Don't Lose Her

by Jonathon King

  “Oooh.”

  Not a hard one, but obvious. She’d been feeling movement for weeks but never considered the pushing and flexing going on inside her as painful. It had always made her smile before, the thought of her baby growing there, moving, and becoming more real in her head. But now she thought about the warnings she’d been given about the pain involved in natural childbirth.

  She always thought of herself as having a high pain threshold. She’d been thrown from a horse when she was ten, but got back up, remounted the gelding, and rode back to the stable. They’d only discovered her broken collarbone after a doctor’s visit the next day. She’d played lacrosse at Duke and had taken her share of cracks to the face and body and never flinched. Her parents called her too tough, but that didn’t keep them from encouraging her to play polo at the Palm Beach Club, where her father the judge hobnobbed with the connected class and her mother frankly told her that more respectable suitors would be found there, even if Diane did take an occasional tumble.

  Plus, she tried to convince herself, she was older and more mature than most new mothers. When she and Billy had gone to the birthing class, the other women seemed just girls, and she noted a few wincing at the instructor’s description of contractions and what to expect. She overheard their jokes about demanding epidurals the minute they were wheeled through the ER door. She and Billy had not even discussed pain meds yet. Now, there wasn’t going to be a choice. But you can do this, Diane! You can do this!

  She pulled two pillows up behind her head and back and then raised her knees and looked down. Would she be able to see the baby’s head crowning? Would she be able to reach down and ease its shoulder out? That’s when she heard the lock turn in the outside door, and between her knees and in the light from the bathroom, she saw the young man who had given her food earlier step quickly inside.

  “Oh, geez,” the kid said when he looked at Diane peering at him through her raised knees from the other side of the kitchen counter, and then diverted his eyes as she lowered her legs.

  “I’m sorry, I mean, excuse me. Sorry. I’m just …”

  He glanced at the cupboards, the top of the refrigerator, not just avoiding her, but looking for something.

  “It’s OK,” Diane said, “I just took a shower. I hope that was all right, I mean, taking a shower.”

  “Yeah, yeah, sure,” the kid said. “I mean, of course.”

  He looked so young, she thought. Tall and athletic, but not exactly muscular, in a short-sleeved T-shirt that she noted had no logo or words on it. He was definitely not Hispanic. Her mind was still working, noting every detail as he moved about the kitchen opening and closing drawers and doors.

  “Hey, can you at least tell me what you want? I mean, if Escalante wants deportation, maybe there is something I can do. Maybe if you let me talk to the Justice Department, we could come to an agreement.”

  She was trying to work the moment. This kid had been the only one to speak a word to her and maybe that was a crack to exploit. She was still not sure why they’d taken her, but maybe through this boy she could convince them that she was worth keeping alive and could help them get whatever it was they wanted by letting her speak to the outside world.

  But the kid wasn’t paying any attention and kept searching. Within seconds, he seemed to find what he wanted on an upper shelf. She heard a clunk of something on glass or china as he reached up into the cabinet and then withdrew his hand, closed the cupboard, and turned to leave.

  “Uh, could I at least get something more to eat?” she called out to him. “Hey, is the water even safe to drink?” she added, but the outside door pulled shut and all she heard was the lock turn yet again.

  Diane tried to analyze what she’d just seen. The kid seemed a bit embarrassed when he’d first walked in and caught her uncovered. But if he’d been watching over her for days in that other place he’d seen her squat on the toilet at least a few times, so big deal. And what was the searching all about? He didn’t appear to take anything out of the cupboards; instead, he was leaving something. And he wasn’t thinking about hiding it from her. Hell, he did it right in front of her.

  Sure, he was anxious, and the sight of an old naked pregnant woman lying on the bed with her knees in the air might have thrown him off his game, but he had definitely left something behind to keep from someone else in his crew. Was it a sign of distrust? A little unraveling of the group? In her years as a prosecutor, she’d seen those grandiose schemes of so-called perfect crimes go south because humans will be humans and get greedy, scared, sometimes even have a moral conundrum, and botch up a good plan. Seasoned detectives always say the bad guys will eventually screw up. Maybe this was it.

  She pulled a towel around her and rolled to the side of the bed. With resolve she wasn’t sure she had, she got to her feet. She stood, steadied herself with the chair, and then walked to the kitchen island. She was finding strength from somewhere, maybe just survival instinct, mother-bear strength, instinctual strength to preserve her family.

  With a hand on the counter, she made it around to the cupboards and went to the door of the room where the kid had been searching. He’d gone to the highest shelf, so she strained and stretched her side and arm to reach it. Her fingers fumbled at a stack of small china plates that clinked together, nothing odd or unfamiliar. She probed to the left and felt the shape of bowls or large coffee cups and pushed them aside. Maybe he put whatever it was to the back, behind the dishes where it couldn’t be seen. She was on her toes now, stretching and feeling, but couldn’t get to the back wall. The strain caused a sudden splint of pain in her side. As she came down off her toes with a gasp, a tall mug came out off the shelf with her hand, tumbling down onto the counter and spilling its contents—a cell phone.

  Diane wasted a second staring at it just lying there on the counter. Then she ignored the pain in her side and scooped it up. It was an older model, but she found the power switch and clicked it on.

  911? How would she describe her situation? Where was she? Should she even take the chance to call? Would someone outside hear her? The mug falling on the counter had made a hell of a noise. Christ, Diane, hurry! She thought for a moment more and then thumbed Billy’s text number, the buttons making an eerily familiar clicking noise that she recalled from the room where they’d first taken her.

  Carefully, she thumbed HELP MSMAC DNR and hit the SEND button. She thought of turning the thing off, but was afraid that if she did they wouldn’t be able to track the location. So she took a chance, left it on, dropped it back in the ceramic mug, and then stretched beyond where she thought possible and put it back up on the top shelf. With that effort, she closed the cupboard, spun to the side, put her head down into the stainless steel sink, and puked.

  Chapter 31

  I had to reach Nate Brown on what I knew was a pay phone at a ramshackle bar just outside of Chokoloskee in the Ten Thousand Islands of southwestern Florida. Who has a pay phone these days anyway?

  The pissed-off voice of a woman answered on the twenty-second ring. That was the beauty of the near-extinct pay phone—no switch to the message system. It rang until someone picked up.

  “Loop Road Frontier Hotel, and you better have a reason for ringin’ the damn phone off the wall,” the woman’s voice said.

  “Hi, Patti,” I said. I knew it was Patti, who could be the orneriest bartender on the planet and yet have the heart of an angel when the mood hit her. “It’s Max Freeman. I’m trying to get ahold of Nate.”

  “Of course you are, honey. And it bein’ five o’clock somewheres in the world, he’s sittin’ yonder in the corner drinkin’ per usual.”

  There was a beat of silence.

  “Well, can you get him to the phone please, Patti?”

  “Well,” she said, mocking my tone, “since I AM his private damn secretary I will endeavor to do so, MISTER FREEMAN.”

  She raised the l
evel of her voice fourfold when she said my name, broadcasting it to the denizens of the bar as well as to Nate. I heard the receiver clunk against the wall, no doubt dangling on its metal-coiled cord. A few seconds later, a craggy voice picked up.

  “That you, Max?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Long time.”

  “Indeed.”

  “What’s up? You gotta need to go fishin’?”

  “In a sense,” I said.

  “Uh-oh.”

  Nate was never one for excessive use of words. I told him I was working on the disappearance of a judge from West Palm Beach who might have been taken to his area of the world, and I needed his help.

  “That the one on the TV?”

  “You have a TV, Nate?” A man who’d been born and raised in the Glades and had to be reached on a pay phone could surprise you.

  “It’s on right up there behind the bar this very second,” he said.

  “That’s probably her then,” I said. “Can you meet me at the rest stop at Route 29 and the Alley?”

  “Name the time.”

  “Six in the morning?”

  “I’ll be there. But I’ll tell you now, ain’t nothin’ in the air about that lady judge down here yet. And if they was trying to get her out by boat around here, the watermen would know.”

  I was disappointed, but not put off.

  “I’ll see you at six.”

  He hung up without saying good-bye.

  Nate was a bit of a legend in the Ten Thousand Islands. Some say he just floated up in a canoe onto the shore of Florida Bay one day, a baby in swaddling cloth, so to speak. But Ben-Hur he was not. He was born sometime in the early 1900s of parents who’d been some of the first to try to live in the islands, subsisting on the fishing trade, shooting plume birds from the sky for the ladies’ hat industry, or actually trying to raise crops on land mere inches above the waterline at the end of the Florida peninsula.

  Nate was a crack-shot gunman, a fisherman who could smell the schools deep in the bay, a swamp hunter who could catch and de-tail a dozen gators in a day, and a distiller who could make moonshine in his secret still that would clean the rust off an antique railroad spike.

  He’d lived and made his living on the salt water of the Gulf and its labyrinthine patchwork of shifting mangrove islands for so many years, his sense of direction and place was superior to any map or GPS system yet devised. In the early 1980s, in fact, this acute ability allowed Nate and those like him to thrive in the illegal business of off-loading bales of marijuana from big supply boats offshore in the Gulf of Mexico and bringing them to land using the water trails and routes that no law enforcement entity could ever find.

  It is still a legend in Chokoloskee that when the DEA finally moved in, they arrested nearly every male resident of the island, Nate included. As a result, he’d spent several of his senior years in a federal lockup.

  There was no one more knowledgeable or plugged in to the goings-on in the Glades. If Diane’s captors had brought her there in an effort to hide her or move her to South America, there was a good chance Nate would have wind of it, or know how to find out.

  That evening, I slept fitfully, if at all, on Sherry’s couch. My tossing and turning was such that I’d abandoned her bed before midnight to keep the nightmarish demons to myself. Whenever I drifted off, I’d conjure some sight of dark and twisted mangrove tendrils twisting around legs and limbs and throats. They were always the body parts of clear-skinned women who had no business being in such an environment.

  Startled awake, I tried to interpret the half-dreams and knew I was still beating myself up for taking Sherry out to the Glades and being responsible for the loss of her leg. If something similar or worse happened to Diane, I was once more somehow going to be responsible.

  This time, I realized myself that again I’d found the bullet wound on my neck, once again worrying the small patch of smooth skin. Despite my flight from the streets of Philadelphia, my self-seclusion on the river, all attempts to rid my head of the past, it was for naught. No one forgets. Everything we’ve ever done is back in those memory cells.

  There is no such thing as closure. You don’t just get over it. All you can do is tuck it deep so it doesn’t cripple you, but it will always be with you. I finally got up, dressed, and left for my rendezvous with Nate long before sunup.

  From the tollbooth where the Chrysler 300 had last been photographed, I headed west with little traffic at 4:00 a.m. with sunrise chasing me. On the divided highway, I could see headlights coming at me from a mile away, but those behind me always went dim. I had the Fury up to 90 mph, and no one was holding with me. After an hour, the tops of the saw grass on either side began to glow with a red tinge, and within another twenty minutes, a crimson dawn created the effect of a thousand acres on fire.

  “Red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning.” The phrase sat in my head for twenty stanzas before I shook it like an old song you repeat in your head for seemingly no reason. The Glades did indeed flame up on occasion, usually during long periods of drought when the saw grass and the muck it grows in became tinder-dry. Fires set by lightning strikes or cigarettes tossed by careless travelers or campers will spread like a flood, eating up acres in minutes, the switching winds on the open plain running it in such erratic directions that containment is nearly impossible.

  And if it burns hot enough, long enough, the ground itself begins to smolder. The muck below is simply plant material that dies and falls, building layer upon layer. It is rich in nutrients and feeds a plethora of bioorganic species, but when it is dry and set afire, it can smolder several feet deep for months before the rains come again in amounts large enough to douse it.

  Driving the arrow-straight expressway with nothing but horizon on either side can lull you. Before the Alley was modernized, there was nothing but two lanes, side by side. Now, between the separated lanes, there are grass medians and occasional turnoffs for rest stops and boat ramps spaced along the way.

  Still, the first real stop is when Route 29 running north and south intersects. I finally turned into the gas station and food mart there and saw Nate’s old pickup in the far corner of the parking lot. I pulled up beside it. You might guess the old Ford to be a 1970 or maybe even a late 1960s model. The paint is sun-bleached to a dust color. The bed walls and rails are scraped and scratched and dented by thousands of loadings and unloadings of crab traps and dinghies, bailing wire and lumber, gravel loads and yards of sand.

  The man leaning against the tailgate looked the same: sun-faded in an oilskin jacket and jeans, a face creased deep with wrinkles and folds, a thin bony frame worn hard by manual labor and decades in harsh weather.

  I got out and joined him at the back of his truck.

  “Max Freeman,” he said, his voice scratchy and low in timbre, his words drawn out to maximum length. He was a true Southerner in the most southern part of the country. He offered his hand and I took it, a dry and loose pouch of bones. The frailty took me aback at first, but his grip was still tight and his eyes, a nearly colorless pale from years of staring into reflected sun off the water, looked directly into mine. There was no telling the years. He could have been seventy, or ninety, or a hundred-plus.

  “Nate,” I said. “Long time.”

  He nodded and waited. I started in, foolishly recounting what I’d already told him on the phone, reiterating the possibilities we were both already aware of, and then leaving him to offer any others.

  “You said Indians, but not Seminole nor Miccosukee?”

  “Not from the description from a witness.”

  “So they ain’t gonna look right if they headed north into Immokalee?”

  “Not if they stop anywhere,” I said, noting to myself that a tank of gas wouldn’t get you much farther than Immokalee if you started from the warehouse in West Palm Beach and took the route across the Glade
s.

  Billy and I—not to mention the feds—had no doubt already questioned the road taken by the kidnappers. If you were headed straight to the west coast of Florida, the shortest route would have been straight out 441 around the southern tip of Lake Okeechobee, onto State Route 80, and straight into Cape Coral. It was part of my gut feeling that their destination lay elsewhere.

  “Lots of places to hide out here,” Nate said, his drawl a slow but efficient monotone. “But ya’ll better know somebody. Ain’t a place for strangers.”

  The Glades have been a place apart for hundreds of years. They’re a land away from civilization, and the people who live here like it that way. They don’t like rules. They don’t like intruders who don’t have a history here. Toughened by the antihuman propensities of nature, they’ve paid their dues to live here. Others who have not paid those dues are looked at askance.

  Gladesmen run by this credo: “We live off the land and the water like our forefathers and don’t tell us we can’t.”

  This has been the way through the days of the bird hunters who killed an untold number of fine feathered birds for the 1900s ladies’ hat trade, the alligator hunters who trapped and killed gators for their skins and tail meat, the whiskey still operators and illegal rum runners who kept that trade alive over two centuries, and the fishing industry that continues today.

  Since the nineteenth century, the Glades have been a destination at times for the lawless to hide, and a home for people who want no truck with civilization. They have adapted, made, trapped, shot, and peddled what they could, even when the regulators came in and brought laws that shortened or banned their hunting and fishing seasons or plain outlawed their old methods. For the old-timers like Nate, there is a pride in their heritage. And they are covetous of it.