Open the box, Harry. Careful now …

Nautilus felt guilt pool in his gut and he turned his eyes from the photo. His heart had started racing. He took a deep breath and opened the box, removing a zip bag brittle with age. The bag tore, pouring forth the smell of steel and gun oil. He pulled out a greasy towel and folded it open, revealing a black 40-caliber revolver. It had a five-round magazine and a one-inch barrel. The stock grips had been replaced with fingerprint-resistant burlap, now rotted into threads.

Nautilus ran his thumbnail over a depression in the frame of the revolver where a serial number had once resided.

Jesus, Zing, what is this? What happened to the…

The number seared away with acid.

You know what it is, Harry. What it’s for.

The gun came from Zing Johnson, Nautilus’s long-time mentor in the Mobile, Alabama, Police Department. Harry Nautilus was thirty-two years old the day he’d received the weapon. Zing Johnson was fifty-one, seventeen days from his death by cancer.

Idon’t want the damned thing, Zing. I don’t even want to look at—

Johnson pushed up from the bed, the stink of disease rising from his loose skin like hot fog. Shut up and lissen, Harry. I ain’t got no time left to fuck around. You’re one of the few men able to understand a gun like this means there’s no options left. I can trust you with it.

Nautilus had nodded at Johnson and put the weapon back in the box, thinking first chance he got he’d throw the damned thing off a bridge into the bay. Johnson fell back into the covers, his strength depleted. Standing, bidding his friend farewell, Harry Nautilus went to the door with the box beneath his arm.

Harry? Johnson rasped, struggling upright again. Nautilus turned, eyebrow up in question.

You know that if that gun is ever used, the user will never be the same again. You know that, Harry, right?

Nautilus sighed and set the gun on the desk, staring at a blunt machine modified for one mission: Deliver death and disappear. The weapon had bided its time in his attic for over fifteen years, Harry Nautilus never truly understanding what Zing Johnson had been talking about.

Until yesterday.

2

Present time

Spring in coastal Alabama is a violent time, weather-wise. Two inches of tumultuous, lightning-driven rain in an hour is not unusual, nor is it rare for blue to rule the sky shortly thereafter, as if all has been forgiven. Gulls return to the air and the foaming whitecaps on Mobile Bay settle into a mild green chop beneath warm breezes built for sailing.

But this morning, as I drove to work from my beachfront home on Dauphin Island, thirty miles south of Mobile, we were stuck in the first movement of the meteorological symphony, purple-black clouds laced with bolts of jagged lightning, rain sweeping down in roiling sheets. Smarter drivers had pulled to a halt beside the road, or taken shelter in coffee shops and donut joints. I was plodding along at fifteen miles an hour, peering through my windshield and trying to recall when I’d last had the wiper blades replaced.

Three years ago? Four?

My cellphone rang and I pulled it from my jacket pocket, the words HARRY NAUTILUS flashing on the screen. Harry was my best friend and detective partner in the homicide division of the Mobile, Alabama, police department. Harry kept me grounded in reality and I kept him … I’m not sure, but it’ll come to me.

I punched redial, Harry answering before the first ring faded. “Hey bro,” his voice rumbled, “don’t go to the department.”

A semi passed in the opposite direction, adding another five gallons of water to my windshield. I peered into rippling gray and slowed to ten miles an hour.

“I can turn around and go home? Cool.”

He ignored my attempt at humor - typical. “I’m at the morgue, Carson. There’s a strange situation here.”

“What is it?”

“You’ll find out. Just get your ass to the morgue, pronto.”

“My wipers are shot, Harry. I can’t see through my windshield. I’m stopping.”

“You and that damned ancient truck. Where you at?”

My truck was old but not ancient, perhaps suggesting antiquity by being the color of the pyramids, roller-coated with gray ship’s paint. Say what you will about aesthetics, I’ve never been bothered by rust or barnacles.

I said, “I’m just off the DI Parkway near the city limits sign. I’m pulling into the parking lot of the fish shack by the creek.”

“Hang tight and I’ll send the cavalry.”

“The what?”

Harry hung up. There was a coffee shop just past the fish restaurant, but to get there meant crossing twenty feet of open pavement, getting as soaked as if swimming the English Channel. Lightning exploded above and I sank lower in the seat.

A minute passed and I heard a howling. I first thought it the wind until it turned into a siren, flashing blue-and-white light filling the cab of my truck as a Mobile police cruiser pulled beside me. I wiped condensation from the window with my sleeve and saw a face on the driver’s side, a hand gesturing me to lower my window.

Rain whipped in and the face - a pretty young black woman in a patrol cap and uniform - yelled, “You can see out the windshield a little, can’t you?”

Perplexed, I nodded the affirmative.

“Stay on my bumper,” she said, “but not too close, right?”

I saw the plan, pure magic. The cruiser whipped away and I stood on the accelerator, pasting myself fifty feet behind the MPD wagon. When we hit the highway another set of flashers slid in fifty feet behind me. I was bookmarked by light and sound and we blasted toward the morgue at perilous speed, though I can’t say how fast exactly, never once taking my eyes from the lights of the leading cruiser, my sole point of navigation.

Fifteen white-knuckle minutes later our impromptu caravan rolled to the entrance of the morgue, more correctly the pathology department of the Alabama Bureau of Forensics, Mobile office. It was a squat and solid brick building by the University of South Alabama. I spent a fair amount of time here for two reasons, one being its function as a waypoint in the passage of murdered humans, the other being the director, the brilliant and deliciously lovely Dr Clair Peltier, was my good friend. Take that as you wish, you can’t go wrong.

I pulled under the protective portico and parked beside the nearest NO PARKING sign. The cruiser protecting my flank sped away, dissolving into sheets of gray downpour and leaving only the vehicle driven by the young officer. I waved thanks as she pulled to a stop twenty feet away, on the far side of the portico, rain drumming across her cruiser.

The driver’s-side window rolled halfway down and the pretty face reappeared, frowning at my trusty gray steed. “You really ought to get rid of that truck, Carson,” the woman called through the downpour. “You’ve had it for what - eight years now?”

Her familiarity took me aback. “Almost nine,” I said. “How did you know how many—”

“Carson Ryder …” she said, studying me and tapping her lips with a slender finger, like recalling a story. “Swimmer, kayaker, angler, cook, jazz buff. A man whose intuition battles his logic, perhaps to the betterment of both. A secret fan of poetry. Poorly informed folks might add womanizer to the list, but that’s far too harsh. How about lover of beauty in both mind and body …” A puckish twinkle came to her eyes. “How’d I do? Was I close?”

I felt my mouth fall open. Her other descriptions aside, virtually no one knew of my taste for the poems of Cummings, Dickey, Roethke, and a few select others. My mind raced to identify the face. Even through rain and the twenty-foot distance, I was sure I’d never seen it before. And she was too pretty to forget.