by Scott Cook
“You’re a constant source of comfort, Clay-stones,” I grumbled.
We were near the entrance to the basin now. On my left was the new pier and, to my right, the end of the seawall that separated the basin from the bay. I set the boat on a course that would head out into Tampa Bay and slightly away from the pier, locked the wheel down again and got the hell off the bridge. I swear my back and the backs of my legs were beginning to blister. Sweat covered my face and was soaking through my lovely red guayabera shirt. I went forward and looked at Clay and the woman, who was breathing audibly but with a smoke induced rasp.
“We’ve got to jump for it,” I informed Clay.
He frowned, “Yeah… never a dull moment.”
I gathered the woman up into my arms again and we made our way aft along the port side deck. When the heat grew intolerable, Clay leapt over the side as far away from the boat as he could, and I followed. The water in late April in Tampa Bay was still in the low-seventies. Not biting cold but a considerable change from the searing heat of a few moments before. It was simultaneously soothing and pouch-shrinking as I plunged into the bay.
I came to the surface and maneuvered the unconscious woman’s body so that her head rested next to mine on my shoulder and her back was to my chest. I began to kick backward and away from the boat, which had already passed. Clay appeared next to me, treading water. “Well this is a fine mess you’ve gotten us into this time, Ollie,” Clay joked.
“Fun, excitement and really wild things…” I replied. “Now, how the hell do we get out of the drink?”
“Uhm… dunno… I didn’t think that far ahead!”
“Well what the H good are ya’?”
Clay looked back at the pier, only a hundred feet away. We were just outside of the basin and the pier here was a concrete structure supported by pylons beneath. The rip rap at the base by Doc Ford’s was a few hundred yards away. He sighed, “We might be able to climb those rocks… but not with her.”
I cursed and agreed. No matter what, we couldn’t hang out where we were. I had to keep moving in order to keep myself and the woman afloat, “Got to move… figure it out later. One cluster-fudge at a time…”
“I’m glad Missy isn’t here,” Clay commented casually as if we were still sitting at Doc Ford’s with our beers. “If she knew what you’d gotten me into, she’d be so pissed at you.”
“Me?” I protested and coughed. My charge did the same, then she went into a heavy whoop. I thought that might be a good sign. “Why would she be pissed at me?”
“Look at the fix you got me in!” Clay stated. “It was supposed to be a nice little sailing trip, but oh noooo… old Scotty the Body has to force me onto a burning boat and then dive into the middle of a freezing ocean! Now I’m all wet… and everything.”
“Dude… nobody told you to follow me…”
“And here we are, in the middle of nowhere—“
“Like a hundred yards from shore,” I corrected.
“—and who knows what lurks beneath?” Clay continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “Even now, a blood-thirsty trout or redfish could be stalking us at this very moment.”
“Jesus Christ…” I muttered. “Whatever it is that’s wrong with you, man… it’s… it’s no small thing. I recommend a team of shrinks… seriously.”
“You’re just mad cuz’ your shrimp is gettin’ cold,” Clay guffawed and then said: “Your dinner is probably gettin’ cold too! Ha-haa-HAAA!”
I hate you man… I really, really hate you…” I puffed as I kicked and dragged my burden along.
Clay laughed, “Now don’t go getting’ all poopy-pants on me, Machu-Picchu. I think I found us a ride.”
“Huh?” I asked, trying to look around while still swimming. I had to swim backward, so it was up to Clay to keep us moving in the right direction.
“Hey, y’all need a hand?” A man called out from not far behind me.
I spun around to see a small center console fishing boat idling toward us from the basin, “Is he fuckin’ kiddin’ me or what?”
Clay tittered, “Be nice. This guy is gonna save us from being devoured by a ravenous flounder or something.”
The boat, maybe a twenty-footer, pulled up alongside us with two men in it. Both were in their forties and wore broad-brimmed straw hats and vented fishing shirts. The guy at the wheel leaned over the gunwale, “Damn, son! That was some ballsy shit. You guys all right? How bout the lady?”
“Oh, we’re swell,” I cranked. “Great evening for a friggin’ swim…”
“Don’t pay him any mind,” Clay said pleasantly, going over to the small swim platform mounted to the starboard side of the transom next to the big Yamaha two-hundred outboard. “He’s cranky cuz his special Doc Ford’s shrimp is cold… or eaten.”
The two men chuckled and helped Clay to haul the limp body of the woman carefully out of the water and laid her gently on the deck. I heaved myself up and inboard and sat on the gunwale, pushing water out of my hair, “Thanks, men. Glad you guys got out here so quickly.”
“We was just tyin’ up for the night when we heard the boom and saw that sporty smash into the pier,” The man who hadn’t been at the wheel said in an even thicker southern accent. “Then we seen y’all two fellas jump on board and knew some shit were about to go down… so I says to Earl here… Earl, I says, we oughta git our asses out there and help them two boys…ain’t that what I done said, Earl?”
Earl agreed that this was an accurate assessment of the situation and the ensuing conversation and that he and Pete had watched us turn the boat around and jump off.
“We done called 9-1-1,” Pete was saying. “They oughta be at the dock when we get—“
A thunderous boom rumbled over the bay. We turned and saw the boat we’d jumped from, now three hundred yards away, erupt into a fireball and cloud of roiling smoke. Even from where we idled, we could hear the numerous screams and expletives of people on the pier as they watched.
“Holy sheep shit!” Pete emoted.
“Damn, y’all got off just in time, I guess,” Earl said more sedately. “Kinda weird, though, ain’t it? That boat explodin’ like that?”
I frowned, “Yeah… not impossible, but weird. Well, thanks, gents. Let’s get the lady back to the dock and to the hospital.”
Earl drove us to the transient docks, where a pair of EMTs met us. They strapped the unconscious woman onto a rolling stretcher and whisked her away. I invited Earl and Pete for a beer at Doc Ford’s. When the four of us exited the marina building onto 2nd Avenue, a pair of Saint Petersburg patrolmen waited along with a detective I knew.
“I see you managed to find some trouble again, Scott,” Alex Muñoz said with a thin smile.
“Trouble is my business, Alex,” I said wearily. “Any chance this can wait? I could really use a beer.”
“Won’t take long,” Alex replied. “Give you a chance to drip-dry.”
Lisa rushed up, saw that Clay and I were wet, and reached out and squeezed our hands. Then she punched us both hard in the biceps.
“Jesus Christ!” she exclaimed to the intense amusement of the three cops and the two fishermen. “What the hell were you two thinking?”
“Mostly we were thinking why couldn’t Lisa have jumped on board and done this so we didn’t have to get all wet and smoked out n’junk,” Clay jibed.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Then we were hoping that you and Marcus wouldn’t eat our dinners before we got back,” Clay offered.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” Lisa replied, crossing her arms over her small but generously bosomed chest.
“Then we were thinking, boy, it’s sure a gorgeous evening… why not go for a dip?” Clay went on casually.
“Yeah,” I said.
Lisa sighed, shook her head and then chuckled, “Never a dull moment, is there, Scott?”
“Nope,” I said.
I gave our statement to Alex, and we were released to make an attempt to
enjoy the rest of our evening. My clothes had dried somewhat, but they were still pretty damp. The restaurant didn’t object to Clay’s and my wetness, however. In fact, we received a round of applause from the other outdoor diners and those inside as we walked through and received freshly cooked dishes to replace the ones that had indeed gotten cold. We were informed that the restaurant would be comping our meals. Clay and I were even asked to stand against the railing while our picture was taken and that it would be printed, framed and hung inside for the enjoyment of all future diners.
“Doc would be proud,” the manager said with a crooked grin.
“That’s probably true,” I said, hoisting a fresh beer. “Tomlinson might not be as pleased, though.”
“Nah… he admires bravery, too,” the man said with a wink.
“Well that was pretty awesome,” Marcus noted. “Even though Lisa made me hold the table.”
“Would you rather have talked to the cops?” Lisa asked him.
Marcus shrugged and laughed.
“I wish he had come over,” Clay said peevishly. “He wouldn’t have punched us.”
“You deserved it,” Lisa stated firmly.
Marcus laughed harder.
“It hurt,” Clay whined.
“Oh please…” Lisa said. “I’m just a little girl and you’re a big, badass Marine.”
“I meant my feelings,” Clay sniffed.
I rolled my eyes and sighed, “It’s like being at a damn comedy club with you kids… you know, without all the funny jokes and stuff.”
Marcus grinned and asked, “So what do you think this was all about? Think this is something you’ll investigate?”
I scoffed, “Pfft! Oh, I’m sure it’s just an unfortunate accident. Not at all a weird and obviously sinister occurrence. Not at all something that’ll probably suck me in. What are the odds of that? When has that ever happened?”
They all looked at me and cocked eyebrows.
“Yeah…” I muttered and sighed. “Exactly…”
2
It was nearly the end of the following week when I began to learn something about the exciting incident at the Saint Petersburg Pier. It was a Thursday morning, and I was sitting in my inner office perusing the Orlando Sentinel. They offered an online version of the paper, which I often browsed, yet to my way of thinking, there was something about holding a real newspaper in your hands that just couldn’t be duplicated.
I felt the same way about books, too. Sure, I listened to audiobooks and read on Lisa’s iPad, yet even I, a spoiled millennial who’d grown up in the computer age, felt a strong connection to good old paper and ink.
Besides, it just wasn’t the same reading the funny papers online as it was in the paper. I was deep in B.C. and Beetle Bailey and their friends. I would read the comics aloud sometimes to Ferny the Fern and describe the pictures to her. She liked the funny pages.
“So in the first frame, Ferny,” I was explaining to Ferny the Fern. “We see a delicious lasagna steaming away on the counter in John’s kitchen. Right in the center of the lasagna is a single hair sticking out.”
Ferny waited breathlessly.
“Now, in the next frame, Garfield the cat appears,” I explained. “He’s wearing a black sweater and stocking cap, as if to sneak up on the unsuspecting lasagna… and his eyes are narrowed as a thought balloon appears over his head, ‘Oh, come on! A disgusting hair in the middle of the lasagna!’ Garfield declares irritably.”
Ferny waits.
I laugh, “We see Garfield’s head thrown back with a huge open mouth, the way Jim Davis always draws people eating. I love that. Anyway, Garfield holds the pan up and the entire lasagna slides toward his open mouth!”
Ferny agrees that this is hilarious.
I laugh again, “In the final frame, the empty pan of lasagna is sitting on the counter and there’s John, looking frustrated at the empty pan… well, it’s almost empty… there’s a single hair in the center! Ah-ha-ha-ha-HA!”
Ferny is so overcome with mirth she can’t even speak.
I reached out and picked up my coffee mug and sipped. Some time ago, not long after Lisa had come back to work for me, we’d picked up a Mr. Coffee and appropriate accessories. I already had a mini-fridge, so we could keep half and half and even some flavored creamer in it. I insisted on the regular coffee maker and not a Keurig. For one, I don’t like that crappy flavored coffee Lisa likes to drink. I’m also not a fan of those little plastic cups the coffee comes in. There are billions of those things in the landfills all over the world and I could never understand why they didn’t make them from paper.
So the compromise was to keep Dunkin Donuts medium roast, Starbuck’s Veranda blend and a bag of crappy flavored coffee around for Lisa. Usually something crappy like pumpkin spice…blegh… hazelnut… double blegh… or cinnamon almond blueberry pecan butterscotch vanilla or some other affront to all that’s decent in the world.
Lisa was already gone for the day, having been hired by a woman to stalk her estranged husband. She was to provide proof of his infidelity so that the woman could attain a satisfactory settlement in the seemingly inevitable divorce proceedings. I don’t know how she did it. I couldn’t stand and refused divorce work. She said that She’d take the case if she thought the other party was truly wronging her client, as she felt was the case in the current circumstance.
Hey, we had to eat, and if she could stomach it and a client wanted to pay her three bills a day to take the case, who was I to object. I billed five hundred, but as Lisa was technically a brand new P.I., having only been temporarily licensed for a few months while she completed her apprenticeship, she felt that charging a more modest rate when she was operating alone was fair. Should we work together, at the request of a client, we blended our rates to seven hundred a day, providing our clients with a reasonable discount out of sheer kindness and altruism, considering that Greg Foster and his ten-person agency charged twice as much, I felt this was humane.
I was therefore not sipping on a cup of glazed cranberry broccoli muffin or some other Godforsaken brew when my outer office door opened, and a medium-tall and athletic woman entered tentatively. She was perhaps five-eight with a slender body that moved well, as if it were used to strenuous cardiovascular exercise. Her lustrous black hair was tied behind her long neck with what looked to be a satin ribbon the color of red wine. This left a lot of a high cheekboned, heart-shaped face exposed, showing all the world what a lovely complexion she had. A pair of thin, finely arched brows rose over large glacier-blue eyes framed by long lashes.
The woman wore a skirted business suit over a blouse the color of her hair tie. The wide collar points of the blouse were folded out over the jacket. Her legs, at least what I could see from beneath the hem of the knee-length skirt, were slim and well-muscled. A runner or bicyclist's legs, perhaps. As a trained investigator, it was my duty to take notice of such details.
The woman smiled when she saw me, and this did her appearance no harm. She seemed familiar, yet the connection eluded me at first.
“I take it that you’re Scott Jarvis,” she stated in a pleasing but not over-the-top southern accent. I thought maybe Texas.
“You take it correctly, ma’am,” I said, although she was probably only in her late thirties. “Would you care to take a seat? I’ve got some good coffee brewed; may I offer you a cup?”
She sat in one of my comfortable newish client chairs and smiled, “It’s your office, and you can offer me anything you wish.”
I chuckled. I’d said some variation of that very thing more than once to such a question, “Touché.”
“I’d love a cup, thank you,” the woman said with a twinkle in her eye. “Cream and sugar, please.”
I went into the outer office and made her a cup, using one of the half-dozen porcelain mugs Lisa had procured. Quality coffee, quality containers, she’d observed. I agreed and observed that if this was so, then why fill the quality containers with liquid dung. She had then put forth
the opinion that I was liquid dung.
I handed my guest her cup and set my refreshed one down next to my folded newspaper.
“A real live paper,” she observed. “I didn’t think such a young man would bother with such arcane things.”
I smiled, “I’m no ordinary millennial, ma’am. I value the printed word. And I am thirty-two, after all.”
She chuckled, “A wizened old man, huh?”
I chuckled back, “You’re hardly aged yourself. We might be the same age from what I can see.”
She beamed at that, “You’re precious… I’m forty-three.”
Ghad!” I emoted, fluttering a hand across my chest. “And yet you managed to come in under your own power. I do so admire spryness.”
She laughed out loud now, “I heard you were a bit of a smarty-pants… and a charmer.”
I bowed my head modestly.
“My name is Veronica Bradford,” she finally stated. “And we’ve met, if you haven’t already recalled that.”
I narrowed my eyes in thought, “Have we? I’ve had a feeling of recognition since you walked in but… oh! Are you…?”
She nodded, “I’m the woman you rescued from the burning boat this past weekend. You and your friend.”
When I’d seen her last, she’d been sopping wet, disheveled, and I’d been too distracted by circumstance to register a great many details about her appearance. I smiled gently and said: “It would appear you’ve recovered. How are you? I hope there was no lasting damage from the smoke or… or anything else.”
“Physically, I’m all right,” she replied and then coughed lightly into her fist. “I still get a cough now and then, when I remember it.”
I smiled wryly, “Or when someone foolishly reminds you.”
She shrugged and smiled back, “The doctors say the smoke inhalation singed my lungs a bit, but no permanent damage. Still better than when I used to smoke. No… no, it’s the emotional aspects that still bother me. One doesn’t avoid an attempted murder without a few scars, inside and out, does one?”
