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.
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 stuff he’s found for the museum in Jackson.”
“I have.”
“Then you know there’s no way he fell into the Mississippi. Not unless he had a heart attack or something.”
“Maybe that’s what happened,” I say, though I don’t believe it. “Or a stroke. Buck was over seventy. With some luck, we’ll find out where he went in. That might tell us what he was doing.”
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
