by Edward Lee
What should she do?
Of course, Rick and Joyce would need to keep their torrid romance secret; otherwise they’d lose their jobs. It was easy enough for Clare to condemn their irresponsibility on purely objective grounds. Any way you looked at it, physical displays of affection while on duty could not be tolerated. And outright sexual activity? It’s a fireable offense, plain and simple. No, they hadn’t actually had intercourse right there in the woods but that hardly mattered. They got awfully close, and their intent couldn’t be denied.
I should report them to Dellin and recommend that they be fired.
But then she remembered her own little weakness today: how many times had she caught herself dreamily staring at Dellin? I guess I’m not exactly one to talk about moral malfeasance while in the workplace.
She turned the microphone on, keyed it. “Joyce? This is Clare. What’s your twenty?”
The radio crackled back at once. “I’m at PS-6.”
Clare had no idea what that meant but a quick glance up to a site map explained: DETEX PUNCH STATIONS, followed by numbers going up to twenty-four. PS, she presumed. Punch Stations. “Okay. I need you to show me around the site now. Meet me at the front parking lot.”
“Will do. I’m on my way.”
You’re on your way, all right—probably to the unemployment line, Clare thought, locking up the office and heading out. In the parking lot, even in spite of the sufficient shade from the high trees overhead, the heat had grown absolutely oppressive. Get used to it, she told herself. While she waited, a few more outpatients pulled into the lot and entered the clinic. They were all elderly and all smiling even with their grim diagnoses of cancer. Of course they’re smiling. They’re being cured when a month ago their private doctors were probably telling them they were terminal. Even though she was just a security guard, Clare found it extraordinarily exciting to be associated with a facility that had found a cancer cure. When the trials were over—and hopefully successful—Clare couldn’t wait to see the news break in the headlines.
At the far corner of the lot, she noticed two parking spaces where bright yolk-yellow paint on new asphalt read SECURITY PARKING ONLY. One space was empty but in the other a shining new white Chevy Blazer sat parked. Clare walked slowly around the big fully-equipped four-wheel drive, thinking, Could this be…
Yes!
Dellin had said she would be provided with a vehicle free of charge; Clare saw at once that this must be it. Black stenciled letters on the doors read SECURITY CHIEF. Keys on her shift ring opened it; she couldn’t help but take a closer look. The inside still smelled relatively new, and the upholstery looked immaculate. Air, power windows, a CD player, plus a scanner and radio unit that must be an auxiliary to the base station radio in the office.
“This will definitely do,” she said to herself.
A motor roar rose up, then a smaller four-by-four rolled into the lot, with similar security markings. Joyce smiled and waved from the open driver’s window.
Gee, Joyce, Clare thought in some witty cynicism, Is it my imagination or do you look a wee bit flushed?
“Checking out your new wheels, huh?” Joyce said when she pulled up. “This is the shift truck, but that one’s yours. It’s great, isn’t it?”
“Loaded. I like it.”
“Yeah, so did the first security boss—”
“Grace Fletcher,” Clare stated. She got into the passenger side of Joyce’s truck. “Did you know her very well?”
“No, not really—actually it was only one day. She broke me in on the site, showed me where the punch stations were, and then that was it. Quit the next day. But she was pretty nice.”
“Why did she quit?”
“She couldn’t hack the climate is what she told me, but then one of the other guards told me they felt the grounds were too dangerous.” Joyce drove back out of the parking lot and headed down the main road leading into the clinic. “I’ll show you the eastern spur of the island first—that’s the site’s furthest limit—then the middle spur so you can see the bayou and quicksand.”
The reference half-jolted Clare. “Quicksand? You’re kidding me.”
“Nope. Swamps, sinkholes, quicksand pits—we’ve got it all, along with snakes, sharks off the point, and even alligators.”
“So Grace Fletcher wasn’t exaggerating: the grounds are fairly dangerous.”
Joyce laughed. “Walking around downtown Tampa at night—that’s dangerous. None of the snakes are poisonous, the sharks only come into the middle inlet during the peak of summer, the alligators are more afraid of you than you are of them, and the quicksand field is completely fenced. Unless you’re really careless, the site isn’t dangerous at all.”
Clare decided to save her own judgments for later. The road narrowed when they traversed the eastern spur of the island; suddenly the dense tunnel of trees opened to a completely untended beach and a stunning view of the bay. “That’s some scenery,” Clare commented. “And what a beautiful, isolated beach.”
“Nobody goes there because, for some reason, the stingrays like this point for their breeding ground.”
Fantastic, Clare thought. Snakes, sharks, alligators, and now stingrays.
“Oh, yeah, and the jellyfish too,” Joyce added. “Certain times of the year, thousands of them float out to this point. Some of them have these stinger tentacles that are three and four feet long. Get one of those wrapped around your leg, you’ll be feeling it for a week.”
Clare was mildly flabbergasted. “Well, looks like I won’t be going in the water. Ever.”
“Oh, no, that would be a mistake. There’s none of that in the middle inlet, where the cottages are. You’ll be living on the island, right?”
“Yes. Dellin said I could if I wanted to.”
“Well, believe me, you want to. It’s the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen—and there’s no rent! Right on the beach, too. A bunch of employees live out there, and it’s less than a mile from work. I’ve noticed Mrs. Grable in the end unit, cleaning it up, so I guess that’s the one you get.”
“Mrs. Grable?”
“She’s, like, the resident manager, lives out there too with her husband. She does all the maintenance, groundskeeping, and if anything breaks down in your unit, she’s the one to call.”
“I can’t wait to see the place.”
Joyce drove through the island’s middle spur next: marshes, swamps, and, indeed, an overgrown, fenced perimeter marked DANGER! QUICKSAND! So far, everything Clare had seen was, literally, a tropical jungle.
“So, the east and middle spurs—they’re so overgrown and dense. I can’t believe you have any trouble with vandals and trespassers in those areas.”
“We don’t,” Joyce confirmed. “And now you can see why they chose this half of the park to close to the public; the land spurs are much more narrow and much harder to maintain. But the center spur—where the clinic and the lake are—that’s where we get our trouble.”
“Poachers, right?”
Joyce nodded. “It’s illegal to hunt alligators now, but every now and then we’ll get some boneheads out here doing it. They sell the meat to restaurants. And Lake Stephanie is full of protected and endangered species of freshwater fish, so the crackers go out there at night with their fishing poles. We’ve caught several of them. It’s a $1500 fine for each fish.”
“Ouch!”
“Yeah. But the idiots keep on coming. Then, of course, there’s good old Trojan Point. It’s a little lagoon right at the end of the spur, surrounded by palm trees. It’s considered the ultimate romantic nightspot for all the welfare rednecks in Tierra Rojo and south St. Pete. They’ll go out there to drink beer and smoke dope. And I don’t have to tell you why they call it ‘Trojan’ Point.”
Clare thought about it a moment, then closed her eyes. “I take it we’re not talking about Agamemnon and Achilles.”
Joyce giggled. “I remember one morning I went out there to hit the punch station and I counted forty-six used condoms alon
g the beach. It was just so gross!”
“Look at the bright side. They’re practicing safe sex.”
“Good for them. At least there’ll be fewer meth-babies. The criminal element west of the mainland is one-hundred percent poverty-level cracker. White trailer trash. Sorry if that sounds politically incorrect, but why beat around the bush? These people exist to fuck and smoke ice, and to a security guard, they’re nothing but a pain in the ass.”
Joyce’s sudden rough-edged social observation gave Clare a quick surprise. Her own views on such things were a bit more considerate, or so she hoped: people weren’t bad by choice, they were bad through the obliviousness of discrimination, subjugation, and the negative environments that they were forced to be raised in. Having been raised in an orphanage herself, not to mention a year of homelessness due to discrimination, she knew a little bit about the subject.
On the other hand, she’d always maintained her sense of morality, all on her own.
“Relax,” Joyce went on. “I’m not turning racist on you. It just really ticks me off to see what these people do to themselves. I was raised in a New Hampshire ghetto, and when I was sixteen the tenement burned down, and killed my whole family.”
“Wow. I’m sorry to hear that.”
Joyce’s airy tone indicated that she was not looking for pity. She just gave a toss of her shoulder. “I was abused by some creep teacher in second grade, I grew up eating surplus cheese, and I watched the Nashua fire department put what was left of my parents and little brother in body bags. Shitty things happen sometimes—that’s life. But with all the crap that I’ve been through, I’ve never stolen anything and I’ve never taken or sold drugs. I had plenty of opportunities, and there were times when it was real tempting. But I never did it.”
Clare listened hard to what her employee was relating, not just the words but what was between them. She’s had it even worse than me but she still kept it togther. Now that Clare knew these things, she felt different about her initial impressions. I guess a little hanky-panky in the woods isn’t that terrible an offense. Clare felt morose after hearing about the young woman’s awful tribulations.
Joyce laughed airily. “Sorry! I didn’t mean to get so high and mighty.”
“That’s quite all right. You’re a strong woman.”
“Getting back to my point. When the rednecks aren’t toking on their meth pipes, they’re shooting themselves to Palookaville with—”
“Prescription painkillers,” Clare picked up, “which the clinic happens to be stuffed to the gills with.”
“Yeah. So that’s our biggest concern. We can’t have the ’necks breaking in and getting their hands on all of that.”
Clare almost laughed at Joyce’s casual parlance. ’Necks. Jesus. This girl’s a hoot.
“It’s kind of funny, though,” Joyce went on. “Dellin and Harry are more torqued up about the Interthiolate inventory than all that morphine. They’re really worried that someone might break in to the facility and steal some.”
Clare raised a brow. “It does sound a little overly paranoid, and pretty greedy and corporate, too. But look at it from their perspective. Interthiolate is their baby. Sure, curing cancer shouldn’t be about who gets the credit but let’s face facts. If I’d helped invent this stuff, I’d want the credit too, and the money. And I’d do everything I could to make sure some other company didn’t rip me off.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
“They’re paying us to guard B-Wing like it’s Fort Knox, so that’s what we do.” Along their trek, Joyce pointed out additional swamps and marshes through the more desolate areas of the site; then she was driving back toward the clinic.
“Now that I think of it, the other spurs are kind of creepy.”
“It’s almost like a rain forest back there,” Clare noted. She also noted the heat and humidity. It seemed to press her uniform blouse against her skin and suck moisture out. Suddenly the idea of someone leaving this job because of the climate didn’t seem terribly far removed. “Getting back to what we were talking about earlier. Grace Fletcher told you she was leaving because of the climate but another guard told you it was because of potential hazards? Was it Rick who told you that?”
“Oh, no. This was before Rick was even hired,” Joyce explained. Beads of sweat trickled down her cheeks and her neck but she didn’t seem uncomfortable in the least. Her expression, however, seemed skeptical. “There were a lot of different rumors floating around from the staff. Grace had your job, and she had two other guards: Rob and Donna. The three of them made up the site’s first security crew. Things were going along fine until all of a sudden—about a month ago—the three of them put in their two week notice. Dellin wasn’t too happy because it forced him to take time away from his patients to hire a new crew. I was the first new hire. Grace breaks me in and tells me the reason they’re all leaving is because it’s too hot. Fine. I don’t think anything of it and I’m happy as hell anyway ’cos I get the job. That night, though, I run into the guy, Rob Thomas, up at the bar, and he tells me they all put in their notice because they had a few run-ins with gators and snakes and they just felt the job was too dangerous. Sounded kind of over-reactive to me but, again, what do I care? They don’t like the job, that’s their business. Follow me so far?”
“Yeah,” Clare replied, her arm crooked out the window. “There’s more?”
Joyce paused for an odd moment. “A little, and it is kind of weird. I come in the next morning to start my shift, and Grace isn’t here. Neither are Rob and Donna, and all their lockers are empty.”
“Their two-week notice was up, you mean?”
“No, that’s just it. They still had ten more days to go, but they all left the night before, all three of them, at the same time. That’s why it strikes me as a bit weird. By not honoring their two-week notice, they lose their severance pay. I mean—damn—they must’ve really hated this job to leave that fast and say to hell with the severance. Don’t you think that’s a little weird?”
“Yeah,” Clare admitted. “And it just sounds…fishy.”
“Um-hmm, and no one’ll ever find out the real reason. After they left, there was one rumor after another, to the point that it got ridiculous. Chick in the cafeteria tells me they skipped town ’cos they were really wanted fugitives. Janitor tells me he heard Dellin fired them ’cos they were stealing dope from the pharmacy vault. People at the bar say they were all a bunch of drunks, and the pest-control guy tells me it was a three-way love triangle that went bad.” Joyce shook her head, amused. “Who knows? And if you ask me, who cares?”
“It is pretty unimportant when you get right down to it,” Clare offered, though she had to admit, her curiosity was piqued. “You’ve been here a month and you still like the job, right?”
“It’s a great job. Good pay, a health plan, and a free beach house? Are you kidding? It’s the best job I’ve ever had. Whenever I see an alligator, I yell boo and it runs away.”
“I’m encouraged already,” Clare said.
They were back on the main road, Joyce’s long auburn hair blowing in the breeze. “Believe me, Fort Alachua is as safe a park as you’ll ever find.”
(III)
She was being strangled. The hands twisted expertly around her neck, wringing her out like a dishrag. Her nude body convulsed beneath the crystal-clear water; bubbles burst from her mouth.
Poor Kari Ann.
How could God do this to her? And after being so close to getting away?
She’d been raped in the woods for hours last night, dragged through brambles and sawgrass and bug-infested swamps, and even with all that, she’d managed to escape this fiend, to hide out till daybreak and find the boat. It was a miraculous achievement by any account but especially so for a woman of Kari Ann’s frame and constitution: thin, dehydrated by the bayou’s sucking heat, starved. Yet in her sheer will to survive, she’d evaded this horrific rapist and abductor. She’d survived all that terror and pain and hards
hip—and for what?
To be caught and have it start all over again.
She remembered her manic, blubbering exuberance when she’d tramped her way out of the woodline to the gently lapping shore. Caleb’s boat was still right there where they’d left it last night. She giggled like an imp, eyes wide open in lunatic glee, as she fumbled to untie the bowline from the shore roots they’d moored to, then pulled the boat out till she was waist-deep. The clean water of the inlet felt like the caress of heaven against her filthy, insect-bitten skin. She flipped herself into the boat and began to row at once. I’m free! I’m out! her tortured mind exclaimed.
I made it!
She rowed, literally, like mad, because she was mad by now, a stark-raving little mad-woman who’d just been released from the clutches of an unfathomable death. She’d been jibbering some languageless exaltation, and then even more elation overcame her when she saw, little more than a mile in the distance, a sailboat moving lazily across the mouth of Tampa Bay. The safe, normal world was so close to her now, and she rowed and rowed and rowed till her heart was fit to burst.
And she thought again: I made it! I made it!
That’s when she noticed that the boat wasn’t moving forward.
She rowed harder, more furiously, the oars digging out plumes of water and shooting them yards behind her. But—
The boat still wasn’t moving.
Was she aground? That couldn’t be possible! She was at least fifty feet off shore now! She plunged an oar straight down, all the way down to the very end of the handle, for more proof.
If the boat wasn’t aground, then why wasn’t it moving?
Then her elation disintegrated.
Very slowly, her attacker, her nemesis of the previous night, rose dripping out of the water at the boat’s bow. He’d been there all along, holding the boat with his hands.
He looked at her over the bow and smiled.
Kari Ann screamed so hard her lungs were nearly ejected in hot chunks, so loud, the whites of her eyes hemorrhaged to bright red, and so high egrets and lorikeets lifted off the beach in terrified droves.
