Sanbiel Flats
Authors: Randy Wayne WhiteNarrator: Dick Hill
Duration: 10h 23m
My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Tags: adventure - detective - comedy
Getting fit with a
Quotes:
Ford guessed, wealth was a sophisticated scorecard, a casualty list of enemies.
Tomlinson, who spent his days reading esoteric books on world history and doing God knows what else, was prone to make intuitive leaps, forgoing linear thought; leaps that produced some interesting conclusions. Which is why Ford kept beer in the refrigerator for Tomlinson.
In the tumult of that time, he projected the many roles he played as the manifestations of a single truth. But even his belief in that single truth added to a growing confusion in him. Gradually, the horror dawned that he was just one more player in a generation of bad actors, and that The Truth was just another buzz phrase, not unlike “Where’s your head at?” and “Get your act together.”
Watching, looking at Jeth’s face. Tomlinson was reminded of one of those American film characters, the simple country kid destined for glory. He knew Jeth was not simple—no one was. But Tomlinson, who believed in the glory of the individual, thought the last part might be right. One never knew.
He drove through palmetto flats, then turned west into the commercial outskirts of municipal Southwest Florida, a burgeoning hedgework of asphalt and concrete that extended fifty miles in each direction, Tampa to Naples, pressed right up against the Gulf of Mexico. Real estate brokers, title-insurance offices, 7-Elevens, notaries, law firms, U-Haul rentals, and all the other service components of a society on the move. Here were the nuts and bolts of mobility; the infrastructure to which the rootless seekers and dreamers tethered their hopes of living happily in the sun. Many made it. They did good work, took pride in their lives, raised pretty kids. They earned and enjoyed their little chunk of success. But here, also, were the repo car lots, the boarded businesses, the pawnshops and bail bondsmen; the symptoms of dreams that had gone sour, and the agents who gathered up those broken hopes and resold them at a profit. It was the urban spore of a state on the make; a here-today, gone-tomorrow economic combat that left Ford anxious to get back to his house on the water.
Facts, Ford knew, could be stretched, torn, and reconstituted to support any proposition. That’s why he followed his own strict lab procedures so veraciously. It was also why he had little faith in the legal system. The legal system, Ford knew, was an abacus of shrewdness, not a scale of justice. Indeed, true justice was an anomaly. It was not that legislators, attorneys, and judges weren’t good and decent human beings—though some certainly were not. The problem was that they and their legal forebears had gradually perverted the legal system for the protection of their own profession. Jurisprudence was no longer a moral process. It was a competition in which the competitors—attorneys—created their own rules. It was the lone oversight in the carefully constructed system of checks and balances created by the nation’s founding fathers. The oversight was this: Most legislators were also attorneys. The founding fathers had not foreseen it and probably had no reason to worry about it at the time. As a result, new laws favored the competition of law, not the society that the legislators were mandated to serve. Which was why social ethics and legal ethics—once nearly synonymous—were now strange antonyms, orbiting in concentric circles. Professional behavior that would be considered outrageous by any society on earth was now perfectly acceptable behavior in the outlander orbit of legal ethics. Which was why attorneys could use videos to coach criminals how to lie more effectively to juries. Which was why accident liability had become a predatory device. Which was why judges, if the letter of the law allowed, could, in perfectly good conscience, release murderers, rapists, child molesters, and thugs back into the social maelstrom. The legal ethic was always served, but that ethic—like justice—was a facade, a careful illusion propped up by those who had helped to destroy justice at its roots. Successfully negotiating the legal system. Ford knew, required that an individual be shrewd. Or wealthy. Or both. And Jeth Nicholes was poorly equipped on all counts.
Ford waited, smiling himself. These men were happy in their work; happier than most, perhaps because their daily dealings with death produced in them a more essential awareness of fragile, transient life.
“A tourist area attracts some pretty strange characters,” he said. “Maybe it’s the same with a college town. Both are ideal cruising grounds for transient types, people with the rogue mentality. Because no one knows them, they can create the illusion of being anything they choose to be. Their lies go unchallenged. Understand? In a land populated with strangers, the illusion of fact is more important than the facts themselves. So they’re accepted without question.” Ford looked at the two to see if they were following along. They were—probably even a little ahead of him.
Pathological liars—and psychopaths— are very methodical. They don’t panic. Covering their tracks is a way of life. Isn’t that right?”
Dalbert was fond of calling himself an old country boy, a persona that excused stupidity while implying an innate shrewdness he did not possess.
The beach people came in shifts; moved to and from the houses, hotels, and condos as methodically as a sundial. First came the solitary ones, joggers and fishermen and strollers; early-morning poets out to commune with sunrise. By 10 a.m., suntan freaks had replaced them; the Hawaiian Tropic aficionados basting away, broiling like corn belt hams until the damaged melanin of their skin cells turned black or fiery red from actinic-ray poisoning. By 2 p.m., one shift of sunbathers was replaced with another; a rowdier bunch with radios and Frisbees and coolers.
Now, only an hour before sunset, Ford could see that the late shift was beginning to retreat. Men lugged lounge chairs up the beach while women in bikinis too daring to wear back home in Steubenville or Buffalo folded towels and gathered kids so they could return to their hotel rooms and shower for dinner. The sunbathers were already being replaced by shell hunters. Sanibel and Captiva islands were famous for shelling, and the low tide had drawn them out. men and women in L. L. Bean shorts and floppy hats, shelling bags in hand. A whole wandering line of people looking for whelks and crown conchs and rare junonias. There was no mistaking a sheller. Even in a crowd, they were isolated by their concentration, touching the sand expertly with their bare toes, walking a strange hunched walk as if they were myopics who had strayed from their honeymoon suite and were desperately trying to track their way back.
Another option was to make a pass at both of them—an idea not so farfetched, judging from the body language and constant knee contact they kept up with him. But Ford knew, in time, that would alienate them both, and it wasn’t worth losing the goodwill of neighbors. Plus, it seemed a little too weird, not to mention demanding.
Ford liked storms. In the right mood, and in the right boat, he liked being out in storms. He liked the intimacy of it. He liked having to deal with the elements— people so rarely had to deal with anything elemental. Wind, fire, water—it was all there. He liked being out and alone in the wind and wild light of a blowing rain squall; liked the way it focused his attention and reduced all the threads of his life to one gleaming filament. Not that he went hunting squalls. Nor would he have admitted it, if he did. But there were times when he had the option of sitting one out or riding one out. When he was alone, he nearly always chose to ride.
Which, in truth, was the circumstance he desired. To be in a storm without option was to be shed of all affectation and the risk of contrivance. It made an unreasonable action reasonable, so Ford welcomed it. He didn’t want the luxury of a choice, because he saw himself as an unremittingly reasonable man.