What Lies Beneath: A Florida Action Adventure Novel (Scott Jarvis Private Investigator Book 10)

by Scott Cook

  I did not get onto the Howard Franklin Bridge that led from Tampa over to Saint Petersburg until after seven, and not to the Tierra Verde Marina… which somebody had inconsiderately placed on the south end of Saint Pete, until nearly eight p.m. Luckily, as I told Wayne, the boat was about eighty percent prepared to go out for a weekend.

  The diesel tank was nearly full, with twenty gallons remaining. Enough fuel to go to Marco and back under power if necessary. The freezer was stocked with steaks, burgers, frozen shrimp and chicken breasts. There were some frozen veggies, breakfast sausage and a Tupperware container of ice. About the only thing in the fridge were condiments, butter and a few beers. The booze locker did contain several bottles in various stages of fullness and I even kept a pipe, tobacco and a small stash of cigars on board.

  I sent Wayne a quick text with a list of things we could use and began to get the boat ready. I removed the sail cover, binnacle cover and started the engine, letting the alternator add some charge to the batteries, as I wasn’t sure how full they were and they’d need to power the fridge and freezer.

  At eight-thirty, Wayne and Keisha arrived with a medium-sized suitcase, a garbage bag of bedding and a couple of grocery bags.

  “This is so exciting!” Keisha announced as I helped her aboard and she gave me a hug, “I haven’t been on an extended sea trip in years.”

  “You know we’re doing some work, too,” I told her, taking stuff from Wayne. “You okay with that?”

  She smirked at me, “Shit… I ain’t worried. Just think about the story I’ll have to tell afterward. What can I do to help?”

  “Nothing at the moment,” I said. “If that’s all your stuff, let’s cast off and head out. We can get squared away once we’re underway.”

  Wayne helped me cast off and I backed out of the slip and headed down the long canal that led out to Pass-a-Grille Pass. Keisha went below and stowed their gear in the v-berth and started to put the groceries away in the fridge. The land breeze had asserted itself by the time we got to the pass, although it wasn’t more than six or seven knots. Wayne and I raised the main and set the jib and once we rounded the outer marker and I turned us onto a course of about two-two-zero so as to clear Egmont Key, we had the light breeze on the port quarter and were motor-sailing at six point six knots.

  I set the auto pilot and leaned back. The evening was just a little on the cool side, with temperatures around seventy. The weather report said it’d drop another five or six degrees, but as we headed south, we’d probably not see anything below sixty-five that night. The night itself was clear and a moon just past full was hanging low over the dwindling black line of coast.

  “I know this isn’t a pleasure cruise, exactly,” Keisha said, coming up on deck with a bottle in one hand and a couple of plastic champagne flutes in the other. “But still… thought it was a bit of an occasion.”

  “Hell yeah!” Wayne said, taking the bottle from her and untwisting the wire around the cork. He flicked the cork with his thumb and it went sailing to looward with a respectable pop! “Why not?”

  The flutes filled, we clinked and toasted to a pleasant voyage.

  “Pretty good stuff,” I commented after my first sip. “Not that I’m much of a judge… and to add to the previous sentiment… here’s to satisfactory resolutions.”

  Again we clinked… or clunked… and polished off the bottle while my old Hunter Cherubini thirty-four plowed her way southward into a calm night.

  35

  There’s nothing quite like a sunrise at sea. Especially when the sky is mostly clear but for a few puffy clouds that start as grayish blobs during false dawn. As the Earth rotates toward her star, the clouds slowly begin to take on color. First a lighter gray and then, before you actually see the sun for yourself, you see them flame into pink cotton balls. Suddenly, that first refracted ray of sunlight blazes a thin line across the water and touches your vessel.

  It’s not quite like a sunset. There’s no reason that should be… it’s essentially the reverse application of the phenomenon… yet somehow it’s different. Sharper perhaps. Perhaps it’s simply the human mind expecting something different. In any case, it’s worth witnessing whenever possible.

  The morning, like the previous evening, was calm with only two-foot seas or less. A steady but light seven knot breeze blew from the east, nor east and after almost eleven hours of running, we were seventy miles closer to Marco Island. According to the chart plotter, we had sixty-three miles to go and were making six point seven knots. ETA was four-twenty-seven that afternoon.

  I sat at the helm, sipping my coffee and reflecting. The previous evening had been deceptively pleasant. So much so that I nearly forgot the true reason for this trip in the first place. We talked, laughed, I’d had a cigar and I’d even made us all of Irish coffees around ten when the temperature got a bit chilly. Although it never dropped below sixty-five and promised to be even warmer today… the water temperature in late January was just under sixty degrees, so it chilled the air over the water a bit.

  Keisha had taken the first watch, from ten to two. Wayne and I had stayed up with her for most of it. I went below and crashed out around twelve-thirty. Wayne sat up from two to five and then I came back up to relieve him. Four and a half hours of sleep doesn’t seem like much, but it was all my body needed so long as I didn’t make a habit of it.

  One of the more frustrating aspects of cruising along the Gulf Coast of Florida at night between mid-October and mid-May is the constant threat of fouling your running gear on stone crab pot buoy lines. During the season, crabbers lay them by the thousands within ten or twenty miles of shore. They also often lay them in navigation channels as well, y’know, just to be douchey. Frequently, these traps have black buoys attached to black rope, which is a delight to try and spot in the daytime let alone in the middle of the night. The demand for this delicious and renewable crab delicacy… you only remove the larger of the two claws and allow the crab to go back and grow another… is so great that a man could almost walk from Marco Island and across Florida Bay to Marathon without getting his loafers damp.

  Fortunately, the night vision monoculars I used helped the person on watch tackle this obstacle. At least six times during my watch alone, I’d had to alter course to avoid a trap or line of traps. I had to do so again, aiming between two buoys on a line of pots that seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon. It was illegal to poach these traps, of course… but tempting. Especially if you’ve ever had to go into cold water to cut one of them free from your propeller!

  Wayne and Keisha both got up around eight and after making more coffee, Wayne began to cook us breakfast. Eggs, bacon and even pancakes, which although elongated by the gentle sway of the boat and thus the stove, were tasty.

  “So what do you do on these long slow trips?” Keisha asked.

  I chuckled, “Listen to tunes, troll a bait or two, read or listen to an audio book. I have a few, if you want to use my Audible app on my phone.”

  At the moment, my phone was tuned into my special sailing playlist, Aquatopia, the Official Scott Jarvis Playlist on Spotify and Gordon Lightfoot, Canadian folk-rock superstar of the 1970’s was singing to us about a Carefree Highway.

  “You know, I’ve always wanted to read the one about me,” Keisha said with a grin.

  I laughed, “About you, huh? Well, it’s called Shadows of Limelight. I can turn it on if you’d rather hear it than this old music.”

  “I’ve got an Audible account,” She replied. “And a Bluetooth speaker. Maybe I’ll go up on the bow and lay down in the beanbag chair and listen in a bit.”

  Wayne appeared in the companionway, “So what’s for lunch anyway?”

  “Dude…” I said from my lounging position on the starboard cockpit bench. “I just cleaned up breakfast dishes.”

  Wayne kissed Keisha who was lounging across from me on the portside and settled himself in behind the wheel. I was pleased to see him check the chart plotter and then reach down and ta
p in a slight starboard correction into the autopilot.

  “Well…” Wayne said with a shrug. “You said something about some shrimp…”

  “Ah… you want me to make you my famous shrimp scampi, eh?” I inquired.

  “Nah… was thinking the Alabama shrimp girl might whip us up somethin’,” He replied.

  “Shrimp girl?” I asked her.

  “My family owns a couple of shrimp boats in Mobile,” Keisha explained. “I used to go out and work on them sometimes. So I pretty much know shrimp A to Z.”

  “Got any good ways to prep them? I asked.

  She smiled and then in a drawling southern accent began: “Yup… got your fried shrimp… broiled shrimp… barbequed shrimp…”

  “Oh brother…” I groaned.

  “…boiled shrimp… shrimp on a stick…” She continued as Wayne laughed his ass off.

  “I get it,” I deadpanned.

  “…sautéed shrimp… blackened shrimp…”

  “High-larious,” I moaned.

  “…tempura shrimp… baked shrimp…”

  “Oh my God…” I said, raising my eyes to the bright blue sky above.

  Keisha roared with laughter and I joined in.

  “So which of them are you gonna make us?” Wayne asked after wiping his eyes.

  “I could do a boil,” Keisha said. “Maybe make a nice remoulade or aioli to go with it.”

  “That could work,” I said. “I’ve got a big enough stock pot. Got onions, garlic and some lemons, too.”

  “Got any Zataran’s?” She asked.

  “No… I should though… but I do have Old Bay.”

  Keisha scoffed, “Pssh! Old Bay…”

  “It’s not his fault, baby… he’s white,” Wayne jibed.

  “What? What the hell’s white about Old Bay?” I cranked.

  “Nothin’… it’s just that everything you do is white,” Wayne explained.

  “Yeah? How bout givin’ you a black eye, is that white?”

  “Kinda.”

  “Dick.”

  Keisha was laughing again, “I can work with that. Got any of that homemade chili powder on board?”

  “I do,” I said. “Sorry if that’s too white for Wayne, but it’s what we’ve got. Got a whole locker of mayonnaise and Wonder Bread though… ya’ prick.”

  I helped with the shrimp boil, which was delicious in spite of using Old Bay instead of Zataran’s. At a few minutes after one in the afternoon, we arrived at the coordinates that Richard Kelly had converted from Loran to GPS for me. We were about twenty miles west and maybe ten miles north of Marco Island.

  We were on the exact latitude but there was still a margin for error. A margin that could be a few hundred feet or as much as a thousand. The only thing to do was to drop a weighted buoy on the coordinates and then search around it in ever-widening rings.

  I had several buoys prepared. They were especially made for deep reef fishing. An empty bleach bottle with a hundred and twenty feet of twine wrapped around it tied to a big twelve-ounce lead fishing weight. You simply tossed the bottle overboard, which had the twine wrapped around it. The weight would sink, spinning the bottle and paying out the line until the weight hit bottom. Simple but easy to deploy and very effective.

  I’d upgraded the boat’s navigation gear some time ago. The chart plotter was now joined by a high-powered Raymarine fathometer. Often called fish finders, a fathometer is a civilian-level echo locator. Using sound waves sent and received by a transducer fastened to the hull, good units could plot bottom terrain in very good detail. They were even sensitive enough to detect schools of fish swimming beneath the boat.

  Although not nearly as effective as a full side-scan sonar system, if there was a sunken boat below us in the ninety-feet of water we were in, the fathometer would pick it up. Fortunately, this didn’t take more than fifteen minutes.

  “I think that’s our girl,” I said, tapping the display. “Bottom just rose dramatically… I’m gonna make another pass at right angles. Wayne, stand ready on that second buoy…”

  I circled around and once again the large object appeared. We were only a couple of hundred feet from the first buoy.

  “Toss it!” I exclaimed.

  Wayne dropped the second bottle over the side and I slowed down and moved away. After a couple of minutes, I could see that when in neutral, we were drifting southwest. I pulled a hundred feet or so northeast of the second buoy and had Wayne drop the anchor. He paid out a good scope and tied us off with the buoy floating only fifteen feet off the stern.

  “You ready to get wet?” I asked him.

  “You comin’ on to me?” he retorted.

  “Figured it’d better be now,” I quipped. “That water’s awfully chilly.”

  “That’s okay, you can spare it, baby,” Keisha said with a giggle.

  “Least one of us can,” Wayne jibed, elbowing me.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I replied as I started digging dive gear out of the storage locker under the starboard cockpit bench. “I guess once it gets that small, it’s too dense to shrink any further. Hope you brought a wetsuit.”

  He did, as did I. Unfortunately, mine was a shorty surfer style suit. The shorty was designed to cover the trunk of the body, only going as far as mid-bicep and mid-thigh on the limbs. This allowed for better freedom of movement. It was enough, though. Although the water temp was sixty, and maybe closer to fifty at the bottom, I’d be fine for the time we’d be down there. Also, another advantage of the rebreathers was that the air was warm and humid, slowing down heat loss in your core.

  “Okay,” I said, handing him a full-face mask. “This gear is fitted out with a Gertrude. Keisha, you can talk to us with this unit here.”

  I handed her a walkie-talkie looking device attached to a long, thick cable that ended in a half-gallon milk jug sized object that resembled a cow bell. This I tossed over the railing and wrapped a loop of the cord around one of the jib sheet cleats.

  “Fancy,” She said. “When do I get wet?”

  “I wouldn’t get your hopes up after this dive,” I jabbed Wayne. “We’ll see. If we need to do another dive, you can accompany me. Are you certified?”

  She nodded, “Yes… but I’ve never used those things before.”

  “That’s okay, I’ve got a standard open circuit rig,” I said. “You ready, big man?”

  “I’ve only done this once before with you,” Wayne said, jerking a thumb at the Revo unit on his back. “So take it easy.”

  “No sweat,” I said. “I’ve checked your gear. Same deal as with regular dives, except we won’t have to decompress long. Let’s do this, I’d still like to try and get to Marco before dark.”

  We both sat on top of the cabin with our legs over the lifelines and the heels of our flippers resting on the chain plate. After a final adjustment of our masks, we each placed a hand over the faceplate and stood, moon-stepping out and away from the boat and into the inviting blue water.

  “Damn!” Wayne yelped as we plunged in.

  I chuckled, understanding fully. Although the wetsuit worked by heating the water inside to your skin temperature and then trapping that heat beneath the neoprene… the effect took a minute to start working. That first minute or two was a bit chilly.

  We inverted and began kicking slowly toward the bottom. The water was remarkably clear, even for the southern Gulf of Mexico. Visibility was perhaps sixty or seventy feet, and it was easy to find the buoy’s line and follow it down into the indigo beneath us.

  At sixty feet down I could already clearly make out the shape of a commercial fishing boat. The Lady Lucy, if that was indeed what she was, lay nearly perfectly upright on the bottom. Although sixty-five years of marine growth had collected and softened the shape slightly, when you got close there was no mistake. The A-frame had collapsed, either from rust or impact and was lying across the after end of the work deck, blocking the holds. The pilot house was intact, and its door stood open, revealing a dark and somewhat foreboding
interior.

  The vessel was about forty-five feet long and the top of the wheelhouse rose twenty feet off the bottom.

  “Nice artificial reef,” I commented. “Probably the only big structure around for miles… look at that school of hogs! Man, I wish I’d brought a spear gun.”

  “Not the only thing around,” Wayne replied. He and I had separated, each of us descending to the bottom on either side of the work deck. I could see his top half over the starboard side of the boat. He was about forty feet from me and almost turned completely away.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Come and see for yourself.”

  “Hey, you boys okay down there?” Keisha’s voice echoed a bit in our ears.

  “All good, baby,” Wayne replied. “Just scoping the boat now.”

  I swam up and over the shrimper’s stern. As I neared Wayne, I began to perceive a lump of greater darkness on the bottom just within visual range. I looked at him and he shrugged.

  “Okay… let’s go check it out,” I said. “Halfway, you stop and stand on the bottom. Keep the shrimper in visual and me in visual. I’ll take a quick peek and then we can inspect the boat.”

  Wayne stopped and I neared the… thing. It might have been a boat or a piece of a ship although it was hard to tell with all the growth. Much more growth than on the shrimper, which meant that this thing sank long before the Lady Lucy had.

  There was a vague outline of what could’ve been the starboard bow or port quarter of a large boat or small wooden ship. When I swam around to the other side, I was convinced that was what it must’ve been. For although coral and barnacles and soft growth had thrived here for a long, long time, the pattern of the ridges and bumps and angles had a vaguely symmetrical and artificial appearance. If I let my imagination run wild, I could see what might have been ribs and stringers and bulkheads… or pieces of them.