Read Online 09-Twelve Mile Limit by Randy Wayne White - Free Book Online

Duck for sunset on the beach. Milled around swapping stories with Pat and Memo at the bar, listening to John Paul on the guitar before returning to Dinkin’s Bay.
    The entire time, I noticed that Gardner kept her distance from me, still mad, apparently. Ransom, though, she liked. The two women fast became a pair.
    Once, passing behind them, I paused to listen as Ransom, speaking in her musical Bahamian accent, told her “Amelia, darlin’. Let me tell you something ’bout these nice titties ah’ mine. They changed my womanly life, they surely did, and don’t let no man tell you he doan care about your boobies. A woman deserve to look how she want to look, my sister! Yes sir! I reckon they cost me four, maybe five, blow jobs apiece, and that cheap, girl! Very cheap! I were kind’a sweet on that lil’ doctor man anyway. I’d a’ made him feel good for free, no problem!”
    I liked Gardner’s unembarrassed laughter—then she noticed me. She said to Ransom, “This big goon really is your brother?”
    “Oh yes, oh yes, he one of the very few white ones in our family. He can be kind’a mulish sometimes when it come to women, but he good. Doan you doubt that. My brother, he a good man.”
    Long after sunset, several dozen of us sat quietly listening to Amelia Gardner. She was sitting cross-legged atop one of the picnic tables, behind Dinkin’s Bay’s Red Pelican Gift Shop, facing the docks. Sitting to her left was Claudia. Ransom to her right.
    The windy, high pressure system that had made our search so exhausting was gone now, replaced by a balmy, tropical low. Through the coconut palms, beyond the yellow windows of my house and lab, I could see drifting clouds and oily star paths on black water. Woodring’s Point and the mouth of Dinkin’s Bay were a charcoal hedge of mangroves two miles north.
    It was a very warm night for late November. Even so, Gardner had gone to her Jeep for a jacket, as if affected by memories of the cold that night three weeks earlier. It wasn’t easy for her to talk about it. There was no mistaking the emotion in her voice, and I admired the way she fought her way through it.
    I was holding a plastic cup of beer poured over ice, plus a wedge of squeezed lime, and I took a sip now, as she said, “I met Michael Sanford and Grace Walker when I was in the Keys, then again at a dive club party on Siesta Key. You guys ever eat at the old mullet restaurant there? That’s where the party was. They were with a woman by the name of Sherry Meyer, who was supposed to dive the Baja California with us. Lucky for her, though, she had a cold and didn’t make the trip. I wish to hell we’d all had colds that day—” She touched her hand to Claudia’s arm as she said that; Claudia patted Gardner’s hand in return. “But I guess destiny has its reasons and there’s no going back now. Janet was a friend of Michael’s, and I didn’t meet her until I got to Marco. He’d rented a three-bedroom condo—him in one room, we four women in the other two—and we went to bed early Thursday night so we could get up early Friday.”
    Because I’d seen still shots of them in the newspapers and on television, I had a fixed mental image of both Sanford and Grace Walker, and impressions of both of them that may or may not have been valid. Michael Sanford could have been a fashion model—six foot four or so, probably 220 pounds, with the jaw, the dimpled chin, and dense, curly black hair that photographs well. Walker was his female, African-American counterpart—busty with makeup and lots of jewelry, a businesswoman in her thirties who was making money and fighting for causes in which she believed. They both knew how to look into the lens of a camera and smile.
    Gardner told us that the four of them had left Marco River Marina in Sanford’s twenty-five-foot boat at around 8 A.M. and were headed out Big Marco Pass when Sanford noticed that one of his 225-horsepower Johnsons was overheating. They returned to the marina and had a mechanic switch out a