“Where did you say?”
“Stuart.”
I looked at Faye.
She looked at me.
“Yo’ gramma,” I said. I peered at the map. There it was, as big as life. “They got a Manatee Marina there?”
“Sure,” said Gator. “My brother, he kept a boat there for a while. They stack ’em up there like they’re in mailboxes.”
I couldn’t quite envision that, but my mind was running the trip backward, rewinding, trying to figure out where along all those miles of waterway Miles Guffey and the Sea Dingo would be by now. “How fast does a boat travel?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if some friends of mine took off from St. Petersburg yesterday afternoon, say, and were coming through the canal, where would they be by now?”
Gator looked at me like I was making a funny joke with him. “Ah, depends on the boat,” he said.
I closed my eyes and thought, Well, duh. “Okay, a big, squarely built cabin cruiser. Say, forty feet long. Really wide.”
“Well, that still covers some area. But if you mean not at all modern or streamlined, like a trawler,” he said.
“A trawler! That was it.”
“Then usually about eight knots.”
“Knots. What’s that in miles per hour?”
“Add ten percent. But you may as well subtract it again, because there are tides and currents, and going through the waterway you have to stop a lot to wait for the bridges to open.”
Ah! Bridges! Places where boats stop!
I turned to Faye. “Tom told me to find Miles’s boat and get some information from him. Something he needs for what he’s doing.”
Faye’s eyes turned dark with anger. “I will not aid or abet this any further,” she said tersely.
“But he can’t find Jack unless—”
Faye lurched up from the table and gave me a look that could have peeled paint. She said, “If you want to play cops and robbers with the little boys, Em, go the fuck ahead. I am going back to my little grass hut and gestate a baby!” She stormed away and slammed the door behind her.
I stared at the map.
I felt Gator’s eyes on me. He was studying me, his scarred arms laid out on the table in front of him so he could lean on them. “This has to do with my man Jack Sampler?”
I wasn’t sure what to say. But it was beginning to occur to me that this man Gator was smarter than I had first bothered to presume.
He tipped his head and looked at me kindly, as if to say, It’s okay. His great, dark eyes were soft, searching. He said, “Jack is a man I owe. Enough said?”
There wasn’t much to say, except yes or no. It seemed that lots of people owed Jack. He had grown up watching his mother suffer. Had it made a martyr of him, or a maniac?
Gator patted my hand. “You need to find that boat? I got a couple reptile shows to do this afternoon then one swamp tour, but I’m off duty after that. The Caloosahatchee’s not far. I can get you there.”
I trained my eyes on the index map. I picked up a paper napkin and held it to the bar scale. Jabbed my thumbnail into the folded edge of the soft paper to mark the beginning and end of a map inch. Thirty-five miles. Shifted the napkin along the bar to add a second thirty-five, and a third. Having thus marked off one hundred and five miles, I slid the napkin over to the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico where it swept south from Tampa Bay to the mouth of the Caloosahatchee. “About a hundred miles,” I said. “Divide by eight. Twelve hours?”
“It’s easier than that. Let me show you.” Gator tapped his finger on a spot on the map index about twenty miles upriver. “Map 105,” he said. He opened the atlas to that page. “How tall’s your friend’s boat? Like, twenty feet?”
“I’d say. The cabin is all above the waterline, and there’s a deck above that with a big canopy over it and radar and antennas and all like that.”
“A flying bridge. Call it twenty-five feet with the radar and radio masts folded down. These first bridges are high.” He pointed at five places where highways crossed the mouth of the river at Fort Myers and Cape Coral. “Any boat small enough to navigate the channel can go under them. But here,”—he indicated the point where a highway marked “31” crossed the river—“See? The river narrows here. The spans are shorter, lower. This is Wilson Pigott Bridge. First low clearance. I think that one’s a lift bridge.”
“So what are you saying? He’d have to slow down there while they open the bridge?”
He smiled. “No, he’d have to stop. They don’t open the bridges after nine in the evening, and they stay closed until six A.M. So it doesn’t matter how fast he was going, even at twenty knots he wouldn’t make it this far before nine last evening. Most guys with a brain tuck in behind a barrier island at dusk and wait until daybreak. Some of the waters back there are only a couple feet deep. See these channels? You got to run through one of these mouths between the islands, and at certain tides it’s a rip. The channels are marked, but not all that good. I’ve been through there with my brother in full daylight, hanging on the depth sounder, and we still lost it and run aground on a dredging pile. The channels are narrow, and it’s too easy to miss a marker.” He traced the route Guffey’s boat would have to navigate inside the barrier islands, a spattering of obstacles large and small. “And not only is it real shallow in here if you get outside where it’s dredged, but there are other boats anchored here and there, swinging on their anchor lines, and just ’cause they’re out there don’t mean they know what they’re doing. Some fools pay out a lot of scope, run aground when the tide turns. You go through there on slack tide in the dark, you don’t even know which way they’re lying, and you can get tangled in an instant. I wouldn’t risk my boat like that if I had one.”
“Guffey’s real proud of his boat.”
“Like I say.” He tapped his finger back on Wilson Pigott Bridge. “But even if he did keep running in the dark, he couldn’t get past this point until this morning at six.”
I took hold of his wrist and turned it to read his watch. It was almost noon. “So he could have been running six hours by now. Where would he be?”
“My guess is he’s still out on the Gulf. If he got off last night like you say, he would have run down the coast until he ran out of daylight, or got tired, and then gunk-holed in behind a barrier island for the night. But I’ll go you one better. Come on.” He led me out of the cafeé, down several paths, and into an office, where we found Bill sitting behind a desk reading a magazine. Gator got out a phone book and looked something up in the government pages, then dialed the phone. “Oye, Gus? Hey, my man, this is Eduardo Batista, your man from Miami. ¡Recuerdas! Hey, yeah, long time. ¿Como su esposa? ¿Sus hijos? Oye, I’m calling with a favor to ask. Who me? Yeah. Yeah. I’m trying to track a boat for a friend here. Yeah, it’s her husband, she hasn’t heard from him. Kind of worried. She wants to know if he’s gone through the first lock there. Okay.” He turned to me. “What’s the name of the boat?”
“Sea Dingo,” I said.
“Trawler Sea Dingo. Eastbound. Yeah. You sure? Okay. Good man. I thank you.” He hung up the phone. To me, he said, “That was my friend Gus at Wilson Pigott.” He grinned. “That’s why I know the name of the bridge. He said Sea Dingo hasn’t gotten there yet, but he knows where he is. Heard him cussing someone out on the marine radio about half an hour ago, they all been having a good chuckle.”
“What’s going on?”
“Something about a Sea Ray kicking up a wake. They’re these go-fast boats; people who drive them got no manners, all a bunch of new money. Some woman’s on Sea Dingo’s radio down by Cape Coral telling them to go home and stuff their BMW’s up their butts.”
“Sounds like Waltrine.” For the first time in two days I found myself truly smiling. “Maybe Guffey’s letting her drive while he catches some Z’s.”
“Yeah, he’d be tired. That means he ran most of the night, came all the way down in open water, then turned in maybe
south of Sanibel Island here, where there’s a lighthouse and all like that. But anyway, he’s a couple hours downriver of the Franklin Lock, which is the first place you’d be able to catch him.”
“He’s got to go through locks?”
Gator grinned at my naïveteé. “Yeah. The lake is higher than the ocean, so the boat traffic has to go up through three locks to get there. Slows him way down, especially if there’s traffic.” He opened the atlas again and tapped each lock and each place a highway crossed the river. “Lift bridge. Swing. At LaBelle here, another lift bridge, then here’s the Ortona Locks. From there, you can see the river runs real straight; it’s been channelized. Leads you right through to Moore Haven. One last swing bridge—the railroad, those are really low, maybe five feet—and then one more lock to get you into the lake.”
“And all of them close again this evening at nine?”
“That’s the story. He’s down there by Cape Coral now, ain’t no way he’s going to make Okeechobee in time to get all the way through by nine, and he won’t want to be out there in the dark, either.” Now he grinned at me, very satisfied with his analysis.
I smiled and nodded to him. “So he’ll have to tie up somewhere for the night.”
“Yeah. That’s your best bet. The lock tenders are Army Corps of Engineers. They don’t let anyone get on or off while they’re going through there.”
“I’d like to get to him as soon as possible.”
Gator looked at his watch. “I’ll be off at seven. See you then. Until then, I think your friend needs you.” He gave me a tender smile.
Faye was in the chickee, lying facedown on the cot, which is hard to do when you’re that pregnant. She had swiped my pillow and placed it to one side of her belly to support it.
“Any way I can talk you into touring the canals of the Caloosahatchee?” I asked.
“No.”
“You’d think you were aiding and abetting.”
“Mind reader.” Her voice was thick. She’d been crying again.
“The way I see it, he’s already committed, so he needs help, not …” I trailed off, uncertain which was correct, action or inaction.
Faye said nothing. She kept her back to me.
I said, “Listen, maybe this is a bunch of boys playing white knight, but somebody’s got to do it.”
“Why Tom?”
“So his child can grow up safe?”
“Being born is not safe. Living is not safe.”
I sat down on the edge of her cot and began to massage her back. “I’m so sorry, Faye.”
The tears began to flow again. “I had so hoped he and I could make it work.”
“It’s not over.”
She put her hand on the great roundness of her belly.
I asked, “Is he kicking?”
“She.”
“You know it’s a girl?”
“It had better be. No fucking war games.”
I sighed. “Girls can join the army now, and the FBI … .”
Faye cried a long time, softly keening, rocking herself and her unborn child. I smoothed her clothes, stroked her sweaty back through the cloth. At length, she said hoarsely, “When you see Tom, send him home.”
I put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. “I will,” I whispered.
– 29 –
“The surface of Lake Okeechobee isn’t much higher than the ocean,” Gator informed me, as we bounded along in his little Toyota sedan over a rough two-lane blacktop. The road ran straight as a die between cane fields that stretched as far as I could see in either direction. We were traveling north of the Big Cypress Reservation, heading for the Caloosahatchee River. It was early evening, and the thunderheads had built up high and wide and fuzzy, ready to pelt us as soon as we were foolish enough to drive under one of them. And yet I felt an urgency to get after them, as if they could draw me closer to Miles Guffey’s boat, and his boat could bring me to Jack.
Eduardo “Gator” Batista continued his educational travelogue. “Right now Okeechobee’s surface is maybe twelve feet above sea level. There’s a levee built around it, because one time it flooded and killed about 3,000 people. You know, the Everglades are all water, really, just a little land in there to confuse the folks up north with more money than sense, make them think this is farmland, or a good place to build a retirement house. When you add a whole lot more water all at once—in a hurricane say—well, there’s nowhere to go to get away from it.”
“So that’s why they built the canals? To drain the swamp? Aren’t there bad jokes about that?”
“Yeah. They came and built all these canals and drainage ditches. It drained, alright, and the first thing that happened was all that peat began to catch fire with the lightning.” He shook his head. “Some people think nature’s something they’ve got to tame, like a wild animal. Me, I like my animals wild.”
I ran my gaze over the scars on his arms. “Especially your alligators.”
Gator opened his mouth to show me his teeth and made a claw with one hand.
“Yeah.”
“How … exactly did you get those bites?” I asked.
He grinned. “Oh those? I used to work at an alligator farm. Took me a while to learn how to handle them.”
“Farm? They really do farm alligators?”
“Yeah. All you eat is the tail, that’s where the meat is. They make key chains out of the claws.” He shook his head. Laughed. “Tourists.”
I shook my head, too. Florida seemed one big clash of man and nature, or man’s nature versus nature’s compulsion to exist, with all the certainty of water running downhill and taxes being due on April 15. “So do you think I can catch him at the Ortona Lock?”
“He’s past there by now. I’ve had my friends tracking him all afternoon.” He gave me his grin. “Not much to do here in the Everglades, so they’re only too glad to assist. Sea Dingo called for the lift bridge at La Belle como cinco y medio. Five-thirty. He’s averaging less than seven knots. Don’t worry, he won’t get to Moore Haven before the bridge-and-lock there closes for the night.”
Gator slowed to avoid skidding off the road during a series of sharp right angles. We caught up with a rainstorm. Everything went wet as the little windshield wipers struggled with a sheet of liquid. I held on for dear life.
The streets were shining with water when we reached Moore Haven. Gator drove straight to the town docks. An osprey settled onto a phone pole a hundred yards away and glared at me. No sign of Sea Dingo. “Not here yet,” he announced. “What I tell you?”
“You’re sure he hasn’t gone on through to the lake?”
Gator shrugged. Put the car in reverse, executed a smuggler’s turn, and headed over toward the swing bridge that carried the railroad across the canal. Clearance was only about five feet. No way Sea Dingo was going to crawl under that. The bridge manager was in his pilot box, so Gator got out and talked to him. The man shook his head and climbed out, headed down the road on foot. Gator returned to the car. “He says she’s not come through yet. He’s got a couple trains coming, so he’s done for the night, not going to open it again until the morning.” He looked at his watch. “Ocho y media. You got it made. Let’s go get some dinner.” His smile positively twinkled.
“Okay.”
“¡Splendido!”
Gator took me to a little café with searing blue paint. Inside, my nostrils were greeted by the savory aroma of Caribbean cookery. “Let me guess,” I said. “Black beans and yellow rice.”
Gator gave me an appreciative nod. “Wait ’til you taste her plaítanos.”
Dinner was just the sort of wonderful meal you can find only in a wayside cafeé where the cook looks like somebody’s mama. She fussed over Gator—called him ’Uardo—and was reasonably solicitous over me, even though she was clearly trying to promote Gator’s obvious interest in a shy young lass with doe eyes and skin as rosy as a ripe plum who watched him expectantly from behind the counter.
When we were done, and barely ab
le to move for the largess of Mama’s cooking, we paid our bill—or should I say Gator paid; he would not hear of my even contributing to the tip, so gallant was he as he shamelessly ogled the daughter—and headed back to the dock. Sure enough, there was Sea Dingo, all tied up and shipshape, the only boat in sight. It was past ten o’clock. The osprey had gone to bed, and had been replaced by a nighthawk. The scene was illuminated by streetlights. Things looked very, very quiet.
I walked along the dock until I was next to the place where the rail was folded back to make it easy to get aboard. I called out, “Permission to come aboard, skipper?”
I got no answer. No light came on in the cabin. No one stirred. The only sound was the steady hum of an air-conditioning unit somewhere deep in the boat.
A small pickup truck drove by in the street, spraying something from a fogger mounted in its bed. That explained the lack of mosquitoes.
I turned and looked at Gator. He shrugged eloquently.
I stepped aboard. Walked around to the back door of the main cabin and knocked. “Miles?” I called out. “Waltrine?”
No answer.
Gator still waited on the dock. “Gone to dinner, you think?”
“Must be.”
“We could come back later.”
“No. Knowing Miles, they probably found a bar. But they could come back any time, and I don’t want to chance losing them. I need to wait.” I looked at him with apology in my eyes. “Are you in a hurry to get back?”
Killer Dust Page 26
