Killer Dust (26 page)
Authors: Sarah Andrews
“Em, Jack is a good man. He looks after his friends. But you can be damned certain that Lily is the reason he’s got his ass on the line right now. I’m sorry, Em, but we have to change the subject before my cell battery runs out. Miles Guffey, Em. Did you get anything out of him?”
Answering Tom’s question suddenly seemed like a life raft, a job to do, something to hang onto. “I think he’s on his way to the Bahamas,” I said.
“What?”
“I went to his house yesterday afternoon, and he was packing the boat for a long trip—at least six bags of junk-food’s worth—and he tried to tell me it was a pleasure cruise. Total bullshit. He had the charts for the Bahamas all over his chart desk. The chart for the Berry Islands was on the top of the stack.”
“Do you know which island?”
“No.”
“Damn. Can you get it out of him? I don’t care what you use—pliers, crowbar—just get a location out of him, will you?”
“I would if I could, but as I said, Faye and I are in the Everglades. Why, do you think there’s a connection between his trip and yours?”
“I don’t know. But when I show a man evidence, and he suddenly gets an idea to leave town, I have to wonder. What’s his phone number?”
“I imagine he left already. He might have a cell phone on board. And there were all sorts of marine radios.”
“What’s the name of his boat?”
“The
Sea Dingo
. It’s a big cabin cruiser, maybe forty feet.”
Sea Dingo
. It’s a big cabin cruiser, maybe forty feet.”
“When’d he leave St. Petersburg?”
“I don’t know. Yesterday, I’d guess. Six P.M. earliest. Maybe he waited until daylight to start.”
Tom said, “Well, goddamn it, figure it out!”
“How?”
“Use your head. I’ll be monitoring this phone.” His voice trailed off like he was about to hang up.
“Wait! Any word on Jack? Where are you guys?”
Tom said nothing for a moment, but the connection stayed open. I could hear noise in the background. Heavy engine sounds. I could also hear the gears in Tom’s brain grinding as he tried to decide what he was going to tell me. All he said was, “You stay with Faye.”
I said, “I have to know how to reach you if you go out of cell coverage.”
He said, “We’re forming up on a boat. Jack took one from here. He’s turned off his cell phone, and we haven’t been able to raise the boat on the radio. We have to assume he’s maintaining silence.”
“Where are you? What’s the name of the town?”
Tom paused a moment, then, “Ask Faye her grandmother’s maiden name. And her favorite mammal since she got knocked up—that’s the marina. If you can figure out how to get hold of Miles Guffey, get it out of him where he’s going and call me immediately. If there’s anything he can tell us, it can save precious time. We could be out here for weeks trying to figure out what island, and if it’s not in that chain, it’s even worse. Otherwise our only hope is to get hold of someone who’s seen Jack’s boat, and we have to do that without tipping anyone off that there’s anything unusual about the fact that he’s out there in it.”
“I understand.”
“I’m getting off now,” he said. The line went blank.
“Where is he?” Faye asked.
“White boy speak in code. He says to ask your grandmother’s maiden name and your favorite mammal.”
Faye grabbed the phone and put it to her ear. Swore when she realized that Tom had hung up. “White boy in
major shit! I—I have two grandmothers. Okay, one is Stewart and the other’s Schiller. The manatee.”
major shit! I—I have two grandmothers. Okay, one is Stewart and the other’s Schiller. The manatee.”
I retrieved the telephone from Faye and dialed information for Miles Guffey’s wife, Pamela. When I reached her, I asked if she could tell me how to reach her husband. “I just tried to call him on the cell,” she said. “He’s got the damned thing switched off. But he told me not to expect to hear from him for at least a week.” I took down the number and tried it myself. No luck.
I turned to Glenda and Gator. “Has anyone else come looking for Lily lately?”
Glenda said, “Yeah, about three weeks ago. Big guy, blond. Looked kind of like Jack, come to think of it.”
“You tell him where she was?”
“Oh, hell no. We all told him she’d been sent away.”
“Good.”
I stared up into the sky for a while. It was well past noon.
Endeavor
was due to launch at dawn two mornings following. So forty hours, give or take. That surely was not time enough to search 700 islands and 2,400 cays. I thought about Lucy, a woman geologist whom I had never met, who would soon climb aboard a rocket, and I thought about Lily, her afflicted daughter. And I thought about Jack, who had made a promise to protect them. “Give me the keys to the car,” I said.
Endeavor
was due to launch at dawn two mornings following. So forty hours, give or take. That surely was not time enough to search 700 islands and 2,400 cays. I thought about Lucy, a woman geologist whom I had never met, who would soon climb aboard a rocket, and I thought about Lily, her afflicted daughter. And I thought about Jack, who had made a promise to protect them. “Give me the keys to the car,” I said.
I went out and got the Florida map atlas Nancy kept in it, brought it back to the table, and turned to the index map on the back cover. “Gator,” I said, “you do any boating?”
“Soy Cubano,”
he snickered. “Don’t we all get here on boats?”
he snickered. “Don’t we all get here on boats?”
“If you were going by boat from St. Petersburg to the Bahamas, how would you go?” I traced my finger down the Gulf coast to the southern end of the peninsula. There I ran into a sting of islands, the Florida Keys, which swept westward like a bent tail. “Would you go down around the islands here, or would you cut in closer to land?”
As in, somewhere where you’ll stop at a dock for lunch, and a
certain cowgirl from Wyoming can chase you down,
I was thinking.
As in, somewhere where you’ll stop at a dock for lunch, and a
certain cowgirl from Wyoming can chase you down,
I was thinking.
“I’d go through here,” he said, tracing his short index finger west to east about forty miles north of where we were. “The Okeechobee waterway. It’s a system of canals. You go in here at Fort Myers. See? There’s a river here, the Caloosahatchee. It’s been dredged so you can get boats through it, otherwise it would be too shallow in places. The Caloosahatchee comes out of Lake Okeechobee.” Here he stabbed his index finger at a big, round lake, the largest in a string of lakes that ran down the axis of the state. “The dredged waterway goes up the Caloosahatchee and into the lake here at Moore Haven, follows a channel just inside the flood-control levee for oh, ten or fifteen miles to Clewiston, then you go through the middle of the lake and come out the other side into the St. Lucie canal. That puts you out in Stuart.” He traced his finger along the blue line for the canal and out to the Atlantic Ocean.
“Where did you say?”
“Stuart.”
I looked at Faye.
She looked at me.
“Yo’ gramma,” I said. I peered at the map. There it was, as big as life. “They got a Manatee Marina there?”
“Sure,” said Gator. “My brother, he kept a boat there for a while. They stack ’em up there like they’re in mailboxes.”
I couldn’t quite envision that, but my mind was running the trip backward, rewinding, trying to figure out where along all those miles of waterway Miles Guffey and the
Sea Dingo
would be by now. “How fast does a boat travel?” I asked.
Sea Dingo
would be by now. “How fast does a boat travel?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if some friends of mine took off from St. Petersburg yesterday afternoon, say, and were coming through the canal, where would they be by now?”
Gator looked at me like I was making a funny joke with him. “Ah, depends on the boat,” he said.
I closed my eyes and thought,
Well, duh
. “Okay, a big, squarely built cabin cruiser. Say, forty feet long. Really wide.”
Well, duh
. “Okay, a big, squarely built cabin cruiser. Say, forty feet long. Really wide.”
“Well, that still covers some area. But if you mean not at all modern or streamlined, like a trawler,” he said.
“A trawler! That was it.”
“Then usually about eight knots.”
“Knots. What’s that in miles per hour?”
“Add ten percent. But you may as well subtract it again, because there are tides and currents, and going through the waterway you have to stop a lot to wait for the bridges to open.”
Ah! Bridges! Places where boats stop!
I turned to Faye. “Tom told me to find Miles’s boat and get some information from him. Something he needs for what he’s doing.”
Faye’s eyes turned dark with anger. “I will not aid or abet this any further,” she said tersely.
“But he can’t find Jack unless—”
Faye lurched up from the table and gave me a look that could have peeled paint. She said, “If you want to play cops and robbers with the little boys, Em, go the fuck ahead. I am going back to my little grass hut and gestate a baby!” She stormed away and slammed the door behind her.
I stared at the map.
I felt Gator’s eyes on me. He was studying me, his scarred arms laid out on the table in front of him so he could lean on them. “This has to do with my man Jack Sampler?”
I wasn’t sure what to say. But it was beginning to occur to me that this man Gator was smarter than I had first bothered to presume.
He tipped his head and looked at me kindly, as if to say,
It’s okay
. His great, dark eyes were soft, searching. He said, “Jack is a man I owe. Enough said?”
It’s okay
. His great, dark eyes were soft, searching. He said, “Jack is a man I owe. Enough said?”
There wasn’t much to say, except yes or no. It seemed that lots of people owed Jack. He had grown up watching
his mother suffer. Had it made a martyr of him, or a maniac?
his mother suffer. Had it made a martyr of him, or a maniac?
Gator patted my hand. “You need to find that boat? I got a couple reptile shows to do this afternoon then one swamp tour, but I’m off duty after that. The Caloosahatchee’s not far. I can get you there.”
I trained my eyes on the index map. I picked up a paper napkin and held it to the bar scale. Jabbed my thumbnail into the folded edge of the soft paper to mark the beginning and end of a map inch. Thirty-five miles. Shifted the napkin along the bar to add a second thirty-five, and a third. Having thus marked off one hundred and five miles, I slid the napkin over to the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico where it swept south from Tampa Bay to the mouth of the Caloosahatchee. “About a hundred miles,” I said. “Divide by eight. Twelve hours?”
“It’s easier than that. Let me show you.” Gator tapped his finger on a spot on the map index about twenty miles upriver. “Map 105,” he said. He opened the atlas to that page. “How tall’s your friend’s boat? Like, twenty feet?”
“I’d say. The cabin is all above the waterline, and there’s a deck above that with a big canopy over it and radar and antennas and all like that.”
“A flying bridge. Call it twenty-five feet with the radar and radio masts folded down. These first bridges are high.” He pointed at five places where highways crossed the mouth of the river at Fort Myers and Cape Coral. “Any boat small enough to navigate the channel can go under them. But here,”—he indicated the point where a highway marked “31” crossed the river—“See? The river narrows here. The spans are shorter, lower. This is Wilson Pigott Bridge. First low clearance. I think that one’s a lift bridge.”
“So what are you saying? He’d have to slow down there while they open the bridge?”
He smiled. “No, he’d have to stop. They don’t open the bridges after nine in the evening, and they stay closed until six A.M. So it doesn’t matter how fast he was going, even at twenty knots he wouldn’t make it this far before nine
last evening. Most guys with a brain tuck in behind a barrier island at dusk and wait until daybreak. Some of the waters back there are only a couple feet deep. See these channels? You got to run through one of these mouths between the islands, and at certain tides it’s a rip. The channels are marked, but not all that good. I’ve been through there with my brother in full daylight, hanging on the depth sounder, and we still lost it and run aground on a dredging pile. The channels are narrow, and it’s too easy to miss a marker.” He traced the route Guffey’s boat would have to navigate inside the barrier islands, a spattering of obstacles large and small. “And not only is it real shallow in here if you get outside where it’s dredged, but there are other boats anchored here and there, swinging on their anchor lines, and just ’cause they’re out there don’t mean they know what they’re doing. Some fools pay out a lot of scope, run aground when the tide turns. You go through there on slack tide in the dark, you don’t even know which way they’re lying, and you can get tangled in an instant. I wouldn’t risk my boat like that if I had one.”
last evening. Most guys with a brain tuck in behind a barrier island at dusk and wait until daybreak. Some of the waters back there are only a couple feet deep. See these channels? You got to run through one of these mouths between the islands, and at certain tides it’s a rip. The channels are marked, but not all that good. I’ve been through there with my brother in full daylight, hanging on the depth sounder, and we still lost it and run aground on a dredging pile. The channels are narrow, and it’s too easy to miss a marker.” He traced the route Guffey’s boat would have to navigate inside the barrier islands, a spattering of obstacles large and small. “And not only is it real shallow in here if you get outside where it’s dredged, but there are other boats anchored here and there, swinging on their anchor lines, and just ’cause they’re out there don’t mean they know what they’re doing. Some fools pay out a lot of scope, run aground when the tide turns. You go through there on slack tide in the dark, you don’t even know which way they’re lying, and you can get tangled in an instant. I wouldn’t risk my boat like that if I had one.”
“Guffey’s real proud of his boat.”
“Like I say.” He tapped his finger back on Wilson Pigott Bridge. “But even if he did keep running in the dark, he couldn’t get past this point until this morning at six.”
I took hold of his wrist and turned it to read his watch. It was almost noon. “So he could have been running six hours by now. Where would he be?”
“My guess is he’s still out on the Gulf. If he got off last night like you say, he would have run down the coast until he ran out of daylight, or got tired, and then gunk-holed in behind a barrier island for the night. But I’ll go you one better. Come on.” He led me out of the cafeé, down several paths, and into an office, where we found Bill sitting behind a desk reading a magazine. Gator got out a phone book and looked something up in the government pages, then dialed the phone. “
Oye
, Gus? Hey, my man, this is Eduardo Batista, your man from Miami.
¡Recuerdas!
Hey, yeah, long time.
¿Como su esposa? ¿Sus hijos? Oye,
I’m calling with
a favor to ask. Who me? Yeah. Yeah. I’m trying to track a boat for a friend here. Yeah, it’s her husband, she hasn’t heard from him. Kind of worried. She wants to know if he’s gone through the first lock there. Okay.” He turned to me. “What’s the name of the boat?”
Oye
, Gus? Hey, my man, this is Eduardo Batista, your man from Miami.
¡Recuerdas!
Hey, yeah, long time.
¿Como su esposa? ¿Sus hijos? Oye,
I’m calling with
a favor to ask. Who me? Yeah. Yeah. I’m trying to track a boat for a friend here. Yeah, it’s her husband, she hasn’t heard from him. Kind of worried. She wants to know if he’s gone through the first lock there. Okay.” He turned to me. “What’s the name of the boat?”
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