Dark Waters Read online

  Table of Contents

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Susan Rogers Cooper

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Epilogue

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Susan Rogers Cooper

  The Milt Kovak Series

  THE MAN IN THE GREEN CHEVY

  HOUSTON IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR

  OTHER PEOPLE’S HOUSES

  CHASING AWAY THE DEVIL

  DEAD MOON ON THE RISE

  DOCTORS AND LAWYERS AND SUCH

  LYING WONDERS

  VEGAS NERVE

  SHOTGUN WEDDING *

  RUDE AWAKENING *

  HUSBAND AND WIVES *

  DARK WATERS *

  The E J Pugh Mysteries

  ONE, TWO, WHAT DID DADDY DO?

  HICKORY DICKORY STALK

  HOME AGAIN, HOME AGAIN

  THERE WAS A LITTLE GIRL

  A CROOKED LITTLE HOUSE

  NOT IN MY BACK YARD

  DON’T DRINK THE WATER

  ROMANCED TO DEATH *

  FULL CIRCLE *

  DEAD WEIGHT *

  *available from Severn House

  DARK WATERS

  Susan Rogers Cooper

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2013 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  eBook edition first published in 2013 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2013 by Susan Rogers Cooper.

  The right of Susan Rogers Cooper to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Cooper, Susan Rogers.

  Dark waters. – (A Milt Kovak mystery)

  1. Kovak, Milton (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

  2. Sheriffs–Oklahoma–Fiction. 3. Offshore sailing–

  Puerto Rico–Fiction. 4. Murder–Investigation–Fiction.

  5. Detective and mystery stories.

  I. Title II. Series

  813.6-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8273-8 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-399-0 (epub)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  For the newest little love of my life, Josey Tucker Law

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I’d like to thank Joan Hess for the many mutual plot sessions over a semi-friendly game of backgammon; my long-time reader and even longer-time daughter, Evin Cooper; my stalwart agent, Vicky Bijur, for her input and support; my editor, Sara Porter, for her advice and counsel, and a special thank you to Jan Grape, long-time reader and friend, who invited me to swim with the dolphins.

  PROLOGUE

  One Year Ago, Aboard Swedish Cruise Line Ship Cavalcade

  The old man was way too drunk – he knew that. He could barely walk. Oops! Actually, he couldn’t walk at all. He fell to his knees. There was someone there, helping him. Little someones, with their little hands all over him. Leprechauns, he figured. His grammy’s little people. He always believed – at least when he had a few whiskies in him. And he knew he had more than a few in him now. Little hands pushed him down, so he was lying on the floor. OK, this wasn’t bad, he thought. At least I can’t fall! he told himself and laughed out loud. Hands in his pockets. No, the old man said, maybe out loud. That was the money he’d won! No, no! Don’t take my money! he thought, or maybe said out loud, he wasn’t sure. He needed that money. It was for his grandson! To get him out of the trouble he was in. The old man tried to sit up, and felt the stabbing pain in his chest, the ache in his left arm, the tightness in his throat, and then he didn’t feel anything. Ever again.

  ONE

  Imagine my surprise when, while at the Rural Sheriffs of Oklahoma (or RSO for short) annual meeting in Oklahoma City, I won the big door prize: a seven-day cruise for four to Puerto Rico on the brand-new Gypsy Cruise Lines’ Star Line ship. It was supposedly a smaller ship meant for more intimate travel: it only cruised five hundred, as opposed to the thousands on other cruise ships. Coming from a small town, I feel that five hundred is still a crowd. There were seventy-six people in my high school graduating class; a hundred and ten registered members at the Longbranch First Baptist Church, and eight members of my department. Yep, five hundred souls seemed like a bunch to me.

  Now things would have been just fine if I hadn’t mentioned my great prize to my wife. She was born and raised in Chicago, went to school at Northwestern University, and got her MD at Johns Hopkins. To her, five hundred people are what you invite for a casual lunch. And then Johnny Mac, my ten-year-old son, overheard us, and the mention that I had won four (and us being only three) tickets, and decided then and there that we could do this at spring break and take his best friend Early Rollins with us.

  I harped on the fact that the air fare to Galveston, Texas, from where the cruise ship set sail, wasn’t included, but Jean countered that by suggesting a quick day-and-a-half car trip which would be, and I quote, ‘fun and educational.’ She’s a shrink. You would think she’d know better.

  ‘Honey,’ I said, ‘I’m thinking that’s not a good idea.’

  ‘Why not?’ she demanded.

  ‘We’re talking a ten-hour trip with two ten-year-old boys cooped up the entire time—’

  ‘That’s why I suggested a day and a half. We cut the ten hours in half – or better yet, say seven hours the first day, if we get up early. And speaking of Early, he’ll spend the night with us the day before we leave so we can get out of here at the crack of dawn, drive until lunchtime – so seven hours – stop at a motel with a swimming pool, let the boys swim off their pent-up energy, then finish the trip the next day with plenty of time to board the ship in Galveston!’

  And she smiled. Now my wife is a good-looking woman: almost as tall as me, she’s got short reddish-brown hair turning gray a little bit, green eyes, bodacious ta-tas, a killer ass and well-shaped legs, even if they didn’t work too well due to childhood polio. She’s got a real pretty face, but her smile – I can’t do much against one of my wife’s smiles. They not only light up her face, or the room – it’s like the whole universe smiles back. And they not only make me weak-kneed, but weak-willed to boot. So that’s what we did. And it wasn’t pretty.

  Our crack-of-dawn departure on the Saturday morning of the first day of spring break did not occur. Early, Johnny Mac’s best friend since first grade, had wispy blond hair and w
atery blue eyes and, although he made the same Little League team as Johnny Mac, couldn’t throw or hit a ball worth a damn. His one really good point, as far as I could see, was that he seemed to idolize my son. Jean disagreed, saying he was bright, inquisitive and very funny. Hadn’t seen that yet. Anyway, he forgot one of his bags, so we had to go into town to his house and pick it up, which Early, Johnny Mac and I did while Jean stayed home and fixed treats for the trip (and we all knew they’d be organic, non-sugar, non-fat and non-fun), then we had to drive back to the house to pick up Jean and her treats, and then we had to go back into town because I forgot to gas up Jean’s minivan, which is hard for me to drive because it has multiple hand breaks and stuff on account of Jean’s polio when she was a kid. We didn’t leave until after ten and I had the pleasure of teaching the boys military time, ’cause adding seven hours to ten o’clock made seventeen hours, and you can’t do that on regular time. Meanwhile, Jean sat fuming in the shotgun seat, blaming the whole getting out late thing on me because of the gas. I’m just saying, it wasn’t all my fault. She also might have been a little miffed when nobody ate her homemade granola – oatmeal, dried fruit and raw nuts, with nothing to stick it together. It wasn’t pleasant. Even the boys wouldn’t eat it.

  We made it about thirty miles south of Dallas before we decided to find a motel with a pool. We found one around seven that evening that had a coffee shop as well as a pool. It was right outside a town the size of a postage stamp, but right off the freeway. Unfortunately the pool hadn’t opened yet for the summer, and the coffee shop had a sewer leakage problem and was closed for the foreseeable future. We got a double room, then got in the car to find someplace to eat.

  ‘Why don’t we find another motel?’ Johnny Mac whined. ‘You promised us a pool.’

  ‘Well, he didn’t exactly promise—’ Early started, but Johnny Mac cut him off.

  ‘Shut up!’ my son said.

  ‘You shut up!’ Early said.

  I’m pretty sure my son instigated the first blow.

  ‘OK, you two!’ Jean said, turning around in her seat to glare at the boys. ‘Knock it off and I mean now!’

  There was one more bout of slapping, then they retired to their respective corners. Turning around, Jean said, ‘If you say a word I’ll slap you!’

  ‘Wouldn’t that be lowering yourself to their level?’ I said, keeping my eye on the road and the smile off my face.

  She hit me anyway, in the thigh, and it wasn’t a love pat. ‘Ow!’ I said.

  Then we spied a Denny’s. I pulled in and we had supper. In lieu of swim time, Jean let the boys have whatever they wanted for dessert. It was a God-awful mess and we had two bloated and moaning young’uns on our hands as we headed back to the motel.

  At three o’clock in the morning I made Jean get up when Early started puking. He puked so loud that it woke up Johnny Mac, who decided sympathetic puking was in order. At that point I thought it would be just cruel if I didn’t get up to help. But feeding them hot fudge sundaes and molten lava cakes hadn’t been my idea. I rolled over and stuck Jean’s pillow over my exposed ear. I figured she wouldn’t be back for a while.

  The next morning was no crack-of-dawn experience either. Jean decided both boys needed to sleep it off, which she explained to me in a no-nonsense, I-don’t-like-you-much tone with no eye contact, and then demanded I go out and find coffee and fruit. The only thing I could find open in this East Texas burg of maybe twenty-three citizens was the Denny’s (and how they deserved a Denny’s and Longbranch didn’t, I’ll never know – OK, they had a freeway and we didn’t, but still). I got two large coffees to go, a fruit plate, an extra-large orange juice, two small cereal boxes and a medium milk. I carted all this back to the motel.

  The boys were up by then.

  ‘I was sicker than you,’ Early was saying as I walked in the door.

  ‘No, you were just sick first. I was sicker than you!’ Johnny Mac insisted.

  ‘I was so sick I puked up dinner!’ Early proclaimed.

  ‘I was so sick I puked up green slimy stuff!’ Johnny Mac countered.

  ‘I was so sick—’

  I interrupted whatever it was Early was going to say. ‘Got the fixin’s for your ills, boys! Come sit down at the table.’

  I handed my wife a coffee and the fruit plate, and grabbed two of the plastic glasses from the bathroom sink. I poured some of the OJ in each glass, opened the cereal boxes so that they would be their own bowls, and poured in some milk. I’d been brazen enough to demand plastic spoons and forks from Denny’s. The boys were settled and I headed with my coffee and its accompanying sweeteners back to the bed I’d shared the night before with my wife. Or part of the night before, whatever.

  ‘You want some sweetener?’ I asked, handing her the bag.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, not looking up but taking the bag.

  ‘There’s some forks in there, too, for the fruit plate,’ I said.

  ‘How very nice,’ she said, and it hardly sounded sarcastic at all, but still she wouldn’t look up. She put the bag on the other side of her as I sat down next to her.

  ‘Can I have one of the forks?’ I asked.

  ‘Certainly,’ she said, handing me the bag.

  I grabbed two real sugars out of the bag and the one fork left over. ‘Is this the silent treatment?’ I asked her.

  ‘I hardly think you could call this the silent treatment,’ she said, studiously spearing a pineapple chunk.

  ‘Well, you’re saying words, but they don’t seem real, if you know what I mean,’ I said.

  ‘I have no idea what you mean,’ she said.

  ‘You want me to explain?’ I asked.

  ‘Hardly,’ she said, then got up and, using her crutches that were by her side of the bed, went into the bathroom.

  I sighed and ate the rest of the fruit, and the donut I’d stashed in my jacket pocket.

  Milt – Day One

  The line to get on the boat – ship, whatever – was really long. And again, my warnings came true (Jean insists it was a self-fulfilling prophesy) – the boys were hell-bent on making life miserable.

  Just coming over the causeway onto Galveston Island had been a real treat for our two landlocked boys. Each grabbed a window and exclaimed the virtues of their side, then switched, then switched again. We were a couple of hours early for boarding, so we drove to the sea wall, found a parking spot and took the kids down to the Gulf of Mexico. The water was still pretty cold, but we let them play with the small waves and pick up seashells and throw them at each other. Had they been girls, I suppose they may have kept the seashells to make necklaces or something; thank God we had boys, or I’d have to wear a seashell necklace for the entire cruise. Even though it was mid-March and the day was pretty overcast, the beach was crowded with people and there were quite a few surfers riding the paltry waves of the Gulf. They weren’t very good waves, but they were all they had.

  The hell that is traveling with children started when we needed to leave the beach to go find the ship.

  ‘No! I wanna stay!’ Johnny Mac whined.

  ‘Yeah, please?’ Early, not biologically ours so therefore polite, said.

  ‘No, guys, we got the boat to catch,’ I said.

  ‘Ship,’ Jean corrected.

  ‘I don’t want to go on any stinking ship!’ my son said.

  My wife turned and gave him a look. It was the same look my mama had given me when I’d been a whiny pest. It worked on Johnny Mac the same as it had me.

  He turned, his face a mask of sulking, and headed back to the car, Early following him. When they were far enough away that we could hear only the sound of words but not the words themselves, the two began talking, and what they were saying was pretty damning to someone – or maybe two someones.

  The two sulked all the way to the boat. Having never been to Galveston, I was gaping big time at the old houses surrounding the sea wall. Due to last year’s hurricane a lot of them were under reconstruction, but a bunc
h had been finished, and the fresh paint on these old-painted-lady Victorians was pretty neat, with combinations of colors I wouldn’t have chosen, but somehow worked on these: cerrillium blue with orange shutters, and purple with green, and all sorts of crazy combos.

  ‘Aren’t these glorious?’ Jean said, and I was grateful for the beginning of the thaw.

  ‘Yeah, I like ’em,’ I said.

  ‘We had some like these in our neighborhood in Chicago when I was little – before we moved to the ’burbs. I always wanted one,’ she said. ‘But to have one this close to the water would be awesome!’

  ‘Yeah, we could go surfing every day,’ I said in a playful voice.

  My wife laughed, but my son – with the big ears – said, ‘Daddy, are we gonna move here? Can we? Please?’

  ‘No, buddy. Your mama and I were just kidding,’ I said.

  There was silence from the back seat, then, ‘Well, it’s not funny,’ he said in a very-much-not-amused tone of voice.

  Jean and I looked at each other and grinned. We were back.

  But then we had to park. The parking lot was extremely crowded and Jean’s handicap sticker did us no good as all the handicap spaces were full. So I drove up to the back of the line waiting to get aboard and deposited Jean, the boys and the luggage before heading for a parking spot.

  I ended up in the back row of the lot, about four city blocks from the boat. I got out, locked up and headed seaward. By the time I got there, Jean, the boys and the luggage were gone.

  Meanwhile, Back In Prophesy County

  Emmett Hopkins, chief deputy and temporary acting sheriff for Prophesy County, Oklahoma, looked out over the bullpen at his charges. Dalton Pettigrew was staring moon-eyed at Holly Humphries, the new civilian aid (only called new because the last aid, Gladys, was at the job for twenty-something years). Holly stared moon-eyed right back at him, which meant a lot of work wasn’t getting done. Emmett was thinking he might have to separate those two. Maybe put Dalton back in his office while he was occupying the sheriff’s office. Milt hadn’t said it was OK for him to use his office, but Emmett figured if he had the job, however temporary, he should look the part. And how could he look the part when he was stuck in his cubbyhole of an office? The sheriff’s was big with two walls of windows, whereas Emmett’s just had the one wall with a window. Hell, Milt used to bitch about it all the time when it was his office. So of course he’d understand Emmett moving into his – however temporarily.