The Water Keeper

by Charles Martin

  I liked this man. His honesty was disarming. “Mr. Pettybone, you call me whatever you like.”

  Chapter 13

  With no real cause to send him to the hospital other than the inevitable end no hospital could stop, the firemen sent us on our way. We returned to the marina bearing clothes, a book, a tail-wagging dog, and one dying old man. Fingers’ box stared up at me like a strobe light. He would have loved this. And he would have been laughing. While Clay was a big-boned man, he was also skinny. His clothes were baggy, and I wondered if he wasn’t more fragile than he let on. I turned to Summer and Clay. “Make yourselves comfortable. I’ll be right back.”

  They talked while I returned to the marina store and bought a waterproof beanbag made for boats and a large straw hat with a drawstring. I returned to the boat and wedged the beanbag in between the console seat and the front casting platform. “Clay, you might be most comfortable here.” He climbed down into the boat, sat in the middle of the beanbag, and accepted the hat from my hands. “I thought that might help with the sun.”

  “I’ll be just fine.”

  Summer was smiling at me as I cranked the engine. Letting it idle, I had a thought. Pulling out my phone, I sat in front of Clay and held up the picture of Angel. “You ever seen this girl?”

  Summer began walking toward us. Listening intently. Clay held the phone, studied her face, and nodded knowingly. He pointed toward the Intracoastal. “She’s on the boat. Name’s Angel.”

  Summer sat, and Clay noticed the resemblance. He studied her a minute. When he spoke, there was pain in his voice. “She yours?”

  Summer nodded.

  He sucked through his teeth again, afraid to say more. “I see.”

  She put a gentle hand on his arm. “What are you not telling me?”

  “They like her . . . a lot.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means—” He chose his words carefully. “They do a lot for her and she likes it on that boat.” He shook his head. “They’re not giving her any reason to leave.”

  I asked him to tell me everything he could about the captains, their patterns, the phone calls they made, who else was on the boat, if they’d made plans to stop at any other ports, and if he knew what boat they were on now.

  Barclay took his time and explained, in detail, everything he knew. People. Boats. Names. Places. Even what drinks people preferred. Drugs too. The two captains were of great importance to me, but he didn’t know much about them. They were European, or maybe Russian, and he described identifying tattoos. They kept him busy or buried in the ship and didn’t interact much. He said they weren’t unkind, but not sociable either. There was a total of seven girls on the ship when he stepped off in Jacksonville, but Clay figured they’d picked up more now. More girls was all the two men talked about.

  “What can you tell me about Angel?”

  He looked at Summer, then back at me, and shook his head. “She’s in a bad way.”

  “You talk to her much?”

  “She talked to me mostly. Always asking me to dance with her. That girl likes to dance.”

  Summer both smiled and cried.

  “If I was sixty years younger, I’d fight for that girl . . . but that’s what got me into all this trouble, so . . .”

  “Any idea what type of boat they’re on now?”

  He pointed at the Sea Tenderly across the marina. “Last I saw them, they were on that. Don’t know what kind they’re on now.”

  “If you went aboard, is there anything you could look at that would tell us what they’re on now? Or maybe where they’re going?”

  He thought for a moment. “No, but I can tell you the name.”

  “You can?”

  “Fire and Rain.”

  “You sure?”

  “Like the James Taylor song.”

  I climbed back out of the boat and returned to the harbormaster. I walked in and asked the kid behind the counter, “You guys had a boat here, Fire and Rain. Any idea when it left or where to?”

  The kid sat up and exercised his single ounce of authority. “You got dealings with the vessel or its captain?”

  The kid might have been twenty-two, and I doubted he shaved twice a week. I leaned on the counter. “Look, Scooter, I’m sure you’re good at your job, but I’m not in the mood. I need to know what you know and I need it right now.”

  He was in the process of explaining how he couldn’t give out that information when the real harbormaster walked out of his office. “Can I help you?”

  When I repeated myself, he shook his head. “Sir, I can’t give you that information any more than I would relay that information to anyone about you.”

  “You got CC video of the marina?”

  He nodded. “Of course. But—”

  “Can I see it?”

  The harbormaster was in his sixties. This was not his first rodeo. His forearm tattoos told me he’d served in the navy. Emboldened by the presence of his boss, the kid stiffened and raised his voice. “Captain, you’re not hearing me—”

  I stepped closer and forced him to focus on my eyes. “They’ve kidnapped a sixteen-year-old girl and they’re planning to sell her to the highest bidder when they hit South Florida or maybe Cuba. Then they’re going to use her body for whatever they like and dump her in the ocean or a snowbank in Siberia. The clock is ticking.” Scooter’s eyes grew wide as Oreo cookies. I pointed at his computer. “The video would be a great help.”

  Scooter stuttered and finally spoke. “You mean it’s a—”

  I finished the sentence while looking at the harbormaster. “A flesh ship.”

  The harbormaster pointed at the computer and said, “Tim, bring up last night about midnight when Fire and Rain eased out of here under thick cloud cover.”

  Scooter, aka Tim, clicked a few buttons and brought up a remarkably detailed video of a large, sleek, black yacht darkened with mirror-tinted windows that stretched about a hundred feet as she slid out of the marina, causing barely a ripple on the water. I saw no one aboard. No faces. No lights. No nothing. The only helpful information occurred when she turned south and I got a good look at her tender—a matching black, thirty-six-foot, quad-engine Contender with blue LED lights and trim. The tender’s name was Gone Girl.

  I shook the harbormaster’s hand. “Thank you.”

  He nodded. “If we can be of any help . . .”

  I walked slowly back to Gone Fiction. I needed a few minutes to myself. The situation with Angel was getting worse, and now I was ferrying a dying old man to his grave.

  When I dialed the number, he answered after one ring. “You in the Keys yet?”

  I stared at Daytona Beach. “Not by a long shot.”

  He told me what he had on slave ships moving up and down the ditch. Which wasn’t much, which told me these guys were pros. Not their first rodeo either. I told him what Clay had said about the two captains, their identifying tattoos, and about Fire and Rain and Gone Girl. He muttered as he talked because he was holding the pen cap in his mouth. When he finished writing, he said, “How you doing?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Try me.”

  “It’s too much. Plus, I need you to look up Barclay T. Pettybone. Seventy-eight years old. Did sixty for murder somewhere in the South. Released in the last month or so. Admitted himself to Baptist Hospital in Jacksonville about a week ago. Then checked himself out. Prognosis bad.”

  “Where’d you meet him?”

  “He’s on the boat.”

  “Thought you worked alone.”

  He knew better. The comment was rhetorical.

  “Clock’s ticking. Wake somebody if you have to. I’ll check in with you in a day or so. I need to get to West Palm by tomorrow at the latest. I think the clock is ticking faster than I can hear.”

  “Keep it between the markers.”

  “I intend to.”

  Back on Gone Fiction, I cranked the engine and we idled out of the marina
. Clay sat in his beanbag and stretched out his legs and tipped his straw hat down over his eyes. In the miles ahead, I would learn that he hummed or whistled constantly, had a beautiful singing voice, and must have been a giant of a man at one time.

  Summer stood next to me. She was clutching her book and staring down over the console at Clay. Gunner had dug himself a hole in the bag next to the old man. She put her hand on my arm. “Thank you.”

  I was lost in the chart in front of me, trying to calculate time on the water and how much I could push it and where we might take on food and fuel. She tugged on my arm. “You been on the water a long time?”

  The downtown area of Daytona is one long no-wake zone, which meant we had a while before I could put her up on plane. “All my life.”

  “You love it, don’t you?”

  I stared into the water. Through it. Back to my beginning. “I do.”

  “Why?”

  I waved my hand across the sea of rippled glass in front of us. “Thousands of knife-edged keels and spinning razor blades have cut this water right here. Sliced it into ten billion drops that somehow come back together again. No scar. Nothing can separate it. You could drop a bomb right here and within a few minutes, it’d look like nothing ever happened. Water heals itself. Every time. I like that. And if I’m being honest, maybe I need that.”

  She slipped her hand farther inside my arm. Now she wasn’t tugging on my sleeve so much as winding her arm inside mine like a vine. She said nothing as the prop cut the water for the umpteen-millionth time. But despite the damage and the terror we inflicted on that spot of liquid earth, when I looked behind us, the water had come back together. It had healed. Farther on, there was no sign we’d ever been there.

  She saw me staring behind us. “Can I ask you something?”

  She was pressing closer against the walls I’d erected around myself. The walls I lived behind. The ones that protected me from people who tried to find my heart. I turned and pulled my Costas down over my eyes. “Yes.”

  She lifted them up again, setting them at an odd angle on top of my head. “Is Murphy Shepherd your real name?”

  The no-wake zone ended. To the west, a deserted plantation house sat back off the water. Four chimneys, missing sections of roof, boarded-up windows, spray-painted graffiti, pigeons flying in and out—a shadow of her former beauty. The remains of a dock, outlined only by the barnacled posts that pierced the water, led from the marsh to the boathouse, a single sheet of rusted tin rubbing against its single remaining post. The hull of a fishing boat bobbed in the water feet away. In the water farther south, two dozen half-submerged sailboats lay at twisted angles. Beached. Run aground. Abandoned. No difference between the sea outside and the sea in. Single masts rose like sentinels at forty-five-degree angles, driven like stakes in the oyster shells. A rusted-out shrimper, rotten nets hung like Spanish moss, sat high in the marsh where the last storm surge had buried her and where she will remain. Forever.

  We rode silently through the cemetery. So many muted memories, laughter that would never be heard again. What happens to old boats and those who rode them?

  I pushed the throttle forward, bringing Gone Fiction up on plane and easing off when she reached four thousand rpm’s—or thirty-two miles per hour. While Clay napped up front, caressed by the wind, Summer and I stayed in the bubble behind the windscreen. The eye of the hurricane. That safe place where you can hide from the noise and the wind and the stuff that tears at you. As I turned, a tear rolled down my face. I shook my head a single time. “No.”

  Chapter 14

  We left Daytona in our wake and wound into and through the S-turn at New Smyrna Beach, eventually turning due west around Chicken Island and then due south through the northern tip of Turner Flats and Mosquito Lagoon. It’s here in these frothy waters that mangrove trees grow en masse. Mangroves grow farther north, on up through Palm Coast and into St. Augustine, but it’s down here where the water stays a bit warmer that they really thrive and spread out into islands. It’s this island-spreading tendency that gives the Ten Thousand Islands their name on the southwest coast of Florida.

  While Mosquito Lagoon may be great fishing, local knowledge of the waterways is a must. Fraught with hull-shredding debris just inches below the water, it’s a no-man’s-land outside the channel. The waters both east and west of the channel are littered with boats that strayed too far from the safety of the ditch. With nighttime an hour away, and with a thirty-knot northeast wind pounding the coastline east of us just beyond the mangroves, I needed to make a decision. We would not make West Palm tonight no matter how far I pushed the throttle, and the relatively wide-open water of the lagoon meant we’d be riding in two- to four-foot chops. Doable but not enjoyable. Especially for an old man.

  And once we passed through the Haulover Canal and popped out into the open and wide water of the north end of the Indian River, which borders the eastern side of the Cape Canaveral security area, we’d be exposed for the better part of an hour—maybe three, depending on conditions—which would be miserable but necessary if we hoped to make West Palm tomorrow. And we needed to. The clock in my mind was ticking.

  With the afternoon sun beginning to fall and only a few hours of daylight left, I knew Clay needed to stop. Despite the beanbag, he needed a break. We stopped on the side of the IC at the Sand Hill Grocery and Bait, and Summer and I loaded up with enough food for both an afternoon snack and dinner if things got bad. Twenty minutes farther south, I turned hard to starboard and entered the no-wake zone of the Haulover Canal.

  The canal is an arrow-straight, three-quarter-mile, man-made cut through the finger of land that connects the Canaveral land mass to the mainland of Florida. Inside the protection of the canal, tall juniper trees form a windbreak, calming the water to a sheet of glass. The break from the constant pounding was a welcome relief.

  I beached the boat on a sandy stretch on the northwest side of the canal. We helped Clay out of the boat while Gunner surveyed the landscape, marked his territory, and chased a rabbit. I gathered driftwood and built a fire. Then I asked Clay, “Thirty minutes okay with you?”

  He knew what I was asking him. He nodded and gave me a thumbs-up.

  I stretched a tarp to protect him from the sun and then hung a hammock beneath it. Clay tested the strength of the ropes, then lay sideways using the hammock as a chair. His smile spread across his face in much the same way as the hammock between both trees. Summer brought him a hastily made ham sandwich along with a bag of Doritos—each of which he savored.

  I liked to watch Clay. His movements were purposeful. Singular. And he lived in the moment. Never outside of it. He ate each Dorito as if it were the last Dorito on earth. Thankfully, his cough had abated. For now.

  I didn’t like stopping but we all three needed a bathroom break, and that boat isn’t the easiest place for a woman. It can be done, but there’s nothing graceful about it. Clay swayed back and forth, singing in his hammock, while Summer fed Gunner half her sandwich. I cranked the Jetboil and started water for coffee, giving my fingers something to do while my mind turned.

  Beach before us, a gentle breeze washing over us, and the sound of Clay humming. I wondered if this was the calm before the storm. I questioned if Summer would be able to weather what was coming.

  As the water boiled, I noticed I had Clay’s undivided attention. He was watching my every move. I spooned some instant coffee into an insulated stainless mug and took it to him. He tried to stand to accept it, but I wouldn’t let him. He sipped and said, “Mr. Murphy?”

  I smiled. “Yes.”

  “My bones thank you.”

  Moving from North Florida to South, the water slowly changes from dark to clear. From tannic tea to gin. We were not yet halfway through the Haulover Canal, still in the dark area, but I could see signs of clearing. With a beach next to us, I said, “Summer?”

  She looked up at me.

  “How ’bout you let me teach you how to swim?”

  She s
tood and eyed the water with skepticism. Then shook her head.

  “You do realize it’s rather a good idea to learn how to swim?”

  She nodded but stepped no closer.

  I waded down in the water, thigh deep. The water was warm and felt good. She approached but kept her distance.

  I waved my hand over the water. “Did you have a bad experience somewhere?”

  “You mean other than two nights ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “So you’re just old and set in your ways.”

  She shoved her hands in her back pockets and weighed her head side to side. “Pretty much.”

  “Okay, what if your daughter was passed out and they threw her off some boat and she was floating in the water and you had about ten seconds? Would you wish then that you could swim?”

  She walked into the water up to her waist and stood with arms crossed, staring at the water around her. “Yes.”

  I waded out deeper. When the water got to my neck, with my feet still on sandy bottom, I reached out my hand and said nothing. She inched closer. The water now up to the middle of her stomach. I swam across the canal. It was a short distance. Maybe forty feet. I knew from my depth finder that it ranged from ten to twelve feet to the bottom, so to get to me she’d have to leave her feet and pull with her hands. Which was what I wanted. A simple dog paddle.

  I held out my hand. She shook her head.

  “Summer?”

  She stepped farther in. Water to her collarbone.

  “Make a cup with your hand and push against the water. You don’t have to go anywhere. Just stand right there. I want you to feel that you can push against the water.”

  She did but said nothing to me.

  “Now I want you to push down, hard enough to lift your feet off the sand.”

  She make a rather pitiful attempt, barely coming up an inch.

  “You can do better.”

  She tried again. This time she bobbed up and down, always quickly returning to the safety of the bottom. Summer’s problem was that despite her fearless courage in looking for her daughter, she was afraid of the water. Something had happened. I just didn’t know what it was. Maybe she didn’t either. Regardless, she was scared, and I didn’t have time for her to be scared.