Rising Tide

by Wayne Stinnett

  There was a crowd of people moving toward shore. Vehicles weren’t permitted on the two-mile section of the old bridge connecting Pigeon Key to Knight’s Key and Marathon, but I could see an ambulance stopped on the span just before the ramp.

  “Is anyone alive?” I heard a man shout.

  Savannah looked up. “Yes. A boy about six, maybe. But he’s been hurt badly and looks malnourished and dehydrated.”

  Once we were in shallower water, I stood and pushed the boat toward the people waiting on shore.

  The man who’d spoken was wading toward us. He was a big man. I’d seen him around Marathon quite often. He worked for the foundation that ran the island-turned-museum. The whole island appeared just as it had in Flagler’s day.

  “Jesse McDermitt?” he asked, recognizing me, and then helping to pull the boat ashore.

  “Sorry to drop in like this, Brian,” I said, remembering his name.

  “Did y’all just jump off the bridge? Were you in the race?”

  “Yeah,” I said, as the boat hit a rock.

  We moved to opposite sides and muscled the little skiff onto dry land. Well, dry rocks anyway.

  It’d probably been fifteen or twenty minutes since we’d entered the water. I could usually swim for three times that long, with little effort, but towing the boat against the current had sapped the strength in my arms and legs.

  The paramedics from the ambulance were quickly beside the boat, and Savannah got out, allowing them room to work. I could tell she wanted to stay and hold the boy’s hand, even though he was still unconscious.

  One of the paramedics looked up. “Does anyone know who he is?”

  “A Cuban rafter, drifting on the tide,” I replied. “Can he be moved off the boat? You could probably work better over there on the sand.”

  The paramedic, a guy I only knew as Drew, looked at me. “That policy ended three years ago, Jesse. We’re just here to get him to the hospital. What happens after that is up to the courts and whether this boy has family here in the States.”

  “Everybody’s got a cousin in Miami,” I said, quoting the popular Jimmy Buffett song. “Mind if my wife and I ride with you?” I jerked a thumb toward the Seven Mile Bridge. “It looks like we’re out of the race, and neither of us is wearing shoes.”

  Brian and I helped the EMT guys carry the backboard over the rocky shoreline and sand to where they’d left the stretcher at the foot of the ramp. A uniformed deputy was standing there.

  “Are you the one who found him?” the deputy asked.

  “My wife and I,” I replied, nodding toward Savannah, still holding the boy’s hand.

  “I’ll need to get a statement.”

  “A boat was adrift with a little boy on it. We jumped in the water and brought the boat to Pigeon Key. Jesse and Savannah McDermitt. End of statement.”

  He joined us, jotting our names on a simple, spiral-bound notepad as the paramedics strapped the boy and the backboard to the stretcher and began wheeling it up the wooden ramp to the waiting ambulance.

  I looked at his name tag—Deputy B. Fife.

  I couldn’t help but grin. “Anything else, Deputy Fife?”

  “Before you ask, yes, that’s my real name and no, my first name isn’t Barney. It’s Bradford.”

  I was sure he got that a lot, so I decided against asking if he had one bullet in his shirt pocket.

  “Anything else, Brad?” I asked instead.

  “I’m going to need more than that simple statement,” he said. “Like who is he and where did he come from.”

  “I don’t know what else we can tell you, Deputy,” I said. “Look at him. Then look at that boat and the ninety miles of open water across the Gulf Stream. Where do you think he came from? What do you think happened to his family? Your guess is as good as mine.”

  The boy was strapped to the gurney with a white sheet over him. He had dark features, and hair as black as night. There was a bruise around his left eye.

  As we wheeled him up the ramp, the boy stirred and moaned. When he opened his eyes and looked around, I could see the fear etched on his face.

  Savannah leaned over the little boy and spoke softly in Spanish, holding his hand reassuringly. “Estás seguro. Estamos aquí para ayudarte,” she said, telling him he was safe and we were helping him.

  “What?” the boy murmured. “Where am I?”

  Savannah and I looked at each other, confused. He not only spoke English, but with no accent.

  The deputy and paramedics looked just as confused.

  “What’s your name?” Savannah asked. “Where are you from?”

  The boy looked totally bewildered. “I don’t know?” he whined, as we reached the waiting ambulance. “Are you my mom?”

  We stood there in disbelief as they loaded him in. How does an American kid end up on a homemade Cuban boat?

  The deputy turned to face me. “Now I have a lot more questions, Mr. McDermitt.”

  I looked at him, then at Savannah, and finally at the boy. His eyes were closed again.

  “Can my wife go with him, deputy? I’ll stay with you and answer any questions I can while we look at the boat. Something’s not adding up here.”

  He nodded to Savannah, who climbed into the back of the ambulance, accepting a blanket from one of the paramedics.

  “I’ll meet you at the hospital in a little while,” I told her.

  Then the doors were closed, and the ambulance drove away.

  “So, he’s not Cuban,” the deputy said.

  “I was sure he was a Cuban refugee,” I said, as we turned and started down the ramp.

  “Understandable,” Fife said, looking at the boat on the rocks. “He’s definitely Hispanic and that boat looks like others I’ve seen rafters come over on.”

  At the bottom of the ramp, Fife stopped and pulled his notebook out again. As I watched, he quickly sketched the scene before us.

  “During my rookie year, my partner always made me sketch what I saw,” Fife said. “He told me it trains the eye to look for more details.”

  He finished and we crossed the sand to where Brian stood, keeping tourists away from the boat. Though the bridge was closed to private vehicular traffic, tourists still visited the island by ferry.

  Fife wore jungle boots, typical for a lot of Florida cops. They had drain holes to let the water out. There weren’t many places in the southern half of the state more than a stone’s throw from water.

  Together, we waded around the rocks to the side of the boat.

  “Oarlocks, but no oars,” Fife said, taking his notepad out and jotting something down.

  “And that transom has never seen an outboard,” I added. “No markings from the mount.”

  Fife pulled the small piece of canvas out. There was nothing at all under it. No empty water bottles, no food containers, nothing.

  “I wonder how long he’d been out there?” Fife asked, rhetorically.

  “No more than three or four days without water,” I replied, studying the canvas closer. “Check this out.”

  He leaned over the boat and I showed him a label sewn into the edge of the canvas cover.

  Fife looked over at me. “Ray’s Custom Canvas?”

  “I know a place called that up in Fort Myers,” I said.

  “That’s a hundred miles away.”

  “More than that,” I said, as my mind calculated the currents. “A hundred and thirty to Fort Myers Beach.”

  “But a boat can’t get this far without some means of propulsion.”

  “The Loop Current,” I said. “It flows into the Gulf between the Yucatan and Cuba, then curves around to flow south along the Florida coast before it joins the Gulf Stream in the Straits.”

  “But that’s still a long way,” Fife offered, bending low and checking the boat’s exterior hull.

  “It flows at about three knots,” I said, looking south across the new bridge, to where the two mighty currents converged. “If a boat drifting off Fort Myers was caught in
the Loop, it could be right out there in less than three days, allowing for twice daily tide changes that slow the current. Less if the Loop Current moved farther north.”

  “It moves?” Fife asked, obviously curious.

  “At times, it barely flows into the Gulf before turning east,” I replied. “Other times, it brushes the coast of Louisiana, the Panhandle, and the west coast. I never looked into why; maybe it has to do with how much flow is coming out of the Mississippi River.”

  “You sound like a cop,” Fife said. “Or a scientist. What do you do for a living, Mr. McDermitt?”

  I grinned at him. “I live,” I replied. “And call me Jesse. Everyone around here does.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? I live?”

  “I’m retired military. And I own a fishing and diving charter business. Savannah and I live on a private island I bought twenty years ago. We don’t work for a living. We live for a living.”

  It was something my old friend, Tank had told me. He’d come to the Keys just before my and Savannah’s wedding and stayed on. He’d told me then that he was dying of cancer and he just wanted to live for a living.

  “I’m pretty sure the boat was made in Cuba,” Fife said. “I’ve seen more than my share, not always with living passengers.”

  “A Cuban boat,” I began, thinking out loud, “with an American kid on board, covered by a tarp made in Florida? One of these things doesn’t match the other two.”

  “You sound like my lieutenant.”

  “Then he’s a smart man,” I said. “Always look for patterns and just because one thing doesn’t fit, doesn’t mean it’s not a part of the pattern. Just like the Loop Current. It changes location and anything floating on it is affected by the tides and wind. But its existence is a constant and the changes are anomalies.”

  “You sure you’re not a cop?” he asked, peering closely at the transom board.

  “I also own part of a security firm up island,” I replied. “And over the years I’ve done some ‘consulting’ with federal and local law enforcement.”

  He bent over and examined the inboard side of the transom. “Hey, look at this.”

  I went back to where he was standing.

  “It looks like a word is sort of carved or etched in the wood,” he said, holding his smart phone up and trying to shield the sun to take a picture.

  Leaning over, I picked up the canvas. When I held it up, it reflected some of the sun’s light sideways across the transom, giving the markings more definition.

  “Alberto Mar?” Fife asked, snapping several pictures.

  The wood was soft and it looked like the name had been scratched into it with a small knife or something.

  “Can you radio the ambulance?” I asked. “And see if the boy has a pocketknife?”

  He pressed the button on his lapel mic and asked his dispatcher to contact the ambulance and find out. Then he continued to examine the little boat, scanning every part of it in turn.

  A few minutes later, the dispatcher said that yes, the boy had a small, antique-looking, folding knife in his pants pocket.

  “So, the kid’s name’s Alberto Mar,” Fife said, rubbing his chin. “Ties in with his appearance. Not so much with his very American accent.”

  “Mar means sea in Spanish,” I said. “Could be more to it that he didn’t finish. Martinez, Marina, Martin… Probably a lot more.”

  Fife scribbled on his notepad again.

  “I’d go with the notion that he’s from the Fort Myers area,” I offered. “Like you said, boats like this have drifted ashore many times. Maybe this one ended up on Florida’s west coast somehow.”

  Fife nodded his agreement. “That makes more sense than an American-made tarp and an American kid ending up in Cuba and drifting back.”

  “What should I do with the boat?” Brian asked.

  “Let’s get it up on the sand,” Fife replied. “At least until we find out who the kid is and where he and this boat came from.”

  Brian pointed to three other men, ordering them into the water. Together, the six of us easily lifted the boat over the rocks and carried it up onto the beach.

  “Can I give you a lift to the hospital?” Fife asked. “I’m going there anyway.”

  “Thanks,” I replied. “It doesn’t look like there’s anything more to learn here.”

  We went up the ramp to where his cruiser was parked, the engine idling. There was a large K-9 stencil on the rear fender, and I could see a dog in the back of the patrol car.

  Fife unlocked the car and opened the passenger door. “Major gets less excited if I hold the door for someone,” Fife explained.

  I got in. Barely. The passenger seat had been slid forward about as far as it would go and there was a plethora of gadgets situated within easy reach of the driver’s seat, but they encroached on the passenger side.

  The dog looked at me, his ears up and alert to my every move. He was a shepherd of some kind.

  Fife got in and turned a rugged-looking laptop toward him. “Give me a minute to file a preliminary report,” he said, taking his notepad and phone out. He propped the pad on the dash and plugged his phone into the laptop, and then began pushing keys and typing.

  “Is Major a Belgian shepherd?” I asked, deciding the dog was too small to be a German shepherd.

  “Collectively, there are four breeds of Belgian shepherd dogs,” Fife explained, as he pushed the laptop away and put the cruiser in gear. “Major’s a Belgian Malinois, which literally means made in Mechelen, Belgium in French. They’re not as big as German shepherds, but every bit as smart and maybe a little faster, due to their more compact size. They’re definitely more agile.”

  “How long have you been working with him?”

  “Since K-9 school when he was six months old,” Fife replied. “He’s almost nine now and will be retiring soon.”

  “What happens then?”

  Fife glanced in the rearview mirror, which I noticed was angled down, so he could see the dog. “Hopefully, I’ll move to a desk job about then and Major will just retire to my home. But if I’m assigned a new dog, Major will be put out for adoption. They usually get adopted by someone within the department, which is good. But a handler with a working dog isn’t permitted to adopt another.”

  “That would make sense,” I said. “At least you could see him sometimes.”

  “To be honest, Mr. Mc—Jesse, if I don’t get the desk job when he retires, I’ve been thinking of leaving the department so he can stay with me.”

  I knew that police dogs, like most working dogs, were extremely loyal to their handlers. Apparently, it went both ways.

  Once off the bridge, it was a short ride to the hospital—less than two miles. The new hospital wasn’t complete yet and the doctors and nurses were still using the modular ER facility erected in the parking lot adjacent to the new building. The original hospital had been damaged so badly during Irma, more than three years ago, that it had to be closed.

  “Any word on when the new hospital will open?” I asked as we got out of the cruiser.

  “They say they’re still on track for a fall opening,” he replied, then leaned in to tell the dog, “Bleibe.”

  I grinned. “We use German commands for our Rottweiler, too. Since he’s Belgian, why don’t you use French?”

  “We have several breeds and use German commands for all of them,” he said. “My first dog was a German shepherd. He died in the line of duty.”

  I’d heard about a police dog being killed by a knife-wielding man strung out on meth, about eight years ago.

  “Was he the one who rescued the little girl from the meth monster?”

  Fife nodded as he pulled the door open. “You heard about it?”

  “Everyone in the Keys did,” I replied. “I was at his funeral with my dog, Finn.”

  “A Rottweiler named Finn?” he asked, following me in.

  “No. Finn’s our yellow Lab. Woden’s our Rottweiler.”

  “Cool nam
es.”

  Savannah rose from a chair and came toward me. I held her in my arms for a moment before asking if there was any news about the little boy.

  “Nothing yet,” she replied.

  “We think his name might be Alberto,” I said.

  “I’ll go to the desk and get them to relay that to the doctors,” Fife said. “Maybe it’ll jog the boy’s memory.”

  Savannah was still wrapped in the blanket from the ambulance and her clothes were damp. Having been outside in the sun, my clothes were almost dry.

  A man in scrubs came through the restricted door and looked around. Seeing Fife talking to the admitting nurse, he went over to him.

  Savannah and I followed.

  “Are you the policeman who found the boy?” the man asked.

  “Deputy Fife,” he replied, then nodded to me and Savannah. “They were the ones who found and rescued him. The boy’s name might be Alberto. Any idea what happened to him?”

  The man turned toward me, and I could see his nametag. “I’m Jesse McDermitt and this is my wife, Savannah. How is the boy, Doctor Reynolds?”

  “He’s alive,” the doctor replied. “But he wouldn’t have survived another day. He’s severely dehydrated and seems to have been malnourished for quite some time. But that’s not what worries me. We’re treating him for that.”

  “What else?” Savannah asked.

  “Maybe three days ago, this boy received a beating. He has two fractured ribs. He’s awake but doesn’t know who he is or where he comes from.”

  “So, you both jumped off the Seven Mile into skinny water?” Rusty asked. “You coulda broke your necks.”

  There’d been school buses on Little Duck Key to bring the runners back, but Rusty had driven to the other side of the Seven Mile Bridge before the race to see the finish and bring me and Savannah back. When we didn’t arrive, he started asking some of the runners he knew, and someone told him what had happened.

  “It seemed like the thing to do at the time,” Savannah said.

  We’d walked from the hospital to the Anchor, hoping that Rusty would be back soon, because we’d left a change of clothes in his truck. Now that he’d returned, we were in dry clothes, but since we hadn’t anticipated losing our shoes, our feet were bare.