09-Twelve Mile Limit Read Free Page B

others.”
    He was breathing heavily. Not because he’d been running, but because of the panic he was in. Jeth is a big, good-looking guy with the dense muscularity and loyal face of a high school linebacker. The expression on his face was heartbreaking. The love affair between him and Janet had had its share of setbacks. But they loved each other and would almost certainly end up together. No one at the marina doubted that.
    For the last couple of weeks, Jeth and Janet had been suffering through an off-again cycle, and now the man appeared to be near tears. “We’ve got to get going, Doc! We’ve got to get out there and find her!” He pounded a big fist hard against his own thigh. “Christ!” he said miserably, “I can’t believe I let her go!”
    I walked over to him, put my hand on his shoulder, and told him, “She’ll be okay. We’ll find her. I promise.”
    I saw a small surge of relief come into his face. If I were that confident, so certain she would be found, then there was hope.
    The first thing I did was send Tomlinson and Ransom over to the docks to meet with the others so they could start formulating a plan. With winds blowing fifteen to twenty knots, and seas four to six feet offshore, our small boats wouldn’t be able to make the thirty-mile trip to Marco Island via water. Too dangerous, too exhausting. We’d have to trailer our skiffs south and hope that a couple of the liveaboards would volunteer to run down in their much bigger vessels and let us use them as mother ships.
    That was assuming, of course, that Janet and her party weren’t found before we got started. Which is why the second thing I did was go to the telephone and call my friend Dalton Dorsey who’s a lieutenant commander at Coast Guard Group, St. Petersburg.
    Group St. Pete oversees five small-boat Coast Guard stations and is responsible for patrolling several hundred miles of coastline, from Tallahassee to the Everglades and beyond. It’s a massive area, but the Coasties, as they are called, do an extraordinarily good job. What most people don’t know is that the Coast Guard is under the control of the U.S. Department of Transportation, not the Department of Defense, but its men and women are as well trained, as professional, and often as heroic as any military specialty group.
    Which is why, when Jeth first told me that Janet was in a boat reported overdue, I wasn’t overly concerned. If Janet was somewhere out there in a broken-down vessel, it wouldn’t take long for the Coasties to find her.
    Or so I believed at the time.
    I got lucky. Caught Dalton on his cell phone outside the old St. Pete Coast Guard Administration and Operations Building. It’s a whitewashed, two-story fortress, built back in the 1920s, overlooking Bayboro Harbor and Tampa Bay, just a couple of miles from the Sunshine Skyway. He was there on a Saturday, he said, because he’d scheduled a special inspection, but now he was in the parking lot, headed for his pickup truck and the golf course at McDill Airbase.
    When I told him why I’d called, he said, “Our group had three boats reported overdue yesterday, and I don’t remember the specifics of all of ’em, so let me go upstairs to my office and I’ll check the incident report.”
    We talked about baseball, then a mutual friend of ours, Tony Johnson, who’s a Florida county court judge but still works in naval intelligence as a reserve officer. Then I heard a rustling of paper, and Dalton said, “Okay, here’s a copy. Everything you want to know. Missing small boat. The call came in at nine-ten to our Fort Myers Beach station. A woman named Sherry Meyer, a friend of the guy who owns the boat, Michael Sanford. She’s the one who called. Are you friends with all these people, Doc?”
    “No, just Janet Mueller. I’ve never met the others.”
    “Well … she’s listed as being aboard. According to Meyer, anyway … only she said the name was spelled M-i-l-l-e-r, which I’ll change right now. Her, Sanford, a woman named Grace Walker,