Backwater Pass

by Steven Becker

  “This looks bad. I’ll call 911 and Miami-Dade,” she said.

  We took off at a run. People were out of their cars now, looking for the cause of the backup. After running another block, I saw what looked like a wall blocking the road. Justine and I were both trained as first responders and didn’t hesitate. It became evident after another hundred feet what had happened and I steeled myself for what lay ahead.

  The pedestrian walkway across the highway had collapsed. Huge concrete pieces lay askew and several had fallen directly on vehicles. There was a general sense of panic surrounding the scene, which only increased when we heard the first sirens. Miami-Dade would be here momentarily; the important thing for us was to find the victims.

  Justine and I ran over to the first car and saw that a concrete beam had completely crushed the driver. There were two people in the backseat holding each other and crying. Justine went to them and I moved to the next vehicle. Over the next half hour I did what I could, until Miami-Dade took over and Justine and I were eased out of the way. With our heads down we walked back to the truck.

  Allie had her head down and I assumed she was texting her boyfriend when we got back.

  “Is it as bad as it looks?” she asked. She held up a YouTube video of the collapse that had already been posted.

  Covered in dirt and grime, we looked at each other. “Yeah.” It didn’t escape me that if we’d been here two minutes earlier we could have been under that debris. “It’s bad. Can you call your mom?”

  “Already did. She’s cool, just said to text her when we can get out of here.”

  Trying to force the images I had just seen from my head, I surveyed the scene. The sun had set and in place of another famous Florida sunset was a display of red, white, blue, yellow, and green lights from the emergency vehicles. Several police cruisers were behind us directing traffic to allow the trapped vehicles an exit route. There was nothing else to be done here, and after getting back in the truck, I followed the directions of an officer with an orange vest and flashlights in each hand. He directed me to turn around by pointing one light toward a side street.

  “You guys okay?” I knew I wasn’t, but one of the first duties of the living was to keep moving. They both responded quietly and I followed the road north past several golf course communities until reaching the Turnpike at the next exit.

  “Did people die?” Allie asked.

  “I think so.” I wanted to say something to comfort her, but the words would not form sentences.

  “It’s a terrible accident. The police and firefighters will do everything they can,” Justine said.

  I looked over at Allie. She had started to look older and more mature to me, but now she looked like the younger version I remembered after our house had been destroyed. I reached over to take her hand and she grasped mine hard. We didn’t let go until we pulled into the designated parking lot a half hour later to meet Jane.

  Allie ran to her and they embraced. It hurt a little to watch, but I knew the two had gone through a lot together and had a strong bond. Jane had actually showed some wisdom when she had decided not to resist my attempt for some time with Allie, telling me that if she kept us apart she would be driving Allie away from her in the process.

  “Looked pretty bad on the Internet,” she said.

  “Yeah.” I realized how I must look. “Allie waited in the truck while we checked out the scene before the paramedics arrived.” Allie and I had a long hard embrace and I wiped the tears from her eyes before saying good-bye. Justine held her close for a long time as well. Jane indulged us and we finally left to our separate Monday-to-Friday routines.

  “What do you want to do?” Justine asked.

  We had originally planned on spending the night at her apartment. I could think of nowhere else I would rather be, but something was bothering me. “Can we go back to the scene?”

  “I’ll bite. I have to admit I’m curious as well.”

  Justine worked the swing shift at the forensics lab. She’d seen death and destruction in a myriad of settings. We had both gotten over being close enough to the accident to be aware that if it had happened a few seconds later, we would have been underneath it. Now our clinical brains were taking over and I was curious. Highway 41 was a major east–west road and the debris would be cleared quickly. If we wanted to see what had happened this might be our only chance.

  We came in from the west on 41, figuring it would be an easier escape route. Apparently we weren’t the only ones with this idea. Justine’s credentials got us through the checkpoint setup to divert traffic at the Turnpike, but we ground to a stop a hundred feet later. The road was clogged with what looked like every vehicle Miami-Dade had, scattered randomly wherever they had stopped. We parked off to the side and I grabbed my credentials from the glove compartment. I wasn’t sure where they would get me, but they looked official.

  I recognized several faces as we approached the collapsed bridge, and Justine said muted hellos to others. Generators hummed, powering the large construction lights that had been brought in, and people in and out of uniform, each looking like they knew what they were doing, worked the scene. With no assignment, we stood and stared at the rubble like tourists.

  The site was so busy that no one bothered to question us as we walked around. Justine started taking pictures of the broken sections with her phone. I thought about doing the same except Martinez, my boss, would want to know why I was here. As special agent in charge, he did his job from behind his desk, watching his three large-screen monitors, which showed him more of my life than I wanted him to know. I had learned the hard way that everything I did, and everywhere I went, was monitored. The boat, truck, and phone were all park service issue. He knew my location at all times and all the data on my phone went to the Cloud where he could see it.

  Still, it was a unique perspective to be looking at the wreckage from a ten-thousand foot view instead of focusing on a small part of it like investigators were prone to do. The park service has been my career for almost a decade, but before that I was in construction. I had worked for my dad on a framing and concrete crew in high school and returned to work full-time in his employ after a brief stint in college.

  I had read about this project. Using accelerated bridge construction or ABC, the bridge was built to be assembled in sections, then cranes would swing them into place so as to avoid closing the busy road. The standard procedure, for as long as anyone had been building bridges, had always been to shut down one side of the highway while that section was being built, then move to the other side to complete the structure. On a highway that saw as much traffic as this, that would only add to the nightmare of driving in Dade County. ABC would put the bridge in place in a weekend.

  Looking around I studied the scene. Rebar, the steel that gave reinforced concrete its strength, stuck out of some of the broken pieces that still stood on each side. These were the sections that were built traditionally, as they were out of the traffic pattern. It looked like those had crumbled after the initial failure. In the center of the road, the pre-cast finished sections lay in a jumble, but seemed to be mostly intact. We wandered over to one of them. Concrete by itself is a brittle material. It needs the steel reinforcing bars embedded inside it for strength. If the bridge had been built in place, there would have been a maze of reinforcing bars running through the concrete; instead there were only several large tensioning rods.

  “Looks like it failed here,” I said.

  3

  After a restless night, I sat at Justine’s table drinking coffee, glued to the non-stop news coverage of the bridge collapse, and wondering why Martinez hadn’t called. I had no doubt he knew where I was from the location of the truck and the phone. Generally, when I stayed here, he was my alarm.

  Justine was out training for a paddleboard race she had coming up. Lately, I’d been going out with her on her long slow days, which for me were long fast days. She was good about circling back for me and I felt like I was getting b
etter. My assignment here at the park was less strenuous than walking miles in the forest every day. Living on an island and having a boat at my disposal for transportation had put a few extra pounds around my midsection. Looking at forty I knew that wasn’t a good thing, but recently I had started to do a body weight training program and hoped that between that and paddling with Justine I could reverse that course.

  Justine was still out when I finished my coffee. The news had become redundant and I decided to head back down to the park. It was too early in the investigation to reveal anything useful and the talking heads were just speculating. The initial press conferences were over and the clean-up had already begun. I rinsed out my cup and cleaned the coffee pot, then gathered my dirty laundry from my dresser drawer and headed out to the truck.

  The after-rush hour traffic was moving steadily, giving me time to think. The last few weeks had been slow, but I knew what we were in for with the coming assault of boaters for Sportsman’s weekend. Even though the park was a part of the Biscayne Bay–Card Sound Lobster Sanctuary, many of the hunters passed through its waters. Generally, I split the inside waters of the park into four quadrants and patrolled one a day. That left a day for the paperwork required by Martinez. Today, I thought I might change it up and work north, on the outside of the islands from Elliot Key up to Boca Chita. Tomorrow, I would reverse course and head south.

  I wanted to get a feel for some of the small inlets and creeks on the ocean side. Checking licenses and catches was typically under the jurisdiction of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission, but the tidal creeks, especially the ones with any kind of structure, were loaded with what some of the locals call “bugs”, and I suspected there would be more than a few boaters unable to avoid the temptation of the creeks and canals that wove like a maze through some of the outer keys.

  I reached headquarters and saw Martinez and Susan McLeash’s trucks parked side by side. Susan was my equal as well as my nemesis. I still hadn’t figured out if it was her lack of judgment or her cavalier attitude that usually got her in trouble. Unless her violations were flagrant, Martinez would cover for her, but many were witnessed by outsiders and she was constantly skirting the line between active duty, suspension, or reassignment. The last time she had gone off the reservation it had worked for her, so she had recently been given a commendation and had been reinstated. I guessed there was some probation involved with some of her earlier decisions that she had been sidelined for. But now she was back, and with no call yet from Martinez I was getting paranoid.

  Looking up at the security camera by the entrance I walked in the door. Mariposa greeted me with a big smile from behind the reception desk. The matronly Jamaican was my one ally here, as well as a friend.

  “So, when do we get to meet your daughter?” Mariposa asked.

  I motioned with my head to Martinez’s upstairs office as I approached her desk, thinking he had microphones and could hear our conversation.

  “He’s been up there for the last two hours meeting with your girlfriend. Came down and asked for a map of the park a little bit ago. It was my pleasure to inform him that we called them ‘charts’ here.”

  “What’s he up to?”

  “Got a call this morning from the chancellor of that University where the bridge collapsed. Now, about your daughter—or do I have to go over your head and call Justine?”

  “She’ll be down next weekend. How about if we come by Saturday night? You’re welcome to come out to the island, too. Hopefully we’ll have some lobster.”

  “You can just come by the house; my husband doesn’t like to travel with the Appleton. You bring the lobster and I’ll cook them up.”

  “Deal.” Despite the boat ride back and forth, the dinner would be spectacular and I longed for another taste of her husband’s guest-only rum. “I better go see what those two are up to.”

  I headed upstairs, surprised to see that both Susan and Martinez’s offices were empty. Peeking in I noticed his monitors were in standby mode. Down the hall was my office, which was of course empty, and a conference room just past it. The door to the conference room was open and I looked in to see the two of them leaning over the large table, examining what I guessed was the chart Mariposa had mentioned. They were close. Closer than I would have been to either of them.

  I cleared my throat. “I was planning on heading out to check the out islands north of Caesar’s Creek.” I heard only a muffled “okay” in response. Something about the two of them in cahoots had me on full alert. Whatever they were up to could not be good for the park—or me.

  Over the last year and a half I had developed a deep feeling of respect for the ecosystem in our charge. Billed as ninety-five percent water, the park was a unique environment in itself, but its proximity to Miami made it accessible. That was both a blessing and a curse. The more people that visited and experienced the raw beauty of the water and the mangrove-lined shores the more it would be appreciated. On the flip side, the more visitors the park had, the greater the incidence of damage to the fragile environment. Propellers that tore through shallow flats and destroyed the seagrass were the biggest problem, but there were many others.

  I decided to stop by my office and kill some time, hoping they would take a break and I could get a look at that chart. Opening the door, I sat in the windowless room and started the computer. Wondering what Martinez would think, I started doing the unthinkable and pecked out a schedule for the week. He insisted on them, but I rarely complied, and often when I did they were written on bar napkins or consisted of one-line emails. Having already laid out the week in my head, it flowed through my fingers and onto the computer screen. I was ready to email it before they left the room.

  I thought if I stayed any longer he might get suspicious, so I emailed the attachment and left. Thinking two steps ahead but not paying attention, I bumped into him.

  Martinez looked up at me like I was breaking some unwritten rule by being here. “Hunter, I need to talk to you,” he said.

  Susan brushed by with a smile on her face and I steeled myself for whatever she had set me up for this time. “I just emailed you my schedule.”

  “My office,” he demanded.

  I followed him into his lair. As if they knew their master was present the flat screen monitors came to life. He sat down and motioned me to the other chair. It was his habit to make me wait, either through some feigned urgent phone call or email, and this time was no different. I fidgeted in the chair while he read something on his screen. He hit several keys and turned to the bank of monitors.

  “You have an explanation for this?”

  I stared at the pictures that Susan McLeash had taken of me icing down a pair of mangrove snapper. I knew she had them and wondered why she had chosen now to use them. “That was a while ago,” I said.

  He ignored me. “Timestamp shows that you were on duty that day. We’ve been through this about you fishing on duty before. I’m going to have to write you up for disciplinary action this time.”

  It was actually the first time he had proof. I sat there defenseless, not wanting to give the impression that I didn’t care. “I caught them early that morning before I started patrolling. I was just icing them down.” These were really just words to fill the air. If a mark on my record was unavoidable I didn’t want to prolong the conversation, but I wanted to know why Susan had chosen now to use them.

  “Is the schedule acceptable?” I asked to change the subject.

  “Should work. You’ll be needing to put in some overtime over the weekend with Sportsman’s and all.”

  Allie was going to be disappointed, but there was a six lobster limit. With any luck we could get out early and catch ours, then I could go to work. It was pretty common practice for people to catch their limit, return to shore and place them on ice, and then head out again. That was a line I wasn’t going to cross.

  “That’s fine,” I said, hoping that would get me dismissed. He nodded and I left his office. Susan’s door was
open, and I averted my eyes when I passed. The last thing I wanted to see was the smirk on her face. Remembering the chart in the conference room, I backtracked to my office and opened the door. I waited a few minutes, killing time by checking the tides and weather. It was something Martinez or Susan wouldn’t notice, but anyone who lived and fished out here would find it strange. After a few weeks on the water you could read the clouds and currents to determine the weather and the tide charts became like circadian rhythms in your head.

  I waited five minutes and left again, leaving the door open behind me in case I needed to make a hasty retreat. After checking the hallway I entered the conference room. The chart was spread on the desk with several Sharpies and papers alongside it. Before I could see what was marked I heard footsteps coming down the hall. There was no time to study the chart, so I reached for my phone, fumbled to open the camera app, and snapped several pictures before turning to leave. I took a quick look down the hall and found it empty. Figuring one of them was in the restroom, I decided to rely on the pictures.

  Back at my office, I shut off the light and closed the door. Martinez was still at his desk when I passed, but his back was turned and he was talking on the phone. Susan’s office was empty and just as I reached the stairs I heard the restroom door open. I flew down the staircase hoping she hadn’t seen me and with a finger over my lips looked over at Mariposa on my way out the door.

  I walked quickly to the boat and after checking the water flow against the pilings, saw there was no current so I tossed the lines before climbing aboard. Seconds later, I started the engine and dropped the throttle back into reverse. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough, but knew Martinez had a camera pointed at the small marina. Fighting the urge to throttle up, I slipped the lever to the first stop and idled into the channel. I had to be careful now. In the park service boat, I was an example to other boaters—for good and bad. If I ran too fast or cut the corner before a channel marker they would take that as an okay to do it themselves, until it went badly and they grounded—then it was my fault.