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  Or maybe not. Uncle Bern, jumbo-sized and rubbery, was also quick. Quicker than me—since my concussion, anyway.

  I didn’t get my hand up in time, and he connected on the left side of my face. Hit me hard enough with his palm to create starburst colors behind my eyes. Then slapped me with his left.

  “Don’t let him do that to you! Doc? Do something!”

  Jeth’s voice? Tomlinson? I couldn’t sort it out. In some faraway synapse, I realized that Heller had found this clever way to keep both of them from warning Javier.

  “Well, Doctor. Why don’t you do something?”

  Whap. He slapped me again, then once more. I threw my hands up, expecting him to hit me again. Instead, he pivoted to the side, and kicked me, a boat shoe in the butt. Not hard—it was a message. It demonstrated contempt.

  I lost it. Which is what he expected. I ducked and charged, my vision blurry. As easily as the man dodged Tomlinson, he dodged me, pivoting like a matador. My hair wasn’t long enough to get a handhold, but he did the same quick trip-step, turning my body as he drove me hard, back first, onto the limestone.

  Then…I was looking up into the September sky, colors returning, Bern Heller’s face hanging over mine. He was close enough so details weren’t blurry. The man had an oversized head like a robot: forehead, cheeks, and chin. His jaw mandible was a structure of interlocking cordage covered with skin.

  Something I hadn’t noticed before: no beard stubble. Heller’s face was wiener smooth, his small blue eyes looking out. He’d managed to pin my right arm with his knee; had his forearm on my throat. The jugular vein side, shutting off the blood to my brain.

  I struggled to move. Couldn’t. Tried to speak. Couldn’t.

  He leaned his nose near mine, and whispered so only I could hear. “You snobby-assed motherfucker, if we was alone, I’d strip those pants off you and stick a broom up your butt just to see you wiggle. I’ve done it to pigs, and some of them like it. What about you? If you ever come back here, I’ll give it a try. Stick it right up your ass.”

  The man was giving me a private glimpse of the craziness inside him. Delighted with his secret profanities, the control he wielded. It was a glimpse of the demonic little boy who lived behind those blue eyes.

  Not quite blue, though. Up close, the intensity of his eyes, altered their color a few shades to cobalt. They were glassy receptors, hunting probes that I associated with reptiles and certain birds. Animals accustomed to dampness and night.

  Somehow, I got my left arm free. Formed a fist and hit him with a couple of weak shots to the kidneys. He responded by driving his forehead into my nose. Head butt. Almost got me square, but I turned my face in time. Still, I felt a dizzying explosion in my brain, then warm rivulets of blood.

  “That’s enough, goddamn you. You’re hurting him. Let ’im up!”

  A familiar voice. Whose?

  It seemed to come from miles away, a voice that was energized with the rage of a victim who’d snapped after being cornered.

  I’d never before heard this man enraged.

  Tomlinson’s voice.

  I n the hazy, graying world of unconsciousness, I considered hitting Heller in the kidneys one more time. Decided no. Paybacks were hell with this guy, as the weight of Heller’s forearm on my throat, anvil heavy, squashed me into a blackness.

  “Get off him!”

  Tomlinson again. My weird friend. “Heller, I’m not going to tell you again!”

  Rage and violence. Strange. Hard to associate those emotions with Tomlinson.

  “Goddamn it, I warned you—”

  Through the darkness, I heard a whooping sound. Felt a jolt…and, suddenly, the weight was gone from my throat. Light gathered beyond my eyelids. I opened them to see a storm-blue sky, Heller no longer hanging over me like a vulture.

  I rolled to my side, then sat, fingers exploring esophageal cartilage for damage. I was aware of men shoving, Tomlinson in the middle. Grunting sounds, strained voices swearing. Noises men make when fighting.

  I turned. Focused. Could this be real?

  Tomlinson had his big, bony hands around Bern Heller’s throat. Had his fingers locked deep in neck tissue, and he was backing the larger man toward the water. He didn’t seem to feel Heller’s fists pounding at his shoulders and ribs. Ignored Jeth, who was alternately shoving Augie and trying to separate Tomlinson from Uncle Bern.

  “Jesus, Tomlinson, you’re gonna kill the asshole if you don’t stop!”

  The absurd grin remained fixed on Heller’s face. He made gurgling noises, trying to talk. He didn’t take Tomlinson seriously, despite what was happening.

  His attitude: I’ll end this when it stops being funny.

  Tomlinson’s face had turned a mottled gray, his expression grotesque, as he continued to push Heller toward the bay—Heller’s grin beginning to fade now. Suffocation is the first of primal horrors, and he realized that Tomlinson wasn’t going to quit.

  “Let go of his throat! Damn it, they’re going to shoot Javier!”

  I glanced toward the fence, seeing that Javier was now on marina property, still holding the gun but that it was pointed at the ground. He appeared stricken, the central figure in a shrinking circle as deputies moved into position.

  Something else I saw: Cowboy was headed our way carrying the five-gallon bucket he’d taken from my boat. The bucket, plus the jumble of cable dragging it behind, and a couple of wet towels under his arm—the Nazi artifacts.

  “Javier!” Jeth shouted, and ran toward the fence. His voice finally registered with Tomlinson, who had the confused expression of a man trying to disentangle reality from a bad dream. He looked into Heller’s plum-bright face for a moment, then slowly removed his hands from the man’s neck. He stared at his fingers as if they were strangers.

  Before Heller could recover, I had Tomlinson by the arm, pulling him. “This guy wants them to shoot Javier. Let’s get over there.”

  J avier appeared dazed by what was going on around him, a man who’d paddled an inner tube across a hundred miles of ocean but who now looked as indecisive as a child, standing motionless in his red T-shirt and ball cap.

  He was encircled by uniformed deputies who were using whatever they could find for cover—a fifty-gallon drum, abandoned pontoons, trees—as they kept their guns trained on the man, leapfrogging into position. More than once they’d told him to drop the weapon, get down on the ground, don’t make them shoot.

  Javier just stood there.

  But the cops were taking it slow, which told me Javier had gotten lucky. These were pros who’d read the signs correctly: The man was frozen; immobilized by emotional overload, the same way some kids freeze when they get to the highest limb on the tree.

  “Javier! Don’t move.”

  Jeth’s voice. Magic today because it was like watching Tomlinson again, the way Javier’s face changed: puzzled, then aware but confused.

  He focused; saw Jeth and Tomlinson running toward him, me not far behind. His face came alive. Javier smiled wanly, and shrugged his shoulders: See the stupid thing I’ve done?

  The cops were not reassured. They wanted Javier to remain catatonic, not suddenly alert and maybe thinking of doing something stupid to impress his friends. They also didn’t want civilians running toward them, screwing up their lines of fire—something made clear when a pair of deputies faced us, one of them yelling, “Stop! Get on the ground!” Pointing a left index finger at us but his weapon drawn.

  We were close enough to hear Javier call out, “Hey, those are my friends. Don’t shoot my friends, okay? They didn’t do nothin’. If you want, I’ll drop my pistol. Okay? Watch. That’s what I’m doing. I’m dropping my pistol”—the deputies had Javier’s chest centered above their gunsights, leaning as he let the pistol roll off his finger to the ground—“See? I tell you something, I do it. My friends, though, they just want to help—”

  Which is as far as he got before he was tackled from behind. Other deputies charged in, one of them kneeling
to take Javier’s pistol.

  “It’s not even loaded, man, ’cause I couldn’t find the bullets.” Javier, now being handcuffed, sounded apologetic. “That storm, the cabrone, Carlos. Everything in my house is wet, piled up like garbage. But I don’t want to shoot nobody anyway. I just want my boat.”

  They had him on his feet, frisking him again. “See the pretty green boat over there? That’s mine, man.”

  A deputy checked the cuffs as he told Javier that he was under arrest, then began to recite his Miranda rights.

  As they were leading him away, Javier called to Jeth, “I didn’t tell you but I shoulda. Anita, she left me, and the girls, too. The storm took them, it was the same thing. That cabrone, the hurricane. That fishing client of mine who’s an attorney, call him, okay? You know his name.”

  Javier’s bemused look again: God’s shitty jokes!

  B ehind me, I could hear Bern Heller yelling, “That’s it? That’s all? The guy’s obviously crazy, comes on my property with a gun, and all you do is talk to him?” His throat was hoarse. His voice was shaking, he was so mad.

  “Mr. Castillo is on his way to jail. What did you want us to do, Mr. Heller? Shoot him?”

  Heller nearly said, Yes, but caught himself. Instead, he pointed at us. “What about these three jerks? They’re not only trespassing, we caught them stealing. We already recovered our things from their boat.”

  I turned to see the deputy rip a sheet of paper from his clipboard at the same instant he lifted his head, seeing me. He spent a moment looking at my bloody shirt, at the gash on my face caused by the head butt.

  “Whose boat?”

  “The guy wearing glasses. His boat.”

  “The man who’s bleeding, you mean.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. He stole from me and wouldn’t give the stuff back, so I detained him.”

  The deputy said slowly, “Your employees removed property from a private vessel?”

  “Because we saw them stash it in his boat. They stole it from us!”

  The officer moved his eyes to Jeth, then to Moe, who was on his knees trying to wipe the fish stink off his hands having already tried the towels. The deputy looked at Tomlinson, with his hippie hair, wearing the magic green goggles around his neck.

  “I’m going to get my tape recorder,” the officer told us. “A couple more deputies, too, to take statements.” His tone saying: This is going to take awhile.

  8

  Bern looked forward to telling Moe that he was fired, then slapping the man stupid. Stupider. The loser: he’d just stood there and admitted to the cops that he’d taken the stuff from that jerk’s boat. Moe had time, he could have made up a story.

  When they unfolded the towels and saw the Nazi badges, even the cops didn’t say anything for a while, all of them breathing through their noses as they moved closer to look. A diamond swastika. Silver skull with diamond eyes. A German eagle on metal that might have been brass, it was so black.

  In Milwaukee, by the airport, there was a shop that sold stuff like that. On the south side, near the nudie bars Bern frequented whenever he was in town, always staying at the best hotel in the world, the Pfister, down by the convention center.

  The store called itself a war museum, but was really a place that sold retail. Japanese samurai swords, uniforms, old medals, a German Luger pistol engraved with SS lightning bolts—Bern had bought a working replica for his collection—and similar things. Expensive.

  Nothing in the place, though, as impressive as the diamond swastika. Probably nothing as valuable, either.

  “Who knows what else was in that glob of stuff?” Bern had said to Moe as the cops pulled away, the lunatic Cuban handcuffed in back of a squad car. “Damn it, we may never know now!”

  Which was true because the cops had made Moe give back everything he’d taken from Ford’s boat.

  Ford, being a smart aleck even with his swollen face, had thanked the cops for the diamond swastika, and offered to let Heller keep the bucket, which the jerk had filled with rotten fish. His tone had been so easygoing, eager to be fair, that the deputies had actually said, “There you go, Mr. Heller. Dr. Ford’s not filing charges, and he’s willing to compromise.”

  Redneck Cracker jerks, sticking together, even though the cops pretended to be impartial—they’d as good as told Ford he should press charges. They probably bowled together on weekends. Belonged to the same lodge.

  He’d like to get Ford alone. The man thought he’d taken a beating? Bern hadn’t even gotten started good. On his grandfather’s farm outside Baraboo, what they’d done to pigs to get a laugh before slaughtering them—that’s what he wanted to do to Ford. No…the hippie first, then Ford. Catch them someplace in the middle of nowhere, nobody around to hear.

  Moe had it coming, too. Slap him a few times, then use elbows on his kidneys. Let him piss blood for a week to remind him how stupid he was. That’s what Bern wanted to do.

  Problem was, he couldn’t fire Moe. Not now. Moe knew how to scuba dive. In fact, he’d taken Augie and his chubby butt-buddy, Trippe Oswald, to the same instructor, Korzeps, in Fort Myers, where they both took the course, while Moe completed some kind of higher certification.

  Bern needed the man’s scuba skills. Maybe there were more diamond-studded badges out there in the Gulf.

  Another small problem: Moe knew things that could cause Bern trouble, maybe even put him in jail. The boat barn that had collapsed—he’d bribed the building inspector, so it wasn’t up to code. Also, Moe had been on site when Bern had bulldozed the mangroves, then used the Indian burial mounds for fill—which added a couple more acres of waterfront property but was a felony.

  Hurricane damage could explain everything. Unless someone like Moe started talking.

  Bern needed something on the man. Something that could put him in jail. Let Moe use his scuba skills until they didn’t need him anymore, then fire that loser’s butt.

  Bern gave it some thought, and came up with an idea, the sort of thing his grandfather had pulled on his employees all the time. Relatives included.

  But Bern couldn’t trust himself to talk to Moe right away. He was too mad. So he waited a couple of hours, then called Moe to tell him they had to load diving gear on the Viking tonight because they were diving tomorrow.

  “We need to go looking for the place where they found those diamonds,” Bern told him. “Get out on the water before those Sanibel jerks do. Can you get back to the marina by nine?”

  Bern also mentioned that, in an unrelated matter, they had something important to discuss.

  Moe was suspicious. “Unrelated to what?”

  Unrelated to your being choked to death, Bern wanted to say. “Don’t worry. It’s good news.” Good news for me, anyway.

  He turned his thoughts to Augie. Another idiot. But at least Augie had told Bern what he needed to know.

  Right after the confrontation, he’d dragged Augie inside the Viking, insisting he remember where they’d found the artifacts. Augie had just played dumb, pissing him off, and further pissing him off because Augie had seen the hippie and Ford make him look like a fool. Worse, Augie would tell the rest of the family. By Christmas, when nearly a hundred Roths, Pittmans, and Hellers gathered in Appleton, every branch of the family would know that a hippie had beat his ass, and a dork had made him look dumb.

  Finally, Augie had mouthed off just one time too many.

  In a tone that was supposed to show he was an adult, not a kid anymore—like that was possible—Augie had told him, “Out there on the Gulf of Mexico, all you see is waves, and every wave looks the same. It’s not like driving the boat ten miles down the channel for dinner at South Seas. Next time, maybe I’ll take spray paint and make an X on the fucking water.”

  Jesus, that did it. Bern was punching buttons on the GPS one moment, next Augie was on the floor after being slapped so hard that his vision was blurry. Then Bern was grabbing Augie’s belt. He lifted him one-handed and slammed him against the cabin wall.
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  “You worthless little punk, you’ve been tit fed all your life. Never smart-mouth, ever.”

  “Sorry, Uncle Bern. I mean it, I really am.”

  “Grandy’s dead, so you can’t go tattling to him. I’m God, as far as you’re concerned.”

  Grandy—Augie’s great-grandfather, Bern’s grandfather. Augie had been the old man’s favorite.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking. It’ll never happen again.”

  His uncle had nodded toward the boat’s controls as he lowered Augie to the floor. “Maybe there’s something you can tell me. Yesterday, I put some numbers in that GPS, just messing around. Today, you and stuttering what’s his face used the boat. Now I can’t find those numbers. Someone erased them from the memory.”

  Augie had shrugged, afraid to speak.

  “Did you or your butt-buddy, Oswald, screw with the machine while you were fishing?”

  Augie shook his head. “No. Just Jeth.”

  “When you stopped to fish, did he say anything about the GPS? That the spot was already marked…was he surprised?”

  “Well, the first time we found the wreck, we did slow down kind of sudden-like. He mentioned something about a ‘waypoint,’ then we started going back and forth, back and forth, like plowing a field. He was watching the fish-finder, looking for something.”

  “You didn’t find it right away?”

  “No.”

  Bern had begun to smile, feeling better about things, more like his old self. That explained why someone had erased the coordinates Bern had punched in three nights ago—the numbers he’d copied from the old man’s map. Turned out Stuttering Jeth wasn’t such an idiot after all.

  Bern had thought: I know where the wreck is.

  B ut first, he had to create a way to control Moe.

  By ten that night, with Bern supervising, Moe had finished loading scuba gear onto the Viking, including the old nautical map with the latitude/longitude coordinates in his grandfather’s writing. Then it was time to carry out his plan.