Crime and Punishment

The Murffs left this morning.  We were sad and ill.  We both have colds.  The Murffs were such good company and such troupers.  Anne and I had a great day downtown on Tuesday.  We all had brunch and Mallory Square on Wednesday.  Thursday was full of rain and coughing.  Poor Anne!  She was trying to stay healthy.  She managed to escape and have her own adventure while George and Murff and I played cards at home.  Last night we ate a delicious fish dinner at Hogfish Bar and Grill. Now they are gone, and we miss them.

All day we have been doing a little bit of work and then sleeping or resting.  George has the ability to sleep more than any other human.  He slept several hours in the morning and again in the afternoon.  I did the laundry and read my Jimmy Buffett thriller, Where is Joe Merchant?

So I'm reading about murderers and smugglers and wackos in the Florida Keys, and we see a person being taken in handcuffs off Dock C (our dock!) by four guys in dark blue.  What is going on?  It happened so quickly and quietly that if we were not watching, we would have missed the moment.  I did not imagine this.  It happened during one of George's moments of consciousness.  He was washing the breakfast dishes.  (We had eaten key lime pie with the Murffs for breakfast.)

A little while later George was talking on the phone with his mother.  I was downstairs, and George said, "Come up.  Look at this."  Four guys with official police jackets were moving down the Dock C ramp this time.  One guy had an automatic rifle out.  What??  We watched out the front window.  A dock hand was on the ramp.  One of the men touched him and said, "Buddy, move aside."  He did.  Then he came back near our boat, and we compared notes while we waited to see what was happening further down the dock.  Our next door boat neighbor was sitting on the bow of his boat with no shirt on, watching.  He was not worried about being shot.  He just stared at the scene.  I had read enough Jimmy Buffett to know not to hang out on top of the crime scene.

After a few minutes they exited without any more prisoners.  I asked the dockhand which boat they were looking at, and he replied, "C-16."  Later I walked down there to check out that boat.  But it was a looper boat.  We had met these folks yesterday on the shuttle to Key West.  So obviously something doesn't compute here.  We will follow up on this story tomorrow after checking local police reports.  Stay tuned.