Hell's Bay (12 page)

Mangroves were the forests of my youth. They were my sequoias and my hemlocks and my giant sugar maples. Scrubby vegetation, unlovely, nothing awe-inspiring about them, mangrove forests were frequently thought to be dismal wastelands, mosquito-breeding habitats with no useful purpose. As with much of the Everglades, a sensitive eye was required. Any fool could stand at the rim of the Grand Canyon and experience awe. But the majesty of those low-lying, unvarying mangrove-lined estuaries and bays was far quieter and harder to grasp, which was one of the many reasons why the ever-growing legions of newcomers to the state were so dangerous.

To have an unobstructed view of blue waters, those idiots were eager to raze the lowly mangroves, to call in the bull-dozers and dredges and hack them away. Though it was illegal to destroy those crucial trees, in the rare instances a developer was actually caught and fined a few thousand dollars, most of them considered the penalty simply part of the cost of providing their clients a million-dollar vista.

As we entered the Broad River, pelicans and great blue herons broke loose from their perches and circled away from our unnatural racket. When we were safely past, they floated back to their watchtowers in the highest branches of that primordial forest. Our wake sloshed into the warren of roots, agitating the alluvial silt and the rich brew of decomposing vegetation, no doubt jostling whole communities of organisms into radical readjustments, exposing some, hiding others, initiating some new challenge in their never-ending struggle for survival.

The sky was still polished to a faultless blue from the re-cent cold front, and the air blasting into my face was so oxygen-rich I felt light-headed.

Inside the console, the laminated photographic chart was tucked into the webbed pocket, but I doubted I'd need to consult it. I'd spent so many hours tracing the intricate maze of bays and tributaries, creeks and snaking waterways, each twist and jog of the journey was imprinted into my long-term memory banks.

We were heading directly toward the southernmost tip of mainland Florida, but it was our intention to push as far northward as the winding waterways would allow. Where the water dropped from two feet to one foot, then inch by inch gave way to the muck, then the hard-packed marl and lime-stone of terra firma.

Just as the Broad River was narrowing to a few dozen feet across, I swung the wheel and carved a sharp path through the tranquil morning water southward, then swung east into the Wood River. The lakes I'd chosen to explore were a few miles east up the Wood. There were no markers back there, no dramatic turns I could use to measure off the distance to the hidden creek that appeared on the photographic chart to be the only possible entry point. So from this moment on, I had to count down each kink in the river's path and measure them against the image in my head, because I suspected that at water level the creek mouth would be all but obscured by mangrove branches.

John Milligan was gazing around at the scenery, his expression set in a solemn pose, as though even he, a man not easily impressed, could not help being stirred by the primal vibrations of the wilds we were passing through.

Mona, dressed in jeans and a long-sleeve white T-shirt, stared forward, her hair whipping around her face. She made no effort to rein it in, seemingly content to take the full blast of our forty-mile-an-hour clip.

That brush she gave my hip last night came back to mind. A gesture more intimate and bold than the rest of her self-absorbed behavior, as though she'd been seeking a connection with me, an alliance she couldn't bring herself to admit any other way. I watched her hair twist and snarl in the wind and wondered for the dozenth time what the hell I'd gotten myself into by leaving the safety of my house and my quiet routines.

For months I had been hankering for this day. In all my debates and calculations about making this foray into un-charted waters, I'd tried to weigh the effect of sharing such a rousing experience with complete strangers. I knew that hav-ing others aboard would be, at the very least, a distraction— that it might even blunt the pleasure in some major way, just as it might also, given a lucky break and the right companions, give the whole experience an added dimension. But I had not factored in the possibility that I would be escorting members of my own newly discovered family—people whose motives for joining this expedition seemed to lie somewhere between murky and treacherous.

I counted down the twists in the river's path, and studied the northern shoreline of the Wood for any break in the density of the mangroves. With my head turned, my left ear out of the wind, I heard an unnatural rumble behind us. I cut the engine back to idle, and as we lurched to a halt, I turned to peer back down the river.

“What is it?” Milligan followed my gaze.

At the last turn we'd rounded, through the dense screen of roots and branches, there was a flash of yellow. Then the low, sleek hull shot past the jutting mangrove roots and around the sharp bend.

“We have company.”

As the boat came into our stretch of river, it dropped off plane and its huge wake died away behind it, the waves over-taking the boat and crashing into the mangroves we'd just passed.

A tall woman was at the wheel. Dark black hair braided and tucked down the front of her clothes. White-skinned and lean, she wore black wraparound shades and a green camouflage hunting jacket and jeans and sported a red baseball cap.

Running across other anglers this far back in the Glades was rare but not unheard of. A woman alone, however, was another thing. I'd seen it only once—a cast-iron cracker from Chokoloskee or Everglades City making the long run into the vast national park, intent on packing her ice chest beyond the legal limit with snook and reds. Later on she'd be selling her illicit catch out of the back of her pickup on the shoulder of Tamiami Trail.

Any encounter in such isolated spots generated heightened suspicion. The chance for menace was greater, and the vigilance was more acute than it would be closer to civilization. This far into nowhere, when two strangers met, a rank, animal tension always filled the air.

And because I was so near the turn into our fishing hide-away, I had an even greater desire to make no lingering contact with this woman. A polite nod would do.

As she approached, I made that nod, but the stranger did not return it. She continued idling in our direction without a break in her posture.

I recognized the brand of boat as a cheaply made fiber-glass craft used to chase bass and corral them in the back bays of freshwater lakes. It was fitted out with an electric trolling motor mounted on the bow and a flip-up seat for the lazy beer-drinking crowd. The boat appeared to be brand-new, and I saw there were no Florida registration numbers affixed to its hull. A second after that I noted that the rod holders were empty.

I turned the wheel and nudged the throttle to give her more room to pass. The raven-haired woman took off her sun-glasses and set them on the console, then fixed her gaze on us, moving her eyes from my face to John Milligan's then on to Mona's. Studying each of us, then returning to me.

She kept her focus on my face as she coasted not five feet off our starboard rail. During the instant she passed abreast, I felt something like the crackle of current, black and invisible, arc across the narrow gap between us. My neck hair bristled and something in my chest rotated off-center. Our skiff seemed to rock out of all proportion to the wake that swelled under it, as though this woman had momentarily disrupted the force field that governed our small corner of the planet.

In silence the Milligans and I stared back at her, and when she'd passed ten feet beyond our boat, the woman fitted her sunglasses back in place and mashed her throttle. The heavy boat shot forward and lifted her up onto the slick steel-gray surface. She traveled not more than fifty feet before she veered the bass boat close to the right side of the mangrovelined waterway and executed a tight U-turn, then came roaring back toward us.

There were only a few seconds to react. I swung the wheel sharply to the right and gunned forward, but there was no way I could dodge her speeding craft if her intent was to ram us head-on.

But she did not. She skimmed past our port side not more than an arm's length away and her wake splashed high and doused us all. She kept her eyes trained on the river before her until the boat fishtailed around the bend and was gone.

“What the hell was that?” Milligan brushed water from his face.

“Who knows,” I said. “Maybe a warning, something ter-ritorial. People in these parts can be very protective of their fishing holes.”

Mona stood up and came around the console. Her shirt and jeans were sopping and ribbons of seawater seeped from her hairline and ran down her face like steam-room sweat.

In the confusion, I'd failed to monitor our position and the skiff had swung around and the bow was stabbing into the mangroves. Branches scraped the hull and swatted at the console, and one poked Mona in the back and made her yelp.

I reversed the prop and backed us on a hard angle toward the center of the waterway. Ten feet out, as we swung around, I saw it—the opening in the dense growth I'd been looking for—that elusive entrance to the ancient stream that led back to the three joined lakes.

At the mouth, just as the aerial photo had shown, there was a slight indentation in the undergrowth. Oddly, the opening had been more discernible from a speeding plane several hundred feet in the air than from where I stood, twenty yards away at water level.

“What kind of weapon do you carry?” Milligan asked.

I pulled a clean towel from my waterproof duffel and handed it to Mona. A smile crinkled the corners of her lips. Good humor getting the better of her for the moment. Then she turned away to scrub the water from her hair.

“Don't tell me you come out here in the boondocks unarmed?”

“This is a national park,” I said. “No firearms allowed.”

“Not even on the houseboat? Nothing?”

I held his fuming gaze for a moment, then stepped back to the wheel.

“A woman in a passing boat has you spooked? She splashes you and you're ready to start shooting?”

“There was more going on back there than being splashed.”

He was probably right. Up close she looked more cultivated and well-maintained than some roadside fishmonger. The whole encounter had the feel of a reconnaissance. Testing our reactions, getting a closer look.

I dug through the duffel and pulled out the cell phone Rusty had given me. I flipped it open, but no bars showed on the screen, zero reception. Lance, the same hurricane that last August had ravaged the shoreline mangroves, also wrecked the cell towers on the mainland that once served this region. Five months later, only a couple were back in service, but we were just beyond their range. The satellite phone Rusty carried for emergencies was locked up back on the Mothership.

Though I knew it was useless, I switched on the handheld VHF radio, tuned it to our agreed-upon channel 67, and tried to hail Rusty. By now she was probably on the far side of Whitewater Bay, beyond the reach of my meager wattage and stubby aerial. The Mothership had two twenty-foot antennae with boosters, so there was a chance that Teeter might hear my voice, but after three tries and no response, I set the radio back in its holster.

There was something quaint and pleasing about passing beyond the range of modern electronics. Even the map on my global positioning screen was wildly inaccurate, show-ing the Wood River to have dwindled away to nothing a half mile back. According to the GPS indicator map, the spot where we were floating was a half mile inland on the solid ground of Florida's southern tip.

That seemed a pretty fair definition for a wilderness zone—a place where none of the gadgets worked, and if you were going to save your ass you better have a command of the basics.

I couldn't remember the last time I felt so relaxed.

I slipped behind the wheel. Milligan was still staring at me and shaking his head.

“Let's go fishing, why don't we?”

I eased the skiff forward a few feet so the bow brushed the outer branches of the creek mouth. I bent forward to peer down the corridor to see if there was any hope we could penetrate the snarl.

The good news was that there was a line of sight for about two hundred yards. The bad news was the line was cross-hatched by branches at intervals of about every yard or so. If we were to penetrate that overgrown stream, we'd have to claw and cram and scrape the skiff ahead for a good part of the morning.

I tilted the engine up so high the propeller was barely below the waterline. That way we could muscle ahead through as little as five or six inches. If it got any shallower back there we'd have to kill the engine, tilt the prop all the way up, and drag the boat ahead by hand.

“You sure about this?” Mona said.

“I'll need you up front, John.” I drew the loppers from be-neath the console. “You keep us in the center of the channel, clip as few branches as possible. Be on the lookout for any submerged logs. And don't fall overboard. This is gator country. And a few crocs show up back here, too.”

“We're going in there?” Milligan said.

“That's the idea.”

I flipped open the rear hatch and drew out the two net bags that held the foul-weather gear.

“Put the jackets on, hoods up.”

“It's not going to rain,” Mona said. “Skies are perfectly clear.”

“Spiders,” I said. “It's going to be raining spiders.”

They put on their slickers, and I inched forward into the thicket.

“Spiders?” Mona said. “The biting kind?”

“I don't know. Let's not find out.”

* * *

Sasha killed the engine and let the boat drift a mile beyond the perimeter of Ponce de Leon Bay, out in five feet of water in the quiet gulf. They had a straight-on view of the mouth of the Broad River, with empty miles of silver-blue in every direction squirming like a pan of mercury.