Bone Deep

by Randy Wayne White

  “I was at dinner with you,” I pointed out.

  “You must have heard something. I wonder what it would be like . . . you know, swimming naked with a bunch of strangers?” Her musing tone caused the churchgoer in her to add, “Not that I would do such a thing. Well . . . unless you were there . . . or . . . or maybe someone I felt safe with.”

  “That’s not exactly comforting,” I responded. “What time’s your charter in the morning?”

  Hannah yawned again, a neural reflex that signaled more than sleepiness. Then kicked the cover off her legs and lay naked. “I’ve got to be up at five, so you should probably go.” There was a pause. “But not just yet . . . okay?”

  Fingers slid from my hand, fumbled with the bedsheet, then began a gentle, probing search to confirm my answer. But I stopped her. I was annoyed by her scolding certainty and peeved at myself for feeling so spellbound in this woman’s presence.

  “You need your sleep,” I said.

  “You’re serious?”

  “Occasionally.”

  She sat up. “You are mad.”

  “Mad about you,” I corrected. Then kissed the lady good night, got in my boat, and ran backcountry to Dinkin’s Bay, where my dog was waiting, golden-eyed and alert.

  “It’s four in the morning,” I told him.

  The dog acknowledged me with an indifferent sniff, a single wag of its tail, and grunted for permission to swim.

  “Let’s go for a run first,” I said.

  FIVE

  After two hours at a flea market off Englewood Road, and before we interrupted a burglary in progress, our cab abandoned us in downtown Venice because Tomlinson hollered, “Stop, Kato, stop!” as we passed a sno-cone vendor.

  At that moment, a man carrying bolt cutters and a gun was casing a house a few miles away. A glassy, summer Friday can drift us toward disaster as surely as a waterfall.

  “You scared the driver,” I told Tomlinson, pocketing my billfold.

  “Not if he waited to get paid,” he argued. “That’s happened, man. Cabbies hit the accelerator before my butt’s off the seat.” Yellow hibiscus shirt and thongs flapping, he went to get his sno-cone. I turned and walked the other way. Fallsdown, I assumed, would follow one of us.

  He didn’t. When I looked back, he was entering a shop that promised Fine Shark Jewelry. Not unusual in Venice, known as the “Shark Tooth Capital of the World,” but unexpected. At the flea market, Fallsdown had gotten a lead on an elderly antiquities dealer—just a name, not an address—but the man from Montana had seemed intrigued. So I found a bench and waited. Watched the passing of pretty ladies, who scented the air with boutique incense. One after another, they reassured me that walking out on Captain Hannah Smith last night was the manly thing to do.

  Soon, while Tomlinson lapped at his sno-cone, Fallsdown reappeared. He was folding a piece of paper, his expression optimistic—or so I thought. But then said, “Nothing here. Might as well head back,” and asked me, “How far to the marina?”

  Osprey Nest Marina, where I had tied my boat, was about ten blocks north.

  “What about the old dude collector?” Tomlinson asked. We had been given the name Finn Tovar.

  Fallsdown, already walking—but in the wrong direction—said, “He died last week. The lady in the store’s been in business fifteen years and she knew the man. Didn’t like him, but she knew him.”

  “Has his collection already been sold?”

  Fallsdown held up the folded paper as if it were a prize. “That’s what we’re going to find out.” Then added, “Perfect,” as if the universe was unfolding as he’d expected.

  He knew what he was doing, apparently, so I fell in line, the three of us walking like ducks, east, for five hot blocks, before I finally asked, “Where are we going?”

  “I told you,” Fallsdown replied over his shoulder, “to the marina.”

  I stopped. “You’re going the wrong way.”

  “What?”

  I said it again.

  “What?”

  I waited until both men turned before asking, “Take another look at that paper. I thought the lady gave you an address.”

  “No, just a name. We’re looking for a tour guide, some local who hangs around a bar near where we left the boat.”

  “You need a tour guide,” I said. “The Gulf of Mexico is that way. The marina is another ten blocks north.”

  Fallsdown said, “You’re shitting me.”

  Tomlinson tried to reassure the Crow medicine man. “Don’t worry, Dunk, you just need to brush up on your Indian skills. I’ll help you, brother.”

  Fallsdown asked, “Do you remember me ever getting lost back when I was a drunk? I don’t.”

  Perfect, I thought.

  • • •

  A WHILE LATER, Dunk regained some of my confidence when a man who resembled Mick Jagger, but with braided pirate hair, said, “I’m part Indian,” and Dunk replied, “Which tribe? Sicilian or whitefoot?”

  Up until then, I’d been ready to pull the plug. There are worse ways to waste a day than gunkholing the Gulf Coast, but I’d had enough. We’d found the tour guide, whose name was Mick-something, at a tiki bar on the water. Osprey Nest was a nice marina—orderly docks, with a fueling station and a patio restaurant. A busy place during high season, I guessed, but quiet on this June afternoon, where Mick, a shirtless man drinking beer and smoking a pipe while in full lotus position, did not inspire confidence. Yes, he knew a relics collector by the name of Finn Tovar, but I was restless. Work awaited me at the lab. I was irritable from lack of sleep. So I had wandered off to check my boat but returned just in time to hear the tour guide’s claim and Fallsdown’s response.

  “Whitefoot?” Mick asked. “Never heard of that tribe, man. You’re trying to be funny, right?”

  When Dunk told him, “They’re part of the Fawnee Nation,” I decided it was getting interesting and moved into the shade to listen.

  Mick asked, “Faw-nee?” Then got the joke. “Oh . . . phony nation,” and decided to ride with it instead of taking offense. “No, but I know what you’re saying, there are so many fakes out there, man. See, I’m one-quarter Cherokee. My mother’s side. That’s why I hit it off with Old Man Tovar. It’s where my talent for finding things comes from.” After a glance in my direction, he relit the clay pipe in his hand—puff-puff-puff. A mixture of tobacco and weed, the smell. Then continued talking.

  “The old man was a bastard—he’d say it himself, ‘I’m a ruthless bastard’—but Finn trusted me. We did a lot of hunts together. Once, these three dudes were bird-dogging us, heard we’d found a very hot spot off the Myakka River. So what’s Finn do? Doubled back and slit their tires. That didn’t—what do you call it?—deter them, so next time Finn set what he called a werewolf wire. You know, a wire stretched neck-high? One schlub was bleeding pretty bad, but, of course, we were all trespassing, so they couldn’t call the cops. Finn, he’d say, ‘In the bone biz, you need balls or you end up bones.’”

  When I took a seat, Mick stared at me, and asked Tomlinson and Dunk, “Is he a cop?”

  “My pal’s cool,” Tomlinson said.

  Mick accepted that. “No offense, mate.”

  “I took it as a compliment,” I replied, which he decided was another joke and laughed. “Funny bunch, you guys. Yeah, but seriously . . . The Brown Shirts arrested thirteen collectors a while back. Something like four hundred felony charges, man. Confiscated all their shit. Like, perfect—I mean perfect—Clovis knives and arrowheads. Tools of this semitranslucent coral you would not believe. One poor schlub they got was in his seventies, spent his life bone hunting. They took a giant condor skull he could have retired on. His whole collection of shark teeth and shark points”—Mick used his hands to indicate size: three to six inches—“and they put his ass in jail.”

  Tomlinson explained to Dunk tha
t Brown Shirts were “Swamp Cops,” or Florida Fish & Wildlife officers, and that Florida’s first people had worked shark’s teeth into hunting points, “which,” he added, “provides a beautiful integration of paleontology with archaeology. Don’t you agree?”

  Dunk replied, “Last thing I want to do is talk to a cop,” then they discussed ancient tools made from shark teeth while my attention abandoned the conversation. It was because of the way Duncan had said talk to a cop.

  A troubling possibility entered my mind. After three years in state prison, was it possible that Fallsdown was still on parole? If so, leaving Montana could put the man behind bars again. I’ve done far worse in my life than aiding and abetting a felon. That wasn’t the problem. I liked the guy. He had come to Florida on a quest that was admirable in a clumsy Don Quixote way. Maybe a phone call or two could make it right if he had skipped without permission. It depended, of course, on how forgiving his parole officer was.

  When I returned to the conversation, though, and tried to exchange eye contact, Fallsdown swung from me to Mick, the tour guide, and asked, “How much do you charge?”

  “Hundred bucks an hour to look for shark’s teeth. To see what’s left of Finn’s collection? Well . . .” Mick pretended to struggle with the quandary, then decided, “Ah, what the hell. You’re a brother Skin, so . . . so let’s say two hundred for the afternoon?”

  Getting to his feet, Tomlinson said to me, “Hope you don’t mind, Doc. We volunteered your boat.” Then hesitated. “You’re carrying cash, right?”

  At about the same time, a thief carrying bolt cutters and a gun was entering the house once owned by another violent man—Finn Tovar.

  • • •

  HALF A MILE OFFSHORE, Snake Island and the Venice Pier behind us, Mick, in teaching mode, told me, “Stop, I want to explain something.”

  I shut down, and drifted, while learning that five million years ago, when the Florida peninsula was twice as wide, an archaic river had vented here from a shallow inland sea—thus the shark’s teeth.

  Mick’s story varied from what I’d read, but it was close enough. I started the engines and steered south while he hollered an addendum: “That inland sea is where they dig phosphate now. For millions of years, bones stacked up there. But we don’t find teeth like we used to. It’s because of beach reclamation. They covered Venice Beach with tons of sand.”

  Then, a few seconds later, he pointed toward the airport and informed us, “You’ll get a kick out of this—that’s where three of the nine/eleven terrorists learned to fly. One was a pretty cool operator. He came to my yoga class, showed up every Tuesday . . . almost.” As an aside, in his dreamy, stoned way, he explained to Dunk, “Yoga has a lot in common with our ancient ways. Equality, you know? The oneness of all life.”

  Dunk, straight-faced, said, “I didn’t know ragheads were into equality.”

  “Rag-whats . . . ?” Mick asked.

  To Tomlinson, sitting beside me, I leaned over and said, “I want that asshole off my boat.”

  He gave me an OK sign and said into my ear, “Mick has the keys to Tovar’s house—it’s only a mile down the beach. He keeps a bike there, so I figure he’s got permission.”

  I didn’t like it. Rather than taking charge, I said, “He’d better.” Then moved on to my concerns about Duncan, saying, “Is there a chance he jumped parole?”

  Tomlinson shrugged. “I can’t ask. It’s not the Indian way.”

  I said, “Yeah . . . much smarter to let him go back to jail,” and bumped the throttles up to 5000 rpm, a blur of white sand to our left. Two miles later, Mick hollered, “That’s Finn’s place,” and told me to pull up on the beach.

  The Gulf was calm, so I did. It was an isolated stretch of sand and foliage, a single orange roof through the palms. A big chunk of property in an exclusive area—the violent antiquities collector had been a wealthy man. The spot appeared safe enough until my friends and the tour guide filed through the door into Tovar’s house. By then, the thief had filled his bag and wanted out.

  Unfortunately, I distanced myself from the expedition by staying on the boat. A bad bilge pump was my excuse.

  • • •

  THAT’S WHAT I WAS DOING, lying on my belly, arm deep in the aft access port, when I heard the distant whap-whap of what was probably a screen door but could have been Mick, our stoned leader, hammering off a lock.

  I raised my head, but the view was blocked by two black engine cowlings, so I returned to work. My boat carries four high-speed pumps, a redundancy system for running wide open in heavy seas. Using the braille system, I was testing the float switches on each pump when, a minute later, I heard a faraway siren . . . then another siren much closer.

  No need for concern. Venice is a low-crime area, but heart attacks and head-on collisions are indifferent to geography and the sunniest of days. The combination nagged at me, though. I couldn’t convince myself. What if the house was equipped with a silent alarm and police were on their way? Fallsdown, even Tomlinson, might be cuffed and taken to jail.

  Damn it.

  I got to my knees to seal the access port, which is when I heard a man yell, “Hey . . . you! I’m a cop—I need your boat.”

  Was he talking to me? Yes—a nervous man in blue sweats, mid-twenties, head shaved, with a goatee. He had crossed the beach unheard because of the sirens and stood at the water’s edge, yards away. Undercover cops sometimes wear jogging suits, but their heads do not swivel frantically when commandeering a vehicle. Nor do they carry a duffel bag in one hand while aiming what looked like a .22 pistol at the face of a surprised citizen.

  That would be me.

  I said, “If you’re in trouble, this is the worst possible way to handle it. What happened back there?”

  The man splashed toward the boat, pistol elevated. “Shut up and do what I tell you.”

  “Do you want me out?” I was hoping he did.

  He swung the bag aboard, needed both hands because it was heavy. “Start the engines,” he said.

  That told me he wanted a hostage or was unfamiliar with boats. I scanned foliage beneath the orange roof, sirens louder now. The whap-whap I’d heard could have been his .22 pistol. Tomlinson, Dunk, or the tour guide might be lying in pools of blood. The possibility converted my surprise into anger. Even so, there was not a damn thing I could do for my friends that police and EMTs couldn’t do better when they arrived.

  My heart, which had been thudding, began to slow—symptomatic of a change in my attitude. Decision time: Throw myself over the side, swim beneath the boat and take the guy under before he climbed aboard? The move risked a bullet before our watery wrestling match.

  No . . . the image of Tomlinson or Fallsdown wounded or dead demanded a cleaner, sharper response.

  I made my decision.

  Rather than pull the stern anchor, I tossed the line free, eager to put a few miles of water between my boat and any beach-walker witnesses.

  “Hop in,” I told the man.

  SIX

  I’ve known good athletes who had the physiques of McDonald’s clerks. A couple of all-American wrestlers so mild-mannered, so shy, they would have looked right at home stocking shelves at Kmart. Gauging ability based on size is typical of our culture, but unwise, naïve—dangerous, too, in a violent situation.

  Like now. My boat had been commandeered by a man who was unimposing, even clumsy when he’d tumbled aboard. But so what? A heavy duffel bag and a gun proved nothing. He could be a skilled burglar . . . or a psycho killer with a new trophy to add to his collection.

  Something he could also add were my billfold, my phone, and a fine Gerber multi-tool he’d pocketed after ordering me to empty my pockets on the deck. Clumsy or not, the man was careful. Which is why I was thinking, Pick your move. Make it clean, something you can explain without ending up behind bars—or dead.

  Standing at
the controls, I considered options while we cruised at thirty knots toward an empty turquoise horizon. My abductor faced me from the other side of the windshield, his knees on a cooler. It gave him a clear view of what lay behind: Venice Beach, Manasota Key, the coastline shrinking, but no helicopters or boats in pursuit. He kept the pistol pressed to the Plexiglas, a profile view, his hand flat over the weapon to brace himself against the mild dolphining of waves. But he used the weapon for emphasis whenever he yelled to be heard.

  He raised the gun now, asking, “Can this boat make it to Mexico?” The windshield became an aiming post for his cheap revolver, the kind sold in pawnshops. The cylinder was loaded, but at least one chamber was empty, possibly two. The weapon had been fired.

  Yucatán, Mexico, was four hundred miles away, which I communicated by shaking my head, then held up a hand until he angled the pistol away. I tried reason. “What happened back there? It can’t be worse than what you’re doing now, but I won’t press charges if you talk to me—and give me my stuff back.”

  The man looked south where two boats, in tandem, cruised the beach, then north where another boat was exiting Roberts Bay. Wiped a hand over his bald head and muttered, “Shit.”

  “Take it easy,” I told him. “There’s not a boat around that can catch mine. If police saw you get in, they know that, so they won’t try.”

  It wasn’t true, but it earned his attention. “Yeah?” He considered the B-Impact boat’s stealthy coloring, the electronics and oversize engines, wanting to believe, but he didn’t. “Doesn’t feel like we’re going that fast.”

  “You want to attract attention?” I asked, touching the throttles. “We can. You should be worried about helicopters. That’s what they’ll send. Use a laser that transmits our GPS coordinates, but they’ll keep their distance if they know you’re armed.”

  He licked his lips and sniffed, “Cops are the least of my worries, man,” but his eyes moved from the console to the sky.

  I kept talking because it’s easier to kill a stranger. Told him I was willing to help but needed to understand the situation. Then shared an ironic truth I couldn’t entrust to a friend—or even a woman I might be falling in love with.