“Yeah? Well, that sounds like your department.” Byron chuckles, the low laughter rumbling in his generous belly. “Look at them keystone cops out there. Deputy Dawg, man. That drone ’bout to run ’em crazy!”
“I’ll call you later,” I tell him. “I’ve got work to do.”
“Sure, man. Just leave me out in this sun. Don’t worry ’bout me.”
Byron winks as I give him a mock salute.
Getting back into the Flex, I push the engine button and head up Foundry Road, which ascends the bluff on an opposite angle to Front Street. As my motor strains on the incline, a pistol shot cracks over the river, echoes off the bluff face. I jump in my seat, stunned by the reckless idiocy of a deputy firing into the air in a populated area to try to hit a drone. Another shot pops off below me. I hope they don’t have a shotgun on board the boat. If they do, they can probably bring down the little aircraft, which by law must carry a registration number. And since Bienville has an asshole for a sheriff, the pilot will wind up in a lot of trouble. If the pilot is who I think it is, that’s a story I don’t want to have to cover.
I don’t pray, but all the way up the hill I beg the universe to grant me one dispensation in the midst of its daily creation and destruction: Let that body belong to someone else. Don’t let it be the man who stopped me from killing myself at fifteen.
Don’t let it be Buck.
Chapter 5
On the Bienville bluff, you can’t park closer than thirty yards from the edge. Within the city limits, there’s a buffer of green space between Battery Row and the iron fence that keeps kids and drunks from killing themselves on a daily basis. As I’d hoped, the slight figure standing at the fence turns out to be my friend’s son, fourteen-year-old Denny Allman. Denny surely recognized my Flex as I parked it—if he hadn’t, he would have bolted.
I lift my hand in greeting as I approach him. Denny tosses his head in acknowledgment, then turns back to the river, his hands never leaving the drone controller. Even with his back to me, I can see his mother in his stance. Dixie Allman was athletic and attractive in high school. A C student, mostly because of laziness, she had a quick mind. Her problem was that from age ten she’d focused it solely on getting male attention. She married at eighteen—pregnant—and divorced by twenty-five. Denny’s father was her third husband, and he abandoned them when Denny was five or six. Dixie has done her best to raise the boy right, and that’s one reason I’ve encouraged him by posting his stuff on our website.
“Did they shoot at your drone?” I call to him.
“Shit, yeah! Morons.”
I force a laugh and walk up to the fence. Denny has a salty vocabulary for an eighth grader, but so did my friends and I at that age. “They probably called a backup car to hunt for you.”
“They did, but it went down to the river. I grabbed some altitude and landed behind some trees farther south. They’re trying to work their way down there now. They’ll never make it through the kudzu.”
The drone controller in his hands mates an iPad Mini to a joystick unit. Denny has strapped a sun hood onto his iPad, so I can’t see the screen with a casual glance. Looking over the fence, I see the county boat down on the river. It’s headed toward the dock now. The deputies must have finally taken their cargo on board.
“Did you get a good look at the body?” I ask.
“Not live,” Denny replies, focusing on his screen. “I had to keep my eyes on the deputies while I was shooting.”
“Can we look now?”
He shrugs. “Sure. What’s the rush?”
“Did you ever meet Dr. Ferris, out at the Indian mounds?”
“Yeah. He came to my school a couple of times. I—” Denny goes pale. “That’s him in the water? Old Dr. Buck?”
“It might be.”
“Oh, man. What happened to him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he was looking for arrowheads or something and walked too far out on a sandbar. They collapse under people sometimes.”
The boy shakes his head forcefully. “Dr. Buck wouldn’t do that. He walked rivers and creeks all the time hunting for stuff, usually after storms. He found tons of Indian swag, even mastodon bones. You should see the