Captiva df-4

by Randy Wayne White

  I considered running right on past. If I pushed it, I could make Dinkin's Bay in a little less than half an hour. But I was feeling restless. Dissatisfied with myself, and oddly dissatisfied with other things—what, I didn't know. Still felt as irritable as some moonstruck adolescent. So what could it hurt to pull in for a beer?

  I tied up near the boathouse. There were a couple of mansion-sized yachts moored in the deep-water slippage. One looked like a Hatteras, the other a beautiful old Trumpy. On the Trumpy, people were milling around above deck, drinks in hand. A couple of corporate types in blazers along with what looked to be a cluster of sorority-age girls. The music being piped out of the main salon was vintage World War II, Glenn Miller. The gal from Kalamazoo had just become the girl who was drinking rum and Coca-a-a-a-Cola, as I trudged up the path to the inn. I wondered if the corporate types really believed the antique music would put their MTV generation guests in the mood.

  Rob, the owner, wasn't around, but Captain Doug and a couple of other guys I knew were at the bar. I had a Heineken, then another. The guys had heard about the explosion; wanted me to give them all the details. We kept buying rounds and Bob, the bartender, kept serving them. Pretty soon, the party from the Trumpy came spilling in. I found out that the men in the blazers were, indeed, corporate types, but they were neither ego-brittle nor stuffy—the good ones seldom are. Also, the women, though attractive and pert enough, were neither sorority-age nor were they college girls.

  "What we do is market cellular phones," one of them told me—a chunky little blonde with pale, Germanic eyes. "This is sort of like a convention, only it's really not, 'cause we had to market more units than anybody else to win this trip. Our regions, I'm talking about. All seven of us, we were picked the top marketers. All women!"

  It took me a moment to translate: "marketers" meant "sales staff." Like "educator" and "refuse attendant," it was another one of those inane euphemisms that, instead of clarifying, only murk their own definitions.

  She said, "So we won two days at Orlando, then three days at this place on Captiva Island. I just loved Epcot, but Captiva . . . well, that's been sort of boring. It's so . . . quiet. But then we met Charlie, and his corporation leases this great big boat, complete with captain, two weeks every year. You see it down there? Huge. And Charlie, he's such a nice man, Charlie said, what the hell, he'd take us on an overnight cruise so we could see the islands. But no strings attached. He made that real clear." She poked my arm with an index finger to emphasize the importance of that. Said, "What we found out is, Charlie's corporation does a lot of business with the group that owns us, so we're like business associates. Just down here networking, doing our jobs!" She giggled and beamed at me.

  I could see Charlie across the room. He was engaged in the delicate task of cutting one of the seven women out of the group. He had selected an aloof brunette—by far the most attractive woman in the room. The two of them were hunched over a table, insulated from the rest of the bar by the intensity of their conversation. The brunette had the look of country clubs and tasteful dinner parties and expensive boutiques. I wondered what circumstance had motivated her to get into the very tough world of sales. Also wondered if Charlie had noticed the sizable diamond on the ring finger of her left hand.

  Watched the brunette scoot away from the table; then, very deliberately, very privately, place her hand on Charlie's thigh—a brief, intimate gesture—before rising to go to the rest room.

  The ring, apparently, wasn't a problem.

  "You want another beer? But you have to let me buy this time. I always pay my own way."

  The little blonde was drinking margaritas. She loved the salt. I stuck with beer because that's what I drink. Her name was Farrah. I didn't ask, but I assumed her mother had watched a lot of television back in the seventies. Farrah was from Granite City, Illinois, right there on the Mississippi River, so close to St. Louis that it was like just one great big city now. She'd graduated from high school six years ago, was accepted into the University of Missouri's nursing program, but just hated it. What she really wanted was a nice car and a nice apartment—both of which she now had. "All because I went into cellular marketing. You wouldn't believe the benefits our company gives. Just for the team members—that's what they call us, the people who work for them. They've even produced an exercise video just for us. 'Cause we're all a team, understand?"

  I understood. She kept ordering margaritas, and I continued to pour down beer. Normally, I limit myself to three. But I wasn't in the mood for rules or limits. If I allowed myself to pause, to examine what I was doing, the image of Hannah and Tomlinson popped into mind . . . that small house, just the two of them . . . cricket noises outside and the ceiling fan whirring overhead.

  Farrah was telling me, "I like you, Doc. No, I mean it. I first saw you, I thought, whew, he's got cold, cold eyes. But I was wrong. You're just a big ol' sweetie. Hey—your turn to buy or mine?"

  Through the gradual process of increasingly familiar body contact, Farrah let me know—and those around us know—that she had made her selection. Now she sat on a barstool, just high enough to throw her arm casually around my shoulder. Just close enough so that I could feel the heat of her left breast as it traced designs on my ribs.

  Jerry came into the bar, saw the crowd, and began to play Jimmy Buffett on the keyboard. Farrah wanted to get out on the dance floor with the rest of the group. I told her that there were few things more ridiculous than a full-grown man trying to mimic jungle ceremony. She said, "Huh?" then, "You better not go anywhere," before giving me a moist kiss on the cheek and shimmying out among the dancers. I watched her nudge one of her girlfriends, heard her say, "You meet the guy I'm with? He doesn't even own a cellular unit." As if it was proof they were on a tropical island, a million miles from the regional office.

  I stood there watching, a cold green botde in my hand. Farrah was wearing beige pumps, a black T-length sweater dress—looked like cashmere—that fit snugly enough, and was cut low enough, to show the weighty bounce of breasts, the slow roll of buttocks as her body absorbed the music and reissued it. Every so often, she'd look over and give me an owlish wink . . . which caused me to consider just what in the hell I was getting myself into. I was no meat market predator; I'd never gone to a bar and tried to pick up a woman in my life. "You want to come home and see my specimens?" would have been a lackluster line. So I had just about decided to quietly disappear, when I felt a tap on my shoulder. Turned to see a face that was familiar. Finally realized it was Garrett Riley, a deep-water guide out of Naples.

  "What are you doing this far north, Garrett?"

  He said, "You got your skiff handy?"

  "Yeah."

  "There's something you need to see."

  I looked at the empty bottle I was holding, looked at Farrah on the dance floor.

  Garrett said, "Hell, don't worry about that. She ain't gonna catch a cab, and I'm a little drunk myself. I don't need you to make sense. What I need is somebody to give me a hand." When I hesitated, he added, "Hurryin' wouldn't hurt none."

  I put the bottle on the bar and followed him outside.

  Chapter 7

  Garrett had been hired to run the Hatteras that was moored down by the boathouse. The charter was a three-week island hopper, he said, Key West to Tampa and back, that he wouldn't have taken, this being the prime day-tripper season, except his own forty-two-foot Johnny Morgan had spun a prop, which scored the drive shaft and stripped the bearings just inside the stuffing box.

  "I figured three weeks at half pay was better than waiting on parts, sittin' home whackin' off to the Weather Channel," he told me.

  He made a stop at the Hatteras. Signaled me to wait, then scrambled gibbon quick up the ladder to the fly bridge. He returned carrying an industrial-sized bolt cutter.

  "You mind telling me where we're going, Garrett?"

  He held a finger to his lips—his clients were asleep. Said, "Not far. Where's your skiff?"

  Once I got my
boat away from the seawall, I let him take the wheel. He hurried us out the channel, no lights at all, then gunned us onto plane. Directly to the east lay Useppa Island. At the turn of the century, back when West Florida was still considered wilderness, Useppa had been a sportsmen's en- I clave, host to people like Teddy Roosevelt and Joe Kennedy. The Kennedy connection proved useful in the sixties when Useppa was leased by the C.I.A. to train Cuban exiles for the Bay of Pigs invasion. Now the island was a graceful private community: palm trees and white houses built on rolling hills. Garrett ran toward the island, obviously in a hurry; didn't throttle back until we had snaked our way past

  the oyster bar near the private channel. Obviously, whatever he wanted to show me was on Useppa.

  "That's where it is," he said, motioning.

  "Where what is?"

  "Where they strung the cable."

  "What cable? What the hell are you talking about, Garrett?"

  We were idling along now, through the island's harbor. "Little more than an hour ago," he said, "I was over here in the dinghy, plug-casting the docks for snook. Noticed a boat up there in the shallows, somebody poling it along. Didn't look to me like they was up to any good. You know how men'll act when they're tryin' to be real quiet? It was like that.

  "Watched 'em dump something. Something heavy, too." He pointed to the shoreline. "Right there. They had to do some gruntin'. Then they fired up their boat and purely tore ass out of here. Still no lights. Shit, they about run me down. It was a mullet boat, two guys in it. But the weird thing was, they run clear out around the island, then north toward Charlotte Harbor. Why not just pop through the Pineland cut? I couldn't figure it out." He pulled the throttle back to neutral and switched off the engine. "But I found out. That's what I'm going to show you."

  The momentum of the boat carried us forward along an old mortar seawall into a narrow cut. The cut was only a few boat lengths wide, but it was deep enough to navigate on any tide. That made it a popular passage for small-boat traffic. The markers to the pretty little village of Pineland, and Pine Island, began on the other side.

  "It's right in here someplace." Garrett was standing on the casting deck, his hands out, searching around in the darkness. "Watch yourself. . . ." Then: "Got it."

  I felt the boat jolt abruptly.

  "What is it?"

  "You got a spotlight? Or just come up here and feel."

  I reached under the console, brought out a flashlight. What Garrett had found was a length of what appeared to be quarter-inch steel cable. It was stretched tight across the cut, connected to something above the seawall on one side, then to a channel marker on the other.

  Garrett said, "After they pulled out, I came blasting over here to see what they'd dumped. If I hadn't been in the dinghy, it'da cut my head off. As it was, it just knocked my hat back and scared the shit out of me. Didn't even see it. Hell, even in daylight, you probably wouldn't notice it—until it was too late."

  He was pulling us along, hand over hand, toward the seawall. Had I been sitting at the wheel of my flats boat, the cable would have been about neck-high. Now that I was standing, it was belly-high. I projected what would have happened had a boat come wheeling through that cut doing twenty or thirty knots. A couple of fishermen, maybe, headed out at morning dusk ... or a family with two or three children perched on the bow of their Bayliner. Whatever the scenario, it was a bloody scene to imagine.

  It sobered me. It leached the alcohol out of my brain. Stringing a cable across a busy waterway was not vandalism, nor was it a statement of political dissent. It was attempted murder, nothing less.

  Garrett said, "Hand me those bolt cutters. I'll snip this side, then we'll pull our way back and get the other side, too."

  I said, "No. Not yet."

  "Huh? Why the hell not?"

  "Did you contact the Coast Guard?"

  He said, "What?"

  "The Coast Guard."

  "I hope you're not serious. There's plenty of time for that later."

  "I am serious. Did you call them?"

  Garrett demonstrated his impatience by being meticulously patient. "No, Doc, I didn't call the Coast Guard. I don't keep a VHF in a rubber dinghy. An idiot might, but I don't. What I did was go bust-assin' back to Cabbage to get the bolt cutters, then decided I could use some help. Which is where I felt kind'a lucky spotting you. Because I figured you'd be a good man to help me cut this bastard down before some poor sonuvabitch comes flying around that corner and cuts his head off. Which could happen any minute now!"

  I told him to calm down, take it easy. Used my hand-held VHF to raise the Coast Guard on channel 16. I asked for the duty officer. The Coast Guard had me switch to 22-Alpha for extended traffic. While I waited, I opened the forward locker and broke out the big spotlight and plugged it in. Also got out the disposable gas air-horn. Handed them both to Garrett and told him that unless deaf and blind people were racing around Pine Island Sound, he should be able to stop any boat for miles.

  It took quite a while to give the Coast Guard all the information they wanted, and the duty officer finished by suggesting we stand by.

  "Christ awmighty, are you happy?" Garrett sputtered when I was finished. "This'll take all night."

  I didn't need all night. All I wanted was a few minutes alone with the cable. Anyone sick enough to rig such a thing was also sick enough to include a booby trap. Jimmy Darroux was a failed bomber. But there might be other, more skilled bombers waiting in the wings.

  I handed Garrett the VHF. "If a judge ever starts questioning you about mishandled evidence, you'll thank me."

  "Right. . . . Where the hell do you think you're going?"

  I had grabbed the flashlight, Leatherman pliers, a chunk of heavy monofilament line, and had slipped overboard into waist-deep water. "I want to take a closer look at the cable before we cut it."

  I watched while Garrett and my skiffdrifted away on the incoming tide . . . then used the flashlight to follow the cable up over the seawall.

  The cable appeared to be belted around the base of a palm tree. Before approaching the palm, I tied my Leatherman pliers to the monofilament, thereby making an effective plumb line. Then I walked slowly, very slowly, holding the plumb line out just as far from my body as I could get it. If there was a trip wire in my path, the monofilament would catch harmlessly on it.

  There was no trip wire.

  Even so, I remained cautious. Garrett had told me the men had lifted something heavy out of their boat. Something that made them grunt. The typical marine battery weighs thirty-seven pounds. A five-gallon can of gas weighs more than forty. Add a blasting cap and you have the ingredients for a powerful bomb.

  I had good reason to be cautious.

  I used the fishing line to probe around the cable. No strings or wires running from it. Used the flashlight to check overhead. No strings or wires to be mistaken for harmless vines. The cable was secured with a common screw-down bridle. I slid the fishing line delicately, very delicately, into the chock, alert for the first slim resistance of wire.

  Nothing.

  I took a couple of deep breaths . . . relaxed . . . used the screwdriver head on my Leatherman to free the cable. Then I half swam, half waded across to the channel marker, where, after a less exacting inspection, I disconnected that end, too. Had there been a mad bomber, he almost certainly would have placed the device on the Useppa side of the cut, where it could do the most damage.

  Garrett came puttering up as I was coiling the cable. Shut off the engine and, after a properly dramatic pause, said, "You get a few beers in you, you act like a damn lunatic. I'm serious."

  "Nothing but screws and chocks holding it. So I figured, what the hell, why wait for the Coast Guard?"

  Garrett said, "No shit, Sherlock," as I climbed into the boat.

  As we idled back toward Useppa's harbor, I asked Garrett what he thought the men might have dumped. He said, "You didn't see? What the hell were you doing up there?" Before I could invent an answer, he
said, "Here—take the spotlight. I'll show you." Then turned the wheel. When the bow nudged the beach, he took the light and began to sweep it back and forth. "Probably wake up everybody on the whole damn island. There-— see that? There's another one . . . and another."

  What he was showing me appeared to be lengths of bar stock, chunks of two to three feet, scattered along the northwestern fringe of the island. I removed my glasses, polished the salt spots off, and looked again.

  What I was seeing were fish. Dozens of them. I stepped out of the boat, carrying the flashlight.

  They were big snook, ten-to-twenty-pounders. The snook is a prized saltwater game fish; an extraordinary animal, both in terms of behavior and physical beauty. It has an efficient, cartilaginous jaw that flares cutlasslike around black peregrine eyes that are ringed with gold. Its body is pewter-bright, amplified by yellow, with an armorwork of scales covering a dense and broadening musculature. It is a heavy, functional, predator's body, as if all the thousands of years of the species' evolution were the refinement of one moonless night in murky, prehistoric water. The black lateral line, running from gill to caudal fin, is a sports car touch, something that might have been dreamed up in Detroit. On any other animal, the stripe would appear frivolous. You see a snook for the first time and, along with the lingering impression of beauty, you think: Survivor.

  But these animals had failed the genetic mandate. They had not survived. I went from one to another, touching, lifting, inspecting. They had been dead for more than a day and not kept on ice. The scales were loose. The eyes milky. Their skin had the withered look of roadkill. On several, I found telltale geometries as if etched in blue, then baked hard: net scars.