09-Twelve Mile Limit (27 page)

It set up a fun, unspoken sexual tension. When she’d finished her wine, we walked out onto the Bradenton Pier. It seemed the most natural thing in the world when she slipped her arm through mine and then, later, when I placed my hand on her waist as we walked. I could feel the pivot of her hips, the sharp blade of her pelvic bone. There were men fishing, lovers tangled together in the shadows.

Near the end of the pier, we stopped, me looking down into the water, fish moving through the circles of light, her with her head pillowed against my arm. It surprised me when she said, “I don’t want to be obvious here, but there’s something we’ve never talked about.”

I said, “Oh?”

“Yeah, it’s your social status. There used to be little symbols. Wedding bands, bracelets … tattoos.” She chuckled. “Who belongs to who. But now you have to ask. So I’m asking: Do you belong to anyone, Dr. Ford?”

“Nope. Never been married, never been engaged. I have a long list of female friends who are just that—friends. Nothing serious going on right now.”

“Does that include JoAnn and Rhonda from Dinkin’s Bay? I got the impression there was something special between you and… well, frankly, both of them.”

An insightful, perceptive lady. But I said, “No, we’re all three buddies, that’s all.”

“Ah, the independent type, the male rogue.”

I turned to look at her, smiling. “I used to tell myself that, and for a time I believed it. Like you, the thing you said about lying to yourself? I don’t have much patience for my own lies anymore, either. I’ve come to the conclusion that I live alone because I am, at the core, an essentially selfish person. It’s taken a while for me to admit it. My lab, the work I’m doing, it always comes first. All loving, devoted relationships require compromise in terms of how time is shared, and I’m too self-interested to compromise. No woman’s going to put up with that for long, and I don’t blame ’em.”

“My God, and you’re honest, too.”

I thought about the lie I told her, explaining why I happened to be in the Sarasota area—research at Bell Fish Company—and replied, “Just because I’ve lost patience for my own lies doesn’t mean I don’t tell them to others. Nope, I’m not particularly honest, either.”

That seemed to touch her on some deeper level. “I can relate to that, my new friend. One thing I’ve learned is, you can’t pray a lie, which maybe, in a way, makes sinners of us all. So, from one sinner to another, how about I walk you back to your cottage?”

In the darkness of banyan shadow near the motel, Amelia stopped, and I turned her toward me, looking down into her face. Then I kissed her softly, feeling her lips move against mine, feeling her rib cage pressing washboard-like against my stomach. As her hands moved up my sides, her mouth opened, tongue searching, my hands began to move, too.

Open-palmed, exploring with fingertips, I felt body heat radiating through the sheer material of her dress, felt the stricture of latissimus cordage beneath her arms, swimmer’s muscles. Then felt her mouth open very wide, heard her moan softly as my fingers found eraser-hard nipples, her breasts flat over bony sternum. Felt her pull away long enough to whisper, “I hope you don’t like the busty type. If you do, you’re in for a disappointment.”

I found the self-deprecation touching, almost sad. If we men were required to wear sized penis stockings outside our pants, our discussions of women’s breasts would be markedly less frequent and our preferences more vaguely defined.

I wrapped my arms around her hips and lifted her chest high as I whispered my reply: “The way your body feels, I like just fine. There’s less distance between my lips and your heart.” Then I kissed her neck, and each nipple, feeling her swell and arch beneath the black dress, breathing heavier now, making soft sounds.

“Doc … we have a perfectly nice cottage right there. If you keep doing what you’re doing, I’m going to rip those shorts off you. Indecent exposure—the cops’ll arrest us both. Me, an officer of the court.”

Which is when it finally dawned on me that I couldn’t allow this to go any further. I do so many stupid things so often, it should no longer surprise me. Sometime that night, way after midnight, I had to go a’calling on Dex Money’s shrimp boat, the Nan-Shan. If Amelia went upstairs to my bed, there was a good chance she’d stay over. How would I explain a lengthy disappearance?

I lowered her to the ground, held her away from me. “You are one spectacular woman,” I said.

Her voice had an unmistakable huskiness. “I can barely hear you, my heart’s pounding so loud.”

She took my hand and pulled me out of the shadows, into a circle of streetlight, toward the cottage. I hated the way her expression changed when I stopped, refusing to follow her, and I said, “Amelia, let’s … let’s not do this. Not tonight, anyway. Let’s give it some time, date for a while, see what happens. Why risk the friendship?”

She said very slowly, “Give it… some time? You’re kidding, right? Please tell me you’re kidding.”

I badly wanted to tell her just that, but couldn’t. “I’m trying to look down the road, anticipate what’s best for the both of us.” Then added lamely, “We really don’t know each other that well, when you think about it,” and I hated myself for sounding so prudish and insipid.

“Uhh-h-h, excuse me.” She laughed, an attempt to mask embarrassment. “I’m looking at you, not believing what I’m hearing, but you do mean it. You really don’t want me to come up to your room. Sorry, Amelia, request for service denied, Amelia. That’s what you’re telling me.”

“No, no, absolutely, it’s not like that at all. It’s just that I don’t want to rush you into something you might regret.”

Her face had gone from flushed, swollen, and sleepy to a pained look of surprise. “What you really mean is, you don’t want to risk doing something you’ll regret. Well, Doc, just for the record … let me put it this way: I want to set you straight about something, just so you don’t get the wrong idea about me. Before I get in my car and drive away, which is what I’m about to do.

“When it comes to men, I’ve never rushed into anything in my life. I don’t go around hopping from bed to bed. This is as close as I’ve ever come in my life to throwing myself at someone, and, believe me, sir, it’s something I’ll never risk again. It’s been nearly a year for me, and it may be another year before I find a man I like enough and trust enough to join in bed. But that’s one thing you don’t have to worry about, Dr. Ford, it won’t be you.”

The woman had a temper. I tried to call her back as she walked away. She never turned, never looked, never replied.

There’s an alarm on my watch, which I set, and I set the alarm in the cottage’s bedroom, too—both for 2:45 A.M.

But I didn’t need either one of them because I couldn’t sleep. I laid awake in the darkness with a Gulf wind blowing through the screen, berating myself for my insensitivity, my stupidity. Why hadn’t I the foresight to come up with a more plausible, less insulting lie?

Twice I dialed Amelia’s home number, got the machine each time.

Clearly, she didn’t want to talk to me. The woman had taken enough cheap shots over the last few months, and now I’d added to her pain and humiliation.

At 2:30, I dressed and checked the duffel I’d packed for the boat. Inside were military BDU pants with tiger-stripe camo, my old black watch sweater, Navy blue stocking cap, leather gloves, mask and snorkel, Rocket fins, and a small waterproof flashlight. Back in Dinkin’s Bay, I’d decided against packing my 9mm SIG Sauer semiautomatic handgun. That was before I’d seen Dexter Money and his pit bulls. I regretted that decision now.

I carried the bag to the marina, stepped into my boat. On one of the liveaboard yachts, I noticed a silhouette pass across the disc of the porthole—someone in there awake—and so I didn’t risk poling my skiff away from the docks. At that hour, people who try not to make noise are suspicious people. Instead, I started the engine and idled out into the bay.

There was still sufficient moonlight to read the markers, so I didn’t use a light. I ran north, then turned my skiff east toward Mead Point and Perico Island.

Somewhere out there, beneath the blackness, beyond the flashing markers, I hoped that Dexter Money and his dogs were asleep.

I pushed my skiff upriver, staying close to the bank, where the water was shallow. My push pole is made of fiberglass, similar to a vaulting pole, and it bent beneath my weight as I levered it against the marl bottom. Standing above the engine, pole in hand, I watched the moon flatten itself over a black plateau of mangroves. Then the moon vaporized in a striated cloud of rust.

Nearing the final bend, I could see the yellow glare of sodium lights reflecting off the water. Security lights. I’d noticed the poles on my first visit, which was why I brought my swim gear.

Time to get wet. I moored the skiff’s stern to a prop root and stripped off my T-shirt and shorts, ears straining to hear: tidal drainage and wind in leaves. Nothing else. I continued to listen as I dressed myself in BDUs, sweater, and stocking cap. I had a pair of Five-Ten rubber-soled climbing shoes and fit my Rocket fins over them. Wearing mask and snorkel on my arm like a bicep band, I bellied over the side into the water. Brackish water, just a hint of salt and oil. This far up in the swamplands, the river felt earthy, warm.

I swam with my eyes above surface level. When I rounded the bend, I could see the big shrimper, the Nan-Shan, motionless beneath the security lights. Could see rooftop angles of the two blockhouses through the trees, part of an outside wall. No lights showing in the windows, no sign of life. I stayed close to the bank, in the shadows.

Once, I stopped, held myself erect, treading water. Was that a log floating on the surface up ahead of me? Or maybe an empty fuel drum?

I decided that my eyes were playing tricks and continued on.

When I was beneath the docks, I held on to a crossbeam, looking up through the deck, listening. Now I could hear something unusual. It was a faint whining noise, a weak animal sound. Maybe the sound of an injured bird … or a pump with a bad rotor. I wasn’t certain if the noise came from near or far, but it couldn’t have been human.

I pulled myself up onto the dock. Stood there crouched long enough to feel confident I was alone. Then I removed my fins, walked along the dock, and stepped over onto the deck of the shrimp boat.

The odor of an ocean shrimper is distinctive: petroleum-based net coating, diesel and paint, the protein rot of sea animals stuck in nylon mesh or in small crevices that are impossible to clean thoroughly.

This vessel smelled of shrimping, but of something else, too. I have been in places of war where battlefield sanitation required that personnel attempt to destroy the stench of death with disinfectant.

The boat had that odor, the odor of flesh masked by strong chemicals. Someone had tried hard to scour the stink out of this vessel. I tested the door of the wheelhouse and stepped inside: The smell of bleach, pine cleaner, and ammonia was nearly overpowering.

I closed the door behind me, waited a few moments in the darkness, accustoming myself to the fumes before taking out a rubberized mini-flashlight. I rotated the bezel until I had a little flood beam and then began a methodical search.

It didn’t take me long to find the ship’s log. It was a mess, nearly illegible. Entries sometimes included weather as well as the GPS numbers of where the boat was fishing at the time. Sometimes the entries were signed, sometimes not. The last entry into the log had been made in October, three weeks before Janet and the others were set adrift, signed by someone named Baker.

I made a mental note of the name. If Dexter Money hired Baker to drag for shrimp, maybe he hired Baker to run refugees, too.

I ducked down the companionway steps into the galley. It was the standard layout: propane stove, sink, icebox, dinette table that collapsed into a settee berth. Despite the smell of disinfectant, the place was a mess. Greasy dishes, empty beer bottles, dented peanut cans filled with cigarette butts, Penthouse magazines strewn around the tiny head, soiled linen in the master’s quarters. The only personal items I found—subscription labels, a locker filled with prescription medications—were in Dexter Money’s name.

One time I stopped, frozen and listening for more than a minute. Had I heard footsteps on the dock outside?

Nothing.

So I continued my search and had an unexpected stroke of luck. When slovenly types want to trash a document they don’t want found, they invariably wrap it in something innocuous and throw it away. On a boat, you’d expect them to toss it overboard. But here, someone had packed in a hurry, not much worried about covering his tracks.

In a trash bag in the master’s quarters, I found an empty, crumpled bag of Starbuck’s coffee—expensive tastes for a commercial fisherman. I opened the bag and found therein a series of digital photograph rejects. They were badly printed on standard computer paper and smeared. Each shot was graphically pornographic, featuring a tall, thin, naked albino man in a variety of poses with two naked, Latin-looking women. Oral sex was the consistent theme.

Because the shots were badly framed, I got the impression that one of the three had probably placed the camera on a desk, touched the timer button, then rushed to get into the picture. Strictly amateur.

In one of the photos, both women stared into the camera’s lens, moistened lips and sloe-eyed, their expressions so obvious and salacious that they might have been parodying stage sensuality. Because of certain grotesque characteristics of the man’s anatomy, and because the women looked to be no older than their late teens, I guessed them to be prostitutes. Women doing things they’d never do unless they were getting paid. Because of the man’s dull, glossy stare, I made another deduction: He was very drunk during the session or on drugs.

The rattan furniture in the background had a commercial look, suggestive of a hotel.

The inference got some support. Crumpled with the photos, I found a brochure for a place called Hotel de Acension, Cartagena, Colombia.

I knew the hotel, had even been in the bar a couple of times. High marble ceilings and European prices. It had been a cathedral during the time of the Conquistadors. Now it was a notorious hangout for drug cartel people, informants, and State Department types on the make. With the brochure was a copy of receipts for a one-month stay made out to someone named Hassan Atwa Kazan. He had expensive tastes and liked room service. Moët, smoked salmon, Dunhill cigarettes.