Randy White - Tampa Burn

My son.

Those two words had once seemed a foreign combination. But I’d come to like the sound.

Maybe we’re all trapped, to a degree, by our own self-image. I’m an anti-gizmo snob. I’d once had Internet service because I’d needed it for research, but canceled it when I was done. Bringing another computer into the lab had taken some convoluted rationalizing.

Tomlinson hadn’t helped matters when he told me, “Buy it, man. Hell, I just got a cellular phone and a beeper. So my Zen students-when they’re panicked, or in trouble with the cops-I’m just ten digits away. I’m thinking about getting one of those infrared laser pointers, too. From my boat, I can screw with the guides at night. Hell, I’m a Buddhist monk, but I’ve come to the conclusion we’re all destined to be microchip whores.”

I bought the desk PC anyway, and so it was through the Internet that I got to know Lake. In the last year or so, we’d been e-mailing almost daily. Sometimes we wrote in Spanish, sometimes in English. The early letters had been strained, but they’d gotten to be friendly and often funny. They’d certainly become far more familiar. He’d started out addressing me as “Father,” then as “Dad” when he wrote in English. He seemed most comfortable, though, calling me “Doc”-two friendly equals exchanging thoughts and news-and that’s the way it had stayed.

Fact was, I’d been fretting about why I hadn’t heard from him in nearly a week.

Now I knew.

He was a smart kid; loved natural history. He knew his birds, reptiles, and plants. He asked a lot of questions about my work in the marine sciences. Lately, he’d been setting up several of his own saltwater aquaria. I’d been helping.

I saved his letters. Sometimes, alone at night, I’d reread my favorites.

Science is its own language. Lake already knew that. Science was the language we shared.

So credit the Internet for changing the way I felt about my boy. He went from being the child I’d fathered, to an individual. He became the articulate young man whose sense of humor and intellect exceeded my own. I began to think of him not just as our son, but as my son. Laken Fuentes-the name “Laken” taken from some obscure Mayan legend. He didn’t seem to mind when I shortened the name to Lake.

I liked that. People who get pissy about their names being shortened make me uneasy.

My house is actually two small wooden houses built under a single tin roof. The houses are separated by a breezeway, or what used to be called a “dog trot.”

I live in one of the houses. The other is a small but well-equipped laboratory from which I run my company, Sanibel Biological Supply. Collecting marine specimens to sell to schools and research labs around the country is not a booming enterprise, but it’s what I do, and I do it to the best of my abilities.

We were in the lab now. In the center of the room, I’ve installed a university-style science work station: an island of oaken drawers and cupboards beneath a black epoxy table, complete with a sink, faucets, electrical outlets, and double gas cocks for attaching Bunsen burners.

We were standing at the work station. Tomlinson’s white Apple laptop was open before us. To my right, beneath the east windows, on a similar table, was a row of working aquaria, octopi and fish therein. There were additional glass aquaria above on shelves.

To my left, along the east wall near the door, were more tanks filled with fish and crabs and eels. My lab always smells of fish, formaldehyde, disinfectant, books, old planking, and barnacles that grow at water level on pilings below the pine slab flooring.

Tomlinson touched the computer’s Play button. As the DVD began to spin, aerators charged the air with ozone and provided a pleasant, bubbling backdrop for a video that was anything but pleasant.

When Lake’s face filled the screen, mouth taped, I felt Pilar place her hand on my arm for support. Or perhaps to support me. It was the first time I’d felt any emotional or physical connection from her since her arrival.

At first, the audio was garbled. But then, off camera, I heard a man’s smoky voice say in Spanish, “Grunt so that your mother can hear you. One grunt for yes, two for no. Have we hurt you?”

The man had a distinctive lisp. I also noted that he had an equally unusual accent. The dominant inflection was the cracker-American that is poor white Southern. But there was something else mixed in there, too. French? Close but not quite right.

The man waited before he said again, “Make some noise, kid. Have we hurt you?”

The tone was threatening. Even so, there was another long pause before the boy grunted twice. No.

Pilar whispered, “I know him too well to believe that. He’s injured. They’ve done something to him.”

The man asked, “Have we treated you all right?”

Once again, the long hesitation said more than the boy’s single grunt. Yes.

During that space of silence, the cry of a bird could be heard from outside. It was a muted, two-toned whistle.

The man: “Do you think we’ll kill you if your mother doesn’t cooperate?”

This time, the boy grunted instantly. Yes.

Now the shot widened so that much of the room was visible. I could see that Lake was barefooted and wore blue jeans without a belt-he’d dressed in a hurry. I pressed my glasses to my face and leaned closer, trying to focus on detail.

There appeared to be a raised ribbon of welt that ran the length of the boy’s right forearm. It might have been a burn were it not so narrow. Flames are seldom projected like water from a hose or, say, from a Bunsen burner. Something else I noticed: His feet seemed to be stained with something. Blood?

Possibly.

He wore a dark blue T-shirt, only a portion of an insignia visible: An M and a T overlaid.

The boy was a Minnesota Twins fan. He liked the Cubs, the Red Sox, and the Mets, too. Some combination.

That’d earned him an Internet introduction to Tomlinson, which is why they were now e-mail pals, too.

I remembered Lake writing to explain. He liked the Twins because they had one of the lowest payrolls in baseball, but still produced winning teams. He liked the Cubs, the Mets, and the Red Sox because they were perennial underachievers, plus the brilliant and quirky Bill “Spaceman” Lee had pitched for the Sox. Tomlinson loved him for that.

An advocate of the underdog. It was a characteristic I credited to his mother.

As the shot widened, the camera jolted, then the aperture became fixed. A person then moved into the frame-a large man who was oddly dressed, I realized.

When he appeared, Pilar’s fingers squeezed my arm.

At first, the man’s face wasn’t visible because he wore the kind of hooded cloak that I associate with cloistered monks. The hood was pulled over his head.

Also, he was holding a Miami Herald up to the camera. It was the Latin-American edition, printed in Spanish. He held the paper long enough so the day and the date could be read. He had a big Caucasian left hand, and hairless fingers that were thick and badly burn-scarred. I noticed that he didn’t wear a wristwatch.

The paper had been published on Thursday, five days before.

I wasn’t prepared for what I saw when the man lowered the paper.

Perhaps I should have been. There are certain varieties of bank robbers, kidnappers, and other career criminals who use disguise as an excuse for wearing bizarre clothing. It’s a kind of fetish. Part of the psychological profile.

This guy was certainly dressed bizarrely. He wore black sunglasses over a mask that had painted eyebrows and rouged cheeks. The mask may have been more than a fetish, though, because there was enough of his forehead showing to see that, like his hand, his face had been scarred by fire. A tuft of blond hair protruded from a waxen area of skull that was visible from within the cloak.