09-Twelve Mile Limit Read Online Free PDF

a friend out west who used to be the Coast Guard’s surgeon general. The equivalent of it, anyway. He’s done a lot of research on hypothermia, so I need to give him a call.”
    “I almost hate to ask, but I have to. Doc, how would it have been for her? Those last hours?”
    I’d thought a lot about it. When you lose someone tragically that you care about, much of the anguish comes from imagining their anguish during their final moments. So I gave JoAnn an edited version. But not edited much. I told her that the body is an amazing thing—it’s got lots of ways to conserve heat. When we’re exposed to cool water, small blood vessels near the skin’s surface automatically constrict to keep blood flow away from the outer tissues. That’s true of the entire body except for the brain, which needs unrestricted blood flow. Which is why the blood vessels of the head do not constrict and why heat is lost most quickly from the area of the head.
    “So her first major organ affected,” I said, “was her brain. She probably got confused, then drowsy. More than likely, she just fell asleep. Once her core temp got below … I think it’s ninety-five degrees, once her core temperature got below that, her heartbeat would have become erratic, and then, finally, it would have stopped. But, like I said, she’d have been asleep by that time.”
    “So it wouldn’t have been that bad for her and the others?”
    “No,” I lied. “Not that bad at all.”
    We lay there in silence for a time. Beyond the canvas canopy I’d rigged to keep off the dew, I could see the black horizon lifting, pausing, then falling out of a black sky. I wondered as I’d wondered before: What had it been like for Janet? As I wrestled with all the horrible scenarios, Janet was there in memory, her pudgy, girlish face alive in my mind and her sensitive eyes, green and kind, looking directly into mine.
    I remembered the smell of the musky perfume she sometimes wore. Remembered the distinctive cocoa-butter scent of body cream, and how, when she was excited or telling a joke, she punctuated her sentences by combing her fingers through her hair. I remembered that the first time Janet made me laugh, really laugh, was a couple of weeks after she’d been working in the lab, and she accidentally let it slip that she’d named each and every one of my fish. Janet had made me laugh many times after that, and she’d confided in me and encouraged me. She’d brought me little handmade presents at Christmas and dyed eggs with silly faces at Easter. In front of others, she’d slapped me on the ass at dock parties, and, when she knew I was stressed, she’d come quietly up behind me and massage the muscles of my neck and shoulders. Janet was a good woman, and she had been a good and true friend.
    I thought that JoAnn had drifted off to sleep when, suddenly, she spoke again. “Do you hear it?”
    I lifted my head slightly. “No. I don’t hear anything.”
    “That’s what I mean. He’s stopped. Finally, the poor darling’s stopped. Probably exhausted.”
    She meant Jeth.
    Then, after another long silence, she said, “Doc, there’s one thing I will never understand. If Janet and the other two were wearing those big, inflated vests, why didn’t we find them? All those air hours, the choppers and planes, and all the boats out here looking. Why? It seems almost impossible.”
    I said, “I don’t know, JoAnn. It does seem impossible. That’s one question I can’t answer.”
    Rhonda joined us for a bit. She came topside, sniffling and snuffing, a tall, skinny-hipped woman with short brown hair and a heart as big as Tomlinson’s. Her voice was quivering as she said, “You got room there for one more?” and slid her long body in behind me when I lifted the blanket as invitation.
    I’ve read somewhere that certain religious groups and some primitive societies practice a form of healing known, variously, as “powwowing” or “hiving” in which members of the group unite in what is, essentially, an extended communal