Randy White - Dead of Night

If I could get him to answer the phone and confirm that he was fine, my obligation to Frieda would be fulfilled.

Never in my life did I ever think I’d own a cellular phone. Now I seemed tied to the damn thing.

I drove along Kissimmee’s oak-lined and Christmas-bespangled main boulevard, Broadway, finally found a triple-big parking space for my truck and boat trailer in the heart of downtown next to Shore’s Men’s Wear and Joanne’s Diner. A gas station attendant had told me the diner served good country-fried steak, collards, and iced tea. Florida’s restaurant fare proves that the state has become the Midwest’s southernmost possession. I wasn’t going to miss a chance for some authentic Southern cooking.

But Joanne’s was closed for some reason on this early Sunday eve, so I roamed around town to get the kinks out of my legs, and to give Dr. Jobe more time to materialize. I looked at plastic snowmen and candy cane decorations. I tried to decipher inscriptions on a stonework called “THE MONUMENT OF STATES.” Stood beneath a streetlight and watched an Amtrak passenger train clickety-clack its way through downtown, bells ringing, red lights flashing, on its way to somewhere far, far north of the horizon.

It was a little after 6:30 P.M. three days past the dark of the moon; the sort of black night that invests city parks, benches, and trees with a glistening, winter incandescence. The air had a hint of cool; tasted of snow.

Half an hour later, I was sitting at the bar of the Kissimmee Steak House out on Bronson Monument Road, eating an unexpectedly fine piece of beef while the affable bartender told me about the local fishing woes. The city sits on the northern shore of nineteen-thousand-acre Lake Tohopekaliga-called “Lake Toho,” locally. It’s one of a hundred or so lakes that comprise the freshwater headwaters for the Everglades system.

As Tomlinson is quick to point out, one of the earth’s few unique ecosystems-Florida’s River of Grass-actually begins on the outskirts of Orlando. “The real Magic Kingdom,” he often adds.

But things weren’t going too well for anglers on Lake Toho, the bartender told me.

“Last year, the state wildlife people decided the lake needed what they call a ‘drawdown.’ It’s like an artificial drought to lower the water level so exotic plants and stuff that’s not supposed to be there can die and be hauled out. But the state people emptied so much water into the Kissimmee River and Lake Okeechobee that at local marinas-Richardson’s Fish Camp, Skinny Al’s, some others-you couldn’t use the boat ramps. The canals was just mud. I haven’t been out fishing for nearly a year! They’re letting the water level come up now, and fishing’s supposed to be great once they’re done. But we’ll see.”

Some perverse part of me was heartened by low water and difficult boat ramps. If I couldn’t launch my skiff, then I couldn’t check on Frieda’s brother, could I?

But at Big Toho Marina, not far from downtown, I was told there was plenty of water, and I’d have no trouble at all floating a boat.

So at a little after 8 P.M. on a winter Sunday night, I launched among docks where a bunch of bass boats were moored-fast, low freeboard craft that, to me, always look as if they were designed by people who should be building customized vans for a living. The boats seemed gaudy, with their carpeted Corvette appointments, vinyl swivel seats, and fiberglass glitter. In comparison, my twenty-one-foot Maverick flats skiff appeared as functionally staid as a knife blade; an outlander without makeup, or ribbons.

I idled alone out into the darkness, running lights shining.

I didn’t have a chart, but had been told that Night’s Landing was only a mile or so from shore. Not hard to find-even on a black night.

It wasn’t.

Nor was it difficult for me to locate the island’s communal docks. The narrow channel wasn’t far from the steady car traffic and lights of the road it paralleled, and only a few hundred yards or so from an area buoyed off for competitive waterskiing-or so a big, white wedge of floating ski ramp suggested.

I idled down the channel, into a marina basin where a sign next to several empty slips, a pontoon boat, and an overpowered bass boat warned: RESIDENTS ONLY, ALL OTHERS PROSECUTED. THIS MEANS YOU!

Friendly place.

The lone bass boat was a twenty-footer; well maintained, but the person who’d moored the thing had left the huge Yamaha outboard in the water-not something water-men do when securing a boat. An aluminum motor casing in electrically charged water creates electrolysis, and it’s also a platform for barnacles or mussels.

It was a lapse that only an experienced, anal-retentive boater would notice.

Someone like me.

It took a quarter hour of wandering poorly marked sand trails before I was standing on the porch of Applebee’s secluded three-story home. I stood there looking up at all the dark windows and darker turrets, fuming because I was here and not halfway home by now. If it wasn’t for the damn golf cart plugged to its charger, I’d have concluded he was gone. No use trying.

Now, instead, I raised my fist to knock… and then stopped when I heard the indistinct moaning of a man in pain.

Seconds later, I was standing at the glass doors of the back entrance, peering in between the curtains. I could see that it was Frieda’s twin brother, the gifted, reclusive biologist, face bloodied, expression terrified.

It was Applebee, my colleague who built amazing dioramas, the expert on the interlinks of water.

A man worth rescuing.

The back doors were locked. But French doors are notoriously poor security risks, and these imploded on their dead bolt when I took two short sprint steps, and crashed my shoulder into the midframe, just above the brass handle.

I had a lot of adrenaline, sufficient weight, and momentum when I hit. The doors were flimsier than I’d anticipated, which is why they barely slowed me, and I went stumbling, clawing, falling into the room

… and continued to stumble across the floor, out of control, trailing splintered wood, shattered glass, plus the door’s lace curtain, which had somehow gotten tangled over my head, covering my face like a shroud.

Because of the curtain, I couldn’t see. But I could hear a man and woman scream Russian words of surprise just before I collided with someone-no telling who-then hit something else hard but moveable. A chair?

Whatever it was cut the legs out from under me. I somersaulted forward, my right shoulder down, and used the momentum to roll immediately back to my feet just as a good CPO had taught us to tumble and roll long ago. One thing the CPO hadn’t taught us to do, though, was to use that fluid energy to vault ourselves face-first into a stucco wall. Which is what I did.

Poor judgment became dark comedy.

I hit the wall squarely. Felt an ether-like explosion inside my head, and saw a starburst of expanding colors. The next thing I knew, I was sitting up groggily, pulling a damp and scarlet-stained curtain off my head, wondering who in the room was bleeding.

Me. I was the one bleeding. It had to be me because the Russians had bolted, leaving Jobe and me alone. The little man was in the corner, balled up in a fetal position, still rocking, face showing his own blood.

I sat there for a moment, listening to him whisper in mantric rhythm: “Leave me alone… Please leave me alone… Leave me alone, alone, alone, please…”

The Russians didn’t have much of a head start-I could hear the dissipating racket of limbs crashing. Before I started after them, though, I wanted to make sure Applebee was okay. I got to my feet, wiped my hands on my fishing shorts, and knelt beside him. I touched him on the shoulder, before saying, “It’s okay, Jobe. They’re gone. You’re safe. Jobe? Dr. Applebee?”