I stood there dumbly for several uncomfortable beats—far too many. The woman’s expression slowly changed. Then her face contorted, mortified by her behavior or yet another rejection. “Oh my god, how stupid can I get? I’m acting like a crazy woman again.”
As she lunged for her dress, I took her in my arms and stood her up so we were face-to-face. “Good morning, Delia,” I said. Then I kissed her.
TWENTY-THREE
The boat ramp at O’Neill’s Marina on the St. Pete side of the Skyway Bridge closes at 8, so I couldn’t linger until sunset with Delia and her siblings while they decided who was going to overnight on the houseboat and who wasn’t.
“What are you so damn antsy about?” Tomlinson asked me. “If I didn’t know better, I’d guess you’ve been snorting Adderall. Don’t have any, do you? I could use a pick-me-up.”
We were alone aboard my Pathfinder. The deck was piled with bags of post-party trash to be dumped before I started back to Sanibel. He staggered forward toward the cooler. “Geezus, remind me to never whack off in a test tube again . . . Got any beer left?”
I said, “It’s right next to the cocaine and illegal weapons. I’ll take a Diet Coke, while you’re there.”
He returned to the swivel seat to my right, his Corona already half empty. “I told you they don’t want us around,” he confided. “Like kids waiting for the adults to leave so they can tell secrets. Nothing weird about that.” When I took yet another look over my shoulder, he chided, “Hey—what is it with you? They’ll be fine. Cripes, it’s not like you’ll never see her again.”
Delia, he meant. He sensed that our relationship was different now. And it was. Instead of the looks and nudges we had shared for weeks as secret confidants, there was a new and palpable coolness between us. To me, it signaled that I’d done something really stupid and she resented the embarrassment I had caused us both.
Was I reading too much into the sudden change? The woman had been eager to say good-bye and be off with the family she was just getting to know—it wasn’t my imagination.
“I guess that might be possible,” Tomlinson said agreeably, “if you had an imagination, which you don’t. Stop worrying. Life flows on, man. That’s about all I can tell you.”
By then, we had cleared the no-wake zone off Indian Key. I was turning toward the boat basin inside Maximo Point. To the west, the sun cast a molten funnel that darkened the first shadows of dusk. To our right, the lights of the Sunshine Skyway streamed on. The bridge was a circus tapestry of color that resembled a galactic trapeze act. The shipping channel provided an animated gray net below.
“Something’s not right,” I said. “I like Chester, I really do”—I had to organize my thoughts—“but this morning we were talking about Imogen, and he said he’d been worried about her since the day she was born. No . . . said he’d been worried about ‘those kids’ since the day we were born.”
“That’s pretty darn articulate for a Southern Baptist,” Tomlinson joked. “Hey—we’ve already been through this.” He was getting impatient. “Man, you don’t think my sensory receptors would be on fire if my own flesh and blood were in danger? Give me some credit. My powers aren’t what they used to be, but I haven’t lost all my Indian skills.”
“And how often are you wrong?”
My pal has a gift for articulate observation, it’s true, that sometimes appears to border on mysticism, but he is occasionally far off the mark—as we both knew.
“Well . . . shit the bed,” he conceded. “If you want, call the guy. Tell Chester what you’re worried about. Talk to him, lay it all out. There’s still time.”
“What do you mean?”
Tomlinson said, “On the phone, coconut head.”
“I know, but there’s some kind of time limit?”
“They’re doing the kum ba ya, thing,” he explained. “All phones off, once the houseboat leaves, but they might still be waiting on the pizza delivery guy. The campground doesn’t close at eight.”
I was idling into the boat basin. Immediately, I shifted into neutral. “Delia didn’t mention anything about pizza. And I asked her—made of point of asking—if anything had been delivered to the boat. She said absolutely not. In fact, I warned her not to accept any deliveries.”
“It’s just pizza,” he replied. “That was my going-away surprise. Five big pies, all vegetarian. Imogen knew. I told her to make excuses until the delivery guy shows.”
“Imogen? Are you out of your mind?”
Tomlinson was getting flustered. “One of us sure as hell is. Geezus frogs, shallow up, dude. There’s nothing dangerous about pizza—” He hesitated, suddenly uncertain. “Well . . . depending on the mushrooms, I guess. Yeah, you’re right. Go ahead, call. Call Delia, see if they’ve already left.”
I reached for my phone. It was in my tactical bag, not my pocket. I ripped it out of its waterproof case. Notification alerts vibrated in my hand.
I swiped the screen open. There were several voice messages. One was from Hannah, the second from Delia, and another from an unknown area code—910. Only one message demanded immediate attention. It was from Donald Piao Cheng.
I hit play and pressed the phone to my ear.
“Damn . . . this is not good,” I said softly. Cheng had just provided me with some shocking information.
Now my pal was worried. “What’s wrong, Doc?”
I spun the boat around, then throttled onto plane. “Take my phone,” I said over the noise of the engine. “Hit Delia’s number on redial. Tell them to get the hell off that houseboat.”
“Why?”
“Just do it, damn it.”
Tomlinson redialed. The blank look on his face told me the call went immediately to voicemail.
“That guy—Alonso Arkham?—when he was born, it was a multiple delivery,” I said, which might have been heard as an accusation. “Arkham has a twin. They were separated at birth. That’s all I know for now.”
My pal either didn’t want to believe it or couldn’t pull the threads together. I took the VHF mic from the console and pressed it into his hands. “Sorry, buddy. Try to raise someone on the houseboat.”
* * *
—
We crossed Boca Ciega Bay doing fifty-plus, the lighted Skyway to our left. High above, miniature cars traveled at Interstate speed, which gave the illusion that we were being held back by a dark, unnatural tidal anomaly.
Tomlinson tried over and over on the radio, calling, “Break, break, channel 16. I’m trying make contact with a houseboat in the Fort De Soto Park area. A double-decker with twin Evinrudes. Does anyone have a visual?”
He tried other descriptions. He tried channel 21 alpha, his ponytail flagging in a wind that swept his words away.
“Crapola,” he muttered, and gave up. “Doc, maybe we’re worried for no reason.”
“Use your cell and call Delia again. Anyone who might be aboard,” I said. Our next move—although I didn’t say it—was an emergency call to St. Pete Coast Guard.
My friend ducked behind the console and started dialing.
The sun was gone. The entrance into Tampa Bay is a major shipping channel. Night markers blinked on, a horizon of robotic, pulsing colors—red, white, green. Confusing colors, unless you have spent a lot of time at night at sea. A cruise ship was being piloted outward bound. It was a towering neon skyscraper that could crush a houseboat if the skipper had lost an engine or made the mistake of allowing a novice to take the helm.
Someone suicidal, perhaps.
I found the cut into Bunces Pass. Roared beneath the bridge to Madeline Key, indifferent to the bobbing No Wake buoys. From a quarter mile away, I confirmed that the houseboat was no longer anchored where we’d left it. I slowed and made a hard turn toward the Fort De Soto Park camping area, then buried the throttle because of what I saw.
“What the hell are the
cops doing there?” Tomlinson wondered.
Blue police strobes echoed off trees midway down the shoreline. The shore was dotted with RV campers, and flickering Colemans marked a row of tents. An EMT vehicle was there, too. But not the houseboat.
“Is that where your group is camped?” I asked.
I knew it was. Tomlinson tugged at his hair. “Drop me off, I’ll run up and see what’s wrong.”
We were in a narrow bay, no docks, just shells and mangroves. A good place for kayaks, not powerboats. I trimmed the bow and tilted the engine high. Doing thirty, we skated around a spoil bank on a skittish starboard chine in a foot of water.
The hull of my boat banged hard on the bottom. Tomlinson didn’t wait for me shut down before going over the side. He put a fist to his ear to mimic a phone and hollered, “I’ll call you. Don’t go off and leave me, man.” He slogged toward shore.
“Find out where Delia is,” I hollered back.
It was so shallow, I had to get out and push my boat into deeper water. From shore, a Q-beam flared. The beam searched and damn near blinded me. “Sir . . . Hey, you! This is a no-wake zone. I need to see your registration.”
In the glare was the silhouette of a policewoman.
I shielded my eyes, and called, “Sorry—talk to my friend, Officer. He’ll explain what’s going on.”
The spotlight tracked me until the woman had intercepted Tomlinson. The light went off. When I was in muck up to my knees, the Pathfinder’s hull shifted with buoyancy. I climbed aboard and fired the engine. Wooden stakes marked the channel out of what my chartplotter identified as Mullet Bayou. At the mouth of the bay was a view of the Gulf of Mexico, an inky rim attached to a high, fading strand of orange.
It was an hour after sunset.
With the engine running, I waited. An outgoing tide tried to carry me westward, so I anchored with the power pole. Finally, Tomlinson phoned.
“Everyone’s going to be okay,” he said. “I know where the houseboat is. Pick me up, we’ll go together.”
“What the hell happened? I can’t get in that bay again, the tide’s falling.”
“Food poisoning,” he replied. “At least, the cops are willing to buy it for now, depending on the what the EMTs say.”
Geezus, the pizza! I thought. “You’re covering for someone. Tell the truth.”
“I am, so stop being such a hardass. It’s nothing serious. Two of our people are going to the ER just in case. The rest are sort of, you know, strung out.”
“You mean strung out or hallucinating?” I demanded. “You wouldn’t have mentioned mushrooms if you hadn’t suspected. Damn it, Tomlinson, someone’s trying to kill your whole family . . . Is Imogen there?”
“We don’t know it was her,” he argued. “Doc, we’re not squealing to the cops about this. The ’shrooms could have been a sort of bonding experiment. Or an accident. I’m eating a piece right now and it’s actually pretty good.”
“I didn’t accuse Imogen,” I responded, “I said ‘someone.’ And you’re a fool if you don’t spit that crap out right now. Where’s the houseboat?”
Tomlinson refused to answer. “How about I catch a ride to the bridge? There’s plenty of water at the parking lot. Pick me up there.”
He meant the ferry landing. It was only a few hundred yards up tide. I was tied there when the headlights of a Pinellas County Sheriff’s cruiser panned the area, then accelerated toward me.
Oh damn . . .
But it was okay. Tomlinson hopped out of the cruiser, waved his thanks, then waved again after he had stepped aboard.
“The houseboat’s supposed to be anchored off Egmont Key,” he said. “Know where it is?”
I did. The illuminated screen of my GPS confirmed the island’s location. It was Gulf side, a few miles southwest.
“Hold on,” I said.
Tomlinson grabbed a windshield bar. “And, for god sakes,” he said, “pay attention to the no-wake buoys. That cop’s got the hots for me and I don’t want to have to lie to her again.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Egmont Key sits offshore, alone at the mouth of Tampa Bay. It is an uninhabited barrier island, amoebic in shape, narrow, two miles long, with an abandoned lighthouse station at the northernmost point.
“See it?” Tomlinson stood on bare tiptoes and pointed.
“What?”
“The lighthouse, man. It’s right there.”
Ahead was a confusing array of night markers—red, white, and green beacons.
“Are you hallucinating?”
“No . . . Yeah, a little. Very mild, but I’m cool. The tallest light, man. It blends in with the stars.”
I said, “You shouldn’t have eaten that stupid pizza,” but then had to agree. Visible from two miles away was the old Egmont light tower, 80 feet high. Every fifteen seconds, a fixed white flasher strobed.
“We’ll have to get closer to find the houseboat,” I said. “I hope to hell you’re right.”
My friend was. The houseboat was there, anchored to the south of what the GPS showed as Quarantine Pier. But first we raised the tower itself and the remnants of the keeper’s quarters.
That building, too, had been abandoned after twenty decades of hurricanes, wars, and tropical hardships that included a bout of yellow fever in 1878. As I knew from my files, the fever had started concurrently with one of the worst red tides in history. Lethal algae had plagued the peninsula for more than a decade.
I increased speed to 4,500 RPM. The island shrunk the horizon into charcoal strokes of casuarinas and palms. Stars formed a canopy. Jupiter was bright on the elliptic, Saturn a thumb’s width behind. I nudged the throttle back when I saw double-decker lights anchored close to a beach half a mile away.
“That has to be them,” I said. “Take the wheel.” We switched places. I opened a locker on the console and found the night vision headgear. A 9mm Sig Sauer went into a holster belted to the small of my back.
“Oh . . . shit-oh-dear,” Tomlinson said several seconds later. He was looking to starboard. “I hope to hell that’s the mushroom fairy playing tricks and not that lady deputy sniffing around.”
In the distance, flashing blue lights hobbyhorsed toward us. I didn’t need night vision to confirm it was law enforcement of some type.
“Darn it, Doc! Please tell me you didn’t call the cops. Delia—all of them—are going to be seriously pissed off.”
I had tried to summon help. From the bridge, I’d radioed St. Pete Coast Guard, but had been unable to provide the houseboat’s location or details of an actual emergency. The watch officer had told me to check back. “It wasn’t me,” I said. “Maybe there’s something else going on out here.” I gave him a nudge. “Move—I’ll take the wheel.”
Blue lights continued to close as I dropped the Pathfinder off plane and plowed toward the houseboat. It became a tactical race. I wanted to get Delia and the others ashore in case something—an explosive, perhaps—had been planted to supplement the poison mushrooms.
A bomb . . . ?
I backed the throttle to idle. “We can’t just go charging up there,” I said. “We’ll use the trolling motor.”
“Why?”
“What if the wrong person sees us? They might spook and do something really stupid.”
Tomlinson didn’t get it. A bomb could be detonated manually. A cabin doused with gasoline could be torched. I killed the engine—but too late. On the upper deck, houseboat windows flickered with what I hoped was an array of candles. A door on the boat’s lower level swung open. A hunched figure exited outside onto the aft patio deck. The figure seemed to pivot toward us and waved with both arms.
“Who’s that?” Tomlinson cupped his hands to his eyes. A moment later, he hollered, “Hello, boat! It’s us, me and—”
I threw the throttle ahead before he could finish.
“Jesus Christ!” my pal yelped.
“Get ready to fend off,” I told him.
Pulling abeam another vessel at speed is tricky. I powered forward as if my intention was to ram. Just before impact, I spun the wheel in full reverse. My boat skated sideways, came to a stop until our wake caught us, then we banged together, hull to hull. When Tomlinson grabbed the houseboat’s safety railing, I used the gunnel as a step and vaulted aboard.
“Hey—whoa, stop right there, mister! Who the hell are you crazy people?” a man’s voice demanded.
The galley lights were on, not bright. I was looking down at Chester Pickett in his wheelchair. The pistol aimed at my chest was a Glock, him having admitted as much that morning.
“Ford . . . That you, buddy ruff? My Lord . . .” Uneasy laughter allowed him to take a deep breath. “I thought you were drug pirates, the way you charged up here.” He lowered the weapon, adding, “You can show me your other hand now. You ain’t gonna need that Sig.”
I made a show of straightening my shirt until the Glock vanished somewhere beneath the man’s catheter bag.
I said, “Where’re Delia and the others?” The boat’s lower cabin area appeared to be empty. No music—an odd silence on a vessel that smelled faintly of weed and vomit.
Tomlinson was cleating off, starboard to portside.
Chester replied, “You sure enough don’t check your phone messages, Ford. You’re the first one I called.” He peered beyond me, where blue strobes showed a boat dropping off plane. “Thank the Lord,” he said. “I been on the phone with the Coast Guard for half an hour. Doc”—he spun his wheelchair around—“get up there and check on ’em. They’re all either sick or freaking out because of some bad pizza, I’m pretty sure. And my gimpy ass can’t make it up the winding staircase.”
I had started inside when a chilling thought stopped me. “Why aren’t you sick, Reverend?”
Chester didn’t appreciate the insinuation. “’Cause I’m not a damn vegetarian. What the hell, man! Didn’t I already tell you I’m wary of ’shrooms and that sort of crap? Now, get going. Imogen’s in a bad, bad way.”
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