Fallen Out: Jesse McDermitt Series, The Beginning (4 page)

Thirty minutes later, Aaron and I agreed on $300 a month and he contacted a local air brush artist to come out and put the name on the boat, the gear box, and the portal over the dock. I was now in business
. That is, with the exception of getting a six pack license to charter, registering the boat, and acquiring a business license. Details.

For the next two weeks, Jimmy helped me get the boat ready to charter, made arrangements with a nearby bait shop, helped me buy tackle and other gear, and went with me to the County Clerk to get a business license and even to the Chamber of Commerce. He suggested I might want to buy a small skiff to get around whenever the International broke down, explaining that just about everything was accessible by boat on the island. I had to go down to Key West to register the boat and while I was waiting, I looked over some pamphlets that were on the counter.

“Thinking of buying an island?” one of the clerk
s asked.

“Buy an island?”

“Yes sir,” she said. “Some of the smaller uninhabited islands are available to be used as fish camps.”

“Really?” I said. “How much would a little island sell for?”

Later that evening, after I’d registered the
Revenge,
Rusty, Jimmy, and I were sitting at a table in the bar, eating blackened grouper and washing it down with cold Kalik beer.

“You bought a freaking island?” Rusty said in amazement.

“It’s a little over two acres at high tide,” I replied. “Up in the Content Keys, near Harbor Channel. And no, I haven’t bought it yet. Just put a deposit on it until I can see it.”

He roared with laughter, his face turning beet red. “Bro, most of those islands up there you can’t even get a flats skiff up to. You got taken.”

“So, are you gonna take me up there, or not?”

“Sure, first thing in the morning
,” he said still laughing. “Bring your waders, though.”

We left before sunrise and got to the GPS coordinates I was given at the County Clerk’s office. Rusty was right. Even though the tide was nearly high, we beached his little skiff
a good twenty yards from the mangrove shoreline and only ten yards out of Harbor Channel.

I was somewhat dejected. “Maybe the water’s a little deeper on the other side.”

“Might be,” Rusty said pondering the little island that lay before us. “I don’t get up here enough to know for sure. The thing is, if you’re serious about buying this island, right here’s where you’re going to have to dig a channel. That, or a dock all the way out to Harbor Channel.”

We got out and waded ashore. The mangroves weren’t very thick, but the saw palmetto was. We finally found what looked like a path to the interior and followed it. After only ten yards it opened up into a large clearing, mostly sea grass and a few palmetto
, scrub oak, sea grapes, and one tall coconut palm right in the middle.

Rusty
looked back through the path where the skiff sat with its anchor line stretched out halfway to shore. Then he looked back to the clearing. To the west was a pretty wide opening through the underbrush, with only a handful of coconut palms and gumbo limbo trees. Beyond it we could see a sandbar twenty yards offshore.

“You know,” he said thoughtfully. “If you was to dredge a channel from out there, right up into the island here, you could build a little stilt house above it and have a ladder going right up into the house.”

“Why not in the middle of the island?”

“Yeah, that’d work. But, it’d be really cool to park your boat under the house.”

As we walked out into the clearing, I gave that some thought. We split up and explored the little island, which didn’t take long. Before the clearing on the west side overlooking the sandbar we found where someone had a campfire once. Outside of that, there was nothing to indicate anyone had ever been here.

On the north side, the water was deeper. It looked to be about two feet deep just a few yards from shore and dropped to even deeper water
twenty yards out. “I think I’m going to buy it,” I blurted out.

“I gotta admit, it’s secluded. Didn’t you say something about it had to be developed as a fishing lodge or
some such?”

“Yeah. Within ten years, I’d have to have an established fish camp, even if it’s nothing more than a bunkhouse.”

“Lots of fly fishermen come up this way,” he said. “A place to overnight wouldn’t be a bad idea. Julie’d be the one to talk to about that. I swear, that girl knows every ledge and lobster hole from here to Key Weird.”

“Was a time when you did, too.”

“Long term memory’s the first to go,” he said. Suddenly, we heard his outboard cranking and we both spun around at the sound.

“Sumbitch!” he exclaimed. “Someone’s trying to steal my boat.
” In a second, he reached under his shirt at his back and pulled out a Sig Sauer P-226 nine millimeter semiautomatic and started running across the clearing. It always surprises me how fast he’s able to move for a man his size. I tore off after him and we crashed through the saw palmetto on the south end of the island together just in time to see a beat up aluminum johnboat speeding away with two young men in it.

Rusty sloshed out to his skiff and checked it over quickly. “Damn kids,” he said. “At least they weren’t smart enough to take anything.”

“Lucky they didn’t get it started,” I said. “It’s a long swim back to Marathon.”

He pulled out another key on a chain and said, “Luck d
on’t have nothing to do with it. The key in the ignition only spins the starter. This one turns on the ignition.”

“Smart thinking,” I said.

“There’s pirates all over these waters, bro. I was you, I’d put a good security system on your boat and never go out without firepower. The more the better.”

“Pirates?” I asked.

“Not the swashbuckling kind. The drug running kind. They’ll board ya, slice your throat, and feed ya to the sharks. Then they’ll use your boat to run drugs, or worse.”

A month later, the island was mine. I’d also spent several thousand dollars on a state of the art security system for
Gaspar’s Revenge
, fishing tackle, dive equipment, an air compressor for filling scuba tanks, a nice little 18 foot Maverick Mirage flats skiff, and armament. It turned out that Jimmy was sort of a computer guru and set me up with a website to attract clients. Aaron had a friend who created some slick looking flyers that Aaron displayed prominently in the bar. I was a charter fishing and diving Captain.

I took Rusty’s warning to heart, especially after a pleasure craft with a family on board
was attacked while cruising a few miles off Boca Chica Key. The father was shot, but he survived. His wife and two teenage daughters disappeared with the boat. I had the bunk in the forward berth, which raised up on hydraulic cylinders, equipped with a digital lock to secure it. I bought a large, heavy trunk and put it under the bunk. Inside were watertight boxes that held four Sig P-226’s with plenty of ammo and magazines. I even went so far as to special order an M-40A3 sniper rifle, the newer version to the one I used in Somalia several years ago. Bring on the swashbucklers.

Over the summer, I managed to eke out a living without having to dip too much into my savings, which had quickly been cut
nearly in half. I really loved being out on the water, but I let Jimmy handle the clients. I learned a lot from him in the first few weeks and soon we made a good team. He kept up his end of the deal and never once brought pot aboard. By the end of summer, we were one of the top offshore fishing charter boats in the middle Keys and in high demand. I paid Jimmy a fair weekly wage even though we only went out two or three times a week.

During the week, when we didn’t have a charter, I used the little Maverick and scoured the back country north of Marathon and Big Pine Key, sometimes camping out on my island
and doing some target practice. I took snorkeling gear and a spear gun on these forays and managed to keep the freezer aboard the
Revenge
stocked with fish fillets, stone crab claws and lobster later in the summer.

I
n early August, Jimmy and I built a bench rack to replace the fighting chair in the cockpit of the
Revenge
. It was big enough to accommodate six divers sitting back to back. Lobster season was upon us and I wanted to take advantage of the influx of divers. They paid more and tipped better.

There were days when I missed the rigid structure and organization I had in the Corps, but I was slowly relaxing and learning to take each day for what it was. I spent some time on the island and using various implements of destruction, I cleared some of the underbrush away in the center. One night, after a particularly hard day of digging and uprooting a number of scrub oaks, I sat in my skiff anchored on Harbor Channel, fishing. The sun had gone down hours before
and the moon was only a sliver on the western horizon. As I waited for a grouper to take my bait, I looked up to the night sky.

“Damn,” I said
aloud to nobody, my voice sounding unusually loud in the darkness. I’d never really noticed the night sky way out here in the back country. It had been a good fifteen minutes since I doused my flashlight and my eyes had become adjusted to the darkness. With no lights around to pollute the sky, I was able to see a lot more stars than I’d ever seen in my life. A hazy streak of stars spread across the inky blackness in an arc from the southwest to the southeast. I knew it was our own galaxy, the Milky Way, but I’d never really seen it so clearly before. It really made me feel small and insignificant.

The next day
, having returned to civilization, I related my star gazing experience to Rusty. “Let your eyes get used to the darkness up there and you can see millions of years into the past,” he said. “Ya oughta learn to navigate by them. Never know when a skill like that might be needed.”

“Millions of years into the past?”

“Sure. Them stars ain’t nearby. Ever heard of a light year? It takes years for the light from the nearest one to get here. Some of ‘em are millions of light years away.”

“When did you get to be such a science whiz?” I asked.

He went on to explain how his grandfather had taught him celestial navigation at an early age. “The stars are timeless and predictable, Jesse. If you know them, you’ll never get lost. Early mariners had only a compass, a sextant, and a timepiece to navigate and map the world.”

So I
cheated those early mariners, bought a laptop and started teaching myself about the stars. I found a website that advertised celestial navigation and bought a sextant and star charts. It turned out to not be as daunting as I thought it would be. Locating the North Star and shooting it with the sextant gave a fairly precise latitude. Using the star charts, I could locate and shoot one of the equatorial stars at a certain time of night and that would give me a pretty precise longitude. Combining latitude and longitude, then comparing the location on my nautical charts to the GPS, I found I could quickly determine where I was, within a mile or two.

In early September we had a hurricane scare. Or at least I did. Rusty and the other locals took it in stride. Tropical Storm Floyd turned into a hurricane about three-hundred miles east of Puerto Rico and a couple of days later, it was a strong category 4 storm, plowing through the southeastern Bahamas on a beeline for the Florida Keys. With sustained winds of 155 mph, a very low barometric pressure and hourly reports from the Bahamas showing massive damage, I was really worried about the boat.

“You have insurance, right?” Rusty asked when I brought it up
Sunday morning.

“Yeah, but I’d rather not have to replace her. It’s my home.”

“Fuel up and take her out,” he said. “But, I’m betting this storm’s gonna turn north before it makes Andros.”

Andros is
the largest of the Bahama Islands and less than one hundred-fifty miles from Miami. “Take her out in a hurricane?” I asked incredulously.

“
Not in. Before. She can handle rough seas and has plenty enough speed and range to dodge a storm. Hell, bro, you could make the northwest coast of Florida without stopping in less than ten hours.”

Monday evening, as people
began evacuating from Key West to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, I prepared to do just that. I topped the tanks and stocked up on provisions. If the storm didn’t turn by morning, I was going to bug out for my hometown of Fort Myers, on the southwest coast. Leaving at sunrise, I could be there by 0900, refuel and head further north if it looked like Floyd would cross the state.

I walked from
Dockside
to the
Anchor
at 0530. There were already a lot of people there, glued to the Weather Channel. Julie poured me a cup of coffee when I sat down at the bar next to Jimmy.

“It started turning northward about an hour ago,” Julie said. “They’re forecasting it to skirt the coast about a hundred miles off the northern part of the state and make landfall in the Carolinas in a couple of days, or maybe even turn out to sea.”

“Where is it now?” I asked.

Coming through the back door Rusty said, “About
a hundred and forty miles east of Andros. Turning north like I said it would.”

“So you’re an astronomer
and
a meteorologist now?” I asked turning toward him.

“No, I’m a Conch
,” he said as he placed a case of Budweiser on the bar and started stocking the cooler. “My dad was a Conch, his dad was a Conch and his dad before him. Julie here is fifth generation Conch. When a people live this close to the sea for over a hundred years, they pick up a thing or two about it.”

“No chance it’ll turn back this way then?”

“None,” he replied as he continued putting beer in the coolers behind the bar. “Did ya feel the air this morning walking over?”

“Feel the air?”

“Yeah. Feel the air. Go outside and do it right now.”

I got up and walked out the door and stood in the middle of the yard on the side of the bar, just as the sky to the east was starting to get a purple glow. Rusty walked quietly up beside me. It always amazed me how a man of his size could move without making a sound.

“A light westerly wind, cool and dry,” he said. “Ya feel it?”

Before I could answer he continued, “But a heaviness to the air. Sound travel
s better, you can pick up that morning dove way on the other side of the woods. Hear it?”

“Yeah,” I replied.

“Dense air means high pressure. A ‘cane wants to avoid high pressure, but at the same time wants to feed off it, drawing the air toward it. She prefers to feed on warm, moist air, though. So, she’ll move away from cool, dry air. Been this way a couple days now. Ya just gotta think like a storm, my brother.”

“I have a lot to learn master, before I’ll be a Conch.”

As we turned back toward the bar he said, “Being a Conch is a birthright. But, you’ll make a decent waterman one day. Listen to that hippy ya got workin’ for ya. Even when he’s high as a kite, he knows more about being a waterman than most of the Conchs round here. Boy seems to be in tune with the sky and the water.”

Coming from Rusty, I decided that was high praise. We’d had two dive charters scheduled for the day. The morning one had canceled and I told Jimmy to cancel the afternoon one, too. He’
d protested, but I told him to do it anyway. Now, I wish I’d listened to him.

We went back inside and Julie poured me another cup of coffee. Turning to Jimmy I said, “You think you might be able to get that afternoon charter back?”

“Won’t need to, man,” he replied with a knowing grin. “I figured you’d come around, so I didn’t cancel. Them guys have been diving down here for years and woulda booked someone else within thirty minutes.”

“We’re still on?”

“Yeah, man. They’ll be at the dock at noon. I could call ‘em and see if they wanna go out earlier, if ya want.”

“Do it,” I said. “And from now on, you handle all the scheduling. But, no more than three work days a week.”

Julie handed Jimmy a cordless phone, while he dug through his pockets for the number. Within a few minutes, he’d moved the charter up to 0930 and booked the same four guys for an afternoon and night dive, also.

“You’ll like these guys, man,” he said. “They’re hard core divers.”
While I had no idea what that meant, I believed him.

“Ya need to make a plan,” Rusty said. “One day a ‘cane will come and if ya ain’
t ready, ya could lose everything. I know you’re always well stocked with provisions and ya got that water maker, but what would you do if and when the real thing comes?”

“Probably do like you said and head out, though I’m not crazy about the idea.”

“Ya never know what a storm’ll do, though,” he continued. “If you go north, it might just chase you all the way to Pensacola. Then you’d be out several hundred bucks of fuel and still be facing the storm.”

“What would you suggest then?”

“Head for a hurricane hole, dude” Jimmy said.

“Yep,” Rusty agreed. “A deep water creek with lots of mangroves you can tie off to.”

I thought it over and asked, “What’s wrong with Boot Key Harbor?”

“It’ll do for a small storm,” Rusty said. “But a big blow can have a storm surge higher than Boot Key. Then that harbor’ll just be a part of the Atlantic. Me and my dad got caught in a bad one, when I was a kid. We were out in Florida Bay fishing. He drove that old trawler straight up Shark River to
Tarpon Bay.”

“I know that area,” I said.

“Thought you would. Tarpon Bay is big and deep. In a big blow there’ll be some sizable waves even in the bay. But, there’s a ton of deep water creeks that feed into it. Stock up on a bunch of long, heavy lines, to tie her off to the mangroves and it’d be a dandy hurricane hole.”

We went back to the boat and got things ready for the charter.
I planned to head for the marina store when we got back and do just as Rusty had suggested. The four men arrived early and we were headed out to the reef before 0930. They wanted to do a deep dive first and specifically asked to dive the Thunderbolt. It’s an old Navy cable layer that Florida Power and Light later used to study lightning, hence her name. She was scuttled in ’86 just five miles southeast of Marathon in one hundred-fifteen feet of water. Jimmy had taken me out there just a few weeks earlier and I was amazed at the amount of life that had accumulated on her in thirteen years. Between the two huge props we saw a large Jewfish, probably five feet long and four-hundred pounds. He told me after the dive that the fish ‘lived’ there and was a popular attraction.

Jimmy was right. A
fter meeting the four men, I liked them immediately. Three were retired military like myself and had thousands of dives logged in their books. The fourth was a friend who was a fairly new diver, but about the same age.

The Thunderbolt dive went well
, but at one hundred-twenty feet they only had about fifteen minutes of bottom time and still needed to take a ten minute safety stop at the submerged buoy, which was actually an aluminum beer keg. Once everyone was back on board I motored slowly northeast toward the reef line. There was no hurry, since the divers needed a long surface interval after making the one hundred-twenty foot dive to the screws of the Thunderbolt to see the giant Jewfish. I dropped the anchor in a sandy spot near a reef called Coffins Patch for the second dive.

I’d been on this reef many times, myself. I knew it would be a great dive for the men, especially the new diver. It’s loaded with pillar coral, some reaching a height of
five or six feet, and dozens of species of tropical fish. A Spanish galleon, the
Ignacio
, had wrecked on the reef in a hurricane in the early 1700’s, but hardly anything remained of the wreck to see. She carried silver and gold coins, though. So, divers were always fanning the sand in search of an elusive piece of eight or doubloon.

Being only
twenty-five feet at the deepest, the divers were down well over an hour, only surfacing when the new diver was low on air. We got them back on board and I invited them into the salon, while Jimmy hooked their tanks up to the compressor to refill. We had lunch and talked about diving and of course our time in the service. I was surprised to learn that Jimmy had served three years in the Navy.

After lunch,
I offered to take the divers west to Looe Key for a dusk and night dive. They jumped at the chance, since most dive operators preferred to keep the distance between dives to a minimum and Looe Key was southwest of Big Pine Key, about thirty miles from Coffins Patch. Plus, it offered plenty of extra surface time, to bleed off the nitrogen that had built up in their bodies. Both Looe Key and Coffins Patch were inside the sanctuary, so they couldn’t take any lobster. They were planning to do some lobster diving the next day in the back country, anyway.

We arrived at Looe Key an hour before sunset. The divers having spent a good
four hours on the surface, could now start at the offshore edge of the finger reef in one hundred feet and work toward the shallows. Even though it was still daylight, at one hundred feet it would be nearly pitch dark, so they all carried high powered, underwater flashlights and backups. Two of the divers also carried expensive underwater digital camera equipment. Jimmy had loaded editing software on my laptop computer just for digital photography and offered to help the divers review and enhance their pictures. That was a big hit with the two photographers.

Jimmy had been keeping track of their dive times and surface intervals on the laptop, even though the three experienced divers had underwater dive computers strapped to their wrists.
Before entering the water, they compared all four and unanimously decided to go with the most conservative profile and limit the first dive to twenty minutes. Since there were no mooring buoys this far off the reef, I told them I’d move due east of where we dropped them, tie off to a buoy in thirty feet of water and switch on the powerful underwater lights that the
Revenge
had mounted on the transom, below the water line.

It was near
ly 2130 when we got back to the dock. Jimmy helped the divers edit their pictures and showed them a few things his new software could do, while I started hosing down the foredeck. When they left, each of the four divers gave Jimmy a fifty-dollar tip and assured me they’d not only spread the word, but would be calling again soon.

While we were hosing down the deck
in the cockpit and rinsing the equipment, I turned to Jimmy and said, “You’re editing software was a big hit. Got any other high tech ideas like that?”

“How about an upgraded sound system, dude? Maybe some underwater speakers?”

“Yeah, a better stereo maybe. I don’t know about underwater heavy metal, though.”

I told Jimmy to go ahead on home and
I finished cleaning the boat myself. I ate a late supper then sat on the bridge with a few cold Jamaican Red Stripe beers in a small cooler. My slip was next to the dinghy dock and far enough away from
Dockside
that the sounds from inside were pretty muted, but close enough that I could see the goings on outside.

There were about
forty boats of all shapes and sizes moored in Boot Key Harbor, even a Japanese junk. All of the liveaboards in the harbor used the dinghy dock to come and go.
Dockside
provided a mail slot for each of the liveaboards and free use of the showers, all for only fifty dollars a month. Not a bad way to live if you’re on the cheap.

A dinghy was rowing toward the docks, with three people aboard, nearly overloading it. As they neared the dock I could tell it was a man and two women that I hadn’t seen around before. I didn’t notice what boat they’d come from. As the man tied off the little boat, the women stepped out, each carrying a bag.
As they walked by, I couldn’t help but notice they were both very attractive and dressed expensively. After they walked on toward the bar the man climbed out and started after them, but he didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry to catch up.

As he walked by, he looked up
admiringly at the
Revenge
and noticed me on the bridge. I lifted my beer and nodded. He nodded in return and kept walking a couple more steps before stopping, turning back and glancing up at the small Marine Corps flag flying on the short radar mast above the overhead.