Deep Shadow
( Doc Ford - 17 )
Randy Wayne White
From Booklist
Now, in Randy Wayne White’s latest Doc Ford thriller, the intrepid marine biologist goes underwater for a couple hundred pages. It starts innocently enough, with Ford, his hippie pal Tomlinson, teenager Will Chaser (from Dead Silence, 2009), and cranky old-timer Arlis Futch embarking on a treasure-hunting trip to an isolated lake, on the bottom of which is purported to be a mother lode of gold from Batista’s Cuba. Three problems quickly develop: a sort-of underwater avalanche that leaves all but Ford trapped under tons of limestone (a cave keeps the victims alive as their air supply dwindles); the arrival (on land) of two psycho killers right out of In Cold Blood (one is even named Perry); and, scariest of all, the lurking presence of, yes, a sea monster. Ford eventually surmounts all the obstacles before him, of course, but along the way, we are treated to a wonderful mix of hair-raising horror, grace under pressure, and fascinating natural history. There turns out to be a biologically sound explanation for the presence of the sea monster, but that doesn’t make it any less terrifying for anyone who remembers Creature from the Black Lagoon (as Ford notes, “The universe beneath is alive—relentlessly alive”). It’s no surprise that White’s long-running, always-popular series has broken through to mainstream best-sellerdom; his novels appeal on so many levels: as portraits of a steadily evolving, tough-yet-introspective hero; as eco-friendly investigations of natural Florida; and as muscular, head-banging adventure thrillers. And, now, there are sea monsters, too!
ALSO BY RANDY WAYNE WHITE
Sanibel Flats
The Heat Islands
The Man Who Invented Florida
Captiva
North of Havana
The Mangrove Coast
Ten Thousand Islands
Shark River
Twelve Mile Limit
Everglades
Tampa Burn
Dead of Night
Dark Light
Hunter’s Moon
Black Widow
Dead Silence
NONFICTION
Batfishing in the Rainforest
The Sharks of Lake Nicaragua
Last Flight Out
An American Traveler
Tarpon Fishing in Mexico and Florida (An Introduction)
Randy Wayne White’s Gulf Coast Cookbook
(With Carlene Fredericka Brennen)
FICTION AS RANDY STRIKER
Key West Connection
The Deep Six
Grand Cayman Slam
Cuban Death-Lift
The Deadlier Sex
Assassin’s Shadow
Everglades Assault
Deep shadow
Randy Wayne White.
Sanibel and Captiva Islands, and the area near Venus, Florida, are real places, faithfully described but used fictitiously in this novel. The same is true of certain businesses, marinas, bars and other places frequented by Doc Ford, Tomlinson and pals.
In all other respects, however, this novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is unintentional and coincidental.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
http://us.penguingroup.com
This book is for my pals
Mark Marinello and Coach Marty Harrity,
who lured me back to Dinkin’s Bay.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
One of the joys of writing is doing research. Details regarding Florida geology and cave diving required and received particular attention. I would like to give special thanks to Florida geologist Jason Sheasley, and also William and Cameron Barton, for reading an early draft of the manuscript and offering their insights. Lee Florea of the Karst Research Group, Department of Geology, University of South Florida, and Dr. Bruce Flareau, M.D., provided valuable information on air bells and karst topography. Bob Alexander of NAVSYS Inc. was of great assistance in helping me select a first-rate underwater night vision system, which I used often as reference while writing this book. For assistance in research regarding Florida exotics, monitor lizards, neurological pain, cerebral diseases, the effects of blood-thinning poison on stroke victims and the luminosity of various dive watches, I want to thank the following people, in no particular order: Oklahoma authority Henry Baker; Ken Warren, public affairs officer, South Florida Ecological Services office, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; Jenny Edgar of the Mermaid Restaurant; Dr. Brian Hummel; Captain William Gutek; Dr. Donald Slevin; Captain Russ Mattson, Marvin Metheny; Nitrox diver Audrey Fischer; Dr. Chance Wunderlich; chronograph experts Eric Loth, David Camba and Alexandra Castro; maestro O. J. Whatley; and marine biologist/ watch entrepreneur Dr. John Peterson. If there are factual errors in the narrative, they are wholly the fault of the author.
The early chapters of this book were written in Cartagena, Colombia, and Havana, Cuba, and I am indebted to friends who helped me secure good places to live and write. My thanks go to Giorgio and Carolina Arajuo for their help in Cartagena, as well as Evelyn, Eliana and Elisa for their kind attentions, and also to my pals Ron Iossi, Marlin, Javier and José of the Hotel Centro. In Cuba, my Freemason brothers Ernesto Batista and Sergio Rodriguez were particularly helpful, as were Roberto and Ela Giraudy, Rául and Myra Corrales, Alex Vicente and Mack Wiggins. Through the generosity of the Robert Rauschenberg estate, much of this book was written on Captiva Island, in a fish house, thanks to Mark Pace, Darryl Pottorf and Matt Hall.
Most of this novel, though, was written at a corner table, before and after hours, at Doc Ford’s Sanibel Rum Bar and Grille on Sanibel Island, Florida, where staff were tolerant beyond the call of duty.
Thanks to my friends and partners Brenda Harrity, Heidi Marinello, master chef Greg Nelson, Dan Howes, Brian Cunningham, my baseball pal Chad Cook; Reynauld Bentley, Andrea Guerrero, Dawn Oliveri, Mojito Greg, Liz Harris, Captain Bryce Randall Harris, Milita Kennedy, Kevin Filliowich, Kevin Boyce, Eric Breland, Sam Khusan Ismatul, Olga Guryanova, Rachel Songalewski of Michigan, Jean Crenshaw, Lindsay Kuleza, Greg Barker, Roberto Cruz, Amanda Rodriguez, Juan Gomex, Mary McBeath, Kim McGonnell, Allyson Parzero, Cindy Porter, Sean Scott, Big Matt Powell, Laurie and Yak’yo Yukobov, Bette Roberts, as well as the wonderful staff at Doc Ford’s, Fort Myers Beach. At Timber’s Sanibel Grille, my pals Matt Asen, Mary Jo, Audrey, Becky, Debbie, Favi, Bart and Bobby were, once again, stalwarts.
I would especially like to thank dear Iris Tanner, my helper and appointed angel, for clearing the decks, gradually over the last few years, so that writing, finally, has become my primary focus.
Last, I would like to thank my two sons, Rogan and Lee White, for helping me finish, yet again, another book.
—Randy Wayne White
Casa de Chico’s
Sanibel Island, Florida
“He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.”
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
PROLOGUE
TUESDAY MORNING, KING WAS WATCHING THE SKY, relieved there were no search helicopters plowing the horizon, like the day before, and he thought, Good.
Maybe Florida cops had arrested someone else for the murders.
King was about to tell Perry, “Let’s get the bikes an
d head south,” meaning Homestead or Key West. Anywhere but here, where they’d been hiding for two days, sleeping with ants and mosquitoes, near a teardrop-shaped lake, black water and cypress trees, in the boonies of central Florida, sixty miles south of Orlando.
Perry had shushed him, though, flapping his hands, saying, “Listen. You hear that? Someone’s coming.” A moment later, Perry had crouched lower, hissing, “Listen!”
Perry, a man with small hands and a small brain but good ears.
Shit. He was right.
Twenty minutes later, King and Perry were in the trees, south of the lake, watching four men with machetes hacking a path for a diesel pickup, a truck that made a whining sound when it accelerated. Three men plus a teenage boy, actually. Indian-looking kid in jeans, a red wind band around his head, black hair long, like an Apache in a TV western.
Miles from the nearest dirt road, but here they were. Perry’s expression read Can you believe this crap?
The truck crept forward . . . stopped . . . bounced over palmetto stumps, then stopped again, while a crabby old redneck sitting behind the wheel yelled orders.
“Fifty more yards, Doc, we got her licked!”
Doc? King studied the men. Unlikely that it was the hippie-looking dude, skinny with ribs showing, or the Apache teenager, which left the man who was doing most of the work. He was a nerdy-looking guy with glasses tied around his neck, but he had a set of shoulders on him. Forearms, too. A doctor, maybe, but the teacher variety, not a real doctor, because, sometimes, when they spoke to the guy, they called him Ford.
Perry whispered, “You think they’re cops? They don’t look like cops.”
No. Cops wouldn’t be driving a truck loaded with scuba diving gear, a generator and a bunch of other stuff that Perry and King watched the men unload, half an hour later, interested now instead of worried.
Nice-looking Dodge with oversized tires, the tow-rig package. Easy to steal, once the men put on those wet suits and went into the lake, which it appeared they were going to do—as long as they left the keys in the damn truck.
It should have put Perry in a better mood. Instead, when King said, “Looks like the King was right. Our luck’s changing,” Perry stared at him, then spit in the direction of King’s feet, before saying, “You haven’t been right since we left Indiana.”
Not something King would have admitted, but it was true.
From the bus station, downtown Bloomington, an Arctic low had followed the two men south like bad luck, blowing snow across parking lots from Nashville to Atlanta, then Macon, too, which caused Perry to finally say, “Maybe Florida’s not such a hot idea. I feel like we’re being chased into a corner.”
To which King had replied, “What? You’re blaming me for the shitty weather now?”
A little later, thinking about it, King added, “A corner has walls. That was a stupid thing to say about Florida.”
Perry said, “What do you call an ocean? The damn state’s surrounded on three sides.”
It took King a moment. Surrounded by water, Perry meant.
King said, “You ever seen a wall that could take you to Mexico? Costa Rica, maybe. I hear that’s sweet. Stick with the plan, Jock-a-mo. With enough money, a man can live like a king in those places. Personally, the King’s ready for a change. Or maybe you’re getting homesick for Joliet?”
It had irritated Perry, at first, the way the man spoke of himself, the King this or the King that, like he was speaking of a third person, but Perry was used to it now, and said, “How much, you think?”
Money, Perry meant.
King knew what Perry wanted to hear, so he went over it again, saying, “We each put a couple hundred grand in some Mexican bank, the word will get out. That’s millions, when you convert dollars into pesos. How you think that would feel, to be a millionaire?
“Cops will protect us, for a change. No questions, no trouble. We do this right, you’ll have yourself maids, a cook, hell, a driver, if you want. Be pretty nice, wouldn’t it, wake up and have a pretty little Mexican maid standing there, ready to give you the big finish before your day even starts.”
King smiled, his expression asking, Is the King right?
Perry liked that, no matter how many times he heard the story, but then he had to go and spoil it by looking around the truck stop, beyond the eighteen-wheelers parked in rows, and saying, “Snow’s sticking on the damn palm trees! You believe this shit? The leaves are silver, like ice.”
King told him, “Dude, that’s not snow. It’s neon light that does that, the way the wind hits the trees. An optical illusion.”
King, the know-it-all, an expert on everything.
Perry had lit a cigarette, his expression saying, What-ever, as he shifted from foot to foot, the two of them standing near gas pumps, waiting for the Greyhound to load. Two a.m. Damn, it was cold.
“When you talked Florida, you never mentioned snow. I’m starting to wonder if you’ve really been here before.”
King, who had never been south of St. Louis in his life, said, “Believe what you want. Backstage at a Buffett concert, maybe Jimmy will help me convince you. Besides, Macon’s not Florida. Orlando, that’s Florida.”
Perry was twenty-three, King, thirty-one or thirty-two, he wasn’t sure. Both men skinny with Adam’s apples showing, combs in their pockets, King carrying his belongings in a Army duffel, Perry with his in a backpack stolen from a playground. The men had been cell mates at Statesville Correctional, near Joliet, which worked out okay because neither of them was into the butt-buddy thing. At Statesville, sleeping on your belly could be interpreted as an invitation, so having a cell mate who dug only girls was worth a hell of a lot more than friendship. They had both worn their pants low, kept their mouths shut, and done their time kicking around ways to get rich when they finally made parole.
It was at Statesville that they met Julie, a black dude, who told them about a man he’d worked for in Winter Haven, which was near Orlando, doing lawn maintenance, picking oranges—an old man, he said, who had a coin collection worth a fortune and paid his help in cash, usually twenty-dollar bills. Older bills, Julie told them, the picture of Jackson small on the front, which suggested to King, the thinker, that the old man didn’t use banks.
“How’d he make his money?” King had asked.
“Family owned a thousand acres of citrus,” Julie had told them. “Then Disney came along. The old man still owns a hundred acres—six years ago, he still owned it, anyway. You’d need a calculator to count that much money.”
Julie was doing life but wasn’t a typical con, because the man he’d killed was a one-time thing, and he had it coming, from the way Julie told it.
“I wasn’t drunk, never used a damn drug in my life, but when I heard what the son-bitch did to my wife, I sort of went nuts. I used a shotgun, four rounds of bird shot. It took a while. I wanted to give the son-bitch time to review the rules.”
When King had asked, “Why didn’t you go for the old man’s money while you were at it?,” the look of contempt on Julie’s face said more than any parole board would ever know.
“I worked for that man. The man paid me on time and he treated my family fair. What kinda punk-ass question is that?”
After that, Julie wouldn’t give King or Perry the time of day, but they’d learned enough by then. They knew the old man’s name, and that what was left of the citrus farm was set back off Green Pond Road and Route 27 on property north of Winter Haven, most of it probably golf courses and trailer parks by now, but the big white house still there, Julie guessed, hidden by trees.
It took a few weeks thinking about it before King really latched on to the idea of Florida, heading south, scoring big, then buying their way out of the United States and into foreign lives. It wasn’t until then that King mentioned he’d once lived in Florida. He claimed he’d worked as a lifeguard in Palm Beach, hustling rich old women, wearing custom-sewn jackets—he’d even done some scuba diving, he said, when he wasn’t sittin
g on the beach, eating mangoes and drinking orange juice, every morning.
Six months they’d been cell mates, and it was all news to Perry.
“You ever had fresh squeezed? Not the crap that comes out of a can, the real thing. Sun’s hot, tan all year round, but with a nice cool breeze off the ocean—try to picture it. And the girls, they’ve got no reason to wear clothes. Before you even say hello, Jock-a-mo, you’re halfway home.”
King, a tropical expert all of a sudden, particularly on Florida. He’d been reading about Mexico and Central America, too.
Perry suspected King was full of shit, but the man had ideas, he was ten years older, always thinking, so maybe it was okay. Perry wasn’t a thinker. Perry was a doer.
King processed out three months before Perry, but he was there in the visitors’ parking lot, waiting, carrying a magazine, Florida Travel & Life, that was folded open to an article entitled “Winter Haven’s Stubborn Son.”
It was a story about the old man, whose name was Hostetler, refusing to sell the last fifty acres of his property, even though the county was pissed off because they were losing taxes that Disney or Comfort Suites were eager to pay. The picture showed a sour-looking old man with bitter, superior eyes, sitting next to a dog, some kind of pointer that looked more crippled up than the old man.
Damn, the guy was real. Just like Julie had said.
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