The Heat Islands: A Doc Ford Novel (2 page)

Ford cut in. saying, "Hey—hey!" giving it a genial touch, waiting for the guides to exchange glares and settle themselves before he said. "I can take care of things here. Maybe you ought to get back to fishing."

"Yeah—Doc's right. Let's get the hell back to work." Ford said. "But I wouldn't mention Rios's name on the radio. He has a wife, and the authorities ought to be the ones to tell her. Mention on the radio he's dead, the whole island will know in an hour."

Nodding, Captain Dalbert said. "Good news docs travel fast," and started his engine.

Ford watched the six boats wheel away slowly, then faster, fanning into formation toward Lighthouse Point, his own boat and the late Marvin Rios bobbing in their wakes. On the radio, from miles away. Captain Felix was saying, "It's not like you'd have to use your hands, Nels. I don't want you touching no dead people."

Silence.

Captain Felix again: "We going to sit around fat, dumb, and baitless, with no tarpon in sight?"

Static and silence.

"You want me to beg, Nels, I'll beg! I need
ammo.
man. I need surefire tarpon-catching crabs. So how about you dip those little darlings out with a net...."

The sheriff's deputy said, "I've seen a lot of drownings, but I don't think this guy drowned."

Ford, anchored now, sat and listened to the deputy while watching the five-man Coast Guard team in their blue ball caps, blue fatigues, and bright orange life jackets try to wrestle the body of Marvin Rios onto the flush deck of their thirty-foot cruiser. The sheriff s deputy, who had rafted up in the department's gray twenty-five-foot Mako, talked right along, leaning over the stern to help when he could.

The deputy said, "A person who's drowned usually has a lot of white stuff around his nose and mouth. Like a kinda foam. And when they've been in the water awhile, they get something like that all over them. But I forget the name of it."

Ford thought
adipocere.
but said nothing.

The deputy said, "Like a kind of jelly."

Grunting with effort, one of the Coasties said to the deputy, "Hey, knock it off. You trying to make us sick? Grab his legs and lift if you want to help. We got a softball game this afternoon."

The deputy said, "It's just that I've seen a lot of them, that's all. This guy didn't drown ... but, jeez, he's
stiff.
huh?"

Ford had sat at anchor in the Mud Hole, just off Ding Darling Sanctuary, for nearly an hour waiting for the Coast Guard to arrive. He had switched his radio to channel 22 so that he could talk to the cruiser's helmsman and direct him in. While he waited, he checked the anemones in the bait well, and he neatened up his skiff, and he watched the surface for rolling tarpon.

He saw several rays break the water, their wings cutting the surface like sharks. And he saw a cobia cruise by, its dorsal fin wagging back and forth in synch with each slow tail thrust.

Mostly he avoided looking at the body that tumbled slowly in the now-strong outgoing tide, fifteen feet off the back of his boat.

He saw no tarpon.

Ford had met Marvin Rios only once: a small man with bitter blue eyes, elevator shoes, and a driving insolence that projected the daily war he waged on life and the people around him. The previous January. Ford had attended Rios's annual New Year's Eve party, open to the whole island. But, with Rios watching from the shadows, the party was less like a celebration than a way of exacting tribute, and Ford hadn't stayed long.

For Rios. Ford guessed, wealth was a sophisticated scorecard, a casualty list of enemies. He had made a fortune on island real estate and kept his hands in various developments and investment ventures; then, two years ago. he built an extravagant marina and restaurant at Two Parrot Bight.

Two Parrot Bight was a paw of land that created a small harbor midway between Dinkin's Bay and Sanibel Marina near the toll bridge to the mainland. According to local folklore, the bight had been named years before by fishermen who noticed a pair of parrots, presumably feral, nesting in a gumbo limbo, and which squawked madly at any osprey or fish crow or fisherman who came near.

Rios had taken the name for his marina, a marina that was instantly successful—not because Rios was liked, or respected, or gave fair dollar service, but because dockage was hard to find on the islands. People had to moor their boats somewhere and, since the other marinas were always backlogged. Two Parrot Bight was the only alternative.

It was getting that way all over Florida. A marina didn't have to be good. No matter how surly the management, no matter how inept the mechanics—if the place offered docks and sold gas, it flourished.

What Ford knew about Rios, he had learned from the fishing guides. There were three fishing guides at Dinkin's Bay Marina, several at Sanibel Marina, and three guides at Parrot Bight. All of them detested Rios because they were his prime targets for abuse: a small man who took real joy in bullying bigger men. Ford had heard about Rios humiliating his guides in front of their fishing clients, screaming that if they didn't like the rules at
his
marina, they should take their boats and get the hell out. But the Parrot Bight guides—Dalbert Weeks and Javier Castillo—could not get out, because the guide slots at the other marinas were filled. They had no options. But they did have families, mortgages, and boat payments. So they endured, allowing this tiny man to abuse them.

The deputy said to Ford, "You say you knew this guy?" Ford looked up from the anemones in the bait well. "I knew of him."

The deputy was writing on a pad now while the Coasties took photographs and went through Rios's pockets. "He have any family? Someone we should call?"

"He had a wife."

"And you say he manages Parrot Bight, the marina over there. I mean managed. Past tense, right?"

Ford said, "Owned and managed, I think. Oh yeah, he's got a brother-in-law. A guy named Sutter who's kind of a fishing guide. More family. Karl Sutter."

Holding Rios's billfold, one of the Coasties gave a low whistle. "There's more than two grand here. Fifties and hundreds. If money floated, this guy'd be alive right now." Water was draining out of Rios's pants, small rivulets losing momentum and draining across the deck into the scuppers. A wedge of distended belly showed beneath the dark shirt. In the water, his skin had appeared white. But now, lying on the white deck, his face and hands were the color of wet clay; his eyes black holes in bloated flesh: a soggy thing, swelling in the heat like road kill.

The deputy said, "Whata you mean, kinda a Ashing guide? Like he just does it part time?"

Ford said. "Karl Sutter? I don't know much about him, either; Sutter or Rios. Anything I tell you would be third-or fourth-party hearsay."

But Ford had heard a lot about Rios's in-law. Karl Sutter, too.

A little more than a year ago, Rios had brought in Sutter as head guide, which meant that, each day, he was the first captain to be booked. Traditionally, the position was given to the most senior guide and, to add to the outrage. Sutter was a bumbling failure as a fisherman. Yet only the guides and a few experienced fishermen recognized the man for the incompetent he was. New tourists to the island, interested in a day's fishing, naturally gravitated to the biggest marina. Two Parrot Bight. And, as neophytes, they naturally wanted to fish in the biggest, newest boat—Sutter's. And when they met Sutter, who was an innate con man and, by all accounts, an outrageous liar, they willingly plunked down the sizable chunk of money it took to go out.

This hurt all of the guides, because novice anglers who fished once with Sutter would never want to fish the area again Probably never fish with a guide again. Nor would their friends. And Sutter, who rarely caught anything, shifted the blame by complaining bitterly about his clients' lack of skill.

As Jeth Nicholes, the stuttering guide from Dinkin's Bay Marina, told Ford, "You know how some people get a creepy feeling when they see a sna-na-na-ake? That's the way I feel when I'm round Rios and Sutter. There's something ain't right 'ba-ba-bout them. Like a sickness. And I'm the kinda guy who gen'rally likes snakes."

As an interested outsider. Ford had listened to these stories over the past year, gauging the growing disgust with Rios and Sutter. He suspected that at least some of the horror stories had profiled from too much beer and too many days on the water, stories exaggerated by the guides to better illustrate the hatred they felt. But the hatred was real. Ford was sure of that. Just as he was sure that it would somehow, some way, come to a head.

Now perhaps it had. Rios was dead.

The deputy asked, "Was his brother-in-law one of the guides who found him?"

Ford said, "No," and named the guides who had discovered the body, then gave the marinas where they could be reached. "Sutter doesn't fish with the other guides," Ford said. "He's new."

"You know if the deceased has any history of heart problems, or high blood pressure? Any health problems? What is the guy. 'bout fifty-five? Not that old." The deputy was writing away, filling out a form, and Ford considered the deputy's hands for the first time: nails bitten on both hands, the habit of a nervous childhood. Slight pale band on the ringless ring finger of his left hand: separated from his wife within the last three months, the divorce probably already under way. Smoked cigarettes; had a few acne scars on his face, enough to suggest some tough teenage years; and, with those forceps marks on his temples, his mother had suffered while birthing him. The deputy. Ford judged, was twenty-six years into a difficult life, a guy who found refuge in his work.

"What?"

The deputy said, "I asked how old the guy was."

"His wife would know that."

The deputy said, "Male Caucasian." He stood on his toes to get another look at Rios. "Looks like that's a kinda cut on his head. Big slice. Under obvious injury." Then he said, "You know anyone who had a reason to dislike the deceased; hear anything recently about any problems?" Ford thought about Captain Dalbert asking where Jeth Nicholes was, mentioning an argument. He said. "You need to ask someone else. I do know that Rios was supposed to be at the start of a tarpon tournament this morning. He sponsored it at Parrot Bight. I was told he didn't show up."

The deputy said, "Oh, yeah—hey, right. The one with the big prize money. I heard about that. The one with the big entry fee. And this guy ran the show, huh?" He said to the Coast Guard. "We'll be on the news tonight, boys. We've got a solid citizen here."

One of the Coasties said. "Did you get Mr. Ford's number? We'll need it for our report." They had just tied a tarp over Rios's body, and Ford could see that they were anxious to get to their softball game. He didn't blame them. Wrestling a corpse on a clear Florida day leached a little sunlight from the air; added a mortal pale that forced a grim Sunday tint upon the morning.

Nodding and writing, the deputy said, "Way I see it, Mr. Rios here probably had a heart attack or a stroke and gave his head a whack when he fell in. You watch, I'll bet the medical examiner says the same. Dead before he hit the water." The deputy closed the stainless-steel folder that held his notepad. "That wraps it up for me."

Ford said, "I'm surprised to hear you say that."

The deputy said. "What?"

Ford said, "If Rios had a heart attack or a stroke, there's something missing."

The deputy waited.

One of the Coasties said, "You don't get it, do you? This guy didn't swim out here. And he sure didn't walk."

The deputy said, "Aw, man ..."

Ford said to the deputy, "You would have thought of it. Wondered how he got out here. ..

The deputy snapped his fingers, saying, "Unless he could'a floated. Like from an island. Drifted," and looking at them to see how this was accepted.

Ford was rubbing his chin with his fist, wondering if the drift and set of a corpse could be calculated.

But then the deputy said, "Never mind, never mind, I better do it. Go look for Mr. Rios's boat."

Ford banked his skiff through the cut at Woodring Point and into Dinkin's Bay, past the old Woodring house squatting in the shade where chickens scratched at the water's edge, feeding, it appeared, on dead fish that had washed ashore.

He reminded himself again to test the water sample he had taken for traces of red tide.

Ford followed the markers to Green Point, then cut behind the fish-house ruins. Pelicans and egrets flushed off the spoil islands, their wings laboring in the heat and heavy air, gaining slow altitude as their shadows panicked baitfish in the shallows.

Ford ran straight across the flats, but at reduced speed, concentrating on the water before him. It was an area often inhabited by manatee—huge, slow-moving mammals that cruised the shallow bottom, feeding on grasses and tunicates. Ahead was a tiny clearing; wooden buildings. a few cars, and docks: Dinkin's Marina. It was the only break in the great ring of mangroves that formed Dinkin's Bay.

Ford's house and lab were just a few hundred yards east of the marina, two weather-bleached cottages under a single tin roof, all built on stilts, and connected to shore by ninety feet of old boardwalk. At Ford's approach, his flat-bottomed trawl boat—the one he used for drag netting—swung idly on its mooring. The stern of the trawl boat read sanibel biological supply. As he tied off, he searched for Jeth Nicholes's boat among the cruisers and sailboats and skiffs docked in a line at the marina.

Jeth's slip was empty.

Using a bucket, Ford transferred the anemones to his fish tank. He planted them carefully on the sand bottom, stepping back to admire his own work.

He had built the fish tank on a reinforced seetion of the platform, using half of an old wooden cistern built like a whiskey barrel. Raw water was constantly drawn in by the Briggs pump housed onshore, aerated and clarified by a hundred-gallon upper reservoir and subsand filter, then sprayed as a mist into the main tank. The water in the tank was clear, two feet deep, and alive with snappers, shrimp, whelks and conchs, reef squid, sea squirts, and, a recent addition, four immature tarpon, all about a foot long.

Ford found the tarpon and watched them for a lime as the fish held nose-first into the current created by the aerator; thin bars of silver that seemed to create their own light.

He stood watching the tarpon, mentally trying to retrace his steps from the morning; trying to picture Jeth's dark-blue fishing boat, an old Suncoast.

Had Jeth's boat been at the dock when he left in his flats skiff?

Ford hadn't noticed.

Not that it was important. Jeth Nicholes was no murderer.

About 2 p.m., Ford heard someone yell to him from the boardwalk; someone coming up the ramp, calling, "Hey, Doc... yo. Ford!... ready to have your butt run into the ground?"

Ford was sitting beneath the roofed walkway that separated the stilt house's two rooms. He lived in one of the rooms. The other was his lab.

He was reading the new issue of
Copeia.
the Journal of the American Society of Ichthyology; taking notes and listening to Crosby. Stills, Nash and Young do "Guinnevere." Because he had lived in the stilt house without electricity for the first five months, the place was furnished half like a boat, half like a house, so his stereo was a Maxima marine with Micro 100 waterproof speakers. Not big wattage, but they handled CSN&Y just fine, diffusing the intricate chord patterns through the screen windows and screened door, spreading a soft mood.