Deceived (A Hannah Smith Novel)

Also by Randy Wayne White

Doc Ford

Sanibel Flats

The Heat Islands

The Man Who Invented Florida

Captiva

North of Havana

The Mangrove Coast

Ten Thousand Islands

Shark River

Twelve Mile Limit

Everglades

Tampa Burn

Dead of Night

Dark Light

Hunter’s Moon

Black Widow

Dead Silence

Deep Shadow

Night Vision

Night Moves

Chasing Midnight

Hannah Smith

Gone

Nonfiction

Randy Wayne White’s Ultimate Tarpon Book

Batfishing in the Rainforest

The Sharks of Lake Nicaragua

Last Flight Out

An American Traveler

Gulf Coast Cookery

(and Recollections of Sanibel Island)

Tarpon Fishing in Mexico and Florida (An Introduction
)

Fiction as Randy Striker

Key West Connection

The Deep Six

Cuban Death-Lift

The Deadlier Sex

Assassin’s Shadow

Grand Cayman Slam

Everglades Assault

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

Publishers Since 1838

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Copyright © 2013 by Randy Wayne White

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Published simultaneously in Canada

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

White, Randy Wayne.

Deceived / Randy Wayne White.

p. cm.—(A Hannah Smith novel)

ISBN 978-1-101-59561-9

I. Title.

PS3573.H47473D455 2013 2013016785

813'.54—dc23

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Mrs. Iris Tanner, a true Southern lady

See, when you are a kid, you do not listen to all this [stories from old fishing families]. It just goes whisp. Then, when it is too late, you wished you had listened to a whole lot of that stuff.

CAPT. ESPERANZA WOODRING

(1901–1992)

Quoted in

Fisherfolk of Charlotte Harbor, Florida

by Robert F. Edic

IAPS Books,

University of Florida

Most fishing guides would consider it lucky to escape without injury or a lawsuit when, out of nowhere, a hundred-pound fish jumps into her boat and knocks two clients overboard.

When it happened on that clear, bright morning in April, the idea that a close call can also be a warning never entered my mind until later that afternoon. It was because of something a friend told me, a strange friend named Tomlinson whom some dismiss as a pot-smoking beach bum—which he is—but I like and trust the man anyway.

“I’d either move to Montana for a week or fire your clients,” he counseled after giving my story some thought. “Could be a bad omen, Hannah—not the first time God sent a giant fish as His messenger.”

Which was something I didn’t take seriously because my boat was safely back at the dock and I had joined him in a hospital waiting room, hushed voices and the echoing footsteps of fear all around. Why worry about bad events in my future when there were people nearby with real problems? Some fighting for their lives, some recovering from near death—including a man I secretly hoped to date when he was well. Selfish thoughts didn’t seem right in such a setting. Besides, the tarpon had appeared so unexpectedly, the blurry details weren’t solid enough to carry the weight of a warning, let alone God’s personal message to me.

“Some of the crazy notions you get,” I replied, and expected a smile to signal he was joking. He wasn’t. Tomlinson is tall and gaunt-faced, with long, scraggily hair that he fiddles with when fretful or preoccupied. He was chewing a strand now.

“This morning, a tarpon lands in your boat while you were under way—what are the odds?”

“I know, I know,” I agreed. “My clients are lucky they weren’t hurt. Me, too. Not more than a few bruises between us, which is a miracle.”

“See?” Tomlinson said, then pressed, “A shark buzzed you, too. How big?”

The memory of that dorsal fin cleaving toward my client’s legs caused a shudder—the fin had to be a yard tall. “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “They dropped the idea of a lawsuit.”

Tomlinson shook his head in a way that suggested I had missed his point. “Go over it one more time. Close your eyes first. Picture what happened in your mind, and go slowly. It was only a few hours ago.”

“You’re serious?” I said.

“You see any magazines here you haven’t read?” He looked around the room where, the previous month, we had spent six long nights waiting, and now we were back again. Tomlinson was jumpy, I realized, eager for a diversion. Truth was, I felt the same. Soon, we hoped, a physician would come down the hallway and tell us if a man we both cared about, a biologist named Marion Ford, could carry on with his life or would need a second heart surgery.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll start from the beginning.”

Something inside me feared the worst, but I closed my eyes, let my mind drift back, and did what I had been asked to do.

There are spring mornings so calm off Sanibel Island that in bays where islands block the breeze, saltwater bonds like blue gel, and, if you’re in a good boat, the surface feels as solid as ice and as slick. I was in a good boat, a twenty-one-foot open boat, no top or canvas to get in the way, and powered by a fast Mercury outboard—a “flats skiff,” as the design is known in Southwest Florida, where my family has lived for generations.

It had been one of those rare April mornings.

I’d picked up my clients at sunrise, and by eight a.m. we were nearing a shoal named Captiva Rocks when I saw water boil from the corner of my eye. An instant later, a huge fish jumped, floated high above us, then seemed to hurtle itself toward the boat. Because my clients were standing, we weren’t going fast, but the fish came at us like a rocket. Dreamlike, that’s the only way I can describe my surprise. What happened next took only seconds, but my eyes and brain processed the details in stop-action, as if viewing photos of a car wreck.

A tarpon,
I realized. Six feet long, glittering like chrome, saltwater sparking from its tail. The fish froze for an instant, a silver pendant suspended from a cloudless sky, then the string broke and the huge fish fell. Instinct told me either to speed up or to yank the throttle into neutral and try to stop.

I did neither.

True, I was stunned, but a sudden change in boat speed is always risky. My clients, both men, had left their seats and gone forward. The youngest of them was wearing a photographer’s vest but, fortunately, had left his cameras behind. The other, a big man in his sixties, had a belly pack strapped around his waist and had brought an old-fashioned wooden fishing rod, which he’d babied because of its age but was using like a walking stick for balance. Standing while under way is something I normally don’t allow and I should have spoken up, but my livelihood depends on winning repeat charters, when I’m not tending to my late uncle’s business—a private investigation agency that doesn’t stay busy. The older man had made it clear that fishing was secondary, shooting photos is what he wanted, and he had hinted his project might require several trips. Besides, how could anything bad happen on a morning so calm and clear?

Seconds before the tarpon jumped, the older man—Delmont Chatham, as he’d told me on the phone—pointed and called over the sound of the engine, “Can you get us closer?” He was referring to a cluster of shacks built on pilings in shallow water, old fish houses, some almost a hundred years old. One was painted red, the others were gray weathered pine. It was a scene as pretty as any watercolor: tin roofs golden in the morning sunlight, pelicans and gulls hovering like kites. Seldom had I passed those stilt shacks that clients didn’t want to stop for pictures, so I began a slow turn the moment Mr. Chatham pointed.

My eyes remained focused on the water, though. Most people believe May to be the start of tarpon season, but tarpon don’t watch the calendar, and I’d been seeing pods of those big silver fish since March, so I scanned the surface for activity. Not just looking for tarpon either. April is a fertile time; a month that is as sweet and spirited as October. Bays come alive with oceangoing fish that move to the shallows to feed or spawn, often both. Turtles, too, hawksbills and loggerheads, appear, some the size of umbrellas. Manatees gather in families, the tip of a nose often the only warning a thousand-pound animal swims beneath. Cobia forage the flats, their periscope tails knifing the surface; schools of feeding redfish create oil slicks and can cause an acre of quaking water. The shacks would make for good photos, but a fishing guide’s eyes are always on the hunt so my attention didn’t swerve from the surface. Which is why I was the first to see the whirlpool swirl of a big fish flushing ahead of my skiff. Then another . . . and another.

My right hand, already on the throttle, tightened.

We were in an area of potholes and bars where depth changed abruptly from a foot or less to twenty feet in the channel. The water was shoaling fast, so what else but a bunch of tarpon could create such a disturbance? Bull sharks, great hammerheads, too, sometimes ride the flood into the shallows but seldom in schools.

Can’t be sharks,
I thought, and knew it was true when something moved to my left: a big silver tail stirred the surface, a tarpon swimming in the sickly way of a fish that has been played too long, then gaffed. The man wearing the photographer’s vest—his name was Ransler—was kneeling on the front casting deck and saw it, too.

“What’s that?”
he yelled.

Which is when, before I could slow the boat or answer, the water exploded to our right and a hundred-pound tarpon arched high into the air in front of us. Both men threw their hands up to shield themselves while I tried to steer away, but there was no avoiding a collision. Like a silver wave, the fish slapped Ransler overboard, then slammed bone-hard onto the forward deck where Delmont Chatham stood frozen, his weight braced on the vintage fishing rod. Automatically, I reached and grabbed the man by the collar while I reduced throttle slowly, slowly, hoping the tarpon wouldn’t slide off the casting platform into the boat, but it did. Even so, I thought I had things under control until the fish’s wild flopping caused me to lose my grip, then knocked Chatham’s legs from under him and he tumbled overboard, too.

Hannah Smith, you fool! You’ve just killed your clients!

That’s what I was thinking. A nightmare so unexpected, it caused my brain to go numb. But I grew up on the water, fishing and running boats, so my hands and eyes knew better than to panic. With a glance over my shoulder, I located both men, shoved the throttle forward and circled back, the chines of my skiff skidding in a tight turn. Ransler, in his sodden photographer’s vest, was already standing, water up only to his waist. Chatham, though, had dropped into a deep pothole and was struggling to keep his nose above water. The heavy belly pack, I realized, was pulling him down.

He’s drowning,
I thought.
I can’t let that happen!

The men were separated by a distance, so I pointed my skiff at Chatham, full speed, one hand trimming the engine while the other searched behind me for the anchor I keep in the transom well. The whole time, the tarpon was hammering the deck of my boat, slinging slime and saltwater in a frenzy, the engine noise was deafening, which was why I couldn’t hear what Ransler was hollering at me—
Slow down!
most likely—but I didn’t touch the throttle. Didn’t do anything but keep a finger on the trim switch until I was two boat lengths away. By then, the propeller had cleared the surface, the angle seemed right, so I killed the engine while I dumped the anchor and then let the boat glide.

“You’re gonna hit him!”

I could hear Ransler clearly enough now despite the thrashing tarpon, but I paid no attention. My skiff had lost so much speed, there was no need to wait for the anchor to pull taut and I didn’t. I grabbed the bowline and jumped over the side, only a few yards from where Mr. Chatham was still struggling to keep his head up. I was wearing khaki shorts, a long-sleeved shirt, and leather boat shoes. The water was cool when it flooded my clothing and too murky to see much when I went under. I found the bottom with my feet and pushed off in what I guessed was the right direction. When I surfaced behind Chatham, it surprised us both, but him more than me because he yelped, “Jesus Christ!” as if he’d been bitten by a shark.

His reaction almost caused me to laugh, but I didn’t, thank god. There was no way of knowing there was a shark in the area, but there was—a big one, too. The wounded tarpon I’d seen moments earlier should have put me on my guard, but all I could think about was getting my clients out of the water and returning them safely to the dock.

“Stay calm!” I said into the older man’s ear. “Take a big breath!” Then I got an arm wrapped around his huge chest and used the bow rope to pull us to the boat, which was settling itself in a shallower area. Chatham was scared and twitchy, I could feel it, coughing water, too, so he came along meekly enough until he found his footing and I tried to help boost him up onto the deck. He’d gotten enough air to reinflate his confidence, or his pride, though, and he pushed me away, saying, “I hope you’ve got a good attorney!” Then he floundered up onto the transom like a seal trying to exit a slippery pool but fell back. The man had to weigh close to three hundred pounds.

I was too stunned to reply, at first. Then felt such a flush of anger I decided it was best to ignore the comment, so I turned my attention to the younger man, who was wading toward us. “Are you hurt?”

Ransler was smiling, thank god, and sounded good-natured when he replied, “Ruined a camera lens probably, but I’ve got a great story to tell the grandkids—if I ever have any! You okay, Del?”

Delmont Chatham was still trying to pull himself out of the water but paused long enough to wheeze, “Hurry up, I want to get back to the car!” Which caused the younger man’s smile to only broaden while he gave me a private look and made a calming motion with his hands that promised
He’ll cool down, don’t worry.

I didn’t believe it was true but appreciated the reassurance. It was in that instant the younger man became an actual person in my mind, not just a client, which is an example of how quickly and unfairly I sometimes judge people. That morning at the dock, Chatham had introduced the two of us, saying, “This is Rance—try not to act like he’s so damn good-looking,” then added the man’s full name, which I heard as Joe or Joel Ransler but wasn’t certain. We had shaken hands, but I’d made only brief eye contact because Chatham was right: the man was as tall and handsome as a pro athlete or a news anchor and I’ve never been comfortable around unusually handsome men, no idea why. So I had dismissed him as a “type”—one of those beautiful people who moved easily through life full of confidence and absent of worries. After a day on the boat, or even after several charters, we would still have nothing in common, I would never see him again—not that I was interested personally because I wasn’t. Even so, it was a way of shielding myself, I suppose, but also the type of lazy thinking I dislike in others and try to avoid.

The man’s small gesture of kindness, though, caused me to see his face clearly for the first time—a nice face with a boyish grin, brown hair done by a stylist, but not too prissy neat, especially now that it was wet, blue jeans, no belt, and a black T-shirt under the photographer’s vest. I didn’t know him well enough to use his nickname, Rance—that would have been unprofessional—but at least he wasn’t threatening to sue me in court.

“Anybody hit their head?” I called while I moved to the side of the boat. “We need an ambulance if you’re hurt.” It was a question I should have asked Mr. Chatham since he’d booked the trip, but fishing guide etiquette had gone out the window as far as I was concerned. Fact was, Chatham’s threat didn’t have my full focus. The tarpon was knocking my gear to pieces, fishing rods and cushions flying, so I tried to get a hand on the fish’s lower jaw while also steadying the boat—which was not easily done in water up to my chest. Mr. Chatham wasn’t helping, either, with his attempts to belly flop aboard, which was frustrating for us both. Finally, after another failed effort, he yelled, “I can’t do this with that goddamn fish banging around!”

I seldom use profanity, don’t find it attractive, but rude talk was the least of my worries so I paid him no mind. But the younger man didn’t like it. He snapped, “Watch your language, Delmont!” Which surprised me because of the sharp tone, plus he’d hardly opened his mouth all morning. Even more surprising was Mr. Chatham’s reaction—silence. Just stood there, looking embarrassed, until Ransler got to the boat, leaned his weight on the gunnel, then said coolly, “After we get that fish in the water, you’re going to apologize to Captain Smith. Okay, Del?”

“Just Hannah,” I corrected him, aware there was something else I’d misjudged: Mr. Chatham was working for Ransler or was his subordinate in some way, not vice versa.

Joel was the younger man’s name. I asked when he was close enough to shake hands a second time. Then the two of us, by using our weight to lower the gunnel, slid the tarpon gently into the water.

•   •   •

MR. CHATHAM
actually did apologize, muttering, “Guess I overreacted.” By then, he was sitting with his feet dangling off the side of the boat, both men watching me revive the fish. Joel was in the water, standing waist-deep to my right, while I walked the fish back and forth, hoping its gills would soon show some color.

“Don’t blame you a bit, Mr. Chatham,” I replied, which prompted the younger man to give me a nod of approval. Thank god I looked up when he did it because that’s when I saw the dorsal fin—a metal-gray fin, tall as a scythe’s blade, thick as a steel bar. The fin cleaved the water in a lazy serpentine pattern, then disappeared behind Joel only twenty paces away.

“What’s wrong?” he asked when he saw my expression change.

“Get in the boat,” I said.

“What?”

“In the boat—
now
.” I had stopped what I was doing but didn’t raise my voice; didn’t want the man to stumble and fall if he panicked.