Hunting Season Read online

  Flashing in the sun, she was as colorful as any fish. Her mask and fins were iridescent lime green, her dive skin startling blue. Though the water was a welcoming eighty-eight degrees in late June, that was still eight point six degrees below where she functioned best. For prolonged stays in this captivating netherworld she wore a skin, a lightweight body-hugging suit with a close-fitting hood and matching socks. Not only did it conserve body heat, but it also protected her from the sometimes vicious bite of the coral. Like all divers who weren’t vandals, Anna assiduously avoided touching—and so harming—living coral, but when they occasionally did collide, human skin was usually as damaged as the coral.

  Again she stayed with and played with the fish until her lungs felt close to bursting. Though it would be hotly debated by a good percentage of Dry Tortugas National Park’s visitors, as far as she was concerned the “paradise” part of this subtropical paradise was hidden beneath the waves.

  Anna had never understood how people could go to the beach and lie in the sand to relax. The shore was a far harsher environment than the mountains. Air was hot and heavy and clung to the skin. Wind scoured. Sand itched. Salt sucked moisture from flesh. The sun, in the sky and again off the surface of the sea, seared and blinded. For a couple of hours each day it was heaven. After that it began to wear one down as the ocean wears away rock and bone.

  Two dive sites, twenty dives—the deepest over forty feet—and Anna finally tired herself out. Legs reduced to jelly from pushing through an alien universe, she couldn’t kick hard enough to rise above the surface and pull herself over the gunwale. Glad there were no witnesses, she wriggled and flopped over the transom beside the outboard motor to spill on deck, splattering like a bushel of sardines. Her “Sunday” was over. She’d managed to spend yet one more weekend in Davy Jones’s locker. There wasn’t really any place else to go.

  The Reef Ranger, one of the park’s patrol boats, a twenty-five-foot inboard/outboard Boston Whaler, the bridge consisting of a high bench and a Plexiglas windscreen, fired up at a touch. Anna upped anchor, then turned the bow toward the bastinadoed fortress that was to be her home for another eight to twelve weeks. Seen from the level of the surrounding ocean, Fort Jefferson presented a bleak and surreal picture: an overwhelming geometric tonnage floating, apparently unsupported, on the surface of the sea.

  Enjoying the feel of a boat beneath her after so many years in landlocked parks, Anna headed for the fort. The mariners’ rhyme used to help those new to the water remember which markers to follow when entering heavy traffic areas rattled meaninglessly through her mind: red on right returning. Shrunken by salt and sun, her skin felt two sizes too small for her bones, and even with dark glasses and the sun at her back, it was hard to keep her eyes open against the glare.

  The opportunity to serve as interim supervisory ranger for the hundred square miles of park, scarcely one of which was above water, came in May. Word trickled down from the southeastern region that the Dry Tortugas’ supervisory ranger had to take a leave of absence for personal reasons and a replacement was needed until he returned or, failing that, a permanent replacement was found.

  Dry Tortugas National Park was managed jointly with southern Florida’s Everglades National Park. The brass all worked out of Homestead, near Everglades. Marooned as it was, seventy miles into the Gulf, day-to-day operations of the Dry Tortugas were run by a supervisory ranger, who managed one law enforcement ranger, two interpreters and an office administrator. Additional law enforcement had been budgeted and two rangers hired. They were new to the service and, at present, being trained at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia.

  “Supervisory Ranger” was a title that bridged a gray area in the NPS hierarchy. For reasons to which Anna was not privy, the head office chose not to upgrade the position to Chief Ranger but left it as a subsidiary position to the Chief Ranger at Everglades. Still, it was a step above Anna’s current District Ranger level on the Natchez Trace. To serve as “Acting Supervisory Ranger” was a good career move.

  That wasn’t entirely why she’d chosen to abandon home and hound for three months to accept the position. Anna was in no hurry to rush out of the field and into a desk job. There’d be time enough for that when her knees gave out or her tolerance for the elements—both natural and criminal—wore thin.

  She had taken the Dry Tortugas assignment for personal reasons. When she was in a good frame of mind, she told herself she’d needed to retreat to a less populated and mechanized post to find the solitude and unmarred horizons wherein to renew herself, to seek answers. When cranky or down, she felt it was the craven running away of a yellow-bellied deserter.

  Paul Davidson, his divorce finalized, had asked her to marry him.

  Two days later, a car, a boat and a plane ride behind her—not to mention two thousand miles of real estate, a goodly chunk of it submerged—she was settling into her quarters at Fort Jefferson.

  “Coincidence?” her sister Molly had asked sarcastically. “You be the judge.”

  The fort had only one phone, which worked sporadically, and mail was delivered once a week. Two weeks had passed in sandy exile, and she was no more ready to think about marriage than she had been the day she left. But, given the paucity of entertainments—even a devotee could only commune with fish for so long—she was rapidly getting to the point where there was nothing else to think about.

  Under these pressing circumstances, she’d done the only sensible thing: she stuck her nose in somebody else’s business. Daniel Barrons, a maintenance man-of-all-trades and the closest thing Anna’d made to a friend at the fort, had a weakness for gossip that she shamelessly exploited.

  He was a block of a man, with what her father would have referred to as a “peasant build,” one designed for carrying sick calves into the barn. Perhaps in his late forties, Daniel covered his blunt face with a brown-black beard. On his left arm, seldom seen as the man wasn’t given to tank tops, was a tattoo so classic Anna smiled whenever she glimpsed its bottom edge: a naked girl reclining on elbows and fanny under a cartoon palm tree.

  Given this rough and manly exterior, tradition would have had him strong and silent. Every time he snuggled down in his favorite position to dish the dirt, elbows on workbench, hindquarters stuck out and usually bristling with tools shoved in his pockets, furry chin in scarred hands, Anna was charmed and tickled.

  With only a small nudge, Daniel had assumed the position and filled her in on why she’d been given the opportunity to explore this oddly harsh, boring, beautiful, magical bit of the earth. Her predecessor, Lanny Wilcox, hadn’t taken an extended leave willingly. It had been forced upon him when he’d begun to come unglued.

  “His girlfriend, a little Cuban number as cute as a basket full of kittens, ran out on him,” Daniel had told her, his voice low and gentle as usual. He consistently spoke as if a baby slept in the next room and he was loath to wake it.

  “Lanny was a terrific guy, but he was getting up there, fifty-one this last birthday. At his peak he couldn’t a been much to look at. Hey, I like Lanny just fine, but, well, even he knew he was about as good-looking as the south end of a northbound spiny lobster. Five, six months ago he hooked up with Theresa. She’s not yet thirty, smart, funny and a nice addition to a bathing suit. Next thing you know, she’s living out here. When she cut out, Lanny just sort of lost it.”

  From what Anna had gathered, the old Supervisory Ranger’s “losing it” consisted of increasingly bizarre behavior that revolved around the seeing and hearing of things that no one else saw or heard. “Ghosts,” murmured a couple of the more melodramatic inhabitants of the fort. “Hallucinations,” said the practical ones, and Lanny was bundled up and shipped off to play with his imaginary friends out of sight of the tax-paying public.

  On first arriving, struck by the beauty of the sky and sea, the fishes and the masonry, Anna couldn’t understand what stresses could possibly chase even a heartbroken man around the bend. Piloting the Reef Ranger int
o the harbor, the glow of her swimming with the fishes burned and blown away, she realized that after a mere couple weeks of isolation, wet heat and scouring winds, she was tempted to dream up companions of her own. She needed a sense of connection to something, somebody to keep her on an even keel.

  She laughed. The sound whipped away on the liquid wind over the bow. Soon she was going to have to relinquish her self-image as a hermit. Paul—or perhaps just the passage of years—had socialized her to. some extent. Molly would be pleased. Anna made a mental note to tell her sister when next she phoned. It could be a while. Not only was the fort’s only phone in much demand, but it also had a one-to-two-second delay, like a phone call from Mars, that made communication an exercise in frustration.

  Red on right.

  Anna slowed the Ranger to a sedate and wakeless speed as she entered the small jewel of a harbor on the east side of Garden Key. Eleven pleasure boats were anchored, two she recognized from the weekend before, Moonshadow and Key to My Heart, both expensive, both exquisitely kept. They were owned by two well-to-do couples out of Miami who seemed joined at the hip as their boats were joined at the gunwale, one rafting off the other. Anna waved as she passed.

  At the end of the harbor away from the tourists, as if there were an invisible set of tracks running from Bush Key—Garden’s near neighbor—to the harbor mouth and they had been condemned to live on the wrong side of them, two commercial shrimpers cuddled up to one another.

  Commercial fishing and, much to the shriek and lament of the locals, sport fishing was banned in the park, but right outside the boundaries was good shrimping. The boats stalked the perimeters, the honest—or the cautious—keeping outside the imaginary line established by NPS buoys. Perhaps a few sought to poach, but there were plenty of shrimp outside. Most came for the same reasons ships had been coming for two hundred years, the reason the fort had been built in the middle of the ocean: the natural safe zone of flat water the coral reefs provided.

  Shrimp boats, their side nets looking like tattered wings falling from a complex skeleton of wood and metal, were a complication Anna’d not foreseen. They sailed from many ports, most in the south and southeast, following the shrimp: four weeks in Texas, then through the Gulf to the Keys. Some boats were family owned, most were not. All were manned and kept in a way unique to an idiosyncratic and inbred culture. Daniel called them “bikers of the sea.” Having spent an unspecified and largely undiscussed number of years in the land version of that violent fraternity before, as he put it, “breaking my back and seeing the light,” he would know.

  The shrimpers were a scabrous lot, not just the boats, which reeked of dead fish, cigarette smoke and old grease—part cooking, part engine—but the sailors themselves. The family boats were crewed by men and women, three or four to a boat. The others were all male, but for the occasional unfortunate who, like a biker chick out of favor, was passed from boat to boat, usually fueled for her duties with drugs and alcohol.

  Anna had yet to see a shrimper with all his or her teeth. The violence of the culture coupled with months at sea away from modern dentistry marked their faces. A lot of them went to sea to kick drugs and found more onboard. A startling percentage had felony records.

  This borderline lifestyle would not have affected Anna had not a symbiotic relationship sprung up between them and the tourists and park employees at the fort. Fresh gulf shrimp were delicious. The shrimpers were glad to trade a few for the culinary delight of those in the park. The problem was that the currency was alcohol—mostly cheap beer, but enough whiskey to make things interesting. Drunk, the shrimpers lived up to Daniel’s name for them. They came ashore; they yelled, disrupted tours, urinated in public, knocked one another’s few remaining teeth out, beat their women and occasionally knifed one another.

  Her third day at Fort Jefferson Anna had been made painfully aware of a few administrational oddities of Dry Tortugas National Park: there was no place to hold prisoners and, though they were legally allowed to make arrests, it was highly discouraged by headquarters in Homestead. Two law-enforcement rangers keeping drunken violent shrimpers under guard in the open air for hours till the Coast Guard arrived wasn’t a great idea. Transporting them three hours one way to Key West and so leaving the park without law enforcement or EMTs for a day didn’t work either.

  The best they could do was separate the combatants, bind the ugliest wounds and shoo the lot of them back onboard their boats.

  The two shrimpers anchored in the harbor as Anna motored in were family owned. They’d never caused problems, and the lady on one of the boats had a terrific little dog she let Anna pet. Tonight should be quiet. Anna didn’t know if she was grateful or not. With only one other ranger—Bob Shaw—in house, neither ever truly had a day off but slept with a radio ready to serve as backup for the person on duty. Quiet promised uninterrupted sleep. Anna supposed that was a good thing. Still, she would have welcomed something to do.

  As she backed the Reef Ranger neatly into. the employee dock, Bob Shaw walked down the weathered planking. Opposite where Anna tied up, on the far side of the park pier with its public bathrooms and commercial loading area that the ferries from Key West used, the NPS supply boat, the Activa, was moored. Like Christmas every Tuesday, but better, the Activa arrived with supplies, groceries, mail and Cliff and Linda. Cliff was the captain, Linda the first mate. New blood was as exciting to the inhabitants of Fort Jefferson as fresh food. The crew of the Activa could be counted on to bring the latest news and gossip along with other treats and necessities.

  “Teddy took your stuff up to your quarters for you and stuck the perishables in the refrigerator,” Bob said as Anna cut the engine. She tossed him the stem line and he tied it neatly to the cleat on the starboard side. Wind was more or less a constant on DRTO, and the NPS boats were tied to both sides of their slips to keep them from banging into the sides of the dock. Fenders could only do so much when the winds flirted with hurricane force.

  “I’ll be sure and thank her. Is Teddy in the office?” Anna asked. Teddy, short for Theodora, was Bob’s wife.

  “Till five, like always.” He stood stiffly to one side as Anna heaved towel, fins, snorkel and water bottle onto the dock.

  Bob was a strange fit with the park. He’d been there for eleven years and clearly loved the place. He said, and Anna believed him, that he never wanted to work anywhere else and intended to serve out his remaining six years till retirement at the fort.

  Anna suspected his desire to remain in this isolated post was due only partly to his love for the resource. A good chunk of it, she theorized, was because nowhere else could he live such a rich and rewarding fantasy life without coming head-to-head with the cynicism of his fellows.

  Fortunately for her, Bob’s particular brand of psychosis made him a great ranger.

  Swearing he was five-six, though Anna, at five-four, could look him in the eye in flat shoes, he seemed bent on being the poster boy for a benign version of the Napoleon complex. Now, as he readied to go on his evening rounds—showing the flag, boarding boats he deemed suspicious, handing out brochures to newcomers and checking the boundaries because they were there—he wore full gear: sidearm, baton, pepper spray, cuffs and a Kevlar bulletproof vest. If the man hadn’t been such a strong swimmer, Anna’s greatest worry would have been that he’d fall overboard and his defensive equipment would sink him like a stone. The only concession he made to the cloying heat was to wear shorts.

  Though Anna would never have dreamed of telling him so, they tended to spoil the effect. Not only was he no taller than Anna, but he couldn’t have exceeded her one hundred twenty pounds by much either. Like a lot of men who take to the water, most of that was in his chest and shoulders. Chickens would have been insulted to hear his legs compared to theirs.

  “Anything up for tonight?” she asked as they made lines fast. Mostly she asked for the fun of hearing Bob’s answer. His fantasy, as luck would have it, was that he was the sole protector (she didn’t count f
or reasons of gender, and Lanny hadn’t counted for reasons Bob clearly had but was too honorable to speak of) of this jewel in the ocean. Like all other great and honorable lawmen of history, Bob was constantly in danger from the forces of evil. Each and every boat could be smuggling cocaine from Panama, heroin from the east, guns from pretty much anywhere. All shrimpers were ready, willing and able to knife him in the back.

  Given that he apparently genuinely believed this despite eleven years in a sleepy port, Anna couldn’t but admire his stalwart courage in facing each day, never late, never shirking. Having been exposed to this criminal-under-every-bush, Marshal Dillon under siege mentality the day she arrived, Anna was pleasantly surprised the first time she’d patrolled with him. Part of honor and duty—and natural inclination probably, though his tough-guy image would never let him admit it even to himself—required he be gracious, polite and, when he thought no one was looking, overtly kind. Seeing that, Anna had been quite taken with the man and made it a point to resist the temptation to tease him about the boogeymen that lived under his boat. She didn’t even resent his sexism. Respect for a superior overrode it, and it wasn’t personal. There were no women patrolling the streets of Dodge City, flying fighters over Nazi Germany or walking shoulder-to-shoulder with Clint East-wood through the saloon’s swinging doors.

  Sans petticoat and fan, Anna simply didn’t fit into Bob’s worldview.

  “Did you see the boats on the south side, anchored out a ways, not in the harbor?” Bob asked. He smoothed his sandy-red and handsome mustache with one hand and pointed with the other.

  Vaguely Anna remembered passing them, but had paid them little mind.

  “I saw them.”