Everglades, page 28
As I sailed through the school, I saw something else. I saw the predator that was feeding on the mullet. It appeared beneath the water as a submarine-shape, outlined in green. It cruised with a slow, reptilian movement as if crawling, tail and head shifting, always at apogee.
It was a shark. In this brackish mangrove lake, it was almost certainly a bull shark judging from its girth. It was the fish that I’d traveled the world studying. It was the fish I often used as an excuse for clandestine work.
The shark was big. Probably nine feet long, three or four hundred pounds. As I passed near it, I watched the shark turn in a whirlpool of light. I saw the shark pause, as if reviewing its options. Then it began to trail me, pushing water in a vectoring, sparkling blaze as it increased speed.
Drunk as I was, I could feel my heart pounding, my knees shaking. A cliché often repeated is that sharks are unpredictable. Seldom true. Like most predators, sharks have a strong pursuit instinct. If something runs from them, they chase it. What this animal was now doing was perfectly predictable: It was tracking me. If I was fleeing, there was a reason. I must be prey.
Watching the fish, my head was turned toward the rear of the board—not a smart thing to do when windsurfing day or night. I could see the shark’s bulk creating a column of water as it swam faster, closing the gap between us. I applied pressure to the board and sheeted in even tighter to get maximum speed—an absurd thing to do, because there was no way that I, a land mammal, a novice surfer, could outrun the muscled culmination of a million years of perfected genetic adaptation.
Then the shark was on me, behind the board, its fin cleaving the water, tacking back and forth with every thrust of its tail. I pulled my back foot out of its strap in an attempt to kick at the thing, and nearly lost control of the boom; almost went flying over the sail.
For several seconds, the shark matched my speed, both of us streaking through darkness, stars above, bioluminescent stars below. Then I felt the board jolt beneath me once . . . twice . . . then a third time.
The bull shark was bumping the board with its nose. It was testing, feeling, sensing what I was, interpreting the why of me.
Few know that a shark’s most powerful sensory organ is not its sense of smell, even though the sensory apparatus is located on the animal’s nose. If you ever get a chance, take a close look at shark’s head. You will see that the snout area is covered with tiny black dots. These are, in fact, pores that are filled with a complicated jelly. The jelly accurately detects bioelectric impulses. Quite literally, a shark can sense the precise location of a human heart beating from many hundreds of yards away. It is a remarkable sensory ability, and I know of no other animals that are equipped with it.
By touching its snout to the board, the fish was monitoring my physiology: pounding heart, electrical circuitry on panicked overload, mammalian blood pressure lowered by alcohol then spiked by fear.
I was flesh. I was eatable.
For a micro-instant, I felt a tremendous weight on the back of the board—perhaps the fish had mistakenly bitten the skeg. Then the fish passed beneath the board at twice my speed, its tail-slap creating an unexpected wake.
In the same instant, my big sail was hit by a gust of wind.
I was drunk. My balance isn’t great to begin with. It was enough to catapult me over boom and board. I landed atop the slowly sinking sail, still hooked to the boom.
My hands were shaking as I fixed my glasses back on my face and tried to free myself. Frantically, I looked ahead: The shark, turning, had created a swirling green vortex with an exit streak like an arrow.
The bull shark was returning. Its sensory receptors were attuned. The sound of my pounding heart had to be unmistakable, nearly deafening. It knew exactly where I was, what I was.
Windsurfing sails are made of see-through plastic, a kind of monofilm. I watched the shark cruise toward me, and then beneath me—me atop the thin skein of plastic, it below. I could feel the pony-sized girth of the animal lift both the sail and me briefly; could hear the rasp of its rough skin abrade the boom. I sensed a rolling movement—had it turned to bite?
Then the shark exited from beneath the sail. Confused, it cruised a few meters beyond, and turned toward me again.
I was free of the sail now, standing in waist deep water, trying desperately, pathetically, to right my board and get back atop it. But I was drunk and disoriented. I was too fat, too winded, too slow. I kept slipping, falling off.
That’s when something in my brain ruptured once again. It was the same sensation: a flashbulb exploding behind my eyes.
And, once again, the result was a cold and loathing fury.
“Fuck it!”
I shoved the board away from me, and turned to face the shark. I could see the column of water rising as the animal gained speed, coming at me. I could see the silhouette of its dorsal fin trailing star-bright streamers. In my crazed state, there was a single, stabilizing truth that fueled my rage: Why run? We are both predators.
I began to walk toward the shark. Then I charged it, creating my own wake as the stranger in me screamed aloud, “Come on, you big bastard. Hit me. You’re doing me a favor!”
When the bull shark was three or four body lengths away, I dived hard toward it, both fists extended. I expected to collide with the fish; to feel its jaws crush my arms.
Instead, my fists touched only soft bottom.
I came up, searching the surface through blurry glasses.
I could see that shark’s wake plainly.
It was swimming away at top speed. Spooked.
I took my time sailing back. I’d not only sobered; I felt as if I’d experienced some elemental transformation. What had occurred was powerful beyond any encounter I’d anticipated or imagined.
I thought about it on the long reach home, trying to figure out what had happened, why I felt changed. The lights of the marina glittered in the near distance. The windows of my house and lab were yellow rectangles, uniform and solid. My tin roof appeared waxen.
To live fearlessly, one must first invite death. It’s one of Tomlinson’s favorite maxims. That may have been a tiny part of what I was feeling, for I had certainly accepted the inevitable when I charged the shark. If the shark had rolled and locked, I would have been killed. I would have died quickly or gradually, but I certainly would have died. I would have bled to death.
It was a strange disconnected feeling, as if I were suddenly free of all emotion, fear included.
It was unexplored territory. I felt energized.
What I felt was more than just the absence of fear. I’d spent the last year or so reacting to past mistakes, punishing myself—or so my inner voice claimed. After my shark encounter, though, self-flagellation seemed an absurd justification for allowing the circumstances of my life to control me. We’ve got to be suspicious of that little voice. Our innermost voice sometimes lies to us. It is a necessary revelation if a man or woman is to take the occasional leap of faith and invite the courage necessary to live an aggressive, creative and satisfying life.
I’d known that before. How had I lost the thread?
Maybe it happens to us all, sooner or later. Maybe we all stray off the path, driven by incremental events, great or small. Or maybe it’s just a secret laziness that seeks an excuse to escape the daily discipline, bravery, endurance and plain hard work that it takes to live up to our own idealized image of self.
I’d certainly strayed from the path.
I despised what I’d become. I didn’t like the way I looked, didn’t like the way I felt. There had been growing in me a bedrock unhappiness and discontent that I could never quite define.
Now, though, I was struck by what seemed to be a rational explanation: For the last many years, I have been at odds with my own past. In my previous work, in what I think of as my former life, I’d been required to demonstrate what I prefer to define as extreme behavior.
I was ashamed. Ashamed of what I’d done. I’d hidden it from others, which was not just understandable, but a legally binding mandate. However, I’d also attempted to hide the truth from myself.
Why? What did I have to be ashamed of?
Alone, beneath stars, buoyant, water light and moving with the wind, the answer to that question seemed to ring like crystal in my innermost being.
Nothing. You have absolutely no reason to be ashamed.
It was a transcendent moment. A few minutes before, I’d confronted what is truest in me—We are both predators.
It was true. I am predatory by nature. I also like to think that I am ethical, kind, selective and generous. But, at the atavistic core, I am a hunter, a killer.
I am a collector.
It has always been so with me. It will always be so.
In accepting that truth, I felt a delicious sense of freedom.
I steered my surfboard home. I hung the sail, washed the board—a kind of workmanlike penance. The bottom half of the skeg was missing: Ragged fiberglass in a half-moon shape. No surprise.
Then, after a quick glance at my fish tanks, a quicker hello to Crunch & Des, I went to my galley and placed upon the cupboard every bottle of booze I owned. It was an impressive stash. Five unopened bottles of Flor de Cana, two unopened bottles of Patron, which is a superb tequila, plus a complete stock of other whiskeys, gins and vodkas.
I also stacked up two and a half cases of beer . . . thought about it for a moment before deciding to keep the beer for Tomlinson’s visits.
I put the bottles in boxes. It took me two trips to carry it all to the marina. It was a little after 2 A.M. Aside from the hiss of the bait tank aerator, and the flapping of sail halyards against masts, all was still. I opened the ice machine and buried fourteen bottles therein.
Finders, keepers. If someone wanted the bottles, there they were for the taking.
I’d brought a flashlight. The marina’s commercial fish scale is out back behind the marina office, next to the cleaning table. It had been more than six months since I’d last weighed myself. I stepped onto the scale, touched my fingers to the poise counterweights, moving them.
It took awhile. Was the damn thing broken?
When the suspension bar was finally balanced, I whispered, “Jesus Christ, this can’t be right.”
I was still wearing my wet T-shirt and shorts. I stepped off the scale, stripped naked, then stepped back onto the scale plate.
After a few more seconds, I whispered, “You fat son-of-a-bitch.”
I walked back to my stilt house.
Every human being should have at least a half-dozen people that he or she can call day or night when they are sleepless, goofy drunk, feeling lonely or in emotional need.
Dewey Nye is on my short list.
When I got back to the house, my rubber wristwatch said it was 2:39 A.M.
Feeling totally sober, now, I dialed the lady’s number. The phone rang twice before I heard her groggy voice answer, “This better be fuckin’ good, Walda.”
She expected it to be her longtime, off again-on again roommate and lover.
I said, “Dew. It’s me.”
I could picture her sitting up a little, focusing. “Doc? What time is it?”
I told her.
“Are you drunk? You’ve got to be drunk.”
I said, “In the morning, seven A.M., I’ll meet you on the beach at the end of Tarpon Bay Road. We run, then swim. Three miles, then swim a half mile. No—make it a mile. You don’t have to swim the whole way.”
I listened to the lady yawn. “Oh, Doc, you are drunk. Go to sleep, sweetie. I’ll stop by around noon. We can go for a walk.”
Not raising my voice, I said, “You need to listen to me, Dewey. It’s important. I’m not going to explain it to everyone, but I’m going to tell you because I need your help. Starting tomorrow, we work out at least five days a week. And no more alcohol. Period. Not for me. Twenty, twenty-five pounds from now, maybe I’ll reconsider. Or maybe I won’t. I’m making you that promise. Hold me to it.”
“You’re serious.”
“Yep. It’s time I quit feeling sorry for myself. Seven A.M. on the beach. I’ll see you there.”
“What time’s the sun come up?”
I said, “Seven-oh-one.”
“Our own private sunrise service. I’ll be there.”
I hung up, found a pencil, then walked to my outdoor shower. On the outside wall of my house, I wrote my weight: 247.
Then, in parentheses, beside it, I wrote my minimum objective: 220.
It seemed to formalize the change that had taken place in me. Because I had written it, I now had no choice but to achieve it.
I showered, walked into the lab and looked at the stranger in the mirror for a long moment before I said, “You’re done.”
Then I went to bed.
For months, I’d been plagued by nightmares or dreams of frustrating inabilities. On this night, though, I dreamed of the face of a child whose photo I kept in a moon-shaped locket. Then, in my dream, the child’s face became the face of an old, old love.
She was a woman with waist-length blond hair, dressed in white crinoline. Her face was luminous and comforting, a woman so beautiful that seeing her caused me to linger upon detail: lighted portions of chin and cheek, strong nose creating shadow, perceptive eyes unaware and uncaring of her own beauty.
Her voice was a kindred chord as she said, “I have waited so long for you, my dear. So many, many years. Now, once again, you’ve come back to me. . . .”
chapter twenty-seven
Tomlinson said, “The way these people are behaving, it’s more like a rock concert for fascists. Or a magic show. I’d say a kind of Grateful Dead deal, but that’d be an insult to Jerry. They’re giving me the creeps, man.”
He meant the several hundred Church of Ashram members who were moving along the boardwalk, filing toward the outdoor amphitheater, Cypress Ashram, on this Easter Sunday late afternoon. They were men and women of various ages, but there did seem to be a strange, almost mechanical, similarity in the way they moved, the way they behaved.
Many wore robes: orange or white or green. There were far fewer orange robes than green, and fewer green than white, so the colors were suggestive of rank. Others were dressed in neatly pressed slacks or skirts, hair trimmed short. They traveled in tight groups, sometimes creating human chains by holding on to each other’s waists—slow conga lines—or walking in step, calling odd phrases back and forth as if in some cheerful competition:
“We’re running Thetan Three over here.”
“We’re running Thetan Four over here!”
“Bhagwan Shiva’s version of Scientology,” Tomlinson told me when I asked. “Don’t worry about it.”
Frisbees were popular, too. The church must have designed its own. Each plastic disc was a black-and-white yin-yang symbol stamped with CAMI, the church’s initials. The air was filled with their slow, arching ascents. Prayer wheels, I heard one person call them.
The Archangels were maintaining high visibility. Shiva’s security people, dressed in black, weight-lifter types, male and female, were cruising in their golf carts, letting their authority be seen.
So far, I hadn’t seen any guards that I recognized.
Not that I would have minded.
I was in that kind of mood.
I’d talked to Detective Podraza twice during the day. They’d found no sign of Sally, no witnesses, no clue to where she might be, despite press conferences and expanding media coverage. They were, however, accumulating some crime-scene evidence. He’d also told me that he’d spoken to the Sanibel police. They’d vouched for me, so his manner, though still professional, was slightly friendlier.
“The security camera at the front gate shows Frank and Sally’s cars leaving, then both cars coming back,” he said.
I said, “They came by boat. Whoever shot Frank and the old guy, they were smart enough to come by water. Unless you’ve got something else on the security cameras.”
Podraza said, “That’s a possibility we’re considering.”
I didn’t expect him to provide any other details, and he didn’t.
I added, “I’m no expert, but I’ve read that a kidnap victim’s first twenty-four hours are critical.”
“I’ll tell you the same thing I told Mrs. Minster’s cousin, Belinda. If the lady was our own sister, mother—name it—we couldn’t be working this case any harder. A double homicide and a kidnapping. That’s about as bad as it gets. And you’re right—the longer she’s gone, the less chance of finding her alive.”
When I said that, if she was already dead, her body was probably out in Biscayne Bay, Podraza replied, “We have boats looking. And you’re right again. In an abduction-murder, getting rid of the body is always the biggest problem, because it’s evidence found on the body that usually nails them.”
What he wanted to know was why I’d guessed that both victims had been shot with a .22 caliber.
I told him the truth: Like my suspicions about Izzy, it was a hunch. Something about the way the guy looked, the way he handled himself. Israeli intelligence, the Mossad, uses the .22 Beretta as its signature weapon of assassination. Only a sociopath would put two innocent men in the trunk of a car and execute them, and the Mossad signature was the sort of touch a sociopath might try to imitate.
Podraza said, “I’ll be honest. The first time we talked, I got the impression you might be a kind of kook. But the Sanibel police chief told me that if you had some suggestions, I’d be smart to listen. So I did try to find out about the guy.
“I contacted the church’s main office. But cult religions, law enforcement, we don’t get along. Family members are always asking us to help get their sons and daughters out. I didn’t expect the church to be cooperative, and they weren’t. There’s no way I can check the guy out if I don’t even have his last name.”
