Lt. Jim Tile had heard about it before it made the TV news; the state Highway Patrol sent five road troopers and its top K-9 unit to join the search for the important visitors. The discovery of the canoes—and the emphatic manner in which they’d been sabotaged and strung up for display—confirmed Jim Tile’s suspicions about the incident on Steamboat Creek. He was hopeful the Japanese would remain silent, so that no other authorities would make the connection. Obviously Dick Artemus had not. Jim Tile purposely hadn’t shared his theory about the ecotour abduction with the governor during their brief meeting in Tallahassee.
That afternoon, though, the trooper dialed the voice-mail number they customarily used to trade messages—he and his friend, the long-ago governor—and was annoyed to find the line disconnected. So he packed an overnight bag, kissed Brenda good-bye and drove south nonstop, virtually the full length of the state. The sun had been up an hour by the time he arrived at the gatehouse of the Ocean Reef Club in North Key Largo. The trooper was admitted to the premises by a surly young security guard who apparently had failed the rudimentary knuckle-dragging literacy quiz required to join regular police departments. The guard reluctantly escorted Jim Tile to the club’s executive offices, where—after producing a letter of introduction from the attorney general—the trooper was permitted to examine a roll of film that had been found in a camera bag left behind by one of the Japanese canoeists.
The film had been developed into a black-and-white contact sheet by the local sheriff’s lab technician, who had understandably failed to recognize its evidentiary value: Thirty-five of the thirty-six frames were dominated by a blurred finger in the foreground—not an uncommon phenomenon, when a 35-mm camera was placed in the excitable hands of a tourist. But, to Jim Tile, the finger in the snapshots from Steamboat Creek did not appear to be the wayward pinkie of a slightly built Japanese business executive, but rather the fleshy, hairy, crooked, scarred-up middle digit of a six-foot-six Anglo-American hermit with a furious sense of humor.
The last photograph on the roll, the only photograph without the finger, was of equal interest to the trooper. He turned to the slug-like security guard and said: “Does the club have a boat I can borrow? A skiff would do fine.”
“We keep a twelve-footer tied up at the marina. But I can’t letcha take it out by yourself. That’d be ‘gainst policy.”
Jim Tile folded the contact sheet and slipped it into a brown office envelope, the same envelope Dick Artemus had handed to him at the governor’s mansion.
“So, where’s the marina?” the trooper asked the security guard.
“You ain’t authorized.”
“I know. That’s why you’re coming with me.”
It was a shallow-draft johnboat, powered by a fifteen-horse outboard. The guard, whose name was Gale, cranked the engine on the third pull. Over his ill-fitting uniform he buckled a bright orange life vest, and told Jim Tile to do the same.
“Policy,” Gale explained.
“Fair enough.”
“Kin you swim?”
“Yep,” said the trooper.
“No shit? I thought black guys couldn’t swim.”
“Where you from, Gale?”
“Lake City.”
“Lake City, Florida.”
“Is they another one?”
“And you never met a black person that could swim?”
“Sure, in the catfish ponds and so forth. But I’m talking about the ocean, man. Salt water.”
“And that’s a different deal?”
“Way different,” the guard said matter-of-factly. “That’s how come the life jackets.”
They crossed Card Sound behind a northerly breeze, the johnboat’s squared-off hull slapping on the brows of the waves. Gale entered the mouth of Steamboat Creek at full throttle but slowed beneath the low bridge.
He said to the trooper, up in the bow: “How far you need to go?”
“I’ll tell you when we get there, Gale.”
“Is that a.357 you got?”
“It is.”
“I don’t got my carry permit yet. But at home I keep a Smith.38 by the bed.”
“Good choice,” said Jim Tile.
“I b’lieve I’ll get somethin’ heavier for the streets.”
“See the eagle? Up there in the top of that tree.” The trooper pointed.
“Cool!” exclaimed Gale the security guard. “Now for that, you need a pump gun, twenty-gauge minimum… Hey, I gotta stop’n take aleak.”