* * *
The quiet that develops in the presence of a dead body is like no other in the world. I could see straight down the dirt road to the main drag of Grand Pelican, where a group of kids had appeared with a couple of hula hoops and a basketball. They were mostly boys, probably around ten years old or so, but there were a few girls as well, all in bathing suits, shiny wet with their hair slicked flat, screaming and giggling the way kids do. I imagined they’d probably been playing with a garden hose to cool off.
At the edge of Levi’s dusty yard, there were three squirrels racing around in the brush at the foot of the pines and chattering at one another, and there was a loud whispering like the white noise of a broken radio coming from above as the pine needles shimmied in the steady breeze off the coast. None of that, however, could drown out the silence of the body lying not three feet away from me.
When Michael and I were little, Siesta Key was practically deserted compared to what it’s become in the past thirty years or so. Back then we could wander around for hours by ourselves. The entire island was as safe as our own front porch, and if you wanted a little excitement or drama, you were plumb out of luck.
But that didn’t stop me. I managed to get myself into trouble on a daily basis without even trying. If there was a hornet’s nest hidden in a tree, that was the tree I’d climb. If a fight broke out at school, I was the primary witness. If a newborn bird was pushed out of its nest, you could bet the farm I’d be standing nearby, and then I’d be saddled with the inevitable heartbreak of trying to keep it alive. My grandmother called it the Hemingway Curse, and I think it haunts me to this very day. Basically, if there’s a wrong place to be, I’ll be there, and if there’s a bad time for it, I’ll arrive promptly.
At almost the exact moment I hung up with 911, I heard the sirens start up from the north, thin and distant at first, so I knew the crew was probably coming from Sarasota Memorial. The operator had asked me all the standard questions: Was the victim stable? Was he conscious? Was he breathing? Was I able to perform CPR?
All I could do was hang my head between my knees, shaking slightly and muttering, “No,” over and over again while she went down the list. It’s standard procedure to dispatch an ambulance crew no matter what, even if the person reporting the victim is one hundred percent certain there’s no hope. As fragile as the human body is, it’s also amazingly resilient, and even in cases where every organ in a person’s body has ground to a stop—the lungs, the heart, even the brain—with the right equipment and a little luck, a skilled emergency crew can work miracles.
But I knew, in Levi’s case, it was hopeless.
The massive pool of blood was bad enough, but the way its edges had dried meant he’d been lying there for at least a few hours. The back of his legs had taken on a milky translucence, while gravity had drawn what little blood was left down toward the floor, turning the front of his legs a pale eggplant-purple, something that only happens after a body has long stopped. His knees were pressed into the hard tile floor, and there were rings of white skin where the blood couldn’t reach without the will of his heart to force it there.
Before the 911 operator had hung up, telling me to stay where I was and not to touch anything, she had asked if I was alone. I said yes, which of course wasn’t true, but it might as well have been. Sasquatch was still propped up against Levi’s car. She’d been snoring quietly the whole time, but as the sirens grew closer they must have roused her, because she raised her head abruptly and looked around with glazed, frightened eyes.
I tried to give her a comforting smile. “It’s okay. The police are almost here.”
She blinked a couple of times and frowned, and then, before I could say anything else, she looked down at the pool of blood in the open doorway behind me and her gaze traveled to Levi’s legs.
“No…”
Her eyes widened as she pushed herself up onto the car and shook her head from side to side. “No. No. No…”
I said, “It’s okay, try not to panic.”
She climbed over the side of the hood and slid down to the ground, her eyes glued to Levi’s body the whole time, but now she looked directly at me.
Her voice was trembling. “What happened?”
“I called 911 right away. They’re almost here.”
Just then, an ambulance came around the corner of Old Wharf Way and headed through the trailer park toward us. The woman looked over her shoulder and then back at me, and for a moment I thought I saw something flash in her eyes, something subtle … It was triumph.
She shook her head as she pushed herself off the ground and backed away.
I said, “Hold on. You should wait—”
But she wouldn’t let me finish. The next thing I knew she was running across the yard, shrieking at the top of her lungs and windmilling her arms at the emergency crew like she was some kind of innocent damsel in distress and they were her only hope of survival. As the ambulance slowed to a stop in front of her, she fell to the ground in the middle of the road and crawled forward a few more feet on her hands and knees, sobbing, her head flailing violently up and down, her screams piercing the air.
10
I was sitting in the passenger seat of the Bronco with my sunglasses on and my legs tucked up under me. The sun was still glaring down like a blowtorch, but that wasn’t why I was wearing glasses. I needed something to hide behind.
The group of kids playing in the street had moved closer and were standing in a huddle at the head of the dirt road, watching with quiet faces, and I noticed the little blond-headed boy with the pogo stick beyond them. He was by himself, standing on his toes in the grass at the edge of his yard like he was afraid to step into the street. The squirrels had retreated into the treetops to view the proceedings from a safer distance.
It hadn’t taken long before practically the entire dirt road leading up to Levi’s trailer was filled with a line of emergency response vehicles with all their lights flashing. The ambulance had pulled in just behind Levi’s car, but the two sheriff’s cruisers had parked just shy of the yard, probably to minimize the possibility of disturbing potential evidence. A couple of unmarked sedans had appeared moments later and were idling behind the cruisers.
Two of the deputies led Sasquatch over to the side, and another officer—he must have been new to the force, because I didn’t recognize him—was standing a few feet to the left of the Bronco, pretending not to watch me. I couldn’t help but notice he’d situated himself where he could see my hands. I was probably just being paranoid, but I got the distinct feeling he’d been told to watch out for any sudden movements.
Standing on the bottom step of Levi’s trailer, surveying the scene, was a tall lanky man with dark skin and sad, drooping eyes—Sergeant Woodrow Owens. He stood there quietly for a few moments, and then turned and motioned to one of the officers to join him. After they spoke, the deputy nodded and pointed in my direction, but Owens didn’t look over.
I sank down in my seat and sighed. Sergeant Owens had been my commanding officer when I was on the force. After Todd and Christy were killed, while everyone else at the station was waiting for me to pull out of the depths and return to my old self again, it was Owens who had called me into his office and dismissed me from service. It hadn’t surprised me one bit. We both knew I was too fragile, too unstable, too “fucked up” (his words, not mine) to continue in any capacity as a sheriff’s deputy.
There was a fly skating along the inside of the windshield, buzzing back and forth in a vain attempt to escape to the outside. The Bronco was broiling hot, but I couldn’t bring myself to turn on the AC. The idea of starting the engine and letting it idle while less than a hundred feet away the officers were inspecting the scene of a murder felt wrong, so I had the windows on both sides of the car rolled down all the way. That didn’t seem to help the fly one bit, though. He just kept skittering from side to side, convinced he was trapped and that the only way out was forward.