Mostly, I looked after Arlis Futch. The man was miserable. He looked as if the last few days had aged him twenty years. He walked around in a fog, too tough to cry, in too much pain not to. Looked up at me more than once and said, 'I sure 'nuff hope they catch the ones that kilt her.'
More than once, I answered, 'You can count on it, Arlis.'
The fire department had done a superb job of saving my stilt house. Even so, much of the lower decking had been destroyed and most of my lab, too. My optical equipment had either cracked or fogged because of the heat. Many of my slides were ruined and whole rows of specimen jars had exploded. Because my one-room house is under the same tin roof, heat-saturated smoke had invaded the place, ruining my telescope, melting some of my record albums, and the stink of the smoke was on everything I owned.
The only bright spot was that Crunch & Des, the black cat, had been panhandling around the marina at the time of the explosion, so he was still his lazy, healthy, indifferent self.
For several days after Hannah's death, I was led to believe that the explosion and fire had also somehow killed all the specimens in my fish tank. But Janet Mueller finally told me the truth: The reason she had dropped the lid so abruptly that Thursday morning was not because she heard Hannah calling to her, but because she had been shocked to find all the fish, including our six tarpon, swirling around in a green chemical foam. She decided that my raw-water pump had somehow sucked in some kind of pollutant, but didn't want to tell me right away. Wanted to give me time to recover from the concussion she insisted that I had suffered. 'A big chunk of wood hit you right in the head, Doc. I saw it. That's why I still think you need to see a doctor.'
I didn't want to see a doctor. It was my own stupidity that had allowed the explosion to occur. A mild concussion didn't seem penalty enough for the harm I had caused. Nor did I tell Janet what I suspected was the truth: A couple of drunk sportfishermen in a pickup truck had poisoned my fish as punishment for my traitorous association with the netters. Didn't mention my suspicions to Nels Esterline, either. Why reopen old wounds?
Everyone from the marina community joined together in an attempt to help me. No one worked harder at that than Janet. A change had come over her since the explosion. She was no longer the weepy, nerve-shattered woman she had been when she arrived at Dinkin's Bay. Maybe it was because she had finally come to terms with what had happened in her life. Or maybe it was because the explosion required that she refocus her energies on the needs of others. Every day, I would find her picking through the wreckage of my lab, sorting and boxing and scrubbing.
Not that I was staying at my stilt house. No. I couldn't stand the smoky stink of the place; the images that flashed into my brain caused by just standing on the charred dock. I had spent the first night sleeping on Tomlinson's sailboat, but there were too many ghosts there, too. Finally, I rented a one-bedroom condo unit down on the beach. I moved in enough personal items to be comfortable—my shortwave radio; a few books—and had my telephone forwarded. It was a pretty tourist place called Casa Ybel. Each morning, I'd sleep just as late as I possibly could, then do a very long beach run, a very long surf swim. Each night, I'd force myself to stay awake just as late as I possibly could, my brain whirring away with devious little ideas; nasty, nasty scenarios.
When you are planning a trip to the other side of the world, it's best to nudge the body clock ahead long before departure.
One afternoon, Janet confronted me and said, 'Look, Doc, I can relate to what you're going through. I've
I had patted her arm affectionately, smiled my bland smile, and said, 'But I
I was.
The first thing I had done was box all my important personal items; then rented space at a high-security storage business. The kind of business that gladly accepts cash in advance and isn't too fussy about identification. The kind of business favored by people who realize that a safety deposit box can be sealed and searched by authorities if a judge can be found to sign the right papers.
Through a much traveled friend, I also drew out a sizable chunk of cash from my account at the Royal Trust Ltd., Seven Mile Beach, Grand Cayman Island. Then I took a tiny piece of that cash around to several local banks and converted it into hefty bags of quarters.
When you are traveling from pay phone to pay phone, over a large area and over a period of several days, you don't want to be caught short of change, particularly if you are making tough but untraceable trunk calls to places such as Nicaragua, Singapore, Burma, and Medan, Sumatra.
I also converted a tidy chunk of that cash into two large money orders. I Fed Exed both of the checks, but to different parts of the world. One went to an acquaintance of mine in Miami, along with a passport-size photograph. Pretty nice photograph; didn't wear my glasses.
The days prior to Hannah's funeral were very busy days indeed.
On Tuesday afternoon, January 17, Ron Jackson called and invited me to accompany him on a midnight bust he and some A.T.F. agents had planned. Even though I declined, he didn't tell me who they were going to hit, or why. He didn't need to. I had already given him all the information I had collected. After thinking long and hard about it, I had even told him my suspicions about Raymond Tullock. I didn't press the issue too hard. But I told him. If fate—or Tullock's good planning—made him impossible for the law to touch, then fate
Tomlinson might have called the gesture an attempt to seek karmic approval.
On Wednesday morning, Jackson showed up at my condo apartment. His clothes were wrinkled; he looked tired. Probably hadn't been to bed all night. When I opened the door, he held up his gym bag. 'Run?'
We ran.
They had swept the beach at Copper Rim, he told me. They had bagged every man there on probable cause, including one Julian Claypool.
'Julian?' I said. I had called him Julius—another mistake to add to my list.
'Claypool may be the strangest man I've ever arrested,' Jackson said as we chugged along, the hard sand sponging our waffle tracks. 'The whole time, he just beamed and grinned. Not the least bit upset. Hell, Claypool seemed
I said, 'I imagine it did. Florida's an electric chair state.'
'Naw-w-w. Second degree maybe, but more likely they'll work it down to manslaughter. Claypool won't get the chair.' More silence.
Something was on his mind. I thought he was going to confront me with it but, instead, he told me about Kemper Waits. How the bust had gone.
It had gone very well. They had cuffed Waits and read him his rights. Unlike Claypool, Waits had not been cooperative. He had slobbered at the mouth and screamed about government conspiracies. Waits, Jackson told me, was a certifiable freak. Because Waits refused to provide a key, they had battered down the door of his cement shed. Inside, the A.T.F. agents had found wiring and timers and caps and fuses, along with four vacuum-packed sticks of dynamite, plus a tattered counterculture pamphlet with the words 'Cook Book' in the title. It was a well- equipped little bomb factory.
'He wasn't going to stop with two,' Jackson told me. 'Kemper had a taste for it. He'd declared his own private war. A diet of drugs and whiskey can create paranoia, and that guy has a big-league case of it.'
In the pond behind Waits's house, agents had waded in and confirmed that there were heavy, metal objects in the shallows that were presumably boat engines, but they wouldn't know how many until they started winching them out.
'The information was all good, Ford. Everything you gave me was dead on.' We had run halfway to the Sanibel lighthouse, and now were on our way back. 'A clean bust like that, it didn't hurt my reputation with the sheriff. . . or the federal boys, either, for that matter. I appreciate it. I really do. But what I'm worried about is . . .
