He listened to the next several calls intently, trying to establish some sort of pattern. Jason took each call in high good humor, chatting briefly with each of his men, giving instructions, and then turning to Benny each time and telling him where to put another check mark. The progression of check marks seemed to be absolutely clear, running down the chart vertically, and across the chart horizontally, the calls coming in order from the diner, the tackle shop, the Parch house, and then the Champlin house. When Jason hung up after the call from the Champlin house, he told Benny to check off the Stern house as well, since he positively knew that was secured. Luke assumed he must have come directly from the Stern house to the marina.
The next listing on the chart was for Samantha’s house.
The palms of Luke’s hands were suddenly covered with sweat.
His hands had begun sweating that day long ago as the landing barges approached Omaha Beach. He had repeated the words over and again to himself, Don’t be frightened, don’t be frightened, but his hands had begun to sweat, and then he was enormously frightened when the ramp went down and he found himself running across the wet sand with the machine-gun bullets spraying the beach. He had wanted to turn and run back into the water, but they were dead and dying behind him, so he threw himself flat on the sand and began to crawl, listening to the shattered screams around him and the roar of the shells and the angry clatter of the machine guns. Nobody ever talked about the sounds of war; nobody ever told you that dying in pain had a terrifying sound all its own. That was when the enemy bullet struck him.
He had been lying flat, so nothing really happened when the slug pierced his calf except that he felt a sharp stinging pain, and then he looked back and saw that his leg was bleeding just a bit above the top of his combat boot. Well, he had thought, it’s over; I get a Purple Heart and a trip home. Then the man crouching in fear not a foot from him in the sand took a slug right in the mouth, the bullet shattering his teeth and blowing away the back of his helmet and his head. Luke felt neither guilt nor relief. He had not asked for the bullet that caught him in the calf, and he experienced no joy when the man lying next to him got killed. Years later he would hear the combat clichés repeated so many times in so many different ways that he would come to believe perhaps he had been overjoyed when the bullet smashed into the soldier beside him. But at the time he only winced when the blood spattered up onto his own hands from the man’s broken face.
He came very close to breaking on that strange beach with a stranger’s blood spurting onto his hands; he began weeping like a baby. In 1960 he again came very close to breaking on the edge of his hurricane-demolished pier in Islamorada. He was thirty-six years old, too old to cry; this was no longer the kid who had trembled in fear on a beach in France. He looked out over the water. Donna had smashed his pier to splinters, taking away each of the slips and even knocking down most of the pilings. She had tom through the big sign he had erected facing the Atlantic — WELCOME TO COSTIGAN’S MARINA, and then had extended her welcome into the marina office itself, destroying it completely. Undiminished, unwearied, she had ripped the sides off three of Luke’s sleeping units and shattered the windows and tom the shingles off all the others. Luckily he had moved his customers’ boats northeast to Windley Key and into Snake Creek the moment he had heard the first advisory. They, at least, had been saved.
His insurance, he knew, would cover only part of his investment.
For the first time since 1944, he was filled with an overboiling sense of unfairness, a choking self-pity that bordered on rage. For the first time since he had been wounded, he came very close to accepting himself as a cripple who just could not make a go of it, the hell with it, the bloody goddamn rotten hell with it.
He kept staring at the debris floating offshore.
I could sell the derrick hoist, he thought. I could get maybe thirty-five thousand for it, less than I paid, but at least I’d be able to settle with the bank.
When Luke Costigan discovered Ocho Puertos in 1961, it was a community of seven beachfront houses on the southern side of the island and one larger house on the northern side. In addition, the community could boast of a diner owned and operated by one of the charter residents, a man named Lester Parch. Luke decided at once that it would be a good spot for a marina. The waters just off Spanish Harbor were full of amberjack and wahoo, king mackerel and yellowtail. Up north toward Bahia Honda Channel, and among the myriad small keys dotting Florida Bay, were tarpon and red snapper, muttonfish and trout. In the Gulf Stream you could expect to pull sailfish or bonita, Allison tuna or dolphin. Luke knew the fish were plentiful; the thing he did not know was whether he could persuade anyone to leave a boat at a small marina on an essentially isolated key. He hoped that he could. He asked the bank for another loan, and they gave it to him.
The new marina was nothing pretentious, but at least it was a beginning. His pier had only thirty-five slips, back-in slips at that, no sleeping facilities, and only a small travel lift. There were three Esso pumps at the end of the pier (two for gasoline, one for Diesel fuel) and also a sign identical to the one that had dominated the marina entrance in Islamorada. WELCOME TO COSTIGAN’S MARINA. The welcome included fuel and docking facilities, as well as the limited amount of marine supplies (lights, flags, bolts, pumps, horns) he carried in the small store behind his office. In addition, there was a locker where he hoped to store boat covers and batteries for his customers, a men’s room and a ladies’ room, a Coke machine alongside the marina office, a machine selling block ice and ice cubes, a telephone booth, and the long repair shop with its big overhead doors where he would work on his customers’ boats. That was it. He watched it rise on the edge of the ocean with a feeling of pride and determination; he would not let this bastard life kick him around and make him the cripple he never was and never wanted to be.
Samantha came into the office the week after the new marina opened for business. It had been in construction for close to six months, but he had never seen her before, and he was surprised when she told him she lived there, fourth house on the beach, right between Stern and Ambrosini.
“I inherited it,” she said. “From my mother, when she died.” She paused. “Do you like it here?”
“Yes,” he said. “Very much.”
“So do I.” She paused. “I’ve got ten cats,” she said. “I have to feed them every day of the week, twice a day. I’m running out of money.” She paused again. “I need a job.”
“I can’t hire anybody right now,” Luke said.
“I wouldn’t expect you to pay me much in the beginning.”
“I couldn’t pay you anything.”
“Okay,” she said. “It’s a deal.”
“Look, Miss...”
“Watts,” she supplied. “Sam. Well, really Samantha.”
“I just don’t need any help.”
“If you start getting customers, you will.”
“I haven’t got a single boat yet.”
“You’ll get them. It’ll be too late then to set up an office system.”
“What do you know about office systems?”
“I used to work for a savings and loan company in St. Pete before my mother died.” She paused. “I know how to run an office. Also, I know most of the boat captains in the area. Once you get going, you’ll need charter boats for fishing parties.”