“Now what happens?” Diane asked.
Louis pocketed the Sutter’s Marina matches. “We hope your father has just gone fishing,” he said.
CHAPTER 13
The leather-faced guy behind the counter at Sutter’s Marina handed Louis the picture of Frank Woods and went back to picking his teeth.
“So have you seen him?” Louis asked.
“Not sure. Maybe.”
“Think harder.”
The guy tugged on his sweat-stained ball cap. It was embroidered with a blue Grateful Dead bear. “You a cop?”
Louis had a feeling the guy had spent some time in the backseat of a squad car. “No, I’m not.”
The guy pursed his lips. “Yeah, I saw him. He was in here yesterday asking about ferry service.”
“To where?”
The guy shrugged.
“Okay, so where do your ferries go?” Louis asked.
“Anywheres with a dock. Useppa, Cabbage Key, Cayo Costa, Bird Island, Safety Harbor.” The man leaned over the counter. “And me personally, I got a skiff that can take you a few places without docks. If you know what I mean.”
Louis knew exactly what the guy meant. His eyes drifted out the open door to the sun-silvered waters of Pine Island Sound. Even from here he could see about a half dozen small green islands and he knew there were dozens more. Some owned by the state, some private, some inhabited, some nothing more than tidal flats colonized by mangroves. But dense and isolated enough for a man to get lost in, especially if he wanted to.
“So did he take a ferry or not?” Louis asked.
“Seems I remember him buying a ticket, yeah.”
Louis was losing patience. “To where?”
The guy shrugged his bony shoulders again. “Cayo Costa. But I sure as hell wouldn’t want to go camping out there, man.”
“He had camping equipment with him?” Louis asked. When the guy nodded Louis went on, “Why do you say you wouldn’t want to go there?”
The guy looked at him like he was crazy. “It’s August, dude. The skeeters eat you alive unless you stay out near the gulf.”
Louis glanced at his watch. Nearly four. “Give me a ticket to the island.”
The guy eyed Louis’s khakis and polo shirt. “Kinda late to be going out there. There’s only one boat coming back at six.”
“I’ll take my chances,” Louis said, slapping some bills on the counter.
He was the only passenger on the ferry. As it chugged out into the open waters of Pine Island Sound, his thoughts came back to something that had been bothering him from the day he looked down at Jane Doe’s body lying twisted on that stinking little mangrove island.
Water...it touched everything here. Literally, water surrounded the barrier islands and streamed up the river and estuaries of the Fort Myers mainland. Figuratively, water touched the lives of the people, from the shrimp fishermen to the girls who sold suntan lotion on the beach. Water was probably the most important part of his new home’s makeup. Yet he knew almost nothing about it, or the whole outdoor thing really.
Neither did Frank Woods, if Diane knew what she was talking about. But something told him she didn’t.
The ferry let him off at a small dock on the east side of the island. He saw a sign with an arrow that said CAMPGROUND. He followed the path through the mangroves and came to a large clearing sheltered by high-arching Australian pines. There were some tent sites, picnic tables, and a few primitive-looking cabins. But not one person.
Louis stood there, listening to the wind in the pines. Shit, now what? He thought about what the Deadhead had said about no one wanting to camp this time of year. Maybe Frank had camped somewhere over on the gulf side of the island. He glanced at his watch. He had more than an hour until the ferry came back.
With a look up at the sun low in the western sky, he started toward it, down a path leading into a tunnel of brush and trees. Soon he was dripping with sweat and the mosquitoes were starting to swarm in the heavy motionless air. Sounds rose up around him in the gathering dusk. A strange cry of a bird somewhere above. A groan of some unknown creature below. He felt his heart quicken slightly and picked up his pace.
Bessie Levy came to his mind, something she had said as she motored him back to the Bokeelia dock.
A pelican had soared over the boat and she had pointed to it saying, “Look! Ain’t that beautiful?”
“It’s ugly, like one of those prehistoric birds,” Louis had said.
She had laughed at him. “Well, that’s what this place is. Pterodactyls on our docks, centrosauruses crawling out of the canals to eat little dogs. Florida is a prehistoric place, young man, where the sea is still close and the sky still burns at night. Here in this place, we humans are still very close to the moment we crawled out of the slime.”