"Did you mention my name to anyone you met?"
"She's honking out there, man. I don't get out the door quick, she'll leave me. She'd do it, too."
"Did you mention—"
"Maybe. I don't know. Hannah, she could have mentioned you. Seriously. You're like one of her favorite topics."
I felt an unreasonable surge of pleasure at hearing that. "What I'm saying is, you need to be careful, Tomlinson. That's all I'm telling you." I hesitated. What I wanted to ask, I couldn't ask. So instead, I said, "She's bringing you back to Sanibel tonight, right?"
He said, "I don't think so. Whatever she wants . . . hey . . . Jesus, she's—" His voice suddenly contained the flavor of panic. Maybe Hannah was pulling out of the drive. Heard him yell, "HOLD IT! I'M COMING!" before he said into the phone, "Gotta go, man! I'll call you. Okay?"
I said, "One more thing—"
Tomlinson said, "Can't. The magic bus is rolling. Manana!" Then he hung up.
The coffee didn't help my head or my gurgling stomach. Decided what I needed to do was sweat my system clean.
So I put on the Nikes and ran down Tarpon Bay Road to the beach and did five killer miles on the soft-packed sand. Ran east along Algiers Beach almost to the golf course and back, forcing the pace, ignoring my swollen toe, checking the watch, making myself sprint two minutes, then stride three minutes, never allowing a peaceful anaerobic moment.
The last lingering chill of the cold front was gone. Clear, sun-bright January morning. Heat radiating off the sand. A mild tropical breeze huffing from the south, out of Cuba. Vacationers already out with their beach towels and tanning goo, eager to bake in the first summer-hot day Sanibel had presented them in more than a week. Around the hotel pools, the uniformed staff members were busy shuttling towels and drinks, renting sailboards and paddle pontoons and jet skis. Scattered all along the beach were little strongholds of oil-coated flesh; some, truly spectacular women in their thong bikinis or sleek one-piece suits. 1 didn't linger. Didn't let myself pause, or even slow. Kept right on hammering away at the sand, through the lotion stink of coconut oil and Coppertone, lungs burning, sweat pouring, until I was back to my starting place just off Tarpon Bay Road.
After that, I did an ocean swim. Twenty minutes up the beach, twenty minutes back—more than a mile. Swimming is so deadly boring that the brain, in defense, compensates with an alluring cerebral clarity. That's what I like about it. While swimming, I could think intensely and without distraction. Thought about the anonymous phone calclass="underline" He snoops around, we'll cut his nose off. Idle threat or not, it took a lot of anger to generate a call like that. If the call came from Sulphur Wells—which seemed likely— Tomlinson had already added two or more enemies to a life list that contained no enemies anywhere. It was precisely because Tomlinson had so little experience in dealing with personal menace that he was so vulnerable. The question was: How could I make him believe it?
Also thought about Hannah. Still felt the familiar abdominal squeeze when I pictured her eyes, that long body, but the symptoms of obsession had faded. I was relieved, because there were things about Hannah Smith which I found unsettling. Her judgment, for one thing. She apparently believed that Raymond Tullock, her prospective business partner, had worked hard to prevent the net ban. But Garrett Riley's story was more convincing: Tullock had actually lobbied hard to get the net ban passed. He was lying to Hannah and the other commercial fishermen to protect his own interests.
But that was her problem. Maybe Tomlinson's, too. Which would probably delight Tomlinson. The man was never truly happy unless he was involved with a woman who was struggling with interesting and complex personal difficulties. The more personality quirks, the better. Life was never too strange or complicated for him. As he had told me more than once, "I am, above all else, a divine healer."
Actually, I believed him to be, above all else, a divine flake. Yet I also knew that no one would work harder for a friend. If Hannah wanted him to help her write and publish a book, that book would be written and published—or Tomlinson would collapse trying.
After I had showered and changed, I telephoned the Coast Guard just to make sure they had found the cable where I left it. The duty officer said that they had, then told me the investigation had been turned over to the sheriff's department and the marine patrol. I told the duty officer that I hoped both agencies dropped everything until they found the people who were responsible. The duty officer reminded me that both agencies were trying to patrol several thousand square miles of water and shoreline with just two or three boats and limited budgets—the equivalent of a couple of beat cops trying to patrol all of Rhode Island, alone and on foot.
Then I called a friend on Useppa, Kate Schaefer, to make sure that the community had been alerted. Kate had heard, and so had everyone else on the island. As one of the community leaders, she'd made certain of that. "It made me so mad I was shaking," she told me. "I'm still shaking. All those poor fish, that was bad enough. But to come here and rig a trap like that— Doc, are they insane?"
Nope, I told her. Probably not. In all likelihood, they were ruthless, indifferent, and more than a little stupid. But mostly, they were mean. Just dumb-dog mean. I told her to stay on her toes and to call me if she needed any help. Kate said, "The only thing I want from you is the dinner you owe me. Some restaurant that isn't too loud or too smoky, and has a superb menu. Sarasota is nice." She had a very bawdy chuckle for someone with her business accomplishments and political clout. "Or I could fly us to Omaha. I know how much you love a good steak."
I took a rain check. Then, after we'd said our goodbyes, wondered why in the hell I hadn't taken her up on the offer. Kate was a great lady. She was smart and tough, but she was also elegant, tender, and she had an outrageous sense of humor.
So why not? Or why not telephone Dewey Nye? See how her campaign on the pro golf tour was going. Offer to fly up to New York ... or wherever she happened to be, and spend a few days buddying around. Nothing physical—not with Dewey. Her psychological makeup wouldn't allow it. Still, it would be nice to spend some time with a woman I cared about. Get away from my damn fish for a while. Have my Hewes put in dry storage and go. From what I'd seen lately, dry storage was the only safe place for a flats boat—until after July, at least, when the net ban went into effect.
A five-mile run, a one-mile swim, and a hundred pull-ups, I decided, were not sufficient to dissipate a blooming case of male restlessness.
So I futzed around with my damn fish for a while. Got the raw-water intake pump going again. Paid special attention to the six immature tarpon I had in the tank. The fish looked healthy. No apparent ill effects from spending twenty-four hours in water that did not circulate. I wasn't surprised. The tarpon is a euryhaline species, which means that it can live in a wide variety of saline and nonsaline environments: from open ocean to the muckiest landlocked sulfur pit. In Central America, I had seen tarpon in the leaf-choked jungle ponds of Guatemala and Honduras, and as far inland as Lake Nicaragua, 127 miles from the sea. One reason for their hardiness is that tarpon can supplement their oxygen supply by rising to the surface and gulping in air. The mysterious thing is, tarpon surface—or "roll," as it is called—whether the water they inhabit is rich with oxygen or not.
That was my current interest. And why I paid special attention to the six metallic-bodied animals in my tank.
In the early 1940s, biologists Charles M. Breder and Arthur Shlaifer had published articles in Zoologica which suggested that the behavior of tarpon was not just respiratory, it was social. I had obtained copies of those papers from the New York Zoological Society. It was my plan to duplicate their experiments and, perhaps, expand on them.