Naval Air Station Jacksonville; Saturday, 19 April; 1630
By the time Mike had made his calls, checked back on Quigley, and talked to Lieutenant (J.G.) Sorento, it was well after four o’clock. He made his way to the entrance of the hospital and found that it was raining hard, the skies darkening even as he stood in the vestibule. He slipped into his plastic raincoat, pushed his hat down over his forehead, and made a run for his car. His shoes were soaked after about twenty feet by the standing water in the parking lot.
He made it to the Alfa and piled in, fighting the flapping raincoat as he wedged himself into the car. The rain drummed down on the car roof vengefully, as if angry that he was finally under cover. He lit off the engine, and waited for the rain to let up so that he could see where he was going. After a few minutes of increasingly harder rain, he decided to go.
Turning on his lights, he threaded his way out through the lanes of parked cars. The main hospital building was no longer visible, blotted out by sheets of rain; he had to stop in the lot periodically to get his bearings. Using a line of streetlights as a landmark to find the narrow exit road, he crawled along in first gear to make sure he stayed on the road, which was rapidly becoming indistinguishable from the flooded drainage ditches on either side. It was a serious, tropical rain, and he knew that those ditches were four feet deep. A sheet of lightning glared in the dark clouds overhead, followed by a boom of thunder. He turned his wipers on high, but without much effect. The entire area of the road ahead was a yellow white wedge of thrashing raindrops.
Coming around the second bend in the road he nearly ran into a car that was stopped ahead. Stopped and listing to starboard. As he closed in, he saw the car lurch even more to the right, its brake lights flaring in the rain. It ended up hanging at a precarious angle, half on the road, halfway into the ditch. It was a Volvo station wagon. As he
slowed, the driver of the Volvo tried to pull it out to the left, but the rear end slid the last few remaining inches over into the ditch. The entire rear end began to sink down into the deep ditch, the drive wheel churning the water as the right brake light submerged, canting the front of the car up high enough for its headlights to illuminate the tops of the palm trees on the other side of the road. Then all the Volvo’s lights went out as the water shorted the system. Scratch one Volvo, he thought, as he pulled up as close as he could get, turned on his flashers and set his hand brake.
He kept his engine running to provide lights. As he prepared to get out, he saw the driver’s door open on the Volvo and a woman climb out. In the glare of his headlights he recognized Diane Martinson. She had no raincoat on, and the rain quickly soaked her Gray Lady uniform as she went around to look at the rear end of the car. She banged a fist on the back window of the Volvo, and then stumbled back as the car lurched even deeper into the ditch. She lost her footing and sat down hard.
Mike got out, forgetting his hat. He ran forward to where she was sitting in two inches of water in the pouring rain. Mike fought down a sudden wild impulse to laugh, and offered her his hands. He pulled her up off the road. She stood there, eyes blinking, not yet recognizing him.
“Dammit!” she cried. “I couldn’t see the road. Look at my car. His car. He’s absolutely going to kill me!”
Then she recognized him, and became aware that she was gripping both his hands. She let go, and turned to stare at the car. The rain came down even harder, as if it were proud of what it had done.
“Hey,” he shouted over the noise of downpour. “Grab your purse and get in my car. I’ll take you over to the Exchange garage and we’ll get a tow truck.”
He started back to the Alfa, but she just stood there looking at the Volvo. He went back, took her arm, and pulled her along to the Alfa, where he handed her into the right front seat. He went back to the Volvo, gingerly opened the driver side door, and recovered her purse; the car was still settling into the ditch. He ran back to the Alfa,
opened the driver’s side door, handed her the purse, and then went back to the Alfa’s tiny trunk and extracted a flare. He tried for a minute to get the thing going, but the striker became soaked the moment he ripped the top off.
“Screw it,” he said, throwing the flare into the ditch.
He got back into the Alfa. Diane sat there, soaked to the skin, her mouth tight and her eyes very close to tears. The rain drummed hard on the roof.
“Shit,” she said.
“Shit, aye,” he said, putting the Alfa in reverse.
He backed away from the Volvo, and then pulled out around the sinking station wagon. He crept along the road even more carefully now; the ditch that could take one third of a Volvo could eat an entire Alfa. Diane remained silent for the next fifteen minutes as he navigated in first gear across the golf course perimeter roads towards the Exchange Service Station area. The rain continued, although not quite so hard.
They arrived at the Exchange gas station to find it dark. An attendant inside the small office waved him off as Mike figured it out. Power failure. He maneuvered the Alfa alongside the office door, and rolled his window down. The man stepped reluctantly into the doorway.
“We’re shut down,” he called. “No electricity.”
“I don’t need gas, I need a tow truck,” Mike shouted over the noise of the rain on the metal overhang. “Got a Volvo in the ditch over by the hospital.”
The attendant shook his head in the doorway.
“Truck’s already out; we got a three car pile-up on the main drag. You can leave a work order if you want, and we’ll get it when we can. But it’s gonna be awhile. Like tomorrow, maybe.”
“OK, we’ll do that.”
Mike rolled up the window, and pulled the Alfa under the gas pump line overhang. He looked over at Diane. The front of her hair was plastered to her forehead, and the Gray Lady dress was a sodden mass of wet cotton. He found himself staring again. She looked back at him for an instant, and then down at the floor.
“I have to call J.W.,” she said, resignedly. “Might as well get it over with. I take it they can’t help us.”
“Not right now, but they’ll go pull it out sometime tonight, or maybe in the morning, after this rain lets up a little and they get power back in this part of the base. I’ll go in and call the cops on a base phone, and get the guy to work up a towing order. There’s a pay phone over there you can use to get off base. I can run you home, and then you’ll probably have to come back over tomorrow morning. That’s the best we can do, I’m afraid.”
She nodded, and fished in her purse for a coin. She got out, and went to the pay phone. Mike got out and went inside to call the base police to report the Volvo. The rain on the tin roof of the gas line sounded like hail. The attendant wrote up the towing order, which Mike signed. By the time he came back out, she was standing at the edge of the office apron, with her back to him. He could see her shoulders shaking. Alarmed, he went over to her. She was crying silently, her arms folded over her stomach, her chest heaving in short gulps. He put his right hand on her shoulder.
“Hey. What happened?”
She did not turn around, but stood there, trying to get control of herself. He remained silent, his hand still on her shoulder, until she could speak. The attendant was watching through the window of the office. A car pulled into the gas islands, saw that there was no power, and pulled out again, its headlights sweeping across the two of them for an instant. Finally she spoke.
“He said—he said that I’m to stay here until they get the car out. He said I should have waited for the rain to stop before leaving the hospital. He said—I should have taken my car, and now that you’ve destroyed my Volvo, you get it fixed, and don’t come home until you do. That’s what my dear husband said. Among other things.”
She closed her eyes in frustration. Mike shook his head.
“Hey, Diane,” he said, speaking to her left ear over the noise of the rain on the roof. “They’re probably not going to get that car out of there until tomorrow morning—they won’t work those ditches in the dark. You can’t make it
happen any faster by hanging around here. I’ll run you home—just give them a credit card, and let’s get out of here.”
She half turned towards him, leaning into him a little bit, her face still wobbly. She smelled of damp cotton, that perfume, and wet hair. He suddenly ached to take her in his arms. He steered her instead towards the office. They went in and she handed over a credit card for an imprint. The rain continued outside, but it was now a steady, Florida rain instead of a tropical monsoon. The attendant was obviously trying to figure out why the card said Captain, but the man with her was a Commander. He started to ask, but then looked at the woman’s face and decided to mind his own business.
When they were finished in the office, they walked back to the Alfa. He started off again, headed for the back gate. Diane remained silent as they left the base and made their way towards the Jones Point bridge back across the St. Johns. She fussed in her purse for a comb and made a desultory pass through her wet hair before sighing and giving it up as a lost cause. He watched her out of the corner of his eyes; her dress was plastered to her lush figure. He concentrated on keeping his eyes on the road.
“I can’t go home,” she declared minutes later, as they turned north on A1A after crossing the bridge. “Not after what he said. I just can’t.”
He was silent for a long minute, and then took the plunge.
“I can offer a hot shower, a washer and dryer, and a drink back at the Lucky Bag. I’m the guy with the houseboat, remember?”
He kept his eyes on the road. What the fuck was he doing. A voice in his mind was telling him that he was being incredibly dumb. A second voice said, you want her. Her husband doesn’t. You’ve rarely wanted a woman as much as you want this one. She can always tell you to take her to a neighbor’s house.
“Thank you. I think I’ll just take you up on that. It
sounds like just what the doctor ordered,” she said, her voice neutral.
It was her turn to keep her eyes on the road. They remained silent, alone with their thoughts all the way back to Mayport. A new band of heavy rains swept through as they arrived at the marina parking lot. They made another dash through the downpour to the boat. He was glad that it was raining, that no one would see him with this woman. His heart was pounding as they climbed aboard, and it was not all from the quick sprint across the bulkhead pier. He flipped on lights and showed her below to the main lounge. She stood in the middle of the room, soaked and uncomfortable, looking around. Hooker roused himself on his perch when the lights came on, and stared at Diane. He bobbed his head back and forth a couple of times, and then gave a long, loud wolf whistle. Diane smiled.
“That bad, hunh, bird?” she said.
“That was a compliment,” Mike laughed. “This way to the amenities.”
He took her to one of the forward guest cabins, produced a full length, terry-cloth bathrobe and showed her where the bathroom shower was, checked towels, and handed her a Navy style laundry bag. She took her purse with her, gave him a brief smile, and closed the door. He went aft to get out of his own wet clothes and to shower. He dried off in his bathroom, and then paused for a moment, wondering what to put on. She would be in a bathrobe; it wouldn’t do for him to get dressed up. He pulled on a pair of swim trunks, and then his own terrycloth bathrobe. He was setting up the bar when she reappeared a half hour later. He tried mightily not to stare.
The white bathrobe came down demurely to her ankles. She was carrying the laundry bag with its limp, wet contents. The bathrobe was made of a thick pile material that revealed nothing, but the flash of white lace in the laundry bag confirmed what he already guessed. Her dark, wet hair was pulled straight back in a limp mass covering the collar of the robe, accentuating the fine arch of her eyebrows, the lush contrast between her creamy, white skin and her dark
eyes. She smiled tentatively before glancing away, clearly reading the interest in his eyes.
“I think I’m going to live,” she said.
“You look—marvelous.” He almost blushed. “What’s your preference?” he asked, nodding towards the bar.
“A brandy, I think,” she said, coming closer. “Yes, a brandy. It’s not cold, but it’s been a brandy sort of day.”
“Brandy it is. There’s a washer-dryer set in the galley, just back there, if you want to get that stuff going. Soap’s in the cabinet above the washer.”
He poured two snifters of Courvoisier while she attended to the laundry, and started to take them over to the leather couch.
“Goddamn,” said Hooker. Mike diverted to the perch.
“Yeah, Bird. Goddamn is right. You want a hit?”
He tipped the snifter so that the bird could get his beak in the glass, but at the last moment he shook all his feathers and backed away from the fumes.
“You don’t really let that bird drink alcohol, do you?”
She came over to the perch, where he handed her the other snifter. They stood side by side, watching Hooker as he weaved from side to side to keep them both in view. Mike was very much aware of her nearness. He could smell her wet hair, and a trace of perfume that had eluded the downpour outside. Part of his mind did a whirlwind comparison between this woman and the occasional dates he had brought home from the Jacksonville Beach bar scene. Diane projected the self assurance that all attractive women have, exuding a mature awareness of sexual competence without the coy trappings and flirtatious devices of the young single set. She was looking at Hooker, who continued to shift from one leg to the other, looking back at both of them.