Captain Felix said to me, “He says we all have to help sink the boat, ’cause that way no one will talk. Every single one of us has to have a hand in it. We’ve already pulled her onto the canoe trail, out of sight, so the live-aboards won’t know.”
“If we don’t all hang together, we’ll all surely hang separately,” Mack said, paraphrasing the famous Benjamin Franklin quote.
Jeth appeared stricken. “Jesus Christ, they can still hang you for stealing shit from a police depa-pah-partment?”
Mack calmed him with a look and a gesture before adding, “I’ve already locked the marina gate, so there’s no chance of any outsiders coming around. What I suggest you gents do is take axes, crowbars-” He pointed to the repair shop. “We’ve got all the tools right here. Knock plenty of holes in the hull. Take out all the flotation and fuel, then plug the holes with something temporary.”
Puffing on the cigar, he looked at me. “Rags, maybe? Old life jackets? Whatta you think, Doc?”
Sounding calm, but a little helpless, too, Captain Felix said, “He wants us to do it tonight before the moon gets up too bright. Tell him he’s crazy, Doc. Steal the freaking police department’s boat? Jesus, what are we going to say if we get caught?”
Mack, all the guides, everyone was looking at me. Under any other circumstances, in any other mood, I would probably have used some gradual, delicate line of reasoning so that Mack would finally decide for himself that it wasn’t a good idea. But it wasn’t a normal circumstance, and I was in anything but a normal frame of mind.
I looked at my watch-I could spare a little time before checking e-mails and meeting Tomlinson. Plus, I was aware, on some subtle level of consciousness, that this was a good thing for me to be doing; a healthy diversion, interacting with the marina family. Earlier, as I’d driven past the party the Jensen brothers were hosting, I’d thought about how emotional trauma distorts our normal orbit. But now the strong, not-so-normal gravitational power of Dinkin’s Bay was pulling me back into line again.
To Mack, I said, “What I don’t understand is, we get along fine with the police. They’re a good bunch, from the top right on down. It doesn’t have anything to do with-”
“It’s not the uniforms,” he interrupted. “It’s the bloody bean-counters. The suits. It’s not the cops themselves.”
“How many months are they late?”
“Eight, if you count May. And I think I will.”
I said, “You’ve tried all the formal steps to try and get them to pay?”
Nodding, Mack replied, “They enjoy making me jump through their bloody little hoops. They could pay. The bean-counters know they should pay. But I can’t sue ’em, and the bastards know that, too. So when they come lookin’ for their boat, I’m gonna say I don’t know what happened to it, and I don’t care. That boat stopped being my responsibility when they stopped payin’.”
I looked from Jeth to Felix to Dave. I felt more like myself than I’d felt in days, yet what I said to them was way out of character: “Guys, I can’t believe I’m saying this, and I know you never expected it. But Mack’s right. Let’s go sink that son-of-a-bitch.”
A few minutes before moonrise, I ran my 21-foot Maverick flats skiff past Woodring Point, the big 225-horsepower Merc blasting a platinum rooster tail toward the stars as I ran throttle-heavy toward the pocket of lights that marked the marina. I left the channel at Green Point, just before the old fish house ruins, touching the jack plate toggle to raise the engine, then increased trim and steered straight toward my lab, running fifty miles an hour across the flat in two feet of water, sometimes less, sometimes more.
As I expected, Tomlinson was in the house waiting on me. His dinghy was tied up next to my 24-foot trawl boat, the old cedar plank netter I bought in Chokoloskee and use for dragging up specimens. The moon was already so bright that I could read the words SANIBEL BIOLOGICAL SUPPLY painted on the stern.
As I tied my skiff, he called from inside, “I was about to give up on you. Or come looking. Since we met, I can’t remember you ever being late before.”
I called back, “I’ll be right up. Help yourself to a beer.”
“I’ve already helped myself to three. I’m doing the fifteen-minute dosage tonight. But thanks anyway.”
He meant a beer every fifteen minutes.
I ignored the urge to hose and flush my skiff, and the guilt that went with ignoring maintenance, and went upstairs, taking the wooden steps two at a time. Tomlinson was in the galley, kneeling at the little refrigerator when I came in. He looked at me for a moment, then looked again, his expression a mix of surprise and uneasiness… but then the uneasiness changed to unexpected relief.
“Holy shitskee, what happened to you?”
I looked at my arms, looked at my legs, and saw that I was streaked with gray marl, bits of turtle grass, and that my shorts and shirt were a mess of mud and shell. There was some blood involved, too.
Stripping off my shirt, I said, “Have you ever tried to sink a boat? Intentionally, I mean. I had no idea, but it’s damn near impossible. You know that cheap tri-hull runabout the cops use sometimes? It’s like a damn floating vampire. It just won’t die.”
Tomlinson grinned-oh yeah, he was very relieved that I’d provided some amusing way to neutralize the discomfort between us. The fact was, I was glad, too. But I also wondered if, after this meeting, there would ever be an easy moment between us again.
After he’d assured me that Pilar hadn’t heard anything new from the kidnappers or from Lake, Tomlinson asked, “You were intentionally trying to sink the police department’s boat? Why? ”
I explained the reason, and then how we’d gone about trying to sink the thing, as I changed into dry clothes-I’d shower later, after checking my e-mails. Just because they hadn’t contacted Pilar didn’t mean that I hadn’t been sent a note.
We’d knocked holes in the runabout’s hull, I told him. We’d removed all the foam flotation-or so we thought. We plugged the holes with old life jackets and rags, then connected all the plugs with a complex network of fishing line so that we could remove all the plugs with a single yank.
I said, “We towed it out into about ten feet of water near the mouth of the bay-you know the spot. When we pulled the plugs, the damn boat filled halfway up and wouldn’t sink any farther.”
We’d spent the next forty minutes hacking, chopping, and then finally, with all of us in the water, physically trying to stomp and pull the hull under.
“The guides are still out there. When I left, the tri-hull was sitting with its bow out of the water, just high enough so you could still see the Sanibel Police Department reflector stencil from, oh, say, no less than a quarter-mile away. I thought Jeth was going to start bawling, he was so upset. But then he got caught under the boat’s stern somehow and nearly drowned, and that seemed to calm him right down.”
I was tucking in my shirt, hurrying toward the computer in my lab as I added, “The last I heard, they were sending a skiff back to the marina to load up that old stove that’s piled with the storage junk. How they’re going to fit a stove on a fishing skiff, I don’t know. But the plan is to shove the stove off onto the deck of the police boat, and the weight of the stove is supposed to take it under. You know, finally kill the bastard. A stove through the heart.”
Tomlinson and I were both laughing as I sat at the computer and began the process of signing on to AOL. But then I stopped laughing and turned to look at him, suddenly serious. “You know something, Tomlinson? Even with all the crap that’s going on in my life, I realized something tonight. Just hanging out with the guides, doing something as idiotic as trying to sink a stolen boat, it reminded me. We’ve got great lives here. Dinkin’s Bay’s a great little place. A bunch of fun people who don’t take life too seriously, but with enough fabric and character to give a damn. To know that other people’s lives matter. Plus, they really seem to care about us.”