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5

Augie and Oswald were walking fast toward us, an older man leading the way. He was NFL-sized, bald, late forties, with a monk’s dark wreath of hair. He was wearing shorts, TopSiders, a green polo shirt with marina logo. No one was smiling. They were pushing a hard-assed attitude ahead of them like an energy wave, the way they leaned, fists pumping.

Augie: Stocky, short, in his midtwenties, midwestern vowels; big-city volume. He had a swagger that comes with money and inherited power. His buddy Oswald was older by a decade. He was pudgy, with a bubble-shaped butt, but had the same attitude of tough-guy indifference. Another guess: He worked for Augie’s family.

As they got closer, I decided that the older guy was Augie’s family, a dad or an uncle. He was twice the size, but there were genetic similarities. The same elongated earlobes, Scandinavian chin, and slaughterhouse forearms, the same big square head and hands. The expressions on the faces of all three men pointed, territorial.

I got a glimpse of the smile Jeth mentioned. Jolly, but fixed in place, worn like a warning. It told you something about the owner. He was a handler; he knew how to deal with people and the smile was part of his technique. He was showing it to me, letting me know that he was nobody’s fool—if I was smart enough to read it.

I fitted the top onto the bucket. I used my eyes to motion toward the marina’s southern boundary, where I’d finally picked out Tomlinson. “There he is. It looks like he’s already irritating the hell out of everyone.”

Tomlinson was on the far side of the property, much of it still flooded, standing by a green boat on a trailer, talking to men who wore hard hats and orange vests. He’d wandered off shirtless, wearing baggy khaki shorts—“Bombay Bloomers,” he called them. Very British, with pleats, pockets, and a fly that buttoned. He’d bought knee-length socks to match. He was wearing them now with Birkenstock sandals—his “hurricane kit,” he called it.

Goggles, too. They were strapped around his neck like an RAF pilot, loose and ready—old-fashioned, with a leather strap and thick green lenses. “Kilner goggles,” Tomlinson had said they were, made in the early 1900s by a London physician. The special lenses, he claimed, revealed human auras and energy fields.

They were among the newest in Tomlinson’s long list of weird interests.

When I’d showed him the bronze eagle, he’d put the goggles to his eyes briefly. Bizarre.

Jeth said, “I don’t see him. Where?”

I pointed, watching as Tomlinson became animated, using his hands to converse with the men wearing hard hats. He gestured toward the green boat, angry for some reason. Why?

Jeth stared toward the parking lot for a moment. “Hey—that’s Javier’s boat. The green Pursuit, with twin Yamahas. What’s Tomlinson doing?”

What it looked like he was doing was climbing onto the boat. Maybe with reason: For the first time, I noticed Javier Castillo in the distance, walking like a man on a mission.

But why was Javier walking away from Tomlinson?

F rom a hundred yards, I watched two of the hard hats reach, grab Tomlinson by the belt, and haul him off the trailer as he tried to swing a lanky leg aboard the boat. One of the men wagged a finger in his face while another held him. A warning.

Three marina employees stood nearby, hands on hips, a classic aggressive posture intended to broaden a man’s shoulders.

I pointed at Javier, who had now reached the marina’s access road. Jeth and I both watched as he vaulted a fence rather than use the main entrance where a security truck was parked next to the gate. A clot of people were gathered outside the gate, no one getting in.

Jeth said, “Geez, the owner of this place really looks pissed off,” now gazing in the direction of the three men striding toward us. “He’s a big’un, huh?”

Yes, he was a big one. Coming to claim what we had taken from little Augie.

I lifted the bucket that contained the artifacts and said, “Time to leave. Go get Tomlinson. He’ll listen to you—put him in a headlock if he doesn’t. I’ll bring the skiff and meet you at that little clearing in the mangroves. Once we’re off marina property, there’s nothing they can do.”

Jeth tried to downplay his surprise. “You want to run?”

“Yes, I want to run.”

“I don’t know, Doc. You know how fishermen gossip. What’ll people say?”

“They’ll say we’re not in jail. Jeth…?” I glanced and saw that the men were closing. “Let’s move.”

He did, grabbing his fishing gear and striding away from me, his eyes fixed, which caused the owner to pause, Augie and Oswald stumbling to a halt behind.

I waved at the three men. Gave the group a smile of my own, and pointed toward Tomlinson, who was still arguing with the hard hats. Meet me there.

Angry little mobs are unsettled by people who respond cheerfully. It added to their confusion.

When I got to my skiff, I set the bucket on the casting deck, then ignored it. I ignored the men, too. I knew they were watching as I waded through the flotsam toward the boat’s console. I got aboard and flicked a toggle switch beneath the wheel. There’s a built-in fiberglass tank astern plumbed to circulate salt water—a well for keeping live fish.

As water hissed into the tank, I behaved as if I’d lost something, it didn’t matter what as long as it bought enough time for Jeth to drag Tomlinson to the mangrove clearing, where I’d meet them.

As I hunted through compartments, I noticed a raft of dead fish floating in the trash line. The fish were bug-eyed from the pressure of internal gases.

I snuck a look at the bucket that contained the artifacts. Glanced again at the fish. Mullet, spadefish, a couple of snook, several sheepshead, their color leached gray.

Folklore credits animals with knowing in advance when a killer storm is coming. It suggests they escape to a safe place.

Folklore is often wistful.

From Tomlinson’s direction, I heard a muted shout. I turned and saw a white truck similar to the truck parked at the marina gate. Big tires, windows open, security on the door. Inside were two men, their expressions cop-serious as they accelerated toward Javier’s boat, where Tomlinson was still arguing.

Augie Heller’s group was watching, too, reading body language, no longer focused on me. The owner said something. He watched a moment longer, then decided that’s where he was needed. They headed off at an angle to intercept Jeth, who was walking faster now.

In a rush, I freed my boat’s bowline, and grabbed the bucket from the casting deck. It was heavy. I popped the plastic top, the smell of organic rot and metal blooming. Looked to make certain I wasn’t being watched, then poured the contents into the flooded live well.

The artifacts I had cleaned sank to the bottom, still wrapped in their towels.

Had Jeth mentioned the owner’s name?

Whoever he was, I knew he wouldn’t settle for half of nothing. He wouldn’t give me his special smile—not if I handed him an empty bucket.

J avier’s boat was on the far edge of the clearing near a hill-sized mound of dirt. The hill was backdropped by wreckage of uprooted trees where shoreline changed from shell to asphalt. The shell was bone gray against the wet asphalt, the survey stakes the same shade of yellow as a backhoe parked on that raw space.

It was land being prepped for a parking lot. Or more condos.

The boat’s trailer, I now noticed, was hitched to a hydraulic handcart. Maybe Javier had been muling his boat toward the ramp when Tomlinson came along.

Which didn’t explain why Tomlinson was still trying to climb aboard the damn thing. I watched him attempt to vault himself onto Javier’s boat again…watched the hard hats pull him to the ground.

There were a half dozen of them, different sizes, and ages. They wore their helmets straight like derbies, no scratches showing, new safety gear worn by novices not old construction hands. They looked like school-crossing guards confronting a homeless person, this shirtless outsider with hippie hair and baggy shorts.

Amusing. But not to Tomlinson, who was furious. His chin was thrust forward, fists clenched as if he might take a swing at somebody. Also amusing. Tomlinson, the Rienzi Zen Master. The passive, nonviolent hemp smoker. Tomlinson the Gandhi devotee. The worst he might do was give them a stern lecture, or a forgiving hug.

I stood at the wheel of my skiff, idling toward the clearing. I was in a hurry, but going slow in this shallow water, protecting my new propeller, which was attached to my new engine, which was mounted on the transom of my new skiff. It gave me time to allow my eyes to drift along the shoreline. As I did, I felt the same emotional jolt as when I’d arrived an hour earlier, seeing the place as it had been, unchanged. Not as it was.

What had been subtropical forest was now a hollow geometric; a rectangular space that had been bulldozed flat, surveyed, and graded—the precursors of high-rise construction so obvious that the sky seemed already darkened by stucco.

PRECONSTRUCTION PRICES. PENTHOUSE SUITES. GATED WATERFRONT, ASSOCIATION DUES, ASSIGNED DOCKAGE.

There should be standardized billboards, the destiny of commercial waterfront in Florida is so predictable. There probably were similar billboards on the road into this place: a village that was now a commercial venture to be split up, repackaged, and sold like berths on a cruise ship.

Pre-Death Chambers. A Tomlinson phrase.

There had once been a fishing village here…

I pictured a woman I’d lost only a few years ago standing on the porch of a house that no longer existed. Yellow house of pine, a tin roof. The woman had Deep South eyes that hinted how the weight of her body would feel, her footsteps resonating on wood, leading me to a cooler and darker place, her skin burning beneath my fingers.

I could hear the woman’s woodwind voice in fragmented sentences, the oboe notes of her laughter:

“Way I’m built, when it gets cold? You could see my nipples through a raincoat…

“I’m a Gemini born on the cusp. But with Leo rising. Like two people in one body, both of us bossy…

“We can have separate lives, Ford. We’ll be like secret partners.”

The voice of a woman I’d liked and admired, Hannah Smith. Maybe even loved, though I’ve never settled on a comfortable definition for that overused word. I stood at the wheel, imagining the sound and shape of her, feeling nostalgic…

Irritated, I caught myself. There’s a long list of self-indulgent emotions, and nostalgia is as pointless as—

“Doc! Get over here.”

Jeth’s voice.

Startled, I refocused.

Now what?

Tomlinson’s confrontation was no longer amusing. There was Jeth, striding up behind the hard hats, giving the situation some gravity because of his size. Arriving at the same time was Augie Heller’s group, the oversized boss man already elbowing his way in. Nearby was the security truck, doors open, two men keeping an eye on things from striking distance. The tallest of them wore a cowboy hat. White straw.

“Doc?”

Jeth called again as I watched Tomlinson step toward the marina manager. He was overexcited, and moved too far into the big man’s space, bumping him accidentally. Immediately, though, he declared a truce with his hands, eager to talk.

That’s not the way the owner read it. He stepped aside as if dodging a bull, dwarfing Tomlinson. Then he reached and caught Tomlinson’s hair in his fist. He did a competent trip-step, and jerked my friend’s head backward as his knees hit the ground. The man yanked hard a couple more times to demonstrate his control, Tomlinson’s neck snapping puppetlike.

“Doc!”

I leaned on the throttle, throwing a geyser of muddy water astern, hull shuddering as my boat plowed shoreward. Before the Maverick grounded itself, I bailed into water calf-deep, and ran…