I can see Denny making mental calculations. “I need to leave the DJI down there till the cops leave,” he says, “but I can access the file from here. It just eats up a lot of my monthly data allowance.”
“I’ll reimburse you.”
His face lights up. “Awesome!”
He stabs the iPad screen, waves me closer. Thanks to the sun hood, I now have a glare-free view of what Denny shot only a few minutes ago. On the screen, two deputies with no experience at hauling corpses out of water are attempting to do just that. All I can see of the dead man is one side of a gray-fleshed face and a thin arm trailing in the muddy current. Then the head lolls over on the current, and a wave of nausea rolls through me. My mouth goes dry.
It’s Buck.
I can’t see his whole head, but the far side of his skull appears to have been broken open by some sort of fracture. As I strain to see more, his head sinks back into the water. “Fast-forward,” I urge.
Denny’s already doing it. At triple speed, the deputies dart around the deck of the rescue boat like cartoon characters, occasionally leaning over the gunwale to try to yank Buck’s body free of the tree fork holding him in the water. Suddenly one looks skyward and begins waving his arms. Then he starts yelling, draws his pistol, and fires at the camera suspended beneath the drone.
“What a freakin’ idiot,” Denny mutters, as the deputy fires again.
“Does he not realize those bullets have to come down somewhere?” I ask.
“He flunked physics.”
“Don’t they teach gravity in grade school?”
After holstering his gun, the deputy stomps back to a hatch in the stern and removes what looks like a ski rope. Then he makes a loop in the rope, leans over the gunwale, and starts trying to float the lasso he made down over Buck’s body.
“No, damn it!” I bellow. “Have some goddamn respect!”
Denny snorts at this notion.
“He needs to tie the rope around his waist,” I mutter, “then get in the water himself and free the body.”
“You’re dreaming,” Denny says in the lilt of a choirboy whose voice has not yet broken. “He’s gonna lasso the body, gun the motor, and leave a rooster tail all the way back to the dock.”
“And rip Buck’s body in half in the process.”
“Was it Buck for sure?” he asks. “I couldn’t tell.”
“Yeah. It’s him.”
Denny lowers his head over the screen.
It takes some time, but the deputy eventually gets the rope around Buck, and he does in fact use the motor to tear him free of the snag’s grasp. Thankfully, the corpse appears to stay in one piece, and after the boat stops, the deputies slowly drag it up over the transom.
“Oh, man,” Denny mutters.
“What?”
“Look at his head. The side of it. It’s all messed up.”
It doesn’t take a CIA analyst to see that something caved in the left side of Buck Ferris’s skull. The vault of his cranium has a hole the size of a Sunkist orange in it. Now that he’s out of the water, his face looks oddly deflated. “I saw.”
“What did that?” Denny asks. “A baseball bat?”
“Maybe. Could have been a gunshot. Gunshot wounds don’t look like they do on TV, or even in the movies. But it might be blunt force trauma. A big rock could have done that. Maybe he took a fall before he went into the river.”
“Where?” Denny asks, incredulous. “There’s hardly any rocks around here. Even if you fell off the bluff, you wouldn’t hit one. Not igneous rocks. You’d have to hit concrete or something to do that.”
“He could have fallen onto some riprap,” I suggest, meaning the large gray rocks the Corps of Engineers carpets the riverbanks with to slow erosion.
“I guess. But those are right down by the water, not under the bluff.”
“And he would have had to fall from a height to smash his skull like that.” Despite my emotional state, I’m suddenly wondering about the legal implications of Denny’s drone excursion. “You know, you really need to turn this footage over to the sheriff.”
“It’s not footage, man. It’s a file. And it’s mine.”
“The district attorney would probably dispute that. Are you licensed to fly that drone?”
“I don’t need a license.”
“You do for commercial work. And if I put it up on our website, or pay your data bill, you’re doing this for hire.”
Denny scowls in my direction. “So don’t pay me.”
“You’re missing the point, Denny.”
“No, I’m not. I don’t like the sheriff. And the chief of police I like even less. They hassle me all the time. Until they need me, of course. That time they had a car wreck down in a gully by Highway 61, they called me to fly down in there and check to see if anybody was alive. They were glad to see me then. And at the prison riot, too. Although they stole my micro SD cards and copied them. But any other time, they’re major A-holes.”
“I heard they have their own drone now.”
Once again, Denny snorts in contempt.
“You know what I’m thinking?” I say.
“Nope.”
“The next thing we need to know is where Buck’s truck is. He drives an old GMC pickup. It’s bound to be upstream from where he was found—unless something isn’t what it appears to be.”
Denny is nodding. “You want me to fly the banks and look for his truck?”
“Seems like the thing to do, doesn’t it? You got enough battery left?”
“Two is one, one is none.”
“What?”
“Navy SEAL motto. Meaning I brought some extras.” Denny leans over the fence and looks down the sharp incline of Front Street. “Looks like they’re loading him into the coroner’s wagon. Let the deputies get clear, and I’ll fly the drone back up here, change out my battery, and start checking the banks.”
“Sounds good. Let’s try the Mississippi shore first.”
“Yep.”
We stand at the fence together, looking down into Lower’ville, which on most mornings would be virtually empty (except in March, which is peak tourist season for our city). But on this May morning, death has drawn a crowd. Though they’re almost stick figures from our perspective, I recognize Byron Ellis helping the deputies slide the sheet-covered body from his gurney into the old Chevy. Watching them wrestle that mortal weight, I hear a snatch of music: Robert Johnson playing “Preachin’ Blues.” Turning back to the road, I look for a passing car but see none. Then I realize the music was in my head. “Preachin’ Blues” was one of the first songs Buck taught me on guitar. The harmless man lying beneath the coroner’s sheet with his skull cracked open salvaged my young life. The realization that he has been murdered—possibly on the river—is so surreal that I have to force it into some inaccessible place in my mind.
“Hey, are you okay?” Denny asks in a hesitant voice.
I wipe my eyes and turn back to him. “Yeah. Buck and I were close back when I lived here. When I was a kid.”
“Oh. Can I ask you something?”
He’s going to ask me about my brother dying, I think, searching for a way to avoid the subject. Seeing Buck pulled from the river has already knocked me off-balance. I don’t want to dwell on the nightmare that poisoned the river for me.
“Sure,” I reply, sounding anything but.
“I knew you won a Pulitzer Prize and all, when you were in Washington. But I didn’t realize what it was for. I was online last week and saw it was for something you wrote about being embedded in Iraq. Were you with the SEALs or somebody like that? Delta Force?”
A fourteen-year-old boy’s question. “Sometimes,” I tell him, relief coursing through me. “I was embedded in Afghanistan before Iraq, with the Marines. But in Iraq I was with private security contractors. Do you know what those are?”
“Like Blackwater and stuff?”
“Exactly. Most guys who do that work in Afghanistan are former soldiers: Rangers, Delta, SEALs. But a lot of them in Iraq were just regular cops back in the world, believe it or not. And lots of those were from the South. They go over there for the money. It’s the only way they can make that kind of paycheck. They earn four times what the regular soldiers do. More than generals.”
“That doesn’t seem fair.”
“It’s not.”