Dead of Night df-12 Page 3

  Later, my conscience would play the inevitable game of “What if. ..”

  What if I had stopped by the man’s home on Friday instead of Sunday night? What if I hadn’t interrupted the two people who were interrogating and beating him? Would he have lived? Or would he have died? And what would have happened then?

  I had Frieda’s directions on a square of paper stuck to the truck’s dashboard, so I knew he lived on a lake twenty-some miles south of Orlando, and slightly southeast of Kissimmee, on a little unincorporated island I’d never heard of, Nightshade Landing, Bartram County.

  Nightshade grew wild on the island, Frieda told me. The bushes were something to see come spring, all those white blooms. Even so, locals had shortened the name to Night’s Landing. Typical. Boat access only, she said, which is why the place had never really flourished-even though real estate values had soared because of Orlando’s theme park boom.

  “Night’s Landing is about a hundred acres, but the population can’t be more than a few dozen people. In the early nineteen hundreds, some New York developer tried to create his own little Cape Cod. But he so sufficiently pissed off the local power structure that they refused to build the bridge he was counting on. Plus, most of the properties have title problems. It’s tough to sell or resell what you can’t prove you own. Which is why he never finished the project.”

  She’d added, “I think the island’s a little creepy. A few sand roads, all Victorian houses. Some abandoned. Lots of gables, turrets, towers, and New England porches. The kind of architecture that a New Yorker would think of as classy. The island’s perfect for Jobe, though. It’s the sort of place that people don’t go to live. They go there to disappear. Or hide.”

  The scrap of paper also contained her brother’s phone number. On my way to Kissimmee, I used my cell phone. Tried three times. Got nothing but his short, shy phone message: “I am not available. Try again. Or leave your name, number and the first four digits of your birth date, zeros included.”

  Birth date, zeros included?

  Weird. Did that suggest an interest in astrology? It didn’t mesh with what I knew about the man-nor any responsible scientist I’ve ever known.

  Another unusual thing was that he spoke with the careful, halting diction that I’ve come to associate with people who have speech impediments, or drunks who are trying their best to convince police that they are not drunk.

  I’d read his papers.

  The man wasn’t a drunk.

  When I got to Kissimmee, I dialed and listened to his recorder for a fourth time. Wrestled with the decision to launch my boat and go bang on his door, or buy time by having dinner. Maybe he was outside taking a long walk, or just getting back from a research trip, or maybe working in his lab.

  If I could get him to answer the phone and confirm that he was fine, my obligation to Frieda would be fulfilled.

  Never in my life did I ever think I’d own a cellular phone. Now I seemed tied to the damn thing.

  I drove along Kissimmee’s oak-lined and Christmas-bespangled main boulevard, Broadway, finally found a triple-big parking space for my truck and boat trailer in the heart of downtown next to Shore’s Men’s Wear and Joanne’s Diner. A gas station attendant had told me the diner served good country-fried steak, collards, and iced tea. Florida’s restaurant fare proves that the state has become the Midwest’s southernmost possession. I wasn’t going to miss a chance for some authentic Southern cooking.

  But Joanne’s was closed for some reason on this early Sunday eve, so I roamed around town to get the kinks out of my legs, and to give Dr. Jobe more time to materialize. I looked at plastic snowmen and candy cane decorations. I tried to decipher inscriptions on a stonework called “THE MONUMENT OF STATES.” Stood beneath a streetlight and watched an Amtrak passenger train clickety-clack its way through downtown, bells ringing, red lights flashing, on its way to somewhere far, far north of the horizon.

  It was a little after 6:30 P.M. three days past the dark of the moon; the sort of black night that invests city parks, benches, and trees with a glistening, winter incandescence. The air had a hint of cool; tasted of snow.

  Half an hour later, I was sitting at the bar of the Kissimmee Steak House out on Bronson Monument Road, eating an unexpectedly fine piece of beef while the affable bartender told me about the local fishing woes. The city sits on the northern shore of nineteen-thousand-acre Lake Tohopekaliga-called “Lake Toho,” locally. It’s one of a hundred or so lakes that comprise the freshwater headwaters for the Everglades system.

  As Tomlinson is quick to point out, one of the earth’s few unique ecosystems-Florida’s River of Grass-actually begins on the outskirts of Orlando. “The real Magic Kingdom,” he often adds.

  But things weren’t going too well for anglers on Lake Toho, the bartender told me.

  “Last year, the state wildlife people decided the lake needed what they call a ‘drawdown.’ It’s like an artificial drought to lower the water level so exotic plants and stuff that’s not supposed to be there can die and be hauled out. But the state people emptied so much water into the Kissimmee River and Lake Okeechobee that at local marinas-Richardson’s Fish Camp, Skinny Al’s, some others-you couldn’t use the boat ramps. The canals was just mud. I haven’t been out fishing for nearly a year! They’re letting the water level come up now, and fishing’s supposed to be great once they’re done. But we’ll see.”

  Some perverse part of me was heartened by low water and difficult boat ramps. If I couldn’t launch my skiff, then I couldn’t check on Frieda’s brother, could I?

  But at Big Toho Marina, not far from downtown, I was told there was plenty of water, and I’d have no trouble at all floating a boat.

  So at a little after 8 P.M. on a winter Sunday night, I launched among docks where a bunch of bass boats were moored-fast, low freeboard craft that, to me, always look as if they were designed by people who should be building customized vans for a living. The boats seemed gaudy, with their carpeted Corvette appointments, vinyl swivel seats, and fiberglass glitter. In comparison, my twenty-one-foot Maverick flats skiff appeared as functionally staid as a knife blade; an outlander without makeup, or ribbons.

  I idled alone out into the darkness, running lights shining.

  I didn’t have a chart, but had been told that Night’s Landing was only a mile or so from shore. Not hard to find-even on a black night.

  It wasn’t.

  Nor was it difficult for me to locate the island’s communal docks. The narrow channel wasn’t far from the steady car traffic and lights of the road it paralleled, and only a few hundred yards or so from an area buoyed off for competitive waterskiing-or so a big, white wedge of floating ski ramp suggested.

  I idled down the channel, into a marina basin where a sign next to several empty slips, a pontoon boat, and an overpowered bass boat warned: RESIDENTS ONLY, ALL OTHERS PROSECUTED. THIS MEANS YOU!

  Friendly place.

  The lone bass boat was a twenty-footer; well maintained, but the person who’d moored the thing had left the huge Yamaha outboard in the water-not something water-men do when securing a boat. An aluminum motor casing in electrically charged water creates electrolysis, and it’s also a platform for barnacles or mussels.

  It was a lapse that only an experienced, anal-retentive boater would notice.

  Someone like me.

  It took a quarter hour of wandering poorly marked sand trails before I was standing on the porch of Applebee’s secluded three-story home. I stood there looking up at all the dark windows and darker turrets, fuming because I was here and not halfway home by now. If it wasn’t for the damn golf cart plugged to its charger, I’d have concluded he was gone. No use trying.

  Now, instead, I raised my fist to knock… and then stopped when I heard the indistinct moaning of a man in pain.

  Seconds later, I was standing at the glass doors of the back entrance, peering in between the curtains. I could see that it was Frieda’s twin brother, the gifted, reclusive biol
ogist, face bloodied, expression terrified.

  It was Applebee, my colleague who built amazing dioramas, the expert on the interlinks of water.

  A man worth rescuing.

  The back doors were locked. But French doors are notoriously poor security risks, and these imploded on their dead bolt when I took two short sprint steps, and crashed my shoulder into the midframe, just above the brass handle.

  I had a lot of adrenaline, sufficient weight, and momentum when I hit. The doors were flimsier than I’d anticipated, which is why they barely slowed me, and I went stumbling, clawing, falling into the room

  … and continued to stumble across the floor, out of control, trailing splintered wood, shattered glass, plus the door’s lace curtain, which had somehow gotten tangled over my head, covering my face like a shroud.

  Because of the curtain, I couldn’t see. But I could hear a man and woman scream Russian words of surprise just before I collided with someone-no telling who-then hit something else hard but moveable. A chair?

  Whatever it was cut the legs out from under me. I somersaulted forward, my right shoulder down, and used the momentum to roll immediately back to my feet just as a good CPO had taught us to tumble and roll long ago. One thing the CPO hadn’t taught us to do, though, was to use that fluid energy to vault ourselves face-first into a stucco wall. Which is what I did.

  Poor judgment became dark comedy.

  I hit the wall squarely. Felt an ether-like explosion inside my head, and saw a starburst of expanding colors. The next thing I knew, I was sitting up groggily, pulling a damp and scarlet-stained curtain off my head, wondering who in the room was bleeding.

  Me. I was the one bleeding. It had to be me because the Russians had bolted, leaving Jobe and me alone. The little man was in the corner, balled up in a fetal position, still rocking, face showing his own blood.

  I sat there for a moment, listening to him whisper in mantric rhythm: “Leave me alone… Please leave me alone… Leave me alone, alone, alone, please…”

  The Russians didn’t have much of a head start-I could hear the dissipating racket of limbs crashing. Before I started after them, though, I wanted to make sure Applebee was okay. I got to my feet, wiped my hands on my fishing shorts, and knelt beside him. I touched him on the shoulder, before saying, “It’s okay, Jobe. They’re gone. You’re safe. Jobe? Dr. Applebee?”

  The man didn’t respond. He seemed deaf; his eyes glazed, catatonic. He continued to chant, “Leave me alone, please leave me alone…”

  I spoke louder; gave his shoulder a quick shake. That got a reaction. The little man screamed, and began to flap his hands. “No more! Please no more. I can’t… I can’t… I’m sorry, I can’t.”

  Kept yelling until I took my hand away.

  Once again, I was struck by the childlike quality of his voice. Once again, I got the impression that this distinguished scientist wasn’t begging. He was apologizing for an inability to cope.

  I tried a final time to get a response.

  Nothing.

  Applebee was frozen by pathology; hysteria that would not tolerate outside stimuli. He wasn’t capable of communication. Not now, not with me.

  I stood, took my cell phone from my pocket, and slid it next to him, after a moment of indecision. “The police have this number, so answer if it rings. My name’s Ford, I’m your sister’s friend. Tell the cops. I’m going after them, the people who were beating you.”

  The frail man was balled up like an embryo, eyes glassy with terror.

  I jogged off through the broken doorway.

  4

  The woman looked like a sprinter because she was. An athlete. She had that kind of freaky quickness. I was still a hundred yards or so away from the communal docks, running as hard as she was, when I heard an outboard engine start.

  Her ox-sized accomplice wasn’t as fast. Him, I almost caught. He was jumping aboard when I came sliding around the storage shack that separated the golf cart path from the marina basin.

  They were in the bass boat, the one with the oversized engine-left in the water for a reason, I now realized.

  The woman was at the wheel, already gunning away. I went charging down the dock, thinking that if I timed it right I might be able to vault myself aboard, yank the key from the ignition, and then escape by tumbling into the water before they had a chance to beat the crap out of me.

  Leaving them stranded on a small island would be as good as catching them. Just hide out until the cops showed.

  But the woman knew how to drive fast, too. She was no stranger to water and boats. Clear of a mooring piling, she rammed the throttle forward. The stern-heavy skiff lifted like a rocket before leveling onto plane, already moving fast through the basin toward the channel. The g-force catapulted Ox-man backward onto the stern deck, and he came close to rolling off into the water. He screamed something in Russian-I have no idea what. It was a scream of fear, not anger. Maybe he didn’t know how to swim.

  I grabbed my skiff’s lines and jumped behind the wheel. I wanted to follow them closely enough to find out what marina or dock they were using as a land base. No confrontations, no problems. Their boat had a high-performance engine, but so did mine-a recently mounted 250-horsepower Mercury Optimax that I kept shielded from law enforcement types with a black engine cowling that claimed less horsepower.

  I’m not a speed freak. I’d yet to push this engine beyond the modest threshold of forty miles an hour, my favorite cruising speed. But those of us who know how fast bad, random things can happen at sea tend to build in little safety hedges. If I ever get caught on the fast edge of a really bad storm, or in a tight and nasty situation, an extra twenty-five horses might make all the difference-or so I tell myself.

  I used the additional horsepower now, throttling into the bass boat’s expanding wake. There was no moon, but the trail was easy to follow in the winter starlight because of the froth of overoxygenated water stirred by their propeller. I watched my speedometer, illuminated in red, move from forty to fifty and then fifty-five-and I still had a couple of inches of throttle left.

  Fifty-five in a boat feels dangerous, especially at night. Sixty seems crazy. I held her steady.

  The speed created a wind stream that made my cheeks flutter, eyes teary. I leaned forward, hands tight on the wheel, concentrating on the black water ahead. The closer I got to the bass boat, the narrower its wake would appear… and it had already narrowed a lot in a short time.

  Most boats with high-powered outboards also have what’s called a “dead man’s switch” near the helm. Mine is next to the ignition, attached to a coiled red wire that clips to the belt. Fall out of the boat, the engine shuts off automatically. Because I don’t relish the idea of trying to outswim an empty boat that is making fast circles around me, coming ever closer, I always use the switch.

  I reached now and clipped the wire in place.

  I was gaining on them.

  I spotted the bass boat just a minute or so later. Saw the metallic glitter of fiberglass and chrome, saw two people silhouetted by the lights of the busy highway that was ahead and off to our left.

  It was the road that paralleled the channel, not far from the waterskiing area I’d noted earlier. I’d marked it mentally because the unlighted buoys and the floating ski jump made it a dangerous place at night.

  The Russian woman was steering for it.

  When I was thirty yards or so off their stern, I backed the throttle, matching my speed to theirs. We ran that way briefly before they turned and sprinted ahead. I’d been spotted.

  Which was okay. I was just playing good citizen; a bird dog for the police.

  I caught the boat a second time, and maintained the same safe distance astern. As I did, I fished the little handheld VHF marine radio out of its holder beneath the console, pressed the squawk button, declared that this was an emergency transmission, and did any law enforcement agency copy? Within a few seconds, a woman’s voice came back, saying, “This is Port Canaveral Coast Gu
ard. What’s your emergency?”

  I told the woman I’d interrupted two people assaulting a man on Night’s Landing, Lake Toho, and that they were now escaping by boat. I gave her Jobe’s name, his address, and told her that he needed medical attention. I was careful not to use police jargon such as “perpetrators” and “victim.” It’s something solid citizens don’t do, so the usage makes law enforcement types suspicious.

  We were inside the ski area now. With my peripheral vision, I’d already seen a couple of plastic, pumpkin-sized buoys flash by. Hit one of the ropes or chains that were attached, and the Russians were in for one hell of a jolt. The same was true for me.

  Holding the radio to my ear, I listened to the lady Coasty say, “Our duty officer strongly recommends that you break off pursuit. I say again, end your pursuit. We are notifying the Bartram County Sheriff’s Department. Let them handle it. We can’t allow you to put yourself in personal danger.”

  I pushed the transmit button. “Recommendation noted. No danger, no plans to confront. I’m just following. And they don’t seem to be carrying any-”

  I was about to say “weapons” when I was interrupted by a loud th-WHACK, and the hull of my skiff jolted as if someone had just slammed it with a sledgehammer. For a confusing moment, I thought I’d hit one of the ski buoys. But then the hull shuddered again-th-WHACK-and I knew that I was taking fire. Someone in the bass boat was shooting.

  I told the lady, “Out for now,” and dropped the radio as I turned the boat sharply to the right, then back to the left, then to starboard again, making myself a more difficult target.

  I’m not a fool, nor am I particularly brave. When someone is shooting, and you can’t return fire, the wise course is to run. That’s exactly what I was trying to do. I was scrambling like hell on an arc that would turn me in the opposite direction. The Coast Guard was right: Let law enforcement handle it.

  So I was squatting low in my swivel seat, head ducked, eyes barely above the steering wheel, making my zigzag return to Night’s Landing, when I again heard the piercing sound of lead hitting fiberglass and felt the skiff jolt. Simultaneously, I felt a burning sensation on my right ear.