Shark River (4 page)

I jogged down the highest hill through a grove of citrus trees, limbs heavy with tangerines and little yellow Spanish limes, then north along the beach. Ran past rows of modern vacation homes that were careful imitations of tin-roofed Cracker houses, and so thereby emphasized their newness. Where the pink sidewalk looped and ended, I cut toward the bay side of the island, picking up the pace as my lungs seemed to expand and become more efficient.

Guava Key once had a grass airstrip on the narrow, southern point of the island, but it had been recently closed and platted for building. On an island where property values are astronomical, a half-mile strip of open land was an impossible indulgence. I turned south on the strip, running hard on the straightaway. On either side was mangrove fringe. Through hedges of black limbs, I could see patterns of shadow and light and the brassy gold of water at sunset.

At the very tip of the island, ahead of me but not yet in sight, was a canal for small boats and a boardwalk that wound through the trees to a dock. It is the only deserted part of the island. No houses, no golf cart trails, too many mosquitoes for foot traffic. Yet, I knew that if I followed the boardwalk to the dock, I would find the girl joggers I’d seen earlier, the two of them standing there, cooling down from their run, watching the sunset.

I also knew from our few previous encounters that the blonde’s greeting would be slightly cheerier, more inviting than Ponytail’s grim nod.

I am reluctant to impose on anyone’s solitude, so I’d decided to do what I’d done for the last two evenings: turn around at the boardwalk, thereby avoiding the women.

But, as I ran, something happened that caused me to change my mind. Nothing dramatic. It was a very small thing, indeed. What happened was, ahead of me and to my right, a flock of parrots flushed out of the mangroves, screaming and cawing their way into clumsy flight. Parrots aren’t indigenous to Florida. Birds escape, meet, breed, reproduce, then tumble around in groups like feral outlanders. From my years in Central and South America, however, I am very familiar with the warning alarm that parrots make, and that was the sound I heard as the birds flushed.

Someone or something was in those mangroves.

Not that I suspected anything sinister. I have an orderly mind that naturally seeks explanation for the unexplained. This was an oddity, a small incident that did not mesh with the expected pattern of cause and effect. A mangrove fringe is an inhospitable area. Those swampy borders stink of muck and sulfur. They’re a breeding ground for mosquitoes. People avoid mangroves for good reason.

So what had spooked the birds?

As I approached the boardwalk, still running, I heard a voice call, “’Scuse me, mister big man. Hello? Could you maybe give me some information?” A female voice with the breezy, singsong rhythm of the Bahamas. When she said “maybe,” I heard “maw-be.” When she said “big man,” I heard “beeg mon.”

I glanced to see a tall, coffee-brown woman pulling a canoe up onto the bank of the little canal. Late twenties, early thirties, wading-bird legs, heavy breasts without bra that swooped and strained, defining themselves. She wore a tie-dyed T-shirt, scarlet and blue, over canvas shorts that emphasized her legs and muscular rump. I noted that her hair was braided cornrow-style with red beads at the ends and her gaunt, chocolate-colored skin stretched tight over athletic cheeks, bones, and jaw. A striking figure.

I held up an index finger—“Back in a minute!”—and mounted the boardwalk, ducking beneath mangrove limbs, feeling my own weight in the vibration of wood.

The boardwalk tunneled through the mangrove fringe for more than fifty meters, then made a sharp right toward the bay. When I made that turn, I saw what had frightened the parrots. I also knew immediately that the two runners, Blonde and Ponytail, were headed for a very nasty fall. Not that they realized it. Nope, not yet, and not surprising. Targets who are about to become victims seldom see it coming.

Ahead of me, the boardwalk became a low dock on pilings that poked a couple hundred feet out into the bay. The girls were at the end of the dock, leaning against the railing, faces toward the parachute-sized sphere that was the setting sun. The sky was a lucent indigo streaked with citrus and peach. The bay was glazed with molten gold.

Between the shore and the girls were two men. The men were walking toward the end of the dock, backs to me. Each wore blue coveralls, the legs of the coveralls showing fresh mud stains up to the calves.

They’d just waded through the mangroves, flushing birds.

Another telltale indicator: Both men also wore ski masks.

Except for 7-Eleven clerks and the occasional bank teller, we don’t see a lot of ski masks in Florida.

My first reaction was surprise: damn! Then, as my brain translated the visual data, my reaction changed to: oh-h-h-h-h
damn,
because some kind of involvement was now impossible to avoid.

The men had some bulk to them and moved with a disconcerting confidence. One carried some kind of semiautomatic pistol in his left hand, the bottle-sized sound arrestor pointed downward, as if to hide it. The other man carried what looked to be a walkie-talkie or cell phone. On the south side of the dock, the yellow Scarab hull was idling in for a landing, its engines making a slow, thunderous rumble. It looked to be pretty close to thirty feet long and had the Wellcraft logo on the side. The other boat sat off several hundred yards, as if waiting to see what happened.

In panic situations where events unfold rapidly, the brain sometimes processes those events in what seems to be slow motion. That was the way my brain now reacted. It was as if I were viewing a film run at half-speed. My eyes suddenly enjoyed absolute clarity in which I seemed to see everything at once, interpreting and understanding what was happening and why.

Clarity is not always an aspect to be envied.

What I saw were professionals who’d done their homework. It is what the really good ones must do to succeed and survive. They learn their target’s habits, their target’s routes.

There’s a very good reason for that.

All routes have a chokepoint—a section of road or walkway the target
must
take to reach his or her final destination. The most suitable chokepoints also possess a contained area that can be easily sealed and controlled by the assassin or his accomplices. That precise place where the hit will be made is known to people in the business as the X-spot.

What I had stumbled into was an attempt to murder or to kidnap one or both of the women runners. The shooter would shoot, confirm his kill, then escape in the yellow boat. Or the men would wrestle one or both of the girls into the boat, transport them at speed to another vessel or waiting car, kidnapping complete.

The second yellow boat could be there to serve as a decoy in the event someone gave chase, or as a backup. The boats were stolen, of course. Choosing Mercury test boats suggested a level of professional sophistication that was unsettling. They were fast boats but a part of the common seascape, boats that always followed the same Intracoastal route, so very easy to anticipate, track, and take down.

Steal a couple high-performance boats, then abandon them when done. That was probably the plan. The actual escape vehicle would be nearby, a boat or a car on some island or maybe a chopper.

Unfortunately, in those few moments of clarity, I didn’t process the wisest course of action. Charge into a group of armed men who were being assisted by other men, who were, presumably, also armed?

Suicidal.

I should have turned, tucked my tail, and lumbered off to the nearest phone.

My instincts are usually pretty good. Not this time, though. This time, my poor judgment nearly got me killed.

 

 

The engines of the boat now lying aside the dock were rumbling at idle, the vibration so loud that it radiated through water and wood. The noise masked the sound of my heavy feet.

There was another man in the Scarab, standing at the helm, his face covered by a bandana. Three men in all, two on the dock, one aboard, and their attention was laser-focused on the women who were their targets.

That was encouraging. It seemed to give me the extra few steps I believed I needed.

The women had finally noticed the approaching men. I could see the expression on Blonde’s face change from surprise to puzzlement and then to fear when she correctly interpreted the only reason why men would wear ski masks in the late winter heat. I saw Ponytail’s expression change from indifference to an emotion that may have been anger. Her reaction certainly wasn’t passive.

As always, Ponytail was wearing a gray belly pouch strapped around her waist. I watched her reach into the pouch with her right hand as she threw her left hand up, palm out as if to hold the men away. Heard her yell, “Freeze! No closer!” as she drew a chrome, short-barreled revolver from the pouch, probably a .38, crouching as she lifted the weapon into the classic combat position.

Surprise, surprise. The lady jogger was armed.

I was sprinting now, seeing everything in articulate, slow detail as it happened. I watched the man with the big semiautomatic raise his pistol in the same instant. Watched his left hand bounce with the recoil of firing. Heard two distinct
th-h-wap-waps
as Ponytail’s revolver flew high into the air then banged its weight upon the deck. I expected her to fall, but she didn’t. I expected to see blood, but there was none. The woman wasn’t hit. She was stunned, probably, and spasmed by shock.

There was no way the shooter could miss at that distance, so he’d fired intentional warning shots. The scene provided me with inductive information. The attackers weren’t assassins. They were kidnappers. Or maybe the shooter had simply suffered a moment of indecision. It’s not like the films and cheap television shows. Squeezing a trigger exacts a price. For most people, it’s not easy to initiate the destruction of a breathing complexity never better defined than by the look of terror in a stranger’s eyes.

Unfortunately, I know that truth better than most.

The shooter, though, was reconsidering.

I watched him swing the sausage barrel toward Ponytail’s face. Heard Blonde screaming, “Don’t hurt her! Don’t hurt her!” as he leaned slightly as if to fire again, but then hesitated, perhaps hearing me for the first time. I was only a few strides behind him and pushing a lot of air ahead of me as I sprinted.

Both men began to turn slightly. I got a glimpse of dark eyes through holes in the ski masks. Both sets of eyes grew wide just before I impacted, running low and hard, generating a lot of torque. I hit the shooter in the lower back with my right shoulder. I heard a sickening sound, like a green limb snapping, and he screamed as I drove through him. Caught the second man with my legs as I tumbled past in a cross-body block. Heard him give a whoop of pain as he went down.

My glasses went flying when I hit the dock hard with my shoulder. I rolled, and came up on my feet, already in mid-stride, face-to-face with the two now-blurry women. They were still frozen, not understanding any of it, standing there, letting it happen.

I heard two lightning-bolt explosions—gunshots from a different weapon. No sound arrestor, and a volume of air sizzled past my left ear. I ducked reflexively as I caught Blonde in my left arm, Ponytail in my right, lifting them off the dock, still running. I’d hoped to tumble with them over the railing at the end of the dock, but great balance is not one of my gifts. Instead, I caught my shoe on something, stumbled badly, still holding the women, and crashed back-first through the dock’s side railing, all of us smacking into the water, splinters of wood showering down from above.

As I surfaced, I heard one of the men yell in Spanish, “Shoot him but don’t kill the girl!” which is why I pulled both women to me, forcing them underwater, all of us sinking to the bottom.

Blonde struggled. Ponytail was muscle-tight but still. She seemed to understand.

The water was murky with diatom bloom. I had to guess the direction and the distance to the dock. My feet found the muck bottom and I pushed away hard.

I misjudged the distance badly and smacked face-first into a barnacled piling. We all surfaced at once.

I was aware of men yelling in Spanish. I heard another lightning-bolt explosion as I grabbed each of the women by the back of the neck and pushed them beneath the dock, out of sight. I said into Ponytail’s ear, “Stay under the dock, get back to shore. Run!”

The woman looked at me, a streak of blood on her cheek. She nodded, didn’t hesitate, pulled the blonde after her, already moving from piling to piling.

I had to create a diversion, had to keep the three men occupied, to give the women time to find their way to the mangroves and escape.

And then what?

Look into the barrel of some indifferent weapon and experience the final white flash?