Send Down the Rain(35)

“Why then?”

I stared down the range, then back at him. “At one time I did a lot of things I’m not real proud of. Sometimes I think if I do some good, it will either erase or help me forget the bad.”

“Has it?”

I shook my head. “No.”

He stood over another golf ball, wiggling the head of his club. He chose his words carefully. “When you two left my office, you left some papers behind. I’ll call my secretary and have them waiting for you.”

I had a feeling my answer lay in those papers. I shook his hand. “Thank you.”

I returned to the offices of First General, where the receptionist met me with a thin envelope. I tucked it under my arm and then sat in the front seat of my truck studying its contents. Four pieces of paper. The first three were certified mail receipts. The fourth was one legal-sized sheet of paper stating a change of address. It was dated a month after the purchase date of the policy. Jake had requested to change the mailing address of the policy from Allie’s address on Cape San Blas to an address in North Carolina. None of this was making any sense until I looked again at the certified mail receipts. All three had been sent to North Carolina.

As I was driving back to Allie’s, my phone rang. It was Bobby. “You own a smart phone?”

“No. Flip.”

“Where are you?”

“Leaving Tallahassee.”

“Buy a smart phone. Something with a screen and Internet access. Text me from that number when you get it.”

“You find something?”

“Just text me.”

Driving south on Highway 319, I stopped at a Verizon store and bought a no-contract phone with a screen that looked like a small tablet. When I asked the salesman if people actually kept these things in their pockets, he slid one out of his. He then educated me on how to send texts, surf the Internet, and use the maps program. He was launching into a dissertation on social media when I thanked him and paid my bill. An hour after having hung up with Bobby, I texted him. Thirty seconds later, my new phone chimed. Then it chimed again.

I opened Bobby’s text. It read, A little grainy but it’s taken from 90 miles above the earth. I clicked on the attachment and a video loaded. I pressed the play icon, and the video showed a dark road bordered by the ocean. That much I could see. Four seconds into the video a moving object appeared on the right of the screen, winding along the road toward the waterline where the road curved. The object was long, thin; headlights shone on the road in front, and as it stayed on the road, I could only assume it was Jake’s semi. A half mile from the wall of rocks and the turn in the road, the semi veered into the other lane, the oncoming lane. As it did this, a second set of headlights appeared quickly on the driver’s side of the truck. It moved in close, the truck door opened, and the driver hopped into what appeared to be an open-topped Jeep. The Jeep slowed, veered left down a dirt road, and disappeared from the picture about the time Jake’s truck exploded on the rocks and a large white flash appeared on the screen.

I was having a tough time believing what I saw.

I returned to the crash site, following the same northerly path as both Jake’s semi and the Jeep. A quarter mile from the crash site, a dirt road peeled off to the left, snaking through the woods and then making a complete U-turn, emptying south again onto the two-lane road that served the island.

While I sat on the side of the road shaking my head, my phone chimed a third time. Bobby again. This is video taken from the sur-veillance cameras recording traffic onto and off the island. We have an “intelligence base” on the island. Have for years. Without it, these pics and video don’t exist.

I pressed play and two seconds’ video footage from eye level showed Jake’s semi, followed closely by a light-colored Jeep—top down—turning right, onto the island. From the rear, only the driver could be seen. No passenger. The video continued as the red taillights of both the Jeep and Jake’s semi disappeared a mile down the road. Here the video had been spliced, as the timer on the bottom of the screen jumped forward several minutes. As the seconds ticked by at the bottom of the dark screen, a large flash was seen suddenly in the distance, turning much of the screen white. Again, the video had been spliced, as the timer jumped forward four minutes to a single set of headlights appearing in the distance, slowly growing larger and closer. The headlights were narrow, like a Jeep’s. After a few seconds, the Jeep rolled to a stop at the flashing red light. Two people were now sitting in it. Given the reflection, I could not tell if they were man or woman. Just figures. The video continued as the Jeep turned left toward Port St. Joe, exposing its rear bumper where the license tag had been removed.

I sat on the side of the road, shaking my head.





20

Allie was sitting in a chair staring out across the ocean when I returned. I didn’t waste time. I pulled up a chair and sat next to her. “I need to show you something.”

Surprise spread across her face when I pulled out my hour-old tablet phone. But not nearly as much surprise as what occurred when I pressed play. I turned the phone sideways, enlarging the picture. Jake’s semi appeared in the video. Then the Jeep. Then the truck driver’s jump to the Jeep. Then the separation of the two vehicles, followed by the explosion.

She was trying to make sense of it when I replayed it for her a second time. When it finished, I played her the surveillance video showing the entrance of Jake’s semi and the Jeep—driven by one person—the flash, and then the return of the Jeep now showing two people.