Mangrove Squeeze(51)

So he kept his distance, and Suki healed herself through a series of prodigious sleeps. Hour by hour, her bruises faded and shrank inward like evaporating puddles. Pain lost its sear, became abstract, a lesson.

Between stretches of oblivion, she spent much of her time out on the widow's walk that wrapped around her little tower. The walkway's planks were grooved and burnished with ancient footsteps. The drooping foliage of a fig tree tickled its railings, and light came through in patches and dabs. The widow's walk was a serene place, out in the world and yet removed, above it, and in its cozy shadows, mostly hidden from the courtyard and the street, she could reflect almost calmly on her situation.

Her problems had not even begun to be solved; that, she had no choice but to acknowledge. She couldn't hide forever in her turret. Nor could she emerge while her enemies were at large. She was only stealing time.

Still, there was a certain peace in being cloistered away and given up for dead. No one bothered to hunt the dead, and eventually the dead were all forgotten. In the meantime, she was as comfortable as any threatened damsel, and safe beneath the munchkin ceiling of her room.

Or so it seemed for the short space of a couple days.





Pete and Clam weren't trying to make trouble. They were stoned and harmless guys, locals from Big Coppitt, and all they were trying to do was round up shrimp.

They'd gone out on the evening just before the moon was full, when shrimp were running through every cut and channel in the lower Keys. Shrimp coursed under bridges, steering with spit and flicks of their tails; shrimp traced out the curves of beaches, funneling and tumbling in their millions. Catching them was easy; took no more than a flashlight and a net, a mask and snorkel if you wanted to get fancy. The big shrimp you could eat and the little ones were bait.

So Pete and Clam smoked a joint as they waited for dusk to settle and the moon to get some height, then they piled in Pete's truck, crossed the highway, and smoked another as they drove a bumpy road that wound and scratched through mangroves, until they reached their shrimping spot. They saw tire tracks and the remnants of a campfire in the little clearing that gave onto the water, but made nothing of it at the time. Other locals used the spot for fishing. Kids got hand jobs there. Tire tracks were nothing that unusual. It didn't really register that the tracks went straight into the ocean.

They started shrimping. Pete waded in thigh-deep, and his flashlight beam almost immediately discovered translucent clouds of shrimp, their bodies so sheer that he might have looked right through them except for their stalked unearthly eyes that wiggled like paired periscopes and gleamed an orangy pink. He snagged them with a net and dumped them into a mesh bag he carried on his shoulder.

Clam used a different method. He put on fins and a mask, and he rigged his flashlight through the mask straps so that it sat behind his ear like a giant cigarette. He waded out maybe thirty yards, then pan-caked into a lazy float, his net poised at his side as his beacon shone straight down. Swimming after shrimp was no more productive than just standing there, but Clam was pretty ripped and felt like looking through the water. A baby bonnet shark slipped past, its head flat as a catfish. A sergeant-major scudded by, its yellow stripes almost disappearing against the sand, its black bars disconnected.

Clam kicked himself a little farther out and scored some shrimp. He was just jiggling them into his pouch when he saw an angelfish whose iridescent blue flashed a weird magenta against some car upholstery.

For just an instant it did not compute that there was something off about car upholstery, a dashboard, a steering wheel at the bottom of the ocean. Clam blinked inside his mask and held his breath. Current carried him past the windshield and directly over the Caddy's hood ornament, its chrome not yet corroded. The drowned logo finally persuaded him that something very unusual was going on. He raised his head and called his buddy.

They swam around the car together, stood on the sodden boot, agreed that it was really there.

Not much happened on Big Coppitt. When something did happen, and it happened to you, you played it up, because it made you briefly a celebrity. Pete and Clam put their shrimp in the cooler, smoked a joint, then headed to the bar at Egret Key, to tell everyone what they had found.

The sunken Cadillac spawned theories all up and down the bar. Better ditched than repo'd, one suggestion went. Or someone stole it then got scared. Or a jilted girlfriend trashed it for revenge.

"Y'oughta call the paper," someone said.

Discreetly, the sober bartender advised, "I was you, I'd call the cops."

Clam sucked some beer. He didn't really like to deal with cops, but probably the bartender was right. Civic duty and all. Maybe a reward. He looked at Pete. "Any more shit in the truck?"