Shark River Read Online Free PDF Page A

No houses, no golf cart trails, too many mosquitoes for foot traffic. Yet, I knew that if I followed the boardwalk to the dock, I would find the girl joggers I’d seen earlier, the two of them standing there, cooling down from their run, watching the sunset.
    I also knew from our few previous encounters that the blonde’s greeting would be slightly cheerier, more inviting than Ponytail’s grim nod.
    I am reluctant to impose on anyone’s solitude, so I’d decided to do what I’d done for the last two evenings: turn around at the boardwalk, thereby avoiding the women.
    But, as I ran, something happened that caused me to change my mind. Nothing dramatic. It was a very small thing, indeed. What happened was, ahead of me and to my right, a flock of parrots flushed out of the mangroves, screaming and cawing their way into clumsy flight. Parrots aren’t indigenous to Florida. Birds escape, meet, breed, reproduce, then tumble around in groups like feral outlanders. From my years in Central and South America, however, I am very familiar with the warning alarm that parrots make, and that was the sound I heard as the birds flushed.
    Someone or something was in those mangroves.
    Not that I suspected anything sinister. I have an orderly mind that naturally seeks explanation for the unexplained. This was an oddity, a small incident that did not mesh with the expected pattern of cause and effect. A mangrove fringe is an inhospitable area. Those swampy borders stink of muck and sulfur. They’re a breeding ground for mosquitoes. People avoid mangroves for good reason.
    So what had spooked the birds?

    As I approached the boardwalk, still running, I heard a voice call, “’Scuse me, mister big man. Hello? Could you maybe give me some information?” A female voice with the breezy, singsong rhythm of the Bahamas. When she said “maybe,” I heard “maw-be.” When she said “big man,” I heard “beeg mon.”
    I glanced to see a tall, coffee-brown woman pulling a canoe up onto the bank of the little canal. Late twenties, early thirties, wading-bird legs, heavy breasts without bra that swooped and strained, defining themselves. She wore a tie-dyed T-shirt, scarlet and blue, over canvas shorts that emphasized her legs and muscular rump. I noted that her hair was braided cornrow-style with red beads at the ends and her gaunt, chocolate-colored skin stretched tight over athletic cheeks, bones, and jaw. A striking figure.
    I held up an index finger—“Back in a minute!”—and mounted the boardwalk, ducking beneath mangrove limbs, feeling my own weight in the vibration of wood.
    The boardwalk tunneled through the mangrove fringe for more than fifty meters, then made a sharp right toward the bay. When I made that turn, I saw what had frightened the parrots. I also knew immediately that the two runners, Blonde and Ponytail, were headed for a very nasty fall. Not that they realized it. Nope, not yet, and not surprising. Targets who are about to become victims seldom see it coming.
    Ahead of me, the boardwalk became a low dock on pilings that poked a couple hundred feet out into the bay. The girls were at the end of the dock, leaning against the railing, faces toward the parachute-sized sphere that was the setting sun. The sky was a lucent indigo streaked with citrus and peach. The bay was glazed with molten gold.
    Between the shore and the girls were two men. The men were walking toward the end of the dock, backs to me. Each wore blue coveralls, the legs of the coveralls showing fresh mud stains up to the calves.
    They’d just waded through the mangroves, flushing birds.
    Another telltale indicator: Both men also wore ski masks.
    Except for 7-Eleven clerks and the occasional bank teller, we don’t see a lot of ski masks in Florida.
    My first reaction was surprise: damn! Then, as my brain translated the visual data, my reaction changed to: oh-h-h-h-h damn, because some kind of involvement was now impossible to avoid.
    The men had some