Everglades Assault (2 page)

I had been enjoying a quiet July morning on my weather-scoured house built on stilts a mile out to sea where Calda Bank curves around the channel into Key West.

When you've lived in Florida for a long time, you come to treasure those summer mornings.

In the fresh heat of a new day, the sea is glass. Fish moving over the flats leave a wake, and you can hear the sound of barracuda crashing bait a long, long way off. The air is rarefied and washed by the rain of the previous evening, and the allotropic ozone fragrance of lightning is as strong as jasmine.

So when you treasure the morning, you get up early and try to enjoy every second.

Like most things in life, the morning is not the sort of thing you enjoy by hot pursuit—like kids racing to open presents on Christmas morning.

It's the sort of thing you enjoy obliquely. It's the sort of thing you enjoy through the wayward eye, savoring and tasting like a voyeur. You have to sit back, pick out a few meaningless tasks, go to work, and let it settle upon you. The Zen people have a delicate image for such things. They use a snowflake. You have to let the flake settle at its own speed, follow its own course, because if you reach out to grab it, it will just disappear.

So I was enjoying the morning.

I had awakened at first light, boiled coffee, urinated from the uppermost dock, then forced myself to do pull-ups and a fast half-mile swim before settling back for my attack on the new day.

On the Transoceanic radio, I dialed in the BBC at twenty-one hundred megahertz. The London Symphony was doing a piece on strings and timpani I had never heard before. It was controlled and fresh, and I turned up the volume so that I could hear it out on the porch.

Looking south, I could see the thin darkness of Fleming Key. Pelicans wheeled and crashed in the distance, and the eastern sea was a track of molten gold. I sat on the porch, back against the worn wood of the house, and went to work tying leaders.

When a half-dozen Bimini twists had finally gotten the sweat going, plopping down from my nose, I stood up and went inside.

I have to watch my beer intake.

In my line of work, an extra pound of fat can slow you a half step.

And a half step can mean the difference between living and dying.

But on a morning such as this, a cold Tuborg was a necessary indulgence.

As I said, you have to meet the good things halfway.

So I opened the beer, letting it sluice away the sleep phlegm and morning taste of coffee, then went back outside.

That's when I saw the boat.

One of those old flats skiffs built for stability and shoal water. At first I thought it might be one of the Key West bonefish guides. The skiff was typically overpowered, but the person at the wheel damn sure knew how to use that power.

The boat came arrowing across the morning sea in a perfect V-ing of turquoise wake. Had to be doing forty, minimum. The pilot paid no attention to the channel markers. Didn't have to. People who really know the backwaters off Key West can run the wheel tracks of crabbers or the intricate network of flat streams as easily as most people follow interstates.

And this person obviously knew the backwater.

I considered going down to my thirty-four-foot sportfisherman,
Sniper,
and breaking out the binoculars to get a better look at this skiff ace.

But I didn't have to.

The skiff banked prettily, followed the winding Bluefish Channel briefly, then powered off into shoal water my way. And in another minute I could see exactly who the skiff ace was.

She wore one of those dark-blue string bikinis that grab at the heart and contort the stomach muscles. And since I knew the woman, I also knew that she wore it more for comfort than for style.

A thousand years ago, she would have been the type to shake her head in disapproval at the fig-leaf breechcloths, and choose instead to run around happily and healthily nude.

For her the bikini was a compromise.

I went down to the dock to meet her after pulling on a pair of gray cotton gym shorts. She waved as she backed the skiff off plane, and brought her in starboard side.

It was April Yarbrough, the daughter of a crusty old Key West friend of mine.

More than a year before, April had paid me the supreme compliment of falling into a girlish infatuation. She had flirted and winked and wagged that lush body of hers around, and finally I had to take off on my boat just to get the hell away.

Because the infatuation was mutual.

But in the meantime she had gone off to college in Gainesville. Her first month away, I had received a steady stream of letters at the marina at Garrison Bight where I run my charterboat and stay when business demands that I be in town.

But the letters gradually tapered off as her interests and her life were refocused—as I knew they inevitably would be.

You have to love the young ones from afar. You have to give them plenty of room to live and roam and seek, because if you make the unforgivable mistake of allowing them to give themselves too soon, they must ultimately end up feeling trapped.

And April Yarbrough was far too fine a woman for that.

So I had acknowledged the letters politely, and allowed them to disappear unchallenged.

And then buried my disappointment privately.

But I couldn't hide my delight in seeing her again. She really hadn't changed that much. The ravenblack hair had been braided, and it hung like a rope down to her hips. There was the hint of Indian heritage in face and cheeks, and her strange golden eyes still suggested some ancient knowledge that went far beyond her nineteen years. Her body was lithe and long, sun-bronzed beneath the bikini, with heavy thrust of breasts and curve of thighs pouched beneath thin material.

“MacMorgan, you old fart!”

“April—you young fart!”

She gave the bowline a couple of quick wraps and jumped up onto the dock. Her excitement was contagious. I found myself lumbering across the dock to meet her halfway. She threw herself into my arms, and I held her closely, swung her around, feeling that fine body tremble beneath my arms. When I set her down, there was that awkward moment when two people share an uncontrolled emotional outburst without prior intimacy.

She brushed at her hair, gazed momentarily at her bare toes—then laughed it all away.

“Damn,” she said, grinning at me. “Damn, it's good to see you.”

“And good to see you too, lady. I enjoyed your letters—for as long as they lasted.”

Her quick temper hadn't changed either. The golden eyes flared wide, and she put fists on hips. “For as long as they lasted! What in the world did you expect when every letter you wrote back was about as cold as old fish? I'd write you poetry, and you'd send back news briefs. Really, MacMorgan . . .”

I held up my hands, stopping her. “Take it easy, April. This is a reunion, remember.” I held up the Tuborg. “I was just having a morning beer. Would you like a Coke or something?”

“Coke!”

“Or maybe a beer. . . .”

She yelled, “Coke! You still see me the way I was ten years ago, don't you, MacMorgan?” Grinning, she actually gave me a shove in the chest. “You still see me as that barefoot girl playing in the dirt down by Daddy's docks. I had a crush on you even back in those times, you know. I'd get behind a tree and watch you walk by. . . .”

“Does that mean you want a beer?”

“Yes!”

We stood toe to toe on the dock in the fresh morning heat. I noticed that she wore a delicate chain of Spanish gold around her neck—a memento of a treasure wreck her father, Hervey, and I had worked off the Marquesas. I looked down into her perfect face and felt an irresistible urge to kiss the face and never stop.

Instead, I held out my arms at the same moment she held out hers, and I hugged her warmly.

“Did I already say it was good to see you again, MacMorgan?”

“Just once. It bears repeating.”

“Good to see you.”

“And you.”

“I saw that face of yours in one of those movie magazines last month. You were holding hands with some famous actress or something. She looked fat.”

“Did you come out here to fight?”

She stepped back, her face suddenly serious. “No,” she said. “I wish it was that easy.”

I didn't like the look on her face. “What is it, April—it's not your family, is it? There's nothing wrong with Hervey?”

“Healthwise, you mean? Oh no, nothing like that. But he did send me out here. Figured I could fetch you into town as fast as anyone—that, plus I made him let me come. There's some of our folks up in the Everglades having trouble, Dusky. Bad trouble. And you know how our folks are. Trouble is a private matter. They aren't ones to go whining to the law. Daddy figures this particular kind of trouble is going to take someone big and mean and ugly to fix right.”

“And he suggested me, huh?”

“Not exactly,” she said. Her wink was the same as that of the little girl who had stood shyly behind the tree long ago. “I think it was me who brought up your name first. . . .”

So I walked her up the steps to the porch and then into my stilthouse. The place was built years ago, before refrigeration came to the Florida Keys.

In those back times, it was called a fishhouse—a stoutly constructed icebox built like a cabin to house a caretaker and the weekly catch of fish and lobster. One of the old-time fish companies would send a boat out to pick up the catch once a week—and bring more blocks of ice.

I had bought it from a sour old man who had had a hand in its construction.

He pretended he hated the place. He told me he was sick and tired of waking up alone every morning with only the wind birds and fish as neighbors.

He told me he was anxious to move to one of those retirement villages so common in Florida; one of those mechanized, prepackaged settlements that try desperately to turn the deathwatch into a recreation.

Sour as he was, I liked the old man. And I knew better than to believe that he really wanted to leave the little house built a mile out to sea.

A month after we had closed the deal, he returned for the afternoon. He turned a dour eye on the “improvements” I had made: watercolor paintings on the wall by Wellington Ward and Gustave Ameier, a big brass double bed in the only sleeping room, brass oil lanterns for light, and a bookcase stacked with my small but good ship's library.

He had raved unconvincingly about the wonderful life he was living at Sunset Retirement Estates. Told me about the shuffleboard tournaments, the evening card parties and the afternoon arts-and-crafts classes.

I hoped the happiness I tried to show for him was a lie better disguised than his own.

Just before he left, he stopped before the ragged teeth of the bleached mako jaws he had allowed to remain hanging on the wall.

“Big goddamn shark, that one was,” he had said.

“Ten-, twelve-footer?”

“Twelve-footer my ass, young fella. Fifteen and a half by my measure—and I'm the one that kilt the sombitch! Started cruisin' aroun' my house here every mornin' a few years ago. Scared off all o' my snappers and groupers that fed by the pilin's. I'd watched them little fish so long that I'd kinda grown ta like 'em. Almost like pets.” Then he had turned a blazing suspicious eye on me. “Suppose you've been catchin' and eatin' them little fellas, huh?”

“No. I like to watch them too. When I want fish to eat I go out in my boat. Sounds silly, but I know what you mean.”

“Humph,”
he had said—but he couldn't disguise the relief he felt that I wasn't pilfering his old friends for food or sport. “Anyway,” he continued, “that big bastard on the wall kept a-stealin' my little fish. Took me a week to finally figure out how ta get 'im. Got twenty foot o' junk cable down by the shrimp docks in Key West. Coupled that onto four hundred feet o' half-inch anchor line. Tied that onta my boat and baited with a thirty-pound amberjack. When he finally hit, the battle lasted all night. Fourteen hours I chased and fought that shark, him draggin' me all around under the stars. Sun was jest up when he finally turned white belly side. Came up gaspin'; that sweet urine smell of a shark about ta die. Funny, but after all that struggle and plannin', and him killin' my little fish, ya woulda expected me ta feel good about it all. But when you're connected to a livin' creature like that for so long—the two of us hung together by a rope all night long, both of us strugglin' like our lives depended on it . . . well, I didn't feel as good as you might think. I felt . . . I felt . . .”

He had made an empty motion with his hands, and said nothing more about it.

Two weeks later, I heard that the old man had died at Sunset Retirement Estates. It was a classic exit in a state geared toward vacations and old age: a heart attack during the last set of a shuffleboard game. The obituary made mention of his sole surviving heir: a mentally retarded son. It cleared up the final mystery—why he had sold me the stilthouse. Knowing he didn't have long to live, he wanted to provide money for the son. So he had parted with the only thing he owned.

I had my Key West CPA take care of the trust fund. A year or two before on a particularly nasty mission, I had become unexpectedly wealthy through a combination of good fortune and blind luck.

Money means little to me. It supplies the few material things I want—and that's all. I learned long ago that independence is available, to rich and poor alike. You just have to have the nerve to grab it.

So I had the CPA make sure that the old man's son would have the best of everything for as long as he lived.