09-Twelve Mile Limit (12 page)

Instead, I said, “That’s great news. So why’s this the first I’ve heard it? There ought to be headlines. Instead, they’re trying to close down whole hectares of the water around here.”

She shrugged. “I’ve got a private theory about that, but I’d hate for you to get the impression I’ve gotten old and cynical. Don’t get me wrong, Doc. Manatees should continue to be fully protected, but they’ve recovered to a level where, clearly, they’re no longer an endangered species. Fish and Wildlife ought to down-list them from endangered to threatened, at most.

“This afternoon, I expected SAM’s board members to clap and cheer when I told them what I was going to talk about. They’ve done a hell of a good job getting the word out, educating boaters on what to look for and how to avoid contact. They deserve a fair share of the credit, right along with another club, Save the Manatee. I was going to tell them congratulations, score a big win for the good guys. Instead, I watched their jaws drop open, and they looked at me like I was a heretic. They couldn’t get me out of the room fast enough. The club’s president—get this, Doc—she’s afraid of big bodies of water, won’t get on a boat, but there she is, running the whole show. She actually screamed at me. Called me a liar and… what was the phrase?” Matthews tilted her head, thinking about it. “She called me a ‘stooge for the boating industry,’ that was it.

“Doc, we don’t get a cent from private enterprise. You know that. She has to know it, too, but it was like, because she said it, that made it true. So now a couple hundred people in there are convinced our entire project was bought and paid for by boat manufacturers. Their president has spoken, and that’s that. I had to be discredited, and that was the only way she could do it.” Matthews was shaking her head, frustrated and angry.

“God spare me fat, middle-aged, neurotic do-gooders!”

I said, “So why are they doing it?”

I watched her take a sip of her beer, eyebrows furrowed. She said, “Just between you and me? After they booted me, I went back to my room and used my laptop to do a little online research. The question seemed obvious to me: Why would any group continue to manufacture and promote an endangerment crisis that simply does not exist?”

“Money,” I said. “Group survival or some political agenda.”

“Probably all of the above,” she said. “You catch on quick. Save All Manatees was started by two people who had good reasons to be worried about the well-being of that animal. They worked their butts off raising money and expanding the membership. So now, fifteen years later, the membership’s grown to about half a million nationwide. It’s got an annual budget of a couple million. They’ve got a paid staff and a stable of attorneys on retainer. SAM isn’t just a club, it’s a growing industry. Same with a couple of state and federal jobs created to keep tabs on this particular animal. The department heads now employ assistants to the assistants of their assistants.

“So what happens if the manatee is all of a sudden taken off the endangered species list? They’re all out of business. So SAM, at least, has stayed aggressive. They file lots of lawsuits. People are going to stop donating if Fish and Wildlife down-lists the manatee, so they keep them on the defensive—that’s my guess, anyway—and, to get new members, they base their arguments on emotion, not science. Most of the bay areas they want to close to boat traffic have never had a manatee fatality in the thirty years we’ve been keeping records. That’s a fact. I went back and checked.”

“Like Dinkin’s Bay?”

“Like Dinkin’s Bay.”

“So you’re saying they don’t need to close down the marina and kick us all out of there. The trouble is—and I’m sure you’re aware of this—there are a number of very good biologists around who are going to disagree with almost everything you’ve just told me. People I know and respect. So who am I supposed to believe?”

With her hands, she made a nothing-I-can-do-about-that gesture. “I’m just giving you the data, Doc—which are now part of public record. Look ’em up. From everything our team has learned—this is my opinion, of course—but closing Dinkin’s Bay is absolutely unnecessary. I wouldn’t tell you that if I didn’t believe it was true.”

She went on. “I used to think that I was as radical and green as they come. Not anymore. I don’t know the board members in there well enough to say, but lately I’ve been meeting more and more so-called environmentalists who aren’t really pro-environment. What they are is anti-human. Anything that has to do with people, they hate. They want to rope it all off, exclude everyone—except for themselves, of course. They’re enviro-elitists, not environmentalists. And just like SAM’s leaders, hysteria is their favorite tool. So see, Doc? I have gotten old and cynical.”

I smiled at her and said, “Join the club, pal.”

“I know, Doc, but it still bothers me. I’ve worked so damn hard all my life to get it right, to do my science properly—follow the data faithfully and without expectations wherever they may lead. Isn’t that what the really good professors taught us?” She looked at me and snapped her fingers. “One thing they didn’t teach us, though, is—that quick—one big, public lie can completely taint the work. I don’t doubt that most of SAM’s members are good people and honestly care about protecting the environment. But who are they going to believe, our science or their own president? See my point?”

I was about to say I did, but instead, we both stopped talking because of a growing noise coming from inside the Crow’s Nest—raised voices and screaming. Then we watched as the double doors came flying open and out poured a running, tumbling, shoving mob of people, a many-headed pointillist swarm that seemed to have one frantic body.

It took me a moment to understand what was going on. Because they were both a little taller than most of the others, I saw that Jeth and Gunnar Camphill were at the center of the crowd, shoving each other and swearing, the familiar preface to a bar fight.

Already moving, I told Matthews, “I need to see if I can break this up. But do me a favor. Don’t get too close.”

Studies have been done on multigroup violence, and the template is fairly standard and shares an odd and surprising symmetry with tornado storm cells, of all things.

As fighting between the combatants intensifies, little skirmishes will begin to occur on the outskirts of the main fight, much as large tornadoes at the center of a storm spawn a minion of smaller tornadoes on the borders. Like the smaller tornadoes, the skirmishes are energized, concentrated, but dissipate quickly, only to reappear at another place along the outskirts.

Which is why I told Frieda to keep her distance, and why I didn’t go charging right in.

We followed the mob down the sandy drive, past the pool bar, and then under the condo parking to the beach where rental kayaks and canoes were neatly stacked by the water. I kept looking and looking, and finally picked out JoAnn, Rhonda, Ransom, Claudia, and Amelia moving along with the mob, in their own tight little group. I ran up behind them, grabbed Ransom and JoAnn by the arms, and yelled to them above the noise, “You ladies come with me. We’re going to watch this from the docks.” Meaning I didn’t want to risk some drunk taking a swing at any of us.

Ransom wouldn’t budge, though. “Mister pretty man and his friends, they all jump on Jeth at once. Know how it started? One of their guys, he drunk, and he find out who Amelia was, and he ask her, right out loud, ‘Tell us the truth about the drug deal that got your buddies killed. Everybody in Florida know you’re lying.’ That’s when Jeth step in. Then their women friends, they try to rip Jeth’s shirt off him. You think I’m gonna let them city trash get away with something like that?”

“Ransom, please! As a favor to me. Okay?”

She didn’t want to follow me, but she finally relented, allowing the mob to move away from us, and I led the five of them—Frieda had wisely vanished—up the ridge to the docks where we could watch the scene from the aspect of open water.

It was not a pretty thing to watch.

They’d torn off all of Jeth’s T-shirt except for the collar and a patch of material down his back. He was faced off against Camphill while a few men but mostly women stood around them in a ragged circle, screaming. In peripheral skirmishes, I noticed that a couple of our guides, big Felix Lane and Javier Castillo—a Cuban immigrant—were moving from fight-cluster to fight-cluster, separating the combatants until they could tell who was who, then systematically cold-cocking anyone they didn’t recognize as one of us, an islander—something else that was not pretty to watch.

But the main event was Jeth Nicholes, the local fishing guide who’d just lost the love of his life, and Gunnar Camphill, the film hero.

So far, it looked as if Jeth had gotten the worst of it. His face was swollen, and blood was pouring from his nose. I watched Camphill use his nasty sidekick to batter Jeth into the canoe rack, then almost drop him with a spinning back elbow to the ribs. Jeth staggered, nearly fell, but managed to keep his feet.

I badly wanted to help him, but I couldn’t. You can’t fight another man’s battle. Jeth wasn’t going to quit, and he would have taken my intrusion as an admission that he was beaten.

But he wasn’t.

I watched him take a deep breath, charge Camphill, and manage to wrestle his arms around the man’s chest. The actor knew all the pressure points, all the dangerous places to hit. But Jeth held on and, with the slow determination of a boa constrictor, worked his way upward until he got Camphill’s neck cradled in his strong right arm, then used his left hand to apply pressure—a headlock.

That’s when the momentum began to turn.

Jeth grabbed a fistful of Camphill’s hair and levered him over his hip onto the sand—a weird thing to see because a capsized patch of the actor’s hair actually came off in Jeth’s hand. Jeth looked at the thing, shocked, and then flung it into the water.

It made no sense at first, but then I realized—a small crown toupee. Camphill wore a hairpiece.

Maybe the psychological impact of being exposed had something to do with it, or maybe Camphill was just exhausted. Whatever the reason, Jeth ended it quickly, using his fists to pound away at the man’s face until Camphill rolled into a fetal position, hands protecting his head, calling, “Enough! Enough! I quit, goddamn it!”

Jeth stood shakily; he seemed a little surprised that it was over and he had won.

But it wasn’t over yet. He still had a small mob to deal with, pointed-face and tennis player among them, plus a couple dozen women and men. The little mob began to walk toward Jeth as he retreated, backing away faster and faster until he was running as they pursued him.

He chose exactly the right escape route. I watched him vault over the railing of the dock where we stood, then sprint toward us, not realizing, at first, that we were there—he probably had planned to jump into the water to get away.

His expression, when he saw us, was touching. It’s a frightening thing to have a mob after you, and his face registered panic, then puzzlement, as his brain scanned to identify us and analyze the situation. Then his expression changed to pure relief.

I pushed him past me, saying, “You okay?” not expecting an answer. Then I began to walk shoreward, toward pointed-face and tennis player, who were leading the mob.

Both men stopped abruptly when they realized who I was. The men and women behind them suddenly went quiet, perhaps sensing pointed-face’s uneasiness. They saw the way he was looking at me, seeming to get smaller as he took a step back, then another, retreating as I continued to walk toward him, his little mob bunched up behind him now, blocking his escape.

When I was just a couple of paces away, hearing sirens warbling in the distance, he yelled, “Stay away from me, damn you! Don’t you touch me!”

He looked at me blankly when I asked, “Can you swim?” Then I lifted him and vaulted him into the bay.

Amelia told me, “You’ve sobered up a little—maybe we all have—but not enough for me to talk about the boat. The one that maybe picked up Janet, Michael, and Grace.”

“You’re absolutely certain you saw it?”

“It wasn’t light yet, but it wasn’t dark. You know that time of morning when it’s powdery gray, like fog? I hadn’t heard the Coast Guard helicopter in a while, or the search plane. Like maybe they’d gone back to base or something to refuel. That’s when it went by, maybe a mile off. No lights, like a ghost ship, and it stopped out there. But what I think might have happened, the way I feel about it all, let’s save for the morning. Maybe because I’m a public defender, dealing with all those indigents in trouble, I’ve learned never to discuss anything serious when I’m drinking. That’s what nails them each and every time. And this is about as serious as it gets.”

It was a little after 3 A.M. We were back at Dinkin’s Bay, a couple dozen of us, bruised and scarred a little, but the whole group intact, no one arrested, no one hospitalized, although Jeth was going to need a doctor to check out that crooked nose of his. Camphill had almost certainly broken it.

We were in a small open area of grass and sand by the seawall near the boat ramp and canoe racks. A couple of the guides had built a fire of driftwood, piled the wood on high, and now we all sat around it, feeling the heat, watching sparks comet skyward, little pockets of us set off in shadows, the familiar faces of friends suspended like orange masks above the flames, a tribal effect. There was a tribal feel, too. We’d drawn blood and been bloodied together, and now we were back in camp, our secluded mangrove village.

The feeling was not unknown to me. But it had been a very, very long time since I’d experienced it.

Only two of us were missing: Tomlinson and Ransom. After leaving the ’Tween Waters docks, I spent half an hour searching around, convincing myself that someone hadn’t knocked him unconscious during the brawl and left him to die in the condo parking area or facedown in the shallows.

Instead, I found Tomlinson near the water facedown in the sand at Jensen’s Marina, passed out at the base of the palm tree totem pole there everyone calls Queenie. When I rolled him over to make certain he was still breathing, he pulled a curtain of scraggly hair away from his face, struggled to focus, and, after a few beats, finally realized who I was. “Ah … my compadre. Back from the Crusades, I see. Did Jeth slay the black knight?” He slurred the sentences together, wincing as if it pained him to form words.