The Water Keeper

by Charles Martin

  She held her fiancé’s hand. “It’s one thing for him to see me as I want to be seen. It’s another thing entirely for me to see me, and I want to see me.” She laughed. “When I look in the mirror, I don’t see the freak. The maggot. The refuse. I see the new. Sparkling. Radiant. And I like her. I have hope for her. I think she’s going to make it. She is now what she once was . . . beautiful. A daughter. A wife. Maybe one day, a mom. If you only knew how impossible that seemed not so long ago.”

  She waved her hand across The Town nestled in the valley below. “I cannot begin—” We sat in silence several more minutes. The temperature was dropping. I stoked the fire. She reached into the air in front of her, made a fist and returned it to her chest. Pounding. “I was there. Now I am here. Love did that.” She spoke through gritted teeth. “I am free.”

  So, while it may seem cheesy if you don’t know the story, The Town became Freetown. It worked in West Africa; why can’t it work in western Colorado?

  Walking into Freetown is a bit of a homecoming for me. It’s there and really only there that I possess some sort of celebrity status. These girls know nothing of my artistic career. Sure, they read my books; they just don’t know I wrote them. They only know I’m the guy who kicked down the door. Some don’t even know that. So walking down Main Street can take a while. I love seeing their faces. Hearing the stories.

  Sipping my coffee, the wind whipping around me as Gone Fiction split the water, I let my mind wander back to Main Street and the sound of freedom. Which is laughter.

  One hand on the wheel, staring at water staring back at me, I needed the sound of that laughter. I would have given most everything I had to teleport all of us to Freetown in that moment. Just lift out of here and leave all this behind.

  We motored south out of West Palm Beach into Lake Worth, Delray Beach, and Deerfield Beach. It was slow going but I had a pretty good feeling that whatever captain or captains I was chasing would not venture out into the Atlantic. The wind was blowing out of the northeast at greater than thirty mph. No captain in his right mind would take a pleasure boat out into that. Not if he wanted to keep the people on the boat. And my guess was that he desperately wanted to keep them on the boat and keep the party going. Even if it meant turtling down the IC.

  Pompano gave way to Fort Lauderdale, which put Miami off the bow. I’d now come some three hundred miles since my island. Seen a good bit of water beneath the hull. My problem was simple: I had no idea what vessel they were on or where they were going. Every boat was a possibility, and there were ten thousand boats. Fingers’ box hung above my head. Staring down. I missed him.

  Motoring under the Rickenbacker Causeway en route to Biscayne Bay, Clay stood from his perch on the beanbag and shuffled back toward me. He asked, “You got a minute, Mr. Murphy?”

  We were idling at little more than six hundred rpm’s. Ellie was asleep on the back bench with her head on Summer’s lap. I stood. “Yes, sir.”

  “Late at night, when the party died down and I was cleaning up my bar, these two fellows would order drinks, stand within whisper distance, and talk in muffled tones. One foreign. One not. I didn’t understand much. Caught bits and pieces. They thought I was hard of hearing. Harmless.” He laughed. “Maybe I’m not as hard as they think. They’d talk around me as they sipped their drinks, and they’d point at a chart showing the southern end of Florida. Down ’bout where we are now. Kept using phrases like ‘picking the coconuts’ and ‘walking on water to the loading dock.’ That make any sense to you?”

  I shook my head. “No, sir.”

  “Last thing I remember them saying was something about ‘fruit in the grove,’ ‘walking on water,’ and then ‘spending one last night with Mel and his turtles’ before they cashed in their chips.”

  I let the words settle. “None of it rings a bell at the moment.”

  He looked bothered as he glanced at Summer. “She’s a tough momma. But she may have tougher coming. They’re bad men.” He paused. “And I seen bad.”

  I watched Summer hug herself against the wind. “Yes, sir.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Sorry I’m not more help.” Then he returned to his beanbag.

  I studied the chart. The University of Miami sat just a mile or so to the west. So did Coconut Grove. A common hangout for girls from the University of Miami. Maybe that had something to do with it. Walking on water? Not sure. But we would soon be in spitting distance of Stiltsville. The remains of a group of vacation homes built by the most optimistic people on the planet out on the shallow shelf in Biscayne Bay. Most of the forty or so homes had been blown away in hurricanes. Maybe six or seven remained. That wouldn’t be a bad place to hide if you wanted to do it in plain sight.

  And Mel and his turtles. Mel Fisher found the Atocha—the richest underwater shipwreck treasure ever—near the Dry Tortugas. Tortuga is the Spanish word for turtle, and the Dry Tortugas is the name of a Civil War fort on a small island some sixty miles west of Key West.

  While I knew a little more, I still didn’t know much.

  Biscayne Bay opened before us. The wind from the Atlantic had churned the water to whitecaps. I tried skirting the edge as close as possible to get a break from the wind, but it was no good. She beat us up pretty good. We gassed up at the Black Point Marina, used the bathrooms, and I tried to cheer up the troops for the remainder of the trip across the bay. Conditions were ugly and worsening. If I could come out of the marina and drive due east-southeast toward Elliott Key, I could come in under the windward side of the key where the waters would be calmer. But getting there would beat most of our teeth out of our heads. Moving due south along the western edge of the bay was asking for more of the same, only longer. My hope was to get to the Card Sound Bridge and inside the cover of Key Largo, where we could dock for the night at a hotel on the water. After today’s beating, they’d need a good night’s sleep in a bed.

  I chose Elliott Key. We’d pay for it for the first hour, but getting there would be worth it. When we exited the safety of the channel and were back out in open water, Gunner hopped up onto Clay’s lap and the two held each other. Summer and Ellie crouched behind me, bracing themselves between the back bench and the seat of my center console.

  Me? I held on while the waves broke over the gunnels. I put her up on plane, tried to find a rhythm to the waves with the least amount of water in the boat, and adjusted the tabs. I tried everything I knew, but it was little help. We were getting soaked. Between spray and waves breaking over the bow, I turned on the bilge pump and watched as the ankle-deep water drained out the scuppers. While Gone Fiction could handle it, I wasn’t too sure about us. Crossing the bay, one thing became apparent: we were the only boat on the water.

  Two hours later, we approached Elliott Key. Once inside her shadow, she broke the wind and the water calmed. Almost to glass. Gunner walked around, sniffed my ankle, looked up at me, and then returned to Clay. I think that was his way of telling me I was crazy.

  Elliott Key is a national park. Nice cove marina. People camp here for days at a time. Atlantic on one side. Bay on the other. It’s idyllic. Right now, the place was empty as the waters and wind from the Atlantic beat the shoreline and campsites. Save one boat.

  A nice boat. Forty-plus feet. Five Mercury engines. Two thousand horsepower total. She was a seventy-plus-mile-an-hour boat made to run the islands and back in about the time it takes to eat a sandwich. A million dollars or better. Black hull. Black windows. Black matching engines.

  She said, “Don’t mess with me.” So of course I did.

  I tied up behind her and let the troops and Gunner stretch their legs while I made myself look busy. Nobody moved up top, but I heard the faint noise of a stereo beneath. Walking along the boardwalk to the bathroom, I passed her from stern to bow. She was spotless. New. Well maintained. Somebody’s pride. She also had no name and no significant markings. Nothing to set her apart other than the all black.

  If I was waiting for a storm to
pass or let up, this would be a good place to do it. Nobody in their right mind would attempt to pick up anyone from land or deliver them either to another vessel or—and this got me thinking—a house on stilts. The wind and waves made it impossible. Both people and boats would be crushed. But if the wind abated, I’d stow my boat right about here.

  I needed to do some snooping around, and I couldn’t do it with a deck full of tired people. We exited the marina and wound through the mangroves en route to Key Largo. Mangroves are one of my favorite trees, and Summer picked up on this as we slipped between them. She, too, was glad to be out of the eggbeater.

  The sun was falling, but she chose to say nothing. She just stood there. Next to me. And if I’m honest, I liked it.

  Chapter 32

  Key Largo loomed on our left, and soon we passed beneath the Card Sound Bridge. A bridge of some reputation. Years ago, some crazy writer with a broken heart drove his Mercedes off the top of the span. His mangled German automobile had been salvaged and erected as a rusty monument on the shore nearby. His body, on the other hand, was never found.

  We passed through the relatively calm waters of Barnes Sound, where Clay sat up and began taking notice. Off to our left, an old sailboat, maybe sixty feet or better, lay on her side, taking on water. Had been for years. Her mast was snapped at the waterline. She’d never recover. Lost at sea. Once beautiful. Now, not so much.

  We idled beneath US1, and the life of Key Largo opened before us. Waterfront bars, jet skiers, fishing boats—the calm waters were alive with people. Most had come to snorkel or scuba in John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park, a three-mile by twenty-five-mile underwater haven on the other side of the Key. In the Atlantic. It’s Florida’s Grand Canyon. Living coral for seventy-five square miles or thereabouts. It’s so fragile, and so alive, that boaters aren’t allowed to anchor in it for fear of killing it. It’s one small part of a larger whole known as Florida’s Great Reef, which stretches from Miami to some seventy miles south of Key West. If you really want to “see” Florida, you’d be hard-pressed to do better than Pennekamp. It’s an undersea wonderworld. Full of sergeant majors, jack crevalle, pompano, yellow grunts, mangrove snapper, smiling barracudas, sharks, leopard rays—you name it, it’s there. Then there’s the coral. Every color under the rainbow paints the coral, which waves at you as the current ripples through.

  But there’d be no Pennekamp for us. I skirted along the eastern edge and pulled into the marina attached to the Key Largo Bay Marriot Beach Resort. I needed something that attracted the party crowd.

  I parked the boat much like you do your car and rented three rooms. As the dark reds and crimson of sundown burst onto the western skyline, I handed each their key and told them, “Don’t wait up.”

  Clay stiffened. So did Summer. Both objected, but I explained, “I’ve got to do some snooping, and besides, I need your eyes and ears around the pool deck. I need you to listen to what people are saying. I’ll be back. Midnight. Maybe after.”

  Summer tried to convince me otherwise, and I told her, “You can be the most help to me if you’ll watch Ellie, drink some drinks with umbrellas sticking out the top, and listen closely to what other people are saying.”

  Gunner looked at me and pushed his ears forward. I patted my thigh and he stiffened and looked at Clay. Clay said, “Get on,” and Gunner hopped down into the boat. I cast off, eased back out into the water, and tried to shake off both the weary and the tired. Behind me, Summer stood on the dock, arms crossed. I turned the wheel and returned, pulling up alongside the bulkhead. She looked down at me. I shifted to neutral.

  “I’ll be back.”

  “I know.”

  “Oh, you do?” I’d missed that completely. “I thought you looked worried that I might not.”

  She shook her head. “I’m worried about the condition you’ll be in when you do.”

  I laughed. “That’s comforting.”

  I turned the wheel and put the resort in my wake. With daylight fading, I shifted to nighttime mode on my electronics, passed back beneath the Card Sound Bridge and within sight of the Mercedes monument, and began hugging the easternmost coastline. As long as I stayed within cover of the mangroves, I cut through smooth waters. But the moment I ventured too far from the protection of the shoreline, the waves and whitecaps returned. An hour later, shrouded in darkness, I cut all my running lights, running illegally and blind to anything but radar, and continued creeping along the inside. When I reached Elliott Key, I tied up loosely to a mangrove and watched the entrance to the cove through Leica binoculars.

  For three hours I studied the cove and the rough waters of the bay. In the distance, silhouetted against the sky, I counted seven houses on stilts. Each was dark. Not a light anywhere. The only lights I could see were those of the Miami shoreline and the lighthouse just north.

  At two a.m., a forty-plus-foot vessel cloaked in black and carrying five engines on her transom idled out of the cove without a single running light. Once clear of the shallow water, she throttled up and churned the rough water, having set a vector for what looked like Stiltsville. That boat was far more capable of handling six- to eight-foot seas, which was what we were looking at. I could survive in my Whaler. That boat could navigate. Big difference.

  Losing sight, I knew I needed to close the gap. I pulled in my line, set my phone inside a watertight OtterBox, and ventured out where the waves began crashing over the gunnels. Within minutes I was soaked. Between my chart and the physical landmark of the lighthouse, I set a course toward the closest house, knowing I couldn’t get near any of the pilings or the waves would split Gone Fiction against them. The vessel I was following no doubt had bow thrusters. Given her weight, agility, and power, she could navigate close enough to one of the homes to either take on or offload passengers.

  The wind pushed me hard off course, and I had to fight the wheel to keep her aimed north. Gunner whined above the roar of the wind. He didn’t like this any more than I did. He retreated from the bow and huddled next to me, eventually bracing himself between my legs. I kept one hand on the wheel, one on the throttle, and every few seconds I’d touch his head and let him know I knew he was there.

  In the chaos, I lost sight of the boat, but that did not mean they had lost sight of me. While I couldn’t see twenty feet off the bow, chances were good they had radar, which told them both my and their exact locations. My chart told me I was within a thousand feet of the first home, but my electronics worked off of GPS; given the clouds, I doubted my location. And I was right to doubt it. A wave crashed over the bow, flooding the inside. When I looked up, I was nearly beneath the porch or some outcrop of the first home. Above me loomed concrete beams threatening to crush my T-top.

  I slammed the throttle forward, digging myself out of the black hole I’d fallen into. My momentum pushed me into and through the next oncoming wave, further flooding the deck. The water had risen above my ankles. More mid-shin. I wasn’t worried about Gone Fiction sinking as much as I was worried about the engine flooding and leaving me powerless to be bashed against the pilings or tossed at will through the bay.

  The next wave brought more water. The boat turned thirty degrees beneath me and Gunner slid out from beneath my legs, slamming into the wall of the gunnel. The impact flipped him and sent him spinning through the air like a caricature from a comic book. While he was a good swimmer, I doubted he was that good. I lunged, grabbed his collar, and dragged him back through the foam and spray. I wedged him between my legs and throttled through the next wave as the water poured over the bow, again threatening to swamp the boat. Conditions had deteriorated, and I needed to get out before I lost the boat. Gunner whined beneath me in agreement.

  In the distance, a single running light flashed. Tossing about the water like a bobber. There it was again. At half throttle, I circled, allowing the wind to come in behind me, which meant the waves were no longer coming over the bow. Now the wind was pushing the nose down, threatening to bury the bow in the troughs
between the waves.

  I used the light like a beacon and moved toward it. Somehow that boat had enough power to remain stationary on the leeward side of one of the homes toward the middle of the cluster. Between her two thousand horsepower, her bow thrusters, and a bow line that threatened to snap the piling in two, she was able to counter the storm and remain stable enough beneath a platform. Stable enough that bodies appeared, walking on the porch above it. Ninety seconds later, a line formed on the edge of the porch, and one by one they began jumping off the platform onto the deck of the boat below. This was roughly akin to jumping off a one-story house into a swimming pool—although the pool was moving and tilting at more than thirty degrees. The figures were female. Save the very last one. He was stocky, in charge, and pointing something at them. Prodding them. One by one, they jumped. Maybe ten in total. Their mouths said they were screaming, but I couldn’t hear them.

  With two to go, one of the girls mistimed her jump and missed the boat entirely, landing in the water. One of the girls in the boat reached for her while others shined a light, but it was useless. She was gone.

  The guy with the gun pushed the last of the girls headfirst into the boat, and then he turned toward me. I knew this because I saw the thing in his hand flash red. Once, twice, then a continual red flash. I did not hear the report of the rifle over the roar of the wind, but in my experience, you never hear the bullets before they hit you. If you’re lucky, you hear them after.

  I cut the wheel hard north and slammed the throttle to full, shooting me out of one wave trough and immediately into another. Cutting the wheel again hard left, I saw the transport vessel had throttled up and was moving up on plane. Attesting to the power of the engines. All I could see was the white foam of her wake painted against the darkness that had become the ocean.

  Whoever had ended up in the water was certainly long gone, but judging by her mistimed landing, she was only a hundred yards or so from the next house. The wind and waves would push her directly into the pilings or the dock. Which would either snap her neck, causing her to drown, or spit her up on the floating dock.