Randy White - Shark River

I’d been worried they’d come with a chopper. Maybe two. The drug people have plenty of money. If they’d sent a chopper after me equipped with the right kind of heat-sensing electronics, I wouldn’t have a prayer.

It also suggested that they hadn’t been tracking me personally. Someone had been passing them information.

I knew exactly who it was.

I was high above the ground on my little camouflaged platform watching them through my superb Zeiss binoculars. Hours before dawn, the wind had freshened from the north, blowing in a glittering high-pressure system. The seas were choppy; the sky had a crystal, Arctic resonance. The temperature dropped so abruptly that, by first light, it was too cold to sleep, so I climbed down from my hammock and stomped around until I got the blood circulating again. I used the binoculars to check the beach where I’d heard the boat the night before.

Nothing.

Because I was still cold, I stoked the big beach camp fire until it was roaring and boiled coffee, baking myself in the fire’s heat, watching the horizon for boats.

There were a couple shrimp boats far out to sea, booms folded like wings. A speck of a sailboat, too, its canvas gull-white, motionless in the wind. Nothing in close, though.

Because I was confident I had the time, I took my entrenchment tool and hiked back through the sea oats and prickly pear cactus southward to the grove of royal palms.

It took awhile, but I finally found the remains of what was probably the Lunsford house, the place Tuck had described in his note. Partially buried in the sand were sheets of tin from the fallen roof and gray planks of clapboard. There was a rusted iron hulk being strangled by vines-a generator, perhaps-along with a small junkyard of pipe, porcelain, glass and wire. Out back were a couple of cattle skulls, too. Nearby were short chains of vertebrae growing out of the sand.

The stone pilings weren’t hard to find. There were more than a dozen of them, much too heavy to move, spread out in a symmetrical, Stonehenge pattern.

Not stone, actually. In Florida, at the turn of the previous century, they’d made a dense cement out of local sand and crushed shell. Built all the houses up on knee-high stilts so air could circulate above and beneath. The cement was as hard and heavy as rock.

I don’t know why I was so surprised to find that one of the pilings had an X cut in the top. Probably because Tucker had told me so many lies during his lifetime that honesty and accuracy even after death seemed out of character.

The cutting saw that Joseph had probably used was there, too, orange with rust, the wooden handle rotted off. It was strange to think that Joseph was the last person to have touched that handle.

I used my entrenchment tool and began to dig around the base of the piling. I watched a tiny scorpion crab away, its tail curled like a backhoe. I got down deep enough so that the silver sand turned gray with moisture when I finally hit something.

A second surprise: There really was a bottle.

I picked it up and studied the bottle in the sunlight. It was an old glass Hatuey beer bottle, the word “Havana” embossed on the bottom. Tuck had used a cork, and some kind of wax to seal it. Even so, I expected the paper inside to be a soppy mess.

It wasn’t because he hadn’t written this note on paper. He’d written it on a piece of buckskin brown cowhide that had been tanned soft as glove leather. He’d probably used a fountain pen judging from all the smearing.

I sat on the piling and read the note, then read it again. Read it a third time and began to laugh. The postscript from Joseph Egret was the funniest part. It read, “He’s telling the truth, for once, Marion. If there was any way we could of gotten that box out, he would have lost it somehow by now or pissed it away, which he always had a way of doing.”

I stood, still laughing, and said aloud, “You sly old son-of-a-bitch. Finally. You finally pulled one off.”

Back at my mangrove camp, I tossed a rope over the limb of a nearby tree and tied the cell phone to it. Tied it close enough to the lean-to so that anyone approaching would see the little camp and make the obvious assumption, but far enough away so that I’d remain unseen, unexpected.

I studied the area carefully, considering my field of fire, then studied it some more. I finally decided that it was a good ambush point. A nice little predatory drop-off.

By late morning, the sea breeze had begun to warm. By noon, I could feel the sun radiating through the canopy of mangrove leaves, but still I remained hidden away in my hammock or on the platform.

My Navy watch sweater became too hot, so I stripped it off and changed to an OD green T-shirt.

OD: olive drab.

I’d brought along The Windward Road to pass the time. A couple of journals, too. I’d alternately read for a few minutes, then check the horizon with my binoculars.

I saw several more boats far offshore, probably bound for Key West or the Dry Tortugas.

I had a Mako, then a Hewes flats boat sweep in close to the beach, trying to find some lee, on their way around the Cape to Flamingo.

Each time I saw a boat, my heart began to thud.

Then I did see them. Saw them pounding through waves a couple miles off, throwing big water, running way too hard for conditions.

It caught my attention.

I watched the boat dolphin right past my little place on the beach. Then watched it slow… stop… turn and began to vector shoreward.

They’d either seen the red Moss tent and the fire, or they were following some kind of direction finder.

As they drew closer, I identified the boat as one of the mass production tri-hulls that only non-watermen buy, and saw the name on the side-CHOKOLOSKEE BOAT RENTALS-and knew it had to be Cordero or his hirelings. I could also see that the OMC was burning way too much oil, blowing a cloud of blue exhaust as the boat banged its way through the waves. Then I could see the faces of the two men who stood behind the cabin windshield.

Both faces were familiar to me.

At the wheel of the boat was a man with a huge pumpkin-sized head and dyed, punkish hair-his hair was, appropriately, bright orange now instead of blue. I recognized him because he’d driven the smaller of the two Scarabs when Cordero’s men had attempted to kidnap Lindsey.

Beside him was the man with the dark, Indio eyes set in a Castillian face; the man with the mustache and pointed goatee who’d tried his best to shoot me only a week ago.

They’d both come a-hunting, wanting a second chance.

They would have it.

I remembered the Lauderdale investigator who’d been tailing me-Romano?-remembered him telling me that he’d spotted three men on active surveillance, two white and one a very light-skinned black.

Where was the third?

I watched the two men closely through the binoculars, breathing evenly, but heart pounding. I saw that Goatee was holding something in his hand, staring at it intently. It looked to be like a little palm computer… yes, and he was wearing earphones, too. A computerized GPS link that was now undoubtedly locked onto the cell phone that Harrington had sent me-a device similar to something I’d used several times in the past; a high-tech surveillance system known by the code name of Glockenspiel and then, later, Triggerfish.

Beneath me and forty meters to my right, my cell phone began to ring-the first time I’d ever heard it ring. It rang so loud that I jumped, startled. It was a computerized melody that was familiar, yet my brain couldn’t identify immediately. Then it did: The phone was playing the William Tell overture, the theme from the old television show The Lone Ranger.

Hal Harrington’s strange little joke.

The phone continued to ring. Maddening. If Goatee and Orange were having trouble zeroing in on my cell phone’s signature, they’d have no trouble now.