Sanibel Flats

finally rang. A man said, 'I have a message to call a Mr. Ford.'

Ford said, 'I need to get in touch with Harry Bernstein, Central American Division, Branch One. I don't know what his cryptonym is anymore.'

'Branch what? I don't know what you're talking about. Did you want the Federal Transportation Pool?'

'I'm on Sanibel Island, Florida. I'll be at this number between nine and eleven in the morning. If he misses me, telephone information should have my home number under new listings as of tomorrow. I hope. '

The man said, 'I think you must have the wrong number.'

Ford said, 'Thanks. Tell Bernstein it's very important.'

Ford was still in the marina office when Jeth Nicholes returned from his upstairs apartment, nautical in khaki shirt with epaulets. It looked as if he had maybe washed here and there and combed his hair, too. 'I'm wearing cologne,' he told them.

MacKinley said, 'You might as well stay for the party now, Doc. Seems like the guests are arriving.'

Looking past MacKinley, who was behind the counter, Ford saw a group of women in expensive leisure clothes. Creased slacks and pastel blouses; vacation women with tawny, tended hair, drinks in hand, careful expressions of professional control on their faces.

'I like women da-da-da-doctors,' said Nicholes to no one in particular, all three men staring out the window. 'They always look like they grew up taking vitamins and ba-ba-brushing their teeth.'

'Right,' said Ford, 'I know what you mean.'

Nicholes said, 'Another hour or so the dancing'll start. Then about midnight the dirty doctor stories and maybe a little cryin' cause they've been through so much together. That kind of stuff. Then they're gonna want to swim in the bay, sure as hell. No clothes. That's when the real fun will start. You really ought to stay, Doc; find you a nice smart one.'

Ford said, 'I've got to take a shower.'

'Now you're talking,' said MacKinley. 'Might change that shirt of yours, too.'

Ford headed toward the door, then stopped. 'Hey, Jeth.

How many people do you figure know the way into Tequesta Bank?'

'Why, you want to ga-ga-go?'

'No. I was just wondering, that's all.'

Nicholes looked at the ceiling, thinking. 'All that shallow water, and there's only the one little cut takes you in, and that's not marked. Not many, I'd guess. Hardly any at all, if you don't count the commercial guys. Unless they were in a real small boat and didn't mind tearing up their prop. Anybody could make it that way.'

Ford said, 'Thanks. I'll see you guys later.'

When he had left, Nicholes said, 'I like Da-Da-Doc. He's an easy guy to get to know.'

MacKinley said, 'Been nice having him around.'

Nicholes said, 'Smart, too. But in a booky kind of way. The kind of guy who puts his hand in the fan cause he's concentrating so hard on the manual.'

After a time MacKinley said, 'Doesn't say too much, though. You ever notice? Just asks questions and listens. Ends up, he knows all about you but you don't know anything about him.'

'What's wrong with that? Ma-ma-ma-most people, it's the other way around.'

'Nothing wrong with it. Just an observation.'

Nicholes said, 'Besides, what's there to know? He likes to wade around the flats, collect stuff, and bring it back for his microscope. Doc's idea of a home entertainment center is a six-pack of beer and a dead fish. A guy like him, you trust right away.'

MacKinley was nodding. 'I was just saying he's different, that's all.'

THREE

Ford went through Rafe Hollins's address book while he fired the little gas stove and made dinner. He dumped a can of black beans into a pot, flipped pages as he chopped onion, garlic, squeezed in lime juice, added cumin, and put coffee on to boil.

He recognized seven names in the book, three of them from Central America. Only one of the names surprised him. Most of the entries were in ink, but his own name and the marina's phone number were written in pencil—an entry Rafe had probably made within the last few days. Ford leafed through the book searching for other penciled entries, and found two, both inserted above numbers written in ink. Ford reasoned that the inked numbers had been changed, and Rafe had penciled in the new numbers after calling information. Each of the numbers had a Sandy Key prefix, but he recognized neither of the names.

He could hear Rafe saying 'I got to meet some of my buddies from Sandy Key. Make a little money to finance this thing ...'

Ford wiped his hands on his pants and went out the door across the roofed walkway and unlocked the room that he had converted into a lab. Against the far wall was a stainless-steel dissecting table angled slightly to drain. Above it on a shelf were rows of jars containing chemicals and preserved specimens: the comb jellies and nudibranches, the sponges and brittle stars, the octopi, anemones, and unborn sharks he had collected since returning to Florida. He switched on the draftsman's lamp and in a very neat, very tiny script, he noted five of the names, addresses, and telephone numbers on a yellow legal pad.

Beneath the names he wrote Wendy Stafford? then opened the metal box he had found on the island.

He removed one of the jade amulets from the box, a small parrot's head with wings folded close to the chest, and studied it under the light. It looked authentic, but he wanted to be sure. He crossed the room and placed the artifact on the dark stage of his Wolfe zoom binoculared microscope. He raised and rotated the binocular tube, dialed to the lowest power, and took off his glasses, focusing carefully on the parrot's drilled left eye. Through the illuminated lens, the jade—jadeite, really—was a brilliant field of translucent green, magnified seven times. Ford wanted to be certain of how the eyes had been drilled. The indigenous peoples of Central America had used wooden augers, string, and the cutting power of sand to fashion their amulets. Ford was looking for the trace spirals of a modern metal drill. Street shysters were selling mass-produced jadeite junk all over Central America, but this little parrot wasn't junk; he found no spirals. It was a little green god, cool to the touch, a dense little weight on the palm. Probably eight hundred years old or more, and Mayan, though it could have been Chorotega, Corobici, Brunca, or possibly even Inca—there had been trade between most of the Meso-American tribes. Ford didn't know enough about it to be sure.

He gave the other amulets a quick inspection, then took the plastic bag from Rafe's metal box and used a tweezers to extract a thin beige flake of residue. He dampened it, mounted it on a slide, touched the reflected light switch, upped scope power to 25x, and took a look: rough congealed particles; some kind of membrane. He choose another beige flake, the largest in the sack, and positioned it beneath the scope. This sample was blotched with a long dark stain. As Ford increased power and illumination, the hairline stain became a sweeping reddish-brown stroke that bled and faded into the beige membrane.

Ford opened the plastic sack once more and inhaled the faint odor of old leather—but now from another direction he caught a stronger odor.

Damn it!

Ford ran across the walkway into the room he thought of as his living area, and yanked the pot of burned beans off the propane stove.

Now he'd have to start supper all over again.

Through the window above the stove he could see the marina. Dock lights shimmered, strips of gold on liquid darkness, funneling out across the bay. Most of the boats were lighted, too, sitting in rows looking bright and Christmasy, vibrating with muted laughter, wild sentence fragments rising above the night sounds.

Ford listened to the party for a time as he made fresh beans, trying to pick out words, match voices with the silhouettes he could see on the docks. Then the hilarity began to underline his own sense of solitude; made him feel like an eavesdropper, so he decided to make a little noise of his own. He slid a cassette into the Maxima waterproof stereo system, The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, cranked it loud, poured coffee in a mug, went out onto the porch and down the wooden steps to his fish tank while the beans simmered.

To make the tank, he'd taken a thousand-gallon wooden cistern built like a whiskey barrel, cut it in two, mounted it on the widest part of the dock, added a subsand filter and a hundred-gallon upper reservoir to improve