The Deep Six

by Striker, Randy

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Two decades ago, under the pen name Randy Striker, the New York Times bestselling author wrote this macho thriller classic. . . .

  PRAISE FOR RANDY WAYNE WHITE AND HIS NOVELS

  “What James Lee Burke has done for Louisiana, Tony Hillerman for the Southwest, John Sandford for Minnesota, and Joe R. Lansdale for east Texas, Randy Wayne White does for his own little acre.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “White takes us places that no other Florida mystery writer can hope to find.”

  —Carl Hiaasen

  “White brings vivid imagination to his fight scenes. Think Mickey Spillane meets The Matrix.”

  —People

  “A major new talent . . . hits the ground running . . . a virtually perfect piece of work. He’s the best new writer we’ve encountered since Carl Hiaasen.”

  —The Denver Post

  “White is the rightful heir to joining John D. Mac-Donald, Carl Hiaasen, James Hall, Geoffrey Norman. . . . His precise prose is as fresh and pungent as a salty breeze.”

  —The Tampa Tribune

  “White doesn’t just use Florida as a backdrop, but he also makes the smell, sound, and physicality of the state leap off the page.”

  —South Florida Sun-Sentinel

  “This satisfying madcap fare could go seismic on the regional bestseller lists.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “He describes southwestern Florida so well it’s easy to smell the salt tang in the air and feel the cool gulf breeze.

  —Mansfield News Journal

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of

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  Published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, February 1981

  First Printing (Author Introduction), October 2006

  eISBN : 978-1-101-53062-7

  Copyright © New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 1981

  Introduction copyright © Randy Wayne White, 2006

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  For my friends Dr. Harold Westervelt,

  Bob Fizer, Dr. Amanda Evans, and

  dear Roberta Petish

  Introduction

  In the winter of 1980, I received a surprising phone call from an editor at Signet Books—surprising because, as a Florida fishing guide, the only time New Yorkers called me was to charter my boat. And if any of my clients were editors, they were savvy enough not to admit it.

  The editor said she’d read a story by me in Outside Magazine and was impressed. Did I have time to talk?

  As a mediocre high school jock, my idols were writers, not ball players. I had a dream job as a lighttackle guide, yet I was still obsessed with my own dream of writing for a living. For years, before and after charters, I’d worked hard at the craft. Selling a story to Outside, one of the country’s finest publications, was a huge break. I was about to finish a novel, but this was the first time New York had called.

  Yes, I had time to talk.

  The editor, whose name was Joanie, told me Signet wanted to launch a paperback thriller series that featured a recurring he-man hero. “We want at least four writers on the project because we want to keep the books coming, publishing one right after the other, to create momentum.”

  Four writers producing books with the same character?

  “Characters,” Joanie corrected. “Once we get going, the cast will become standard.”

  Signet already had a template for the hero. He was a Vietnam vet turned Key West fishing guide, she said, talking as if the man existed. He was surfer-boy blond, and he’d been friends with Hemingway.

  I am not a literary historian, but all my instincts told me the timetable seemed problematic. I said nothing.

  “He has a shark scar,” Joanie added, “and he’s freakishly strong. Like a man who lifts weights all the time.”

  The guys I knew who lifted weights were also freakishly clumsy, so . . . maybe the hero, while visiting a local aquarium, tripped during feeding time?

  My brain was already problem-solving.

  “He lives in Key West,” she said, “so, of course, he has to be an expert on the area. That’s why I’m calling. You live in Key West, and I liked your magazine story a lot. It seems like a natural fit.”

  Actually, I fished out of Sanibel Island, on Florida’s Gulf Coast, a six hour drive from Sloppy Joe’s, but this was no time for petty details.

  “Have you ever been to Key West?” I asked the editor. “Great sunsets.”

  Editors, I have since learned, can also be cagey. Joanie didn’t offer me the job. She had already settled on three of the four writers, she said, but if I was willing to submit a few sample chapters on speculation, she’d give me serious consideration.

  Money? A contract? That stuff was “all standard,
” she told me, and could be discussed later.

  “I’ll warn you right now,” she said, “there are a couple of other writers we’re considering, so you need to get at least three chapters to me within a month. Then I’ll let you know.”

  I hung up the phone, stunned by my good fortune. My first son, Lee, had been born only a few months earlier. My much adored wife, Debra, and I were desperate for money because the weather that winter had been miserable for fishing. But it was perfect for writing.

  I went to my desk, determined not to let my young family down.

  At Tarpon Bay Marina, where I was a guide, my friend Ralph Woodring owned a boat with Dusky painted in big blue letters on the side. My friend, Graeme Mellor, lived on a Morgan sailboat named No Mas.

  Dusky MacMorgan was born.

  Every winter, Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus came to town. Their trapeze artists, I realized, were not only freakishly strong, but they were also freakishly nimble.

  Dusky gathered depth.

  One of my best friends was the late Dr. Harold Westervelt, a gifted orthopedic surgeon. Dr. Westervelt became the Edison of Death, and he loved introducing himself that way to new patients. His son, David, became Westy O’Davis, and our spearfishing pal, Billy, became Billy Mack.

  Problems with my hero’s shark scar and his devoted friendship with Hemingway were also solved.

  Working around the clock, pounding away at my old black manual typewriter, I wrote Key West Connection in nine days. On a Monday morning, I waited for the post office to open to send it to New York.

  Joanie sounded a little dazed when she telephoned on Friday. Was I willing to try a second book on spec?

  Hell, yes.

  God, I was beginning to love New York’s can-do attitude.

  The other three writers (if they ever existed) were fired, and I became the sole proprietor of Captain Dusky MacMorgan—although Signet owned the copyright and all other rights after I signed Joanie’s “standard” contract. (This injustice was later made right by a willing and steadfast publisher and my brilliant agent.)

  If Joanie (a fine editor) feels badly about that today, she shouldn’t. I would’ve signed for less.

  I wrote seven of what I would come to refer to as “duck and fuck” books because in alternating chapters Dusky would duck a few bullets, then spend much-deserved time alone with a heroine.

  Seldom did a piece of paper go into my old typewriter that was ripped out and thrown away, and I suspect that’s the way the books read. I don’t know. I’ve never reread them. I do remember using obvious clichés, a form of self-loathing, as if to remind myself that I should be doing my own writing, not this job-of-work.

  The book you are now holding, and the other six, constituted a training arena for a young writer who took seriously the discipline demanded by his craft and also the financial imperatives of being a young father.

  For years, I apologized for these books. I no longer do.

  —Randy Wayne White

  Cartagena, Colombia

  1

  Underwater, in the angling tawny light of late afternoon, everything was gold. Flaxen sea fans undulated in the current that swept around the reef, and aureated and jewel-crested reef fish watched the naked woman as she reached beneath a pod of brain coral and pulled out a spiny lobster. It was a big one—enough for her half of the supper we would eat back on my thirty-four-foot cruiser, the Sniper. Drifting above, mask in the water, breathing easily through my snorkel, I watched the naked woman with delight. Even she appeared gold in that strange afternoon light; a tenuous light that seems unique to the open sea, and to the reef islands far, far off Key West. It is a light that does more than illuminate—it seems to melt and liquefy, gilding everything it touches: the Australian pines and coconut palms that leaned in windward strands on nearby Fullmoon Cay; the long sweep of white beach on Marquesas Keys; the blue and then orange expanse of open sea as the sun whirled toward dusk, setting behind the Dry Tortugas. And the woman, too. Drifting above the reef, I watched her slow ascent. Her blond hair streamed behind her in a long veil. After a month on my boat, her body was bronzed and trim, and the bikini strips on chest and hips appeared as pale geometries upon her golden nakedness. She winked at me as she stroked toward the surface, holding the lobster like a prize.

  Gold, gold, gold.

  Later, it would return in my memory as a prophecy. An augury of the future. That’s the way our minds work. Something happens, and our brains scan the past for omens. It’s a human compulsion: search for order in a universe that, at times, seems to be anything but orderly. A friend dies and, in our minds, his last words take on portentous significance. We are involved in an accident, and we remember that “something” told us not to take the trip. Now it was golden light on a golden sea and in less than two hours it would take on a whole new meaning.

  I watched the girl. She wore only mask, fins and snorkel. Oxygen bubbles, clinging to her blond triangle of body hair, looked like little pearls, and her breasts moved with heavy, liquid weight. Her beauty, the reef, and the afternoon light filled me with a strange yearning.

  “Hey! Look what I’ve got!” She pulled the mask off her perfect face, laughing with delight.

  “I know what you’ve got—it’s hard to miss.”

  She slapped at me with mock outrage. “Oh, you! I’m talking about the lobster. Isn’t he a beauty?”

  He was indeed. A beautiful crustacean, the Florida lobster. No claws, but with sharp spines between their eyes that can needle through heavy cotton gloves. And because of that, this woman, Lisa-lee Johnson—Lee, I called her—hadn’t caught one the whole trip. But she wasn’t one to give up. Some afternoons she would come back from diving with her hands perforated, then sneak off to the first-aid kit to doctor herself in private. She never complained and I never let on that I knew. And the next day she would go back for more. Until now. Finally, she had caught one. And it was a beaut. A two-pounder, easy. Her blue eyes gleamed victoriously as she dropped it, squeaking and kicking, into my dive bag, and we swam together over to the little Boston Whaler I had hauled along behind my Sniper.

  “And what about your supper?” She sat naked on the low gunnel of the thirteen-foot boat, her blond hair hanging down in a thick wet rope, dripping water on her upturned breasts.

  “Ah . . . supper . . . oh, yeah. . . .”

  “Your mind seems to be someplace else, Dusky.” She grinned bawdily.

  “Dressed the way you are, woman, I find that my thoughts are on anything but food.”

  The smile left her face, and a new look came into her blue eyes; a heavy, sleepy look with which I had become very familiar over the past month. It had been a good month. A month of sun and fish and clear water; a month of aimless cruising and, then, love. In our own ways, we were both healing. Lee had separated from her domineering husband. And for me, only two eternal months before, the pirates, the ruthless ones, the money-hungry drug runners, had blown my life apart. A little ignition bomb in the trunk of our old blue Chevy. How were they to know that I wouldn’t be the one to start it that awful August night? And why should they care that my beautiful wife, Janet, and my twin boys, Ernest and Honor, had been killed instead?

  Well, I had made them care. And the few I had allowed to live would regret it until their own dying day.

  So, when I was done with them, I had returned to my dock in Key West to find this woman, Lisa-lee Johnson. I had come to know and admire her when she and her husband chartered me and my Sniper for a day of fishing, and I had welcomed her tearful request to cruise alone for a few weeks. She wanted to cruise to think. And I wanted to get away so I wouldn’t have to think. When we left Key West and headed across Florida Bay, we were two strangers filled with our own private horrors. The first week had been one of nervous laughter and averted glances. Neither of us was interested in love—just companionship. I had seen too much recent death and had done too much killing to want to be alone. And she—well, she seemed to be looking for a man strong e
nough not to try to hurry her into the sack; a man she could talk to and depend upon while she made up her mind about the husband she had left behind.

  But it seemed inevitable that we would become lovers. I had known from our first meeting that there was a strong sexual awareness between us. You know it instinctively, and it has nothing to do with coy exchanges and suggestive remarks. And when we had finally kissed, it was like a dam breaking. We couldn’t get each other’s clothes off fast enough. We couldn’t touch each other enough. We couldn’t satisfy each other enough.

  “Oh, Dusky, is it so awful that I want you this way . . . ?”

  “No, Lee. No. . . .”

  It was an affirmation of the things we had left behind; an affirmation of the new lives each of us would have to find. And afterward, we would talk: long, rambling, self-indulgent conversations, telling each other everything. We didn’t talk like lovers—nothing about our combined plans and hopes for the future. We talked like best friends. We soothed each other and tried to bolster sagging egos and shattered dreams.

  It was harder for me to talk than it was for Lee. I find it difficult to stick more than four words into a sentence, and more than one sentence into a paragraph. I’ve always been quiet. Not shy, just quiet. My wife used to kid me by calling me Captain Stoic. But finally, with Lee’s gentle help, the words started pouring out. When someone you love dies, you first feel outrage, then remorse, then guilt. I had been through the remorse and outrage—nearly a dozen men died in the flare of it. And Lee had helped me reason the guilt away.

  “I just can’t figure out the why of it. Why did that woman and those two boys have to die?”

  “Dusky, you told me once when we first met that for some things there are no reasonable explanations. There is only acceptance. It’s happened. Accept it. And go on.”