The Deadlier Sex Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Teaser chapter

  PRAISE FOR RANDY WAYNE WHITE AND HIS NOVELS

  “What James Lee Burke has done for Louisiana, Tony Hillerman for the Southwest, John Sandford for Minnesota, and Joe R. Lansdale for east Texas, Randy Wayne White does for his own little acre.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “White takes us places that no other Florida mystery writer can hope to find.”

  —Carl Hiaasen

  “White brings vivid imagination to his fight scenes. Think Mickey Spillane meets The Matrix.”

  —People

  “A major new talent … hits the ground running … a virtually perfect piece of work. He’s the best new writer we’ve encountered since Carl Hiaasen.”

  —The Denver Post

  “White is the rightful heir to joining John D. Mac-Donald, Carl Hiaasen, James Hall, Geoffrey Norman… . His precise prose is as fresh and pungent as a salty breeze.”

  —The Tampa Tribune

  “White doesn’t just use Florida as a backdrop, but he also makes the smell, sound, and physicality of the state leap off the page.”

  —South Florida Sun-Sentinel

  “This satisfying madcap fare could go seismic on the regional bestseller lists.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “He describes southwestern Florida so well it’s easy to smell the salt tang in the air and feel the cool Gulf breeze.”

  —Mansfield News Journal

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

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  Published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, August 1981

  First Printing (Author Introduction), October 2007

  eISBN : 978-1-101-53060-3

  Copyright (c) New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 1981

  Introduction copyright (c) Randy Wayne White, 2006

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  For D.J.W. and General Lee

  Few things are more illuminating than our own sense of darkness… .

  —R. WAYNE WHITE

  Introduction

  In the winter of 1980, I received a surprising phone call from an editor at Signet Books—surprising because, as a Florida fishing guide, the only time New Yorkers called me was to charter my boat. And if any of my clients were editors, they were savvy enough not to admit it.

  The editor said she’d read a story by me in Outside Magazine and was impressed. Did I have time to talk?

  As a mediocre high school jock, my idols were writers, not ball players. I had a dream job as a lighttackle guide, yet I was still obsessed with my own dream of writing for a living. For years, before and after charters, I’d worked hard at the craft. Selling a story to Outside, one of the country’s finest publications, was a huge break. I was about to finish a novel, but this was the first time New York had called.

  Yes, I had time to talk.

  The editor, whose name was Joanie, told me Signet wanted to launch a paperback thriller series that featured a recurring he-man hero. “We want at least four writers on the project because we want to keep the books coming, publishing one right after the other, to create momentum.”

  Four writers producing books with the same character?

  “Characters,” Joanie corrected. “Once we get going, the cast will become standard.”

  Signet already had a template for the hero. He was a Vietnam vet turned Key West fishing guide, she said, talking as if the man existed. He was surfer-boy blond, and he’d been friends with Hemingway.

  I am not a literary historian, but all my instincts told me the timetable seemed problematic. I said nothing.

  “He has a shark scar,” Joanie added, “and he’s freakishly strong. Like a man who lifts weights all the time.”

  The guys I knew who lifted weights were also freakishly clumsy, so … maybe the hero, while visiting a local aquarium, tripped during feeding time?

  My brain was already problem-solving.

  “He lives in Key West,” she said, “so, of course, he has to be an expert on the area. That’s why I’m calling. You live in Key West, and I liked your magazine story a lot. It seems like a natural fit.”

  Actually, I fished out of Sanibel Island, on Florida’s Gulf Coast, a six-hour drive from Sloppy Joe’s, but this was no time for petty details.

  “Have you ever been to Key West?” I asked the editor. “Great sunsets.”

  Editors, I have since learned, can also be cagey. Joanie didn’t offer me the job. She had already settled on three of the four writers, she said, but if I was willing to submit a few sample chapters on speculation, she’d give me serious consideration.

  Money? A contract? That stuff was “all standard,” she told me, and could be discussed later.

  “I’ll warn you right now,” she said, “there are a couple of other writ
ers we’re considering, so you need to get at least three chapters to me within a month. Then I’ll let you know.”

  I hung up the phone, stunned by my good fortune. My first son, Lee, had been born only a few months earlier. My much adored wife, Debra, and I were desperate for money because the weather that winter had been miserable for fishing. But it was perfect for writing.

  I went to my desk, determined not to let my young family down.

  At Tarpon Bay Marina, where I was a guide, my friend Ralph Woodring owned a boat with Dusky painted in big blue letters on the side. My friend, Graeme Mellor, lived on a Morgan sailboat named No Mas.

  Dusky MacMorgan was born.

  Every winter, Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus came to town. Their trapeze artists, I realized, were not only freakishly strong, but they were also freakishly nimble.

  Dusky gathered depth.

  One of my best friends was the late Dr. Harold Westervelt, a gifted orthopedic surgeon. Dr. Westervelt became the Edison of Death, and he loved introducing himself that way to new patients. His son, David, became Westy O’Davis, and our spearfishing pal, Billy, became Billy Mack.

  Problems with my hero’s shark scar and his devoted friendship with Hemingway were also solved.

  Working around the clock, pounding away at my old black manual typewriter, I wrote Key West Connection in nine days. On a Monday morning, I waited for the post office to open to send it to New York.

  Joanie sounded a little dazed when she telephoned on Friday. Was I willing to try a second book on spec?

  Hell, yes.

  God, I was beginning to love New York’s can-do attitude.

  The other three writers (if they ever existed) were fired, and I became the sole proprietor of Captain Dusky MacMorgan—although Signet owned the copyright and all other rights after I signed Joanie’s “standard” contract. (This injustice was later made right by a willing and steadfast publisher and my brilliant agent.)

  If Joanie (a fine editor) feels badly about that today, she shouldn’t. I would’ve signed for less.

  I wrote seven of what I would come to refer to as “duck and fuck” books because in alternating chapters Dusky would duck a few bullets, then spend much-deserved time alone with a heroine.

  Seldom did a piece of paper go into my old typewriter that was ripped out and thrown away, and I suspect that’s the way the books read. I don’t know. I’ve never reread them. I do remember using obvious cliches, a form of self-loathing, as if to remind myself that I should be doing my own writing, not this job-of-work.

  The book you are now holding, and the other six, constituted a training arena for a young writer who took seriously the discipline demanded by his craft and also the financial imperatives of being a young father.

  For years, I apologized for these books. I no longer do.

  —Randy Wayne White

  Cartagena, Colombia

  1

  Less than ten minutes after the props of my thirty-four-foot sportfisherman, Sniper, almost cut the girl into fish-bait, the boat exploded.

  Not my boat.

  Some kind of commercial trawler. Hard to tell for sure. There wasn’t much left of it.

  It went up with a dazzling flash and rumble on the near horizon which turned the full-moon night to eerie day and exposed the mangrove jungle shoreline of the Ten Thousand Islands in a negative of stark whites and shadowed blacks. It was so unexpected that, for one crazy moment, I grabbed my head, thinking that I had been clubbed. But then, in the brightness of the explosion, I saw the burning four-foot wall of shock wave coming at us, and all we could do was hold fast and bow into it.

  We were supposed to be on a vacation cruise. A little rest and recreation for me and a wild Irish friend of mine, Westy O’Davis. I had met O’Davis down in Mariel Harbor, Cuba. Mariel was an ideal place for making quick friends and influencing deadly enemies. The Irishman had, in the period of less than twenty-four hours, become a close friend. He also happened to have saved my life. Twice.

  And he wasn’t about to let me forget it.

  So he had come to visit me on my little house built on stilts out on the clearwater flats of Calda Bank near the pirate island of Key West, where I moor my charterboat, Sniper. For years it was a valued way of life—working as a fishing guide, going down every morning to the docks at Garrison Bight where my sign reads:

  Captain Dusky MacMorgan

  Billfish, Dolphin, Sharks, Grouper

  Full days, Half days—inquire at Marina

  I didn’t make much money as a fishing guide. But on the other side of the ledger, I had all the good clear fishing days a man could want, pretty nice tourist people to show a good time to, and best of all I was my own boss. Once I also had a fine wife and twin boys who were the best of both of us. But then the drug pirates got them, and I had nothing.

  So I went back to doing what I did best—the deadly trade I learned as a Navy SEAL. Revenge is not an ideal reason for living, but it’s certainly one of the most compelling.

  And I have lived fully since.

  Especially in Mariel Harbor, Cuba.

  So, after that ordeal, it seemed reasonable that O’Davis and I take a little time off. O’Davis, who works for that labor-union-ruled island called Great Britain, is a leprechaun giant with red beard, copper hair, and a Viking face which speaks with the amused black humor of the Irish poet. O’Davis had gone to Mariel from his island home in the Caymans, where his cover occupation includes leading scuba-diving tours and squiring around the pretty tourist ladies.

  But he had had enough of government work and killing, and so had I, so we had spent that first week on my stilthouse drinking cold beer, battling good fish on light tackle, and telling tall tales. Then one night, while I sat with beer, a good book, and a fresh dip of Copenhagen, O’Davis began to go through my library of Florida charts. He unrolled them one by one, studying them, humming some strange tune as he did. I watched his broad face in the yellow light of the kerosene lamp.

  “I want those all rolled back and catalogued the way I had them, O’Davis.”

  “Tum-da-dum-dum-dum … what?” And when I repeated it, he made a face of mock outrage. “An’ do ya think me some kind of slovenly child, Dusky MacMorgan, that ya be remindin’ me to care for yer precious charts?”

  “I do.”

  “Hah! An’ now yer laughin’ at me to boot!” He made as if to throw down the chart he was holding, then thought better of it. “So this is the thanks I get for savin’ the life of the likes of you—and a big ugly brute you are, too… .”

  “Oh God, O’Davis.”

  “I’ll wager ya didna think me a slovenly child when meself, Westy O’Davis, clouted the Cuban guard who was about ta shoot ya.”

  “Do I have to listen to this again?”

  “An’ knocked the bloody Russian rifle from the other guard’s hands.”

  “O’Davis?”

  “Jest when he was about ta shoot ya, ya ugly little snit.”

  “O’Davis. Just tell me why you’re looking at the charts. Okay?”

  He stopped in midsentence, looked at me, and grinned. It was the kind of pleasant banter we had been enjoying all week; the kind the big Irishman reveled in. He rattled the chart meaningfully and said grandly, “Because, brother MacMorgan, tomorrow we’re gettin’ on that black-hulled power demon of yers and takin’ a trip. All week long ya’ve been tellin’ me that the only coastal wilderness left in Florida is the southwest coast, an’ now that I’ve seen the Ten Thousand Islands on a chart, I want to see them in real life.”

  I shrugged, hiding my enthusiasm. Truth was, my stilthouse is awfully close quarters for two big men. And I, like the Irishman, was getting a little antsy. Besides, I loved the Ten Thousand Islands and the wilderness below it. On a map of Florida, it looks like the area below Naples and that concrete grotesquerie called Marco Island breaks into a massive jigsaw puzzle of windswept islands and sea. It’s wild and deserted—a hundred miles of tidal rivers and mangrove islands and st
retches of desolate beaches.

  “Bugs will be bad,” I said.

  “Devil take the bugs.”

  “I have a friend who lives on one of the backcountry islands. He’s a hermit.”

  “The island with all the tarpon?”

  I nodded. “But there’ll be no women, O’Davis. Don’t forget that. You’re not going to be able to slip into Key West like you did last night and cat around.”

  He put on his special lecherous look and winked at me, a big bawdy wink. “And after last night, who needs the ladies, brother MacMorgan? I felt like a candle in a town full of moths, I did—so who needs ‘em now?”

  So that’s how we happened to be cruising off White Horse Key on a full-moon night in June. It had taken us three very lazy days of fishing and diving to get across Florida Bay and idle our way along Cape Sable, past the mangrove giants of Shark River. We had spent the best of the twilight nosing around Indian Key Pass on the outgoing tide, taking five good snook on sweetened jigs—and releasing four. So now I steered from the main controls of the cabin, vectoring in on the distant flare of Coon Key Light with the vague idea of running Dismal Key Pass into the back country where the tarpon would be rolling in sheens of silver moonlight by the old houseboat across from Dismal Key.

  Because of the bright moon, we ran without lights. The VHF was squelched off in favor of a Fort Myers radio station that fed a steady diet of classic old jazz throughout Sniper. O’Davis was up on the flybridge supposedly watching for crabpot buoys that could foul Sniper‘s twin brass wheels—but he was actually gazing at the moon, drinking beer, and singing. It is the secret belief of most ethnic descendants that the little ethnic legends are full-blown truths, as if some mystic source seeds our brains with the talents of ancient birthright. With Italians it is cooking, with the French it is love, with the Swedes it is sailing, and with the Irish it is singing. I don’t know about the Italians, French, and Swedes, but Westy O’Davis was seriously shortchanged in his atavistic talents. His Irish tenor sounded more like a water spaniel having difficulties with a bear. Even so, he still loved to sing—and that’s really why he was up on the flybridge.