Baja Florida (3 page)

She came out of it in stages. Sleeping, waking. Sleeping, waking. Not certain where one ended and the other began.

Her mouth was dry, crusty around the corners of her lips. Like when she was sixteen and had knee surgery after her cleats caught on the lacrosse field. Torn ACL. The anesthesiologist stuck a needle in her arm and told her to count backward from hundred. She'd made it to ninety-four.

And when she'd woken up it was like this. Woozy, nothing making sense. She half expected to see her mother standing at her bedside. She had always been there for her. Always.

She strained to see. Everything was black.

She tried to put thoughts together, hold on to something.

She hurt all over. Especially along the top of her back, the left side, by the shoulder blade. She remembered: A storm. Running to the foredeck, falling. And blood. Lots of blood.

And who was it? Will. Yes, Will. Dr. Will. Helping her down below, cleaning the wound, making her drink Absolut straight from the bottle as he stitched her up. And Pete, always the joker, saying, “Just like the cowboys would have done it. Here, pardner, take a belt of cranberry vodka.”

But that had been on the crossing, not long after they left Charleston. And other days had followed that.

And what? Then what?

The last thing she recalled: On the boat. Night. All of them sitting in the cockpit, having a good time. And then…and then things fell apart.

What she thought was:
Something happened, something bad, and now I'm at the hospital.

Only…

She couldn't see. Something was wrapped around her eyes.

A bandanna? What? Duct tape…

Must pull it off.

But she couldn't. Her hands, tied behind her. Her feet, they were tied, too.

That's when she screamed.

The deal that Barbara and I have going is that I do the grocery shopping and the cooking, and she does the cleaning up afterward. Which can be considerable. My
mise en place
is better described as me really messing up the place.

So when we were done with dinner, I got out of the way and headed down to the boat house with Shula. She was strapped in a baby sling, a papoose-style contraption that let her ride on my chest so she could face out and see everything I saw.

Time was when I would spot a father hauling his child around in a baby sling and think:
No way on God's good earth will you ever catch me wearing one of those things.

Then Shula came along. And I got soft in the head.

My office, such as it was, occupied the first floor of the boat house. I stepped inside, flipped on the light, looked around: Sofa, desk, refrigerator, rods and reels, cast nets, tackle boxes, outboard motor propellers, gas cans, motor oil, nautical charts, a couple of crab traps, scuba tanks, assorted flotsam and jetsam that I couldn't remember exactly how it got there or what I needed it for.

There wasn't any work that really needed doing in my office, but it gave me a sense of accomplishment to visit it occasionally, put in an appearance, let it know who was the boss.

Before long, I'd have company on the two floors above me. I wasn't sure exactly how many people would be making the move to the new Orb Communications headquarters. As many as twenty perhaps. Editors, an art director, and a couple of designers. Some accounting people, the circulation director, and an IT guy. Barbara ran a pretty bare-bones operation. The ad reps were scattered all over the place and telecom-muted mostly. Barbara farmed out the HR work.

Compared to the rest of the magazine business, which was in a fiery tailspin, Barbara's publications were holding their own. The flagship,
Tropics,
was a few pages thinner than in previous years, but circulation was steady and a loyal core of advertisers remained on board. Barbara had steered the company more in the direction of custom publishing for niche audiences. Quarterly in-room magazines for boutique hotel chains. Slick biannual publications for some high-end resorts and a couple of cruise lines. A few months before Shula's birth, she had made a trip back to London, met with some old college friends now in high places, and landed lucrative contracts for publishing the annual reports of several international corporations. She called it bottom-feeding, but it bulked up the cash flow. And there was enough hope in the future to constitute a capital investment in a new office atop the boat house.

Not all the staff was happy about leaving Winter Park. For those who'd be moving to Minorca Beach, Barbara was helping absorb the relocation costs. And for those who would be making the haul back and forth, she was leasing a couple of vehicles for carpooling and giving plenty of flex time. She was good to her people.

I was good to my people, too. I told him he had put in a long, hard day and it was time to knock off for the night.

“Thanks, boss,” I said.

Then I flipped off the office light, locked the door.

I walked Shula and me out on the dock and sat us down at the end, feet dangling over the water.

Shula cooed and made her little-girl, gurgly sounds. What ever she was saying, it was brilliant.

I cooed back and made gurgly sounds of my own. Yeah, totally soft in the head.

I sipped from the glass of rum I'd brought from the house. Flor de Caña. From Nicaragua. The twelve-year-old old stuff. My go-to brand of late. I sampled some more.

Drinking while daddying. Call the authorities.

The big lights that hung out over the end of the dock illuminated the water and I could spot shrimp after shrimp working their way in the falling tide. My Oak Hill Sock was close at hand. It's a tight-mesh dip net on a twelve-foot aluminum pole. The net funnels at the end and hangs down like a long tube sock. The shrimp stay put in there so you don't have to empty the net every time you catch one.

It was a pretty good run, a regular freeway full of shrimp, free for the plucking. There was lots of activity on the boats in the channel. But tonight I figured I'd let the shrimp live. Plenty of fun just to sit there and watch them.

Shrimp don't exactly swim. It's more like they do abdominal crunches in the water. They draw their tails toward their heads and then snap straight and it propels them along.

Which, thanks to the way shrimp are built, means they move through life ass-backward, never knowing exactly where they're going or what they might be getting themselves into.

Not that the metaphor for my life was identical to that of a lowly crustacean's, but there you have it.

I leaned over and nuzzled Shula. Gave her lots of kisses, rubbed my nose along the back of her neck. There's no smell quite like baby smell. Maybe it's the innocence seeping out.

Shula crooked her head and looked up at me. In her growing inventory of expressions, she was giving me a new one. It was a look that said:
Something's going on, I know it. What's bugging you anyway?

Women. You can't hide anything from them.

I held Shula close and we sat like that until she dozed off and I heard footsteps on the dock and Barbara sat down beside us. She put a hand on my knee and leaned against me, her head on my shoulder.

A mullet leaped and belly-flopped back into the water. Country music played from one of the boats in the channel. Barbara pointed at something in the night sky.

“Look,” she said. “A falling star.”

“Lightning bug.”

“Mmmm, you're right.”

“Don't sound so disappointed. Better to see lightning bugs these days than falling stars.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Lightning bugs are becoming extinct. Their numbers are down something like forty percent over the last decade. I read it somewhere.”

“Hmmm,” Barbara said.

“Urban sprawl. Fewer and fewer places where it gets truly dark anymore. Makes it tough for male lightning bugs to find female lightning bugs. Bottom line: No lightning bug babies.”

“I'm intimately familiar with how that works,” Barbara said.

“Meanwhile, there are more and more falling stars. Only most of them aren't really falling stars but what astronomers call orbital debris—space junk and chunks of dead planets. World's going to hell, the universe is crumbling around us.”

Barbara looked at me.

“In a bit of a funk, are we?”

I shrugged.

“It's not like you, Zack.”

I shrugged again.

Barbara sat up with a start, pointed overhead.

“Look, there goes another one,” she said. “Maybe that's the male lightning bug about to find his honey.”

“Maybe,” I said.

She snuggled beside me, tickled my ribs.

“You think when lightning bugs do it they shoot off sparks?”

I laughed.

“Hope so,” I said.

“You leave tomorrow?”

I nodded.

“Boggy going with you?”

I nodded again.

“Well, that makes me feel a little better.”

“Just a little?”

“A lot actually. Nothing the two of you can't handle.”

“Figure we'll head down to Miami first, have a few words with this detective who's giving Mickey the runaround. Any luck, he'll have some kind of a lead on where we might find Jen Ryser.”

“How old is she? Twenty-two, twenty-three?”

“Something like that,” I said.

“You know how it is when you're that age, Zack. Out spreading your wings, having a good time, oblivious to the rest of the world. You'll find her and be back home before we even knew you were gone.”

“Doesn't make leaving any easier,” I said.

She looked at me.

“And since when did you become Mr. Homebody? You haven't been anywhere in nearly six months, since Shula was born. Not like you to stay put for that long.”

“Guess I'm becoming domesticated.”

“You say it as if it were an infectious disease.”

“No, it's not like that at all. But…”

“But, but, but…” She shook her head. “Darling, you are a wonderful husband and an absolutely perfect and doting father, but you will never be wholly domesticated. It is not in your nature. So don't be frightened that it might be happening to you. It's a biological impossibility. And I love you ever the more for it.”

I started to say something, but she put up a hand to silence me.

“Please, I know that the gentleman in you feels it necessary to protest, feels it necessary to make me think that you are perfectly content to sit on your porch and oversee the construction and keep an eye on your business and…”

“Hasn't been much business, lately.”

“My point exactly,” Barbara said. “Inertia does not become you, Zack Chasteen. You are a creature of motion. Deep down inside you've been craving for something to come along that would require you to haul yourself out of house-husbandry and hit the road. That opportunity has now presented itself and you need not feel the least bit guilty about it.”

As always, she'd pegged me.

Barbara said, “Thing about us, Zack, we get along together. And we get along apart. Not everyone can say that.”

“I like the together better.”

“Me, too. But sometimes we need the apart to fully appreciate the together.”

“You saying you'll be glad to get rid of me?”

“No, I'm not saying that at all. But…”

“But what?”

She curled up against me.

“I won't mind having the bed all to myself when you're gone.”

“Is the bed really that crowded with me in it?”

She looked up. Something about her eyes. They swallowed me.

“Perhaps I'm mistaken,” she said. “Perhaps further research is required.”

“Perhaps we should go hop in that bed and conduct research of a collaborative nature.”

She gave my leg a squeeze.

“Perhaps, my ass,” she said.

Breathe in, breathe out. Stay calm. Try to figure out what's going on…

She lay on her side. Thin mattress on a narrow bed. Her legs hanging over the edge of it. Coarse blanket against her cheek.

She was on a boat. She knew that much.

She could feel it rocking gently, side to side. Like it was anchored somewhere. No slap-slap-slap of forward motion.

Not her boat. Because there was the odor of old bilge and diesel and mildew, and her boat, it didn't smell like that.

She was a fanatic about keeping her boat tidy. When they were provisioning, getting ready to leave Charleston, Karen had made fun of all the cleaning supplies she'd bought at Harris Teeter.

“Ya know, Jen, they
do
sell Clorox in the islands. And an entire case of teak oil? You think there's going to be a worldwide shortage while we're gone or something?”

Her boat didn't sound like this boat either. Her boat, she knew its creaks and groans. She'd lived on it for two months before they left, fell asleep each night listening to the clang of the halyards, the whine of the stays.

Her boat, it spoke to her. This boat did not.

She heard: Footsteps, from somewhere above, getting closer. A door sliding open.

A voice: “Well, well. If it's not Sleeping Beauty.”

Another voice: “Damn, it stinks down here. Look what she did to the blanket. What a mess.”

“The back of her T-shirt, it's all bloody.”

“Too bad Dr. Boy isn't here to take care of her.”

She recognized the voices.

“We need to get her out of those clothes, wash her down.”

“You'll like that, won't you?”

“Just shut up and help me.”

“We'll have to untie her first.”

“You untie her. I'll hold her. She's not going to put up a fight. Are you, Jen? Just be a good girl.”

She said, “Where are my friends?”

“Don't you worry about them, Jen. You just do what we tell you.”

She felt his hands upon her shoulders.

She tensed.

The other one untied her legs, her arms.

She waited.

Hands, his hands, pulling her T-shirt over her head and off.

Other hands unbuttoning her shorts…

She waited.

Yanking her shorts down…

And then she rolled, pulling both of them with her onto the floor. Landing a knee, hard, into the one beneath her. Her elbows jabbing ribs, soft flesh, anything.

Her blows had little strength behind them. Still, weak as she was, she managed to break free, scramble blindly across the floor.

They were on her in an instant, pinning her down.

“Bitch!”

A hard fist into the side of her head. Again and again.

Darkness…