Everglades (28 page)

DeAntoni said, “I’d like to get in on some of this action,” as I told my friend, “Listen to me just for once. Most experts couldn’t make a shot like that. Just stop. Let it go. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

But Tomlinson wouldn’t be swayed. He accepted a shotgun from a grinning Izzy, then a single 12-gauge shell. Tomlinson held the shell in his long fingers, inspecting it. I doubt if he’d ever seen one before.

The shell was the size of a miniature sausage and had a brass cap attached to a red plastic casing. He bounced the shell in his hand, feeling the weight of it.

Then, to me, he said, “Show me how to operate this thing, brother.”

The shotgun was a 12-gauge Beretta over-and-under, which means that the two barrels were mounted vertically as opposed to side by side. I demonstrated how to load his single cartridge in the top barrel, then showed him how the safety worked. When he seemed to understand, I opened the chamber and grabbed the shell as it popped out. I handed both the shell and shotgun to him.

As I said to Tomlinson, “You’re making a mistake,” Shiva, standing off to the side, told him, “Izzy’s all set when you are.”

Dimple-chin was standing by the catapult, clay targets in place, the spring arms cocked.

I watched Tomlinson pause to tuck his purple-and-pink Hawaiian shirt into his baggy shorts and pull his scraggly hair back. Then he stepped onto the shooting deck, shotgun ready—an incongruous combination and an absurd thing to witness.

I listened to Shiva say, “What an amusing little soul you are.”

I listened to DeAntoni say, “Concentrate, Mac. You can do it. Wait until just before the plates cross, then
squeeze
the trigger.”

I listened to Izzy say, “Tell me when you’re ready. I’m throwing two at once.”

Then I heard Tomlinson call,
“Pull!”

There was the fluttering sound of spring compression as twin clay targets arched high toward the pond—but Tomlinson didn’t shoot. Instead, he snapped open the shotgun and plucked out the unfired shell with his big right hand. Then he whirled like the gangly pitcher he is, and rocketed the shell toward the mechanical catapult, narrowly missing Izzy.

But he hit his target. The 12-gauge cartridge had to have been traveling close to eighty miles an hour when it crashed into the stack of clay birds mounted vertically into the machine. Several of them shattered.

In the microsecond of silence that followed, I heard two soft
plop-plop
s as the airborne disks landed in the pond.

Tomlinson tossed the shotgun on the ground with theatrical contempt. Then he walked toward Shiva. “No more live pigeons for you, Jerry. You’re going to keep your word. Like the big-time religious guru you claim to be.
Right?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You cheated. You tricked me.”

“Nope. I told you if I broke any fewer than two targets with one shell, you win. But I broke five or six. Maybe more. Count ’em if you want. You know what the key is?
Mushin.
That’s a Japanese word.”

Shiva’s smugness was gone now. Beneath the beard, his face was turning shades of ruby, his neck muscles spasming. His voice was more of a hiss as he said, “You pompous, meddling son-of-a-bitch. I want you out of here. I want you off my property. Get the fuck away from me!”

Tomlinson was only an arm’s length away from Shiva now, nose to nose, smiling. “No more pigeons, Jerry. You promised. Or don’t promises mean anything to you?”

Shiva began to reply, but then he appeared to think of something. The sudden grin on his face was manic. Abruptly, Shiva raised his shotgun, leaned, and fired both barrels.

The snail kite perched in the maples exploded in a smoking swirl of feathers, blue and gray. The corpse of the bird tumbled like a wingless plane. It made a melon sound when it hit the ground.

Shiva lowered his shotgun and yelled into Tomlinson’s face, “Okay, smartass! I won’t shoot any more pigeons. But the blood’s on
your
hands, not mine.”

For the first time since I’ve known the man, I saw Tomlinson break emotionally. Eyes bulging, he lunged toward Shiva. He got his huge hands around the man’s neck just as I grabbed him from behind. I had to call for DeAntoni to help—Tomlinson had surprising, freakish strength. I’ve never experienced anything like it. It took us both to restrain him.

I believe—I truly do believe—he would have tried to kill Shiva if we’d let him loose.

As we dragged Tomlinson away, he was screaming every foul word, all aimed at Shiva, and interspaced with this refrain: “You’re ruined, Jerry. The Everglades won’t allow it! I swear to God almighty, that we will
ruin
you. . . .”

I noticed that Izzy, holding the recorder, was relaxed. He seemed very pleased about something.

 

 

It was on our way home, just after sunset and while we were crossing the Sanibel Causeway, that DeAntoni’s cell phone rang. I looked at a sky that was streaked with iridescent clouds, mango gold and conch-shell pink, and listened to his side of the conversation.

I heard him say, “Hey, Mrs. Minster, good to hear from you. Oh . . . okay, Sally.”

We were riding over sand islands, Lighthouse Point an elevated darkness off to our left, as I heard: “You’re kiddin’ me. And you knew the guy?”

After a full minute of silence, DeAntoni spoke again into the phone, saying, “I’ll drop off Doc and Tomlinson and come straight to your place. It’ll take me about three hours. Maybe we can have a late dinner. If it’s not an imposition.”

He closed his phone, and glanced at me. “Ironwood, the gated community where Sally lives, has a night security guard. A guy named Johnson. He disappeared last night, and they found him floating in the bay this afternoon, dead. Sally said the guy took special care of her. Kept an eye on her house because of the break-ins she’s been having.”

I said, “How’d he die?”

“They don’t know yet. Maybe a stroke and he fell off a dock. That’s what the cops are guessing. But Sally doesn’t believe it. She says someone was in her bedroom again last night. They went through her drawers. She thinks maybe Johnson surprised the guy.”

Sitting sprawled in the backseat, working on his seventh or eighth beer since we’d left Sawgrass and already slurring his words, Tomlinson said, “Evil, man. There’s something evil in the air. There is a very wicked mojo seeping around Sawgrass. The whole scene. Like swamp gas, man. I can
feel
it.”

DeAntoni said, “Um-huh. Have another beer.”

“An excellent idea. I think I will.”

There was the carbonation
sssush
of a can being cracked.

DeAntoni was chuckling. “I got to hand it to you, Tinkerbell. You stuck it right up that weirdo’s cheap seats. The only thing that separates Shiva’s lips from his asshole is a couple of feet of tubing—and you proved it.”

For the fourth or fifth time, Frank said to me, “The skinny fucker’s got an arm on him. I’ll never question that again.”

Meaning Tomlinson.

Sounding miserable, Tomlinson replied, “Wrong, wrong, wrong. Shiva
won,
man. The way I behaved, it’s against everything I believe and stand for. What happened is, he
proved
I’m as much a fraud as he is.”

Tomlinson had been talking that way since we left Sawgrass.

To DeAntoni, I said, “When you talked to her about the dead guard, did Sally sound frightened?”

“Yeah. But in control. Not too bad. There’s an ex-cop who works with me sometimes, lives in Hialeah. I’ll call him, ask him to hop over to Ironwood and keep an eye on things ’till I get there.”

“I think that’s a great idea, Frank. We don’t want anything to happen to her.”

Showing some emotion, DeAntoni said, “If anybody touches that lady, by the time I’m done, they’ll need a compass to find all the parts they got missing.” Then: “Hey, you know what? She said she’d have dinner with me. Just the two of us alone. That she’d be
delighted.
”

He was sounding pretty delighted himself.

chapter twenty-two

The
next afternoon, Sunday, April 13th, at 6 P.M., I was working in my lab when I felt the framework of my stilt house vibrate with what seemed to be a series of three distinct tremors.

I was standing at my stainless-steel dissecting table when it happened. I immediately looked to my right where, beneath the east windows, and on a similar table, is a row of working, bubbling aquaria—octopi, squid and fish therein. There are more glass aquariums above on shelves.

In each aquarium, the tremors had created seismic oscillating circles on the surface, and miniature waves.

Nope. I wasn’t imagining things. And, no, it wasn’t because I’d just built my third drink: the juice of two fresh Key limes mixed with Nicaraguan rum, crushed ice and a splash of seltzer.

To my left, along the east wall, near the door, there are more tanks, all heavily lidded and locked because they contain stone crabs and calico crabs. Octopi, I’d learned, are master thieves when it comes to their favorite food—thus the locks.

The water in those tanks was vibrating as well.

I was working late in the lab because I was running low on supplies. Restocking inventory was long overdue. On a yellow legal pad clamped to a clipboard, I’d written:
compartmented petri dishes (pack/20); Tekk measuring pipets (dozen); Pyrex tubes (mm/various/72); ultraviolet aquarium sterilizer; tetracycline tablets (pack/20); methyl-chrome; clarifier; pH test paper.

The shopping list wasn’t close to being complete. I was leafing through my Carolina Science & Math catalog, thinking about adding a neat little portable water tester to the list when the house began to shake.

At first, I thought to myself,
Sonic boom?
But then I felt it twice more, and I thought,
Construction blasts.

I walked to the center of the room where I’ve installed a university-style lab workstation. It’s an island of oaken drawers and cupboards beneath a black epoxy resin table, complete with a sink, two faucets, electrical outlets and double gas cocks for attaching Bunsen burners or a butane torch.

I placed the catalog on the table, pushed open the screen door and walked outside, carrying my drink along with me.

I wasn’t the only one who’d felt the tremors. The unusual sensation of earth and water shaking had stirred our little liveaboard community to action on this quiet Palm Sunday afternoon. Across the water, I could see Rhonda Lister and Joann Smallwood exiting their cabin door onto the stern of their wood-rotted Chris-Craft cruiser,
Satin Doll.
They were looking at the sky, as if expecting to see fighter jets.

Jeth Nicholes, the fishing guide, was standing on the balcony of his apartment above the marina office. Janet Mueller, I was surprised to see, was standing beside him—a recent development in what has been an old and complex love affair.

Dieter Rasmussen, the German psychopharmacologist, and his nubile Jamaican girlfriend, Moffid Seemer, were climbing onto the fly bridge of his classic, forty-six-foot Grand Banks trawler,
Das Stasi,
heads turning. Dieter was in his underwear, and Moffid, I couldn’t help but notice, was topless. When people are surprised, they react without considering how they are dressed.

Tomlinson was out, too. Standing on the cabin roof of
No Mas,
a black sarong knotted around his waist, his head tilted, as if listening.

I was surprised to see him. We’d played baseball earlier in the day at Terry Park, a classic old Grapefruit League anachronism in East Fort Myers. After the game, still in his baseball uniform, he’d invited me to drive with him to Siesta Key Beach and join in the weekly drum circle that is held there at sunset.

“Is that the sort of thing where a couple of hundred beach hipster-types stand around a fire, banging on drums?” I said.

Tomlinson replied, “
Exactly. I
know, I know, it sounds almost too good to pass up. Tonight, I’ve been asked to serve as the lead Djembe drummer. Quite an honor.”

So I was surprised he was still aboard his boat . . . or maybe he was just leaving—yes, that was it. I watched him reach into the cabin of
No Mas
and lift a massive skin drum from the hold, his eyes still searching the sky.

Then, as if on cue, everyone looked in the direction of my stilt house, as if seeking an explanation. I held both hands out and shrugged, meaning that I had no idea what’d caused the tremors.

They all made the same universal gesture:
We don’t know, either.

So I walked to the marina, where Joann, Rhonda and Dieter and I stood around discussing it.

“What a weird feeling,” Joann said. She’s a short, dark-haired woman with a Rubenesque body and a bawdy sense of the absurd. “It was like I was suddenly standing on jelly. I’ve had the feeling a couple of times, but it was always while I was having good sex. Never when I was brushing my teeth.”

When I suggested that the tremors were caused by a construction blast, Dieter said, “Daht does not seem reasonable. A construction blast at six P.M. on a Sunday? Even Germans don’t work on Sundays.”

I told them, “Well, one thing we know it’s not. It
wasn’t
an earthquake. Florida’s not on a fault line. There’s never been an earthquake in Florida as far as I know.”

I would soon learn otherwise.

 

 

The next morning I was awakened by a heavy pounding on the door. I swung out of bed, checked the brass alarm clock and thought,
Damn. Overslept again.

It was 8:45 A.M.

Wearing only khaki shorts, I padded barefooted across the wooden floor, gave Crunch & Des a quick scratch in passing and opened the door to find my old friend, Dewey Nye, standing before me. She was wearing Nikes, blue jogging shorts over a red tank suit, blond hair haltered in a ball cap, and she had her fists on her hips—a pose that seemed as aggressive as the expression on her face.