Deep Shadow

EPILOGUE

ON A BALMY, MOON-BRIGHT NIGHT IN FEBRUARY, ONE week after Arlis Futch was airlifted to the hospital and four days after police finally located King, I was on the deck outside my lab trying to bracket a camera to my new telescope when I heard the familiar two-stroke rattle of Tomlinson’s dinghy. I covered the Celestron with a towel, let the screen door slam behind me and went inside to fetch a fresh quart of beer.

Tomlinson prefers beer from the bottle. I like mine over ice—an old habit from years of traveling the tropics. We would compromise: most of the quart for him, a mug for me. It was Tuesday night, long after sunset, so there wasn’t much doubt he would be thirsty.

Tomlinson had been away. On Friday night—an hour after police confirmed that they had found King—he had left aboard No Más on the flood, motoring to the mouth of Dinkin’s Bay before setting his mainsail, which suggested to me that the man was upset and in a hurry. In a hurry to where, there was no telling.

Who knows where Tomlinson goes? Key West is a favorite, but a four-day trip wouldn’t have allowed him much time on Duval Street. And the same was true of Pensacola, another of his favorite haunts. So I had guessed Sarasota—he likes the public anchorage there, possibly because so many pretty girls jog in the park—and he likes Venice Beach, too, for the same reason, and also because there’s a nightly drum circle nearby.

It made for interesting speculation among the fishing guides and liveaboards, but no one truly knew. We hadn’t heard a word from the man since Friday night, which was not unusual. When Tomlinson leaves, he leaves. There are no phone calls, no postcards saying Wish you were here.

“You’re not really sailing unless you let go of all the lines,” the man is fond of saying.

For me, it had been a productive few days. I had done my version of a Tomlinson escape, which is to say I hadn’t left the island, and I had rarely left my lab. I read books I had been meaning to read, I worked out twice a day on my new VersaClimber, then swam to the NO WAKE buoy off West Wind Hotel. I listened to my shortwave radio at night, or I enjoyed the marvels of my new Celestron. And I awoke each morning alone.

Because the quarter moon was waxing, I was stuck with neap tides, which aren’t good for collecting by hand, so I had spent two evenings and part of a day dragging for specimens in my old twenty-four-foot flat-bottomed trawl boat.

Stenciled neatly on the stern of the craft is the name of my little company, SANIBEL BIOLOGICAL SUPPLY. It is built of cypress planking and duct tape. The trawler is equipped with nets and outriggers, which must be hand-cranked when lowered or raised, but it’s a ceremony of which I never tire. No matter how many times I drop the trawls, I still feel a pleasant treasure hunter’s anticipation when I pop the strings and dump the nets because a small, secret universe comes spilling out onto the deck. There, alive at my feet, are tunicates, sea horses, cowfish, catfish, pinfish, filefish, eels, shrimp, sea trout and stingrays—a flopping, throbbing mound of life among the sea grasses and hydroids. As I do the culling, rushing to preserve or release each creature, I am reminded that the universe beneath us is wild and alive—relentlessly alive—despite the outrages, the small kindnesses, the small wars and the brief, brief lives that stumble on blindly above.

In other words, I did what I wanted to do, when I wanted to do it. In further words, I got a hell of a lot more done because Tomlinson wasn’t around to interrupt my lab procedures or lure me away from the instruments of my craft and a solitude of my own choosing.

That doesn’t mean I resented his arrival, though, on this soft winter night. It was hours before moonset. Coupling the camera—a Canon 5d—onto the telescope had gone smoothly enough, and I was getting thirsty myself.

The solar system could wait. Tomlinson and I had a lot to talk about.

I was using one foot to push the screen door open, beer in hand, when I felt his dinghy nudge the pilings of my home and then I heard him call, “Hello, the house! Can I come aboard?”

I replied, “Since when did you start asking?”

“I’m changing my ways, Doc, I mean it,” he hollered. “This is a whole fresh start for me,” and then I heard his bare feet slapping the steps.

I placed the bottle on the little teak table next to the railing, then returned to the galley for a block of Gorgonzola cheese and Colombian hot sauce.

“Again?” I said over my shoulder.

Two quarts of beer and a jar of salsa later, Tomlinson was saying to me, “I don’t know why I did it, Doc. It wasn’t her fault, it was mine. I got Barbara a little drunk, I followed her home on my bike. She was pissed off for some reason or another . . . Hell, who knows. Will was on the beach, we knew he wouldn’t be back, and one thing led to another. Man, oh man, I don’t know what gets into me sometimes.” He shook his head, his voice shy with remorse, and he looked at his toes as if they held the answer to some inexorable secret.

I said, “What gets into you isn’t the problem, Tomlinson. There are only about five or six nonnegotiable rules in life and seducing a pal’s girlfriend breaks at least three of them.”

“Valid point,” he nodded.

“We’re not debating, we’re discussing the women I date. Plural, because this wasn’t the first time it happened—no, don’t deny it. Just because I never mentioned it doesn’t mean I’m unaware. And what kind of example does that set for Will? He’s a sharp kid. He doesn’t miss much.”

Tomlinson lifted his head, concerned. “Do you think he knows?”

The wind gusted, and I got a whiff of patchouli and cannabis as I replied, “If they let him come back to Florida, ask him.”

I was speaking of Oklahoma Social Services. Using her political clout, Barbara Hayes had petitioned some board to allow Will to return to Sanibel on a work-study program, with her serving as temporary guardian. His grades were so poor and he’d already missed so much school that it seemed a reasonable proposal. The work would include helping us map the wreckage of Batista’s gold plane and possibly—possibly—salvaging the manifest—all under the guise of marine science of course. But that now, too, involved politics. Cuba’s people had already lost too much of their wealth to thievery, and Arlis’s instincts had been right from the start about intervention from attorneys.

That didn’t mean we wouldn’t be able to dive the lake we were now referring to as Lost River. We would. And if the few coins I had seen were an indicator, Will Chaser’s share would be more than enough to pay for college. The rest of us would bank sizable sums as well, even if we had to work it on some kind of shared-percentage deal. But much of the timing depended on Barbara Hayes’s jockeying and also on the progress Arlis Futch was making at the hospital. He had lost his leg to what tests determined was the bacterium Pasteurella multocida, but the reptile’s blood-thinning venom may have in fact prevented Arlis from suffering a fatal stroke during what he himself described as “the by God scariest moment of my life.”

For me, information on Barbara’s progress wasn’t easy to come by. Our relationship had turned frosty, which was not unexpected. Because it’s rare, in my experience with Tomlinson, to be in a position of moral superiority, I didn’t want to let him off the hook now by confessing that I had been as unfaithful to Barbara as she had been to me. Technically, Tomlinson hadn’t done anything wrong because Barbara had every right to do whatever she wanted, considering my own infidelities. I’m a hypocrite, I admit it. But now was not the time to admit it to Tomlinson.

“I feel like hell,” he said. “What I did was in my mind the whole time that Will-Joseph and I were trapped down in those vents. My last dying thoughts, I’m saying, which is a very heavy tribute to you. Doc”—he paused to load a wedge of cheese with hot sauce—“Doc, I will never make a cuckold of you again.”

I said, “What?,” even though I knew what the word meant. “You’ve been hanging out with Brits, I can tell. Where’d you disappear to?”

“I anchored off the shrimp docks at Fort Myers Beach. It’s still Old Florida down there, man. Fisherman’s Wharf, Hansen’s Shrimp Packing—a good place for a rum bar, that’s what I think. There was a group of British officers on some kind of exchange program at the Coast Guard Station. There were these three young ensigns who’d never been to the States before, so I sort of felt like it was my duty to show them around.”

“All female,” I said flatly. “Very patriotic of you.”

“Your sensory powers just keep getting better and better.” Tomlinson smiled, nodding his approval. “But I would’ve invited them to stay aboard No Más even if they weren’t. I like Brits, that accent just knocks me out. And they were fun—once they loosened their buttons a little and let their hair down.”

I was shaking my head, but the man was oblivious. Or maybe he wasn’t, because he quickly changed the subject to the fate of the Komodo monitor and its offspring.

“What’s the news from your biologist pals in Tallahassee?” he asked.

There had been very little news until biologists, sent by the Florida Wildlife Commission and the Florida Invasive Animal Task Team, had finally confirmed the existence of Komodo monitors living in and around the lake.

They had managed to catch one of the small lizards, but their efforts didn’t get serious until police stumbled upon the giant female while combing the area for King. That had happened Friday afternoon, so Tomlinson already knew the details—most of the details, anyway, because he had been there. But he hadn’t heard the latest.

Tomlinson and I had returned to the lake with an archaeologist from the University of Florida—Dr. Bill Walker—to do a preliminary survey of the cave that he and Will had found. By one p.m., the three of us had cut our way to the mound, unaware of what police were dealing with only a quarter mile away.

I had assigned myself the uneasy task of standing watch as Dr. Bill lowered a camera into the cave and then used a special low-light lens and a remote shutter control to snap more than a hundred blind photos.

“I’ll let you know if we have anything,” he had told us, “when I get back to the house and download them on the computer.”

A quick photo survey was the best we could do, under the circumstances. I wasn’t going down into that damn cave—or into the lake—until the area was secured, and Tomlinson agreed. We had already done enough research to know that, while Komodos usually reproduce sexually, they can also reproduce asexually through a process called parthenogenesis. Unfertilized eggs hatch as an all-male brood, which is evolution’s way of guaranteeing that a lone female Komodo can repopulate a remote island in Indonesia . . . or the remote pasturelands of Florida.

Judging from the size of the monitor that attacked me, she could have lived near the lake for a long, long time—more than fifty years, I believed. It wasn’t a guess, and I didn’t arrive at the figure simply because two generations of ranchers had made the creature into a family legend. Something that Arlis had told me about Fulgencio Batista had put me on the right track. I asked friends in Cuba to do the research, and it was from them I learned that in December of 1958 two fledgling Komodo monitors had vanished from the Havana zoo. My own research confirmed that the animals can live and reproduce for more than seven decades.

At least one of the fledglings had survived a plane crash on a December night long ago. Now there was no telling how many Komodos were stalking the area, and I, for one, didn’t relax until we were safely in my truck, headed for Sanibel.

Because Tomlinson had sailed on that Friday evening, though, he had yet to see Dr. Bill’s photos. I knew that’s why he had come straight to the lab after returning to Dinkin’s Bay.

I replied to Tomlinson’s question by telling him, “They haven’t caught the big female yet, if that’s what you’re asking. And they haven’t killed her, either, although police could have. They decided that a reptile her size might be of interest to science, so they cordoned off the area until biologists figure out a way to trap her. Or use some kind of tranquilizer gun. Personally, I’m glad she’s still alive. It should make you happy, too. Maybe that will change your attitude about cops a little.”

Tomlinson shrugged, smiled and said, “I’ve always been against slaying my personal dragons. It’s more interesting to get aboard and enjoy the ride. The view’s better, too.” He sent me a message by holding his quart bottle up to the moon so that I could see that it was empty. I also noticed something else.

“What happened to my watch?” I asked him as I stood. I had more beer in the fridge, and there was a stack of Dr. Bill’s photos on the kitchen table, too.

Tomlinson replied, “I gave the Chronofighter to Will, man. I figured I owed him something—the kid saved my life, after all. Besides, I found this really cool surfer dive watch that fits me better. It’s called a Bathys—” He stopped in midsentence, finally realizing what I had just said. “What do you mean, your watch?”

I stared at the man until he sought refuge in his toes again. “You know about that, too, huh?”

I said, “I may not have a dazzling intellect, but I don’t miss much, either.”

“Jesus, Ford,” he whispered, looking up at me. “You’re getting a little too good at this. Not that I don’t think . . . not that I don’t really believe . . . you have a first-rate intellect—”

“Forget it,” I said, mystified by his reaction. I patted the man’s shoulder, went into the galley and returned with two more quarts of beer, plus a single photograph from the stack on the table. I placed a bottle near Tomlinson’s elbow but held on to the photo until I had asked, “Back there by the fire, when you shot King, you never answered my question. Did you mean to shoot him in the hand? If you did, that was one hell of a shot. Have you ever fired a rifle before in your life?”

Tomlinson opened his beer and sat back. Then he took several long gulps, as if working up the courage to say, “That’s why I sailed out of here Friday night, Doc. After the police called and told us about King, I just couldn’t stand it, being around people I care about—people who see me as something . . . I don’t know . . . something special. I’m not, Doc. You know that better than anyone. I’m nothing special. I’m an asshole and I’m a fraud.”

I nodded. “Well, you’re at least half right—in my opinion, anyway.”

Tomlinson looked at me for a moment and managed to chuckle before he turned away. “And I’m a shitty shot, too. I wasn’t aiming at King’s hand. I wanted to kill the man. I thought I was aiming right at his heart, but I must have flinched or closed my eyes or something because I missed. But I meant to do it. I meant to kill him.”

I nodded, and gave it more time than was required to reply, “King fired his last round at you, but you still feel guilty? That doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, pal.”

“You’re right,” Tomlinson said, missing my point. “Killing another human being never makes any sense. But that’s what I did. And that’s what happened. I killed King just as sure as if I’d hit him in the heart. When we left him alone by the fire, with his hand bleeding, man . . .” Tomlinson cleared his throat, getting emotional. “It was the same as staking out a wounded lamb. I knew that. And I knew there was a lion in the area.”

I leaned and placed the photo on my friend’s lap. Then I stood to hit the deck lights so Tomlinson could confirm the details for himself. As I walked away, I said, “When Dr. Bill downloaded the photos and saw what he had, he e-mailed the picture you’re holding straight to the police. When they called Friday night? That picture is how they found King. That’s how they knew for sure what happened to him.”

I added, “But you didn’t kill the man, pal. You’re looking at the proof. It was his decision to run—not yours.”

I watched Tomlinson study the photo, familiar with what he was seeing because I had examined the image so many times. The photo showed a section of a rock room where roots connected ceiling and floor. In the deep, deep shadows of the room, beneath what looked like a cave petroglyph—a stick man with horns—lay a portion of a human skull, the broken jaw grinning up at the wide-angle lens.

Next to the skull was my night vision monocular. The camera’s unfiltered photocells had captured something that was invisible to us but not to other predators. The infrared light was still on, throwing a beam that was straight as an arrow and true.