Tampa Burn

TWENTY

I saw Tomlinson briefly late that afternoon at the marina. He’d puttered ashore in his little dinghy so he could drive to Bailey’s General Store and buy supplies. The encounter was as uncomfortable as it was unexpected.

Unexpected because he makes shopping runs less frequently these days. Too much risk of being recognized. He has a garden variety of phobias, and the newest is the fear of being mobbed by foreign-speaking strangers.

It’s happened because of his growing cult status as a Zen teacher. His adoring groupies come to the marina to seek him out, and the attention makes him edgy. Until Mack, who owns and manages the marina, put a stop to it, they’d hang around the docks, hoping for a glimpse of their beloved prophet.

That’s the way they think of him, too. It has to do with a religious treatise that he wrote years ago when he was still a university student, One Fathom Above Sea Level. A fathom is six feet, so the title refers to the universe as viewed through one man’s eyes-Tomlinson’s.

The paper was published in Germany, enjoyed a brief European vogue, and then vanished. But a while back, it was rediscovered. It was translated into Japanese, then Chinese, and began to circulate around the world on the Internet. The Internet’s great triumph is that it is successfully joining us as one race, even while inviting dependencies that amplify our vulnerability, and that may well destroy us as a modern society.

Anyway, Tomlinson has his faults, but ego isn’t among them. Except for an understandable wariness, he’s been unchanged by all the attention. The problem is, he says, he can’t remember writing One Fathom, nor what inspired it.

It used to trouble him: not remembering what he’d written, or what had moved him to that level of virtuosity. As he explains it, heavy drink and drugs were involved, so the brain cells that did the actual creating are long since dead.

It bothered him so much, in fact, that around Christmas, he disappeared for a couple of months on what he later described to me as his personal quest to rediscover the source of that lost inspiration. When I asked for details, he demurred, though I noticed that he stopped speaking of One Fathom as if it had been written by an unknown person.

And he was forced to change his lifestyle because of the unwelcome fame. Tomlinson has always kept his sun-battered Morgan sailboat moored only a few hundred yards offshore from the docks, and just across the channel from my stilt house. Now, though, he’s moved it near the middle of the bay to discourage his followers from attempting to swim out to meet him. It’s a considerably longer distance, and one of the reasons he makes fewer trips to the marina.

Which is why I was surprised to run into him that afternoon. I’d seen him ride by earlier that day-probably to pick up his cell phone, which I’d left for him behind the counter in the marina office. With the phone, I’d also left a note that listed the medical supplies we needed, and a brief explanation. I couldn’t help adding a postscript reminding him that he had hipster doctor buddies who were happy to sell him sevoflurane gas and laughing gas to sniff for recreational use, so maybe they’d come through with a couple of drugs that were actually intended for medical purposes.

The sevoflurane gas he used was the worst. Smelled exactly like anchovies to me. But Tomlinson loved the stuff, and would walk around giggling for hours, stinking of marijuana and fish.

I’d told him where to find his cell phone in a brief exchange on the VHF radio. Other than that, I saw no need for us to talk.

We had no pressing business.

Pilar had called me from her hotel room early that morning just as I returned from swimming, and I’d already told her about my e-mail exchange with Prax Lourdes. I’d described the bizarre call on the satellite phone. Told her a lie-that he’d demanded my e-mail address, and that he’d written me directly. Explained it all without mentioning that I’d broken into her Internet account, her personal e-mails, and that I’d already read Lourdes’ earlier demand that we drive to St. Petersburg.

I’d let her find that letter for herself, then act surprised when she told me.

Behaving as if I were surprised-after all the experience I’d gotten in the last few hours, that’d be no problem.

I’d slept off and on during the day, Ransom keeping me company. She works at Tarpon Bay Marina, managing the little store there, and also at the Sanibel Rum Bar amp; Grille. She said things had been so slow, taking a day off was no big deal.

That indicated to me the degree of her concern.

It was showing. The turmoil, all the stress, were getting to me, or she wouldn’t have taken a day away from work.

I found myself worrying about Dewey-Where was she? Why hadn’t I heard from her? And Lake-Would they let him write me? And when?

I thought about Tinman. Who the hell was he?

I knew a man who might be able to tell me…

I have a satellite phone of my own. Seldom need it; keep it packed away because I can use it to contact only one man: a guy named Hal Harrington.

Hal’s with the U.S. State Department. He’s also a member of a covert operations team that is known, to a very few, as the Negotiating and System Analysis Group-the Negotiators, for short.

Because the success of the team requires that members blend easily into most societies worldwide, each man was provided with a legitimate and mobile profession when he joined. Harrington became a computer software wizard.

Another of the group’s members became a marine biologist.

The trouble with becoming a Negotiator was that, once you were in, there was no getting out. You could never be free again.

Whenever I talked with Hal, he reminded me of that.

“Quid pro quo,” he would say, granting most technical favors I asked, but always giving me an assignment in return.

I hadn’t talked with him in a while.

I decided not to talk to him now. But I did send him an e-mail, asking for information on Thackery. Did the crazed surfer ever go by the alias “Tinman”?

I knew that, ultimately, it would mean another assignment from Hal.

After that, I paced; checked my AOL account over and over for e-mails. I paced; glared at the phone, willing it to ring, hoping that I would hear Dewey’s voice on the other end.

I telephoned Janet Mueller twice, pressing her to contact the woman, each time stressing how important it was that I speak with her. When I picked up the phone a third time, I stopped and had to vow to myself I wouldn’t pester Janet again.

There was something else I was obsessing about, too: Tomlinson.

Except for his quick trip into the marina, he’d spent the day out there all alone aboard No Mas. From the windows of my lab, I could see the vessel’s old white hull at anchor, pointing like a slow weather vane against the tide. With all that was going on in my life, I had to ask myself, under normal circumstances, wouldn’t I have sought out his opinions and advice? Wouldn’t I have hopped in my skiff and gone a-calling? Or invited him in for an early beer?

The answer was an unqualified yes. He would have been the first person I would have turned to for help. Ransom was correct. The man had come to seem like a brother to me.

That had changed, though. For now, anyway. Maybe for all time.

Which is probably why, that afternoon when I nearly collided with Tomlinson as I exited the Red Pelican Gift Shop, I tried way too hard to mask my uneasiness-which, of course, just made my uneasiness more obvious.

The most startling thing, though, was that Tomlinson’s manner was just as stilted.

“Whoops, sorry… oh. Hello, Tomlinson.”

“Doc? Hey, great to see you, compadre. Just really… great.”

“In for supplies?”

“Oh yeah, man. Beans and beer.”

“Food and beer, well… you need those.”

“Absolutely. Food, yeah… even for me, eating is, like… mandatory.”

“Yeah, sure. Food. Um. Did you… did you get the note I left about the medical supplies?”

“Oh yeah. My doctor buddies are already working on the list.”

“Good. Good. Well… nice seeing you.”

“Right back at you, amigo!”

Walking away from him, I could feel sweat beading on my back, and I knew that my face had to be flushed. I was already dreading our next meeting, when from behind me I heard him call after me, “Doc. Hey, Doc? Hold it just a sec, would you?”

I turned to look. I was standing in the parking lot. He’d stopped just outside the marina office, next to the doorway that led up the steps to Jeth’s upstairs apartment. He was conservatively dressed for him: shirtless, khaki British walking shorts belted with a rope, and a knitted Rastafarian cap, red, black, and green, holding his hair in a bun.

I said, “Something wrong?”

I couldn’t remember ever seeing him looking so melancholy. “Yeah, Doc. Your aura, man. It’s impossible for me not to notice. You don’t even have to tell me, and I already know.”

“Know what?”

“I know something’s happened.”

I said, “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

“What I’m talking about is you. That something very heavy has gone down. It’s like- ouch -iceberg country. A solid cold wall has dropped. That’s the vibe I’m getting. Emotional cataclysm; bridges burning.” He seemed to be thinking it through as he spoke, feeling the words. “An event has taken place that has changed the entire social interactive structure. You’ve… discovered something. A real mind-bender. Is any of this making sense?”

My tone flat, I said, “No. But that’s not unusual when I listen to you.”

“Are you sure? Then why is it I get the feeling you’re pissed off at me?”

I said, “I don’t know. Is there some reason I should be pissed off?”

He still wore that poignant expression, but there was now also a spark of awareness. “O.K. I’m beginning to tune in. Like clouds moving away from the void.”

“I’m glad one of us understands, because I don’t.” I turned to leave.

“In that case, I’ll walk along with you, if you don’t mind. Maybe we can hash it out.”

I didn’t want him to walk with me, but couldn’t think of a quick excuse that made sense. I looked from one to another of the marina’s main roofed structures. There are four: the combination office and take-out restaurant, the Red Pelican Gift Shop, Mack’s house, which is beyond the docks at the edge of the mangroves, and the storage barn and repair shop behind it.

I was on my way to the storage barn because Mack, for mysterious reasons, had invited me and some of the guides to a private meeting there. So I used that. I said, “I’m in kind of a rush. Mack wants to see me about something-it’s important; I’m not sure what. And I’m late.”

I’ve known Tomlinson so long that I can read his mannerisms nearly as well as he can read mine. The gentle smile on his face told me, I know you’re lying, but it’s O.K., even as he spoke, saying, “It won’t take long, and I’ll walk fast. Promise.”

I began to walk again and he joined in step. “I heard about Dewey splitting. Man, I am so sorry. As you know, good women can’t dump me fast enough once they catch on to how truly weird my act is. So that kind of emotional pain is something I’ve got a handle on. Like, if you need an ear to listen?”

I said, “What I need is to find out where she went. She’s so damn stubborn. I need to discuss something with her. There’s a very important reason that we need to talk. But she won’t. So, if you know where she is, I’d appreciate your telling me.”

He was shaking his head. “I told everybody I don’t want to know. That’s ’cause if you asked, I knew I’d tell you, man. It’s the lady’s gig; Dewey’s secret. Not mine to share. But Doc-” He seemed to put additional meaning in his emphasis. “There’s nothing in the world you couldn’t ask me. Not if I knew the answer. Or do for you. The same deal, man. Anything. ”

I stopped walking. Stood there looking into his blue and ancient mariner’s eyes. “It makes me nervous when friends put little messages between the lines. It’s like they’re trying to make me guess. Or find out what I know. If you want to tell me something, just come right out and tell me.”

He thought about that for a moment, considering, before he said, “You’re in a hurry. You’ve got that meeting with Mack. So maybe tonight, we can have a few beers, sit out and feed the mosquitoes. Yeah, Doc”-this was added reflectively-“I think we’ve got a few things we need to discuss. Maybe clear the air a little, huh?”

Not wanting to sound too unsociable-he was already guarded-I told him, that reminded me: I had a Tucker Gatrell story for him that he was going to love.

THE junk and marine litter that has accumulated around the storage barn and repair shop is screened from the parking lot by a wooden fence that runs back and along the mangrove swamp that encircles the marina and Dinkin’s Bay.

The marina’s fishing guides-Jeth, Felix, Neville, Alex Payne, Dave-were already there when I arrived, sitting on packing crates or leaning against savaged outboards, all looking at Mack, who’d been speaking. Mack was wearing green Bermuda shorts, a yellow tank top, and a massive straw hat, and was smoking a cigar that was just long enough to extend beyond the brim.

When I appeared, Mack paused long enough to relight the cigar and say, “See? I invited Doc. That proves I’m not crazy.”

I wondered what that meant.

Mack is Graeme MacKinley, a New Zealander who sailed to the States years ago and took a flier on a marina. He is stocky, plainspoken, and a superlative businessman who’s tight with a dime but big-hearted when it comes to philanthropy, and with the quirky cast of characters who live and work at his marina. Like many foreign nationals who’ve done well in the States, he’s both ardently patriotic and also a raging libertarian who despises government regulations and interference. When it comes to marina business, he rarely asks opinions or takes polls.

Unaware of the meeting’s purpose or what he meant, I replied, “Sorry to disagree, Mack, but I’ve come to the conclusion that almost everyone at this marina is a tad crazy-including me,” which got a small laugh and, to my own surprise, seemed to lighten my mood a little.

Mack said, “Oh, you got a point there, mate!” and then added to no one in particular, “Fill ’im in, gents. Tell the doctor what we’re doing here.”

Big Felix Blane took charge. “You wanna talk crazy, well, Mack’s come up with one of the craziest ideas of all time. You know the Sanibel police boat? That shitty little tri-hull they keep moored next to the Island Belle? They almost never use the thing, and the engine’s about shot.”

I said, “Sure, I know the boat,” picturing a stained hull with an older Evinrude outboard. I’d heard the department had gotten it in some kind of sting a few years back.

Captain Felix said, “The boat just sits there, they don’t keep the bottom clean, but it could be an O.K. little skiff if they cared a little more about it. Which they don’t seem to. So maybe that’s why the police department hasn’t paid their wet-slippage rent in a couple months.”

“Seven months,” Mack corrected sharply. “For seven months, their bean-counters have been stringing me along. They don’t return my calls, they ignore my letters. I’m sick of being treated like a fool.”

“That’s what this is about,” Captain Dave said. “The Sanibel Police Department hasn’t paid their rent, and Mack’s on the warpath. Now he wants us to do something that’s just plain nuts.”

“Seeking justice isn’t nuts,” Mack said priggishly. “Do you remember what country you’re in? Or a thing called the Constitution? I’ve called them, I’ve sent notices. I’ve gone down to City Hall in person; wasted hours trying to collect that goddamn debt. They made me fill out forms because they haven’t paid their bills.

“How long would I be walking around free on the streets if the tables were turned? If I owed the city money? If I told them to go piss up a rope when they came to collect?” Mack had been gesturing with his cigar, but now jammed it back in the corner of his mouth. “It’s the principle of the thing, damn it! When the government starts ignoring the basic rules of commerce, we’re all taking it up the bum. The department owes me money. They refuse to pay, so I’ve had it. I’ve given them every chance.”

I could see that Mack had been worked up about it for a while.

I asked, “So what are you going to do?”

Jeth Nichols had avoided eye contact after our minor confrontation the night before, but that was now forgotten as he said to me with emotion, “He wants us to steal the Sanibel Police Department’s boat. All of us. We could get in a lot of trouble for doin’ something like that, couldn’t we, dah-dah-Doc?”

Sounding as if he really were a little crazed, Mack said, “I want you to sink the son-of-a-bitch, not just steal her. Punch her full of holes, tow her out, and make a reef. We’ll catch enough grouper and snapper off that piece of junk to pay their tab twenty times over. Just what the bastards deserve, too.” He said the last as if he could feel the satisfaction it would bring him, already anticipating how he was going to feel.

Captain Felix said to me, “He says we all have to help sink the boat, ’cause that way no one will talk. Every single one of us has to have a hand in it. We’ve already pulled her onto the canoe trail, out of sight, so the live-aboards won’t know.”

“If we don’t all hang together, we’ll all surely hang separately,” Mack said, paraphrasing the famous Benjamin Franklin quote.

Jeth appeared stricken. “Jesus Christ, they can still hang you for stealing shit from a police depa-pah-partment?”

Mack calmed him with a look and a gesture before adding, “I’ve already locked the marina gate, so there’s no chance of any outsiders coming around. What I suggest you gents do is take axes, crowbars-” He pointed to the repair shop. “We’ve got all the tools right here. Knock plenty of holes in the hull. Take out all the flotation and fuel, then plug the holes with something temporary.”

Puffing on the cigar, he looked at me. “Rags, maybe? Old life jackets? Whatta you think, Doc?”

Sounding calm, but a little helpless, too, Captain Felix said, “He wants us to do it tonight before the moon gets up too bright. Tell him he’s crazy, Doc. Steal the freaking police department’s boat? Jesus, what are we going to say if we get caught?”

Mack, all the guides, everyone was looking at me. Under any other circumstances, in any other mood, I would probably have used some gradual, delicate line of reasoning so that Mack would finally decide for himself that it wasn’t a good idea. But it wasn’t a normal circumstance, and I was in anything but a normal frame of mind.

I looked at my watch-I could spare a little time before checking e-mails and meeting Tomlinson. Plus, I was aware, on some subtle level of consciousness, that this was a good thing for me to be doing; a healthy diversion, interacting with the marina family. Earlier, as I’d driven past the party the Jensen brothers were hosting, I’d thought about how emotional trauma distorts our normal orbit. But now the strong, not-so-normal gravitational power of Dinkin’s Bay was pulling me back into line again.

To Mack, I said, “What I don’t understand is, we get along fine with the police. They’re a good bunch, from the top right on down. It doesn’t have anything to do with-”

“It’s not the uniforms,” he interrupted. “It’s the bloody bean-counters. The suits. It’s not the cops themselves.”

“How many months are they late?”

“Eight, if you count May. And I think I will.”

I said, “You’ve tried all the formal steps to try and get them to pay?”

Nodding, Mack replied, “They enjoy making me jump through their bloody little hoops. They could pay. The bean-counters know they should pay. But I can’t sue ’em, and the bastards know that, too. So when they come lookin’ for their boat, I’m gonna say I don’t know what happened to it, and I don’t care. That boat stopped being my responsibility when they stopped payin’.”

I looked from Jeth to Felix to Dave. I felt more like myself than I’d felt in days, yet what I said to them was way out of character: “Guys, I can’t believe I’m saying this, and I know you never expected it. But Mack’s right. Let’s go sink that son-of-a-bitch.”

A few minutes before moonrise, I ran my 21-foot Maverick flats skiff past Woodring Point, the big 225-horsepower Merc blasting a platinum rooster tail toward the stars as I ran throttle-heavy toward the pocket of lights that marked the marina. I left the channel at Green Point, just before the old fish house ruins, touching the jack plate toggle to raise the engine, then increased trim and steered straight toward my lab, running fifty miles an hour across the flat in two feet of water, sometimes less, sometimes more.

As I expected, Tomlinson was in the house waiting on me. His dinghy was tied up next to my 24-foot trawl boat, the old cedar plank netter I bought in Chokoloskee and use for dragging up specimens. The moon was already so bright that I could read the words SANIBEL BIOLOGICAL SUPPLY painted on the stern.

As I tied my skiff, he called from inside, “I was about to give up on you. Or come looking. Since we met, I can’t remember you ever being late before.”

I called back, “I’ll be right up. Help yourself to a beer.”

“I’ve already helped myself to three. I’m doing the fifteen-minute dosage tonight. But thanks anyway.”

He meant a beer every fifteen minutes.

I ignored the urge to hose and flush my skiff, and the guilt that went with ignoring maintenance, and went upstairs, taking the wooden steps two at a time. Tomlinson was in the galley, kneeling at the little refrigerator when I came in. He looked at me for a moment, then looked again, his expression a mix of surprise and uneasiness… but then the uneasiness changed to unexpected relief.

“Holy shitskee, what happened to you?”

I looked at my arms, looked at my legs, and saw that I was streaked with gray marl, bits of turtle grass, and that my shorts and shirt were a mess of mud and shell. There was some blood involved, too.

Stripping off my shirt, I said, “Have you ever tried to sink a boat? Intentionally, I mean. I had no idea, but it’s damn near impossible. You know that cheap tri-hull runabout the cops use sometimes? It’s like a damn floating vampire. It just won’t die.”

Tomlinson grinned-oh yeah, he was very relieved that I’d provided some amusing way to neutralize the discomfort between us. The fact was, I was glad, too. But I also wondered if, after this meeting, there would ever be an easy moment between us again.

After he’d assured me that Pilar hadn’t heard anything new from the kidnappers or from Lake, Tomlinson asked, “You were intentionally trying to sink the police department’s boat? Why? ”

I explained the reason, and then how we’d gone about trying to sink the thing, as I changed into dry clothes-I’d shower later, after checking my e-mails. Just because they hadn’t contacted Pilar didn’t mean that I hadn’t been sent a note.

We’d knocked holes in the runabout’s hull, I told him. We’d removed all the foam flotation-or so we thought. We plugged the holes with old life jackets and rags, then connected all the plugs with a complex network of fishing line so that we could remove all the plugs with a single yank.

I said, “We towed it out into about ten feet of water near the mouth of the bay-you know the spot. When we pulled the plugs, the damn boat filled halfway up and wouldn’t sink any farther.”

We’d spent the next forty minutes hacking, chopping, and then finally, with all of us in the water, physically trying to stomp and pull the hull under.

“The guides are still out there. When I left, the tri-hull was sitting with its bow out of the water, just high enough so you could still see the Sanibel Police Department reflector stencil from, oh, say, no less than a quarter-mile away. I thought Jeth was going to start bawling, he was so upset. But then he got caught under the boat’s stern somehow and nearly drowned, and that seemed to calm him right down.”

I was tucking in my shirt, hurrying toward the computer in my lab as I added, “The last I heard, they were sending a skiff back to the marina to load up that old stove that’s piled with the storage junk. How they’re going to fit a stove on a fishing skiff, I don’t know. But the plan is to shove the stove off onto the deck of the police boat, and the weight of the stove is supposed to take it under. You know, finally kill the bastard. A stove through the heart.”

Tomlinson and I were both laughing as I sat at the computer and began the process of signing on to AOL. But then I stopped laughing and turned to look at him, suddenly serious. “You know something, Tomlinson? Even with all the crap that’s going on in my life, I realized something tonight. Just hanging out with the guides, doing something as idiotic as trying to sink a stolen boat, it reminded me. We’ve got great lives here. Dinkin’s Bay’s a great little place. A bunch of fun people who don’t take life too seriously, but with enough fabric and character to give a damn. To know that other people’s lives matter. Plus, they really seem to care about us.”

He was nodding, listening carefully but not making eye contact as I continued.

“For a couple of tropical drifters like you and me, it’s probably the closest we’ll ever come to having a home. I’d hate to see anything screw that up because of old… old stuff. Things that happened in the past. Events, or old promises. Alliances that maybe seemed the right thing to do at the time. Bullshit like that is absolute poison, and it always comes out sooner or later if you try and keep it hidden.”

Now he was looking at me, his eyes wise and old as he tugged nervously at a strand of frazzled, sun-bleached hair, still nodding, and I could see that he understood.

He said softly, “I was right this afternoon; right about you changing. So there’s something I wish I’d’ve told you a long time ago. Back when I figured out I could trust you. Back when I realized that you and I-about the two most unlikely nerds in the world-were going to be friends. I’m damn sorry about that, Marion.”

I said, “From one nerd to another, we all make mistakes. I’ve got scars from dealing with my scars.” I studied his face evenly for a moment before adding, “But that doesn’t mean everything can be forgiven. Some mistakes, there’s no statute of limitations.”

I waited through his long, thoughtful silence, then watched him stand a little straighter before he said, “I know that. I realize the risk. Even so, there’s something I need to tell you-”

Listening, I turned, glanced at the computer screen… and then did a quick double-take before interrupting, “ Whoa. Hold it right there,” stopping Tomlinson in midsentence.

I was holding up a warning index finger, my eyes fixed on the screen again as I added, “If you’ve waited this long, it can wait a little longer. There’s an e-mail here from Lake. I’ve got an e-mail from my son.”