Winner The Crystal Awards 2016, Best Multimedia Story (3d Place).
A spinster doctor rents her spare room to a brain-damaged patient who doesn't know he is a former undercover agent targeted for execution by a powerful criminal.
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AUTHOR'S NOTE: This novel is organized in four parts. Here are Chapters 1 and 2 of Part 1. The action continues from the Prologue, in which an injured man fell from a helicopter into the Atlantic Ocean off the South Florida coast.
Enjoy today's installment of DUBY'S DOCTOR.
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CHAPTER 1 -- AIRBORNE
At dawn over Elliot Key, seagulls glided across the pink-orange-blue pastel streaks of sunrise mirrored in the glassy blue-silver ocean. Waves swished against the soft sand that fringed the island, and a sailboat sloughed at its anchor cable. Against the eastern sky, the boat's tri-corn sails formed a romantic silhouette against the sky, while its three-sided shadow doppelganger rippled on the surface of the water.
Halfway between the sailboat and the shore, a honeymooning couple rowed their dinghy toward the beach. She giggled at something he said. He crooned something seductive. She laughed and swatted him playfully.
Miami city lights adorned the northwestern horizon like a diamond choker, two dozen miles away as the osprey flew.
Gulls cawed to one another, the sea gurgled against the shore, and the honeymooners' oars softly slapped the water. A breeze off the ocean rustled dry palm fronds. A four-foot-tall blue heron stood sentinel among flying buttresses of mangrove roots.
When they reached the shore, the couple dragged their little boat shushing across the sand onto the beach, beyond the water's grasp. They kissed beneath the rustling palms, and when they stepped apart, the man tickled the woman.
She twisted away, laughing and scolding, and ran from him, come-hither fashion. He pursued. They left two sets of footprints in the dimpled sand as they trotted like children along the beach in the pale dawn.
From time to time the mangrove trees' arching roots crept all the way to the water line, forcing the couple to detour into ankle-deep surf and come back to the sand. At one such spot, the woman was several yards ahead of the man because he had stopped to examine a nearly intact conch shell. She worked her way from sand to water, wading around a mangrove root, and glanced back at her pursuer.
He straightened from his shell collecting and winked at her.
She giggled and turned to look ahead of her again. As she rounded the mangrove, she screamed.
The man reacted to her scream and doubled his pace. He found her standing rigidly beside the mangrove, screaming again and again. He took in the situation and, with protective arms around her, he turned, putting himself between her and the source of her horror: a man's naked body sprawled face down, tangled in the arching tree roots.
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A bedside telephone rang at the home of Frank and Mandy Stone. Frank reached across Mandy's impersonation of Moby Dick in curlers. He lifted the receiver and answered with a sleepy grunt.
