“I’m willing. I was hoping you’d ask.”
“You were the first one I called because that’s what I was already thinking. Javier, too. Maybe we can use his boat—if the damn marina lets him have it back.”
I said, “Sure. Does he dive?”
Jeth said, “I don’t know if he’s certified, but, yeah, he’s got tanks and stuff. Thing is, the visibility’s so bad now we wouldn’t be able to see the end of our nose. And the water won’t clear up for weeks, maybe a couple months, she’s so stirred up.”
He reminded me that there were two more hurricanes down by Cuba, one of them maybe headed this way.
Actually, both were now on track to hit Florida’s Gulf coast. I’d listened to VHF weather on the boat ride here. Statistically, there wasn’t much chance we’d get another direct hit. But even if the storms passed within a few hundred miles, it’d be too rough to anchor offshore.
I said, “Then either we use the small window we have, tomorrow or the next day, or we wait a month or more. Even if it’s murky, I wouldn’t mind giving it a try.”
“I don’t know, man. The water out there’s thick as motor oil. We won’t be able to see nothing. Just feel around with our hands. Us bumpin’ into stuff, crap bumping into us. Doesn’t sound like much fun to me. Javier’s not gonna be too wild about it, either.”
I was holding the death’s-head in my hand. It seemed too light, too fragile, to support the history it represented.
I said, “Nobody likes diving in murky water. If those storms hit close, though, they could bury your wreck again. We wouldn’t get another chance.”
“Crap…I hadn’t thought of that. Geez”—the big man made a face of distaste—“we’ve both seen the size of sharks out there. Big ol’ lemons, and tigers and hammerheads. Bull sharks, too. Big as canoes, and they’re always on the feed. If the water’s clear, I don’t worry about them when I’m diving. But, if the viz is crappy—”
“Sharks see better in the dark than we see in daylight,” I interrupted. “They’re the least of our worries. I think we should go if weather allows.”
Jeth made a low sound, close to a groan. It told me he would dive in the murk but hated the idea.
“Then we can’t show this Nazi thing to Augie?”
I said, “Augie Heller? No. I don’t even know the man, but I do know one thing about him: He’d try to beat us to the wreck.”
I refilled the pan with salt water, then used the forceps to remove a final layer of barnacle. The entire swastika was now visible. Twenty-six diamonds, counting the eyes.
Jeth took a closer look before straightening, gazing around, head moving slowly, trying not to show that he was nervous. “That thing’s gotta bad feel to it. Sorta like this marina.”
I knew what he meant. The Indian Harbor Marina and Resort had once been a village of tin-roofed cottages built on shell mounds, called Gumbo Limbo, plus docks and a commercial warehouse. I’d had friends here, crabbers and mullet fishermen. Among them was a long-legged woman with skinny, countrified hips and denim-colored eyes. A woman who wore boots and jeans, who owned her own boat, and lived an edgy, independent life of her own design. She was a powerful lady, Hannah Smith.
Like the village she’d once called home, Hannah was gone.
Florida’s most destructive storms have been developmental, not environmental. I’d read about the village’s transformation in the newspaper, heard about it from locals. I hadn’t relished the idea of coming back. I’d done it for Jeth, no other reason. Now I was eager to leave.
Jeth was right. Indian Harbor Marina and Resort had a bad feel.
I’d wrapped the bronze eagle in a towel soaked in salt water. I now did the same with the death’s-head, as I said, “We’ve given Javier enough time. Let’s get out of here. There’s a better way to clean this stuff, anyway. When we get back to Sanibel, I’ll call an archaeologist pal of mine and we can do it in my lab.”
What was left of my lab, anyway.
I glanced toward the bay. “Where’s Tomlinson?”
“Huh?”
I repeated myself as I squatted, placed both towels in the five-gallon bucket, and nodded toward the docks where my boat was tied: a new twenty-one-foot Maverick with a ghost blue hull and a high-powered Yamaha engine on the back. Just looking at it gave me pleasure.
The boat was empty.
“Where’d he go?”
Tomlinson had witnessed our confrontation with Heller and Oswald. I’d told him to go back to my skiff and stay there in case we had to leave in a hurry. But giving an order to Tomlinson was another mistake. Counterculture visionaries have an aversion to authority. Ordering him to do something was a guarantee he’d do the opposite.
Jeth said, “Tomlinson’s about as predictable as a fart in a forest fire. He coulda wandered off anywhere, that bonehead. If it wasn’t for Javier, we shoulda left the moment I realized there was gonna be trouble…” He was looking over my shoulder, his face registering surprise, then tension. “Probably should of…buh-but it’s too late now. Here they come.”
Augie Heller and Oswald. And they had someone with them.
“Jesus, that’s the head guy, the owner,” Jeth said. “That smile of his…He sounds like the nicest Yankee in the world, but he looks at you like a bug he’d squash, give him a chance. I won’t even talk to him, he makes me so nervous. Which tah-tuh-tells you something.”
5
Augie and Oswald were walking fast toward us, an older man leading the way. He was NFL-sized, bald, late forties, with a monk’s dark wreath of hair. He was wearing shorts, TopSiders, a green polo shirt with marina logo. No one was smiling. They were pushing a hard-assed attitude ahead of them like an energy wave, the way they leaned, fists pumping.
Augie: Stocky, short, in his midtwenties, midwestern vowels; big-city volume. He had a swagger that comes with money and inherited power. His buddy Oswald was older by a decade. He was pudgy, with a bubble-shaped butt, but had the same attitude of tough-guy indifference. Another guess: He worked for Augie’s family.
As they got closer, I decided that the older guy was Augie’s family, a dad or an uncle. He was twice the size, but there were genetic similarities. The same elongated earlobes, Scandinavian chin, and slaughterhouse forearms, the same big square head and hands. The expressions on the faces of all three men pointed, territorial.
I got a glimpse of the smile Jeth mentioned. Jolly, but fixed in place, worn like a warning. It told you something about the owner. He was a handler; he knew how to deal with people and the smile was part of his technique. He was showing it to me, letting me know that he was nobody’s fool—if I was smart enough to read it.
I fitted the top onto the bucket. I used my eyes to motion toward the marina’s southern boundary, where I’d finally picked out Tomlinson. “There he is. It looks like he’s already irritating the hell out of everyone.”
Tomlinson was on the far side of the property, much of it still flooded, standing by a green boat on a trailer, talking to men who wore hard hats and orange vests. He’d wandered off shirtless, wearing baggy khaki shorts—“Bombay Bloomers,” he called them. Very British, with pleats, pockets, and a fly that buttoned. He’d bought knee-length socks to match. He was wearing them now with Birkenstock sandals—his “hurricane kit,” he called it.
Goggles, too. They were strapped around his neck like an RAF pilot, loose and ready—old-fashioned, with a leather strap and thick green lenses. “Kilner goggles,” Tomlinson had said they were, made in the early 1900s by a London physician. The special lenses, he claimed, revealed human auras and energy fields.
They were among the newest in Tomlinson’s long list of weird interests.