“But you sailed with him anyway?”
“Sure, he was okay. In small doses, you know. And he had a very nice boat.”
“So who were the others on deck with him?” asked Lenny .
“Who? Oh, Felicity and Drew? Felicity’s the blond girl, nice girl. She’s works at the Post . Drew’s a boat builder and sailor.”
“The walrus with the mustache?” I asked. Ron nodded.
Lenny leaned forward on his desk. “What did they say happened?”
“They don’t know. Felicity said she was on deck and Will told her that the water was as flat as a bath, so she might as well go below and rest. Drew had spent a good few hours eyes on the water getting across the bank, so he must have been pretty tired, and I think Alec offered to take his place on deck. Alec said he fell asleep waiting down below.”
“Which one was Alec?” I asked.
“Young guy, smart dresser,” Ron said.
I recalled the Ralph Lauren wannabe. “What was he waiting for?”
“No idea.”
“So this guy, Will, was on deck alone?” asked Lenny.
Ron shook his head like he had let his skipper down. I knew the look. I’d had a few occasions in my previous life playing minor league baseball, when I’d done something, thrown a bad pitch or not followed the catcher’s call, and I’d been thunked out of the park and felt bad about letting the team down. But what I didn’t see was how this was Ron’s fault in the slightest.
“He was up there, and somehow he went over,” whispered Ron. I could see him kicking himself for not being there, up on deck, even if it wasn’t his watch.
“Sounds like this Felicity or Alec guy weren’t doing their job, not you,” I said.
“Was it rough?” asked Lenny .
Ron shook his head again. “No, not really. I mean, it’s the Gulf Stream, right, so it’s no Lake Placid, but for the Stream it was darn good. Like I say, there was a light sou’easter, so we had the breeze at our back. There was just enough roll to put me off to sleep. The weather didn’t turn at all until after.”
“After what?” I asked, standing and pouring Ron a glass of water from the cooler.
He took the water and sipped. “The radio call. I woke a little because I felt the wind change, and it can’t have been more than a few minutes later the radio call came. I was sleeping in the galley. There were only three cabins, each a double, so I bunked on the sofa in the galley. You know I can sleep anywhere.”
“Exhibit one, that sofa,” I said, nodding at Ron.
He gave a little smile, which was encouraging. “I took the call. It was the Coast Guard. They had been alerted by Will’s beacon.”
“His PLB,” I said. Lenny lifted an eyebrow at me.
“That’s right. They were new. Not many sailors have them,” said Ron, sipping his water.
I frowned. “I would have thought they were mandatory.” You wouldn’t get me out in the middle of the ocean, even on a cruise ship, without some kind of tracking device.
“No, they’re not. It’s race rules that the boat has an EPIRB, but not individual sailors.”
“EPIRB?” I asked.
“An emergency position indicating radio beacon,” said Ron. “It’s a beacon that’s registered to a specific boat. As opposed to the PLBs, which are newer, and sailor-specific.”
“So you didn’t have one of these PLBs?” asked Lenny.
“I did. We all did. Will got one for everyone. ”
“So the Coast Guard knew he’d fallen off the boat?” I asked.
“They got the signal, and they were calling to confirm if it was a false alarm. I ran up on deck and found no one, and Alec had woken up by then. He was in a galley chair opposite, and he checked Will’s cabin and found he wasn’t there.”
I felt my skin prickle. “Where was this?”
“Eighteen nautical miles west of Bimini.”
“So what did you do?”
Ron shook his head again. “We did the only thing we could do. We kept sailing.”
“You didn’t look for him?”
“The wind turned,” said Lenny. “Right?”
Ron nodded. “It was the middle of the night in the Gulf Stream, and the wind was turning to a nor’easter. And the boat has an EPIRB but it doesn’t have tracking systems, so we can send the signal but we can’t receive or track it. We’d be looking for a needle in a haystack. We had to make sure no one else was endangered, so we kept our westerly heading to get closer to shore before things got too choppy. And the Coast Guard was in the air before we ended the call. They had the signal, they knew where he was.”
“So why haven’t they found him yet?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Ron, not for the first time. “I just don’t know.”
Chapter Three
THE COAST GUARD search and rescue team lost the signal thirteen hours after it first alerted them. They called Drew, the walrus who knew the Coast Guard guys best, and he spread the news. They had a last position, they knew the direction the beacon was heading, and they planned to continue the search in the triangulated area. Twenty-four hours after the first alert, a front moved across Florida and drove the winds in hard from the north. Lenny told me that was the worst possible wind in the Gulf Stream, but I had no idea why.
Forty-six hours after the first alert, and sunset on the second day, the Coast Guard pulled its boats and birds in. There was no signal, and nothing to see in the dark. The next day a cutter headed out into the rough seas, and a fixed-wing search plane swept the sky, and at sunset on the third day a Coast Guard officer called Drew to say they were suspending the active search and informing the next of kin.
The next morning we left Ron to pack up his files in the office. He had the most files of all of us, since he did the most corporate work, and companies liked paperwork more than divorce or missing persons cases, who generally wanted a yes or no. He was quiet when we left, seemingly resigned to the bad news. Lenny decided we needed some time at the range, but more than that I think he wanted to give Ron some space. I was okay with that plan, because I was at a loss to know what to do for Ron. I couldn’t feel his pain. Sure I’d seen approximations of it, times when I’d come face to face with my own mortality. The death of my mother, and to a lesser extent my father. I’d seen guys get injuries on the ballpark that I just knew, right there, would be the end of their careers. And all that the players knew to do was slap them on the back, tell them chin up, you’ll be all right , and then leave them to work through the demons of opportunities lost, all by themselves. They were hollow words and hollow feelings, and if I couldn’t do more than that for Ron, I didn’t really want to do anything at all.
Lenny drove down to west of Hollywood, which was a bit of a hike from West Palm, but closer to Miami, where his buddy Lucas lived. The range looked like a set from a zombie apocalypse movie. We drove in through a rusted gate to a steel-sided structure that appeared to have been abandoned years ago. I saw Lucas’s Tacoma pickup in the lot. The steel-sided building housed an office where a man in a white-fronted trucker's cap that had the remnants of a peeled-off logo on it stood behind a wooden desk, chewing gum. His T-shirt proclaimed in loud letters, over my dead body , which seemed overly ominous for a rifle range. We checked in, and the guy gave us our lanes and handed me safety glasses and bright orange earmuffs, and then he collected my handgun from the gun safe. Lucas was laid back on a bench, watching a couple of women firing pistols at targets of very ugly-looking men. He smiled as we approached. He had dusty, sand-colored hair and a deep tan that made his teeth glow when he smiled. We shook hands and his skin felt like hide. He wore yellow anti-glare goggles and subtle camo earmuffs.
“All right?” he asked loudly in his broad Australian accent.
Lenny and I both nodded, and we headed for our lanes. Lucas took a spot where he could lay down on one of the longer ranges, which were still way too short to test him. I’d seen him hit a can at eight hundred yards in the Everglades, and I got t
he impression that wasn’t just a good day out. Lenny had served in the US military, and Lucas in the Australian Defense Force, both in capacities that they chose not to talk about much. Their paths had crossed somewhere in the Middle East years before, or as Lucas had called it, a red-hot dung heap of a place. It was my impression, gathered from piecing together fragments of conversations and filling in the gaps, that Lenny had also done some work for the National Security Agency. I liked Lucas. He was laid back, like I imagined all Australians to be, and despite his past, like Lenny he seemed to be at ease with the world. Despite that I couldn’t say I really knew him. There were depths there that hid dark monsters.
Both men could pop a coconut off a tree with a rifle from a distance that most of the rest of us would struggle to see the tree. Lucas made his practice interesting by trying to make only one hole in his target, regardless of how many rounds he shot. I, on the other hand, just tried not to shoot myself in the foot. I hadn’t grown up with guns, and preferred that they stay in the hands of the Army and the cops, and off the streets. But Lenny said in our line of work you could hope for that, but you could never be sure, so better to be prepared. Lenny also drilled into me the idea that if I was to handle a gun, I’d better be darn good at using it, so our visits to the range had been semiregular since my retirement from baseball.
I placed my empty pistol, a 9mm Ruger, on the table and opened a fresh box of ammunition. I unclipped the magazine and pulled the slide back to confirm the chamber was clear, loaded seven rounds into the mag, and then I looked at Lenny, who gave me a nod. I picked up the Ruger in my right hand and slid the magazine home into the gun, then used my left hand to draw the slide and allowed it to snap into firing position. A loaded gun is surprisingly heavy, although some of the heft comes from the weight of knowing that I am holding something that is designed to kill. I pointed the gun down the range, spread my feet slightly and then lifted the weapon to the target. I looked down the barrel at the round target at the other end of the range. I never chose a target printed to look like a person. I understood the logic for law enforcement or military. If you were ever going to have to shoot at another human being, you wanted to have plenty of practice behind you aiming at something approximating your target. I hadn’t reached a point where I was that comfortable with either the weapon or the idea of pointing it at a person, and I couldn’t see that day coming, so I went for the old-fashioned archery-style target.
I pulled back on the trigger, felt the resistance and then pulled a little more. Even through earmuffs, the sound of close gunfire was loud. The gun recoiled some, and I quickly took aim again and pulled off another six shots, until the chamber and magazine were empty. I realized I had been holding my air, so I let out a long slow breath, and then took another, in through the mouth, out through the nose. I released the magazine, placed it on the table and then pulled the slide back to reveal an empty chamber. As I put the empty pistol on the table before me, I felt Lenny lean across my shoulder and hit the button to return the target. It flapped as it was pulled toward us, and then with a thunk Lenny released the button and the target hung before us. There were seven holes. One was on the edge of the circles numbered nine and eight. The other six sat neatly within the red center circle. It wasn’t a long range, but I turned to Lenny like a Little League kid who had just hit a humdinger beyond the diamond. He nodded and smiled, and gave me a wink. Then he stepped away and took his own stall, and we all practiced until our boxes of rounds were done.
Later we sat in a small Cuban taberna and shared a few beers. Neither Lenny nor Lucas lauded their ability with guns over me, and once they had both congratulated me on my good effort, they didn’t usually mention it again. It occurred to me that to these men, guns weren’t a lifestyle choice—something to enjoy—but rather tools of the trade, and they didn’t feel the need to discuss it, like a dentist wouldn’t captivate a dinner party with his latest toothbrushes. But as we sat around in a cinderblock bar, the smell of carnitas wafting out onto the street, Lenny frowned at me.
“You need another gun. It’s time.”
I returned his frown. “Another gun? I would have thought one was deadly and two was superfluous?”
“Different jobs require different tools. The one you have is your main tool. It’s all above board.”
“Of course,” I said, moving to sip my beer but not.
“There may come a time when you need another. A job that might require, how can I say it? For you to go outside the lines.”
This was not news to me. I’d known Lenny since I had met him in Miami while at college, and he had gotten me out of and into a few scrapes since then. I knew that he had a strong sense of right and wrong, and sometimes his sense of the world didn’t quite match up with that written down by the legislature in the state capital. Sometimes he went, as he called it, outside the lines. And I was generally comfortable with that. But I didn’t see where he was going now, so I deepened my frown, which must have given him an eyeful of furrowed brow.
Lenny sipped his beer and then put it down on a beer mat. “I’m talking about something off the record.”
“You mean an illegal gun?”
“Untraceable,” Lucas added, not really helping me all that much.
“Why?”
“Just in case. You never know when it might be important that something not be linked back to you,” said Lenny.
“Do you have one?”
Lenny glanced at Lucas, and Lucas smiled and took a long drink of his beer.
“What would I use it for?”
Lenny leaned into me. “Insurance. The plan would be that you never use it. But you know what the Boy Scouts say.”
“I don’t think they mean have an illegal cache of weapons when they say be prepared . . .”
“Sure they do.”
I leaned back and sipped my beer, and looked at the two men. I trusted Lenny with my life, and Lenny trusted Lucas with his. So I didn’t take what they were saying lightly, even though I didn’t understand.
“I wouldn’t even know where to get one.”
Lenny sipped his beer and raised an eyebrow. “What about your friend, Sally.”
“Sally runs a pawn shop.”
Lucas smiled again. “And the queen lives in a house.”
“You think? Sally? ”
Lenny shrugged. “If I’m wrong, you let me know and we’ll sort something out.”
We spent the next hour chatting about the weather and baseball and nothing at all. There was no mention of guns or Ron or sailing boats, or men lost at sea. But I was thinking about all those things. Of how the things we took for granted could be swept away from us in the blink of an eye. By a gun, or by a slight change in the wind. And I resolved to visit my friend Sally Mondavi, and catch a baseball game and eat a hot dog and drink a warm beer, and chat about batting averages and ERAs and unconventional forms of insurance.
I shook hands with Lucas and he gave Lenny a hug that reminded me of brown bears, and Lucas took off back to the marina in Miami that he managed. Lenny and I turned north and headed back to West Palm. The office was deserted when we got there. Lizzy’s stuff was all neatly packed and ready to go. Lenny’s was all over his desk and in piles beside. He looked at it, and around the empty space until his eyes hit mine, and he smiled.
“Longboards,” we both said at the same time.
Chapter Four
LONGBOARD KELLY’S WAS the kind of place tourists happened upon only if they were horribly lost. It didn’t appear in any online review sites of the best dive bars, or haunts with local flavor, and if it had we would have all gone online and left a string of one-star reviews to keep the flocks at bay. And we would have done that with the blessing of the owner. Mick was a barrel-chested man who spoke as few words as possible to get his message across, and used facial expressions when he deemed words unnecessary. He didn’t care for strangers, and it took me a good couple years before he offered me a nod as I walked in through the rear courtyard. Lenny
and I got such a nod as we wandered in, the warm evening offering a hint at the summer that was brewing, the cloud front of the day giving way to a clear blue sky, lighting the courtyard tables with golden hues from a falling sun. The beer-labeled umbrellas had been opened on the tables in the courtyard and a light breeze wafted in, making them slow dance like lonely kids at the prom.
We headed for the outdoor bar that sat under a palapa shade to the side of the courtyard. Ron was waiting, beer in hand, chatting with Muriel behind the bar. Muriel wore her trademark tank top, hands on hips, ample breasts bursting at the seams. She wore a sly grin, as she often did, and I was happy to see that she had brought Ron’s smile out of him. She saw us wander in and bounced her hips off the bar that opened to the inside of the place, to the dark interior bar that we never bothered with, and she was already pouring two beers before we got under the shade of the palapa.
“Gentlemen,” said Ron, holding his beer aloft.
“Mr. Bennett,” said Lenny. “How goes it?”
“All good. My files are packed and ready to go. You? Still a straight shooter?”
“Whenever possible.”
Muriel passed us our drinks, and we said cheers and I put my arm around Ron’s shoulder and drank silently to the color that had returned to his face.
I sat down on a wobbly stool that had been in vogue when Armstrong did his tap dance on the moon. “How ya doing?” I asked him.
“Good, better.”
“New office digs, soon you’ll get a new place to live. You just need to get a new case and you’ll be set.”
He held his beer up. “To new beginnings.”
I smiled and took a drink. I was looking down my glass at Ron and I saw the smile in his eyes dissolve before me. I frowned and dropped the glass from my mouth. Ron was looking past me, across the courtyard, where the entrance was from the parking lot.
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