Sheriff Abberline and I stood on the side of the road and looked down the hill toward Limestone Creek. A female investigator, a rescue diver and the tow truck’s driver were the only souls down there. The driver – the patch on his shirt said his name was Johnny – handed the end of a long cable to the diver, who disappeared under the cold water with it a few seconds later. The other end of the cable was connected to the idling tow truck behind me.
Abberline took a drag on a cigarette and exhaled the smoke through his nose like a dragon. “You breathe a word of this to anybody before I’m ready to release it, and I’ll cut you off so fast that it’ll make your head spin,” he said without looking in my direction. “The only reason I even asked you to come out here is that I want good photos of the scene, and I didn’t want any of my folks screwing it up.”
He finished his cigarette, dropped the butt and his feet, squashed it out with his boot heel and looked me in the eye. “You be discrete about all of this, and you’ll be the only reporter from Mobile to Montgomery to get the full story.”
I shifted my camera to my other shoulder and nodded. “Understood. Who found it?”
He pointed down the hill. “Two nobodies were down there bank fishing,” he said. “One of them said they’d been down there dozens of time but never saw it. But it’s been so dry lately, the creek’s a lot lower than normal. They were just sitting there when one of ‘em looks up the creek and seeks what looks like a radio antennae sticking up out of the water.”
I watched as the diver climbed out of the creek and removed his mask. The female deputy reached for her shoulder mike. “I’m sending Johnny and Shannon back up,” she radioed to the Abberline.
“10-4, Sally,” Abberline replied before resuming his story. “Anyway, one of the fishermen starts casting his line over towards the antennae. The line’s got a heavy lead weight on the end, and it finally bonks on something metal. Turns out, it was the roof of a submerged car, about an inch below the surface.”
Johnny and Shannon reached the top of the hill. Both were breathing heavily. Without a word, the diver headed toward a rescue squad vehicle parked nearby, where he began to remove his wetsuit. Johnny, on the other hand, walked to the tow truck and pressed a large green button on a control panel on the side of the vehicle’s sizable winch. The brown, metal cable began to wind onto a large spool on the back of the tow truck.
“Come on, McMorn,” the Sheriff said. “Let’s get a closer look.”
We arrived at the bottom of the hill about the time that the rear of the old car began to emerge from the dark water. Abberline looked back up the hill and twirled his hand in the air. Johnny responded with an unenthusiastic thumbs up.
The car was old and the portions that weren’t heavily rusted looked like they’d once been painted brown. No wonder it had been hard to see for all those years. If you hadn’t known where to look, it would have been almost invisible at the bottom of the creek.
The Sheriff raised his arm and made a fist. Johnny responded by hitting the kill switch on the winch. The car jerked to a stop and water poured out of the frame onto the muddy bank at our feet. Abberline squatted behind the vehicle, produced a yellowed handkerchief and began to wipe away what looked like several decades of mud that had built up on the license plate.
Abberline moved a little out of the way and pointed at the old car tag. “Get a good picture of this,” he said.
The tag was filthy, but it had been white at one time with what looked like blue trim and blue letters. It was rusted bad, but still legible despite all those years in the water. It said “HEART OF DIXIE” across the top, and the tag number was “51AA1A8.” Across the bottom of the tag, there was a “76” in the left-hand corner, the word “ALABAMA” in the center and a heart-shaped symbol in the right-hand corner.
Abberline took out a notepad, wrote down the number, tore off the sheet of paper and handed it to Sheriff’s Investigator Sally Greening, who stood nearby. “Call this into dispatch and have them run it through NCIC. Let me know if it comes back on it.”
Greening set off up the hill, and I noticed that Abberline’s gaze seemed to linger over her attractive figure for a little too long. Abberline then stood and began to exam the car. He made his way around to the passenger side and looked into the open front seat window. He stood bolt upright and our eyes met. “Get over here and check this out.”
I walked over, looked inside and saw a skeleton. It looked like the person had been sitting on the passenger side and had leaned over into the driver’s seat. The flesh had rotted away from the bones long ago, but the chains that held it to a five-gallon bucket of concrete in the floorboard were as intact as they were the day the car entered the water.
In the meantime, Johnny had made his way back down the hill. Unaware of the front-seat passenger, he was at the back of the car, on his knees, adjusting the cable that led back up to his truck. He grunted as he tugged hard on the cable, and then we all heard the distinct thunk of the car’s trunk popping open. I looked back and saw that it hadn’t opened all the way, only a couple of inches. Johnny got to his feet, knocked the mud from his pants and lifted the hatch.
“Hey, Sheriff. Come check this out,” he said.
We joined him at the back of the car and looked inside. I honestly expected to see another dead body in the trunk, but I was more than a little surprised by the thing that the trunk contained. It was large and almost filled the entire dark, wet space.
“I knew this sucker felt heavier than it should have,” Johnny said. “I thought that maybe there was a bunch of mud inside it or something or suction from the creek bed. I never thought it would be something like this.”
Inside the truck was a commercial-grade safe. It lay on its side in the trunk and aside from being wet, its gray steel exterior was a clean as it could be. The combination lock stared out at us like the eye of a Cyclops.
“This thickens the plot, eh?” Abberline said. He scanned the wood line as if he’d heard something he didn’t like. “One dead body and an unopened safe.”
Abberline produced a pair of light blue plastic gloves and pulled them on. He then reached inside the trunk and pulled the safe door’s handle. It didn’t budge. “Nah, we couldn’t have been that lucky, right? What are the odds that it was only closed and not locked?”
“Wonder what’s inside, Sheriff?” Johnny wondered.
“It ain’t no telling, my boy,” Abberline said. “But you can bet that we’re going to find out.”
An hour later, two more investigators had joined Greening at the scene. They planned to move human remains to the morgue at Claiborne City Hospital, where they’d try to determine the person’s identity and exact cause of death. They already knew it was a woman based on an examination of the pelvis.
It took the better part of an hour to move the safe to the top of the hill. It was too heavy for deputies to carry to the top of the hill, and even though Johnny offered, Abberline didn’t like the idea of using the tow truck to haul it up the hill. In the end, a pair of strapping, young deputies strong-armed it up the hill, pushing it end over end. I could only imagine what that had done to any important evidence that was inside the safe.
“Put it in the bed of my pickup,” the Sheriff ordered. “I’ll drive it to the jail and call the locksmith or the manufacturer.” His cell phone vibrated on his belt, and he took a quick look at it. He checked a text message and returned his phone to his belt. “McMorn, you get back to town with your camera. I want full color prints of everything you took. And keep quiet about all this. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
A minute later I was back in my truck and headed back to Claiborne. I was less than 10 miles from the city limits, but I was still deep in the woods. It would be dark soon. Just then another vehicle, what looked like a black car, appeared on the road behind me. My eyesight is shot and even after the car got right on my tail, I still couldn’t tell what kind of car it was.
I was unprepared for what happened next. The car sped up and shot into the left-hand lane beside me. It pulled even with my back tires, then steered sharply into my rear quarter panel. An instant later, I felt my wheels lose traction, and I began to spin out of control. I heard the other vehicle’s tires scream as its driver slammed on brakes while I ran off the road and into the ditch. I blacked out when my temple struck the driver’s side window.
When I awoke, it was dark. My head hurt and the sound of someone knocking on my window only made it worse. I opened my eyes and was blinded by the beam of a flashlight. “Hey, man. You all right?” I recognized the voice. It was Johnny, the tow truck driver. He snatched open my door.
“Someone ran me off the road,” I explained. “Call the Sheriff and let him know.”
Johnny ran toward his truck to do just that, and I took stock of the situation. A little bleeding from the side of my head seemed to be my only injury, but a quick inventory of my truck’s interior told me that the only thing that was missing was my digital camera.
(All rights reserved. This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.)
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