This one's on me

It's kinda like paying it forward.. in pieces

This one’s on me.

I don’t know about you but I always like it when someone puts a cherry on top.

That’s a euphemism for going the extra mile or doing a little something extra to make someone’s day.

It requires little effort on the part of the giver (or sometimes more) and can put a smile on a face or really turn a day around.

Like paying it forward.

So today I’m sending two links to upgraded subscribers and giving everyone chapter one to Flyover Zombie – the Battlefield Z series.

It’s hot out there, and though yardwork calls, it’s a fight between the AC and sweating off five lbs trimming the hedges and landscaping mulch.

Plus some time to knock out 1k words on the next in series, and I ordered a cover for a new sci fi project today. You’re gonna love it.

And the stuff we talked about yesterday, and this week, all lined up to be organized and started.

When you do stay inside today, be sure to check out JACK RYAN on Prime.

If you don’t have Prime, Amazon is running specials for PRIME DAY which is July 11. A good time to give it a try and you can see REACHER 1 and 2, plus THE RINGS OF POWER and a lot more.

JACK RYAN has John Krazinski from the Office in the starring role and I’m a fan. This is the 4^th and last season, so no cliffhangers, and it’s based on Tom Clancy books, so it’s pretty darn good.

Check out the trailer.

When I lived in Florida, I had a set of these chairs and spent a lot of weekends at New Smyrna Beach.

I’d drive out on the sand, park the truck about a half mile from Chase’s on the Beach, and go for a run.

NSB has the distinction of being the shark bite capital of Florida.

That’s because the river empties on one end of the island and sharks like to hang out in the water to eat.

So do fishermen.

I’d run the three or so miles to the rock jetty and sometimes catch the lifeguards pulling a victim out of the water.

Not many bites are life threatening because of the species of shark, which I can’t recall off the top of my head.

Lot’s of stitches though.

Which keeps me out of the water at NSB, but it’s gorgeous with hard packed sand and lots of space.

Plus bikini’s, a perk that always makes running more interesting.

Depending on who is wearing one.

After, I’d plot into a chair and read a book and drink something cold from the cooler just to let the surf pull my cares away.

Hurricanes, sharks, gators, snakes, panthers, and the worst of them all, snowbirds.

Man, Florida was nice.

Where’s your favorite spot to read?

Take the Darker Path, Thrillers, Crime and Mysteries group promo

PLUS

The run went north from his house at five-forty, which gave Mike forty-five minutes before the beach got complicated by dog walkers and early tourists and the occasional retiree doing tai chi in a way that suggested they’d learned it from a video rather than a person. November had settled into its best behavior — sixty-four degrees, the kind of air that had finally decided what it was rather than negotiating between summer’s leftover heat and the coast’s idea of fall. The tide was full in, which meant no packed shelf of sand for the metal detector, which was fine because the detector stayed in the carport on run mornings.

He ran the same route he always ran — north past the access ramp, past the cleared lot where the sea oats were winning their slow argument with the developer who’d lost interest three years ago, past the point where A1A bent away from the water and the road noise fell off and the sound of the ocean filled in behind it. His knees had developed opinions about running at forty-eight that they hadn’t had at thirty-eight, and he’d learned to start slow enough that the opinions got made before the first mile rather than during it.

The beach at five-forty was the best version of itself. Low light coming in flat off the water, the kind that made everything look like it had been placed there with intention, the pelicans working the near shore with the focused professionalism of animals that had never confused what they were for. He ran through it without thinking about anything specific, which was the point of the run — not emptying the head, just giving it something automatic to do so the other things could sort themselves without being pushed.

He’d gone maybe a mile and a half when he saw the figure on the public access cooler.

Not unusual, exactly — people sat on the beach at odd hours for odd reasons, and Mike had long since stopped evaluating strangers on the beach as potential problems on the basis of their choice of seating. But this man had the particular quality of someone who’d been sitting there long enough that the sitting had become the point rather than the pause before something else, and there was a stillness in him that was different from the stillness of someone watching the ocean.

Mike recognized the stillness before he recognized the man.

Pat Doyle was fifty-eight, built wide through the chest the way commercial divers got built — not gym muscle, working muscle, the kind that came from years of equipment and water resistance and the specific physical demands of a job done in an environment designed to resist human occupation. He had gray hair gone to white at the temples, kept short, and a face that the sun and salt water had worked on over three decades into something that looked like it had been tested and had held up.

He was looking at the water.

Mike slowed, stopped, because the cut on Pat’s right hand was visible even at this distance — a clean slice across the palm, wrapped in what appeared to be a gas station paper towel held by a strip of electrical tape, the improvised first aid of a man who’d dealt with the injury wherever he was and hadn’t gone anywhere more equipped since.

“Pat.”

Pat looked up. Not startled — he’d heard Mike’s footsteps, probably from twenty yards out, the situational awareness of a man who spent time in environments where knowing what was around you was a practical survival skill.

“Mike.” He said it the way you said a familiar name when the familiar name appearing was something you’d half expected and weren’t sure how to feel about.

“That hand needs something better than electrical tape.”

“Probably.” Pat looked back at the water. “I’m okay.”

Mike sat on the cooler’s other end, which was not the response Pat had designed the two words to produce, and they sat there together for a moment with the ocean doing its low November thing in front of them, the light coming up slowly the way November light came up, taking its time about it.

“You want to tell me what happened.”

“Not particularly.”

“Okay.”

That was it for a while. Seagulls worked the waterline twenty yards south. The pelicans moved further offshore, where something had apparently improved their prospects. The air had the salt and iodine smell of a beach at high tide when the water was fully on the shore and the exposed-sand smell hadn’t come in yet.

“We were running the south corridor,” Pat said, finally. The way people said things they’d decided to say while appearing to have decided nothing. “Night dive. Billy’s idea, I’ll be honest about that, because Billy’s ideas always have a way of sounding reasonable until you’re in the middle of them.”

“What were you looking for.”

“Billy said he’d found something. Equipment on the seafloor, thirty feet down, about eleven miles south of the inlet. He’d been out there free diving on a weekend and he swam over a debris field and got curious.” Pat turned the wrapped hand over, looked at it. “Turns out that’s the right word for it. Debris. What it looked like, anyway.”

“What happened to your hand.”

“Equipment casing. Edge of it. Dark water, you come up against something wrong and you come up against it fast.” He said it with the matter-of-fact tone of a man for whom underwater injuries were a cost-of-business reality and the specific details of this one were less relevant than the context surrounding it. “That’s not the part that kept me out here at five-thirty.”

Mike waited.

“There was another diver,” Pat said. “Not Billy — Billy was twenty yards off, working the debris field. Somebody else. Already in the water when we got there, working that same area.” He looked at the horizon. “He knew we were there before we knew he was there. Dive lights in dark water, you see them coming a long way off. He waited until I was close and then came at my light, not aggressive — more like trying to see who I was. And then he went. Fast, directional, a man who knew where he was going and had made the decision to go before I’d finished registering he was there.”

“Professional.”

“Trained, anyway. Recreational divers don’t move like that in dark water.” Pat’s jaw worked. “He was coming up from the debris field. Whatever’s down there, he wasn’t discovering it. He knew it was there.”

Mike sat with that.

“You didn’t call the coast guard.”

“I didn’t know what to call about.” Pat stood, the motion of a man whose body had stiffened during the sitting and was reasserting its preference for movement. “I went home. Cleaned up the hand. Drove here because I needed somewhere to sit that wasn’t my house.” He looked at Mike with the direct, assessing look of a man who’d made a decision somewhere between the parking lot and the cooler. “Earl says you look into things.”

“Sometimes.”

“Earl says you’ve looked into some things this year and they turned out to be bigger than they appeared initially.”

“That’s one way to describe it.”

“What’s another way.”

Mike looked at the ocean, at the flat November water going its own direction without asking anyone’s opinion about it. “Things that look like individual problems turn out to be the same problem wearing different faces. The face I see is usually the smallest one.”

Pat was quiet for a moment. “My salvage permit’s been in renewal delay for six weeks. Regional maritime office in Jacksonville, no explanation, calls returned late with less information than the call cost.” He said it with the specific flatness of someone who’d been telling himself this was routine and had recently stopped believing his own telling. “I’ve had that permit for twelve years. I’ve renewed it four times. It’s never taken more than three weeks.”

“Six weeks and a professional diver already in your debris field,” Mike said.

“That’s the part I keep coming back to.” Pat picked up the electrical-tape hand, looked at it as if deciding whether to say the next sentence or leave it unsaid. “Whatever Billy found, somebody else knows it’s there and doesn’t want it recovered.”

Mike stood. The run had another mile and a half in it if he was going to keep the circuit he’d started, and his knees were going to have opinions about stopping halfway through that they didn’t currently have. But the cooler and the man on it had the quality that things had when they were going to matter — that low-frequency, slightly off-temperature feeling that he’d learned, over a summer of this kind of work, preceded being useful.

“Come by the marina this afternoon,” Mike said. “Earl’s office. Bring whatever documentation you have on the permit renewal — the original filing, the acknowledgment from the regional office, any correspondence since.” He paused. “And bring Billy.”

“Billy’s twenty-three.”

“I know.”

“He talks.”

“I know that too.” Mike started back south, turning into his run, the knees accepting the restart without too much editorial. “Pat. Don’t go back to that dive site until I’ve talked to some people.”

Pat didn’t answer, which was its own kind of answer — a man who made his living in the ocean not agreeing to stay out of it was at least honest about his relationship with the instruction.

Mike ran south through the improving light, the pelicans back onshore now, the seagulls doing their disorganized thing along the waterline. By the time he passed the developer’s cleared lot the sun was fully committed to the day, the light going from directional to ambient, the whole beach visible rather than suggested.

He ran the last half mile thinking about a debris field eleven miles south of the inlet at thirty feet, a professional diver in dark water who knew where he was going before Mike’s flashlight found him, and a salvage permit that had renewed without delay for twelve years and suddenly couldn’t get through a regional office in six weeks.

Individual problems. Different faces. The smallest face.

The house smelled like coffee when he got back, because he’d left the pot on a timer, the one reasonable accommodation to future self that past self consistently managed. He showered, dressed, ate the same eggs-and-toast breakfast that had become the morning’s standard, and stood at the window over the sink with the first cup watching Mrs. Alvarez’s dachshund work its loop.

The burner phone was on the nightstand where it lived. He picked it up on the way through the bedroom to get his jacket.

One new text, received at five fifty-three, while he was on the beach.

From Jenny’s number.

Not a message. Just her name, typed into the message field and sent: Jenny Baker.

He looked at it for a moment. A person texted their own name to a contact when they were deciding whether to call, which was the specific behavior of someone who’d started to do something and hadn’t fully committed to doing it. Jenny Baker had sent her own name to the burner phone at five fifty-three in the morning, which meant she’d been awake and thinking about something specific at five fifty-three, and the something specific had her circling a call without making it.

He could call her. He’d called her before from this number and she’d answered. But the text wasn’t an invitation to call — it was a report of an internal state. Calling on the basis of it would be answering a question she hadn’t asked yet.

He put the phone in his jacket pocket and went to make a second cup, because the day had given him two things before seven AM that were going to need thinking about, and thinking about two things simultaneously required more coffee than thinking about one.

Pat Doyle on a beach cooler at five-forty-five with electrical tape on his hand.

Jenny Baker texting her own name to the burner phone at five fifty-three.

Two things. Different faces.

He drank the coffee at the counter and decided, the way he’d learned to decide things over a summer of this kind of work, to let them be separate until they weren’t, and to spend the time between now and them being the same thing doing the ground-level work that always preceded the moment when the shape of a thing resolved.

He called Earl Tucker at seven-fifteen.

“Pat Doyle,” Mike said, when Earl picked up.

“Figured,” Earl said. “He’s been looking like a man sitting on something for two weeks. Worse this morning.”

“How’d you know about this morning.”

“His boat was out last night and back before five. I know his engine.” A pause. “He talk to you?”

“He talked to me.”

“He coming by this afternoon?”

“With Billy.”

Earl made the sound he made when something confirmed what he’d already decided. “I’ll keep Cody off the fuel dock from two onward. Give you the office trailer.”

“Appreciated.”

“You eating enough? You sound like a man who ate half a breakfast.”

“I ate a full breakfast, Earl.”

“Hm.” The particular skeptical hm of a man who’d been feeding people from a marina for thirty years and had formed views on the relationship between breakfast completeness and operational effectiveness. “I’ll have the cook make something for when you come by.”

Mike let that stand without argument, which was the most efficient response to Earl Tucker’s opinions about meals, and hung up.

The November morning held its quality outside the window — the kind of day that Florida offered occasionally in this season as a reminder of what it could be when it wasn’t trying to kill you with heat. The dachshund had completed its loop. Mrs. Alvarez was back inside. The street was empty in the specific way of a street whose residents had all started their days and the street itself was between purposes.

He picked up the regular phone, not the burner, and called Jennings.

She answered on the second ring.

“Tell me something I can work on,” she said, which was her version of good morning when she’d already been at her desk long enough to be ready for information.

“Commercial salvage diver out of Calusa Cay. Pat Doyle. Federal maritime permit up for renewal six weeks ago, Jacksonville regional office, no movement.” He drank the coffee. “His dive partner found a debris field eleven miles south of the inlet. Equipment on the seafloor, thirty feet down. Pat went back last night to look and found someone already in the water. Professional. In and out before Pat could get a read on him.”

Jennings was writing. He could hear the pen.

“The permit delay and the mystery diver are connected,” she said. Not a question — a working assumption she was already building on.

“That’s how it feels.”

“Feels how, specifically.”

“Like the permit delay is designed to keep Pat from doing the one thing that would establish what the debris field actually is.”

“What does he think it is.”

“Equipment casings, survey gear. The kind that costs real money.” He set the cup down. “Jennings. Serial numbers on the equipment — if Billy photographed them, and Billy photographed everything because Billy is twenty-three and photographs things reflexively, those numbers run through a federal equipment registry.”

“You think it’s survey equipment placed there deliberately.”

“I think a professional diver in dark water at thirty feet eleven miles offshore at night isn’t recreational, and I think a salvage permit that’s renewed without delay for twelve years doesn’t suddenly stall for six weeks for no reason.” He paused. “I think somebody surveyed the southern lagoon corridor and left the equipment on the seafloor afterward, and I think the permit delay is designed to make sure the person most likely to find and recover that equipment can’t legally do anything with what he finds.”

The pen stopped.

“Southern lagoon corridor,” Jennings said.

“South of the inlet. The proposed pipeline route.”

The pen didn’t start again. The silence had the quality of someone running something through a context they already had and finding that the new information fit the existing context in a way that was both satisfying and uncomfortable.

“Send me Pat Doyle’s permit renewal documentation when you have it,” she said. “And get Billy’s photographs of the serial numbers.”

“This afternoon.”

“I’ll run the equipment registry tonight.” She paused. “Mike. The Forward Florida land bank parcels — three of the sixteen are in the southern lagoon corridor.”

He stood at the window.

“I know,” he said. Though he hadn’t, until she said it, connected the specific geography. The land bank from Jenny’s pages, the sixteen frozen parcels across six Florida counties. Three of them corridor.

“The pipeline route would increase the value of those parcels considerably,” Jennings said. “Access to deepwater port infrastructure changes what waterfront property is worth.”

“Same play,” Mike said. “Same land bank. Same infrastructure investment. Different county, different project, same hand.”

“Johnson’s making one more move,” Jennings said. “Before the case closes.”

Mike looked at the empty street outside the window, at the November morning that was going about its business with its usual indifference to the things people were doing inside their houses while it went about its business.

“Tell Drummond,” he said.

“Already typing the email,” Jennings said, and hung up.

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