James Hall - Blackwater Sound

She reached over and picked up her yellow blouse and slipped it on and buttoned it. She looked at him for a moment, then looked out at the water again.

‘Tell me the right words. I’ll say them.’

She smiled at him.

‘At a time like this, one chance is all you get. It’s over, Thorn. But don’t worry. You’ll find somebody else. That’s how you are. A week, two weeks, you’ll be on to the next thing. Making some other girl all swoony.’

As they motored south the western sky turned pale gold. Along the horizon it was shot full of purple streaks and eddies of red. To the north, out over the Everglades, the sky was bluish-black with thunderstorms – a late cold front stalled just north of Miami. Thorn guided the boat around the shallows and Casey sat in the fighting chair drinking wine and looking back at the froth of their wake.

They were maybe ten miles southwest of Flamingo, the primitive national park that covered the extreme southern tip of the state, about as far from civilization as it was possible to go and still be in Florida waters. Thorn pulled open the tackle box and drew out the .357. He held it in his right hand, steering with his left. Behind him Casey was still facing the wake, sipping her wine. Thorn gripped the pistol by the barrel, and without ceremony, he hurled it over their starboard bow. More heavy metal added to the seabed. An empty gesture. It proved nothing, ended nothing. If the bad shit started again, he could always go buy another gun. He’d tossed the thing away but felt not one bit better about anything. Still stuck in his own tight skin. Cramped by his own mulish ways.

Before him the water lay flat with a spreading scarlet sheen. The twilight air was mellow and seasoned with the tang of barnacles and muck clinging to mangrove roots. The red sun was a smudged thumbprint a few inches above the horizon. Maybe an hour of light left.

Thorn had his face in the wind, steering them around a small mangrove island rimmed with white sand, when he sensed something off to the northwest, and turned to see the silhouette of the jet, a black cutout against the crimson sky.

Casey felt it, too, and swiveled the fighting chair halfway round and stiffened. Thorn pulled back on the throttle. The plane was growing larger by the second.

‘Please tell me that’s a fighter jet going back to Homestead Air Base.’

Thorn shook his head.

‘Wrong color, wrong shape.’

It was skimming very close to the water, headed in their direction, maybe a mile or two away. A 747 or 767, he wasn’t sure. But big, very big, and closing fast. A great blue heron wading on a nearby sandbar squawked once and untangled into flight. To their south a large school of mullet splashed the surface and quickly disappeared.

‘Hear that?’ Thorn said.

‘I don’t hear anything.’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Engines are dead.’

‘Shit!’ Casey dropped her wineglass on the deck, stood up.

The Heart Pounder was too old and slow to dodge anything hurtling that fast. Anyway there was nowhere to hide, and no way to be sure he wasn’t putting them even more squarely in the jet’s path.

Thorn shifted the engine into neutral and watched it come.

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