Randy White - Shark River

Ahead of me, the boardwalk became a low dock on pilings that poked a couple hundred feet out into the bay. The girls were at the end of the dock, leaning against the railing, faces toward the parachute-sized sphere that was the setting sun. The sky was a lucent indigo streaked with citrus and peach. The bay was glazed with molten gold.

Between the shore and the girls were two men. The men were walking toward the end of the dock, backs to me. Each wore blue coveralls, the legs of the coveralls showing fresh mud stains up to the calves.

They’d just waded through the mangroves, flushing birds.

Another telltale indicator: Both men also wore ski masks.

Except for 7-Eleven clerks and the occasional bank teller, we don’t see a lot of ski masks in Florida.

My first reaction was surprise: damn! Then, as my brain translated the visual data, my reaction changed to: oh-h-h-h-h damn, because some kind of involvement was now impossible to avoid.

The men had some bulk to them and moved with a disconcerting confidence. One carried some kind of semiautomatic pistol in his left hand, the bottle-sized sound arrestor pointed downward, as if to hide it. The other man carried what looked to be a walkie-talkie or cell phone. On the south side of the dock, the yellow Scarab hull was idling in for a landing, its engines making a slow, thunderous rumble. It looked to be pretty close to thirty feet long and had the Wellcraft logo on the side. The other boat sat off several hundred yards, as if waiting to see what happened.

In panic situations where events unfold rapidly, the brain sometimes processes those events in what seems to be slow motion. That was the way my brain now reacted. It was as if I were viewing a film run at half-speed. My eyes suddenly enjoyed absolute clarity in which I seemed to see everything at once, interpreting and understanding what was happening and why.

Clarity is not always an aspect to be envied.

What I saw were professionals who’d done their homework. It is what the really good ones must do to succeed and survive. They learn their target’s habits, their target’s routes.

There’s a very good reason for that.

All routes have a chokepoint-a section of road or walkway the target must take to reach his or her final destination. The most suitable chokepoints also possess a contained area that can be easily sealed and controlled by the assassin or his accomplices. That precise place where the hit will be made is known to people in the business as the X-spot.

What I had stumbled into was an attempt to murder or to kidnap one or both of the women runners. The shooter would shoot, confirm his kill, then escape in the yellow boat. Or the men would wrestle one or both of the girls into the boat, transport them at speed to another vessel or waiting car, kidnapping complete.

The second yellow boat could be there to serve as a decoy in the event someone gave chase, or as a backup. The boats were stolen, of course. Choosing Mercury test boats suggested a level of professional sophistication that was unsettling. They were fast boats but a part of the common seascape, boats that always followed the same Intracoastal route, so very easy to anticipate, track, and take down.

Steal a couple high-performance boats, then abandon them when done. That was probably the plan. The actual escape vehicle would be nearby, a boat or a car on some island or maybe a chopper.

Unfortunately, in those few moments of clarity, I didn’t process the wisest course of action. Charge into a group of armed men who were being assisted by other men, who were, presumably, also armed?

Suicidal.

I should have turned, tucked my tail, and lumbered off to the nearest phone.

My instincts are usually pretty good. Not this time, though. This time, my poor judgment nearly got me killed.

The engines of the boat now lying aside the dock were rumbling at idle, the vibration so loud that it radiated through water and wood. The noise masked the sound of my heavy feet.

There was another man in the Scarab, standing at the helm, his face covered by a bandana. Three men in all, two on the dock, one aboard, and their attention was laser-focused on the women who were their targets.

That was encouraging. It seemed to give me the extra few steps I believed I needed.

The women had finally noticed the approaching men. I could see the expression on Blonde’s face change from surprise to puzzlement and then to fear when she correctly interpreted the only reason why men would wear ski masks in the late winter heat. I saw Ponytail’s expression change from indifference to an emotion that may have been anger. Her reaction certainly wasn’t passive.

As always, Ponytail was wearing a gray belly pouch strapped around her waist. I watched her reach into the pouch with her right hand as she threw her left hand up, palm out as if to hold the men away. Heard her yell, “Freeze! No closer!” as she drew a chrome, short-barreled revolver from the pouch, probably a. 38, crouching as she lifted the weapon into the classic combat position.

Surprise, surprise. The lady jogger was armed.

I was sprinting now, seeing everything in articulate, slow detail as it happened. I watched the man with the big semiautomatic raise his pistol in the same instant. Watched his left hand bounce with the recoil of firing. Heard two distinct th-h-wap-waps as Ponytail’s revolver flew high into the air then banged its weight upon the deck. I expected her to fall, but she didn’t. I expected to see blood, but there was none. The woman wasn’t hit. She was stunned, probably, and spasmed by shock.

There was no way the shooter could miss at that distance, so he’d fired intentional warning shots. The scene provided me with inductive information. The attackers weren’t assassins. They were kidnappers. Or maybe the shooter had simply suffered a moment of indecision. It’s not like the films and cheap television shows. Squeezing a trigger exacts a price. For most people, it’s not easy to initiate the destruction of a breathing complexity never better defined than by the look of terror in a stranger’s eyes.

Unfortunately, I know that truth better than most.

The shooter, though, was reconsidering.

I watched him swing the sausage barrel toward Ponytail’s face. Heard Blonde screaming, “Don’t hurt her! Don’t hurt her!” as he leaned slightly as if to fire again, but then hesitated, perhaps hearing me for the first time. I was only a few strides behind him and pushing a lot of air ahead of me as I sprinted.

Both men began to turn slightly. I got a glimpse of dark eyes through holes in the ski masks. Both sets of eyes grew wide just before I impacted, running low and hard, generating a lot of torque. I hit the shooter in the lower back with my right shoulder. I heard a sickening sound, like a green limb snapping, and he screamed as I drove through him. Caught the second man with my legs as I tumbled past in a cross-body block. Heard him give a whoop of pain as he went down.

My glasses went flying when I hit the dock hard with my shoulder. I rolled, and came up on my feet, already in mid-stride, face-to-face with the two now-blurry women. They were still frozen, not understanding any of it, standing there, letting it happen.

I heard two lightning-bolt explosions-gunshots from a different weapon. No sound arrestor, and a volume of air sizzled past my left ear. I ducked reflexively as I caught Blonde in my left arm, Ponytail in my right, lifting them off the dock, still running. I’d hoped to tumble with them over the railing at the end of the dock, but great balance is not one of my gifts. Instead, I caught my shoe on something, stumbled badly, still holding the women, and crashed back-first through the dock’s side railing, all of us smacking into the water, splinters of wood showering down from above.