Mangrove Lightning

by Randy Wayne White

  He kicked around the weeds some more and found what resembled chunks of igneous glass. Beautifully smooth, in varied rainbow colors. Nearby was more copper tubing.

  Copper was as good as cash to druggies and other thieves. Why hadn’t someone stole it?

  In a way, someone had, Ford realized. The No Trespassing signs were proof.

  That wasn’t his problem. He’d worked enough small government contracts to know not to ask questions outside his field. Just focus on the assigned task. That’s what he intended to do, get his first look at the pond, but as he was pulling away, a heavy truck turned in from the main road. It stopped, backed up, then stopped again.

  If not for this, Ford would have driven away. Instead, he paid attention. It was a big white GMC diesel with a hydraulic bucket perched above the cab, the kind used by utility companies and tree trimmers. Only one person inside the cab, probably male, definitely large. The distance was too great to be certain, but the behavior suggested the driver had stopped because he didn’t expect to see another vehicle.

  Ford stuck his arm out the window and offered a mild wave.

  The driver backed to a spot wide enough to turn around, then drove away. No company logo, the windows were tinted, and the Florida license plate was too far away to read.

  Wrong address, the biologist told himself, but there was a chance he was being tailed again—by the same porn mobsters who’d tried to kill him in Nassau. The possibility demanded he at least get a license number, so he followed. By the time he got back to the highway, only one distant vehicle was visible, and it disappeared around a curve.

  Ford pursued in an outdated truck built to last, not for speed. At the intersection of 29 and the Tamiami Trail, he turned west, because why would a utility truck venture into the Everglades? Sixty miles of sawgrass separated the closest populated area from Miami.

  He got lucky. Traffic was sparse, and he soon spotted the truck. When he was close enough, he memorized the tag number, then pulled alongside to get a look at the driver.

  Damn . . . the wrong truck. A Florida Power & Light logo left no doubt.

  He made a U-turn.

  —

  The difference between a lake and a pond, in Ford’s mind, was could he land a seaplane?

  Not here. Chino Hole was a pond, the size of a small crater. It was a limestone implosion, known in the trade as a collapsed sinkhole. A dive would confirm this, he believed, but first he wanted a look at the shoreline.

  Pythons weren’t a worry, but an alligator big enough to eat him was. Water moccasins could be nasty, too.

  Wearing snake leggings, he set off with a machete. Remnants of a path led him past a stone wall to where cypress dominated the shallows and discouraged access. He splashed ahead anyway.

  It was hot on this June morning. The footing was slick. Mosquitoes clouded around despite Ford’s long-sleeved chino shirt and head net. After a few minutes, he stopped to study an indentation that arrowed shoreward.

  An alligator slide.

  This was expected. Gators could be found in any ditch where water collected anywhere in Florida. Other than that, they were no different than most animals. They used they same paths over and over. This one looked well traveled and wasn’t unusually wide.

  Two more slides lay ahead, then a third, in the space of a hundred yards. It was twice the width of the others, but not massive. To confirm this, he followed the slide until vines impaired visibility. This was nesting season. Stumble onto a female protecting her eggs, she’d lunge and bite, or try to knock him down with her tail.

  Ford doubled back and let his eyes settle on the pond. Somewhere in its depths, he expected to find vents and adjoining chambers, variations in current flow, and other elements associated with karst formations. The peninsula’s geologic interchange moved in relentless slow motion.

  A lot was going on under the surface.

  He was already noting data to be used later. Native aquatic plants—white lilies, spike rushes, arrowhead plants—flourished among a few invasive exotics, such as hydrilla, which was a snaking ornamental from Asia, and at least one Chinese tallow tree.

  He sloshed toward the tree and saw his first carousel of tarpon. Fish the length of his arm sliced the surface in unison, then were gone. The tree was displaced by thoughts of Hannah and her skiff. There was no place to launch a boat here, although it was pleasant to imagine. The woman was the most eloquent flycaster he’d ever seen.

  She was also pregnant with another man’s child, he reminded himself, so, Move on.

  He did. On the opposite shore was a spot that suggested he might be wrong about a launching place. It was a delta of marl that funneled ashore over weeds crushed by something as wide as a boat and as heavy. No gator on Earth could create such a slide, so maybe that’s what he’d found, a makeshift boat ramp.

  The biologist was a careful man. He looked for tracks anyway while he followed the swath inland but found no sign of man or reptile. Weather was to blame. This time of year, storms cleaned the slate almost every afternoon. He continued ahead, expecting to find an access solid enough for a trailer, but the path petered out. The machete took him another fifty yards, where, through the trees, he saw a junkyard of old railroad boxcars.

  Good. That told him there was a road. A skiff the size of Hannah’s was too big, but a light aluminum johnboat could be dragged to the pond—if he had such a boat, which he didn’t.

  He arrived at his truck with the intentions of finding one. By then, he was so hot and muddy, he chose to do a quick mask-and-fins recon to cool off. He swam to the middle of the pond, did a few bounce dives until the bottom vanished in spiraling darkness. It was a satisfying fact to confirm. Chino Hole wasn’t just another seepage pit built by landscapers, or shallow depression created by nature. The damn thing was deep.

  In Ford’s mind, the definitions of lake and pond changed. Chino Hole was both, and also a crater.

  On his back, he watched for gators while kicking toward shore. Gulls battled with crows overhead while a great blue heron stalked among cattails. A distant swirl on the surface grabbed his attention. Something big had nearly breached. He sculled upright, using his fins for elevation.

  A tarpon? If so, it was a mature fish way over a hundred pounds. Or possibly a huge Florida gar.

  If not . . . ? Well, he needed to get his ass out of the water until he was sure.

  Several times, he paused to glance back before the bottom was shallow enough to stand. He scrutinized the surface after consulting his watch. Curious alligators, when on the move, seldom stayed under more than a minute or two. A dozen more immature tarpon showed themselves. Dragonflies hovered; an osprey crashed the surface, then struggled off with what looked like a good-sized bass.

  Ford’s attention returned to the shoreline’s finned inhabitants. Later, he would do a controlled fish count, but for now a sampling was enough. He swam up and back through the shallows and made mental notes. Among the eelgrass, schools of small fish—bream, bluegill, crappie, and others—spooked away. Bream—they were also called sunfish—were good indicators of a lake’s health. A couple of lunker largemouth bass also indicated the predatory chain was in balance.

  In his head was the perverse hope he might see a lionfish. His theory about the Atlantis Hotel aquarium, and a karst linkage to Florida, was to blame. Exotic species were undesirable. He saw none. That didn’t mean peacock bass, cichlids, tilapia, and a long list of other exotics, didn’t live here. Same with a lionfish or two, but the absence did suggest their numbers were small.

  The pond’s fringe area was a narrow band of limestone. It was heavily vegetated and dropped off fast. That was good, too. Better for a healthy fish population overall, and better for the flow of resident water.

  Enough. He dried off, changed, and got in his truck, determined to find a small aluminum boat. Satellites interceded when he got to the main ro
ad. Multiple chimes told him he’d missed some calls. Two from Tomlinson.

  “What’s the emergency?” he asked when his friend picked up.

  “How far are you from Tootsie’s cabin?”

  “Can’t it wait? I need to buy a johnboat, and need to get it done before—”

  “Tootsie’s not on Key Largo. If he is, I can’t find him. Drive to his cabin and call me, okay? I’ve got a bad feeling about—”

  “Come on. We’ve been through this once already. You said he was expecting you.”

  “Yeah, he was supposed to drive down yesterday, but I don’t think he made it. He’s got a trailer home near Marina Del Mar. I checked. It’s buttoned tight, even the storm shutters are down, and his truck’s not here.”

  “What did the marina people say?”

  “You think I’d bother you if someone had seen him? Doc, come on, man.”

  “Who’d you ask?”

  “The girl behind the counter, and a couple of others. A lot of his neighbors go north this time of year. I’ll keep looking while you—”

  “Yesterday was the new moon. That means good tides in the backcountry. If you were a fishing guide who had to stay out of the sun, where would you go to talk fishing?”

  “The bar at the Pilot House. They haven’t seen him either, but I see what you’re saying. The poor old dude will be jonesing for the flats.”

  “What about bait shops? Ask around. His niece, Gracie, did you call her?”

  “Doc,” Tomlinson said, “just make a quick stop at his cabin, that’s all I’m asking. It’s a base that needs to be touched.”

  The biologist made another U-turn.

  Satellites didn’t intrude again until he was on the porch of the cabin, which, apparently, was the only conduit to the ionosphere for miles.

  Tomlinson was calling again, but the signal failed.

  —

  For Tomlinson, the yelp of a steam whistle silenced Florida, and the island of Key Largo, shifting time and place. For a moment, it was 1925 in the Everglades again, not Marina Del Mar on this nervous June afternoon.

  A second whistle blast kick-started reality. Or did it? He had to wonder, as he pocketed his phone. Puttering into the boat basin was Bogart’s tramp steamer, the African Queen. The real deal from the movie, not some fake. The British flag was raised, people aboard. She’d been refurbished since her days when dry-docked at the nearby Holiday Inn parking lot.

  That was years ago. There, the vessel had been displayed naked to the weather, chained like a beast to a commemorative plaque. A forlorn sight, indeed, at 3 a.m. on a particular weekday eve that was still a treasured memory.

  It was the juxtaposition that had thrown Tomlinson.

  “The African Queen.” He smiled. “I drank tequila, got lucky, got sick, got lucky again, and woke up on that boat, all in one short night.” He was chatting with the marina’s dockmaster. Or the dockmaster’s helper. Impossible to be certain without a name tag on the guy’s shirt. Tomlinson had stopped him outside the office, where they had clear view of the boat basin and Port Largo Canal.

  “The same African Queen?” the dockmaster asked.

  “Yep. Still have a scar from the wood box. Sharp edges, you know, and there isn’t much room aft of the boiler. It’s not the only reason I prefer sailboats, but it ranks right up there.”

  The guy, who had some hipster in him, was impressed. Or bored on this off-season afternoon, when a lot of the blue water fishing machines sat idle. “Wow, that is so very cool. There aren’t many men who can say that. The same girl both times or were there two?”

  They’d been talking for a while, an easy back-and-forth, because the famous fishing guide’s name opened doors. Tomlinson might have shared details under different circumstances but shrugged the question off as indelicate. “Back to what I was saying about Captain Barlow, what did you find out?”

  “I got this for you.” The guy produced a chamber of commerce map and pointed to a spot he’d circled. “Our maintenance guy has been around forever and he said Tootsie used to keep a tackle shed here”—he pointed—“on Blackwater Sound around mile marker 105. Not a big place, an actual shed like the commercial guys used for storage, but big enough he’d bunk there sometimes after a late charter. The area’s real Keysey, so he could get away with it. You know, dogs and pickups, and the roads are mostly shell, like back in the pot-hauling days. Maybe he still owns the place, the maintenance guy didn’t know.”

  “Pot hauling,” the Zen master mused. “Yeah, the good ol’ days are gone forever.”

  “I bet you’ve got more than just stories,” the dockmaster replied, which, in fact, was a discreet inquiry. It was the way commerce worked outside the system.

  Tomlinson took something from his pocket and shook hands, saying, “Thanks for your help. While we’re on the subject, I’ve got a question. You ever heard of a badass synthetic called flakka?”

  The dockmaster’s mood did a one-eighty. “Don’t even mention that shit around here. You want trouble, try one of the biker bars.”

  —

  Calusa Bait was oceanside, mile marker 90. Capt. Pete’s Bait & Tackle was bayside, near marker 103. No one had seen the famous fishing guide, but everyone knew where he lived. So why not try his double-wide near Capt. Jack’s Mobile Home Estates, just south of 104, close to Wet Dog Charters?

  It was the Keysey way of giving directions down here in this one-lane country; a coral tail that curved seaward like a meteor snagged by the Gulf Stream.

  Tomlinson, not for the first time, thought, I’d live on the Keys if I didn’t know they would kill me.

  The Caribbean Club was bayside, mile marker 104. The outdoor bar, with its Christmas lights and beach, was among his favorites, so better to save it for last.

  Next stop, Tootsie’s storage shed.

  —

  He continued north with the flow of traffic, careful to use his blinker when needed. There was a reason. A van with louvered windows and peace sign stickers was a red flag to cops, and the stakes were higher today. Damn right, they were. In the back of the van were two boxes draped with red towels, towels being the only funereal garnish he could muster on short notice. To the ancient Chinese, the color red, not black, demonstrated respect.

  A baggie of grass could be explained. Not the contents of those boxes.

  The map guided him through a grid of CBS homes. In their yards, wooden crates—lobster traps—were stacked higher than some of the jacked-up trucks he saw. Asphalt lanes gave way to crushed shell that bridged him into the mangroves. Parallel to the road, a canal created a tunnel without the guidance of seawall.

  He liked that: a utilitarian passage dug for working boats and men with secrets to hide.

  Soon, on an open gate a flurry of signs appeared: Fishermen’s Co-op . . . No Trespassing . . . Beware the Gun, Not the Dog, Dumbass.

  Now we’re getting somewhere, he thought.

  No, he wasn’t. Around the bend, he stopped when flashing blue light filled his mirrors. Monroe County Sheriff’s Department. The cop, a Cuban-looking guy, took his time getting to the window. He leaned in. “Are you a member of the co-op? This is private property. Didn’t you see the signs?”

  Tomlinson, in tight sphincter mode, called upon his theater skills to save his ass for the umpteenth time. He remained respectful and articulate, then finally got a chance to explain about Tootsie.

  “The fishing guide, huh? You think something happened to him?” The cop seemed genuinely concerned. “Follow me. There’s a guy I have to talk to at the co-op. If Tootsie’s been here, he’ll know, and if he’s not, we’ll check his double-wide. You know where he lives, right? Since you’re a friend and all.”

  It was a test. An easy one. “I’ve stayed there,” Tomlinson replied. “Near Captain Jack’s, just south of mile marker 104. Thing is, I’ve been by there twice today
already. That’s why I came to check his storage shed. A guy told me Tootsie slept there sometimes when he was guiding.”

  The cop couldn’t help leaning to see into the van. “I hear he was one hell of a fisherman. A storage shed, huh? We’ll find him. Come on.” He got two steps before he cupped his hands to the window and tried to see past the louvered blinds. “What you got back there?”

  “A couple of joints and a case of beer for later,” Tomlinson heard himself say.

  The cop was insulted. “You tell me something like that, why? Being cute? It’s not. It’s still against the law, you know.”

  “I’m trying to save us time by being honest. Open the door, if you want, and have a look around, but that’s all you’ll find.” Tomlinson, dry-mouthed, had barely got the words out when his cell flashed with Marion Ford’s name. “Mind if I take this? It might be about Tootsie.”

  The cop frowned, then wavered. “Wait here until I talk to this guy, okay?” He ambled toward his car.

  When it was safe, Tomlinson plucked up the phone. “Dear Jesus, I just had one of those shit-or-go-blind moments. Where the hell have you been?”

  Ford replied, “Waiting for Captain Barlow to sober up after a two-day drunk. Traffic’s not bad, so we’ll be there in about an hour.”

  “His cabin?”

  “Key Largo. He knows where there’s a cheap aluminum johnboat for sale.”

  14

  They were on Tavernier Key, watching tarpon weave among pilings, when Tootsie Barlow said to Ford, “Screw it. Help me grab some rods. We’re fishing—but don’t tell him. He’ll blab to my doctor.”

  Him was Tomlinson, who had left earlier for Key West. No explanation offered or needed after he’d snapped at them both, “Hey . . . get away from my van. My personal stash is in there.”

  Ford knew he shouldn’t let the old man fish, but he’d never seen a better-looking skiff than the one moored here on Tavernier Creek. It was similar to Tootsie’s original flats skiff, nothing like the aluminum job he’d bought that morning. It was an opportunity to fish with a master, so Ford said, “Let’s wait until the sun’s lower—unless the tide’s no good. We’d have to worry about squalls, too, I guess, so . . . What do you think?”