Chapter 15 Dangerous Dan!

By Gary O'Brien


“Rimpo’s: Your 24/7 Anywhere Office on the Road!”
That’s what the sign says. And now, officially, it is the case. State Road “NC 12” has a Rimpo’s.
That stretch of Route 12 between Buxton and the north side of the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge has some of the most gorgeous driving you can experience on earth. The National Seashore prevents any development other than the strictly managed and planned communities that sprang where fishing villages had once been; these newer collections of tony rentals called, Avon, Rodanthe, Waves, and Salvo. Just North of Pea Island, all of that goes away, and we’re back to civilization, seemingly back to Florida, for here are all the strip malls not found within the sixty-mile stretch of the refuge. They are waiting for you. Some of them have been sitting there since the late 1960s.
The laptop connect card was dead. I guess someone cut me off, either the FBI or whomever.
And so in that plaza beneath perhaps one of the early flight paths of the Wright 1904 prototype, I set to on the office computer and downloaded my next installments of my work from my notebook computer onto my blog deadlitagent.blogspot.com. Wouldn’t want to fall behind on my deadline. I also was able to recharge the battery.
I found the email address for the Orlando Police Department and sent them the next three chapters of The Dead Agent because I am not sure they know about blogs yet, or Twitter or YouTube or even the next thing that’s like five minutes away.
I decided not to send it directly to Public Information dill-weed Lt. Brian Richardson. I sent it to the general “information at” address and let it wend its way there. Richardson was probably giving interviews all day. Let his ego be his downfall, then. I did my part. I laid it all out for him to read. I knew he would essentially ignore it. It made good press, to think that I was guilty.
Speaking of which, the Orlando dailies got their copies of the next three chapters, too. I couldn’t let them down. I tweeted, and all that crap too.
Leslie can’t tweet yet. She’s so locked in the past. To her using email is a new thing. The kids have their own email accounts but, I didn’t want to go that route just yet. How do you go through your children to email your wife?
Then I did some research of my own, tried to catch up to news in the world. Very slow news week, other than some wildfires out in California, much of the east coast news was about me, Chris Naughten’s rumored gay lover, drug buddy and collaboration murderer. Yes, the Orlando papers and television were still calling Naughten’s death a “probable homicide,” owing to what flew from Lt. Richardson’s mouth. And where was I rumored to be hiding out? Somewhere in Virginia, apparently, thanks to the Hendley family’s cell phone, now at the bottom of Pamlico Sound.
Christopher Naughten, author of White Kaffir, was being considered for a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for literature. And here was a weird bullet to the whole thing; The Schnedz Literary Agency was apparently collaborating with Naughten’s former wife to sell the movie rights to White Kaffir, or so the item said, which quoted only Lyzanne.
Claire Whitehall, Naughten’s widowed ex, was unavailable for comment in London.
Claire Whitehall. I had seen that name somewhere recently but the recollection was hazy. Why did that name seem so familiar?
Anyway, after lunch at a local Wendy’s I drove back down Route 12 to Hatteras, listening to the digital voice of the NOAA weather radioman as the miles flew by my window. I wanted to meet the electronic man who made those noises that resembled human speech.
“Over PAM lico SOUND, light SCATTERED showers today. Temp – er- ah tures in the MID to High ayyyyteees, with winds southwest to ten MILES an hour, CLLLEEARING away squalls this EEEEVEhn ING. Seas this evening a LIGHT CHOP, with waters on the sound side one to two feet.”
“Oh-ver the TROPICS a low pressure system, located 4 HUUUHNDRED miles SOUThEAST OF Bermuda, is Expected to DEEVELOP into a Trahhhhhupecal storm this EEEVENing…”
Every now and again static from lightning interrupted the quirky flow of words from “Stan” the electronic weatherman. I thought of him as Stan, for the moment. It was only a matter of time before my paranoid brain developed a fantasy in which he was more than Stan. As in, add an ‘a’ to his name and he was, in fact, Say-tan.
“The souls of the DAMNED will be BOY LING IN eternal HELL fire and damnation THIS evening. The temp –er AH –TURES OF lake DAMN ation will exceed seven HUNDRED dah –GREEEZ out too-ward the CENT er of the LAYYYYYAKE with a moderate chop…”
Just then I passed Bodie’s Island Light off to my right and set off over the Oregon Inlet Bridge. The scattered showers Stan spoke of so quirkily, could be seen on either side of me, but did not threaten as I rounded the turn at the top of the bridge and raced down toward Pea Island Lifesaving Station, long abandoned and forlorn as it was, bathed in mist and salt spray. I felt easier, better now, that I had sent off those next chapters of the book. Even though they meant my damnation, as it were, in the lake of fire that Stan spoke to me about, now at least those reading would know why.
Passing through Avon, I saw a sign. It was like a bit of providence. I knew I had less than $300 to my name, now, after all the expenses, after the new tank of gas, after the myriad of odds and ends groceries I had purchased a few hours back.
That sign was God himself calling to me. It stood at the corner of a rental street and Route 12 where a bar harbored weekend vacationers, and offered everything from steak, lobster and beer, to promises of a romp with college pretties, down from every institution in Virginia on a summer jaunt.
“Karaoke Contest FRI NIGHT. $500 cash prize! 7 p.m.”
How would they pull it off? How would they get around the rules? I meant to find out.

*
7 a.m. Cape Hatteras National Seashore. Cape Point Park
“Hello? Hey!” Hello?”
Who owned that pleasant, tenor voice?
It was like your neighbor, or, better stated, like the neighbor you wished you always had.
“Hello? Hi! Howya doin’? Saw there were some chipmunks rummaging through your radishes and I chased them off for ya!
It was flat Midwest all the way, that accent. If you had to tag it, say, Indiana, or Missouri.
“Hello?” it sang there again.
I looked out of the tent and there he was, chubby with a big, flowing handlebar moustache, big white teeth with wire rim spectacles, bright blue eyes and gray-white, 70s hair. Santa’s younger brother in a Park Ranger’s uniform.
“Hey, hey. Hah-Hah! I chased them off for ya!”
So he did say that. I didn’t dream it.
“Who? Who dyja chase off?”
“Why those silly raccoons, sir. Look at what they did.”
Sure enough, he wasn’t lying. Their dexterous little hands had been into everything, had opened up one of my coolers. Two loaves of bread had been pillaged from my dry box. Five cans of grape soda were now empty and all around the tent.
“No freakin’ way,” I said.
“Oh yeah. They know how to work a pop-top, sir. I’ve got a proposal out to four universities right now because of that. Most of those folks say I’m losing my mind. But, if it can talk, and it can learn, and most important of all, if it can teach its young how to use tools, isn’t it an intelligent creature, capable of socialization on the order of the higher primates and so forth?
I was lost. Was this the first day of some class I had inadvertently signed up for?
“Tools?”
“Mister, they do everything but use an electric can-opener. I’m waiting for the day I come up on a bunch of them spreading mayonnaise on slices of bread, bedding those down with turkey they’ve carved up with a knife. The point is, you can’t be too careful what you leave out. They’ll scatter it to the four winds.”
He extended a paw.
“Dan McGreary.”
I took his strong hand on a reflex.
“Gah…Larry O’Brien,” I said, stammering.
“How’s that?”
“G. Lawrence…. O’Brien. My mom had a sense of humor in the “Boy named Sue,” vein. Call me Larry.”
“Uh-huh,” he said shaking mine twice and eyeballing me. Was that irony? Was he on to me?
“Well, Mr. G. Lawrence, Larry. I’m only glad I’m still a good tracker. I seen one little guy with a sandwich wrapped in tin foil making my rounds, followed his trail over the dunes from my four-by. And, well, here we are…”
“Did you say talk?”
“Talk?”
“Did you say raccoons can actually talk?”
“Oh yes. Have conversations to beat the band. That old saw about monkeys sitting down to write the works of Shakespeare is almost true. It’s raccoons that will do it. They are the meek that will inherit the earth, mark my words. Probably do it all better than we ever could.”
“Very interesting,” I said.
“Say, you’re from Florida, looking at your license plate there…”
“Yes, yes I am…”
“What part?”
There was no point lying now.
“Palm Bay,” I said.
“Well then you know about raccoons. Don’t ya?”
“We have a few there, yes.”
“I’ll bet. You ever hear them at night sneaking from one yard to the next? Ever hear all that racket squeaking they do?”
“Not since I got a dog. But, yes, I know what you mean.”
“Well their vocalizations carry more data than encyclopedia Britainica. I’m convinced of it. That’s the mother raccoon telling her young exactly, and I mean, exactly where and when to step.”
“Really,” I said. “So, you’re a wildlife biologist.”
“It’s a hobby, sir. Mostly I’m a garden-variety park ranger. I majored in history and literature at Ohio State. I wouldn’t mind gravitating to that someday…biology.”
“History, literature….wildlife….wow, you’re a repository of info there,” I said.
“How’s that?” he replied, brooking no irony from me this fine morning.
“Well, I mean you’ve got a lot of information coming out of you, that’s all.”
He let a long pause follow and offered “Yeah, yeah, from both ends, I suppose.”
“No, I mean, I can relate, somewhat to that feeling…”
“How so?”
“I’m a writer. A reporter, really. But I started out my career with a science degree. Oceanography.”
“Holeee shit, huh? Oceanography. It all started with those Jacques Cousteau specials didn’t it?”
“Bingo. I think I still have a Cousteau Society membership card somewhere…”
“Well Mr. Writer, what brings you up here?”
“Oh, I’m looking to do a freelance piece on the Banks. I want to try and sell it to the New Yorker, or someone like that.” That was actually something I meant to do someday so it wasn’t really a lie.
“What do you want to write about?”
“The changes in the Banks over the years. How everything is gone rental, and then, how the real estate market left all these boxes empty. You know, how the character of the place is changing because of that.”
“Funny you should mention that,” he said. “Fellow from the Virginia Pilot came down, Lou somebody, wrote the very article about a month ago. Nice guy. He got some of it right.”
“I think … I saw that. Yeah. I want to develop the story more. You know how writers are, always following the pack. We’re pack animals.”
“So the idea is to get to know the place from the ground up, then? I seen your fishing gear there. You get anything?”
“Fifteen blues yesterday morning at Avon Pier…”
“Any Reds?”
“Don’t I wish, but no. In fact, it’s been years since I hooked a decent Red Drum. I’ve half a mind to say what I’ve got to say in a story about hunting for the perfect one…”
“You know, Mr. Writer. I like your style. That’s exactly what I would do. Why hit them over the head with a mallet when you can slip it under the door jam like a warning letter, scare the shit out of them! Ha ha ha!”
“Well, maybe not scare the shit out of them…”
“You’ll have to excuse me. I’m a bit of a writer myself, but mostly a reader, Steven King you know…”
“You’re a writer too, huh?”
“I’ve got two manuscripts I’m trying to get published.”
“Really? What about? If you don’t mind me asking?” Now I was interested. I really liked this fellow even though the badge and the gun said he could arrest me at any moment.
“Well, all of us who work around here have our variation of the Blackbeard thing, as you can guess, but I got another one that might actually go somewhere. In fact, I have been close with a couple of agencies that looked at it.”
“Go on.”
“During WW Two, there was a lot of German U boat activity out in these waters. We had a U-Boat was sunk, not three miles from here off Diamond Shoals. Depth charges got him, cut him in two but at the time he was running shallow so some of the men got out and tried to make it for shore. Bodies washed up from here to Portsmouth Island. My thought was, what if a young fellow, strong enough and healthy enough, had actually made it to shore?”
“Good. I like it,” I said, without a trace of derision.
“A young cook who also worked down in the engine room, to be precise. Now, not a word of English mind you, he’s trapped here at the Cape and he’s got people searching for him high and low…”
“So, you wrote it?”
“Uh-huh. I did but for some reason I can’t get anyone to listen to me.”
“Why not? It sounds like a great book.”
“One agent told me I made the main character, Hanz, too sympathetic. After all, he was a Nazi.”
I was stunned. I stood there for a second.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” I said.
“Nope. She, uh, wanted me to rewrite the whole thing, make it an indictment of the Nazi regime and Hitler. I was like ‘hey, having your boat shot out from under you, watching all your buddies die didn’t get all that said?’ Aside from which, I wasn’t really about that bull, was it? This kid didn’t know the Nazi party from poultry. It was a simple story about a young sailor fighting for his life in hostile territory.
“The neat thing about it was, you got a view of Americans out here on the Outer Banks during that time period, from his perspective. You know it was about war, mostly. And the fact is, this thing actually happened.”
“No shit?”
“There’s an old guy lives over in Manteo that the story’s based on. He’s the guy I interviewed, came from Germany, said it pretty much happened to him, but he’s sketchy on details since he’s so old now and still doesn’t speak English that well. But he sure as hell is German, and he sure as hell has been living here forever. The main thing that came out of the story was the fact people around here eventually accepted him.”
“Man…”
“Right. You take a seafaring race of people who were dealing with the Wolfpack day in day out while trying to earn a living from the sea, having to deal with lack of supplies, along comes a crewman who was part of the effort that terrorized their communities, and this boy manages to make it here, among them. It wasn’t easy but they eventually accepted him as a neighbor and friend. He ends up loving the place so much he doesn’t want to go home again. And it actually happened.”
I just shook my head and said, “New York.”
“Yyyyup, the agency was in New York.”
“Which one?”
“Don’t remember right off, this was years ago. I’ve still got the manuscript though…”
“Don’t you dare re-write it, do you understand me? Don’t you dare change a word. Not one damn word.”
“Well, okay then. You gonna buy it?”
“No, but talking to you, I’m convinced someone will. Don’t change a damned thing on the basis of what some agent tells you. You wait till you get a publisher and a damned good editor that understands what you’re writing about is history. An editor without his head up his ass on some political agenda.”
“Well, okay then. I guess I hear what you’re saying.”
We chatted more about writing, about what directed him toward a career as a Park Ranger. I admitted it was something I had wanted to do when I graduated from college but the Peace Corps seemed more interesting.
He said he might wander by later in the evening for another jaw session about writing if I didn’t mind sharing the sunset, and some insights on how he might get his work published, and I agreed.
I have to admit his presence scared me at first. I thought he was casing me out. Whatever he did he brought me good luck, though, at the pier. I started the day with ten bluefish caught one right after the other. When the tide changed at Noon, and many of the fishermen wandered away, I took a chance and rigged my surf rod with a sliced up bluefish and tossed it out to sea. No one challenged me for space.
By 4 p.m. I had my Red Drum. He wasn’t huge by North Carolina standards but at just over twenty-five inches, in Florida he would have rated right up there; certainly good enough to eat. He ran out to sea, then back again. I managed to keep him off the pilings, and he fought me all the way to the net. It took just over ten minutes. And this time other guys at the end of the pier helped me drop the hoop net and heft him up and over the rail. I was elated.
That evening I had a repeat of the first sunset and cracked the cap on a fresh bottle of rum, waiting for my new friend.
The camp coffee was brewing and the sun was down. Winds kicked up keeping the bugs off and the sky cleared. The rustle of dune grasses signaled his arrival, along with his flashlight.
“Mr. O’Brien?”
“Present,” I said raising a hand. “Hurry up Dan, your fish is getting cold.”
He was dressed in civilian clothes a floral print shirt and a pair of khaki shorts.
“I had to leave the four by four over the dune. I told Martha I was fishing out back, here. We’re not really supposed to …did you say fish?”
“I did. Seasoned with garlic, lemon, lime and butter. Corn on the cob. I didn’t get any green vegetables though. I forgot what the raccoons had done to all my lettuce. I’ve got Bush beer in the cooler, or you can have what I’m drinking.”
“Which is?”
“Rum and grapefruit juice on ice.”
“Man, you Floridians really do know how to live.”
“I owe it all to you, Dan. You brought me luck. The filet simmering there beneath that plate is nothing less than perfect Red Drum.”
“You finally got your fish, then huh?”
“That I did.”
When we finished, Dan leaned back in his chair and slurped his rum.
“That’s about the best damn eatin’ I’ve done in a while, Mr. O’Brien…”
“What’s with all the Mr. O’Brien crap?”
He raised a hand, took another belt from his cup. He wanted me to shut up for a second.
Dan McGreary reached into a satchel he had with him and began rummaging.
“You know, when I woke up this morning and someone asked me if I would consider shirking any part of my duty, today, I would have looked at them like they’d grown a third eye in the middle of their forehead.”
He tossed me a copy of an Orlando weekly newspaper called The Standard. He handed me his flashlight. There was a picture on the cover of Chris Naughten, from his White Kaffir dust jacket. Beneath it was the headline, “ Chris Naughten’s last night on earth.”
“Then along you come with your little speech about ‘Don’t you dare change a word…’ and it stops me in my tracks. First time in twenty-two years I have ever hesitated.”
“Later in the day, while I’m thinking about what in Hell I am supposed to do about a wanted fugitive living in my park, I get this sent to me out of the blue!”
I was speechless.
“Funny thing is, he FedEx’d it to me! Can you believe that?”
“Who?”
“Uncle Floyd. Check his comments on page nine”
Thorough Uncle Floyd had circled the headline again in red marker and wrote in the margin; “Dan, Sounds dangerous being a writer these days! Sure you want to pursue this? Haha! Floyd.”
“Floyd lives in Orlando?”
“Mister, everybody knows somebody living in Orlando. Did you ever notice that? Not a soul on earth doesn’t have a cousin or an uncle living in Orlando. Some guy in Burma knee-deep in rice taking a stick to a yak’s ass, has a cousin living in Orlando.”
“I can’t argue there…” I said, now sweating bullets and afraid to look up.
“So…Gary,” he said, while setting down his mug and extracting a cigarette from his pack.
“You wanna know what made me realize that everything they said about you was for shit? I mean, aside from the fact you and Naughten were the ones obviously palling around and got into that fight with the bouncers and that suspended cop.”
“Uh, yeah. Go ahead. Let me have it. I’ve got no choice I suppose…”
“Well I circled it in the blue marker. In the article.”
And there it was, something I had been wondering about myself.
“This guy Naughten is dead, right? His book goes sky-high because of that and somehow SHE’S negotiating his movie deal! This agent didn’t represent him until a month ago. She didn’t broker his original book deal, now she’s doing the movie rights? That’s a neat trick. This agent you’re writing about must be some piece of work. Now SHE gets fifteen percent of the movie rights or whatever, and thirty days ago she didn’t even know he existed.”
“Yeah….”
“What? Did he sign up with her KNOWING he was going to die? Exactly how does that work?”
“Yeah,” I said, reflecting back on my earlier question of where I had seen Claire Whitehall’s name before.
“Pretty hinky stuff, if you asked me,” he said. “I can only imagine what she did to you.”
“How many hours do you have?”
He shrugged as if to say ‘all the time in the world.’
And with that, I laid out the entire story for him start to finish. He listened quietly as the camp coffee simmered.
“Well, what are your plans?” he asked when I had finished.
“The first thing I’m going to do is mail this newspaper my latest installment of the book, so they know what happened as well. I’m only sorry I didn’t know about this weekly before, when I was in Nag’s Head.”
“So you’re going back up to Nag’s? I’d be careful. It’s only a matter of time before they start asking your wife about your vacations and such, seeing where you’ve traveled. They’ll put it all together. I’m surprised they haven’t said a word to us yet.”
“What tipped you off about me?”
“No DL.”
“What?”
“You forgot to leave a copy of your driver’s license with the front desk. Then I saw where she had scratched out the license plate number and wrote the real one in. That happens all the time. Some people forget their plate number and when we ask them they scrawl in a bunch of bullshit. We go back and check later and get the right one, just in case there’s a question later. Plus I have been watching the news: same van, same county from Florida. I figured it was you this morning, since your moustache is growing back in.”
“So all that stuff you told me about your book?”
“All true but I admit I used it to flush you out. Man, when you started in on agents, you really hit a chord with me. I went through hell to write that book no one wants to look at. Lost my fiancé when I couldn’t get it published. She couldn’t stand being around me.”
“Welcome to the life of a writer wannabe. You keep after it. You’ll hit it. I know,” I said.
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“That’s some pretty shitty luck for a guy named O’Brien. Especially now, what with Claudine…”
“Who?”
“You haven’t been listening to your weather radio, have you?”
“I try not to, right now. The weatherman scares me,” I said.
“Well you should. Tropical storm Claudine is expected to become a hurricane this evening. She’s headed this way.”
“Earlier they said the system would turn north.”
“Nope. You feel all this warm dry air that hits us? That’s a high-pressure system. It’s going to carry Claudine into us like a conveyor belt, likely to come ashore Monday morning or so. She’s gonna be a bad one.”
“So, in addition to being a wildlife expert on raccoons…?”
“Gary, I been here seventeen years. I know what I know. We’re in for it,” he said. “But, it could actually work out to your advantage.”
“How so?”
“When they evacuate the islands the deputies won’t be looking for your van anymore. They’ll have more to do than a one-armed paperhanger. You can slide on out in the crowd. Probably get a free ferry ride out of it, if you time it right, and off you go.”
“Why don’t you turn me in?”
“I don’t know. I could, but after our little chat this morning I just don’t have the heart anymore. First time in twenty-two years as a ranger I ever shirked a duty.”
“For all you know, I could be armed and dangerous.”
“Yeah, I thought of that, but I know different.”
“How so?”
“When you were fishing, I, uh, went through your tent for drugs or weapons.”
“They could be in my van.”
“You leave that open at night. You know, you shouldn’t do that, Gary. Especially after you drink.”
“Jesus…”
“You could turn yourself in? You didn’t kill this guy, Naughten. When the toxicology report finally comes back they’ll probably see the guy overdosed on Oxy. That shit’s bad news, causes respiratory failure. People get hooked just like they get hooked on smack. This guy Naughten was drinking heavily. He probably took one pill too many and that was that.”
“Yeah but they could say I stuffed the pills down his throat or something. I don’t know. I want to try to get as much of this book written as I can before I run out of money and turn myself in,” I said.
“Well, this is what I can do for ya. I can continue to play dumb until the Feds tell me to check the campground. If you’re still here, I can try to warn you when that happens. After I warn you, you’ll need to beat feet, and I mean real fast.”
“How will you warn me? A signal or something? A flag at half mast, a flowerpot in a window?”
“I know where you fish. I’ll try to catch you in town or at the piers. You remember the movie The Sting?”
“Yeah, sure, Newman and Redford, a finger to the right side of the nose, something like that?”
“That’ll do. Meantime, I can play dumb. That’s not hard for a GS employee. It’s the way we survive.”
“I know I am asking you a lot, and I thank you, Dan.”
“Not at all. Listen, for the hope you given me, and the shit you been through, it’s more than an honor. I only hope one day you remember me. I gotta feelin’ any connection to you I can forge, I’m doin’ okay.”
“You serious?”
“As a heart attack, Mr. O’Brien. As a freakin’ heart attack.”
“All I can say is thank you again, Dan.”
“Think nothing of it, Mr. O’Brien,” he said, and paused a bit sipping the last of his rum.
“Just one question, though.”
“Shoot.”
“You’re not really going to kill your agent are you? Are you?”