Tampa Burn (53 page)

I spent two weeks with her there. Her family had leased out the tillable land, so it wasn't a working farm. But there was still a hell of a lot of work to do. I learned that it's always that way around a farm.

“Kinda like boats,” I told her one night. “There's always something that needs fixing.”

We were sitting outside on the porch swing, watching lightning bugs drift like time-lapse stars among the corn and black trees. Their cold strobing reminded me of navigational markers on Tampa Bay, and I felt a brief pang of homesickness.

When had I ever spent so much time away from saltwater?

That's what we did at night. Talk. We'd sit on the porch and talk. We'd go for long walks and talk. We'd drive into Davenport, have dinner at one of the great restaurants, then walk along the levee and talk.

The words she'd overheard me speak to Pilar had wounded her deeply, and so they had damaged us. Talking was part of what I hoped was a gentle reconstruction phase.

I told her just enough about my battle with Praxcedes Lourdes to explain the fresh scar on my forehead. Also told her about Tomlinson and me accompanying Laken back to Masagua, where the boy's mother was granting interviews and sharing the truth about Jorge Balserio's involvement with the kidnapping of her son.

“His political career is ruined,” Pilar told me.

It was one of the few times that we spoke. When I gave her the nearly $200,000 I'd recovered from the ship, all she said was “Thanks.” Which was fine with me. I was no longer even tempted to ask her about the e-mails I'd found, or about Tinman. She seemed equally uninterested in me. The woman no longer existed in my world, so perhaps I no longer existed in hers.

She seemed indifferent when I asked if Tomlinson and I could take Lake on a vacation tour of Central America's rain forests and jungle coastline.

“We deserve to celebrate,” my friend said on my behalf.

Which was true. But I also wanted to spend enough time with Lake to be certain that he didn't show any delayed signs of post-traumatic-stress syndrome.

To be rescued does not necessarily mean that a victim is out of harm's way.

We had a great trip. The boy seemed to be recovering just fine. We laughed a lot, the three of us. We took tough hikes together, a couple of long swims in the Pacific, and we fished.

The only time we discussed the kidnapping or my son's abductor was when Lake brought up the subject. One night, as we sat at the campfire awaiting a dinner of snook fillets, freshly gathered clams, plus black beans and rice, he said, “Do you know why I think he didn't go through with it? Why Prax didn't kill me?”

I'd thought about it often, but I said, “No. Why?”

My son said, “At first, I thought it was because of some kind of Stockholm syndrome thing, except in reverse. I'd tried hard to make him see me as a person—just like the advice in that e-mail you sent me. I did things for him. I talked to him like I cared. I could tell I was getting under his skin a little. So in the end, he couldn't do it. Or at least that's what I thought originally.”

I said, “But not now?”

He was shaking his head, gazing into the fire. There was no hint of emotion in his voice, only a scholastic curiosity as he said, “No. I think it may have played a small role. Subconsciously,
maybe.
But I think the real reason he didn't . . . didn't go ahead and cut my throat was something else.” He looked right at me. “It wasn't
fun.
He started to kill me, but realized he wasn't getting the emotional charge out of it that he usually got.”

Quietly, I'd come to the same conclusion.

I listened as Lake said, “The guy
burns
people. That's his pathology. That's his sickness. There was probably some sexual component keyed only by fire. So he had to do it
that
way.

“I think Prax still planned to kill me, but he wanted to enjoy it. He always carried this little blowtorch with him. So he left my room to search for something that would protect my face so it wouldn't be damaged. Then, when he came back, I think he would've waited until I was awake. Then he would've set me on fire. It's the only way he could
enjoy
it.”

Tomlinson and I had exchanged glances, both of us thinking,
Smart kid.

The highlight of our getaway, though, was being “captured” by a little band of guerrilla troops who were under the command of my old friend General Juan Rivera. They took us to his secret mountain baseball diamond, where Tomlinson played centerfield. Lake and I alternated innings catching the bearded, revolutionary pitcher.

When my son and I said goodbye at the Masaguan airport, he'd looked into my eyes and said, “Relax, Dad. You get so damn emotional. We'll be together again in August—when I come to the lab to visit.”

 

 

IT took some convincing to get Dewey to agree to allow me to visit her in Iowa, so I spent the last week of May working with scientists from the University of Florida on our tarpon-spawning project.

I also entertained a surprise visitor: Detective Merlin Starkey. One afternoon, he came ambling up the boardwalk, cowboy hat tilted at a jaunty angle, carrying something heavy in a brown paper sack.

Tomlinson happened to be with me. The guides had finally gotten the police boat to stay under, and we were discussing a good time to fish it.

Starkey stopped at the bottom of the steps to my lab, touched the brim of his hat in greeting, and we listened to him say, “When I'm wrong, I admit I'm wrong. And I was wrong about you, Mister Ford. I come to congratulate you on getting your boy back. Plus, I brought you a little make-friends present. You don't seem to be the slimy little snake that Tucker Gatrell was.”

I said, “Thanks. In that case, come on aboard,” and accepted the sack when he handed it to me.

The “present” was as unexpected as the ending of the story that I asked him to repeat for Tomlinson's sake: why he still hated my uncle.

This time, the man actually seemed to get a kick out of it himself. He didn't sound so bitter. Maybe it was because of the pleasant coolness that comes to Dinkin's Bay at sunset. Or maybe it was the tall El Dorado rum drink that Tomlinson got down him.

Sitting in one of the deck rockers, Starkey told Tomlinson, “The way it happened was, I was runnin' for sheriff of Collier County, my first election, and ev'body knew I was gonna win. It was all set. Mr. Ford's uncle come to me with a problem—I already had a lot of power, and I was soon gonna have a lot more.”

Tucker Gatrell's problem, Starkey told us, was that the drug investigation branch of the county sheriff's department suspected that my uncle had somehow hijacked a stash of marijuana. They also suspected that he had it hidden somewhere on his property. The department was seeking a search warrant.

Tucker told soon-to-be-Sheriff Starkey that he didn't have the marijuana. But he did have a moonshine still that he'd prefer not to disassemble. Could he pull some strings and have the search called off?

Starkey continued, “Tucker was a Freemason. I'm a Freemason. You may have heard of it. If so, you know that's a secret and sacred brotherhood that dates back to the time of the Crusades. He asked for my help using a certain word I won't tell you. Because he used that word, I was immediately obligated. But Tucker Gatrell was just as obligated to tell me the whole godly truth when I said to him, I says, ‘Tucker, I don't care if you stole the dang drugs or not. Jus' swear to me it ain't on your property, and I'll see what I can do.'”

Starkey said that Tucker's exact words to him were, “Brother Merlin, I don't got any more of that stolen marijuana hidden on my property than you got hidden away on yours—on my oath. I swear it's true.”

The old man stopped rocking in his chair, took a big sip of his rum, and said, “So I talked to the right people and got the search called off to help my brother Freemason. I had the power—I was gonna be sheriff of Collier County for a long, long time. That's what ev'body thought, me included.

“But then one of our helicopters spotted something odd hidden away on the back section of a little hunting camp I owned near Mango, not far from your uncle's ranch.”

Two tons of marijuana had been stolen. Approximately a ton of it—or half—was found on Starkey's property.

“Tucker had swore to me that he didn't have any more of that marijuana on his place than I did on mine,” Starkey said. “I reckon that was accurate, but it still ain't the way to treat a brother Freemason. That was the end of my run for sheriff.”

We talked for a little longer before the old detective gave us a farewell salute and disappeared down the boardwalk into the mangroves. Because he'd asked me to put off looking into the paper sack until he was gone, I did.

Inside, I found my old 9 mm SIG-Sauer, the handgun I'd planted in Balserio's car.

There was also a note:

A few hours later, working in the lab, I received another emotional jolt when Tomlinson tuned in an oldies radio station, WAXY 106, and turned the volume up, saying over the music, “Hey, remember the great band I told you about? The band that hired me as a roadie before I lost my memory? America, right? This is one of their best songs.”

Then he blasted the volume even louder, and I listened to the rock group who'd inspired Tomlinson sing:

Tin Man?

In reply to my fierce, quizzical expression, Tomlinson shrugged his shoulders, took a long drink from his fifth or sixth rum, Adam's apple bobbing, before he said, “It's always been a race between alcohol and my memory. So far, the alcohol's winning. Thank God.”

We listened to America sing,
“No, Oz never did give nothing to the Tin Man . . . that he didn't, didn't already have . . . ,”
before Tomlinson locked his eyes into mine, and then asked softly, “Does it really matter?”

I thought about Lake, replayed the inflection when he called me “Dad,” before I replied.

“No. Not between us.”

 

 

THE next morning, to fullfill his “moral mandate” as a spiritual warrior, Tomlinson wrote a letter confessing that he was responsible for the long-ago bombing of a San Diego naval base. He addressed it to the federal courthouse in Fort Myers and put it inside the mailbox that sits outside the marina office, flag up.

“They'd have treated me like I'm a kook if I went there in person,” he said.

I told him, “Yeah, they would. Those samurai robes take some getting used to.”

When he was safely away in his dinghy, puttering back to
No Mas
to say goodbye to his beloved boat, I removed the letter from the marina's mailbox and closed the lid, flag down.

I would later touch a match to the letter and use it to light my propane stove before cooking a dinner of bay shrimp steamed in coconut water, lime, and cilantro.

That wasn't the end of it, though—as only I knew. A week earlier, upon my return from Central America, I'd found Hal Harrington waiting on me at my lab—Hal Harrington, head of the organization of which I was a member, and would never be allowed to leave.

I wasn't surprised.

Quid pro quo, he always said.
Quid pro quo.

But I hadn't been cooperating lately, Hal told me.

“With the exception of the executive action you took against Omar Mohammed, former head of Abu Nidal, you haven't done anything for us, Doc. I offered you three assignments. You turned them all down.”

I remembered Lake telling me that he wanted me to stop the assassination bullshit. That it wasn't
necessary.

I said, “I keep telling you, Hal. I'm done. No more assignments. Not those kind of assignments, anyway. Not for me.”

“Doc, there are certain countries where you've operated that would love to extradite you. After a few months in one of their prisons, you'd be begging for the firing squad.”

I said, “Go ahead. I'll risk it.”

“Are you absolutely certain?”

“I'm absolutely certain,” I told him.

He said, “I expected as much. But I'm afraid it's not that easy. You owe us one more. At least one more. And you know it.”

Harrington is not the sort of man who engages in debate. He threw an envelope sealed with wax onto my stainless-steel dissecting table as he said, “Here's the name. Your last assignment—if that's your decision. I have no choice, Doc. If you don't do it—I'll find someone who will.”

I waited until Hal left before I opened the envelope and took out the small, familiar duty card.

The name was familiar, too, as familiar as my own. I'd read it on a similar card long, long ago . . .

Later, I thought. I'll deal with this later.

 

 

SO I had a lot of things to share with Dewey during our long talks, though, of course, Hal's visit wasn't one of them. My next-to-last night in Iowa, she said she had something to share with me, too.