'I hoped you would. Anyway, I wanted to know what the laws are against that sort of thing. '
'There are about seventeen years' worth of laws against that sort of thing. Twenty-seven years if we really want to come down hard. There's the National Stolen Properties Law and the National Receiving Stolen Goods Law—U.S. Codes twenty-three fourteen and twenty-three fifteen if you're writing it down. Then there's the smuggling statute, USC five forty-five, Paragraph B—'
'That tells me what I want to know.'
'No, you're trying to tell me what I should know. Right? Diplomatic language; putting some very odd stuff between the lines, here, Doc, and I want an explanation when I return with your painting.'
'Then you'll do it?'
'I'll miss my run. I usually run in the evening. I'm getting in shape for Boston. But, yeah, I'll go. And I'll dress very nice, just like you said.'
'There's one more thing, Don—'
'You've already had your one more thing.'
'Is this going to be considered a big favor or a little favor?'
'Why is it I get chills just hearing you ask that?'
'Because you know, even after this, you still owe me a big one.'
Ford leafed through the phone book until he found a number for Melinski, Henry S. It didn't say B.J. after his name: bachelor's degree in journalism. In a few years, it probably would. Journalists were taking themselves awfully seriously these days. He dialed the number and let it ring ten times before hanging up. Well, that was okay. It might be better to wait until Sally Field called him with more information.
What he was trying to do was get the right organizations in line; to nudge them in the right direction. It was the one hope he had of securing justice for Rafe Hollins. Lester Durell had said stories of the successful amateur detective were utter bullshit, and Ford knew that he was right. The odds were impossible because, on a formal business basis, people didn't deal with people anymore, they dealt with beings Ford thought of as Bionts. In the literature of natural history, a biont was a discrete unit of living matter that had a specific mode of life. In modern America, to Ford's way of thinking, a Biont was a worker or minor official who, joined with other Bionts, established a separate and dominant entity: the Organization. A Biont was different from an employee. Ford was seeing fewer and fewer employees around. The Biont looked to the Organization as a sort of surrogate family; depended on the Organization to care for him in sickness and in health, to provide for his recreational, spiritual, and social needs. The Organization was an organism, much as a coral reef or a beehive could be considered an organism, made up of individual creatures working for the good of the whole. When the Organization prospered, so did the Biont—a sort of professional symbiosis, with loyalty built in. A Biont might grumble about his host in private, but just let an outsider try to sneak in, ask for information, arouse suspicion, or endanger the Organization, and all the unit members would unite like a shield to rebuff the intruder. Ford thought of the way Aztec ants rushed to attack anything that happened to touch their hosting Cocoloba tree. He thought of killer bees.
There were too many organizations involved: the sheriff's department of Everglades County, the medical examiner's office, Sealife Development Corporation on Sandy Key. An outsider might be able to wrangle a small bit of information from one, but the hope of assembling incriminating data from all three was absurd. What he could do, though, was try to use the organization-organism theory to his advantage. In nature, all organisms filled the dual role of predator and the preyed upon. Big things attacked smaller things. They picked up the scent, stalked, and fed.
Ford was now assembling bigger predators. He was throwing out the scent.
EIGHT
He had work of his own to do.
He still needed more sharks for that order from Minneapolis Public Schools, and he wanted to check the salinity and oxygen content of his fish tank.
Sharks, first.
He put rods and cast net in his skiff, then decided to take his fly rod, too. On the grass flats at the mouth of Dinkin's Bay, just across from Jessica's house, he threw the cast net and put a couple dozen pinfish—small bait fish—into his live wells. While he was catching bait, Jessica came out onto the dock and waved. Ford could see that she wanted him to stop, but he did not. Instead, he ran out onto Pine Island Sound, then cut southward toward the causeway that connected Sanibel to the mainland. When the water shoaled to five feet, he began to drift. Using a light spinning rod, he caught six small blacktip sharks, enjoying the way they jumped: dark projectiles on a pale sea. Then a school of ladyfish moved in, feeding in such a frenzy that he lost several baits without a shark strike.
He put the blacktips on ice, then ran north toward St. James City on Pine Island where, in 1885, W. H. Wood stayed. Wood was the New Yorker who, fishing in Tarpon Bay, caught the first tarpon ever taken on rod and reel. Ford landed three more blacktips and, drifting all alone on a vitreous glaze of sea and sky, sweat dripping down his nose, released several spotted seatrout.
Then he noticed something in the distance—something glittering, energized, rolling across the calm like a boat wake: a school of tarpon coming toward him; a dozen or more fish moving in a tight pod. Their big tails were throwing water; their chromium scales threw sunlight. Ford picked up his fly rod, stripped out line to cast, and stood on the bow of his skiff waiting, his pulse thudding, his mind stilling, concentrating, as he gauged the path of the tarpon and the point where his fly might intersect with them. They were big fish: six feet long, most of them, rolling and diving in a frenzied carousel, gulping surface air before ascending, blowing bubbles, their huge horse-eyes vivid with life but devoid of emotion; primeval fish that were wild with purpose but as mindless as rays of light.
Ford stood watching, loving it.
Then they were close enough. On the surface, the tarpon were silver with dark backs that paled in gradations of blue. As they dove, their bodies became golden beneath the tannin-stained water. Ford released the hook he was holding, catapulting the blue-and-white streamer fly forward. He hauled with his left hand and shot out thirty feet of line on the back cast. Then he released the line on the fore cast, and the streamer fly seemed to carom off the sky. Then it slapped into the side of the boat . . . because he was standing on the line coiled upon the deck.
He straightened the line with a roll cast, then went through the ceremonies of false casting, trying to pick out another fish. This time he casted cleanly, but the adrenaline was in him and he casted way too far: eighty feet, and the plastic line smacked the belly of the rod as if it could have gone another fifty. Ford began to strip in quickly so that the streamer might still intersect with his chosen tarpon. But then an unseen fish materialized through the murk: a flash of gold like refracted light; a momentary vision of a gigantic scimitar turning by his lure. His line jolted, then tightened. Ford lifted the rod, feeling a great weight like a snag, his eyes focused on the triangulation point of rod and line and bay. There was a microsecond of calm; an oleaginous swirl. Then the water erupted into an incandescent whirlpool as the tarpon broke through the film of water, its mouth wide, eyes wild, shaking its head: a huge, animated form that froze for a moment in midair, silver on blue, then tumbled into the water with the percussion of a refrigerator falling from the sky.
Ford was soaked . . . the fish was running, taking line . . . his reel strained with the whine of precision machinery that was being pushed beyond the limits of lubrication, as if the damn thing might overheat and disintegrate in his face.
The fish jumped a second time, way, way in the distance, the siiction-clatter of impact reaching Ford's ears a moment after it had already reentered the water. Then the tarpon was running again, but not as fast. Ford touched the reel's spool, applying pressure, and the bow of the skiff swung slowly around, as if drawn to the tarpon: the inanimate in pursuit of the inexorable.
Now it was fun. The strike of the fish and the first jump were always the most fun, but, in the moment of their occurring, the shock was too close to terror. He would enjoy that moment later, when his legs stopped shaking, when his motor reflexes returned, when he didn't have to remind himself to breathe. Now, though, he could relax a little and take inventory. The line was his conduit to the fish; a sort of sensory filament that joined him, for a very short time, with that which he admired but could never truly be a part of nor fully understand. That's what he liked best about it. By putting his fingertips on the line, he could feel the fish, almost as if he were touching it. The tarpon was shaking its head now. Now the great tail was surging, banging the line as torque increased . . . now it was ascending, stretching the line so that it whined in the summer calm, and Ford could feel it all, one
