Ten Thousand Islands (30 page)

The diver
had
found it. But why hadn’t he told them? Why hadn’t he turned it over and got the bonus? I remembered Ted telling me that the reward his father had offered was way too small. Maybe the diver decided to try and sneak the thing out, make a lot more money by selling it on his own. Or maybe … just maybe the diver
realized that they would never let him leave their property alive, and so he kept it as a bargaining chip … but had never been given the chance to bargain.

I floated there, admiring the medallion; its weight and color and density. It was a stunning piece of jewelry. There was something almost hypnotic about the way light clung to the designs. But while I was holding it between thumb and forefinger, inspecting it, my grip on the diver’s elbow slipped … which caused my right hand to automatically scull for balance … and the medallion fell from my hands.

I watched it for a sickening moment as it fluttered toward the black hole below, glittering like a fishing lure.

Then I switched off the regulator’s valve and was after it, swimming hard, hard, everything a blur but that golden flash. I caught the medallion just before it went over the rim into darkness.

Once I had the regulator in my mouth again, breathing easily, I put the medallion into the pocket of my fishing shorts. No more admiring it until I was safely on the surface.

Nora would get a kick out of seeing the thing. I would present it to her with flowers and a bottle of champagne, perhaps.

If she was still alive….

It crossed my mind that Bauerstock or Parrish might be the extra-careful types. With all the bleeding my ear had done, they had to assume I was dead. But most bodies float. They might find another set of snorkel gear and take a look through the clear water, try to figure out why my body had yet to surface.

I decided I’d better hide.

I unstrapped the rebreather, mounted it on my own back, Velcroed the ruined BC across my chest, then released my breath so that I would sink. I descended down the wall, over the limestone rim into darkness. Felt the familiar sensation of stepping over an underwater wall—the sensation of falling, falling in slow motion.

I drifted downward until the computer panel told me I was at 60 feet. Hunted around until I found a comfortable rock outcrop where I could wedge myself and relax.

Negative buoyancy is an advantage of a closed-circuit rebreather. At this depth, zero decompression time was another benefit. Closed circuit meaning that nearly a hundred percent of the system’s gas supply is used. Each time I exhaled, my air was exhausted through a soda lime filter that scrubbed out carbon dioxide, then recirculated wasted oxygen back into the system. Gases were added depending on my depth and when the volume dropped below a certain minimum value. As long as the batteries that ran the onboard computer were good, I could stay down for a couple of hours.

Hopefully, I wouldn’t have to stay that long.

Water transmits sound more efficiently than air.

Ted and Ivan had an appointment in Naples, a pretty Gulf Coast city that was more than an hour away by water.

They would
have
to start their boat, and I would hear them.

An hour and eighteen minutes later, according to the computer board, they did.

I
surfaced cautiously, still wearing the rebreather. Came up beneath the dock, peering out. My teeth were chattering, my fingers puckered. Wind was in the trees, showing silver in the tops of palms, blowing sand across the lake.

There was someone in the pavilion, a lone figure.

The old brown Indio woman sitting there in her dark dress.

She cupped her hands around her mouth and called something, her words muffled by the wind. She tried again, louder. I realized she was calling out in Spanish:
They are gone!

Who was she speaking to? No way she could know I was there.

Apparently, she did, though, because she stood and began to find her way toward me, hands outstretched, feeling the air.

Heard her say:
I have been waiting for you
.

If a woman without eyes knew where I was, there was no fooling anyone else they’d left behind, so I dropped the scuba pack and scrambled up the bank. When a man climbs fully dressed out of a pool or lake, he frets about mundane things: sopping billfold, credit cards, treasured leather belt. I had something more pressing on my mind.

I touched my pockets.

The pendant was still there.

As she drew closer, I saw that she had something in her hand—my glasses. I’d lost them on the beach, but how had she found them? As I put them on, she said again, “I have been waiting for you.”

I said, “Everyone’s gone?”

“Yes. Everyone.”

“Your name’s Bella.”

“Yes. And yours is Ford.”

“How do you know that?”

“I know more than you realize, big man. I know they tried to kill you but couldn’t. I know that you swam into the eye of the earth and stayed as long as a fish. If your power is so great, perhaps you can destroy them. You found the amulet? The golden god?”

“I didn’t find anything. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you did. You need not lie. I want to help you. I can feel the power of the amulet in you, but believe what I say: use it, but do not cling to it. Free yourself of the golden god the moment you are finished. It is evil and it will consume you.”

I looked down into her face. Even with the wrinkles and sun damage, I could see that she had once been very
beautiful. She kept her eyes closed tightly—a touching vanity. I asked, “The other woman, the younger one named Nora, did they kill her?”

“No, I do not think so. He gave her the drunken potion to make her useful. He likes to use his women before he eats their souls.”

In place of Borracho to describe the drug, she used a chilling Spanish phrase,
cadavere vivo
.

“Then she must be on the boat.”

“Yes. The girl and the large black man, the policeman. Both will be killed before they reach the city if you do not hurry. The policeman, I do not care about. But the woman, it would be a good thing, very powerful, if you could save her. There is a spirit in her. I felt her strong presence when she arrived.” The woman began to walk toward the pavilion, signaling me to follow. “Come. I have something that may help you.”

She handed me a leather snap-open case. Inside was a 20cc glass syringe, very old, and a heavy-gauge, beveled hypodermic needle. The syringe was full of a dark liquid.

“Borracho?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“I’d rather have a gun.”

The old woman smiled slightly, the contracting of facial muscles allowing me a brief glimpse into the white orbits which once held her eyes. “If there was a gun they did not lock, do you think they would be alive now? You will need a boat to go after them.”

I said, “I’ve got a boat.”

“I know. But they moved it so no one would become suspicious. The black man moved it there.”

She gestured toward the river.

I said, “You’re certain there’s not a gun around? The
old man’s a hunter. If he keeps the guns locked, I could break in. Just show me where he keeps them.”

She was shaking her head. Her expression said,
Impossible
. “He locks them in a steel safe. The safe is one whole wall of his study. It has a knob that clicks. Only he knows the way in.”

What was I going to do? Finding them wouldn’t be enough. I’d have to stop them. There was one other possibility. I said, “What about chemicals? Do you have a gardener’s shed? A maintenance shed? The sort of place they would store gasoline, poisons, that sort of thing.”

“If you want to poison them, why not use the drunken potion?”

“That’s not exactly what I have in mind. Can you show me?”

I followed her across the lawn to a concrete building the size of a garage. I had to use a brick to smash the lock off. I flipped the light switch and stepped into stale air that smelled of fertilizer and paint. I began to lift cans and jars from the shelves, looking at labels. It is no longer true that it is easy to make a bomb from common household products. However, it is
very
easy to make a lethal variety of explosives from chemicals and propellants purchased legally from a garden supply store. On the shelves, I found a particular mix of nitrate fertilizer, a bottle of ammonia, plus a very common kind of acid used for cleaning metals. I found a large thermometer, the mercury still in it. I found a bottle of ethyl alcohol, a box of coarse salt and a squirt bottle full of soap. There was a five-gallon can of gasoline, a couple of kerosene railroad lamps and several Mason jars that probably once held paint thinner.

It was no longer a question of, could I mix together an
effective explosive? The question was, what kind of explosive did I choose to make? And which would take the least amount of time? Explosives come in three basic forms: high-order explosives which detonate, low-order explosives which burn, and primers, which may do both. Nearly all combust so rapidly that large volumes of air are displaced faster than the speed of sound, and so a sonic boom occurs.

I wanted the boom. Hopefully enough to shatter the windows on a fast-moving yacht. Maybe even a little fire. And it had to be an impact explosive because I didn’t want to have to mess with lighting a wick in the wind, on a moving boat.

To the woman, I said, “Go to the house and bring me a bottle of iodine and a box of baking soda. Hurry! And a bucket of ice. Don’t forget the ice.” I’d already placed three Mason jars by the bag of fertilizer on a bench next to the acid.

“Have you cut yourself? I’ll bring a first-aid kit.”

I touched my ear. I was still bleeding a little, but that’s not why I needed the iodine. I said, “A first-aid kit might come in handy, too.”

I flew through a blur of mangrove switchbacks; twisting hedges of green that created ponds and creeks, one linked to another through a hundred miles of wilderness. The words of the old woman kept echoing in my head:
He likes to use his women before he eats their souls
.

In his note, Dieter Rasmussen had warned of human anomalies. Bad genes, flawed brains. Remorseless liars, strengthened by their own pathology, who were destined for success.

Teddy Bauerstock would do very well in Tallahassee.
Tomlinson had said it and believed it—all his instincts, his intuition demonstrably wrong. So had Della, one of the women Bauerstock had killed. So had everyone else the man had ever met, probably.

But he had not fooled me.

I found strange comfort in that. Inexplicably, that small triumph brought the face of Dorothy Copeland once again to memory. A lovely face with a mild, wistful smile, silken hair hanging down.

Then she was gone, a momentary nexus left in my wake.

The Hinckley had about a half-hour headstart on me. I had to catch them before they got near civilization. I had to get their yacht stopped in a place where no one could see what I was going to do. My boat was more than twice as fast, true, but, once I got into the Gulf, the growing waves would neutralize that advantage.

So I would stay in the backcountry just as long as I could. I’d gain a lot of time on them because Ted or Ivan—whoever was running the boat—had almost certainly taken the much longer route, out the channel past Panther Key, into open water. No one is going to run a half-million dollar vessel through the unmarked backcountry of the Ten Thousand Islands, even if it doesn’t draw much water. The region is too remote; has too many reefs of oyster and rock. Make the wrong turn, run aground hard enough, and you could be stranded for days before another vessel happened by. Even with a cell phone or a VHP radio, help is hours away.

No, Bauerstock wouldn’t risk that. Particularly with a hurricane bearing down. That’s what I told myself, anyway.

As I drove, I turned the VHF radio volume full on and
switched to Weather Channel 3. Heard that Hurricane Charles had already slipped through the Yucatan Channel, and was being levered toward the Florida coast by an Arctic high-pressure ridge. The ridge was steering the storm like rails beneath a freight train. Predicted landfall was somewhere between Naples and Marco.

The computerized voice told me, “… two hundred and ten miles off Marco Island, the air temperature is seventy-six degrees, water temperature eighty-two degrees, wave heights unavailable. National Hurricane Center at Miami places the eye of Hurricane Charles … slightly north of the Tropic of Cancer, moving northeasterly at fifteen knots … expected to make landfall at approximately noon tomorrow. Voluntary evacuation is urged for residents of all barrier islands, Siesta Key to Marco Island, Goodland and neighboring areas. A mandatory evacuation notice may be issued for Marco Island, Everglades City and Chokoloskee. Winds have been measured at one-hundred-thirty knots and gusting stronger, barometric pressure at 27.50 and falling. Charles may be upgraded to a Category Five hurricane in the next advisory….”

I punched off the radio, feeling an irrational anger toward whoever the fool was who decided to replace a human weatherman with a digitized voice. The phonation was so badly coded that it sounded like a drunken polka king who’d been filching tranquilizers.

No, it had been a group decision, more likely. Individuals are rarely so misguided. Because the voice was difficult to understand, I hadn’t been able to decipher the exact location of Charles, nor how many miles the storm still had to cover before it reached the coast. Computer
profiteers like Ivan Bauerstock would’ve applauded the transition to something that was programmable. Maybe that’s why it made me so mad….

I swung in close to Dismal Key: a ridge of black trees rimmed with swamp. Said a silent greeting to the old hermit who once lived in a shack on the high Indian mounds there, Al Seeley.

Al lived without phone, power or running water, just him and his little dog. He painted, he read books. He had a sharp intellect and an appreciation for the ironic. He loved to tell the story of a hermit colleague who came to Dismal Key determined to build a bomb shelter. He spent hours in the heat and mosquitoes digging through shell until he said, screw it, let global warfare do its worst. He was tired and in need of a beer.