Randy White - Shark River

Then Harrington and I exchanged files. From a plastic sack, from my skiff, I handed him a thick folder labeled OPERATION PHOENIX, and another with the words DIRECCION: BLANCA MANAGUA written on the cover in red felt-tip pen.

I watched him leaf through all those papers before dropping them into the fire.

I took the book-sized dossier on me, the only one in existence-according to Harrington, anyway-and tossed it into the fire. I watched the pages burn and curl, the ink producing colors different from those in the flames from the driftwood; colors not so bright or pure.

Then I said to him, “What about Tomlinson? We do have an agreement.”

From his backpack, Harrington handed me a sheaf of legal-size paper. Said, “This exonerates him. Just like you asked. It’s based on the actual investigative report on the bombing at Coronado, but I had a few things changed here and there. It lays the blame on an entirely different group. Not Tomlinson’s. According to this, he had absolutely nothing to do with it. Legally and officially.”

As I read through the documents, Harrington added, “But he is guilty, you know. He probably played more of a role than either one of us realizes. You’re the one who decided to let him live-why not let him live with the truth? Johnny Garvin was one of us, for Christ’s sake. He was a friend of yours.”

I neatened the papers with my hands before sliding them into my own backpack. I looked out at the Gulf: it was a little breezy but not bad. It’d be a nice run back to Everglades. “It was a long time ago and he’s suffered enough,” I told Harrington. “You keep forgetting something. Tomlinson’s my friend, too.”

On a sleepy, summer-hot March afternoon, I trundled the pretty lady in her lacy red thong bikini around a forgotten curve of beach on Fernandez Bay, Cat Island, in the outer Bahamas. There, amid the sound of gulls and wind, I spread blankets in the sun while she hunted around for a shady place to stow our picnic lunch and cooler full of Kalik beer.

The sky was Bahamian turquoise. The bay silver. Cliffs behind us, copper.

Then I watched as she reached into her oversized straw purse, handed me a little brown bottle, shook her hair down long and blond, and she demanded of me, “Oil, you big lummox. I need sunscreen on all the hard-to-reach spots. But just the public places, not the private. We’ve promised to be on our best behavior, and so far, so good.”

“I know, I know,” I said, “and it hasn’t been easy.”

“Think of it as preventative medicine. Like you’re a doctor. The oil, I’m talking about. I’ve been in snow country, remember, and neither of us wants me too burned to tour the island with your sister’s junkanoo band tonight.”

I said, “She’s not my sister,” as I watched the lady arch her back, hand searching up between her own shoulder blades, and then her bikini top made an elastic popping noise… and hung there momentarily before it dropped at my feet.

I was shaking my head. “Wait a minute. That’s not fair. It really isn’t. Plus, if someone comes around those rocks and sees us, they’re going to get entirely the wrong idea.”

“Sees us?” The woman laughed as she knelt, then made a purring feels-good sound as she lay belly-down on the blanket. “Who’s gonna see us? Surely, you don’t mean Tomlinson and Ransom. You didn’t hear the noises coming from their cabana when we left? It was the same noise they were making all night long. Every time I woke up, anyway. They’re going to be too tired to walk the beach. Probably too sore to walk the beach.”

Two weeks earlier, back at Dinkin’s Bay, I’d given Tomlinson the investigator’s report exonerating him from the Coronado bombing. Told him it had been provided to me by friends who had to remain anonymous. As he read it, and he began to weep, I’d turned and walked away.

I told the lady now, “I think he’s making up for lost time. Trying his best, anyway.”

“Or celebrating,” she said. “I don’t blame them, either. A trip like this, they’ve got every reason to celebrate.”

That was uncontestably true.

The note Tuck wrote to me, the one in the bottle, ink on leather, read: I stole a box of gold from the witch bastard that was too big and heavy for me to hide or carry whole off the island so I had to sink it in a lake where no one goes and carry what coins I could out just a few at a time. The lake’s called Horse Eating Hole and the idiots think it’s got a dragon down there, which is why it’s the safest place in the world fars that witch bastard Benton’s concerned.

The directions that followed were detailed.

Even so, our first few days on Cat Island had not been without difficulties. The first thing I had to deal with was convincing Ransom that we needed to make peace with Izzy and Clare.

“Them two Rastamonsters?” she’d sputtered, “I’d sooner befriend a couple poison snakes. They always treat me so dirty, man. Call me a fat cow and worse before I decided to take my own body back.”

Forgiveness, I told her-talk to Tomlinson about the importance of forgiveness. Plus, there was another consideration, too: If she didn’t make up with Izzy and Clare, they could swear out papers and have the magistrate arrest her.

For Izzy and Clare, making peace meant returning the golden lion’s head ring, along with ten thousand dollars cash. Izzy wasn’t wholly satisfied. He kept hinting around that Ransom might have stolen more cash than that; maybe he hadn’t counted the money right. But he was a victim of his own greed, and that was the final settlement.

Clare was particularly pleased by the ring. His broken nose still bandaged, he squeezed it onto his black pinkie finger, beaming, and said, “My brotheren, my brotheren, you make the Lion of Judah very happy this day, you give praise to the Holy Piby with what you just do. By your holy actions, I’m sayin’.” He then whacked me on the shoulder fondly. “We be friends for all the time now, glory to God, ’cause this here the royal ring of Haile Selassie, the one belonged to King Solomon, who then give it to the Queen of Sheba, who give it to her son, Prince Menelik of Ethiopia. And that the way the ring be passed along for three thousand years ’til our Saint, Bob Marley, leave to be with Black Jesus.”

He didn’t seem upset at all when Ransom added with false innocence, “Yeah, an’ it come all the way from New York, too.”

Something I could not convince her to do, however, was to come with us to the lake that had taken her son. It was near Arthur’s Town, forty acres or so of dark water, ringed with dwarf mangroves. The lake did, indeed, have a sinister appearance. In the low trees, wings spread like gargoyles, were dozens, maybe hundreds, of anhingas, or snake birds.

No other sign of life in a water space so black and luminous that it might have been the gigantic eye of something alive.

Tomlinson and I had to use machetes to hack a trail wide enough for the little inflatable we’d rented, plus SCUBA gear. Then we began the laborious, boring chore of using our anchor to sound the bottom. Tuck’s note said the lake was really a limestone crater connected to the sea, the entire bottom no more than seven or eight feet deep until you found the crater, and then it plummeted to sixty feet.

That’s where he said he’d dropped the box.

Even with the range marker Tuck had used and described-a large dead buttonwood on the western shore-it took us nearly an hour to find the hole. Then I rolled over the side, breathing easily through the borrowed regulator, and drifted down through the murk, not expecting the poor visibility to change, but it did. It changed abruptly at about forty feet. In one instant I was in water too black and dense to see my own hands. In the next instant, I pierced a chilling thermoclime and my head and face poked through a lens of crystal saltwater. Beneath me was an aquarium world of flaming coral colors-a demarcation so abrupt that I felt as if I was falling into a new and secret world from above.