I wondered if Raymond Tullock had also told them they probably shouldn't beat Tomlinson senseless—after confiding that his Tallahassee contacts had confirmed that Tomlinson had been sent to Sulphur Wells as an informant.
Didn't ask. Didn't need to ask. Instead, I got Julie talking about the cocaine trade. I didn't care about it, but I wanted him to think that I did. He kept asking for water—his throat was so dry. I told him he could have all the water when we were done. He tried to ingratiate himself—"Only a coupl'a good ol' boys like you an' me'd understand that!"—and through his abject eagerness to cooperate, he begged for his life.
I grew sick of him. I was sickened by the whole situation. One of the locker room maxims of hydrology is that shit never flows uphill. The maxim applies to human social dynamics as well. When the good ones, the hardworking hill climbers, are displaced for any reason—bad legislation, ghetto diffusion, or political leveraging—social sewage will flood in to fill the void. It was too damn bad. I wondered if the paper Tomlinson had intended to write on Sulphur Wells would have touched on that dynamic. Decided that Tomlinson's paper would have addressed that, along with subtleties that were beyond my power to understand.
I looked at Julie hanging there. He looked lifeless and mummified, like a mounted fish. Allowed myself to picture, for a moment, this big, loose-limbed goon pounding Tomlinson's face . . . quickly forced the image out of my mind because I didn't know if I could tolerate the cold and calculating rage that filled me.
I said, "Tuck your chin up against your chest," and I cut him down. The shock of the landing knocked the wind out of him. I rolled him over onto his belly, and as I sliced through the tape on his wrists, I said, "My boss says I can let you live, but there're a couple of conditions—Get your damn hands away from that tape on your eyes!"
Julie dropped his hands immediately. "Anything, man. Name it." He was sitting up, rubbing his wrists, massaging his cheeks.
"My boss's got what you might call an import-export business of his own. Only it's no piddly-shit operation like you're used to. He was thinkin' about usin' that guy Kemper Waits to expand into the area, only, after what you told us, Waits sounds like some dumb ass hick."
"He is! Kemper . . . Kemper, he's about half crazy."
"My boss is thinkin' maybe you might be a better choice. Set you up here, let you work into it slow. Rules are simple: We supply the product, you find your own distributors. Screw up and we kill you."
I could see Julie shiver at the thought of that. "I'd ... I'd get paid, right?"
"Make more money'n you ever made in your life. Move down here full-time, Julius. Buy yourself a nice place—that's right, we know who ya are, where you're from. First thing we got to do, though, is knock Kemper Waits away from the trough."
"You want me to kill—"
"I want you to keep your damn mouth shut till I'm done. The way were gonna work it is, we got a man on our payroll in the area. A local cop by the name'a Jackson. Now, Julius, you ever so much as hint to Jackson or anybody else that you know he's on our payroll, you're gonna be one of those ones I told you about. The ones I'm not always so nice to?" I waited for Julie to nod his head eagerly before continuing. "We're gonna have Jackson come down hard on Waits. You're gonna cooperate. Tell him everything you know. Might even have him arrest you on some piddly-ass little thing just to make it look good. Don't worry about it. Jackson'll be told you're one of us when the time's right. When Kemper Waits is out of the way, that's when you'll take over."
I patted him on the head; felt him flinch. Said, "It'll be light in another hour or so. You flag yourself down a ride. Wait for us to get in touch. You handled yourself pretty good tonight, Julius. Most times, they bawl like babies. That's how we know you'll fit right in. My boss, he's pretty impressed."
Julie wasn't sure he was allowed to speak. "You mean this was like a sort of. . . test?"
I was already walking away, making enough noise for two people. "My boss runs a class operation. Can't just let any shit-stomper in."
I was almost to the water when I heard Julie call through the trees, "Hey—fellas? FELLAS? You boys . . . you boys made the right decision. Thanks!"
As I took my time running back to Dinkin's Bay, the first smear of daylight hung foglike over Sulphur Wells. . . then expanded out of the Pine Island tree line: a stratum of gray membrane that, gradually, was streaked with conch pink and violet. Somewhere—over Bimini, maybe; someplace in the Bahamas chain—the sun was wheeling hard around the rim of earth, moving incrementally across the Gulf Stream toward Florida.
I was thinking about Raymond Tullock. I had seen him only twice, yet the image of him was picture-sharp in my brain: Not as tall as Hannah, but still a big man. Six feet, six one maybe. Tight muscularity. Hundred and eighty pounds, maybe one-ninety. The kind who worked out, stayed fit. Probably had a NordicTrack at home or a weight machine. Maybe a membership to a good health and tennis club. Early to mid thirties, and very careful about his appearance. The night he had surprised Hannah and me, he had arrived wild-eyed but well groomed. Dusty blond hair styled neatly. Wearing the carefully pressed travel-adventure khakis of a kind favored by the affluent armchair traveler. The Banana Republic style of outfit that is worn to make a statement. Tullock had a bony, angular face of a type that I associated with country club tennis players: athletic but articulate. With his face and hair, he resembled one of the doctors on the television show M*A*S*H. Hawkeye's second sidekick? Yeah, that was the one.
I wondered what motivated the guy. It was not surprising that he had become obsessive about Hannah Smith. A case could be made that I was also guilty of that. Nor was it surprising that he and others were working behind the scenes, plotting ways to turn the net ban into a personal windfall. Tullock was an ex—state employee, so he knew the ins and outs of the bureaucracy. It was not unusual that he and his cohorts would use that knowledge to their own advantage. What was unusual was that Tullock didn't hesitate to cross dangerous lines. He had told desperate commercial fishermen that they had to riot to get Tallahassee's attention. He had provided Kemper Waits—an unstable man, by all accounts—with a book on how to build a bomb. And it was Tullock, I was certain, who had seeded the rumor that Tomlinson was an informant. But the man was shrewd. Each time, he had tacked on just the right addendum to absolve himself of responsibility. I could hear him giving a deposition, telling some assistant district attorney that the only advice he remembered ever giving anybody was not to riot, not to burn, and not to retaliate. Could also picture the commercial fishermen that he had manipulated sitting there, handcuffed, admitting, yeah, Tullock had told them they shouldn't.
I wondered how that would play with Ron Jackson. I didn't know enough about the law to guess. Suspected that Tullock was operating in the gray fringe areas, and it depended on just how hard the DA's office wanted to go after him—if they went after him. What hard evidence was there, after all? Some black market book on terrorism? If Tullock was shrewd enough to remain safely in the background, pulling all the little puppet strings, then he was shrewd enough to buy a book in a way that was difficult to trace.
I was certain of one thing: Raymond Tullock had some dangerous kinks in his brain. He was fixated on having Hannah. The expression on his face the night he found us together had been grotesque. I could hear Hannah saying that in Tullock's mind, she and the land had become one. Tullock was determined to have them both, and somehow, that determination had grown into an obsession; an irrational craving that had nudged him toward the edge. It would be difficult to prove—perhaps impossible to prove—but I was convinced that Jimmy Darroux had been killed because of that craving . . . and perhaps Tomlinson, too.