gestured at the two men on the other side of the booth. “Either of you do any?”

  “Let me finish,” Preston said. He didn’t wait for permission. “Wing had gone to the infirmary earlier that day. But he didn’t rat out. Just got bed rest. Still, going to the infirmary is what a loser would do. We were giving him a chance to man up.”

  “And Jenrette?” Dillon asked. “Why was he there?”

  Preston looked across at Jerrod, who finally spoke: “You saw us ‘bumping rings’ as you call it. We belong to a special, uh, club, that—“

  “The Ring,” Dillon said.

  “The Ring,” Preston confirmed.

  Jerrod continued. “Jenrette is old Charleston. His mother runs St. Cecilia. A very powerful woman.”

  Dillon gave a cold smile. “I’ve met her.”

  “Exactly,” Jerrod said, growing a little more animated and confident. “So Greer Jenrette would eventually become part of the Ring. His birthright. But we do have to make it a bit of an ordeal.”

  “You went through this ordeal?” Dillon said, staring at Jerrod.

  “I did.”

  “Right,” Dillon said. “Musta been tough.”

  “Hey,” Chad said. “We got to talk to you, but we don’t have to take crap off of you.”

  “Please continue your tale,” Dillon said.

  Preston picked up the thread. “We had Wing and Jenrette down in the Sinks. Have you talked to Wing yet?”

  Dillon shook his head. “But I plan on it.”

  “You’ll see what I mean when you do,” Preston said. “We figured we’d make it easy on Jenrette. Wing isn’t exactly a devastating physical specimen. We planned to have them sweat for a while. Then maybe let them go at it against each other a smidge. Gentlemanly stuff. Do some boxing.”

  He fell silent.

  “And then?” Dillon prompted.

  “Then that dickhead Brannigan showed up,” Chad said. “All fired up. Telling us to fuck off. To leave his classmates alone. He grabbed Wing’s bayonet and—“

  “It wasn’t on his rifle?” Dillon asked.

  “Negative,” Preston said. “It was on a bench in the showers. Sheathed. Along with Wing’s rifle. And Jenrette’s rifle and bayonet.”

  “So you big bad three ring-knockers were scared of a single rat waving a chrome bayonet around?” Dillon asked.

  “It was steaming down there,” Preston said.

  “Because you’d turned the showers on full hot,” Dillon said.

  “It was steaming down there,” Preston continued. “We were all hot and sweaty. We’d been bracing those rats for over an hour. Brannigan just busted in and everything got a little crazy. Next thing we know, Jenrette’s got the blade in his chest. And Brannigan’s gone. Ran away like the shitty coward he is.”

  “Were you drunk?” Dillon asked.

  Chad and Jerrod exchange glances, but Preston answered.

  “Unfortunately, we’d had some drinks. Honestly, that’s why we feel so bad about it. If we’d been completely sober, perhaps we’d have reacted quicker and handled it better.”

  “But you’re not drinking now, Preston,” Dillon noted.

  Preston didn’t say anything to that.

  “So that’s it?” Dillon asked.

  “That’s it,” Preston said. “And it’s all in the official inquiry, so you wasted our time bringing us here.”

  “No Quick and the Dead?” Dillon asked.

  Preston rubbed his forehead while Jerrod was looking toward the front of the bar, eager to be gone.

  “Listen—“ Chad began, but then the waitress came by.

  “Get you boys another round?”

  “No,” Dillon snapped, in such a tone that she immediately went away.

  Preston turned awkwardly on the bench to face Dillon. “Brannigan stabbed Jenrette. All three of us saw it. Wing saw it. All four of us testified to that. Brannigan’s fingerprints were on the bayonet. It was in Jenrette’s chest. Brannigan fled. We reported the incident to the duty office right away. Why are you wasting our time?”

  Dillon looked at each of them, one at a time. “You-all would never let me in this Ring of yours, would you?”

  “It’s not our call,” Jerrod said. “There’s a list and—“ He came to an abrupt halt as Preston kicked him under the table.

  “Wing and Brannigan would never be let in either, right?” Dillon asked.

  The three graduates stared at Dillon without a word.

  “You sure y’all have told me everything?” Dillon asked. “On your word of honor as Institute men?”

  “Yes,” Preston said.

  Dillon stared at Chad.

  “Yes,” Chad said.

  Dillon shifted his hard gaze to Jerrod who failed to meet the gaze and simply mumbled: “Yes.”

  “Alrighty then. Guess I have to take your words for it.” Dillon stood and slid out of the booth. The three also exited the booth as Preston threw a hundred-dollar bill down on the table.

  The three headed for the door, but then Preston turned and came back, leaving the other two staring after him out of earshot.

  “Waiting for change?” Dillon asked.

  “What if you could join the Ring?” Preston asked.

  Chapter Five

  Thursday Afternoon

  Hilton Head Island is shaped roughly like a shoe, with the flat of the sole facing the Atlantic Ocean on a long strand of hard-packed beach. The back of the heel points toward Port Royal Sound and the top of the shoe abuts the Intracoastal Waterway. Roughly halfway up where the island faces the Intracoastal, Broad Creek cuts in a wide path, almost dividing the island in two. As the seagull flies, it’s twenty miles north of Savannah and ninety miles south of Charleston. The island is twelve miles long and only four wide at its broadest.

  People who lived there liked to say it was the second largest barrier island, topped only by Long Island, but technically that wasn’t true as Hilton Head is actually two islands, only one of which is a barrier island, but that’s splitting hairs and the island. The first Europeans set foot on it in 1521, some wandering Spanish. It was the English, of course, who gave it a name, when Captain William Hilton stopped by in 1663 and decided to name the north end Hilton Head, after, imaginatively and egotistically, himself.

  Of more immediate interest, the island is in a rather unique position as far as the law. It boasts no police force of its own, instead relying on the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Department. Given that Beaufort is only about ten miles s
traight distance away, that doesn’t seem like a big deal, but the actual drive requires one to come off Hilton Head and drive west a good distance, then drive north, skirting the tidal marshes, then back east. It is an indication of how much emphasis the sheriff’s department places on policing the Island that there is no permanent substation.

  It was more than just geography. Between distance and the desire not to interfere with tourism, the hand of the law rested lightly on the island. Underneath that, Hilton Head was a cesspool of vices from the numerous escort services that catered to all those golfer’s foursomes, to the gambling and the drug smuggling. Money flowed and some of it flowed to the sheriff’s department, pulling that light touch back even further.

  Dave Riley had known this ever since arriving in the Low Country and talking with his Uncle Xavier before the old man passed away. Horace Chase was a relative newcomer, but he was learning fast.

  The two of them were seated at a table at the end of Chase’s deepwater dock, extending 240 feet out into the Intracoastal. A metal gangway led from the deck where they sat to a floating dock below them, although the dock was in pretty bad shape, several of the floats having lost their buoyancy and water threatening to cover the entire thing. When they first got back, Chase had gone ashore to feed Chelsea and grab a small cooler full of beers before rejoining Riley out here.

  “You need to pull some maintenance,” Riley observed as he tipped back a cold one. It was the day after their Caribbean excursion. After dropping them off on Thursday afternoon, Kono and Gator had gone off to do whatever the two of them did, the less known about the better; they were extraneous beneficiaries of the light hand of the law in the Low Country. Unlike Chase, Kono had mentioned something about pulling maintenance after the fast, hard ride back to the coast.

  “I haven’t exactly had time,” Chase said.

  “Haven’t made the time,” Riley said. “So. What now?”

  The house Chase had inherited from his mother was in Spanish Wells, a community on a spit of land between the Intracoastal Waterway and Broad Creek. Only one way in by road and the same way out. Almost every house had a deep-water dock in the back, either on the Intracoastal or on Broad Creek, and many sported large, expensive boats on lifts.

  There was no boat at the end of Chase’s dock.

  “You know,” Chase said, “I’ve yet to see any of those boats get used. It’s like they’re trophies.”

  “Boats are more expensive to operate than most people realize,” Riley said. “Plus, as you noted, the people owning them are working too hard to find the time to enjoy them.”

  Chase turned his attention back to Riley. “The first question is: Should we believe what Sarah Briggs told us? And, by the way, why did you burn the money and passports?”

  “Same answer to both question,” Riley said. “She’s a liar. That’s why I burned her passports. Make it harder for her to run. Gives her enemies some time to catch up and finish her off which I think would make the world a better place. And when I say she’s a liar, I’m not saying we shouldn’t believe what she told us, but we need to understand she only told us half the truth. I view that as a form of lying.”

  “’Never lie to a Ranger’,” Chase quoted on of Rogers’ Ranger Rules. “She paid the price.”

  “We should have killed her,” Riley said.

  “That’s not who we are.”

  “What bothers me,” Riley said, “is that she knows that and counts on it. Maybe we need to adapt.”

  “Become murderers?” Chase asked.

  “I don’t know about you, but I aint too certain exactly who I am. We’ve both killed. Let’s not fool ourselves.”

  “So should we believe her about Oklahoma being a dead end?” Chase asked, implicitly agreeing not to go down a philosophical rabbit hole about killing.

  “Yes,” Riley said. “The key to a successful lie is to tell enough of the truth. She led with that, so I believe it. But let’s take a look at it from her point of view. She wants to find your son. For whatever reasons, although I think she was pretty up front about that—possible leverage if she needed it down the line. Most likely on Erin, but also on you if the need arose. Briggs plays angles. It’s why she’s still alive and there’s a decent chance she’ll probably stay alive a while longer despite our efforts.

  “So,” Riley continued, “it seems to me that she’d check further into Erin. After all, she wouldn’t believe everything Erin was telling her. And it also seems like trying to find his mother might be first on young Harry’s agenda.” Riley had a sudden awareness. “That’s why Sarah checked into it. She knew Erin had this connection with you. And if you found out somehow, you’d come looking.”

  Chase shook his head, but he wasn’t disagreeing. “It’s weird for me to imagine that there’s this person, this young man, out there, who I brought into this world.”

  “You didn’t do much,” Riley said. “Contributed a little sperm, is all.”

  Chase gave him a hard look; Riley simply met the look and raised an eyebrow. Chase’s anger dissolved. “Yeah. It’s just strange. But you mean to tell me if you found out you had a kid, it wouldn’t turn your world upside down?”

  Riley granted him that. “All right. But for all you know, Horace Junior is studying coeds at some college or traveling Europe or working at a Starbucks. You should be glad Erin had nothing to do with raising him. Unfortunately, she was raised by her mother, so I’m not thinking that was the best thing either, but who knows? Maybe crazy skips a generation?”

  Chase shook his head. “Erin was raised by her father. She never said much about her mother. Her parents split when she was young.” His forehead furrowed.

  “I sense a great thought,” Riley said.

  “Cardena said something strange,” Chase said. He was referring to the spook who’d given them Sarah Briggs’ location and several months earlier had a Predator fire a Hellfire missile to take out Karralkov’s yacht. “I didn’t make much of it at the time, but he’s not the kind of guy to say throwaway lines.”

  “Don’t seem like it,” Riley agreed.

  “He asked me why I was so keen to go after Briggs’ son—“

  “Her non-existent son,” Riley had to throw in as he reached into the cooler then pulled out another pair of beers, handing one to Chase.

  “Why I was so keen to go after her son. He said something along the lines of—‘it’s not like he’s your son’. That’s a little odd, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe you should call him?” Riley suggested. “And it was odd that Sarah mentioned spooks, like she had some experience in the area. Seems she—“ he paused as his cell phone vibrated on the wooden table. He snatched it up: “Riley.”

  A voice with a distinct New Jersey accent was on the other end. “Mister Riley, how are the trade winds blowing today?”

  “The words and the music don’t match,” Riley said. “The words indicate someone used to the ocean, the music says Jersey, Mister Farrelli. The only connection I make between New Jersey and the ocean is sleeping with the fishes.”

  Farrelli laughed. “I try. Can’t fault me for that. But you know, we got the Jersey Shore. Lots of oceanfront although Sandy did a number on a fair stretch. Heard you had a little expedition recently.”

  Farrelli Riley mouthed to Chase. “Where did you hear that?”

  “A little birdie whispered it in my ear.”

  “And?”

  “And some things are going on,” Farrelli said. “People asking questions. I don’t like it.”

  “One of those people Sarah Briggs?”

  Farrelli answered with his own question. “You had that animal doctor, Brannigan, with you guys when you did that thing, didn’t you?”

  “What thing?” Riley said.

  “Don’t fuck with me,” Farrelli said. “You wanna talk or not?”

  “I wanna talk,” Riley said.

  “Then come here and talk.” The phone went dead.

  Riley quickly relayed the conversation.r />
  “So Sarah did make inquiries about Horace here,” Chase said.

  “At least about Erin,” Riley said. “We don’t know if she asked about the son. Your son,” he amended. “Told you—Sarah Briggs only tells half a truth. Even if it served her better to tell the whole truth, someone like her will still lie. It’s in their DNA. And I’m not sure I buy her reasons for the inquiry. She didn’t expect to see you again. And I don’t see why she needed leverage on Erin. As she said, she was growing tired of her and saw her as a liability. My take is that she is the type of person who will kill if someone’s cramping their style.”

  “Why would Farrelli call you about her?”

  “Good question,” Riley said. “And one I have to talk to him to find out the answer.”

  Chase was looking at his house, just above the low steel seawall that separated beach from grass. Unlike the McMansions on either side, his was one of the few remaining original single-story houses left in Spanish Wells.

  Riley got up to leave. “What?” he asked, seeing the look in Chase’s eyes.

  “I haven’t paid a utility bill since I moved in,” Chase said.

  “So?”

  “So who’s paying for the electric and water here? Didn’t even realize it. And where did Doc Cleary go?”

  “You lost me,” Riley said.

  Chase nodded. “You’re right. I’ve had my head up my ass. There’s a lot more going on here than is apparent.”

  “Well, good,” Riley said, not having a clue what Chase was talking about. “Get your head out of your ass. I’m going to talk to the mob. If I don’t come back, keep the cannoli.” With that he headed down the long wooden dock, hopping over some of the rotting boards that looked ready to give way.

  Chase followed him, walking slowly, thinking hard. He had the sense that he was at the surface of a deep pool and there were dark secrets down in there; Erin’s admission of a son just being the first. Significant, but part of something more.