Night Vision

by Randy Wayne White

  To Tomlinson and Emily I whispered, “It was Squires’s phone,” as Melinski continued, “My next move is to contact our hostage-negotiation guys and ask them how we deal with this. Risk calling Squires and asking him if he’s got the girl? Then try to talk him down, convince him the smartest thing he can do is turn himself in. Or keep everything under the radar until we locate the truck. I’m not the officer in charge of this, but I know who is, and she’ll listen to me.”

  I said, “If you have the right kind of person talk to him, someone trained—definitely not the tough-guy type—it could work.”

  “But what if it doesn’t?” Melinski asked me, sounding angry or frustrated—a man who had been in a tough business for too long. “Jesus Christ! A thirteen-year-old girl a thousand miles from home. No family to look after her, and some steroid freak jerk grabs her. These Latin American kids, man-oh-man, Doc. The undocumented girls, particularly, they’re the easiest targets in the world—you’re right about that one.

  “Some of these gangbangers,” he continued, “the Mexican coyote types. To them, snatching female illegals is like a sport. Like hunting rabbits or doves—something soft and harmless that can’t bite back. And the sad thing is, hardly anyone even knows this shit takes place every day. Let alone cares.”

  To Melinski I said, “I don’t envy you guys the choices you have to make.”

  I meant it.

  “Doc,” the detective said, “I’ll give you my cell number, if you want. And I’ll call you the moment we get anything new. But I don’t want you nosing around, asking people questions about that girl. And I don’t want you messing with this Harris Squires dude. Give me your word?”

  I replied, “I have no interest in finding Squires. I don’t ever want to see the guy again. I’ll promise you that.”

  A few minutes later, we were in the lab, discussing ways to help find the girl, which, of course, meant finding Harris Squires. Try as I might, there was no separating the two.

  My lab is a wooden room, roofed with crossbeams and tin sheeting. The place smells of ozone and chemicals, creosote and brackish water that I could hear currenting beneath the pine floor as Tomlinson lectured us.

  My friend was trying to hurry us along, doing his best to sound rational and reasonable, telling me, “It’s not even ten yet, and it takes less than an hour to drive to Immokalee. Faster, if we knew someone who had a big fancy car. We could be there way before bar closing time. Right on Main Street there’s a good barbecue place, too, that stays open. I wouldn’t suggest it, but they have a salad bar.”

  He turned to give Emily a pointed look, obviously aware that her Jag was parked outside the marina’s gate. But if the lady noticed, she didn’t react. She was going through a file I had started years ago, a file on bull sharks that inhabit a freshwater lake one hundred and twenty-seven miles from the sea in Central America.

  We had gotten on the subject of sharks earlier in the evening when I was showing the lady a gadget I was testing that might repel attacking sharks. Laser Energetics of Orlando had sent me the thing, a palm-sized tactical light called a Dazer. Its green laser beam was hundreds of times more powerful than a legal laser pointer and could drop a man to the ground with one blinding blast. A test victim had described the pain as “like a screwdriver in the eye,” which is why a special federal license was required to possess it. If the Dazer affected sharks the same way, it might save sailors, pilots and divers who found themselves in a bad spot.

  On the file Emily was holding I had written in ink Sharks of Lake Nicaragua.

  “You have some fascinating stuff here,” Emily told me, looking at a black-and-white photo of a fisherman I had interviewed a few years back. He was missing a scarred-over chunk from his right thigh. Attacks in Lake Nicaragua are not uncommon. Water is murky, private bathing facilities are rare and backwater bull sharks have the feeding instincts of pit bulls. Males of the species, Carcharinus leucas, have a higher concentration of testosterone in their blood than any animal on earth.

  In the background of the photo, tacked to a wall, were several sets of shark jaws. The largest of them was opened wide enough to cut a man in half.

  The fisherman I’d interviewed had lost his thigh as a kid and had dedicated his adult life to getting even. The fact that Japanese buyers paid top dollar for shark fins only made his work sweeter—until he and other fishermen had all but depleted the landlocked shark population. The man was dead broke when I met him but still thirsty for revenge. By then, though, a rum bottle provided his only relief.

  I know a quite a bit about Central America and the varieties of sharks that thrive there—finned predators and two-legged predators, too. For several years I had lived in the region, traveling between Nicaragua, Guatemala and Masagua during the endless revolutions. I was in the country doing marine research—a fact that I made public to anyone who asked because I was also working undercover on assignment for a clandestine agency composed of a tiny, select membership.

  By day, I did collecting trips, wading the tide pools, and I maintained a fastidious little jungle lab. By night, I shifted gears and did a different type of work. I attended village celebrations and embassy functions. I wore a dinner jacket and went to parties thrown by wealthy landowners. I wore fatigues and trained with a counterinsurgency group, the Kaibiles. Less often, I roamed the local countryside on the hunt for gangster “revolutionaries” who, in fact, were little more than paid bullies and assassins.

  On those occasions, I carried a weapon for a reason.

  I’ve spent my life doing similar work in other Third World countries—Indonesia, Southeast Asia, Africa, Cuba. The study of marine biology has served me well in my travels, both as my primary vocation and as a believable cover. When a stranger inquires about local politics, residents are instantly suspicious, and for good reason. But when a stranger asks about the local fishery—where’s a good place to catch sharks?—he is instantly dismissed as just one more harmless, misguided fisherman.

  I’ve never really confided in Tomlinson, but he’s perceptive, so knows more about my background than most. And he probably suspects that I’m still involved in that shadow world of hunter and hunted—which I am. But he doesn’t know the truth and he never will.

  No one ever will.

  I was looking at Emily, thinking about the complications my sort of life brings to a relationship, as Tomlinson intruded again by saying with exaggerated patience, “I don’t expect your full attention. You both have the same rosy glow, which tells me you’ve had yourselves a really fabulous first date, so congratulations. But have you heard even a single word I’ve said?”

  Emily looked up from the folder, her expression empathetic. “I know you’re worried about the girl. I don’t even know her and I’m worried. But I’m going to follow Doc’s lead on this. Something tells me he’s got better instincts than most when it comes to these things.”

  She looked at me as she added, “Trust me, I understand what it’s like to have a family member go missing.”

  Tomlinson gave her a curious, questioning look, as if trying to decipher the implications. Then he got back to business, saying, “Okay, I agree with Doc. If every cop in Florida is looking for Tula, what good can we possibly do? It’s a valid point. But here’s another fact that’s valid: Cops aren’t welcome in immigrant communities. How many times have we talked about this? Why not at least go to Immokalee and have a look around? An hour in a car together—a four-beer drive, depending on traffic, and traffic shouldn’t be bad on a Wednesday night that far inland. Hell, it could be fun.”

  Emily was studying my face, her expression now asking me What do you think?

  She had dressed, but looked less formal in her white slacks, copper blouse, because her jacket was still hanging in my bedroom closet. I hoped it would stay there for the rest of the night—along with the woman—if we could manage to get rid of Tomlinson.

  The trouble was, Tomlinson was right. Guatemalans would probably talk to us, but they would
vanish the moment police appeared. If Squires had indeed taken Tula to Immokalee, someone would have noticed a big gringo with an Indio child. Why he would risk doing something so stupid, I had no idea. But if he had, the locals might trust us with the truth, which we could then pass along to police.

  I said to Tomlinson, “It’s been a while since I’ve been to Immokalee, but I remember it being farther than an hour.”

  Tomlinson was sitting at my desk computer. He’d been doing a lot of typing and printing as I showed the lady around the lab, enjoying her reaction to rows of aquaria that contained sea anemones, snappers, filefish, sea horses, scallops with iridescent blue eyes and dozens of other brackish-water creatures that I had collected from the grass flats around Dinkin’s Bay.

  “Immokalee seems like a long way to you because your truck’s so slow,” Tomlinson replied, not looking up from the keyboard.

  “Have you ridden with this guy yet?” he asked Emily. “Like an old lady, he drives—no offense to old ladies, don’t get me wrong. I love women of all ages. But top speed in that old Chevy of his, it might be sixty. Not that he’s ever pushed it that hard. I keep telling him to buy a new vehicle, but he’s too cheap. In that truck of his, he’s right. It would take us forever.”

  I asked Emily, “Have you ever been there?” meaning Immokalee.

  I got the impression she had, but the lady shrugged, open to fresh information.

  “It’s inland, southeast of Sanibel—saw grass and cattle country. Tomatoes, citrus and peppers, too—all crops picked by hand. It’s only forty-some miles, but you have to take back roads because it’s off the tourist path. The town’s not big, maybe twenty thousand people, and the population is mostly Hispanic.”

  I looked at Tomlinson, expecting him to correct me, as I added, “Back in the nineteen eighties, a Mexican crew chief brought in a truckload of Kanjobal Maya from Guatemala to work in Immokalee’s tomato fields and another place, Indiantown, which is north. That began the connection. Now those two towns have become sort of the Mayan capitals of Florida. That’s where all the Maya head when they’re looking for family. Or if they get into trouble.”

  Tomlinson did correct me, saying, “It was nineteen eighty-two, I’ve got it right here on the screen. Now half the population of Indiantown is Mayan. This article doesn’t say how many Guatemalans live in Immokalee, but the Latin population is almost eighty percent, which means there has to be ten or fifteen thousand Indios in Immokalee—which makes it bigger than most of the cities in Guatemala.

  He continued, “I don’t blame those people for not wanting to be documented. They’re mostly political refugees, on the run from their government because they did something or said something to piss off the big shots in Guatemala City. Their government still uses firing squads, don’t they, Doc?”

  The man said it in an accusatory way as if I were somehow responsible.

  “Up against the wall, asshole,” he added, shaking his head, “which is typical of a bunch of right-wing Nazis.”

  Right wing, left wing, it made no difference in Central America ... nor anywhere else, for that matter, because the power hungry all gravitate toward the same dangerous interstice on the political wheel.

  Even so, I said nothing as Tomlinson continued paraphrasing from what he was reading on the computer.

  “In the seventies, Guatemalan exiles tried building a little village just across the border in Mexico. But their own army had a bad habit of sneaking across and shooting the Indígena on sight. Finally, Guatemalan military wiped out the whole village.

  “Florida was a whole ocean away, and the really desperate refugees decided this was a safer choice. Now about thirty thousand Maya live in south Florida, which historically makes for a very nice symmetry, when you think about it.”

  I saw that Emily had missed the connection, so I explained, “He’s talking about the original inhabitants of Southwest Florida. It was a major civilization. They were contemporaries of the Maya, a people called the Calusa.”

  I suspected that the woman knew Florida history, but she listened intently as Tomlinson told her, “The Calusa and the Maya had too much in common for it to be accidental—in my opinion, anyway. The Calusa built shell pyramids and courtyards. They were led by ancestral kings, not chiefs—just like the Maya. They were here thousands of years before the Seminole.”

  He studied the woman long enough to confirm she was interested before confiding, “Some nights, I anchor off one of the islands near here—Useppa Island—where the shell mounds look like small mountains. I smoke a doobie or two, and those pyramids come alive, man. People march around the mounds in wooden masks, carrying torches. Cooking fires burn, babies cry—real live vignettes. Teenagers screwing in the bushes, old men taking dumps knee-deep in water—scenes like that. When the wind’s just right, I can hear hard men talking war. It’s a very heavy connection for me. The Calusa are still here, man, when moonlight chimes the right notes.”

  Emily was smiling, charmed by Tomlinson’s childlike sincerity. No surprise there. I had seen that smile on the faces of hundreds of women, maybe thousands, in the last ten years.

  My pal continued, “Archaeologists may call them by a different name, but the Calusa were Maya. They were oceangoing people who got around. It’s sad but kinda funny now that the Mayan people are considered illegal immigrants even though they’ve been on this peninsula five thousand years longer than anyone else.”

  Tomlinson looked up from the computer screen, done with his monologue, and glanced at his watch, eager to get going, a familiar stoned smile on his face. It had been fifteen minutes since I had told Detective Leroy Melinski that I would not search for Harris Squires, but now we were planning to do just that.

  But then something unexpected happened. I watched my pal focus on Emily, studying her face, and then the smile faded as he looked at something that had just appeared on the computer screen. Whatever it was troubled him.

  After a moment, the man motioned toward me as he said to Emily, “You’re serious about this guy, aren’t you.”

  It was a statement, not a question.

  Confused, then amused, Emily replied, “What a strange thing to say. I’m not in the habit of picking up strangers at alligator necropsies. Maybe the average girl does, but not me. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t interested.”

  Tomlinson’s expression changed, a look that was all too familiar. I call it his Sorcerer’s face. His eyelids drooped, his eyes appeared glazed by what he was seeing, the details he was absorbing, his attention focused laserlike on Emily Marston.

  “What I’m saying is, you’ve been interested in Doc for a while. In your head . . . in your brain, there’s a whole little room devoted to Dr. Marion Ford, isn’t there? That is unusual.”

  Emily’s smile hardened, a defensive posture, but she continued listening.

  Tomlinson’s eyes were almost closed now as he said, “You’ve done a lot of thinking about this guy. I can sense the vibes, it’s becoming very clear. But it took you a while to find a way to meet him. A proper way to meet him, I mean. Someone told you about Doc a long time ago, maybe. Someone who was. . . . who was important to you.”

  He took a breath, his eyes open now as he asked, “Am I right?”

  Emily turned to me. “Does he guess weights and birthdays, too?” She laughed the words, but her discomfort was visible.

  I understood why. After we had made love for the second time, I had taken her out in my flats skiff, a twenty-one-foot boat. We had drifted from Woodring Point almost to the marina, lying on the deck, looking up the late-sunset sky. I’d learned a lot about the woman by the time we’d returned to my stilt house an hour later and made love yet again.

  As I knew, Emily was uncomfortable because what Tomlinson had just said was all too close to the truth. She had heard about me a couple of years before from her own father, whom she adored.

  Had Emily told me her maiden name, I would have made the connection much earlier.

  The highl
y regarded amateur ornithologist who could afford to travel to Third World places had mentioned my name several times to his daughter—usually when she was dating some guy her father didn’t deem worthy.

  I could admit to Emily that I knew that man, but that was as far as I could go. She willingly shared her secret, I could not.

  I became even more uncomfortable when she told me that her father had disappeared thirteen months ago. I had met the man only twice—under circumstances that are still classified—so I knew without doubt that bird-watching was to him what marine biology is to me. It was an effective cover story for the dangerous intelligence work he did.

  From past experience, I also suspected that Emily’s father was dead. If I ever disappear from Dinkin’s Bay, the same will be true of me.

  It was a strange situation to be in. In a way, I knew things about Emily’s father that she would never know. She described him as “sweet, sensitive and generous.”

  I didn’t doubt that was true, but I also knew the guy had to have a dark side or he would not have survived as long as he had in the business. I covered my discomfort with a silence that communicated an interest in the woman’s past. My interest was genuine.

  Now Tomlinson had pried into our private conversation with yet another of his uncanny guesses. What irritates me is that he always does it in a way that gives the impression he possesses supernatural powers, which, of course, he does not.

  It took me a couple of years, but I finally figured out how he does what he does, although I may never understand how he does it so well. Tomlinson is extraordinarily perceptive. He has a genius for reading nuances of speech, body language and facial expressions. He then ties all those tiny bits of datum together to make plausible and often accurate projections.

  It requires an intellect of the first magnitude, yet it is still a magician’s trick.