I was propelled down a tight hall off the main room.
“Who might that be?” I asked.
He grinned and licked his finger.
“Mr. Ampere,” he said, touching his wet finger to my bare toe, “Buzzzzt.”
Harry Nautilus stood in the covered loading dock of the Alabama Forensics Bureau and watched two interns pull the kayak from the Volvo.
“Easy,” Wayne Hembree said. “Kid gloves.”
“Kid gloves?” an intern laughed. “This thing is beaten like a…” He saw Hembree’s eyes. Said, “Where do you want it, sir?”
Hembree gave instructions, then turned to Nautilus, his voice somber. “Harry, we’re all devastated. Carson was like a-”
Nautilus put his hand on Hembree’s shoulder, squeezed.
“Not right now, OK?”
The interns set the kayak on a table that reminded Nautilus of an outsized autopsy table, a bank of lights overhead. Someone flicked a switch and the kayak was bathed in white light. The boat was bent like clock hands indicating four o’clock. Hembree reached out and stroked the craft with a fingertip.
“I’ve never dealt with a kayak before.”
“You got one now, Bree. Learn.”
Hembree looked across the room at one of the techs, a young guy with an intense look, as though doing math in his head and being timed on the results.
“MacCready, you know polystyrene, right? Polymers?”
“I love plastics. Plastics are my life.”
“Drop what you’re doing and give me a hand,” Hembree said. The guy walked around the boat until he found the manufacturer’s name. Aimed the scowl at Nautilus.
“They still in business? The manufacturer?”
“I guess so. The boat’s pretty new.”
Nautilus tumbled through time, recalling when Carson had purchased the boat. He’d had a party, like a housewarming, except for a kayak. Carson set the boat in the living room on sawhorses, hung leis and Mardi Gras beads over its pointy tips. Everyone at the affair, thirty or so friends and neighbors, had to put a hand on the boat and offer a blessing of some kind.
There was a fair amount of drinking and most benedictions were funny. Nautilus recalled being dragged to the center of the room by Danbury, his hand pressed against the boat. He’d never been good at speeches-hated them-and mumbled some things about winds and tides and friendship.
No one laughed like they had at the other little speeches, everyone getting quiet. Several people wiped away tears. A tipsy Carson had hugged him. It was embarrassing and Nautilus had slipped outside to walk on the beach. When he returned the kayak was in the street, upside down on the shoulders of a dozen people, Carson riding it like a horse as folks waved tiki torches in the dark.
What if those nights were over?
“…tensile strength and resistance and we might be able to…”
“What?” Nautilus said, jolted into the here and now.
“Talking to myself,” MacCready said. “I’ll give the manufacturer a call. They’ll probably have specs on tensile strength, resistance strength. Or can put me on to someone who knows.”
Hembree looked at Nautilus, said, “I’ll call you when we have something.”
Nautilus was almost out the door when Hembree called after him. Nautilus turned.
“Get some sleep, Harry,” the moon-faced technician said, his eyes quiet wells of concern. “You look ter-pretty tired.”
Nautilus pulled the Volvo from the loading dock. He drove six blocks before realizing it was raining and turned on his wipers. His stomach grumbled from not eating in over a dozen hours. A small seafood restaurant appeared in the rain and he pulled into the lot.
“It’ll be a few minutes, babe,” a hefty, fiftyish gum-chewing waitress said, scribbling his order on her pad. She tossed the ticket to the cook behind the counter.
Harry Nautilus put his elbows on the table and dry-washed his face with his hands. The restaurant was quiet and his thoughts loud.
“You got a paper around?” he called to the waitress. “Something to read, anything?”
She reached beneath the cash register, came up with a handful of newsprint, brought him the Register. He snapped it open. A page-one headline read, MOBILE DE — TECTIVE MISSING, BELIEVED DROWNED.
Nautilus pushed the paper away like it was on fire, threw a twenty on the table, ran out the door.
My forehead turned cold and I opened my eyes. My guts felt like they’d been removed, beaten with jellyfish tentacles, stuck back inside. Miss Gracie was wiping my head with a cool, damp cloth. It felt wonderful.
“You feelin’ all right?” she asked, looking into my eyes.
“No.”
She wrung water from the towel, refreshed it from a bowl of ice water on the bedside table.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
Miss Gracie patted the towel against my forehead, then folded it and left it laying.
“Used to be they’d send people here to test us. Fakes. If we told them things we wasn’t supposed to, it could be real bad. If you were fake he wouldn’t have done that to you. I can’t do much, but I can at least give you a clean head.”
“Where am I? And please, don’t tell me-”
“You’re in a story. An’ I think it may be ending. Least the way it is now, the way it’s become.”
“Story?”
“I’ll come back later. Maybe you should know a few parts of the story. Sleep now.”
I closed my eyes beneath the cool towel and drifted off. The next time I awakened, my pain had subsided and my vision was clear. I was still in bed, but someone had pushed me into a different room. Smaller. There was a steel door, closed, a slat at eye-height, also closed. The walls were covered in a thick, coarse-woven fabric, like old-time mats in high school gyms. A light was recessed into the ceiling, crisscrossed with bars.
I was in a padded cell.
Footsteps outside the door, slow and careful. No more electricity, I thought. Not now. Leave me alone.
The slat slid open and eyes searched the room, found me on the bed. I saw a sock puppet beside the eyes and sighed with relief.
“What are you doing, Carson?”
“I’m resting, Freddy.”
“You shouldn’t be in there, Carson,” he chided.
“Why’s that?”
“That’s Lucas’s room.”
I heard a sound of hard-sole footsteps and Freddy scampered away. The door squeaked open. Crandell stepped into the room, his face bright with false bonhomie.
“Whoa there, Ryder. You look like you been out partying all night long. You got to crank it back now and then, boy.”
I mumbled curses his way. It made his smile brighter.
“You was yelling some things while we were playing. Trying to make like you had it all figured out. It was fun to hear.”
“I’m pulling some pieces together, Crandell. Like why you’re here. And what you’re protecting.”
He walked to the side of the bed, raised a questioning eyebrow. “And just what is it I’m protecting, Ryder?”
“The family’s reputation.”
“Interesting theory. Make it go somewhere.”
“Lucas was falling apart, decompensating. I’m talking four years back, when he was eighteen, when these
