Blaine restrained him with a grasp on his forearm. “Just point me in the right direction. I’ll get the equipment somewhere else.”
The man shook his head, half to say no and half to show his disbelief. “You wanna die that much, mister, I got a shotgun right here under the counter. Put you out of your misery real fast.”
“I’d rather let the Dragon Fish do it. That would make my vacation.”
The man regarded him strangely. “You’re different from the others. I don’t know how, but you’re different.” He tried to hold his stare into Blaine’s black eyes but looked quickly away. “You just might be a match for the Dragon Fish, but don’t expect me to help you find him. Know someone who can, though. Name of Captain Bob. You’ll find him in Alice Town, at the End of the World bar.”
“The name’s symbolic, I assume.”
“You go looking for that island, mister, and it might be more than a symbol.”
Blaine and Natalya took the hourly seaplane from South Bimini over to Alice Town and walked the brief stretch from the airfield to the End of the World bar in the center of town. They did not hesitate before entering but perhaps should have: the End of the World, even at this early morning hour, was two-thirds full with patrons, all of them locals. Many regarded the strangers with hostility as they made their way across the floor in the bartender’s direction.
“We’re looking for Captain Bob,” Blaine told him.
“What’d you want him for?”
“Got a job for him.”
“Captain Bob’s kind of retired.”
“Like to charter his boat.”
“It’s drydocked.”
“Just like its owner,” came a voice from the rear of the bar. Blaine turned and saw a flabby black man with a graying Afro pouring a water glass full of bourbon. “Wet docked would be a better way of putting it in my case, though.” His golfball-sized eyes, the whites creased with brownish-red streaks, turned toward the bartender. “Let the kids come over here. Maybe they’ll buy me a drink.”
McCracken slid a twenty-dollar bill across the bar. “Give me another bottle of whatever he’s drinking.”
“Cost you two of those.”
“Steep,” Blaine returned and reached into his pocket.
“You’re paying for the atmosphere.”
McCracken grasped the bottle by the neck and moved toward the old man’s booth, with Natalya right behind. Too much booze had made Captain Bob’s age indistinguishable.
“If you wanna join me, you’ll have to get your own glasses,” he greeted.
“No thanks,” said Blaine, sliding into a chair.
“What about the lady?”
“Too early in the day for me,” Natalya told him.
“Yeah,” said Captain Bob in what seemed to be the local accent, “me too. Too early in the day but too late in life to worry about it much. Suppose I know why you’re here.”
“Somebody tell you to expect us?” Blaine wondered.
“Didn’t have to. People like you come around regular enough. They heard of me somehow and, like you, they buy me a bottle. Then, like you’re going to, they leave disappointed.”
“We haven’t asked you anything yet,” said Natalya.
“Don’t have to. Questions is always the same. Usually they pulls out a map and offers me a fee to point out what they’re looking for. If I likes ’em, I just says no. If I doesn’t, I sends ’em in the wrong direction. Either way they makes out ahead ’cause they stays alive. ’Course that’s not the way they sees it. They comes here to get rich, they figures, and I’m keeping ’em from it.”
“We’ve come to charter your boat,” Natalya told him.
“For a guided tour of the surrounding islands,” Blaine added.
Captain Bob looked surprised. “Well, that’s a new one. Usually I doesn’t come included in the deal. People is usually too smart to bother asking me. They figures with everything I know, I doesn’t need partners.”
“We’re not here to make our fortunes, Captain,” Blaine told him with as much conviction as he could muster.
Captain Bob studied him briefly. “No, I doesn’t suppose you are. You isn’t like the rest, not as demanding but a hell of a lot more desperate. What you’s after’s got little to do with yourselves, I’d wager.”
“It’s got to do with us all right and with you too and with the whole goddamn world.”
“There’s something out there we’ve got to bring back,” Natalya added. “Millions of lives are at stake.”
“You’s a pretty good actress, little lady.”
“The part’s real.”
“I’ve got a map here,” Blaine said, fishing through his jacket pocket. “Just point us in the right direction. You’ll be paid well for the effort.”
“Like I says, it ain’t the money. If it was, I could be a rich man without puttin’ up with the bullshit that walks through the door here. And I can’t just point you in the right direction ’cause the reef formations tear the bottom of your boat out ‘less you know by heart where they lie.”
“Our first choice is to have you come with us,” Blaine reminded him.
“And I can’t do that neither. Ain’t been back that way for a couple years now when the last of the island folk pulled up stakes. Won’t find any of ’em left in these parts. They just up and vanished. I’s the last one left, far as I know. Don’t know enough to move along. Guess a man oughtta die where he got himself born, ’cept I was born on the …”
“The island?” Natalya finished for him.
“Raised there, anyway,” Captain Bob told her. “Ain’t much to the island ‘sides the lighthouse. My daddy first and then me manned it, sweeping that big light to warn ships away from the reef and the shallows. Them waters been a graveyard for ships longer than any of us can possibly imagine. Goes all the way back to Spanish galleons with enough gold pieces still in their hull to buy Miami. Plenty of people tried salvagin’ them and died for the effort even before …” Captain Bob’s voice tailed off, then picked up again. “Worst times started with the quake. That’s what stirred the Dragon Fish awake most in these parts figure.”
“Quake?”
“Sea quake, friend. Awful bad one too, shifted the undersea formations all over the goddamn place. Things that’d been unreachable for centuries suddenly rose. Vast treasures the eyes of man was never meant to see again. Floods of people started streaming into the waters, challenging the reefs, once again. Most never made it. Them that did, well, the Dragon Fish took care of them while they was tied up at night, sometimes during the day, too. Thing come up from the depths with the hunger of centuries. Fishermen was the first to disappear, my two sons among them. I used to sit in my boat at night with a harpoon hoping the Dragon Fish would surface. Never thought I could kill it but I had to try. But it never appeared. So I gave up and moved off the island.” Captain Bob paused. “Become sort of a pact throughout the Biminis that the island just don’t exist, plain and simple, but once in awhile people like you come round knowin’ that it does.”
Blaine assimilated Captain Bob’s story. “This sea quake, would it have occurred about five years ago?”
“Yup, that would be about right, though the years ain’t meant much to me for too long now.”
McCracken turned to Natalya. “Professor Clive said seismic changes in the Earth’s crust forced the Atragon crystals up from where nature had stored them for centuries. That sea quake fits perfectly into the scenario. They’re out there, all right.”
“If there are any left,” Natalya said. “Vasquez could have been a very busy man.”