Randy White: Deceived

The second book in the Hannah Smith series, 2013

Most fishing guides would consider it lucky to escape without injury or a lawsuit when, out of nowhere, a hundred-pound fish jumps into her boat and knocks two clients overboard.

When it happened on that clear, bright morning in April, the idea that a close call can also be a warning never entered my mind until later that afternoon. It was because of something a friend told me, a strange friend named Tomlinson whom some dismiss as a pot-smoking beach bum-which he is-but I like and trust the man anyway.

“I’d either move to Montana for a week or fire your clients,” he counseled after giving my story some thought. “Could be a bad omen, Hannah-not the first time God sent a giant fish as His messenger.”

Which was something I didn’t take seriously because my boat was safely back at the dock and I had joined him in a hospital waiting room, hushed voices and the echoing footsteps of fear all around. Why worry about bad events in my future when there were people nearby with real problems? Some fighting for their lives, some recovering from near death-including a man I secretly hoped to date when he was well. Selfish thoughts didn’t seem right in such a setting. Besides, the tarpon had appeared so unexpectedly, the blurry details weren’t solid enough to carry the weight of a warning, let alone God’s personal message to me.

“Some of the crazy notions you get,” I replied, and expected a smile to signal he was joking. He wasn’t. Tomlinson is tall and gaunt-faced, with long, scraggily hair that he fiddles with when fretful or preoccupied. He was chewing a strand now.

“This morning, a tarpon lands in your boat while you were under way-what are the odds?”

“I know, I know,” I agreed. “My clients are lucky they weren’t hurt. Me, too. Not more than a few bruises between us, which is a miracle.”

“See?” Tomlinson said, then pressed, “A shark buzzed you, too. How big?”

The memory of that dorsal fin cleaving toward my client’s legs caused a shudder-the fin had to be a yard tall. “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “They dropped the idea of a lawsuit.”

Tomlinson shook his head in a way that suggested I had missed his point. “Go over it one more time. Close your eyes first. Picture what happened in your mind, and go slowly. It was only a few hours ago.”

“You’re serious?” I said.

“You see any magazines here you haven’t read?” He looked around the room where, the previous month, we had spent six long nights waiting, and now we were back again. Tomlinson was jumpy, I realized, eager for a diversion. Truth was, I felt the same. Soon, we hoped, a physician would come down the hallway and tell us if a man we both cared about, a biologist named Marion Ford, could carry on with his life or would need a second heart surgery.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll start from the beginning.”

Something inside me feared the worst, but I closed my eyes, let my mind drift back, and did what I had been asked to do.

There are spring mornings so calm off Sanibel Island that in bays where islands block the breeze, saltwater bonds like blue gel, and, if you’re in a good boat, the surface feels as solid as ice and as slick. I was in a good boat, a twenty-one-foot open boat, no top or canvas to get in the way, and powered by a fast Mercury outboard-a “flats skiff,” as the design is known in Southwest Florida, where my family has lived for generations.

It had been one of those rare April mornings.

I’d picked up my clients at sunrise, and by eight a.m. we were nearing a shoal named Captiva Rocks when I saw water boil from the corner of my eye. An instant later, a huge fish jumped, floated high above us, then seemed to hurtle itself toward the boat. Because my clients were standing, we weren’t going fast, but the fish came at us like a rocket. Dreamlike, that’s the only way I can describe my surprise. What happened next took only seconds, but my eyes and brain processed the details in stop-action, as if viewing photos of a car wreck.

A tarpon, I realized. Six feet long, glittering like chrome, saltwater sparking from its tail. The fish froze for an instant, a silver pendant suspended from a cloudless sky, then the string broke and the huge fish fell. Instinct told me either to speed up or to yank the throttle into neutral and try to stop.

I did neither.

True, I was stunned, but a sudden change in boat speed is always risky. My clients, both men, had left their seats and gone forward. The youngest of them was wearing a photographer’s vest but, fortunately, had left his cameras behind. The other, a big man in his sixties, had a belly pack strapped around his waist and had brought an old-fashioned wooden fishing rod, which he’d babied because of its age but was using like a walking stick for balance. Standing while under way is something I normally don’t allow and I should have spoken up, but my livelihood depends on winning repeat charters, when I’m not tending to my late uncle’s business-a private investigation agency that doesn’t stay busy. The older man had made it clear that fishing was secondary, shooting photos is what he wanted, and he had hinted his project might require several trips. Besides, how could anything bad happen on a morning so calm and clear?

Seconds before the tarpon jumped, the older man-Delmont Chatham, as he’d told me on the phone-pointed and called over the sound of the engine, “Can you get us closer?” He was referring to a cluster of shacks built on pilings in shallow water, old fish houses, some almost a hundred years old. One was painted red, the others were gray weathered pine. It was a scene as pretty as any watercolor: tin roofs golden in the morning sunlight, pelicans and gulls hovering like kites. Seldom had I passed those stilt shacks that clients didn’t want to stop for pictures, so I began a slow turn the moment Mr. Chatham pointed.

My eyes remained focused on the water, though. Most people believe May to be the start of tarpon season, but tarpon don’t watch the calendar, and I’d been seeing pods of those big silver fish since March, so I scanned the surface for activity. Not just looking for tarpon either. April is a fertile time; a month that is as sweet and spirited as October. Bays come alive with oceangoing fish that move to the shallows to feed or spawn, often both. Turtles, too, hawksbills and loggerheads, appear, some the size of umbrellas. Manatees gather in families, the tip of a nose often the only warning a thousand-pound animal swims beneath. Cobia forage the flats, their periscope tails knifing the surface; schools of feeding redfish create oil slicks and can cause an acre of quaking water. The shacks would make for good photos, but a fishing guide’s eyes are always on the hunt so my attention didn’t swerve from the surface. Which is why I was the first to see the whirlpool swirl of a big fish flushing ahead of my skiff. Then another… and another.