Dead of Night (4 page)

That sealed it. In a subtle way, Frieda had withdrawn her request that I go on a snooping mission, and transformed it into an elevated meeting between two biologists. A professional courtesy call.

“You’re driving across the state Saturday?”

I told her no, I was driving over tomorrow—Friday—coming back Sunday.

“Excellent. Then you will be able to stop and say hello...”

I had no out. We both knew it, which is why she was laughing when I replied, “Why is it I feel like I’ve just been leveraged by a master?”

The lady had a nice laugh; lots of joy, with a hint of the devil. “It’s because you haven’t spent enough time in Tallahassee to recognize a master. Florida has an annual budget that’s creeping close to seventy billion. Bigger than lots of sovereign nations. Centralize that kind of power in a small town, and that’s where you’re going to find the real manipulators. Compared to some of the sharks here, I’m just a toothless dogfish.”

I found a notepad. “I guess this is where I write directions. You knew I’d say yes, so you’ve already figured out the best route for me to take. Correct?”

The woman thought that was hilarious. “Damn tootin’, sweetie. You’d make an awful woman, ’cause you just don’t know how to say no. Either that, or a very, very popular one.”

 

 

When I finished talking with Frieda, I let my eyes move around the lab, taking refuge in its orderliness. My lab’s one of two houses built over water on pilings, beneath a communal tin roof. I’d chosen the largest of the two as a workplace. A lucky call. The lab’s where I spend most of my time, and where visitors prefer to gather if it’s too hot or rainy on the deck outside.

I prefer functional to fancy. Not everyone does. A disapproving lady visitor once told me the place was a cross between Tom Sawyer’s raft and a castaway’s tree house. She pretended not to be offended when I thanked her.

Some people are lucky enough to find their life’s love. I’ve found my life’s home in this drafty, salt-glazed wooden vessel—which is another rare kind of luck. It’s a good place for a biologist who makes his living collecting and selling marine specimens, but who also enjoys socializing with fellow islanders with a beer or two at sunset.

I like approaching the building by boat, seeing the horizontal banding of clapboard exterior balanced on stork-legged pilings, the tin roof pitched like the bow of an Indonesian junk, all framed by deck railings.

The place also possesses a distinctive olfactory mix—which is something else not everyone appreciates. It’s a fusion of ozone from aquarium aerators, graphite from precision instruments, chemical reagents, and formalin all mixed with odors that sift through the wooden floor: the smell of barnacles, creosote, and salt water.

On the walls are shelves of books, lab instruments, paintings and pictures tacked at eye level so I can look at them if I want, chemicals in jars, and rows of tanks that hold fish, crabs, shrimp, bivalves, and mollusks—including one goat-eyed octopus that now watched me, its focus as intense as my own.

Octopi are the geniuses of their phylum. I was the entity that delivered a crab into its tank daily. To this animal, I was food. If it were larger, or if I were smaller, it would have stalked, dispatched, and eaten me with equal relish.

I stood alone for a few moments in the middle of the room, and let my attention settle on a 250-gallon aquarium into which I’d released five newly born bull sharks; genus:
Carcharhinus,
species: leucas. My son, Laken, visiting from Central America, had helped me build the thing, rig the filters and aerators, so the water inside was Gulf Stream clear. The finger-sized sharks were active, always moving. They seemed to be acclimating just fine.

I’ve had a long-standing interest in bull sharks; spent a lifetime traveling the same jungle rivers and remote sea places they inhabit. I find their ability to prevail in dissimilar environments fascinating. They roam tropic waters worldwide, commonly forage hundreds of miles up rivers, and can thrive in freshwater lakes.

Because the species is identified by various names—Zambezi River shark, the Lake Nicaragua shark—it’s not widely known that it’s responsible for more serious attacks on humans than great whites.

In popular literature, bull sharks are often described as “ferocious,” which is misleading because the word implies emotion.
Efficient—
that’s more accurate, and the way I prefer to think of them.

I’d discovered these five pups while doing a necropsy on a two-hundred-pound female one of the guides brought in. Finding living young inside a shark isn’t uncommon. But three of these fish were uncommon, which is why I’d rigged this big tank. Like the mother, three of the five had visible spinal deformities. It was probably a genetic defect, though it might have been caused by waterborne contaminants. Whatever the source, the deformity was unusual in the cartilaginous fishes. A first, in my experience.

The big female had found a way to survive. Would her young?

On a table near the aquarium was a leather-bound day-book in which I’d been keeping lab notes, a things-to-do list, a few personal observations on people and events. It was novel-sized, with
SHIP’S LOG
embossed on the cover. A salty touch, but a tad theatrical. It was a present from my son, so I used it.

That morning, as had become habit, I opened the log and noted date, tides, and moon phase, before writing:

I also made some personal notes. Wrote more than usual, referencing Lake, my girlfriend Dewey Nye, and Tomlinson. No one is entirely the person he or she appears to be. We all inhabit a more solitary dimension in which we deal with our secret aspirations and fears; frailties seldom suspected even by those closest.

It’s true for me. I didn’t realize to what extent until I began keeping daily notes. Writing allowed me to fret or inspect on a private level, so I now carried the journal even when I traveled.

It wasn’t long before I transitioned back from personal matters to the more interesting subject of sharks:

I was excited about the project. Which is why I was proportionately pissed off at myself for saying yes to Frieda. Did I really want to go off and leave the sharks, leave my work, to look for some oddball biologist who lived on an island in the middle of the state?

No, I didn’t. Hell no. Didn’t want to leave Sanibel. The longer I live where I live, the more I dislike being away. Hate missing a good sunset. Hate missing the 5:00 A.M. silence of a fresh tropical morning.

But the woman had me.

Before I’d received her first Internet message, I’d even already formulated a plausible excuse for not making the surfing trip. But now I was committed.

Tomlinson and I are close enough that it would have been okay to bail. He’d have understood. But I didn’t know Frieda well enough to disappoint her.

So it was on a blue bright Atlantic Coast Sunday, just before sunset, the twelfth of December, and only slightly more than twelve days before Christmas, when I detoured to check on Frieda’s brother. I’d left Tomlinson with his gaggle of new surfer pals, old doper buddies and adoring Zen students, dropped off the crappy rental at Ron Jon’s Surf Shop in Cocoa Beach, and drove my truck inland.

I could have stopped at Applebee’s home two days earlier, on my way to Sebastian Inlet, but procrastination is a powerful copilot when it comes to unpleasant duties. I wanted to put this one off as long as I could.

Later, my conscience would play the inevitable game of “What if . . .”

What if I
had
stopped by the man’s home on Friday instead of Sunday night? What if I hadn’t interrupted the two people who were interrogating and beating him? Would he have lived? Or would he have died? And what would have happened then?

I had Frieda’s directions on a square of paper stuck to the truck’s dashboard, so I knew he lived on a lake twenty-some miles south of Orlando, and slightly southeast of Kissimmee, on a little unincorporated island I’d never heard of, Nightshade Landing, Bartram County.

Nightshade grew wild on the island, Frieda told me. The bushes were something to see come spring, all those white blooms. Even so, locals had shortened the name to Night’s Landing. Typical. Boat access only, she said, which is why the place had never really flourished—even though real estate values had soared because of Orlando’s theme park boom.

“Night’s Landing is about a hundred acres, but the population can’t be more than a few dozen people. In the early nineteen hundreds, some New York developer tried to create his own little Cape Cod. But he so sufficiently pissed off the local power structure that they refused to build the bridge he was counting on. Plus, most of the properties have title problems. It’s tough to sell or resell what you can’t prove you own. Which is why he never finished the project.”

She’d added, “I think the island’s a little creepy. A few sand roads, all Victorian houses. Some abandoned. Lots of gables, turrets, towers, and New England porches. The kind of architecture that a New Yorker would think of as classy. The island’s perfect for Jobe, though. It’s the sort of place that people don’t go to live. They go there to disappear. Or hide.”

The scrap of paper also contained her brother’s phone number. On my way to Kissimmee, I used my cell phone. Tried three times. Got nothing but his short, shy phone message: “I am not available. Try again. Or leave your name, number and the first four digits of your birth date, zeros included.”

Birth date, zeros included?

Weird. Did that suggest an interest in astrology? It didn’t mesh with what I knew about the man—nor any responsible scientist I’ve ever known.

Another unusual thing was that he spoke with the careful, halting diction that I’ve come to associate with people who have speech impediments, or drunks who are trying their best to convince police that they are not drunk.

I’d read his papers.

The man wasn’t a drunk.

 

 

When I got to Kissimmee, I dialed and listened to his recorder for a fourth time. Wrestled with the decision to launch my boat and go bang on his door, or buy time by having dinner. Maybe he was outside taking a long walk, or just getting back from a research trip, or maybe working in his lab.

If I could get him to answer the phone and confirm that he was fine, my obligation to Frieda would be fulfilled.

Never in my life did I ever think I’d own a cellular phone. Now I seemed tied to the damn thing.

I drove along Kissimmee’s oak-lined and Christmas-bespangled main boulevard, Broadway, finally found a triple-big parking space for my truck and boat trailer in the heart of downtown next to Shore’s Men’s Wear and Joanne’s Diner. A gas station attendant had told me the diner served good country-fried steak, collards, and iced tea. Florida’s restaurant fare proves that the state has become the Midwest’s southernmost possession. I wasn’t going to miss a chance for some authentic Southern cooking.

But Joanne’s was closed for some reason on this early Sunday eve, so I roamed around town to get the kinks out of my legs, and to give Dr. Jobe more time to materialize. I looked at plastic snowmen and candy cane decorations. I tried to decipher inscriptions on a stonework called “THE MONUMENT OF STATES.” Stood beneath a streetlight and watched an Amtrak passenger train
clickety-clack
its way through downtown, bells ringing, red lights flashing, on its way to somewhere far, far north of the horizon.

It was a little after 6:30 P.M. three days past the dark of the moon; the sort of black night that invests city parks, benches, and trees with a glistening, winter incandescence. The air had a hint of cool; tasted of snow.

Half an hour later, I was sitting at the bar of the Kissimmee Steak House out on Bronson Monument Road, eating an unexpectedly fine piece of beef while the affable bartender told me about the local fishing woes. The city sits on the northern shore of nineteen-thousand-acre Lake Tohopekaliga—called “Lake Toho,” locally. It’s one of a hundred or so lakes that comprise the freshwater headwaters for the Everglades system.

As Tomlinson is quick to point out, one of the earth’s few unique ecosystems—Florida’s River of Grass—actually begins on the outskirts of Orlando. “The
real
Magic Kingdom,” he often adds.

But things weren’t going too well for anglers on Lake Toho, the bartender told me.

“Last year, the state wildlife people decided the lake needed what they call a ‘drawdown.’ It’s like an artificial drought to lower the water level so exotic plants and stuff that’s not supposed to be there can die and be hauled out. But the state people emptied so much water into the Kissimmee River and Lake Okeechobee that at local marinas—Richardson’s Fish Camp, Skinny Al’s, some others—you couldn’t use the boat ramps. The canals was just mud. I haven’t been out fishing for nearly a year! They’re letting the water level come up now, and fishing’s supposed to be great once they’re done. But we’ll see.”