Death on Daugherty Creek

Eric saw him and looked guilty for a nanosecond before his usual hauteur took over. He raised one pointy eyebrow and went inside his boat, yacht, whatever.

He stepped onto the dock, and a gout of flame leaped from the boat straight at him. He threw up an arm and twisted, and then he was falling. The flesh-melting heat was replaced with a soothing coolness enveloping his body.

It came to him that this was because he was under water. He thought he should do something about that. He paddled to the top.

The fire was growling and hissing, and he could feel the skin of his face start to fry again. Someone was shouting. And then he remembered Neal, and he had to get out of the damn creek. He grabbed the nearest piling. Strong hands grabbed his arm and pulled him out of the water.


Eric's yacht was a charred hulk in Janes Island State Park, and Eric was very dead. His friend, Neal Hartmann, had been Eric's partner in Girard-Hartmann Accounting, and Sergeant King of the Maryland Natural Resources Police was circling Neal and licking his chops.

He, Gabe Bergeron, had been an employee of that same firm...until Eric fired him. So King was giving him a lean and hungry look too.

He knew Neal hadn't blown up Eric, but Neal was keeping secrets. So he had mounted a kayak and paddled into the middle of a marsh following Neal hoping to get him alone for a heart-to-heart.


Neal said, "The salt marsh ecosystem is one of the most productive on the planet."

If the smell was from productivity, then this patch of Janes Island State Park was damn productive.

"It stinks, Neal."

"The tide is going out exposing the mud."

He reached over to try to touch the needle-rushes. He had gotten cocky, because he had been upright on his kayak for almost an hour.

He felt it start to roll. It reached the point of no return and capsized like it had been hit broadside by a tsunami.

The water might be inches deep, but the mud went clear to China. He wasn't going to think about all the creepy crawlers living in the mud.

He grabbed hold of the rushes and tried to pull himself out. His kayak righted itself and floated away. There was the sound of maniacal laughter, but that was Neal and not the perfidious kayak.

Neal caught his kayak and choked off his laughter. "Sorry, Gabe."

"You aren't. You aren't sorry one little bit."

He started laughing again. "I'm stopping now. Come on. We have to get back."

"It's quicksand, quickmud, and it's going to suck me down."

"No, it isn't."

That was easy for him to say. His feet and legs weren't stuck in a black, rotten, decaying goo that was never going to let him go.

"It's just decaying plant material, Gabe."

"Is it really? Is that all it is?"

The methane stink was so much worse now that he had stirred up the petri dish of bacteria, creepy-crawlers, rotting vegetation, and tepid water.

Neal said, "You can't just lie there forever."

"Can to."

But he released his death grip on the rushes and tried to body surf on the mud. He dragged himself along like some hundred and sixty pound, extinct amphibian returning to the warm, shallow waters of its birth.

His hands sunk into the slime, but he clawed his way to deeper water, and finally, finally, his hands didn't hit bottom, and he dog-paddled to his kayak.

He hated kayaks, and Janes Island State Park, and Neal, and the freaking marsh ecosystem in general. He wanted a new ice age to send a glacier south to scrape all of them from the face of the Earth.


Well, he didn't. And despite the laughter, Neal was in trouble. But just what kind of trouble?