The Heat Islands

Authors: Randy Wayne White
Narrator: Dick Hill
Duration: 12h 08m
My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Tags: adventure - detective - comedy

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Another great narration by Dick Hill.

I’ve started listening to Doc Ford from 3rd book, and if there Doc Ford was shy, awkward and paranoid and it was mostly about his uncle, this book is about him, telling us not much about his history but his character.

Doc ford is like Jack Reacher but with a PHD, wearing glasses, being smart and avoiding fights. Not a impulsive ask questions later, not a lonely warrior who always travels, but opposite. Not as much stress.

Adventures around the world, investigation of a friend murder, guerilla tactics.

A ok book.

Quotes:

He left the old man sitting in baggy underwear among the candles and ran out of the park at an easy pace. When the police noticed him, he gave a bland wave and peered at his watch: a runner intent on his training.

All marinas are more than a sum total of docks and property, bait wells, ships’ stores, and receipts. They are communities; ephemeral colonies with personalities as varied as the individuals who form them.

His rapid climb to position in the community surprised no one more than Ford. He had always been a private person, a man who attracted people and valued his friends yet went his own way. But just as the marina s society had adjusted to him, Ford adjusted to his new role, his new life, doing his work each day and sometimes far into the night, accepting callers with the offer of cold beer and letting down his guard, slowly, slowly, for it was not easy after ten years of being necessarily suspicious and living a life of professional deceit.

What was it in the faces of children, he wondered, that created the impression of innocence and keyed in some adults—himself, to name one—the urge to shield them from all harm? It was more than bone structure and the absence of facial lines. It had to be more than an experiential judgment, too, for children sometimes demonstrated the capacity for great cruelty. Perhaps the source of the emotion was some deep coding in the DNA, evolved during speciation to protect the young from marauding adults; a built-in check for the preservation of species.

Those wire-kinda glasses you wear and those baggy clothes might fool some people, but me, I take a look at a man’s shoulders and his wrists.

The bedroom was to her what golf or skiing were to her co-workers. She liked men, all kinds of men, but she was selective and discreet. She told Ford she’d kept a record of every man she had ever been with—in code, of course, because her men often held public office. In the diary, each man was graded in a variety of categories (Ford hadn’t asked what categories) so she could look back and have fun remembering when she was old and single. “Because I’m always going to be single,” she had told him. “No husband could put up with my hobby.” When Ford met her, there were forty-three entries in her book. By the time she confided in him, he was already number forty-four. He had always avoided promiscuous women and probably would have avoided Sally had he known in advance. But the woman was a devotee, and Ford admired dedication wherever he happened to find it.

Ford could see the evening taking shape; could see it in Dr. Braun-Richards’s blue eyes. Nothing overt, but not coy; aware that a subliminal process of selection was going on; aware that, because she was on vacation, there was no time for the normal presexual proprieties. Ford liked that awareness.

After cremation—man or animal—the only thing you can test for in the lab is metal content in the bones. The metallic poisons, like arsenic, aren’t destroyed by fire. I doubt if Rafe was poisoned, but, if he was, they wouldn’t have used arsenic. Arsenic tastes bad. It has to be given in small doses over a long period of time.

He could feel her breathing, feel her heart beat. He was looking down the soft curvature of her stomach, seeing muscle cordage and ribs flex with each breath, and he was thinking there was a finite number of times he would be with this woman and there ought to be a way to lock onto a moment such as this, to preserve it, but there wasn’t. Never would be.

An outsider might be able to wrangle a small bit of information from one, but the hope of assembling incriminating data from all three was absurd. What he could do, though, was try to use the organization-organism theory to his advantage. In nature, all organisms filled the dual role of predator and the preyed upon. Big things attacked smaller things. They picked up the scent, stalked, and fed.

Don’t doubt for a second that everything in this world happens at exactly the right time. It all falls into place, just waiting on us to come along.

Too few public servants had the foresight, or the courage, to say what was really true: that allowing growth to be self-limiting was the very worst form of carrion-feeder economics. It was a get-it-quick-before-it-rots philosophy that promised long-term disaster even more surely than short-term profits. Only three things limited growth naturally: crime, decay, and overpopulation. Most politicians didn’t have the courage to say it, and too many voters didn’t give a damn because Florida wasn’t their state anyway, not really. Wasn’t anything their grandkids were going to be stuck with. They were really New Yorkers or Hoosiers or Buckeyes; just happened to be living here for a while, that’s all. Besides, Florida was just an old whore who was going to be picked clean no matter what, so why not get in line, make some quick money?

He much preferred adulthood, living in the present, and had little patience with the nostalgia freaks, people who escaped the obligations of Now by living in the rosy Then of their imaginations.

Ford drove through the sterile downtown area, immune to the tacky Polynesian fasades and cutesy boutiques.

Former high school teammates, counter-culture Sixties’ expatriates who had weathered the Age of Aquarius, the Drug Culture, and Beatlemania without noticeable scars, probably because they hadn’t paid any of it much attention. They looked like businessmen or commercial fishermen, but their faces still had the weird beach boys light: good-timers who had joined the establishment without being ingested by it. They didn’t look too happy now, though. Just uncomfortable.

Ford settled into his seat, ready to tune out the slick, shallow performance to come. But, surprise, surprise, the sermon was neither slick nor shallow. The Reverend Somebody turned out to be a thoughtful man and an honest speaker. No, he hadn’t known Rafe. But he knew about pain, and he knew about loss, and he spoke about the things he knew with sincerity, a clarity, and a sense of humor that had every man there sitting up, listening. By the time he was done, Ford felt better about Rafe and better about funerals, but foolish for having stereotyped the minister so glibly. Presupposition was a disease of the lazy or terminally oblivious, and he had been showing symptoms of both lately.

That’s how you can tell you’ve reached middle age, by the way: Your friends start dying.

In his life, Ford had met four, maybe five women who had affected him in exactly the same way; women with that same quality of animal sexuality, a sexuality so strong that it bypassed the conscious fabric of awareness and struck some deep visceral chord. It had little to do with beauty. None of the ones Ford had known had been model material. They had been tall and gawky, lean and sharp, or ripe and doughy like this one, Helen Hollins.

Ford worked in his lab, , hoping the phone would ring. Once he had looked upon phones as little plastic invasions of privacy just waiting for an opportunity. Now he seemed chained to the damn thing.

There was part of a grass runway covered by the camouflage. So were two mobile units of antiaircraft artillery, old Yugoslavian M65s from the looks of them. Mostly, though, the camouflaged netting was being used to hide a baseball diamond.

Then the plane jolted, tires screeched, and, to the roar of reverse thrust, the hundred or so people aboard, most of them slightly tipsy with all the complimentary wine, settled a little as their sphincter muscles relaxed, the cheerful mood of traveling replaced by the communal awareness of survival, and they applauded the good landing.

He had known the woman years ago. They’d slept together a couple of times, back when she was a Peace Corps volunteer, a rich American girl with an itch to help the less fortunate, ripe with guilt and eager to make restitution, but who somehow seemed destined to be swallowed up by the very darkness from which she wished to wrest others. Ford had met many Wendy Staffords in his travels: American princesses who sought out the jungle on a lark, but who soon found themselves entangled beyond any hope of escaping.

He had known the woman years ago. They’d slept together a couple of times, back when she was a Peace Corps volunteer, a rich American girl with an itch to help the less fortunate, ripe with guilt and eager to make restitution, but who somehow seemed destined to be swallowed up by the very darkness from which she wished to wrest others. Ford had met many Wendy Staffords in his travels: American princesses who sought out the jungle on a lark, but who soon found themselves entangled beyond any hope of escaping.

During the six months he worked in San Jose, he had become friendly with a couple of the girls. Though he sometimes paid them, he never slept with them—not that it would have been an indignity to him. He had slept with women of far lower moral fabric who were of supposedly much higher social stature— women who were whores by nature, not by occupation. He had never slept with a girl from the Garden because, Ford told himself, he didn’t want to add to the desperation that he guessed was the framework of those smiles. Pure egotism on his part, as if he could make some slight difference.

Some of the American princesses lost themselves because of love. Or because the promiscuity had gotten out of hand and, in their own minds, made it impossible for them to return. Or because of drugs.

“Baseball is more than a game, man. It’s a ceremony.” “All the people who have ever played baseball are linked by virtue of having dealt with predictable game situations in unpredictable ways, each person trying to resolve random events within an orderly sphere of balls, strikes, and outs—” “Plus there’s the scorebook: a historical document more accurate and succinct than, say, the Old Testament. All these thousands and thousands of scorebooks all over the world forming an unbroken ceremonial chronicle far more detailed than, say, Ireland’s Book of Kells—”

These boys were the substance and sustenance of war in Central America, leaving their mothers to carry weapons made in countries they knew nothing about and would probably never see; fighting battles against their own kind in which each side functioned as little more than mercenaries on their own land.

No. You’ve got it backward. Life back home is like something out of a movie. That’s what people don’t realize