Captiva df-4

by Randy Wayne White

  Finally, he said, his mind had sensed a flicker of warmth. "It was sentient consciousness, man. You hear what I'm saying? Life, energy— whatever you want to call it. It was out there, very frail at first. Still a long way away, but I was homing in on the signal. It got stronger. Then—truly amazing—I began to sense other signals, but from different directions. Spread out all over the place. Thought . . . power. In far corners of the universe, these little islands of . . . divinity. I was making contact! This was. . . two weeks ago. Every night, I do deep meditation, man. Bypass all that deep-space bullshit so it's gotten to be like dialing from a cellular. If I had a cellular."

  He chattered on and on while I used the telescope to chase the flashing dot. Universal energy fields. Chakras, auras. Life registered a specific measure of electrical current—that, at least, was true. All matter in the universe was structural repetition. An atom with electrons, a planet with moons. . . adapted fins which were a bird's wing, the fingers of a child's hand. And had I looked down to notice that a stream of urine spirals like a DNA helix? Communication was nothing more than conduction; the dipoles could be at opposite points in the universe and it would make no difference. Tomlinson had simply accessed that current . . . and made a few new friends.

  "God's out there!" Tomlinson said. "God is out there, and He's not us. What a relief!"

  I stood from the telescope, cleaned my glasses and put them on. "Tomlinson?"

  He had been curling his fingers in his hair—a nervous habit. He moved toward the telescope. "The Big Guy wants to talk to me now?"

  I didn't want to have to tell him. "Not exactly."

  "Then what?"

  "It's ... an airplane. That's what you were seeing. An airplane."

  " What? Naw. . . ."

  "It took me a while to figure because the running lights weren't quite right. And it was moving so fast."

  "An airplane? They were going to give me some kind of signal. It popped right into my mind: ocular confirmation. Just the other night, making very heavy contact. Those very words. Right there on my boat, they were telling me to look."

  I shrugged. "Yeah, well. . . but this is some kind of fighter jet, probably out of MacDill or could be Homestead. Maybe a Tomcat with its war lights on, an F-14. Pretty strange. They do strafing and bombing runs in a restricted area off Marco. Remember that time we were anchored off the Ten Thousand Islands and heard explosions?"

  Tomlinson said, "Shit. Wouldn't you know."

  "They like to scramble early, avoid the civilian traffic. They've got Air Combat Maneuvering Instrumentation towers out there, built way off shore."

  He said glumly, "The military industrial complex is going to fuck with me one too many times. Seriously. Mark my words."

  Disappointing Tomlinson is like disappointing a child. I nodded toward the Celestron, checking my watch as I did: 4:00 a.m. We had a good hour of darkness left, and I was about to suggest that he scan another part of the sky. I was facing the marina . . . had, once again, confirmed that there was no movement on the docks; realized I had probably imagined the human form . . . and I had begun to say, "Check the northern sky—" when the dock exploded. An orange corona bubbled up over the water, I heard a suctioning ka-WOOF, and then the entire marina was illuminated . . . illuminated just for an instant, as if a flashbulb had gone off. All this in a space of microseconds.

  I yelled without thinking: "Incoming!"—a response programmed long ago. Yelled it even before I realized what had happened; yelled it as I collapsed, dragging Tomlinson to the deck.

  A fireball ballooned above the dock, back where they kept the sport-fishing boats. Not a big explosion, but it generated enough energy to arch debris, rubble, burning slats high into the air, toward my stilt house. And I thought stupidly: Grenade? Light mortar?

  Tomlinson poked his head up. "Holy shit! The sonsabitches opened fire on us!" Which didn't make any sense either . . . nothing was making sense . . . then, out of the confusion, his meaning took form: He was referring to the jet. He thought the jetfighter was attacking us.

  Ludicrous; it should have been funny . . . but the dock was blazing, looked like a couple of the boats had caught fire too. By then I was thinking: Gas fumes in the bilge, ignited by a spark. It was a reasonable explanation, even probable, but I didn't pursue it because out of the flames stumbled a human figure . . . no, a human torch, clothes ablaze, arms clawing, sputtering, whooshing, making a guttural caw-w-w-w-ing sound. I was already on my feet and running toward the marina when the torch seemed to kneel, a gesture of submission, then tumbled, hissing, into the bay.

  It was a man. Not that I could tell at first. I went sprinting down the dock past the bait tank and gas pumps. . . then tried to stop so quickly that my feet went out from under me and I bounced along on my butt. I had realized something: If the fire got to the gas pump, the fuel tank beneath the marina's deck would blow. Instead of one burn victim, there would be dozens—myself included.

  I found the storage tank's emergency shutoff switch in a gray box beside the pumps. Hit the switch, took two strides and leaped off the dock into the water. The tide was up, but that area of the harbor is so shallow that I had to half swim, half slog to what, in the copper light of the fire, resembled an inflated garment bag. Grabbed it without knowing what or where I was grabbing . . . pulled it to me, felt weight, felt life . . . and the thing rolled over in my arms to reveal a mask of black from which two bright, dazed eyes blinked.

  A hole formed in the mask and a croaking sound came from it: "I can see . . .Jesus. I can see Jesus."

  The image of a human who has been maimed goes straight to the motor reflex region of the brain. It touches all the genetic coding for flight and survival, leaching a primitive, chemical excitement from the adrenal gland—which is probably why the trash newsmagazines and some of the trashier media have come to rely on human suffering as stock-in-trade. If they can't create excitement one way, they'll serve it up in another. Their favorite shield—"We're journalists, trained professionals"—is as clouded as a pornographer's videotape, which at least makes their cry "It's what the viewers want!" analogically accurate.

  What I knew was that I wanted to pull this guy onto the dock and get him covered up before the gawkers arrived. Tragedy is a personal thing; a human property to be shared—if by choice—but not stolen away in film bites.

  I moved to touch the man's head; realized I shouldn't. Instead, I said, "I'll get you out of here. You'll be okay." Wondered if he had even heard the lie.

  There were people shouting now . . . the heavy thump of bare feet on wood . . . the whine of a boat engine. Tomlinson came racing around the corner in his Zodiac as someone called in a panic: "Is he hurt? Who is it?"

  I looked toward the flames, saw silhouettes, and I answered, "Don't know. I can't tell who it is"—pleased, on some perverse level, that my voice remained calm, controlled. "He needs help. Call nine-one-one, tell them we want a medevac. A chopper."

  I was slogging around with the man cradled in my arms, trying to find enough footing to swing him up onto the dock, but Tomlinson interceded. There would be less stress, he said, if we rolled him into his rubber boat. "Plus, we can flood it with cold water. That's what he needs now. Until the paramedics arrive."

  The two of us lifted the man into the inflatable; then Tomlinson took charge, calling for the water hose, calling for buckets of ice while he got the man's legs elevated, already treating him for shock.

  I had a dim memory of Tomlinson telling me that, at some time in his life, he had taken an emergency medical technician course. Tomlinson, an unlikely person, often did unlikely things. Already, there were a couple of marina regulars sloshing around with us . . . people who seemed to know more about first aid than I. Once they had a blanket over the guy, I left them to their work and hoisted myself onto the dock to help fight the fire.

  It wasn't as bad as it could have been, but it was pretty bad: four small sportfishing boats—known locally as flats boats—were ablaze. Mack, who owns
the marina, was doing what he could, getting people organized. While some cut the lines of nearby boats and drifted them to safety, others used fire extinguishers and water to control the fire. Just as a precaution, I took another look at the fuel tank's emergency shutoff switch—and was very glad I did. Some well-intended person had come along after me and switched it off again, thereby switching it on.

  The marina is connected to the main road by a sand road. The Sanibel Fire Department is located just a few hundred yards from that intersection. The trucks arrived in minutes, lights flaring, and they had the fire under control not long afterward. But they couldn't save the four boats, and two others were badly damaged. Nor could the emergency room doctors save the man I had pulled from the bay.

  He died later that morning, with Tomlinson at his side.

  Chapter 2

  I helped around the marina until my help wasn't need, then shuffled back to the cottage to hang bomber jacket and clothes out to dry. I'd been slogging around in boat basin muck; the stink of it was still on me. I took a cold-water shower. Kept lathering and rinsing, lathering and rinsing. Decided there are some things—the memory of an odor, for instance—that cannot be washed away with soap.

  By then, it was nearly ten a.m. I felt as if I had been awake for days, but didn't feel like sleeping.

  Because of the petroleum and spent chemicals that had gone into the bay, I was worried about the fish tank aquarium where I keep live specimens—some to sell, most just for my own research and pleasure. I had built the fish tank on a reinforced section of my lower deck, using half of an old wooden cistern. From a distance, the thing looked like a whiskey barrel. Raw water is constantly drawn into the tank by a Briggs pump housed on shore. Then the water is aerated and clarified by a hundred-gallon upper reservoir and subsand filter, then sprayed as a mist into the main tank.

  But even the multiple filter systems couldn't protect the aquarium from big doses of chemical contaminates. That's why I was concerned. Because of the cold weather, I had a Styrofoam cap on the tank. But the sun was out now—the norther had blown through, and the temperature had already climbed to 65—so I removed the cap and let the sun in. The water in the tank was clear, three feet deep. I released a long slow breath, relieved: everything was still alive. Snappers, with their black masks, were doing slow figure eights, flushing shrimp before them. There were whelks and banded tulip shells, and one great big horse conch, its orange foot out, suctioned to a clam. There were also sea squirts and tunicates—the bay's natural water filters. The most delicate animals in the tank are my reef squid. It took me a while to find them. They can change colors and blend in, their chromatophores changing with the background. But they were alive too . . . and so were six immature tarpon that I had recently rescued from a drainage ditch near the island's Pirate Playhouse.

  I stood watching the tarpon, debating whether to switch off the raw-water intake. The fish held nose-first into the current; thin bars of silver that seemed to generate their own light. Over at the marina, the cleanup continued. The tide was still carrying out charred fragments and white pellets of synthetic goo. I decided that cutting the raw-water intake was the safest course. For a day or so, the recirculation system and aerator could keep my animals isolated and alive.

  "Dr. Ford? It's doctor, right?" I looked up to see a sheriff's detective: sports coat, loose tie. He had introduced himself earlier, asked a few questions, then dismissed me. Ron Jackson. He was on the boardwalk that connects my stilt house to shore, coming toward me.

  I waited until he was closer before I said, "Just Ford. I'm not a physician."

  He smiled a cop smile, illustrative of genial mistrust. "Out on the islands, I keep forgetting. Everything's informal. Probably why the tourists like it." He had his notebook out; found a piling on the lower deck and leaned against it, making himself at home. "Let's see . . . I've already got your number, your name. So . . .just a coupl'a other things. You got a spare minute?"

  I'd already told him everything there was to tell. "Not really. I was getting ready to ..." I cast around for an excuse. Sleep was out of the question and I didn't feel like working. "I was just getting ready to go for a run.

  The smile again. "There you go; best way to get rid of stress. I'm a runner myself. You don't mind, I'll follow you around while you change. It'll save us both some time."

  Jackson didn't look like a runner—short, bull-necked, hair sprayed smooth—but then I don't look like a runner either.

  He followed me through the companionway into the cottage and took a seat at the dinette table, allowing me to change in private while he made small talk. Stress fractures were on his mind—he'd recently recovered from one. The Gasparilla Run, he'd done that, was thinking about the Seven Mile Bridge run, and wasn't it hot as hell, running in the summer? Then he got to the point, saying, "I have two or three more questions."

  "Ask away."

  "Let's see. . . . You didn't know the deceased, right? That's what you told me."

  I hesitated. "The guy died?"

  "Yeah . . . you couldn't have known. One of our guys just talked to them, the hospital. Tentatively, we've got his name as Jimmy Darroux, a commercial fisherman from Sulphur Wells. That's an island near here, huh?"

  I said, "That's right. Darroux . . . the name's not familiar. It took us about an hour to count heads, me and the others from the marina. Make sure it wasn't one of us. But the way he was, I wouldn't have recognized him if it had been my best friend."

  Jackson had the soft, rounded speech pattern of the southern regions of the Middle Atlantic. All o-u combinations rhymed with "boot." He said, "Yeah. Burns are the worst."

  He told me about finding a boat with a commercial sticker hidden in the mangroves; they had traced the numbers. As I listened, I guessed he was from Virginia, maybe Maryland. Hadn't been here long; wasn't familiar with the agricultural and fishing island of Sulphur Wells.

  Jackson was reviewing his notes. "You described the explosion . . . the fire . . . what you did. You and your buddy out with the telescope. ... Is he around? I need to speak with him, too."

  "Tomlinson rode in on the medevac, him and a paramedic. He didn't know the guy either. But I've got your card, I'll have him call you."

  "He didn't know Darroux, then why did he—"

  "Tomlinson is ... a very religious person. He went to the hospital because he felt he could help."

  "I see. Um-huh . . . what I was wondering about—"Jackson looked up when I came around the locker that separates my bed from the kitchen. I had changed into shorts, sweatshirt, and Nikes, and began to stretch, hands against the wall. "What I was wondering about," he said, "were some of the things you told me earlier. Some of the phrases you used."

  "Oh?"

  " 'Point of detonation.' You said that. 'Accelerant flare.' What you said was"—he was reading from the notebook—" 'I saw the accelerant flare before the noise reached me.' You said 'magnitude of compression.' "

  "So? I was telling you about the explosion, what happened. It was a small explosion with a lot of fire. I don't understand your—"

  "The way you told me, that's what made me curious. The phraseology"

  "Phraseology? What was I supposed to say?"

  Jackson's laugh dismissed it as unimportant. "Before my wife and I moved here, I was in D.C., the capital. Jesus, it was like living in Ghetto National Park. Nothing but brothers and half-assed political flakes, and all these squirrelly little bombers. You ask somebody what they saw, they say, 'It just went boom!' Or, 'Blowed up, man.' Or, 'Ka-POW See where I'm headed? In D.C., I heard a lot of people describe a lot of explosions. But you say, 'I saw the accelerant flare before the noise reached me.' You say 'point of detonation.' "

  "I was trying to give a precise account of what occurred."

  The notebook again. "A guy at the marina told me. His name is Graeme . . ."

  "Yeah, Graeme MacKinley, the owner. Mack."

  "Mr. MacKinley told me that you're a biologist. I wouldn't expect a bio
logist to be familiar with those terms." Jackson looked at me blandly. "So how do you know so much about bombs, Dr. Ford?"

  "Bomb? I never said anything about a bomb—"

  "Well . . . explosions then. Were you in the military or something?"

  I paused a beat before I said, "I worked for the government for a while. We had a few courses, I probably picked up the language there."

  "The government. What did you do for the government?"

  "I was with the foreign service."

  Jackson chuckled. "Up in D.C., saying you work for the foreign service is like a hooker saying she works with people—no offense. But it's pretty broad—"

  "I did clerical stuff," I said. "A paper shuffler." I was getting tired of Jackson. Law enforcement people are the standard—-and the victims—of the unappreciated imperative. Day in, day out, they deal with misfits, liars, drunks, and head bangers. Their only reward is low pay, bad hours, and a firestorm of criticism if they make a mistake. If you're a bureaucrat and screw up, you get a private memo from the department head. If you're a cop and screw up, you get headlines. As a result, law enforcement people are usually a hell of a lot more efficient and professional at their jobs than professionals in other fields. But they also develop a myopic under-siege view of the world. They trust no one—why should they? I didn't blame Jackson for being suspicious. But now he was prying into unrelated affairs—things that were none of his business.

  "Where did you work? Countries, I mean."

  "Quite a few. Lots."

  "Don't get shy on me, Dr. Ford."

  "Then let's get something straight: You're not suggesting I had anything to do with the explosion?"

  "You mean you didn't do it?" He was looking at me, smiling like we were buddies and it was a joke. But it wasn't a joke. He wanted to see how I reacted.

  I didn't react. I didn't smile. I said, "I've got a lot of work to do today, Detective Jackson. Anything else?"