Night Moves (39 page)

Authors: Randy Wayne White

Bambi wanted to believe me, though, and he stopped backing away.
Good.
At least one of them had sense enough to know he would have to explain to police. Which he proved by explaining to me, “Seriously, Dr. Ford, I didn’t think he’d pull a stunt like this! It’s what we’re calling a Challenge Coup—a way to create drama between opponents. This wasn’t supposed to happen, I swear!”

I reached a hand toward him. “I . . . believe you. Help me up.”

Deano didn’t like that. “No you don’t, goddamn it! Get back on the camera, I’m not done.”

Bambi had started toward me but stopped. “Probably shouldn’t move you. You have any friends around? Someone should call an ambulance, I think.” Then added in a rush, “Or I can do it. I’ve got my cell right here.”

“The hell you will!” The slosh of a big man wading through water is a sound I know well. Deano, the Zulu pretender, was coming in for the kill. Allow him to get close enough, he’d put the other spear in me.

Fear
. . . we all process it differently. In me, panic arrives as a neural chill . . . a chill soon replaced by a chemical surge, then a chemical burn that I feel in my brain. The transformation is abrupt. It narrows the senses like being shunted into a tunnel or looking through a sniper scope. When it happens, my world is drained of color and I am indifferent to the subtleties of black and white—and pain.

A common word for that chemical transformation:
Rage
.

The transformation happened now. I was on my knees on the east side of the dock, Deano on the other side but farther out, water to his waist, most of my body screened from his view. He couldn’t see what I had already spotted: the floating handle of a mahogany club that had been knocked away when I fell. The club was dragging a gaff hook along the bottom as it drifted.

Something else I noticed: Bambi, a Sony digital hanging from his neck, was wearing a photographer’s vest, the glint of a flashlight lens visible when his right leg moved. The leg moved now when I told him, “Grab my hand.” Then raised my voice above Deano’s heavy splashing to urge, “Don’t worry about him. You want the police on your side or not?”

“You’re missing good footage, you idiot!” Deano hollered, coming faster now while Bambi’s jerky movements told me he was close to a meltdown.

I assured him, “It’s not your fault—it’s
his
fault,” but got one foot under me just in case Bambi didn’t come through. But he did, after one nervous glance at his partner . . . reached, grabbed my hand, and pulled.

I let it happen . . . used the momentum provided by Bambi’s kindness to come up hard and smash the man’s nose flat with the palm of my hand. If I hadn’t caught him by the camera strap, he would have gone down. But I did catch him. Used the strap to choke the man into compliance, yelling, “Dial nine-one-one! Do it or I’ll kill you right here!” When his frantic nodding had convinced me, I yanked the flashlight from his pocket, then shoved the cameraman toward shore. “Do it now!”

Deano saw it all and it stopped him, the spear at shoulder level ready to throw. He yelled, “Ford, that’s not the way the game’s supposed to go!” then took a step back when I tried to blind him with the flashlight. I had the wooden gaff in my hand, prepared to duck . . . was also fighting a sudden nausea because, for the first time, with the flashlight, I could see my bloody tank top and the object buried in my sternum.

Deano’s attention, though, shifted to Bambi, who was crawling into the mangroves for protection, his nose a smear of black, but the phone already in his hand. It caused Deano to turn as if considering new quarry—and that’s when everything changed. The flashlight I was holding became a stage light. The spear hunter became an electrified clown who screamed,
“Shit!”
. . . jumped as if he’d been cattle-prodded and threw his hands wildly into the air. Then bounced around on one good leg, the other leg paralyzed because of what he had just stepped on—only one explanation, as I knew from experience. I watched the big man stumble, fall, get up and fall again, while his larynx was tortured by a shriek so agonized it pierced the party music at the marina. Deano was lunging toward shore in a panic when I heard Mack’s booming voice, “Hey! What’s going on?” Then Tomlinson’s voice, concerned, hollered, “Doc! You okay?”

No . . .
I wasn’t doing well at all. I’d seen what was stuck in my chest. Impossible to pull it out because the edges were serrated like a blade of boney sawgrass—not that I was dumb enough to try. Only two inches of the thing showing, but if even the tip had pierced my heart I would soon be dead. Nothing I could do to stop it from happening and no time to waste, so I walked methodically toward Deano, flashlight in one hand, wooden gaff in the other.

Like most snakes, he’ll run unless you corner him,
I had told Vargas Diemer.

The crazy brother-in-law couldn’t run now, though—not with a leg paralyzed by pain and the primitive protein now pumping through his system. Even if he tried, I would summon whatever was needed to catch him. Thought about it as I slogged past Bambi, who was saying into the phone, “Yeah, an ambulance . . .
Christ . . .
I don’t know how bad.
Bad!
”

Took two more steps before I stopped and told him, “Cancel that.”

“What?”

“Tell them there’s no rush.”

“Jesus, man, I think you’re in shock. You need to sit down.”

“Stay out of this,” I warned Bambi, then continued walking, my eyes seeing only the spear hunter—the man sitting now and moaning—while all the options played through my mind in stark black-and-white:
Gaff Deano under the jaw, drag him out and drown him fast. No . . . grab the son of a bitch by the ponytail, take him way, way out in the Gulf of Mexico, where . . .

Where, if I didn’t bleed to death in the next couple of minutes, there were all kinds of options.

The wooden walkway lay between me and Deano. It took some effort to climb over it, but I managed, hearing him say in the voice of a spoiled child, “Shit, I need a doctor! You guys do something
now
!”

Because I was behind him, only a couple of steps away, he was startled when I replied, “I plan to,” and he spun around. Looked up into the flashlight’s beam and shielded his eyes.

“Dude, you’re blinding me—this is serious!”

“Couldn’t agree more.”

“Goddamn thing went clear through my foot! Pain’s killing me, man!”

“Then I better hurry,” I said and pointed the flashlight at the ground. That’s when Deano saw the club I was carrying, plus the stainless gaff hook, then connected it all with the look in my eyes, the tone of my voice, and he scooched away from me.

“Don’t,” he whispered, “please don’t,” the child in him doing all the talking now.

Several seconds, I stood there and thought about it, staring at the rich boy with the damaged brain who had failed at everything: big, babyish face, mud-streaked with tears, cradling his swollen foot in both hands. Then looked from Deano to my stilthouse, where my eyes lingered on the pond shimmering beneath, the small pond that is Dinkin’s Bay. Took a deep breath, my internal monitor aware that my lungs didn’t gurgle with blood. So maybe I would live, and maybe it was time to be smart for a change. Time to . . .
what
?

Not befoul my own nest, for one thing. And also to stabilize my wound by not moving.

I sat heavily on the walkway, placed the gaff hook behind me, and said to Deano, “Hurts, doesn’t it?” Then angled the flashlight toward the broken stingray spine protruding from my sternum. A thousand years ago, sacrificial victims of the Maya had, no doubt, felt the same numbing fear.

“Goddamn worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life,” the spear hunter replied, then yelled, “Luke, where the hell’s that ambulance?”

—

T
WENTY
MINUTES
LATER,
I was in the ambulance, on a gurney, growing increasingly unsettled by the concern of the EMT who had already strapped me immobile and was now on the phone with a trauma physician.

The stingray barb had moved in my chest, apparently, and I was listening to fragments of one-sided medicalspeak that confirmed I might be dying.

CT scan . . . depth of penetration “significant” . . . Yes, assess damage associated with a fractured sternum: mediastinal structures, pulmonary and myocardial contusions. Then came a long list of words that grated against the beep of the fluctuating heart monitor but might explain my plummeting blood pressure and why I would have to be rushed straight to surgery.

I was feeling hazy, too, a symptom of failing cranial hydraulics that spooked me. An odd realization:
Time—whatever the hell time is or was or isn’t—I might be running low.
I couldn’t see my watch, but knew it was after eight.
Date night!

“Need to call someone,” I told the EMT, my chest burning from the effort.

She shook her head, busy with a syringe. “Quiet! Later, when we get things figured out.”

“Send a text?” I asked.

The woman looked at the monitors in a way that wasn’t encouraging, which pissed me off—irrational and I knew it—then made it all better by allowing me to dictate a message.

Moments later, my phone chimed with Hannah Smith’s reply:
On my way, hold on. Please hold on!

Moments later, I heard another chime, and a second message was held above my face to read privately:
Love always, Hannah.

“Your wife?” the EMT asked, taking the phone away.

“Maybe so,” I replied. “And I’m buying a dog, too.”

—

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