Night Moves (Doc Ford)

33




BAREFOOT, WEARING ONLY RUNNING SHORTS AND A tank top, I walked out on the deck and heard it again: Hoo . . . Hoo . . . Hoo . . . Then my eyes followed my ears shoreward, where, in an instant, all seemed to be explained: someone had set a paper bag ablaze at the entrance of my walkway near the gate.

Idiots, I muttered. The oldest of adolescent pranks: scoop animal poop into a grocery bag, light said bag on fire, then laugh from the shadows while an outraged neighbor stomps the fire out, then has to clean excrement off his shoes.

I looked to my right: Friday night is party night at Dinkin’s Bay. The marina’s traditional Pig Roast and Beer Cotillion—acronym, PERBCOT, but is often referred to as PERV-COT because the hilarity sometimes gets out of hand. Music was thrumming, the docks crowded. Now, apparently, one or more of my playful neighbors were challenging my absence with an ingenious practical joke.

Through cupped hands, I called toward the mangroves, “Put it out before you set the dock on fire! I’m late for a date.”

Hoo . . . Hoo . . . Hoo . . . was the reply.

“Goddamn it, I don’t have time for this!”

Silence while the bag continued to burn, sparks thermaling starward.

I hollered, “Tomlinson! If it’s you, I swear to god I’ll . . .” but left the threat unfinished because now I could smell burning wood. My walkway has been braced and redecked in the patchwork tradition of most old docks and some of the planking is vintage Florida pine—highly combustible. If a plank caught fire, a stringer would go next. Time to act or I’d have a mess to deal with. Worse, I’d be late for my date!

Because I was barefoot, I couldn’t kick the bag off the dock, so I looked for the first thing handy. The bamboo shaft I’d snatched from Bambi’s hands was still leaning against the house where I’d left it. Above it, though, hanging from a beam, was an old gaff hook I seldom used but kept around because it was lashed to a fish billy that had once been my father’s—a chunk of mahogany two feet long. Use the hook to yank the bag away or use the disposable bamboo?

I chose the gaff because I hadn’t felt its heft for a while, then trotted down the steps, onto the walkway, the burning bag so bright it fired the lucidum eyes of something feeding in the shallows. I slowed to look—yep, a couple of big stingrays suctioned to the bottom—then had to wait while my eyes readjusted before I continued on. Which is why I didn’t notice a man’s mud black face protruding from the water nearby. Nor the red laser beam I tripped as I approached the walkway gate, which would have told me there was a camera nearby videoing the whole scene.

Instead of excrement, the bag contained only balled-up newspaper—not that I inspected it closely. I used the steel hook to fling the thing into the bay, turned to watch flames create steam . . . then froze, confused by what I was seeing:

White eye sockets blinked at me from a face of black marble, the statue of a man standing in water, ten paces away, his shoulders glistening as the statue pivoted—a throwing motion.

What the hell . . . ?

A shaft of light launched itself toward me, impossible to dodge it traveled so swiftly, a harmless trick of moon and shadows that split my chest with the impact of a sledgehammer and the crunch of splintering bone.

“I got him!”

A man’s voice conveying a reality while a primal voice—my voice—screamed, “Goddamn it!” Then I was on my back, perplexed by the crushing weight on my chest, a sensation levered by all that was above me, the weight of mangrove darkness and stars. No pain, but I couldn’t breathe. Could I crawl? Yes . . . two feet of water helped float me to my knees. My glasses were around my neck on fishing line, lenses streaked but usable. Floating nearby was a frail shaft of wood: the spear that had hit me and broken away from my body.

“Got him in the heart, I think! Check him, Luke, check him!” Then a boyish howl: “YES!”

Sound of footsteps . . . a red bead of light was leading a man’s silhouette toward me, then over me, the man wary, taking his time, as if approaching a snake. The red light blinking with mechanical precision as my brain linked the image with events and I realized Bambi was approaching, Luke Smith, a camera around his neck.

Jesus Christ . . . the lunatics are making a video.

Yes, they were. Bambi on the Sony while Deano, out on bail, but now standing in water, awaited a damage report from his coproducer. Something else: Deano had another spear in his hand, ready, while his cameraman kept rolling, getting it all down. Deano impatient, too, demanding, “Where’d I hit ’em, goddamn it? Close to the heart? Knocked him right off the damn dock, you see it!”

Bambi, with his Boston accent, telling him, “Hold your horses!” Then asking me, “Are you okay?” without taking the camera away from his face.

Stupid question! Something, a sliver of bone, I guessed, was protruding from my sternum—embarrassing—so I covered the boney stub with my hands, safe from the lens, while I sucked in air so hot it burned my teeth.

“Help . . . me . . . up!” I managed to say. It was the voice of a stranger, but my lungs were gradually filling, my brain was eager to clear—if I could just get to my feet, I’d be okay!

No deal, not just yet, Bambi was busy. Zoom in tight on the fallen quarry: Marion D. Ford, the biologist who had damaged their failed careers. Focus . . . zoom closer, hold the camera steady. Night optics blur so easily! Suddenly, though, Bambi didn’t like what he was seeing. Camera was lowered, allowed to hang from a neck strap, while he said, “Jesus Christ, Deano, he’s bleeding.”

“No shit. But did I get him in the heart?”

Bambi began to back away. “I mean, he’s really bleeding. You didn’t use a blunt tip? Goddamn it, you promised you’d use rubber!”

“No! I said I wouldn’t use metal!”

“He’s hurt bad, Dean. Shit, man, the point’s sticking out of his f*cking chest!”

“It was a clean hit and I didn’t use metal!”

“His f*cking chest, you hear me! I never agreed to this bullshit.”

Bambi was ready to run, but I knew I couldn’t let that happen. Leave me alone with the crazy spear hunter before I was able to move? My lungs were starting to function, my brain was rebooting, assembling details faster and faster, but that all had to remain a secret and hiding secrets is something else I’m good at. So I did my best to appear calm when I wheezed, “It was an . . . accident. I’ll be okay.”

Was that true? I believed I’d recover even if Bambi didn’t. The sliver buried in my sternum couldn’t have gone very deep, but if it had I was screwed. My heart lay against that boney plate. My lungs there, too, which explained the burning sensation. Or was I in shock, lying to myself?—minimizing the damage, which badly wounded men sometimes do? I’d witnessed that reaction on the other side of the Earth. Central America, South America, too. Men who’d groaned “We’ll joke about this one day” while their life’s blood was sumped into the jungle.

Bambi wanted to believe me, though, and he stopped backing away. Good. At least one of them had sense enough to know he would have to explain to police. Which he proved by explaining to me, “Seriously, Dr. Ford, I didn’t think he’d pull a stunt like this! It’s what we’re calling a Challenge Coup—a way to create drama between opponents. This wasn’t supposed to happen, I swear!”

I reached a hand toward him. “I . . . believe you. Help me up.”

Deano didn’t like that. “No you don’t, goddamn it! Get back on the camera, I’m not done.”

Bambi had started toward me but stopped. “Probably shouldn’t move you. You have any friends around? Someone should call an ambulance, I think.” Then added in a rush, “Or I can do it. I’ve got my cell right here.”

“The hell you will!” The slosh of a big man wading through water is a sound I know well. Deano, the Zulu pretender, was coming in for the kill. Allow him to get close enough, he’d put the other spear in me.

Fear . . . we all process it differently. In me, panic arrives as a neural chill . . . a chill soon replaced by a chemical surge, then a chemical burn that I feel in my brain. The transformation is abrupt. It narrows the senses like being shunted into a tunnel or looking through a sniper scope. When it happens, my world is drained of color and I am indifferent to the subtleties of black and white—and pain.

A common word for that chemical transformation: Rage.

The transformation happened now. I was on my knees on the east side of the dock, Deano on the other side but farther out, water to his waist, most of my body screened from his view. He couldn’t see what I had already spotted: the floating handle of a mahogany club that had been knocked away when I fell. The club was dragging a gaff hook along the bottom as it drifted.

Something else I noticed: Bambi, a Sony digital hanging from his neck, was wearing a photographer’s vest, the glint of a flashlight lens visible when his right leg moved. The leg moved now when I told him, “Grab my hand.” Then raised my voice above Deano’s heavy splashing to urge, “Don’t worry about him. You want the police on your side or not?”

“You’re missing good footage, you idiot!” Deano hollered, coming faster now while Bambi’s jerky movements told me he was close to a meltdown.

I assured him, “It’s not your fault—it’s his fault,” but got one foot under me just in case Bambi didn’t come through. But he did, after one nervous glance at his partner . . . reached, grabbed my hand, and pulled.

I let it happen . . . used the momentum provided by Bambi’s kindness to come up hard and smash the man’s nose flat with the palm of my hand. If I hadn’t caught him by the camera strap, he would have gone down. But I did catch him. Used the strap to choke the man into compliance, yelling, “Dial nine-one-one! Do it or I’ll kill you right here!” When his frantic nodding had convinced me, I yanked the flashlight from his pocket, then shoved the cameraman toward shore. “Do it now!”

Deano saw it all and it stopped him, the spear at shoulder level ready to throw. He yelled, “Ford, that’s not the way the game’s supposed to go!” then took a step back when I tried to blind him with the flashlight. I had the wooden gaff in my hand, prepared to duck . . . was also fighting a sudden nausea because, for the first time, with the flashlight, I could see my bloody tank top and the object buried in my sternum.

Deano’s attention, though, shifted to Bambi, who was crawling into the mangroves for protection, his nose a smear of black, but the phone already in his hand. It caused Deano to turn as if considering new quarry—and that’s when everything changed. The flashlight I was holding became a stage light. The spear hunter became an electrified clown who screamed, “Shit!” . . . jumped as if he’d been cattle-prodded and threw his hands wildly into the air. Then bounced around on one good leg, the other leg paralyzed because of what he had just stepped on—only one explanation, as I knew from experience. I watched the big man stumble, fall, get up and fall again, while his larynx was tortured by a shriek so agonized it pierced the party music at the marina. Deano was lunging toward shore in a panic when I heard Mack’s booming voice, “Hey! What’s going on?” Then Tomlinson’s voice, concerned, hollered, “Doc! You okay?”

No . . . I wasn’t doing well at all. I’d seen what was stuck in my chest. Impossible to pull it out because the edges were serrated like a blade of boney sawgrass—not that I was dumb enough to try. Only two inches of the thing showing, but if even the tip had pierced my heart I would soon be dead. Nothing I could do to stop it from happening and no time to waste, so I walked methodically toward Deano, flashlight in one hand, wooden gaff in the other.

Like most snakes, he’ll run unless you corner him, I had told Vargas Diemer.

The crazy brother-in-law couldn’t run now, though—not with a leg paralyzed by pain and the primitive protein now pumping through his system. Even if he tried, I would summon whatever was needed to catch him. Thought about it as I slogged past Bambi, who was saying into the phone, “Yeah, an ambulance . . . Christ . . . I don’t know how bad. Bad!”

Took two more steps before I stopped and told him, “Cancel that.”

“What?”

“Tell them there’s no rush.”

“Jesus, man, I think you’re in shock. You need to sit down.”

“Stay out of this,” I warned Bambi, then continued walking, my eyes seeing only the spear hunter—the man sitting now and moaning—while all the options played through my mind in stark black-and-white: Gaff Deano under the jaw, drag him out and drown him fast. No . . . grab the son of a bitch by the ponytail, take him way, way out in the Gulf of Mexico, where . . .

Where, if I didn’t bleed to death in the next couple of minutes, there were all kinds of options.

The wooden walkway lay between me and Deano. It took some effort to climb over it, but I managed, hearing him say in the voice of a spoiled child, “Shit, I need a doctor! You guys do something now!”

Because I was behind him, only a couple of steps away, he was startled when I replied, “I plan to,” and he spun around. Looked up into the flashlight’s beam and shielded his eyes.

“Dude, you’re blinding me—this is serious!”

“Couldn’t agree more.”

“Goddamn thing went clear through my foot! Pain’s killing me, man!”

“Then I better hurry,” I said and pointed the flashlight at the ground. That’s when Deano saw the club I was carrying, plus the stainless gaff hook, then connected it all with the look in my eyes, the tone of my voice, and he scooched away from me.

“Don’t,” he whispered, “please don’t,” the child in him doing all the talking now.

Several seconds, I stood there and thought about it, staring at the rich boy with the damaged brain who had failed at everything: big, babyish face, mud-streaked with tears, cradling his swollen foot in both hands. Then looked from Deano to my stilthouse, where my eyes lingered on the pond shimmering beneath, the small pond that is Dinkin’s Bay. Took a deep breath, my internal monitor aware that my lungs didn’t gurgle with blood. So maybe I would live, and maybe it was time to be smart for a change. Time to . . . what?

Not befoul my own nest, for one thing. And also to stabilize my wound by not moving.

I sat heavily on the walkway, placed the gaff hook behind me, and said to Deano, “Hurts, doesn’t it?” Then angled the flashlight toward the broken stingray spine protruding from my sternum. A thousand years ago, sacrificial victims of the Maya had, no doubt, felt the same numbing fear.

“Goddamn worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life,” the spear hunter replied, then yelled, “Luke, where the hell’s that ambulance?”

—

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, I was in the ambulance, on a gurney, growing increasingly unsettled by the concern of the EMT who had already strapped me immobile and was now on the phone with a trauma physician.

The stingray barb had moved in my chest, apparently, and I was listening to fragments of one-sided medicalspeak that confirmed I might be dying.

CT scan . . . depth of penetration “significant” . . . Yes, assess damage associated with a fractured sternum: mediastinal structures, pulmonary and myocardial contusions. Then came a long list of words that grated against the beep of the fluctuating heart monitor but might explain my plummeting blood pressure and why I would have to be rushed straight to surgery.

I was feeling hazy, too, a symptom of failing cranial hydraulics that spooked me. An odd realization: Time—whatever the hell time is or was or isn’t—I might be running low. I couldn’t see my watch, but knew it was after eight. Date night!

“Need to call someone,” I told the EMT, my chest burning from the effort.

She shook her head, busy with a syringe. “Quiet! Later, when we get things figured out.”

“Send a text?” I asked.

The woman looked at the monitors in a way that wasn’t encouraging, which pissed me off—irrational and I knew it—then made it all better by allowing me to dictate a message.

Moments later, my phone chimed with Hannah Smith’s reply: On my way, hold on. Please hold on!

Moments later, I heard another chime, and a second message was held above my face to read privately: Love always, Hannah.

“Your wife?” the EMT asked, taking the phone away.

“Maybe so,” I replied. “And I’m buying a dog, too.”

—

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