Ten Thousand Islands Page 2

  I waited, head tilted, and heard branches move once again. The sound of a snapping twig is an ancient alert. It fires all the limbic alarms that enable direct communication between the ears and eager feet. An unknown primate was out there in the gloom.

  I touched a button on my watch and saw that it was 2:07 A.M., 2 October. Very, very late for a friend to come a’calling. Very, very late for me.

  I was awake because I couldn’t sleep, and I was outside because I was restless—neither particularly unusual. What was unusual was the weather. An abrupt and windless cold front had drifted in that night. It brought a sea change. Fog descended as if the island had slipped its anchor and drifted into a mountain cloud. Fall and spring are the seasons. If you have the misfortune to be on the water when the silver shroud arrives, your best bet is to flee the channel, drop the hook and wait it out.

  Sitting in a rocker on the porch, looking out into the mist, however, is very pleasant. That’s what I chose to do. I’d lain in bed, listening to silence and dripping water until I couldn’t stand it anymore, then pulled on a pair of shorts and went out the screen door into the haze.

  Amazing. I stood at one end of my deck and couldn’t see the railing at the other end. I swung down to the lower platform to check my fish tank, and could just barely see the edge of a tin roof through the swirling mist.

  My house was gone.

  Dinkin’s Bay Marina is just down the shoreline. The lights of the marina created a surreal van Gogh sky: swirling stars and corridors of light on a white canvas.

  I found a rocker on the porch and sat there listening. Fog is condensed water vapor and conducts sound far more efficiently than air, so it seemed as if the old wives’ tale was true: Blind people have a heightened sense of hearing.

  I was certainly blind in that fog. From the direction of the marina, I could hear the click of every auto-switch, the whir of every pump, the groan of straining dock lines and the steady gurgle of bait tanks.

  Then I heard it, a sound that didn’t belong, a sound that didn’t fit. It was the careful closing of a car door. It is a distinctive latching of metal on metal made when a door, half closed, is pressed with the hip.

  A moment later, I heard the same sound again.

  I sat a little straighter, trying to peer through the fog. It was blinding, dizzying. The sound came from the direction of the mangroves where the shell road, separated by the marina’s gate, becomes Tarpon Bay Road. I could only occasionally see the mangrove fringe. Black limbs reached toward me, then vanished in a smudge of white.

  It’s not unusual for insomniac tourists to turn onto the marina’s dead-end road to see what there is to see, but there’s a pattern. I’ve heard it too often not to know. They stop at the gate where business hours are posted. They read the sign. Then they back up and leave.

  The shell road also attracts lovers. But people who stop for a roadside encounter don’t get out of the car unless it’s to urinate, and there is a pattern to that, too. Doors open, there’s a short pause, doors close.

  I sat waiting to hear the doors again.

  Waited two minutes; five minutes. Nothing.

  Then I heard that distinctive sound in the mangroves. Heard the snap of a limb; rustle of leaves. Then: silence.

  Thus I knew that two or more people had exited a car, and at least one of those people was trying to find the path to the boardwalk that leads to my house.

  I stood. Listened for another moment. Then, very quietly, I began to move.

  I get the occasional late night visitor. It was bar-closing time on a nasty, foggy night. Stumbling toward me was probably one of any number of my drunken friends with a couple of friendly drunks in tow. I could hear them explaining to me, Doc, it was just too damn foggy to run the boat home, so I caught a ride to your place. I’ll sleep on your porch, you don’t mind.

  It’s happened before.

  I stepped into the house, left the lights off. In any emergency situation, a man wants two things covered: his testicles and his toes. I was already wearing shorts, so I slipped into my running shoes, then fumbled around in my dresser drawer until I found my old 9mm Sig Sauer pistol wrapped in oilcloth, always loaded, always ready.

  I shucked a cartridge into the chamber … then I stopped, remembering a recent letter I’d received from a lover, the tall and articulate Dr. Kathleen Rhodes.

  Correction, former lover.

  Among other things, her letter had described me as a man whose heart and head weren’t connected, that I was capable of violence without emotion. I’d been fretting over the damn thing since I’d received it. While it’s true I’m not overly emotional, I still have feelings, and her words had struck a nerve. Was I really so heartless, so insular? Now I had to admit it—she was right. That’s precisely how I was behaving. I’d automatically assumed I was being targeted for attack. Those were probably friends of mine out there! And here I was already arming myself with deadly force.

  I see my life as divided into two distinct rooms. One of those rooms is forever locked, as it must be. Inside are too many jungled nights; too many nights spent moving quietly in darkness. The second room is brighter, simpler; my life as it is now. I am the owner and sole employee of Sanibel Biological Supply, purveyor of marine specimens to labs around the country. It is a straightforward, constructive life that I tend carefully and reinspect often. The reason is simple. Once the door to the darker room has been opened, the creature therein is forever alive.

  I was sweating despite the cool air. Sweat dripped down my forehead. I took off my glasses. I didn’t need them. They’d be a liability in the fog.

  I hesitated, undecided. Then I put the Sig away.

  Still … some atavistic sense refused to allow me to go lumbering down the dock with my big hand of friendship extended. Boat theft is a thriving business. Thieves carry cable cutters and crowbars, ready-made clubs. Only a fool would walk into something like that.

  And if they were friends? Well, the only reason a friend would sneak around at 2 A.M. is to play a practical joke.

  Friend or foe, I decided to turn the tables.

  Let the joke be on them.

  I stood in the shadows of the deck, peering into the fog. Mangroves disappeared and reappeared before me and to my left. The van Gogh lights of the marina were to the right. Even in fog, if I crept along the walkway to shore, the lights would isolate me in silhouette.

  The best option was to swim along the shoreline, then come up behind them. Surprise, surprise! Guess who!

  Some part of me was glad that it was my only choice. I like black water. I like swimming at night where creatures of purer instinct cruise. There must be a compelling reason to swim, though, or else it is cheapened. It becomes a puerile device, like bungee-jumping or the craps tables at Vegas.

  People naturally think that Sanibel runs north and south, like most barrier islands on Florida’s Gulf coast. It doesn’t. It curves from east to northwest. The north windows of my house look over the bay, and that is where I went. Putting one hand on the deck, the other on a floor-beam beneath the house, I lowered myself into the water. The water was warmer than the air; a mixture of salt and fresh.

  I released air until my feet touched bottom a few feet below, leveled off, and used the pilings to pull myself along. I did everything by feel, seeing only the bioluminescent streaks of fish as they spooked away; hearing the crackle of their fast-twitch muscle fiber as they exploded to speed.

  Unexpectedly, my face pressed into thick netting. It took me a moment to realize that it was the deep-water pen where I keep big fish. Already, my navigation was off.

  I used the netting to pull myself along. Took my time, moving slowly to conserve oxygen. I’d been down for less than a minute. I wanted to surface far from the house.

  The darkness of the innermost core of the brain would be a similar darkness. It was a darkness given occasional dimension by sparkling green light: bioluminescent plankton.

  How many times had I used that darkness t
o travel unseen? The unexpected is defined by the fears of our enemies. Always choose the unexpected route.

  THUNK

  I nearly panicked when I felt a creature of great mass punch me in the side. I floundered momentarily for control, then it hit me again, thunk. Not hard, but in a measuring, experimental way.

  It took a moment for my brain to compute what had happened.

  On the other side of the thick mesh I kept two big bull sharks. There was a torpedo-sized female over two hundred pounds, plus a male close to a hundred. I do ongoing research on these unpredictable animals; animals that can be found three hundred miles up a freshwater river, or a mile below in the purest blue sea.

  Now they were doing their own investigation. I could picture them circling inside the mesh, pectoral fins drooping into attack position as they touched deticles to flesh. It was an ancient interrogative: Was the thing alive? Was the thing edible?

  True predators prefer darkness.

  I pushed away from the netting, toward shore.

  I was no different …

  When I surfaced, someone was whistling …

  It wasn’t a normal, cheery kind of whistle. It was a thin, absent-minded sound, made through clenched teeth, no louder than a series of harsh breaths.

  We all do it. A tune gets into our brain. We don’t know it’s there. During moments of deepest concentration, it slips out, a subliminal backdrop to the work at hand.

  This man must have been a romantic. It was one of those old country-western torch tunes. I could hear little bits and snatches of it, as I drifted toward him through the fog. Couldn’t identify it. Kept listening.

  He was standing on the bank, near the steps of the boardwalk. He was a black, vertical shape in the drifting plateaus of mist. I knew he was trying to decipher the obvious: Was the house occupied? Would someone awaken if he crept out, cut the lines to one of my boats and paddled it away?

  Was he wearing something over his face?

  The cloud parted momentarily. Yes. A tall man. Perhaps wide. A ball cap backwards on his head, a dark scarf tied over his nose.

  The curtain closed and he vanished.

  But I could still hear his absent-minded whistling …

  The reason we remember song lyrics more easily than poetry is that music is stored in the cleaner, mathematical side of our brains. Poetry is shoveled into the cluttered, creative side.

  Some of the lyrics came to me as he whistled: In the dah-dah glow I see her, dah-dah cryin’ in the rain….

  It took me a moment. Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain. That was the song. Willie Nelson sang it; maybe a woman country singer, too.

  My hands were on the bottom now, pulling me along toward my visitor. Fingers touched muck and broad-bladed turtle grass. Only my back and the top of my head were on the surface of the water. I knew the silence of a saltwater croc; knew expectations no croc would ever comprehend.

  Love is like a dyin’ ember, only dah-dah remains….

  Now I was nearly under the base of the boardwalk. Only a couple meters from the man. Staring up at him in darkness, he was still a charcoal shape. I floated there, belly touching the warm bottom, the toes of my shoes dug into the mud for quick traction.

  I waited. I waited.

  On the banks of billabongs in Australia’s Northern Territory, I’d watched massive crocs wait for feral water buffalo to take just one step closer. Move too soon, the quarry runs free.

  I’d learned from the best.

  The whistling stopped. I watched the man take a step toward me; saw him turn slowly, slowly to check his backside. Watched him stumble slightly, disoriented by the fog, perhaps.

  At that instant, I lunged from the water in one smooth motion, grabbed him chest high and held him, consciously fighting the urge to slam him to the ground. He made a screaming, gurgling sound; a cry of pure terror. Screamed loud enough to awaken people at the marina a hundred yards away. It was such a frenzied, feminine sound that it froze even me momentarily.

  I released him; pushed him away. “Take it easy, fella.” I squinted at him through the mist with my poor eyesight. The screaming stopped, punctuated by a series of rapid, suctioning breaths. He began to back away from me.

  I dismissed the old, old voice in my head which told me to immediately take physical control, to force him into some kind of painful come-along hold, bury his face in the mud and lock his arm up behind his shoulder blade until the bone grated. Instead, I took a long, slow breath and said, “A little early to be playing Halloween, isn’t it?” Meaning the scarf over his face.

  No reaction.

  “Okay … let’s make it real simple. You picked the wrong place to rob. But we talk it over, I get the right answers, maybe I won’t even call the police.”

  Kathleen Rhodes would have been surprised and pleased by that.

  The dark shape continued to back away slowly. I kept pace with him for a few moments, but then I stopped. “Hey—listen to what I’m saying. If you run, I’ll catch you. So what you’re going to do right now is follow my orders. You’re going to throw your wallet on the ground; put your hands behind your head and drop to your knees.” I gave it a few seconds. “Do it!”

  Nothing. Which is how I knew he was going to make a break.

  He backed away two more steps, then crouched slightly. It was like a telegraph signal. I was already moving when he pivoted. I jumped onto the boardwalk to cut off his angle of escape … and saw him stumble when he realized that he couldn’t get past me. I stood there looking down at him, and heard a falsetto whine of frustration, a precursor to his shriek.

  People on the verge of panic are more apt to react to words spoken softly. Nearly whispering, I said, “If you scream again, I’ll shut off your air.”

  The whine became a sob, nothing more.

  I stepped down and reached for the scarf that covered his face, then grabbed him roughly by the shirt when he stepped away … which is when I sensed a tremendous rush of wind from behind me that culminated in a withering impact. The force of it drove me away from the boardwalk into the water.

  I rolled groggily, feeling starbursts in my head, expecting to be stomped at any second. I was down. I was hurt. They’d certainly come after me.

  I pulled myself toward deeper water. For me, there is always safety in deep water. I lunged and dolphined until I was underwater, swimming hard. Then I surfaced.

  He was gone. They were gone….

  Sculling on the surface near my shark pen, I heard an automobile engine start and tires spinning in the loose shell.

  I pulled myself up onto the dock, found my glasses and took a towel from the stack near the outdoor shower, then I went into the lab and switched on a light. I thought about calling the Sanibel police, then decided against it. No laws had been broken; I hadn’t given the intruders time even to get to my boat, which had certainly been their intent. I couldn’t blame them. I’ve got a great boat.

  Or was there another possibility?

  I stood there for a moment, letting my mind clear. I took my glasses off and cleaned them. Along the west wall of my lab, there is a stainless steel dissecting table. Scattered on the table were the contents of a box recently delivered by a friend. There was a package of blue glass beads, dozens of arrowheads and a stunning impressionistic wooden carving of a cat; an Everglades panther, perhaps. The cat was upright in a kneeling position, its front legs pressed into its lap. The legs were suggestive of human arms. The carving was surprisingly heavy and there were still traces of paint to be seen if you used my good magnifying glass.

  Only traces of paint because the thing was ancient, made by an American Indian artist many centuries ago, then found in a recent decade by a gifted child.

  The child was the daughter of a friend of a friend who was now in trouble.

  Okay, so what if the guys I’d surprised hadn’t come to steal outboard motors? Was it just possible they knew the artifacts had been mailed to me, and they’d come to take them?

  No, not likely.
The artifacts were valuable, but not that valuable. To try something so risky for so little return wasn’t rational. Even thieves tend to behave rationally.

  Right?

  Right.

  1

  The lady came asking for help on one of the most glorious autumn Fridays in the history of Sanibel Island. I was hunkered down, working in the engine well of my 24-foot trawl boat, up to my elbows in gas and oil and goo, when the familiar vibration of piney wood told me that someone was clomping along the dock, approaching my little house and lab.

  It was just past noon. The September sun was bright overhead. I squinted upward to see chunky legs metronoming from within khaki safari shorts and the shampoo bounce of copper hair. Then a familiar silhouette was standing above me, hands on hips, boat shoe atappin’. So say hello to JoAnn Smallwood, part owner of the old Chris Craft cruiser, Tiger Lily, one of Dinkin’s Bay Marina’s gaudier floating homes. JoAnn is a heavy-hipped, busty lady with the sort of wide, handsome face that I associate with wheat fields or Wisconsin steetlights. She was already talking before she reached the mooring dock.

  “I’ve got a problem, Doc. Can you spare me a minute or two?”

  JoAnn’s voice modulates an alto clarity. Women who are successful in business, trusted in politics, or who are very, very good teachers, speak with similar definition. But there was lots of anxiety in there, too. She was upset. No doubt about that.

  I had a ratchet in my hand, and I was cleaning the ratchet head with a towel. As I fitted a spark plug into the rubber gasket, I said, “Mind if I finish this first?”

  “Take your time.” She looked toward the house. “Is Tomlinson inside?”

  “Yeah. He’s going through his record collection. He stores it here because he says his boat’s too damp.”

  “Good. I’d like him to listen, too. He’s weird, but he’s smart.”

  “Right on both counts.”

  “No kidding. Did I tell you this? Rhonda and I cruised by his boat the other night and he had candles sticking out of each ear. Lighted candles. He was sitting naked on the bow, flames shooting up, his legs crossed. Inner ear purification, he told us. They were special hollow candles. The heat melts the earwax, or maybe it’s the smoke that purifies the inside of his brain. Who knows?”