It was weird the way the cart tilted with Heller beside him, the man was so big.
“According to the log, we had three hundred and nine boats in the storage barn. But I think we racked a dozen more the day before the storm hit. Last-minute dumbasses who wanted them out of the water. We were so busy, they didn’t get wrote down.”
Heller said, “That figures,” not mad, but keeping Moe on his toes.
They were on the canal side of the storage barn where wreckage hadn’t been cleared. The barn had been the size of a retail warehouse, Sam’s Club or Costco, fitted with steel racks six berths’ high. The racks had collapsed when the barn imploded, one boat falling on top of another, among the twisted steel; outboard motors, canvas, fiberglass hulls; white, yellow, blue, poking out of the mess; everything jumbled, as if deposited by a glacier.
At least a hundred boats had already been plucked free by the crane. They sat in rows on the shell parking lot, all tilted on their bottoms. Just like the golf cart when Heller sat his weight on the seat, which is why Moe now locked the brake, and stood.
He stretched and popped his back, saying, “Even after all the work we’ve done, it still looks bad, I know. Like everything in there’s completely fucked. But it’s not.”
His boss replied, “It’s okay the way it looks.”
“Thanks, Bern. We’ve been humping it ten, twelve hours a day trying to get it cleaned up.”
“That’s not what I meant, you schmuck. Another insurance adjustor’s coming tomorrow, and I asked some guy from the E-P-A to meet me here tomorrow afternoon. We got hit by a natural disaster, so it’s good for them to see it.”
Moe thought: Environmental Protection Agency? Invite those assholes on the property after what you did with the bulldozer?
He didn’t ask. Instead, he stuck to business and talked about the two hundred boats still mixed with the barn’s wreckage.
Y ou’ve got to figure the engines, most of them are fine. Electronics? They’ve all got fish-finders, radar. Fishing gear, stereo systems, G-P-Ss—it all adds up. Plus, a lot of them, you could stick in the water right now, crank the engines, and they’d run like nothing happened.”
“Global Positioning Systems, huh?” Heller said. “I’ve got one in my car. But a boat’s, it’s gotta be different, right?”
Moe said, “Yeah, but it’s not hard. I can show you now if you’re interested.”
Heller was interested because he’d copied the numbers from the nautical map he’d found in his grandfather’s briefcase. He knew they referred to a latitude and longitude but decided he could wait to find out. “Maybe over the weekend,” he said. “We’ll have plenty of boats to choose from.”
Moe laughed, then became pensive. “I still don’t get it. How can a salvage company take a guy’s boat even if it’s not damaged? Are we sure this is legal?”
Heller began to nod, but his expression said, Who cares? “My grandfather figured it out a couple of years ago, before I moved down. A hurricane hit north of Lauderdale, and the smart marinas worked it the same way. The key is the contract we make people sign before we store their boats. There’s a clause that covers what’s called a ‘nonjudicial sale.’ If they sign, we can sell their boat for just about any reason we want. There’s also a clause that says we’re not liable for loss if a hurricane hits.”
The lawyers had told Bern neither clause would hold up in court. So far, though, the insurance companies had played along—they were the slimiest con artists on the scene. And the state cops hadn’t lifted a finger.
“This was all your grandfather’s idea?”
“Basically. I arranged all the details, of course.”
“He musta been quite a guy. I think I told you how sorry I was—”
“Yes,” Heller said, “he was a wonderful gentleman. The point is, the state cops, and the insurance people, don’t care what we do.”
Moe began to smile. It was like finding barrels of money in all this wreckage. “I counted forty-five or fifty boats in perfect shape. The biggest—thirty-footers and over—most of those, we stored on cradles outside. Like the Viking diesel, your favorite. Augie’s, too.”
Augie Heller was Bern’s nephew. One of several relatives on the payroll. The little creep had used the boat so much lately that he’d been acting like the Viking was his.
Not a chance.
The Viking was Bern’s. Or soon would be.
Who wouldn’t like a forty-three-foot yacht with plush staterooms, a Bose entertainment system, and a pilothouse that made him feel like an expert seaman, just sitting at the wheel, even though Bern had never spent a day offshore.
He’d driven the boat several times, but always stuck to the inland waterways. Sometimes he took it down the Intracoastal for dinner at South Seas Plantation, or Grandma Dot’s. Man, the boat was beautiful, but he was just learning. Getting his confidence up. The pilothouse was loaded with electronics, including a couple of GPSs, so that’s what he’d do next—learn how to use the boat’s navigation system. Find out what the numbers meant on the old map.
What was today? Tuesday, September 14th. Augie had asked to use the Viking tomorrow—the kid had been taking the boat offshore to fish for grouper. So maybe he’d take a couple of beers, the old map, and figure out the GPS tonight.
Bern was thinking about that as Moe continued, “And the Cuban’s boat. There’s another one that didn’t get a scratch. That’s why he’s so pissed off.”
“Screw ’im. Far as he knows, it got smashed.”
“Well…I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what?”
Moe said, “Well, the thing is, Javier was a fishing guide on Sanibel before he came here. He knows the business. I tell most of these hicks their boat’s totaled, call your insurance agent, they’ll say, ‘Duh-h-h-h, okay.’ Not the fishing guides, though.”
Heller began to get suspicious. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
“Well, Bern, there’s kind of a problem…Javier knows his boat’s okay. He waded in that night, after the storm, when no one was here to stop them.”
“What do you mean no one was here? What about that old fart you hired as a watchman, what’s his name?”
“Arlis Futch. He’s lived around here forever. He’s a pal of Javier’s, so…well, I guess Arlis let him have a look.”
Heller’s face was wide as a box, and his jaw muscles flexed when he was irritated. “I suppose the Cuban came other nights, too. Did he?”
The boss was asking if Javier Castillo had seen the bulldozer working in the dark, in the rain, flattening the Indian mounds to fill what had been mangrove swamp.
“It’s possible.”
Heller’s jaw was flexing now. A pit bull on a leash. “Jesus, I tell you to do something, it still doesn’t get done.”
“I had to evacuate the island. It was mandatory.” Moe’s tone asking: What was I supposed to do?
“The colored guy, though, he stayed here. He didn’t run. And the old fart.”
Moe said, “I guess. Them and a few others.” His tone flat now. “Javier lives south, where the eye came ashore. His house was totaled; now his wife’s run off. Javier told me he was coming back with a gun because he had nothing to lose.”
“Bullcrap,” Heller said. He was picturing the skinny Cuban with a gun, cops yelling Freeze, before shooting him.
Good. He hoped it happened.
“Everybody’s got something to lose,” he told Moe, stealing one of his grandfather’s lines. “Find out what it is—and that’s how much you can take.”
LABORATORY LOG
MARION D. FORD
DINKIN’S BAY, SANIBEL ISLAND, FLORIDA
14 August, Saturday
No sunrise
Returned two days ago, near midnight, 12 hours before a hurricane made landfall. Direct hit on Gulf islands, winds 150 MPH, gusts higher. The marina, my house and lab badly damaged.
When windows imploded, roof began to go, I grabbed a piling, watchin
g whole trees, a canoe, sections of dock, a bicycle tumble skyward, cauldroning like birds.
The storm’s northwestern wall was a phalanx of tornadoes. Tornadoes have a signature sound. A diesel scream that ascends on approach…
15 August, Sunday
Picking through wreckage, Javier Castillo asked about the stitches in my forehead. I told him I was hit by something during the storm. “God plays with us, sending a hurricane like that,” he said in Spanish. I am tired of his shitty jokes.
16 August, Monday
Sunset 19:53 (7:53 P.M.)
Moon waxing
Low tide 7:21 P.M.
Trees are leafless, like nuclear winter. Last night, I watched stars through my open roof, head throbbing, as I replayed the worst of the storm. The wind accelerating past my ears, blowing so hard that it was as if I’d fallen out of a jetliner. No possibility of establishing control, so analysis was pointless. A shadow vanishing into itself. That’s how I felt. Released.
19 August, Thursday
Sunset 7:50 P.M.
Low tide 8:18 P.M.
No power or phones. Islanders with million-dollar homes barter in new currency: water, generators, fuel. National Guard has arrived, trailing insurance adjusters, imposters, contractors, politicians in helicopters, lawyers, land speculators with cash. A few marinas are price gouging—or worse.
A hurricane leaves residual odors: bloating fish and trash fires. The scent attracts vultures, human variety. Bloated prices. Con men.
Greed has an odor, too.
WEEK THREE
30 August, Monday
Sunset 7:41 P.M.
Full moon rises 7:32 P.M.
Low tide 6:54 A.M.
Greed…
Tomlinson says a hurricane is like a beam of light. It exposes decay, and reveals unexpected strengths. Celestial light—his phrase. Cleansing.
He was stoned, as usual. Behavior even more bizarre. Irritable, too—as if he’s been injecting testosterone. Hormones might play a role. Most nights, he vanishes to visit a woman he seldom mentions. She lives in a beach estate, an antique gray house that was hidden until the wind stripped the trees away. I discovered it by accident; was unaware the house even existed until the storm.
1 September, Wednesday
Working late in lab
Winds transformed sea bottom, exposing some structures, covering others. Off Key Largo, in 130 feet of water, a sunken Naval vessel, the Spiegel Grove, was uprighted by storm currents. Off Key West, an underwater forest of petrified wood was uncovered in an area once sand. The forest dates back to the Pliocene.
Yesterday, Jeth Nichols found an unfamiliar wreck—40 feet of water, 240 degrees off Lighthouse Point. He’s been fishing out of another marina where damage was minor. One of those gated condo places, Indian Harbor Resort.
5 September, Sunday
Sunset 7:35 P.M.
Low tide 12:03 P.M.
The hurricane that hit us was the third of the season; more forming in the Caribbean basin. Storms of closed circulation are tropical cyclones. When winds exceed 38 MPH, they are termed “tropical storms” and assigned a name—grating, because a name implies human qualities, intent or malice.
A storm is a mobile dynamic, not a being. Homo sapiens is a mobile being, not a process. The principles of physics and man are diminished by anthropomorphic baloney.
Go to the beach and name waves. Name a lightning bolt. It makes as much sense.
7 September, Tuesday
Sunset 7:34 P.M.
No low tide
Autumn in subtropics: Heat. Jittery wind. Hint of storm darkness even in daylight.
Moon waning; fireflies in mangrove shadow.
Still no phone.
3
16 September, Thursday
Sunset 7:28 P.M.
New moon sets 11:49 P.M.
Four tropical cyclones developing in Caribbean, one a tropical storm, another hurricane force, winds over 74 mph.
I told Jeth, “Your pal, Augie Heller, makes me regret emptying my shark pen before the hurricane hit.”
Jeth Nichols stutters when he’s nervous or mad. He was stuttering now. “I know, Doc, I know. Sorry. I was stuh-stupid to ever leave Dinkin’s Bay and work for another marina. Javier warned me. I shoulda listened.”
Javier Castillo—a Sanibel fishing guide until he moved his family across the bay. Jeth had followed because he was desperate for cash after the hurricane.
I was bending over a tray of salt water, my back turned so it was difficult for Jeth to observe. My left hand was submerged, holding a brooch-sized object encrusted with barnacles. With a surgical probe, I’d removed enough to see that a portion of the object was studded with clear stones.
Diamonds?
With the object cupped, I looked away from the tray. “You said Javier would meet us here.”
“That’s what he told me. He said he was gonna get his boat this afternoon. He was sure of it.”
I pictured a lean man with muscles, a broad African nose. Javier was a good father, a good fisherman. Years ago, he’d floated over from Cuba in an inner tube, which tells you all you need to know about Javier Castillo—he crossed the Florida Straits in a tire.
As if reading my mind, Jeth said, “I wish he’d show up. It’d be nice to see a friendly face.”
True. This place was decidedly unfriendly.
Jeth, Tomlinson, and I were off by ourselves, strangers on strange turf—what had once been a fishing village I’d known well but no longer. Developers had transformed it into an overpriced marina community, on the island of Sulphur Wells, twenty-five minutes by boat from our home base, Sanibel Island, Gulf coast of Florida.
Its name was the Indian Harbor Marina and Resort Community, a mall-sized project built by out-of-state investors, with acres of metal buildings, duplexes, condo sites and dockage, most of the new construction intact after the storm.
There was some damage, though. I saw bulldozers and a crane over there bucking twisted metal where the storage barn had collapsed; security guards stopping cars at the marina entrance. Boats that had survived had been dragged to the parking lot, several dozen of them listing on their keels. They were spaced incrementally like cemetery headstones. A hundred or more.
I said, “If Javier doesn’t show in the next ten minutes, I think we should stow your gear in my skiff and leave. I can’t tolerate much more of this place, or of your pal Augie.”
I was using the surgical probe, along with a magnifying glass and forceps, to clean one of several metallic objects Jeth had snagged while fishing a wreck he’d discovered a few days before. That morning, he’d reeled up a section of cable, a couple of pounds of marine growth attached, man-made objects embedded, most he couldn’t identify.
There was a U.S. silver dollar, some brass screws, and what now looked to be a diamond brooch. A dozen or so other objects were also attached but too heavily covered with barnacles and goop to make a guess.
A few hours ago, Jeth had called me on VHF radio, asking me to meet him here and have a look.
I hadn’t expected to find anything of consequence.
Surprise.
Jeth said now, “Augie isn’t my pal, I already told you. I’ve just got a business arrangement with him and the other guy. They have a boat, I don’t. They don’t know how to fish, I do. We been catching grouper offshore, sellin’ it for top dollar. There’s hardly any boats out since the hurricane. But we ain’t friends.”
Yes, he’d told me. Augie Heller and Oswald, the men who’d offered him a share of the profits to run this marina’s forty-three-foot Viking sport diesel. Jeth needed money, so he’d taken the job even though he didn’t like the duo and didn’t trust them.
My impression exactly. And now Jeth had stumbled onto something important. Valuable, too, depending on the identity of the vessel he’d discovered and what remained on the seafloor.
I hadn’t told Jeth that, not yet. I’d seen no reason to risk sharing the information with the two jerk
s who’d just stomped off to get reinforcements.
I knew they’d be back soon.
I returned my attention to the brooch. The metal filigree was black as gunpowder, scarred with barnacles and worm shell. Silver converts to silver sulfide when immersed in salt water. This object was silver, coated with a black sulfide patina. It had been underwater for a long time, judging from the empty worm casings. Years. Decades. But there was no fresh benthic growth, and the metallic structure was solid.
It had been preserved by something. Sand? Buried and insulated beneath a few feet of sea bottom.
Maybe the same was true of the wreck. Everything cosseted beneath underwater sand dunes until exposed by the recent hurricane.
Thinking about it, I pictured the Sahara desert. Peaks of undiscovered pyramids showing after a wind storm. I pictured the Stony desert and domes of ancient mosques.
As Jeth said, “Even if they weren’t such assholes, I don’t see how they can claim part of something I found.” I touched the object with forceps. A flake of black patina broke away as if it were a scab. I had my glasses atop my head. I removed the object from the water briefly, holding it close, squinting as nearsighted people do.
If this was a brooch, it was the strangest I’d seen. Staring back at me was a silver skull. It was a military-style skull known as a “death’s-head.” It had luminous stones for eyes. Several more stones created the upper blade of something…a symbol. A portion of leaf cluster framed the symbol.
A…swastika?
As I replied, “You discovered the wreck. You’re the one who snagged this stuff. The state of Florida may have claims but your partners don’t.” I took a double-ended mall probe and continued cleaning.
Yes. A swastika.
It was inset with stones, presumably diamonds. Tiny stones, valuable as gems, or maybe not. But part of an insignia from World War II Germany.
Symbols are a form of cipher. This symbol projected a historic energy, dulling the luster of the gems that formed it.
“Then screw ’em,” Jeth said. “They’ve been treating me like some low-life hick since my first day aboard. I ain’t sharing nothing with those two. And Javier, the bastards are trying to keep his boat. They’re calling everything on their property ‘salvage.’”
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