Wood's Reef (6 page)

“Aren’t you supposed to mark low water?” he responded, playing the victim.

"It's my island, my rules. I want folks around here, I’ll put out a welcome mat of green and red markers clear back to Marathon. Turns out I don’t want guests.” Wood spat out in pain

Wood tried to move, grunting in pain. The white sand turned red below him. Mac tried to move the hull off of him, but it was too heavy.

The intruder, finally waking to the reality of what happened, noticed the old man’s condition. He moved cautiously to the hull and studied the situation.

“Goddam’ if you ain’t some city fool. What are you doin’ out here anyway?” Wood snarled.

Mac stepped between them, forcing the stranger back. He watched the intruder as his gaze moved over to the camouflage netting, it’s end lifted off the tail section of the bomb. He could clearly see the nose and tail fin of the bomb. Recognition was evident in the eyes of the stranger. 

Wood noted his gaze as well. “Nothin’ there you need to worry about.” 

“You. Come with me.” Mac pointed at the man. He had no intention of leaving him there alone with Wood and the bomb. They set off towards the interior of the island. Both men struggled through the mangroves as they made a path.

They were back a few minutes later with supplies. Mac set the pry bar into the sand and tried to lever the hull up. But the more pressure he placed on the bar, the deeper into the sand it sank. He yelled over at the stranger. “Put that bottle down and get me some of that driftwood over there.”

Several minutes passed as they dug out some sand and created a driftwood platform for the pry bar to rest on. Mac lifted again, and the boat moved slightly. A little more, and he ordered the stranger to place another piece of driftwood between the hull and the sand. As soon as the pressure was off his legs, Wood used his arms to extricate himself from beneath the boat. He took inventory of himself and looked at the man in disgust.

“This ain’t good.” Wood said.

Mac looked down at the sliver of fiberglass from the broken hull imbedded in Wood’s side. The piece stuck out several inches. There was no telling how deep it went in, but from the look of the blood pooling in the sand it was deep.

“Can you walk?” Mac asked Wood. He turned to the man. “Help bandage him up.” Not really sure what to do, but knowing he had to stop the bleeding Mac opened the first aid kit. He ripped Wood’s shirt away, exposing the wound. “This is going to have to come out. Give me that bottle.”

The guy picked up the bottle, took a slug, then handed it to Wood.

“What the hell? Are
you
hurt?” Mac yelled as Wood winced in pain. He grabbed the bottle and poured tequila on the wound. “Get a bandage ready and some tape. This is going to be ugly. Don’t know how much it’s gonna bleed.”

Mac grabbed the fiberglass chunk and yanked. Wood passed out when it left his body, a steady stream of blood pulsing from the wound. Mac watched the other man puke into the sand as he tried to apply pressure to the wound.

He waited for the man to recover. “Think you can hold this on here before passing out? I’m gonna bring the boat around. We need to get him emergency treatment and fast. It’ll take half the time for me to bring him in than having to wait for a boat or chopper to come out and get him.” Mac set off down the path. 

What seemed like hours later, but was only several minutes, Mac pulled the trawler into view. The man was still holding the bandage, soaked with blood, a panicked look on his face, the empty bottle of tequila at his side.

“How ‘bout we change that out for a clean one? That tequila was supposed to be for this, not for you.”

“It was. If not for that bottle, I would be passed out on the ground right next to him and he’d be dead. I’m not good with blood.”

Mac ignored this bit of idiocy and taped the new bandage to the wound. The blood had stopped pumping, but the pad was soaked through again. This was bad. They needed a hospital.

“We’ve got to move him. If he loses too much more blood, he’ll go into shock.

Mac waded out to the boat he had anchored as close to shore as possible. The shallow water extended a hundred feet until it was deep enough for the boat to rest. He had a paddleboard strapped down on top of the cabin. He removed the tie downs and tossed it into the water, aiming for the beach. In the water, he walked the board toward shore. The two men dragged Wood onto the board and guided it back to the trawler, where they lifted him onto the dive platform. Mac made him as comfortable as possible and set off for Marathon.

Chapter 10

Wood's gurney was wheeled into the emergency room entrance. Mac had dropped him at the dock and handed him, unconscious, to the waiting EMTs. The EMT’s had treated him for shock and re-bandaged the wound in the ambulance on the short trip to Fisherman’s Hospital.

Jerry Doans slithered away from the boat as soon as they reached the dock. He had no intention of talking to the authorities like this. His clothes were tattered and wet, his face dirty, hair unkempt. There was no way he was going to get a ride anywhere like this, either, so he started walking. He covered the mile back to US1 and collapsed on a bus bench, thankful that it provided some shade. Dehydrated from the tequila and slightly delirious from the entire incident, his most rational thought was to get himself cleaned up and head to the closest bar. 

He took inventory. His phone was gone, but there were a couple of wet dollars in his pocket. In his front pocket was a the handheld GPS, screen smashed. Now a man with a plan, he got off the bench and headed north on US1 to find a gas station. When he got there, the clerk made quick change of his dollars, just to get him out of the store, and pointed him in the direction of one of the few remaining pay phones in the civilized world. 

He had no idea of his friend’s phone number, now lost in the contact list on his phone and with the phone book long gone, he dialed information. It took a dozen rings for the man to answer, and another fifteen minutes for an old Toyota Corolla to pull up. 

***

Mac looked around for the guy who’d hit Wood, but he was out of sight. Probably ran as soon as they hit dry ground. He put that on the back burner and thought about the call he had to make. 

He’d decided to walk the mile from the hospital back to the boat ramp at 33
^rd
street where he’d left his boat. Once there he fired up the engines and headed West towards the Seven Mile Bridge. He steered through the old and new bridge sections aiming between the second and third power pole then headed past several markers before changing course to the East. 

He steered by instinct into the Knights Key channel and entered Boot Harbor as he thought about Mel, Wood’s daughter. He hadn’t thought about her in years, but knew from Wood that she was living somewhere around DC. He knew where she was, but had no direct number to reach her. He slowed to idle speed as he rehearsed the conversation he was about to have in his head. He turned the boat into the canal backing on his house and tied up at the dock. Inside, he fired up his laptop and started searching.

They hadn’t spoken in years, but he had to break that silence now.

He pulled up the Davies and Associates website, and called the general information number, half-hoping someone would be working this late. The other half hoped that he would get a reprieve until morning. It had been a hard day, and he wasn’t sure he was ready for this. The first number didn’t go through to anyone, nor did the second. In fact, it took several subsequent calls to finally reach someone who was willing to give him a cell number for her.

He took a deep breath and dialed. 

“Melanie Woodson,” came the slightly out-of-breath answer.

“Mel, this is Mac down in Marathon.” The nervousness turned to a queasy feeling with the pregnant pause on the line. He gathered his courage and continued. “Listen, your dad’s been in an accident. He’s in surgery right now at Fisherman’s Hospital."

The pause continued, then finally broke. “And why are you calling? I knew when I saw the Keys area code that this was trouble.”

Mac ignored the hostility. “Do you even care about him? He’s hurt, for God’s sake!”

“Of course I do. Tell me what happened.”

Mac told her about the boat accident, and she sighed.

“I’m sorry I snapped at you, Mac. I’ll get the next flight down there. Probably won’t be ‘till morning now, but I'll be there.”

“Thanks, Mel, I know he’d appreciate you being here.”

Chapter 11

Behzad woke to a disaster. The sun was already on its way to the western horizon, and he lay in bed wondering first, who was next to him, and second, what had happened the night before. He watched the sun disappear below the third floor roofline of the house next door before he finally gained his feet, his corpulent belly hanging over the silk pants he’d worn for the party. There was something about the sun going down that made his hangover better.

He walked by the coffee maker and over to the half-empty bottle of wine on the counter. Too late for coffee, he thought. A glass of wine in his hand, he sat down at the kitchen counter and tried to piece together the night. There was something he needed to remember. He hated it when his memory eluded him, and it was happening more frequently of late. Making no association with his lifestyle, he assumed it was his thirty-year-old body decaying. He had no idea how older people dealt with life. 

Fortunately, his background and training all but eliminated aging from his worries. He was bred to be a martyr. Just not until he was fifty, he hoped — life was fun now, even if Allah didn’t approve. Sent to the US by his parents to get an American university education, he was befriended by two groups at college, both Middle Eastern. The first group were the reborn Muslims — reborn to live like Americans. They saw beyond the strict laws with which they’d been brought up. So they weren’t always about enlightenment; in fact, most of the time they were just about the fun and the girls. The second group were the fundamental Islamists, who hated everything American, more now that they lived amongst it. 

Most Middle Eastern foreign students arrived naive, with heavily accented but passable English. They quickly fell in with one of those two groups, and moved into that lifestyle. Behzad had fallen for both. He’d quickly learned that the strict Islamic laws weren’t for him. The American lifestyle was more appealing. But, without intending to, he fell for a member of the fundamentalist group. The fun lovers were tolerant of his fundamental lover, because they were enlightened now and thought tolerance was cool. Ibrahim, his lover, was high up in the fundamentalist group and circulated the lie that Behzad hung out with the other group to gain converts. Sexual mores in the Islamic community were hard to understand from a Western point of view. Homosexuality, although a quick path to hell, was rampant. 

Behzad was fearful. He was terrified of not going to Paradise, though he didn’t have the backbone to adhere to the moral codes necessary for getting there. Many practitioners of Islam hedged their bets, much like the death bed confessions of Catholics. 

His answer was martyrdom at fifty - maybe earlier. Why not call it quits when he envisioned himself too old to party like a rock star. He saw no life after fifty, why not call it good and go to Paradise? The only praying he did was that the seventy-two virgins promised in Heaven were boys. Thoughts of the virgins and paradise faded as fragments of the night tried to re-form in his head, lubricated by the wine. His memory started to return … something about a bomb. He topped off his glass and moved over to his computer, suddenly thinking about Ibrahim. The two men had not been in touch for years, as Behzad’s lifestyle and Ibrahim’s fundamentalism drove a wedge between them. The passion had fizzled with time and distance. 

The last method of contact they had used to protect Ibrahim’s identity had been the anonymous email account. Although it had become commonplace in real life as well as novels, this setup was virtually undetectable. He logged into the old Hotmail account and entered their shared password. The home screen came up showing no messages. Behzad navigated to the draft window and started typing. When he was done, he saved the draft and logged off.