Flashback (12 page)

"Bob! Bob?" Then, music to Anna's ears: "Oh, Bob."

Anna turned to follow the joyful noise. Teddy's head popped above a low dune with a prairie-dog quickness that nearly made Anna laugh.

"Bring the first-aid kit," Teddy ordered in a voice that had Anna hopping like one of Teddy's emergency-room orderlies.

The Reef's medical kit slung over one complaining shoulder, she scrambled up the dune behind which she'd seen Teddy Shaw's head. Sand ground into the abrasions on her bare legs and scorched the bottoms of her feet. As she topped the low dune, she forgot her petty concerns.

Ranger Shaw lay on the other side, his lower body sprawled across the legs of a dead man as if he'd lain atop the corpse before his wife turned him face up. Teddy cradled his head in her lap.

"He's not dead," she said fiercely as Anna took in the scene.

"Bleeding out?" Anna asked.

"No."

"Breathing?"

"Yes."

Shaw would live another couple minutes.

"Water," Anna said, dropped the first-aid kit where Teddy could reach it easily, and trotted back to the Reef. Shaw had suffered some kind of trauma, swum at least a half-mile if not more, either pursuing or towing another man, then lay in the sun for half a day. Dehydration would be a serious factor.

In the minutes Anna was gone Teddy completed the evolution from wife to head ER nurse. The dead man had been rolled on his side, facing away, to give him his dignity. The medical bag was set to shade Shaw's face, and Teddy had his trouser leg nearly cut off.

Anna joined her, unbuttoned Shaw's shirt, then ran both hands over his head, neck and torso to check for damage. "Back okay?" she asked as they worked.

"Clean," Teddy replied. "He was laying facedown half on the dead guy. I checked his back before I rolled him over.

"Head, neck and chest are okay," Anna said. "Oh, hey, got some eye movement."

"Not surprised. I hurt him. Look here." Below Bob's left knee the white of bone showed through the flesh. "Broken," Teddy said. "Compound. And lost a lot of blood.

"Bob, open your eyes," Teddy said commandingly.

Shaw opened his eyes; blinds going up in an empty room.

"You're okay, honey. We're here. You need to stay awake. We're going to sit you up so Anna can give you a drink."

Shaw came back into himself, his soul back in his eyes. "Water," he repeated. "Good..."

Cliff, Mack and Danny arrived. Bob was packaged and Danny and Mack carried him aboard the Reef. Mack argued for the Atlantic for some reason but was ignored. After the night's terrors and the day's adventures, Anna was going to carry her catch home.

She did give Mack the unidentified corpse. They didn't have a body bag and the remains, made festive by beach towels, were strapped to a backboard.

Teddy stayed at Bob's side murmuring endearments and giving him as many small sips of water as he would take. The bleeding around the fracture had stopped on its own hours before. Compound fractures were always bad, but where the exposed end of the bone had been drying in sun and jammed full of sand for five hours, complications proliferated. Other than rehydration, neither Anna nor Teddy would attempt treatment. Anna radioed Duncan, the fort's historian, to call the mainland for a helicopter. Before the Reef Ranger brought her cargo to the dock, he radioed back to let her know one had been dispatched.

Mack and Danny carried Bob to his wife's "hospital." The corpse was housed in the researcher's dorm with the air conditioning turned as cold as the thermostat had numbers for. The body would fly back to Key West with Bob and Teddy Shaw.

Everyone was anxious to hear Bob's story, but at Teddy's request, they left the infirmary. Mack, more tenacious or more curious, was inclined to ignore requests, and Anna had ordered him out. After that he remembered his manners and left with good grace. Nobody but the Shaws seemed to want to admit the adventure was over.

With water to drink, a saline IV drip to assist, and a cool dim place, Bob regained full consciousness. Anna asked to do the intravenous drip, needing the "sticks" to keep her IV status as an emergency medical technician current. After she failed twice, leaving small bloody prints behind, Teddy snatched the needle away and inserted it neatly.

"I'd have got it in another try," Anna said.

"Bob's suffered enough."

Anna knew that, but "sticks" were hard to come by.

After a shot of Demerol authorized over the phone by the medivac doctor and administered by his wife, Bob bordered on jocular. Sometimes being alive did that to a person.

When Bob was as comfortable as possible, Anna pulled up a stool and sat by the bedside facing him. Several times she breathed in and out, ridding her feverish brain of the strangeness and ghostly half-images that had plagued her since being awakened by Teddy in the middle of the night. Mind clean and open, she was ready to listen.

"So," she said. "Tell me what happened." She half expected to get a rebuke from Teddy. Though alert and oriented, Bob was in pretty bad shape. Teddy said nothing, and it occurred to Anna that heroes, regardless of personal injury, were expected to make it back through enemy lines to report, even if they had to do it with their last breath.

Bob began his tale with scattered thoughts and broken time lines, stopped, made adjustments inside his skull, and began again, this time at the beginning.

"Just before midnight I was heading in from checking the northwest boundary of the park. Three shrimpers, all outside our waters. Two family-owned. Been here before. Never been any trouble. The third looked like trouble. Details in my patrol log."

Bob's patrol log was providing reading for the fishes, but Anna didn't interrupt.

"As I came past Loggerhead, I caught a glint of something toward East Key. No lights, nothing like that, just a place on the water that didn't match up. I radioed in..."

His voice trailed off, and Anna watched his eyes grow dull as he searched his mind for verification of his words.

"You called in," Teddy said, taking the place of memory. "You told me you were onto something and needed radio silence."

"Okay. I radioed in, then turned off my running lights and cruised toward the place on the water. With binoculars I could see it was a Scarab-one of those go-fast boats, like a cigarette boat but bigger and only a few years old. It was black or some dark color, moored in the middle of a coral bed, no lights. Two people onboard. Maybe three but at least two. Could see the lit ends of their cigarettes. Looked hinky.

"About fifty yards out I turned my light on them and hailed. The boat was deep metallic green and rode low in the water like it was loaded to the gunwales. Not usual for a go-fast boat. They'd have heard my motor so my being there was no surprise, but as soon as they realized I was law enforcement, one guy ducks into the cabin and the other fires up the engine. He got panicked or something and didn't take time to turn on the fans to purge the bilge and engine compartment of gas fumes.

"Must have been a spark, because it blew up. A piece of it hit my boat. I was thrown overboard. My boat sank, theirs burned a second then went down."

Bob stopped and rubbed his eyes with both fists like a sleepy child. "God, it was fast," he said, sounding less like a Joe Friday and more like a real person. "Two boats afloat. Bang. Flash. Both boats gone like they never happened. I didn't know they could sink that fast. I might have a funny time sense. I was never out cold, but things were hazy after I went overboard. Just for a couple seconds," This last was to Teddy, who nodded as if she expected no less from him.

"I could see one of the passengers on the other boat-I think the one that started the engine-was still alive but in a bad way. I got my PFD inflated and started to swim over to give him a hand. Till then I didn't know my leg had been hit-it didn't hurt, nothing. Once I knew, it hurt like a son-of-a-bitch. Anyway I swam toward the guy but with my leg it was rough going and I had to drop my duty belt. I lost my sidearm."

Bob looked at his wife, loath to admit this gross failing on his part.

"Only a damn fool would have kept their gun given the circumstances. Anyway, Cliff found it for you," Anna said. "Go on."

"I got to the guy. He was alive but hurting and not able to help himself. I towed him to East Key-and tried to get up a signal fire. I couldn't manage it. By the time the sun came up the guy was breathing bad. I tried to shade him. Then I don't remember anything till Teddy yelling, 'Bob.'" He smiled at his wife and Anna looked away, not to give them a moment's privacy but because their faces had blurred. She rubbed her eyes, wondering if she needed sleep or what. When she looked again they were back in focus.

"The man you saved-"

"He died."

"Still counts," Anna said. "The man never said anything?"

"Not much. He was never fully there, if you know what I mean. He was burned, and I think he'd been struck on the head. Pain and concussion or whatever had him scrambled."

"What did he say?" Anna asked.

"Let's see." Bob closed his eyes the better to recall. "He was scared, wanted to get to dry land. 'Feet on American soil,' he said once. Once he said, 'cold' and then I thought he was saying 'tree saw' but it made no sense. Nothing he said made sense."

For a minute, or maybe more, Anna waited in case Bob should wish to add anything, but he didn't. "I'll let you rest," she said. "Your ride should be here in half an hour or so. I want to get a look at the man you saved before they haul him off to the knackers."

As she closed the infirmary door it suddenly struck her that Bob had done it. When reality came knocking he'd been able to act out his fantasy. He'd swum over half a mile with a compound fracture dragging behind him a man he'd saved from the briny deep. He'd tried to build a signal fire and, when he felt himself blacking out, his last thought was to fall in such a way as to protect the other guy from the burning rays of the sun.

That made him a genuine, bona-fide hero in Anna's book.

Later there would be time to fete Bob, to wonder why the riders of the green go-fast boat were hovering off East Key, why they panicked sufficiently when they saw law enforcement to forget to clear the gasoline fumes, and why they carried extra fuel in their bow. Right now she had a corpse to examine. The helicopter from Key West would be at the fort in less than thirty minutes to whisk this bit of human jetsam away.

It took her only a minute to fetch a camera and return to the researcher's dorm. Danny and Mack did their work well. All six generators must have been working overtime. The dorm was as cold as a morgue. And as dim. The long narrow room, packed floor-to-ceiling with bunk beds had but one window facing out on the parade ground, and that was dull with a cataract of mini-blinds.

Having switched on the overhead lights, which seemed to alter the nature of the dimness rather than shed illumination, Anna walked back to the industrial-style kitchen. On the counter, stripped of the colorful towels and covered by a white sheet, was her objective.

As she neared, the sheet, draped over what must have been the man's right hand, stirred; a minute flutter and lift as if plucked up then dropped by restless fingers. A horror movie thrill closed Anna's throat, and she stopped. For an instant the room's walls seemed to waver, start to close in. The sudden panic receded, but not the fear. For a minute or more she watched the shrouded form, but there were no more zombie-like manifestations.

"Damn," Anna said aloud and was comforted by the sound of her own voice. The fort, lack of sleep, too much sun, too long underwater, something was playing tricks with her mind. "Okay, buddy," she continued, finding talking brought her out of whatever creepy place she'd glimpsed. "Let's see if you've got anything to tell me."

Pinching the sheet delicately between thumbs and forefingers, she peeled it back. She always took care to respect the dead-an honor she would not necessarily extend were they still living. Dead, a person was evidence at best and the empty valise of someone's memory if nothing else. Anna hoped this dead man would prove a treasure trove of answers. Starting with who he was.

Having taken the sheet off, she put her pocket notebook and pen on the counter by the corpse's right foot, pulled on latex gloves to protect herself as much as any trace evidence, and began. Hispanic-Cuban or Puerto Rican probably-in his late twenties to mid-thirties, black hair cut short and well, the kind of barbering a well-to-do businessman might get. Much of the left side of his face was covered in second-degree burns. The ear had been taken by a third-degree burn. All that remained was a hole surrounded by blackened flesh.

Around his neck was a two-inch gold crucifix-not a cross, a crucifix with the crucified Christ executed in exquisite detail with skill and a joy in the macabre. The chain was fused into the flesh where the fire had hit.

Shirt and pants were burned nearly off the left side of the body, while the right remained relatively intact. He'd been standing to the right of the blast, at the engine. It was probably he who'd triggered the first explosion. Anna checked the rest of him for possible identifying marks. His right pocket contained one hundred fifty-three dollars in a gold or gold-plated money clip with a dog's head engraved on it, a shepherd or wolf or coyote. Other than that he carried no identification. A bird of some kind, maybe an eagle, wings folded, was tattooed on the back of his calf. Possibly he'd been in the service at one time. Her knowledge of the military and its insignias fuzzy at best and gleaned from the movies, Anna couldn't remember which branch, if any, used a bird diving downward as its emblem.