The Spy's Little Zonbi Read online

  Chase caught up to the woman before she could disappear back into the zoo, and she was happy to give him her name and confirm she lived here in town. She’d been volunteering at the zoo since losing her husband to cancer in the summer of seventy-five. “You better have gotten my good side,” she said before marching back to work.

  Chase’s hands were shaking. He hadn’t realized how much of a rush this could be. If Chase hadn’t captured it, the little scene would never have been remembered, except perhaps by the woman and the children who had watched. Like grain prices and proposed parking meters, it would mean something to this community. He’d anticipated being nervous photographing strangers, but it wasn’t like that. Even if you got as close as you needed to be with such a wide-angle lens, you were still hidden—both voyeur and intruder. Chase tucked away his small pencil and the thin reporter’s notebook in his back pocket and settled on the log bench to savor the emotions before Limp woke.

  ***

  “Will I get a scanner?” Chase asked when they were back on the road.

  “Yeah, sure, you’ll get your very own,” Limp said, and Chase noticed his was switched off.

  “Yours is off.”

  “It makes too much noise.”

  “But what if there’s a fire?”

  “It’s a small town, Sugar Pie. Anything happens, I’ll find out.”

  The slim Radio Shack police and fire scanner was a burden to Limp, who preferred cruising for photos of playing children and artsy images reflected in puddles and ponds. Spot news was an interruption of his day, although he did seem to love unnerving cops protecting their yellow police lines.

  “I bet you tie your wife up with this stuff,” Limp said to a bored cop during their first week of training, adding a lascivious wink. Their press passes allowed the photojournalists to duck under the bright yellow tape for shots at a garage fire. Limp took care to flash that day’s pink whale-tail underpants as he bent under the fluttering barrier. The cop continued to look bored, nodding them in the direction of the Fire Chief.

  The odometer flipped to 299,970 as Limp turned them south on Route 13, past the college on the right and away from Salisbury. A few miles later and they were rushing through Fruitland. On the outskirts of Eden they hit 299,980.

  “Where are we headed?”

  “Just cruisin’, Pie.” The noonday sun snuck behind tall thunderheads, which regularly built over the Chesapeake in the heat of the day and then raced across the peninsula toward the Atlantic. The storm’s wake would leave millions of fat night crawlers miserable and dying, flooded from their holes and trapped on the steaming pavement.

  Limp raked a comb one-handed through his greased-back hair, and when he wasn’t talking you saw the hint of Elvis. “Southern Queer,” was how Limp once described himself.

  “I love you,” he said to break the silence, tucking the comb in his shirt pocket.

  “What?”

  “See how that is?”

  “How what is?”

  “Tell someone you don’t know very well that you love them,” Limp said. “And they look at you like you called them the N word.”

  “I took a picture, Limp.” Chase fumbled the notebook out of his back pocket. “Back when you were sleeping.”

  “Power napping, Pie.” Chase saw him glance down as the numbers rolled to 299,982. “So what’d you shoot? Something that might let us knock off for an early dinner?”

  “Maybe, if it’s in focus.”

  “Shootin’ that wide angle lens makes it hard to screw up focus. Did your manly fingers switch over to automatic exposure?”

  “Yeah, but it all happened so fast.”

  “Well, rewind the spool now and a little later in the dark we’ll see if you got lucky.”

  The clouds roiled overhead, dropping low and dark, and Limp flipped on the head lights. The first giant drops hit hard, almost hail-like, and he had to fight the steering wheel against the buffeting wind. Limp threw a quick glance over at Chase, making a funny face and shrugging his shoulders to acknowledge the awesome display.

  “Mother Nature’s pissed ’bout somethin’,” he said in a fake southern drawl, and Chase went to fasten his non-existent seatbelt. Instead, he clutched his camera tighter.

  A nearly blinding sheet of rain cut their pace in half as Limp switched the wipers to their fastest setting. The mileage rolled to 299,985 as he craned forward to see the right turn that would take them due west, through the little towns marked Venton and Monie, and directly into the buffeting storm.

  Chase kept quiet and let him drive, partly because the rain was so loud. He’d found that sometimes you needed to take a break from talking to Limp.

  The clouds continued to lower over the little blue Accord, deep puddles yanking hard at its narrow tires. Giant plumes of water splashed up over the hood from brand new rivers rushing across the pavement. They hit 299,990 and lightning cracked directly overhead. Green leaves tore from swaying limbs, a few plastering themselves to the windshield before the wipers broke their veiny grip. Limp leaned forward and smeared fog from his vision.

  “It’s like drivin’ a submarine!” he shouted. “I’m ’bout gonna have you send up the periscope and have a look around to see what ocean we’re lost in.”

  They defied the wind into Dames Quarter at 299,994, then 95, 96, and 97. Chase had read about this unwelcoming plot of land once known as The Damned Quarters—a stretch of whipping marsh grasses possibly hiding the buried loot of eighteenth century pirates who’d pillaged trade ships en route to Baltimore.

  Passing through Chance, they saw whitecaps dancing in the harbor below the Deal Island Bridge. The small car rocked from the exposure as they crept up and over the long, narrow span onto the three-mile island nestled against Tangier Sound. A sign announced that this spot was home to annual skipjack races each Labor Day.

  Enormous rusting crab pots were stacked against ancient wood shacks, as violent waves slapped the bulkhead, erupting in milky foam that was whisked away on the wind like tumbling birds.

  Limp’s odometer came to a rest at 299,999 and probably nine-tenths. All six numbers had rolled upward and were impossible to read if you hadn’t been keeping track. He frowned down at them as they sat in the public boat launch, empty except for two pickups and trailers of boaters possibly caught in the storm.

  They sat, not talking, listening to the wind and rain, watching a loose roof section of one of the crab shacks rise and fall, as if the building were finally able to talk. Maybe Limp was thinking about trying for the Cold Duck in the back hatch, if the bottle really existed.

  Chase would come back to this spot twenty times over the next two months to shoot kids flying kites in the ever-present breeze. He’d return to photograph the oyster yawls returning, silhouetted against the setting sun and to capture images of the tourists who came for a glimpse at a life completely different from their own. The heart of Deal Island was being lost to time, though. The once thousand-strong fleet of skipjacks that had worked these waters was down to the last couple dozen, Limp had explained. Many rested at the bottom of the bay, some rotted in shallow guts off the feeding rivers and coves. Others were cut to pieces and nailed into the seafood shacks that sold the freshest soft shell crabs anywhere. The watermen who Chase stopped to photograph were eager to tell their stories. Maybe they saw it as an opportunity to keep their way of life from dying out.

  The sky over the boat launch was brightening. The rage had gone out of the rain, leaving just a steady drumbeat on the metal roof. Limp sat sideways against the driver door and looked across at Chase, who again tightened his grip on the camera in his lap when Limp seemed about to speak. Their breath and body heat had fogged the windows the way lovers’ did and Chase knew Limp wouldn’t pass on this opportunity to spout something truly depraved.

  Limp finally spoke. “Do you think you could kill a person and not get all crazy about it?”

  Chapter 6

  Crashing through the briars and sticker bushes, Chase beat a
path in the direction of the voices of police and firemen and the smell of a decomposing body.

  Limp was swearing behind him, swatting at dive-bombing deer flies with karate chops. His soft felt fedora, snatched from his head by a low branch, was now the victim of his unwillingness to backtrack. It was hot, with the humidity that comes with stagnant air trapped between the Chesapeake and the Atlantic, and Limp continued his rueful monologue over having acknowledged his friggin’ pager in the first place.

  Chase had overheard Limp’s side of the conversation after they’d pulled up to the 7-Eleven payphone.

  “No.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “You can’t order me.”

  “Okay, so you can order me, but it doesn’t mean I’m doing it.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You are such a bitch, Mack.”

  “You can’t call me that.”

  “You will not.”

  “I’m not going.”

  Slamming the payphone receiver, Limp bumped past Chase in an angry flourish of Old Spice. “Dead people smell gets all over your clothes. I hate it. Get in the damned car.”

  “A dead body?”

  “Mack said it came across the scanner as a possible suicide. But it was called in as a black male, so you never know.”

  “Never know what?”

  “Sometimes the Klan boys get carried away in that particular neighborhood. And this one’s hanging from a tree.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Alcohol and rednecks are a bad mix, Pie, even though they keep finding each other.”

  “I’m hoping that when you asked if I could kill someone and not get all crazy about it has nothing to do with this.”

  “You reckon the Klan has expanded its membership ranks to include wonderfully refined and sexually omnivorous men such as myself? I’d look like a fat ghost in Klan sheets. Imagine the Halloween fun.”

  “Sexually omnivorous?”

  Limp barely drove forty on the highway out to the small town of Hebron. Loaded Purdue trucks blasted by, leaving tiny white feathers like snow flurries in their wake.

  Limp’s complaints stopped as they parted the last of the underbrush to find a group of uniformed men chatting quietly among themselves, heads mostly tilted upward.

  “Well, look there.” Limp gasped for breath, pointing up to the slowly rotating corpse at the end of what appeared to be the type of nylon rope used for hanging laundry. The suicide—or whatever this was—explained the underpants and t-shirts scattered around the yard they’d cut through.

  “Doesn’t look right,” Chase whispered to Limp as they joined a semicircle of a dozen police and firemen. They were apparently waiting for a hardy volunteer to climb up and cut the man down. The tree was nearly as dead as the dangling man, and there was no chance of maneuvering a ladder truck back through the dense woods. The man’s naked toes were maybe fifteen feet off the ground.

  “It’s because he’s filled up with gas,” said one of the town cops, who stood next to Chase scribbling in a small black notebook with a pencil nub. “Makes his features all out of whack.”

  “See how he’s bloated?” Limp’s breath was hot in Chase’s ear. Radios crackled around them, competing with the noise of buzzing flies. “You think it smells bad now, wait until they pop him.” A fireman nodded in agreement.

  As if on cue, a young fireman in rubber boots and turnout gear tromped through the brush toward the group, hauling an eight-foot fireman’s hook. It was the kind of tool used to pull ceiling material down to get at hot spots.

  “Here ya go, Chief.” He turned the hook over to the commander of the volunteer department.

  “Piñata,” Limp whispered, nodding his head. “No candy, though.”

  The chief walked toward the tree, careful not to stand directly under the body since the limb holding the twisting corps was bent hard under the weight. It looked as though the limb would snap at any second. The man had apparently climbed the dead tree, thrown the cord out over the branch, tied it off in a slip knot and then attached himself to the other end. The final step was just letting go of the trunk and swinging out, quickly choking to death.

  The rope was out of reach of any of the fire department ladders, so the chief decided to attack from below.

  “Jimmy!” he shouted, and the tallest of his men shuffled forward from the semicircle. The chief handed him the hook. “Try to get him by the belt.”

  “Turn around and face me, Pie.” Limp checked the settings of his camera. “Hold your left hand up like this, like you’re dangling a piece of string.” He demonstrated with his own hand. “Pretend like you’re holding a mouse by the tail.”

  Behind them, Jimmy hooked the victim’s belt and pulled down with most of his weight, but neither the tree limb nor the rope budged. Chase watched over his shoulder as the tall fireman secured his grip higher on the hook bar, increasing the pressure until his own boots were a few inches off the ground.

  “Hearns!” the chief shouted. Jimmy and the corpse were now both slowly rotating. “Give him a hand, for Christ’s sake!”

  The new fireman stepped up behind Jimmy, looping his arms under Jimmy’s armpits and mounting him from behind to add weight. Small sharp warning cracks came from the heavy limb as the dead man’s feet tap-danced on Jimmy’s yellow helmet, his milky eyes bulging to the size of golf balls.

  “Almost,” said the chief. “Somebody grab a body bag. I want him zipped up as soon as he’s down.”

  “Smile.” Limp framed Chase in the foreground, with the optical illusion of his pinched fingers holding the top end of the nylon cord and three men.

  Chase smiled.

  “This doesn’t seem right, Limp.” But the chief photographer was busy firing away, bending and dipping to line up the shot just right. Sweat was pouring down his face, and his shirt was plastered to his thick body.

  “Chin up a little to the left. Good. Perfect. Hold that.”

  The branch snapped like a gunshot, echoing through the woods, the body crashing down on the two firemen in a heap. The twenty-foot limb missed hitting the firemen, but slammed down on the head and back of the dead man, pinning all three in a spider web of white rope.

  “Oh, God!” moaned one of firemen from under the rapidly deflating corpse, which had become a gigantic whoopee-cushion of evil-smelling gases. The long, fart-like blatting sound drew sniggers from the on-looking cops and firemen until the odor reached them. They backed up a few steps, their emergency response training stuck in neutral.

  “Help!” But the more Jimmy flailed to escape the body, the more entangled he and the other fireman became, thrashing under the dead weight and tree branch.

  “That tall boy’s gonna have nightmares,” Limp said, motioning with his chin.

  “Hold the fuck still!” The second fireman, who was on the bottom of the pile, tried digging his heels in to push out from under the mess.

  “There’s shit!” screamed Jimmy. “Oh, Lord, there’s shit everywhere!”

  Limp slowly rewound the spool of film. “I can’t wait to turn these in to Mack,” he said. “You might want to grab a quick photo once they get him all tucked into the body bag. Then help me find my hat.”

  ***

  On the ride back to Salisbury Limp’s car stank with the odor of dead body.

  “So what do you think?” Limp adjusted his fedora in the rearview mirror, the black satin band puckered from the thorns he’d carefully removed.

  “About?”

  “Could you kill someone who rightly deserved it? Make him or her just as dead as that poor colored boy up in the tree? It isn’t against your religion, is it?”

  “I don’t have a religion.”

  “You smell that?” Limp took his eyes off the road to stick his nose into his right armpit. “The smell clings to the hair in your nose.”

  “I could protect my family and friends.”

  “I think you’d make a good secret agent,” he said.

  “They get
all the girls, right?”

  “That’s just in the movies. Most of our spy work keeps you too busy for the poontang.”

  “What have you been spying on, Limp?” Chase asked, but Limp was busy trying to squeeze back into the slow lane to make the next exit. “We aren’t going back to the paper?”

  “As much as I adore beating around bushes, I believe the time has come to have us a serious powwow.” Limp maneuvered through traffic on West Main, before turning into the parking lot next to the boat docks off Fitzwater. Chase had concluded that Eastern Shore people seemed to do most of their talking either on board boats or while sitting and looking at them.

  “I recruit spies for a division of the Central Intelligence Agency,” Limp said after switching off the ignition. The car faced expensive boats bobbing in their slips.

  “No you don’t.”

  “The Data Base Six, or what you’ll come to call DB6, is an organization that mostly does information gathering.” Limp mopped his forehead with a shiny teal handkerchief. “They pose as journalists in foreign countries, working as support for the real CIA spies.”

  “You’re full of it.”

  “Even our closest allies have thick dossiers on every one of our highly paid, full-time agents. The CIA jobs are coveted spots, filled with glory and decent pay, but all that limelight kills any chance for double-agent work.”

  “Mack’s expecting us back,” Chase said. He was tired and smelled like the dead guy.

  “When a CIA regular stepped off a plane in Tehran during the Shah’s rule, he or she would be listened to, photographed, and followed around by at least ten SAVAK guys every minute of their visit.” Limp’s voice had changed. It was deeper, with less southern drawl. “It happened all the time. And Iranian, Chinese, and Soviet agents made the same casual visits to America on a regular basis. The point of the trips was classified, but it could be assumed they were nothing more than a way to say howdy, we’re still around and haven’t forgotten about you.”