Chapter 13: The Bay

The gate on Biscayne Bay was due at 6:00 on Wednesday morning, and before it opened there were forty-one boats waiting.

I counted them from the end of the dock at Virginia Key, with my stomach already moving.

Most of the boats were tailgating.

A pontoon had a smoker strapped to the rail and a cardboard menu that said GUN DAY BRISKET, $14.

A fishing guide sold coffee out of a cooler at $4 a cup, and I said nothing.

A county marine deputy in an orange boat worked down the line checking Gate Permits.

The permit costs $85, and Abuela had bought mine the day the commission voted and made me laminate it.

"You're early," said a voice behind me.

Petty Officer First Class Albury stood on the dock in a blue work uniform with her braids pinned up and a sunburn across her nose.

She was five foot ten, and she held a clipboard.

I had last seen her in a Publix lot with her body over a wounded woman.

"Ma'am," I said.

"Joelle," she said. "On the boat you call me Petty Officer, and on land you can pick."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Don't throw up on the deck," she said. "It's a response boat, not a pontoon."

The boat was a forty-five foot Coast Guard hull the color of a dishwasher, with a crew of four.

The commander of her station had signed off on a civilian liaison, and that was me.

I was the only person on the dock who had been given a title instead of a hot dog.

On the dot the bay split open.

It happened a quarter mile east of Virginia Key, on the surface, and it did not hum like the breach on Palm Avenue.

A gray disc sixty feet across spread on the water, flat as a manhole cover, with a rim of white salt floating at its edge.

The forty-one boats went quiet.

I thought the word Appraise and read the card off the disc.

[Gate: Biscayne Bay. Class II. Anchor: Tide-walker.]

[Break: four days after opening. Inside: bay bottom, filed 1971.]

The Inside was a shallow, eight feet of clear gray water over a flat floor with square channel markers drawn in salt.

Four more cards opened one after another, each with a number and a seam.

[Tide-walker. Class II. Health 300 of 300. Condition: Waiting.]

[Seam: gill slit, behind the water claw.]

They stood on the bottom like crabs the size of a pickup, and they were waiting for something to come into the water.

I wrote the rule on the back of my hand with Joelle's pen.

A tide-walker lives on the bottom, and it only comes up to the surface to strike.

The gill slit shows for about two seconds when it does.

The rest of the time there was eight feet of salt water between it and every gun in Miami.

The bass boat made the point for me.

It was a twenty-foot hull in a camouflage wrap, and a man in the bow held a rifle with a pink stock.

He saw the gray shapes through the clear water, and he said something to his friends that I could not hear.

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