“Funny thing is, Bern, I thought you were mad at me because of this afternoon.” That laugh of his, it was as disgusting as his tattoos, both arms looking like he’d dipped them in Easter egg dye.
“Mad because you told the cops the truth? No, no, it was a tough situation. You and me, we didn’t have time to discuss what you found on the boat, to agree on a story. If it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t have had the stuff back in the first place.”
They were almost there.
They had crossed the parking lot, all the empty boats making it seem quieter, and were nearly to the bay where there was more seawall and a boat ramp. Security lights were bright along the water, showing docks, and the gravel area where Bern had parked the bulldozer.
Nearby, spaced along the seawall, were a dozen fifty-gallon drums in various colors. They stored dirty oil from boat engines in black drums. The yellow drums held insecticides. The green drums were for fertilizers, used mostly on the golf course.
When Moe noticed the barrels, he said, “What are those doing there?”
Bern said, “I mentioned that someone from the EPA was coming, right? I requested an inspection so they could test our water quality, take soil samples, that sort of thing.”
Which was craziness, but Moe listened. Listened to Bern tell him that, when the state had declared the marina a hazardous area, it was only good for a month. The month was up in a few days, which meant that boat owners would be allowed to come onto the property. Bern said they needed more time to move the boats to a secure area where they could be auctioned before the owners knew if their vessels had been damaged or not.
A few more weeks, they’d be ready.
“I told the EPA we were missing drums of oil, poisons, and stuff because of the hurricane. The feds could close this place for another month if our water’s so polluted it’s dangerous.” Bern used his smile. “They pay for cleanup, plus reimburse us for lost business—and the public won’t be allowed within a mile of the place.”
“FEMA, because it’s a disaster area. Right?”
Bern gave Moe a nudge toward the bulldozer. “You’ve got a brain. That’s what we like about you.”
For the next ten minutes, Bern used a digital camera to film what Moe was doing under the security lights. He was intentionally dumping petroleum products and pesticides into the bay, which also happened to be a federal wildlife preserve.
Lots of close-ups of the face: Moe beneath his cowboy hat, oblivious at the controls.
The only time Bern got nervous about Moe using the bulldozer was when the retard made a beeline toward a mound of fill dirt on the far edge of the property. Nobody was supposed to disturb that, Bern had told everybody.
Moe remembered in time, and swung the bulldozer around.
Enough. Moe’s ass was his anytime he wanted it. Bern switched off the camera and headed back to the condo.
His thoughts swung back to that dork, Ford. Just let him get the man alone…
9
I was in my laboratory, leaning over a shallow tray of sodium hydroxide that I’d just prepared by mixing distilled water with laboratory grade NaOH pellets. A weak solution, into which I’d placed the silver death’s-head, with its diamond eyes and swastika. The bronze eagle, too.
I’d done a clumsy job of butterflying my split cheek but it felt okay, and my headache, which had become chronic, had eased. Work can be an enjoyable distraction. I was enjoying this.
I’d separated a couple more interesting objects from the cluster Jeth had found, and they were also in the tray: a cigarette lighter, barely recognizable, and two silver coins. Both coins were German five-mark pieces, eagles and swastikas on the back, a man’s bust on the front indistinguishable because of ridges of calcium carbonate.
One coin was dated 1938, the other 1943.
More and more, it was looking as if the wreck was circa World War II, not the detritus of some unlucky modern collector whose plane, or boat, had gone down.
I straightened and braced a hand on the stainless table, testing and discarding explanations.
Was it possible that local stories about a sunken U-boat were based on fact? It’d been several years since I’d researched the subject, but I remembered reading that there were three, maybe four German subs unaccounted for after the war. A theory was that one of the missing subs had been used by high ranking Nazis to escape before the Reich fell. The others had been scuttled, or stolen by the Soviets.
A U-boat off Sanibel? No…the scenario was implausible. Islanders would have known if a vessel that size had been attacked so close to shore. In forty feet of water? For a submarine, that was rendezvous depth, not battle depth. Even a small submarine needed one hundred feet of water to submerge.
There were dozens of people living on Sanibel and Captiva who had lived on the islands during the Second World War. Details of a sunken U-boat would have been anchored in oral history. Fact, not legend.
I t was nearly 7 P.M. I went out a screen door, exiting my lab, and crossed a breezeway to another screen door, which is the entrance to my home.
An unusual structure, for an unusual lifestyle.
I live in a house built on stilts over water, connected to land by fifty feet of boardwalk. Dinkin’s Bay Marina, with its ship’s store, take-out restaurant, and docks, is just along the shore, a quick walk through the mangroves. Tomlinson, nonconformist that he is, lives on the other side of the channel, aboard No Mas, the sailboat that has been his home for years.
I’d had to rebuild the boardwalk after the hurricane. Felt lucky that any of it survived. Same with my house. It had been built in the early 1900s by a thriving fish company that constructed similar piling houses all along the coast. They’d built them to house fishermen and also as storage depots where fish could be iced.
The design of the buildings varied but not much: there’s a lower platform for mooring boats and an upper platform with two small cottages under a single tin roof. One cottage served as a bunkhouse large enough to sleep a dozen men. The other was used for storing ice, so the walls are triple thick.
These structures—fish houses, they’re called—had to be as well built as any seagoing vessel, so the company had used cypress, or Miami yellow pine, which, when cured, is so rock hard you can’t drive a nail in it.
So, yes, I felt lucky my house and lab had survived. There was a lot of damage—I’d had to gut the place because a tornado took the roof off. On a laboratory wall, I’ve tacked photos of the way it had looked the day after the storm, even though the details were vivid in my memory: the tin roof shredded, lower decking gone, pilings and lamp poles all leaning at the same precise angle, still pointing toward the hurricane’s exit path—northeast. There was something accusatory in their uniformity; the impression that my home had been violated.
It had been violated. I’m not a sentimental person, but it was painful to look at the mess. Stare at my damaged property too long, and the image became penetrating, like staring at a strobe light.
As Tomlinson said when he came to check on me after the storm, “Looks like she collided with an iceberg. Which is kinda far-out, if you think about it. Your place has always seemed more like a ship than a house, anyway.”
I replied, “Iceberg. Interesting metaphor, this close to the equator.”
“She almost sunk but didn’t. That’s what I’m telling you. You’ll get her fixed up fast, though. People say things’ll never be the same? Dude, I am glad. It’s exciting. Your place will be better than ever.”