Randy White - Tampa Burn

“Long time no see, sailor. Welcome to fly-over country.”

By “fly-over,” I took her to mean that part of the U.S. that most only see from a plane.

I said, “They don’t know what they’re missing. Now that you’re here, anyway.”

I was nervous, had a case of dry-mouth, but felt instantly better when she allowed me to hug her close, and then to kiss her lightly on the lips.

I said, “You smell great. I missed you.”

“I missed you, too, Doc. And I’m so happy about your son.”

“He’s an amazing kid. You’ll meet him. Soon.”

She scared me a little when she replied, “I’d like that. No matter what happens between you and me. I’d like to meet your son.”

On the phone, she had refused to tell me if she was pregnant. She said she didn’t want it to influence discussions about our relationship. But just the possibility of being parents together had a huge effect on me. I wanted to know. So now I slid my hand to her flat belly, a brief touch… and felt her draw away.

“Put your bag in the guest bedroom. We have a lot to talk about.”

I said, “Yeah, we do.”

I spent two weeks with her there. Her family had leased out the tillable land, so it wasn’t a working farm. But there was still a hell of a lot of work to do. I learned that it’s always that way around a farm.

“Kinda like boats,” I told her one night. “There’s always something that needs fixing.”

We were sitting outside on the porch swing, watching lightning bugs drift like time-lapse stars among the corn and black trees. Their cold strobing reminded me of navigational markers on Tampa Bay, and I felt a brief pang of homesickness.

When had I ever spent so much time away from saltwater?

That’s what we did at night. Talk. We’d sit on the porch and talk. We’d go for long walks and talk. We’d drive into Davenport, have dinner at one of the great restaurants, then walk along the levee and talk.

The words she’d overheard me speak to Pilar had wounded her deeply, and so they had damaged us. Talking was part of what I hoped was a gentle reconstruction phase.

I told her just enough about my battle with Praxcedes Lourdes to explain the fresh scar on my forehead. Also told her about Tomlinson and me accompanying Laken back to Masagua, where the boy’s mother was granting interviews and sharing the truth about Jorge Balserio’s involvement with the kidnapping of her son.

“His political career is ruined,” Pilar told me.

It was one of the few times that we spoke. When I gave her the nearly $200,000 I’d recovered from the ship, all she said was “Thanks.” Which was fine with me. I was no longer even tempted to ask her about the e-mails I’d found, or about Tinman. She seemed equally uninterested in me. The woman no longer existed in my world, so perhaps I no longer existed in hers.

She seemed indifferent when I asked if Tomlinson and I could take Lake on a vacation tour of Central America’s rain forests and jungle coastline.

“We deserve to celebrate,” my friend said on my behalf.

Which was true. But I also wanted to spend enough time with Lake to be certain that he didn’t show any delayed signs of post-traumatic-stress syndrome.

To be rescued does not necessarily mean that a victim is out of harm’s way.

We had a great trip. The boy seemed to be recovering just fine. We laughed a lot, the three of us. We took tough hikes together, a couple of long swims in the Pacific, and we fished.

The only time we discussed the kidnapping or my son’s abductor was when Lake brought up the subject. One night, as we sat at the campfire awaiting a dinner of snook fillets, freshly gathered clams, plus black beans and rice, he said, “Do you know why I think he didn’t go through with it? Why Prax didn’t kill me?”

I’d thought about it often, but I said, “No. Why?”

My son said, “At first, I thought it was because of some kind of Stockholm syndrome thing, except in reverse. I’d tried hard to make him see me as a person-just like the advice in that e-mail you sent me. I did things for him. I talked to him like I cared. I could tell I was getting under his skin a little. So in the end, he couldn’t do it. Or at least that’s what I thought originally.”

I said, “But not now?”

He was shaking his head, gazing into the fire. There was no hint of emotion in his voice, only a scholastic curiosity as he said, “No. I think it may have played a small role. Subconsciously, maybe. But I think the real reason he didn’t… didn’t go ahead and cut my throat was something else.” He looked right at me. “It wasn’t fun. He started to kill me, but realized he wasn’t getting the emotional charge out of it that he usually got.”

Quietly, I’d come to the same conclusion.

I listened as Lake said, “The guy burns people. That’s his pathology. That’s his sickness. There was probably some sexual component keyed only by fire. So he had to do it that way.

“I think Prax still planned to kill me, but he wanted to enjoy it. He always carried this little blowtorch with him. So he left my room to search for something that would protect my face so it wouldn’t be damaged. Then, when he came back, I think he would’ve waited until I was awake. Then he would’ve set me on fire. It’s the only way he could enjoy it.”

Tomlinson and I had exchanged glances, both of us thinking, Smart kid.

The highlight of our getaway, though, was being “captured” by a little band of guerrilla troops who were under the command of my old friend General Juan Rivera. They took us to his secret mountain baseball diamond, where Tomlinson played centerfield. Lake and I alternated innings catching the bearded, revolutionary pitcher.

When my son and I said goodbye at the Masaguan airport, he’d looked into my eyes and said, “Relax, Dad. You get so damn emotional. We’ll be together again in August-when I come to the lab to visit.”

It took some convincing to get Dewey to agree to allow me to visit her in Iowa, so I spent the last week of May working with scientists from the University of Florida on our tarpon-spawning project.

I also entertained a surprise visitor: Detective Merlin Starkey. One afternoon, he came ambling up the boardwalk, cowboy hat tilted at a jaunty angle, carrying something heavy in a brown paper sack.

Tomlinson happened to be with me. The guides had finally gotten the police boat to stay under, and we were discussing a good time to fish it.

Starkey stopped at the bottom of the steps to my lab, touched the brim of his hat in greeting, and we listened to him say, “When I’m wrong, I admit I’m wrong. And I was wrong about you, Mister Ford. I come to congratulate you on getting your boy back. Plus, I brought you a little make-friends present. You don’t seem to be the slimy little snake that Tucker Gatrell was.”

I said, “Thanks. In that case, come on aboard,” and accepted the sack when he handed it to me.

The “present” was as unexpected as the ending of the story that I asked him to repeat for Tomlinson’s sake: why he still hated my uncle.

This time, the man actually seemed to get a kick out of it himself. He didn’t sound so bitter. Maybe it was because of the pleasant coolness that comes to Dinkin’s Bay at sunset. Or maybe it was the tall El Dorado rum drink that Tomlinson got down him.

Sitting in one of the deck rockers, Starkey told Tomlinson, “The way it happened was, I was runnin’ for sheriff of Collier County, my first election, and ev’body knew I was gonna win. It was all set. Mr. Ford’s uncle come to me with a problem-I already had a lot of power, and I was soon gonna have a lot more.”

Tucker Gatrell’s problem, Starkey told us, was that the drug investigation branch of the county sheriff’s department suspected that my uncle had somehow hijacked a stash of marijuana. They also suspected that he had it hidden somewhere on his property. The department was seeking a search warrant.