09-Twelve Mile Limit by Randy Wayne White Page A

if Ransom or the good ladies of the Satin Doll can talk her into spending the night with us here at the marina. But I warn you right now, Amelia, stay at Dinkin’s Bay tonight, and you’re in for an evening of blissful excesses …” He smiled at her, his haunted eyes telling her something, offering comfort, perhaps, as he added, “Blissful excess or maybe even some wholesale debauchery. We’ll have all the food and drink you can handle.”
    Right on cue, people hooted and applauded.
    That quick, he’d changed the mood. Amelia lifted her face from her hands. He’d earned a little smile.

6
    Later that night, what started as a typical bar fight nearly escalated into a riot, and, as I told Tomlinson later, we should have both seen it coming and found a way to put a halt to it before it got started.
    “How was I supposed to stop anything?” he asked me. “I had a pitcher of margaritas in me, four Singapore slings, three grande mojitos made with delicious fresh mint, a six-pack of Corona, plus two joints of very fine Voodoo Surprise. There also may have been pills involved—I remember very distinctly speaking to that lady anesthetist from Englewood. We both know she tends to be overly generous with her recreational pharmaceuticals. No telling what poison that Asiatic brute may have put into my hands. My friend—” he was shaking his head, being serious, “it is impossible for one to impose social order when one is lying facedown, puking, in the sand next to the totem pole at Jensen’s Marina.”
    Then he pointed out: “I do remember that you seemed a little drunk yourself, Marion. That’s not something we see in these parts very often, Doc Ford out of control. I don’t think you were in a position to stop what happened, either.”
    Well … not out of control, but I did have too much to drink. Tomlinson was right. It’s something I rarely do. Alcohol poisoning makes it impossible to do the quiet, articulate work in my lab at night or to enjoy my run or ocean swim the next morning.
    But like everyone else at the marina, Amelia’s story had ripped the emotional bottom right out of me. I’d believed everything she’d said, which is why in retrospect her confidential assertion to me that a boat might have picked the others up really knocked me off my own personal tracks.
    I’d already accepted the fact that Janet was lost. She was dead and gone, and I’d said good-bye to her in my own private way.
    Now, though, Amelia Gardner had opened a tiny little corridor of uncertainty and hope. I was so shaken by it that I immediately understood her wisdom when she asked me not to share the information with the others.
    There is nothing in life so unsettling or so painful as the unknown.
    Alcohol is a favorite analgesic for both.
    The traditional Friday parties at Dinkin’s Bay are usually relaxed and conversational, with pauses for music and maybe a little dancing. Fifteen or twenty people mingling on the docks, discussing esoterica that would be of interest only to those of us who live on the islands.
    This party was different, though. It had a different attitude and a different feel, probably because of the stress we’d all been under—not just because of Janet, but because, for the last many months, we’d all been living with the knowledge that Dinkin’s Bay soon might be closed to all powerboat traffic.
    If that happened, the feds would come in, rip down the old Florida fish camp that is Dinkin’s Bay, and replace it with some sterile, pressure-treated, and poured-to-form clone of the government’s idea of a marina. They would equip it with regulation buildings and docks. It seemed unlikely that, on Sanibel, they’d be able to find and hire the breed of seniority-system employees such buildings required, but that was a sad possibility, too.
    For one or both reasons, everyone at the marina that night seemed more intimately aware that life is brief and that our interaction with the people and places we love is temporary. Those feelings caused