“When are you ever going to learn, Spud?” Gulf Shores Police Sergeant Cameron Durham asked as he stood going through the back seat of James ‘Spud’ Barnes 1983 Cadillac and produced a forged stack of doctor’s prescription pads that would fill half of a shoebox.
Spud shuffled and gave an openhanded shrug, “I have no idea what you are talking about boss man…I loaned my car out to my sister and her boyfriend last night and those must belong to him. I don’t even know what those are. You know I am on parole.” As he spoke, he had the characteristic slow-down and then speed-up singsong of someone making it up as they went along. This traffic stop was fast on its way to ruining Sergeant Durham’s whole day.
Sergeant Durham looked at him disapprovingly. Of course, he knew Spud was on parole. Every cop in the greater south Alabama area knew that he was on parole. Spud was something of the clearinghouse for ditch-weed and stolen goods in the region. Mind you, Spud did not grow dope or even sell it; all he did was perform a role as a dope broker, hooking up those looking with those selling, for a nominal fee. What
did
get him in trouble with the State was being something of an urban hunter/gatherer—mainly of other peoples stuff.
Every legitimate business has a hook-up guy willing to sell a couple TVs out the back door, do an oil change and throw in a couple of free tires, or look the other way on a drive off with a tank of gas. Spud was the person who made a living out of knowing all these people and putting them in touch with each other. If they shipped him out of the county, the crime rate on the island would drop in half.
“Come on, boss man, I got a good job now. I work at the Quick Lube off 59 five days a-week. I keep my meetings with my parole officer and everything. I’m rehabilitated,” Spud was pleading the whole time Durham was searching his car and nodding his head.
“Anything else I’m gonna find in this car you want to tell me about Spud?” Durham asked.
Looking up at the late morning sun rising high in the sky, Spud squinted, “Well there are some laptops in the trunk, but they are totally cool.”
Durham had been with the Gulf Shores Police Department for five years, having transferred to them after another five with the County Sheriff’s Department after graduation from the State Police Academy. Ten years in law enforcement taught him criminal behavior.
The spring and summer in Gulf Shores was crazy, especially on weekends. That is when thousands of visitors from ‘across the Amnesia Bridge’ and the rest of the Southeast flooded into the 29-mile long island every day. The impossibly white sugar sand beaches were known to some as the
Redneck Rivera
. Several vendors sold t-shirts that claimed that Gulf Shores was “a sleepy little drinking village with a fishing problem,” and the tourists embraced that concept. The high-powered drink, “the Bushwhacker,” was perfected, not invented, in the local bars, one of which was even owned by Jimmy Buffet’s sister.
Most of these summer tourists are harmless, but there are the 10% that come to unwind and drink too much which leads to arrests for public intoxication, underage possession, single vehicle accidents, indecent exposure, simple assault, as well as the always popular menacing and sending of harassing communications. At least once a week some guy gets tanked up real good and decides that he can make the jump from his balcony to the swimming pool below.
Sometimes they can, but occasionally one of these daredevils fail and that is always exciting.
Sergeant Durham had been looking forward to a slow winter. Winter is when the throngs of alcohol-fueled tourists left and was replaced by a much smaller amount of often elderly snowbirds escaping the harsh winters of Michigan, Minnesota, and the like. These snowbirds, along with Gulf Shores’ normal regular population of less than 5,000 full-time residents, would calmly sit out the winter until spring break.
The typical day in winter for Sergeant Durham would consist of taking a report of at least one theft (mainly of video games and tools) or responding to a small-scale fender bender. Of course there are traffic citations which lead to arrests for DUI, possession, etc. There are days where you do not have to respond to a single call. This is the time of year that the department does training and grants vacations and extended leaves.
“Dispatch, this is GS5, get ready to take a license for a 27 please….and get me a time and case number,” he called into his radio preparing to start the paperwork for bringing Spud in even before going for his handcuffs.
— | — | —
ChapteR 5
The fishing had not gone too bad, Billy thought, as he idled the
Fooly Involved
back on a course to the marina. They had caught few redfish, a nice speck and some good-sized white trout on the way out once the Coast Guard went their separate way. They had spent a couple hours circling the deep water over the artificial reefs and oilrigs off Ft. Morgan and had picked up a few amberjacks, a smallish wahoo and some triggerfish to add to the collection.
“Shame to turn in so soon,” Billy said down into the salon from the Captain’s chair behind the wheel.
Ted, head of the average white guys and the central mouthpiece of the expedition curled on the half couch in the salon behind the foldout Formica table. “I hate the hell out of this…but I’m dying here.”
“You guys don’t worry about paying for the rest of the trip; Lance has your fish cleaned and ready to go for you. I’ll just use the deposit for the gas and to pay Lance and we’ll call it even.”
Billy smiled to himself and winked at Lance who had spent the morning baiting hooks, pulling fish and mopping vomit as fast as he could.
“Friggin’ lightweights these guys are,” half-whispered Lance as he puffed away on menthol and gazed out to sea, “I got puke in my shoes, Cap’n.”
“Normally you have to pay good money to get that kind of treatment, kid. Hell, I shouldn’t even pay you today.”
Lance was not as easily amused. He thumped the butt of his cigarette, sending it cartwheeling into the sea. “I got fish to clean, boss.”
“Try to keep the puke off of them, will ya?”
Another cool look thrown from a leathery face and a forced smile before Lance exited down to the deck below. “Damn this deckhand bullshit.”
“Remember, Lance, what’s the difference between God and a charter boat captain? Nothing, except God knows he can’t be a charter boat captain,” Billy called down to the younger man.
Billy adjusted the course on the chart plotter with a few quick clicks, settled the
Fooly Involved’s
twin diesels into a high cruise speed, and sat back in the Captain’s chair for the ride back to Gulf Shores. He scanned the VHF radio and listened to the normal traffic.
The big red Mobile Bay Ferry was just off the port bow making its normal run from Fort Morgan to Dauphin Island. Lots of Coast Guard radio communications and a few Vietnamese shrimpers conversing in a singsong filled the air. There seemed to be some sort of commotion about a barge striking the Perdido Pass Bridge. As Billy could tell, there were not many other charter boats out on the water this time of year.
As he got closer to shore along the South Alabama coastline, his cell phone began vibrating with waiting voicemails and text messages as it acquired signal again from land-based towers. It was one of the nice things about going offshore—once you were a mile or two away from land you could not get cell phone service and could not be bothered. He scrolled through the text messages first and there was a series of increasingly frantic texts from both of his kids.
On his phone he read crazy texts about cops at the schools, classes canceled, everyone assembling in the halls, some sort of health crisis and all the kids being held there until their parents could come get them.
Billy increased the throttles on the
Fooly Involved
’s diesels up as he called down to the deck below.
“Hey guys, hold on we are picking up speed to get in a little faster.”
The old Hatteras creaked and popped as she stretched her legs and the front deck of the boat began to take on more spray as the size of the wake behind her doubled. She was good for about 25-knots on her rebuilt engines although it ate into her fuel bunkers and into Billy’s profit margin, but his kids were not likely to exaggerate. The school district had a strict no-cell phone policy but Billy had always made it a point to have both of his kids carry them hidden in their bags so that they would have them to keep in touch if they had a change of plans after school.
Or if there was an emergency.
««—»»
It was just after lunch as the
Fooly Involved
returned to the marina. Billy had tried several times to call the school, to call his kids, his neighbor, the police department and kept getting fast busy signals on the cell phone or
call failed
messages. Occasional text messages kept coming through and he had tried to send several that all failed with “service denied” errors.
Down below, the five charter anglers had gathered around their Blackberries and iPhones and discovered much the same thing. They had turned on the small flatscreen TV in the salon. It was attached to a small-dish satellite receiver and, while it could normally pick up 100-channels when close to shore, all it showed was a black screen.
“I knew this was a friggin’ bad idea to go out while all this crap was going on. When I do connect, I can’t get anything from the news updated past 2am this morning when I checked it earlier,” one of Ted’s fishing buddies said to no one in particular. He had fish guts on his
I’m with Stupid
t-shirt.
“We already put down a non-refundable deposit and we agreed that we wouldn’t spend the whole summer down here and not go fishing once,” Ted defended himself.
“I can’t get a hold of any damned body. I got a text message from Curt back at the lab and he said the National Guard has taken over the city. Set up roadblocks everywhere and have closed down the interstate,”
I’m with Stupid
t-shirt replied.
“In Mobile?” Lance asked, menthol bobbing as he spoke.
“No, Birmingham,” Ted gestured and held up a large gold ring on his hand. “UAB,” he said, referring to the University of Alabama in Birmingham.
The assembled collection grumbled and broke into side conversations.
“How long we get back to the harbor, Captain?” Ted yelled up to Billy.
Billy looked down and advised that they were coming up into the marina in just a few minutes.
The charter boat captain rounded the breakwater coming into the Gulf Shores marina and throttled down to avoid any collisions. There was little activity on the dockside and row after row of pleasure boats, charter boats, and sailboats bobbed gently in his wake as he motored to his slip. Sirens could be heard in the distance. In his previous life as a firefighter, he had learned to tell the difference from the sound of police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances and to Billy it sounded like all three coming from multiple parts of town.
“Get ready with that line, kid,” he said even as Lance, who had spent most of his life as a deckhand for one charter boat or another, already stood by on the rail ready to heave a line over the post and to step off onto the slip decking.
Normally Billy would back the
Fooly Involved
into her slip to enable her to make a smooth and impressive sortie out of the harbor when carrying a charter out to sea, but that was the furthest thing on Billy’s mind at this point. He had not gotten to or from his kids in more than twenty minutes.
He killed the engines as they drifted into the slip and the vessel glided to a gentle bump with her fenders out as Lance stepped off the fore of the boat and began tying her up. Billy had already stepped down from the cabin and was making his way to the rail.
“Sorry about the way the trip turned out; call me if you guys want to reschedule. I’ll make you a deal,” Billy said as he stepped over onto the pier and moved to leave his boat, deckhand and charters behind.
“Lance, lock up the boat and be safe, kid,” he said as he left the boat to the thoroughly pissed off deckhand.
Billy jogged across the docks and through the fence into the parking lot. He felt his old .38 snub nose bounce inside the cargo pocket of his shorts against his right knee as he ran. He had slipped it in there quietly just before they made port. Within five minutes of coming into the marina, he had his truck started up and was on the main road to the high school.
Gulf Shores High School was about a mile away from the marina and ordinarily would have been a short drive but this was not an ordinary day. He clicked on the truck’s FM radio and scanned for anything other than music.
“Hurlburt Field in Florida has been hard-hit by an outbreak that has infected up to 100 airmen on the key Air Force Special Operations installation at Fort Walton Beach, Florida,” he heard on the radio.
“‘Civilian workers fear the bug could spread to them,’ said a source who works in the Education Building on Lukasik Avenue. Some of the people there, we are told, worry about catching the virus and bringing it home to children and other family members,” the radio continued.
“Meanwhile, closer to home, reports of hospitals overcrowded with massive outbreaks of the new virus in Mobile, Selma, and Birmingham has prompted Alabama Governor Patrick Evans today to declare a statewide state of emergency and activate National Guard units to assist with crowd control and possible rioting.