Sand Sharks Page 13

  Even as I ran to Martha and Fitz, cell phones were flipping open all around me, their frantic owners pushing the 911 buttons.

  Martha was dazed and bleeding profusely from a scrape on her cheek and another on her hand. She tried to push herself upright, unaware that it was Fitz’s body that kept her pinned to the pavement. He was unconscious but breathing. I grabbed a roll of paper towels and a bottle of water from the trunk of my car and we made wet pads to ease Martha’s wounds and stanch the blood. We were afraid to move Fitz before medical help arrived but Chelsea Ann slipped off her jacket and made a cushion for Martha’s head. Between us, we managed to keep her calm.

  It seemed hours before we heard ambulance and police sirens, although another glance at my watch showed that only twelve minutes had elapsed.

  Two patrol cruisers got there first. One uniformed officer and a security guard from the hotel held back the onlookers while a second officer began questioning us for details on the car.

  All I could say was that it was an older red car. A hatch-back.

  “There was something about the wheels,” Chelsea Ann said.

  “Yes!” I exclaimed, remembering now. “The hubcaps were spinners.”

  My nephew Reese is crazy about his truck and one of the many chrome extras he’s bought for it is a set of hubcaps that keep spinning even after the truck stops.

  An ambulance from the New Hanover Regional Medical Center swung into the parking lot and was directed over to us. The paramedics hopped out, checked Fitz’s vital signs, and immediately put a cervical collar on his neck, then lifted him onto a stretcher. I heard one of them mutter, “BP’s tanking and one lung’s collapsed.”

  They fitted him with an oxygen mask before loading him into the ambulance—Martha, too.

  Strong-willed, imperious Martha looked at me beseechingly. “Deborah?”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll be right behind you.”

  “Ma’am, I’ll need your statement,” said one of the officers. “You can’t leave.”

  “The hell I can’t,” I told him and slammed the car door on his protests.

  As the ambulance rolled down the drive, I slid my key into the ignition, pausing only when Chelsea Ann yanked open the other door and jumped in. Flooring the gas pedal, I caught up with the ambulance and hung tight. Even after they turned the sirens back on and sped through red lights, I sailed through with them.

  “Omigawd!” Chelsea Ann shrieked when I swerved around a pickup and almost T-boned a blue convertible full of white-faced college kids.

  I saw that she had retrieved Martha’s purse. “Is her phone there?”

  A moment of rummaging and she came up with it in her hand. “What’s their son’s name? Chad?”

  “Sounds right,” I said.

  Moments later, she had scrolled through Martha’s contact list and found the son’s number on speed dial.

  Weaving in and out of the vacation traffic that clogged the island’s main two-lane street, I listened with only half an ear as Chelsea Ann explained who she was and what had happened.

  By the time she finished, we had crossed the causeway and were streaking down the four-lane highway that was the quickest route to the hospital on 17th Street. Adrenaline was still pumping through my system when we finally turned into the appropriately named Ambulance Drive and pulled up at the emergency entrance.

  I let Chelsea Ann off to stay with Martha and went to find a parking space.

  Fitz was nowhere in sight when I got back to the emergency entrance, but I was told I could go back to where Martha’s cuts and scrapes were being treated. Either it was a slow Monday evening or the hospital was exceptionally well staffed for her to be seen so quickly.

  Happily, her injuries seemed to be superficial. The gash on her hand needed only a few butterfly bandages to close it up. Her face would be red and bruised for several days, but she was quickly regaining her equilibrium. I hoped the nurses realized that it was only a matter of time before her polite requests to know what was happening with Fitz turned into a full-scale reminder of a patient’s legal rights and the rights of a spouse to be kept informed. Yet all they could tell her was that he had been taken directly to surgery.

  Their son Chad called twice during his drive up from South Carolina. He had immediately phoned his sisters, which meant that Martha soon had one frantic daughter calling from California and another from Rome. Each clamored to know if she should catch the next flight out. Martha was usually so decisive that this not knowing what to tell them left her impatient and frustrated; but until he was out of the operating room, there was nothing she could do.

  Friends from the conference came to sit with us in the ICU waiting room, and the judges from Fitz’s district brought pizza and milled about to lend support. Poor Fitz got his roast in absentia as we tried to keep our spirits up by remembering funny things he had said or done in his long career on the bench. It wasn’t a wake, but it was damn close to it. And through it all we kept circling back to why the accident had happened and why didn’t the driver stop?

  Drugs? Alcohol? Or was it that someone had suddenly recognized that Fitz was the one who gave him jail time or ruled against him in court and impulsively decided to get even? Most defendants who come to district court wind up admitting sheepishly that yes, they are indeed guilty of the offenses with which they’ve been charged, and if they are angry, it’s usually toward their accusers or the police. Nevertheless, I have been threatened by an occasional belligerent, as have most judges. So far as I know, though, those threats have seldom been carried out. All the same, it’s been known to happen in other states.

  “Fitz with an enemy? Nonsense!” Martha said firmly. “If it was deliberate—and mind you, I say if—then he must have mistaken Fitz for someone else.”

  Nevertheless, a vengeful defendant was one of several theories that kept us going round and round like blind mice hunting for a way out of the maze.

  I was almost grateful for the distraction when Detective Gary Edwards arrived shortly after seven with a Wrightsville police officer in tow for courtesy’s sake and asked to question us. Chelsea Ann and I were the only two there who had seen it happen.

  “Let me buy y’all a cup of coffee or something,” Edwards said, and the four of us went down to the hospital cafeteria where they were still serving supper. Once we were seated with coffee that wasn’t as bad as I expected, Edwards tore open a packet of sugar, emptied it into his mug, and told us that one of the doormen had watched the whole thing. “He says it looked like the driver was deliberately aiming for the Fitzhumes. What was your impression?”

  “Well, there was certainly enough room for him to have missed them if it wasn’t accidental,” I said, and Chelsea Ann agreed.

  “He didn’t slow down at all. In fact, I think he was still accelerating. I feel like kicking myself though.”

  “Why?” Edwards asked. “You couldn’t have stopped him.”

  “No, but I could have gotten his license plate,” I fumed. “Last night, we watched them film a hit-and-run for that TV show.”

  “Port City Blues,” Chelsea Ann murmured, daintily adding creamer to her coffee.

  “The script called for someone to yell, ‘Did you get the license number?’ and nobody had. I thought that surely in real life someone would at least get the first few letters. But when Fitz and Martha went down, it drove everything else out of my head. Why—why—why didn’t I at least whip out my cell phone and take a picture?”

  “Someone did,” Edwards said, “but it’s blurry and the car was too far away to get a good fix on it. Our computer techs are trying to enhance it enough to get a partial plate, but I’m not counting on it. Someone thought it was a two-door Geo Metro and at least ten years old. That sound about right to y’all?”

  Chelsea Ann and I looked at each other and shrugged. Neither of us cares enough about cars to tell a Toyota from a Nissan.

  I took a swallow of the coffee and tried to concentrate. “A hatchback for
sure,” I said, at last, “and yes, just two doors. Bright red and shiny like it’d been waxed recently, but I sort of think it had some serious dings.”

  “What about the driver?”

  We both shook our heads. We had an impression that it was a man behind the wheel, yet couldn’t say for sure. We were both too focused on Fitz and Martha.

  “I think he was wearing a ball cap,” Chelsea Ann said.

  “I couldn’t see him at all,” I said. “He was driving into the sun when he came at us and it glinted off the windshield. Maybe he really didn’t see Fitz and then was too scared to stop.”

  “Maybe,” Edwards said. “Or maybe somebody’s got it in for a bunch of you guys. Is there a connection between Fitzhume and Jeffreys?”

  We couldn’t think of one. “They’re in totally different districts. Fitz has been on the bench for twenty-five years and Jeffreys only for a year or two.”

  Edwards sighed and downed the rest of his coffee. “Well if you think of anything…”

  We assured him we would.

  Throughout the whole session, the Wrightsville officer had remained silent. Now he told Edwards that it looked to him as if the hit and run was related to the murder, so Wilmington could have it. “Just keeps us informed, okay?”

  When he was gone, Edwards looked around the cafeteria. “You know, the food’s not half bad here. I think I might as well grab a bite to eat while I have a chance. What about y’all?”

  Chelsea Ann looked torn and I realized that his ‘y’all’ was only for politeness. Even though there was a hollow space in my stomach, I stood up and told her to stay. “I won’t leave without you.”

  “You sure? ’Cause I can wait.”

  It only took one more “I’m sure” from me to convince her it was okay to do what she wanted, which was stay there and get to know Detective Edwards on a nonprofessional basis.

  Nothing had changed in the ICU waiting room except that a dispirited lethargy seemed to have settled over those who remained. I picked the pepperoni off of a slice of cold pizza and ate part of it.

  Martha’s son arrived just before nine. A few minutes later, a surgeon came to the waiting room in bloodstained scrubs and asked to speak to them privately.

  “Whatever you have to say can be said before my friends,” Martha told him. She held herself erect as if braced for the worst. “Don’t sugarcoat it, Doctor. Is he going to be all right? Yes or no?”

  “We don’t know. There was internal bleeding. A rib punctured his right lung and his hip was fractured. We had to remove his spleen. He took a serious blow to the head but luckily there doesn’t seem to be much swelling of his brain. We’ll monitor for blood clots, of course. He’ll probably be in and out of consciousness for the next couple of days. After that?” The surgeon shook his head. “We just don’t know. His age is against him, but if he makes it through the next few days, then his chances improve.”

  She took it like the stoic she is. “Can we see him now?”

  “It’ll take them another fifteen or twenty minutes to get him hooked up to the monitors, and we’ve put him on a ventilator to help with his breathing,” the surgeon said. “I’ll tell the nurses to call you when they’ve finished.”

  Martha reached out and touched his arm. “We’ve been married forty-two years, Doctor. Thank you for giving him back to me.”

  He started to say not to thank him yet, but Martha’s eyes held his in such fierce determination that he squeezed her hand. “I hope I have, ma’am. I hope I have.”

  CHAPTER

  17

  A judge who takes money [for a decision] against the life or property of a man is deprived of his property and deported to an island.

  —Paulus (early 3rd century AD)

  Even though Fitz could not respond, once Martha had seen him and touched him, she let their son Chad persuade her to return to the hotel for the night. She planned to transfer to a hotel nearer the hospital the next day.

  As we waited with her at the entrance for Chad to bring the car around, I said, “You have my number, so call if there’s anything at all that we can do.”

  Martha’s not normally a physically demonstrative person, but I got a warm hug and a “Thanks, sugar” before her son whisked her away.

  Chelsea Ann was silent on our drive through Wilmington’s dark tree-lined streets. Away from the center of town, all was quiet until after we crossed the causeway that led over to the beach where vacationers were hanging out at the main intersection, spilling out into the street from the clubs.

  “So what’s the verdict?” I asked her as we maneuvered around the cars full of vacationing teenagers that were cruising back and forth.

  She didn’t pretend not to understand. “I don’t know, Deborah. Another lawman?”

  Her ex-husband was an ATF agent.

  “I’ve been down that road before. Gary Edwards seems like a real sweetie. Cute, smart. But I’m in Raleigh and he’s down here. When would we really get to know each other?”

  “It’s only a ninety-minute drive,” I reminded her.

  “And we both know that a lawman’s life is not his own. Look how often Dwight has to bail on you and he’s right there in Dobbs.”

  “Sam’s erratic schedule wasn’t why y’all split up,” I said.

  “No, but it certainly didn’t help that he never seemed to be around when I wanted him,” she argued. “Oh, well, why am I even talking like this? It’s not as if Gary’s even asked me out yet.”

  “And if he does?”

  She grinned. “Oh, what the heck? I’ll probably go. Why not? How I Spent My Summer Vacation. Better a summer fling with him than with a married judge, right?”

  Which led us back to earlier speculations about a pair of fifty-something colleagues. He is from the mountains, she’s from the Triangle. Both married, yet they never bring their spouses to the conferences. They discovered each other three years ago when they sat together during the sessions and talked animatedly during the breaks. At every conference since, they sit on opposite sides of the room, they don’t speak during the morning breaks, and they don’t go out to lunch together; but it’s been noticed that they don’t stay at the conference hotels and that one car pulls into the parking lot within minutes of the other. They both plead poverty and kids in college as a reason to book somewhere cheaper, yet somehow it’s never at the motel where all the other budget-minded judges stay.

  “Like judges have more personal judgment than ordinary mortals,” my internal preacher murmured.

  The pragmatist nodded. “And like nobody noticed when you and Chuck Teach—”

  “Never mind,” I told them firmly.

  “It’s not Sam I miss so much,” Chelsea Ann said, interrupting my thoughts. “It’s having someone put his arms around me and kiss me like I’m special and necessary to him that I miss. I miss being in love, Deborah. Forty-two years. That’s what Martha and Fitz have had. That’s what I want.”

  Me, too, I thought and patted the hand-carved knob on my gear shift that Dwight had given me so I’d always have a handy piece of wood to touch for luck.

  When we reached the hotel, the moon was a huge silvery blue disc playing hide-and-seek with fluffy white clouds that barely dimmed its brightness.

  I was feeling the need for some fresh air after our hours in the hospital. “Want to take a walk on the beach?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Sorry, I’m really tired. And Rosemary’s probably going to want to talk.”

  We rode up in the elevator together and I went straight to my room, but all I had to do was open the French doors and step out into that amazing moonlight and it was too much to resist. I quickly changed into a long-sleeved tee, slacks, and sneakers, and was soon back downstairs.

  Although the bar was now closed, out on the terrace there were still people seated at the small tables or in rocking chairs. Nursing their final drinks, they spoke in low tones, as if equally reluctant to go inside and end this lovely night. One or two spoke to me
when I passed but I wasn’t looking for company and cut across the pool area and down the planked walkway to the steps that led to the beach. A young couple—honeymooners?—were making out in one of the hot tubs, oblivious to the world and certainly to me.

  I walked down the steps to the sand. A whiff of cigarette smoke drifted past on the warm night air and I looked around for the source, but the beach was deserted so far as I could tell.

  I took off my sneakers and tucked them under the steps beside the lifeguard stand. The tide was low again and a wide band of hard sand made walking easy. Not that I was out to do a marathon or anything. Although the moon was so near full that nothing could completely blot out its light, more clouds had drifted in from the west and they hid its face for minutes at a time.

  As I walked, I thought about how complicated it all was. Life. Love. Why some marriages worked and others failed. Chelsea Ann was a funny, impulsively warm-hearted friend and I still liked her ex-husband Sam. I had known them both long enough to remember when they had genuinely loved each other. Where had their love gone?

  And Rosemary and Dave. Almost twenty years down the drain. But that I could understand. She had thanked her sister for not saying “I told you so,” after Chelsea Ann berated her for telling that cute little waitress that Dave could give her the names of some SBI agents, but sheesh! It’s all very noble to forgive your cheating husband, but you don’t immediately turn around and give him the contact numbers of a Playboy bunny, do you?

  And dear Martha and Fitz. If she should lose him, it would be through no fault of her own.

  I paused to wait for the moon to come back out from behind a cloud that was as dark as my worry for Fitz. There wasn’t a mean bone in his body, so why the hell would anyone deliberately try to kill him? And could Pete Jeffreys’s death possibly be linked?

  By now, pleasantly tired, I had retraced my steps until I was almost back in front of the lifeguard stand. I sat down on the dry sand and rested my chin on my knees as I stared out at the slow-rolling waves and rewound the tape on Saturday night.