The Blue Edge of Midnight mf-1

by Jonathon King

  I followed Billy's directions off I-95 and west on Cypress Boulevard. There were no cypress trees anywhere near the roadway. Instead it was lined with strip malls packed with places like Lynn's Designer Nails, E-Z Liquors and Chang's Szechuan Chinese. On the corners stood self-serve gas stations where a single clerk took cash through a drawer from the one out of four customers who didn't pay with a credit card at the pump.

  Farther west the commercial zones were broken by twenty- five-year-old housing developments. Small block homes stood row upon row with patches of green lawn separated by chain link or the occasional wood fence. Trade the palm trees for maples and the white roof tiles for shingles and it could be Lindenwold, New Jersey.

  When I got onto the airport's Perimeter Road, I looked for number thirty-six, Avics Aviation. Halfway around I found the sign on a gun-metal gray hangar and pulled into a spot at the side where I could see several small planes parked on the cracked tarmac. Bent under the wing of a single-prop Cessna was a big man dressed in loose khaki trousers and a white polo shirt. He was rummaging through a side baggage compartment. I watched him for a few minutes as he moved easily about the plane, ducking under struts and checking various spots on the exterior.

  I got out of the Jeep, walked through a curtain of midday heat and called out "Hello" over the mechanical pitch of a plane moving to taxi out toward the runway. I yelled my greeting again and the big man snapped his head up, missing a nearby strut and then sliding smoothly under the wing before standing full up to face me. He was not a clumsy man.

  "I'm looking for Fred Gunther?"

  "That'd be me."

  "Max Freeman," I said, extending my hand. "Billy Manchester suggested I might talk a bit with you?"

  "He did," answered Gunther, tipping down his sunglasses to look at me with pale green eyes.

  He reached out and his massive palm seemed to swallow my own. His fingers were like thick swollen sausages tied at the knuckles and his skin was as dry and slick as waxed paper. I had never seen a hand so big.

  "Come on inside outta this heat."

  I followed him to the hangar, matching his pace and figuring his shoe size to be about a twelve and certainly not smaller. Inside the hangar Gunther led me to a small, half-windowed office along the east wall. He closed the flimsy wood door behind us, took a seat behind a metal desk and nodded at the threadbare couch. The heat that followed us in tripped the wall- mounted air conditioner and set it to rumbling. I declined the stained couch and pulled a straight-backed chair up next to his desk.

  The room held the odor of grease and high-test fuel. There were two calendars on the wall behind Gunther, one of a bikini-clad woman holding some sort of shiny tool and the other a shot of a big bass leaping from clear water.

  "Billy did some favors for me a couple of years ago when some tour clients tried to sue me over a big misunderstanding. So I owe him," Gunther said, propping his elbows on the desk and dropping his ham-sized hands in front of him. "But I don't mind telling you, I'm not real comfortable. People out in the Glades are getting awfully touchy about this kid killing stuff. Especially when folks start saying it might be Gladesmen trying to scare off the developers."

  "Where did you hear that?"

  "Word gets around when lawmen come out asking questions and mentioning license renewals and county tax assessments," Gunther said.

  Hammonds, I thought. His team, the FBI, they would all be squeezing every option they could. But did they really think it was some backwoods crazy poaching suburban kids on the edge of the Glades?

  "Well, I don't know what Billy told you, but I'm really only interested in learning a little more about the landscape," I said.

  Gunther looked down at his hands and then up into my face like he was going to apologize for not being able to help me.

  "Mr. Manchester said you used to be a cop?"

  "Used to be. I got shot in the neck and quit," I said, even surprising myself with my openness.

  The big man's face seemed to change on hearing my admission, as if a gunshot wound made a difference.

  "Well, then," he said, checking his watch. "My four-thirty client stood me up. Let's go flying."

  Outside, ripples of heat shimmered off the runway as we walked to the plane. Gunther came around to the passenger side to show me how to twist down the door handle. He had just popped open the door when the distinctive double hoo notes of a barred owl sounded from behind us. Gunther snapped his head around and scanned the line of Australian pines on the other side of the roadway.

  "Never heard one of those in daylight before," he said. "And never around here."

  He stared a few seconds longer, shrugged his thick shoulders and then dipped under the wing to circle around to his side. I climbed in, shut my door, and stared off into the trees.

  It wasn't until Gunther put us into a hardbanked turn that I truly started to worry. All during the startup, the taxiing and takeoff, I had been mesmerized by the pilot's movements. The snicking of switches and radio checks, the dialing of gauges and maneuvering of levers. His big hands moved across the panel and cockpit with an impressive grace and economy.

  But I had never been in a small plane before and when we went into the first steep bank and climbed into the western sky, that old stomach-on-a-roller-coaster feeling got me. Gunther must have seen the changing pallor of my face.

  "Pick out a spot on the horizon and focus," he said over the tinny-sounding headphones. "It's like a small boat on the ocean, but without the wave motion."

  I locked onto a radio tower in the distance and started gaining some confidence in the steady engine drone and the vibration humming through the cockpit. In the distance a few clumps of cloud moved across the blue background like ragged sails. It was one of those rare summer days when the thunder- heads were not boiling. The afternoon sun was glinting off objects below. I finally shifted my view down and watched the sprawl move under us. We were following a concrete road that lay below. I watched the small white roofs of the old developments start to show a newness. Then, farther west, they turned larger and the barrel tiles turned them orange and terra-cotta. The neighborhood streets were laid out in curving, circular patterns to fight the feel of living in a boxy grid. The homes bloomed around a series of lakes and when I asked Gunther about them he explained that they were created by the giant backhoes that scooped up the ancient limestone and then dumped it on the building sites to give some solid foundation for the housing. The holes left behind lowered the water level and were then gussied up to look semi-natural.

  "Waterfront property out of a swamp," he said. It was impossible to pick up any hint of derision in his voice over the headphones.

  We flew on with little change below for fifteen minutes and then Gunther nodded ahead and announced, "There's the border, for now."

  In the distance I could pick up the color change first. Then it sharpened at a highway running north and south. The barrel- tiled roofs and commercial plazas abruptly ended and an open field of rust-colored grasses began.

  The enormity stunned me at first. The land spread out, unaltered, as far as you could see. When we passed over the roadway the terrain below lost all boundaries and was held only by the horizon. Kansas was my first thought. I'd never been west, but schoolbook descriptions of flat fields of golden grain had to come from a view like this.

  Gunther eased the plane down to a lower altitude and I could pick up more detail. The sawgrass was less uniform and the green tinge of lower growth seeped through. In spots the sun reflected off streaks of exposed water, the first reminder that this was not solid ground and that a huge sheet of water covered mile after mile, and everything grew up through that liquid layer.

  Without my realizing it, Gunther had turned us north and seemed to be heading for a dark green clump growing on the horizon. As we got closer I could see it was a stand of trees, sitting like an island in a sawgrass ocean.

  "Hardwood hammock," Gunther said as we approached and then circled the stand. I recognized
the twisting gumbolimbo and pigeon plum trees that dotted parts of my own riverbank.

  "It would take an airboat or maybe, in high water, a Glade skiff to get out here," Gunther said. When I didn't respond, he looked over at me.

  "This is where they found the first kid's body."

  He took the plane out of its bank and steered us back south. The sun had yellowed and was starting to backlight a new band of streaky high clouds.

  "The second one was down off a prairie creek near the National Park. The third was farther north, in one of the canals to Lake Okeechobee. And I guess you know about the fourth one."

  I looked over at him, watching the pilot's hard profile against the light of his side window. Billy had obviously explained more than Gunther had let on.

  "So who would know how to get to those spots?" I said, dipping into an area he had opened up.

  "Look. You have to understand there's a lot of characters out here. Folks whose fathers and grandfathers lived a rough existence since the 1920s. They stayed away from the coast and traded progress for what they considered freedom, and it wasn't always legal," he said. "Hell, I'm considered an outsider, but I've sat around with these guys and heard them talk about sniping off the wardens and the tax men and land speculators if they threatened what they consider to be their Glades."

  "So it could be a native, somebody who knows the land out here and maybe went off the deep end?" I said.

  "Maybe. But even the guides like me, and the hunters and fishermen who live on the coast and come out here all the time, could get out to those spots. Hell, even the environmentalists get out here. And they're not always wrapped too tight when it comes to fighting development."

  Both of us fell silent. Gunther seemed to be the one focused on a distant point to keep from getting queasy.

  "It's a long way from drinking and talking about it and actually going out and killing kids to scare people away," he finally said.

  By now the sun was going orange and beginning to spin streaks of purple and red through the low clouds. We passed over a fish camp that sat isolated in the grass with a dock that stuck out into a clear-water channel. I could see the beaten- down paths in the sawgrass from airboats spoking out from the weathered building.

  Gunther was banking toward the east when the first cough sounded. When the second one changed the thrumming sound of the engine I looked over at the pilot whose fingers were now moving to try and catch up to the beat.

  "What the hell?" was all he said.

  The third cough came with a lurch and the nose of the Cessna dipped. Gunther never said another word but I could tell from the tight web creasing at the corner of his eyes that we were going down. The horizon suddenly tilted as Gunther tried to horse the plane back toward the fishing camp. Blue sky turned to sun-tinged grass. I had time to grab a handful of the console in front of me. I never even heard the thump of impact.

  CHAPTER 9

  I might have been out ten seconds or ten minutes. Or maybe my brain just shut down with shock and I hadn't been unconscious at all. But Gunther was.

  When my sight kicked back on I could see the big man wrapped hard around the steering yoke, his head up against the windshield and leaking a string of blood that ran down through his eyebrow and onto a cheek.

  I tried to reach out to him, but I was half hanging in the seat harness, all my weight pushed forward with the angle of the cockpit. We had pitched into the Glades and speared into the water and black muck. The propeller and most of the engine had disappeared, buried in front of us. The wings at either side looked like they'd simply dropped flat out of the sky and lay floating on the bent stalks of sawgrass, resting on the pile. But in the cockpit, water was settling knee high around both of our legs and when I looked down at Gunther's leg, I could see the glisten of white bone that had ripped through his trousers at the middle of his thigh. Compound fracture, I thought. And God knows what else.

  I tried to do a quick assessment of myself. I could move my feet, but when I tried to twist my shoulders a pain screeched through my lower chest. I had been punched at Frankie O'Hara's gym with enough wicked hooks to the body to know that I'd at least bruised a few ribs but hoped I hadn't cracked any. I took shallow breaths and after several seconds I reached out and got a good brace with the left arm on the console and pushed my weight off the harness. I fumbled with the buckle but got it loose and then got solid footing on the angled cockpit floor. I leaned back on the edge of my seat and then reached over to get my fingertips on Gunther's neck artery. A pulse. Thready, but a pulse. The pilot had not even reached for the radio when we'd felt the first jolts from the engine. I looked at it now, folded into the crushed console and partly submerged in rising water. Useless.

  I had to get myself out. I had to get him out. And we were already losing daylight. Who was ever going to find us out here? Who even knew we were out here?

  One step at a time, I told myself. "Ya can't book 'em till ya catch 'em," Sergeant McGinnis had said in the police academy. "And can't catch 'em till ya find 'em."

  "And can't find 'em if they're dead," one of the smartass rookies would always whisper.

  I used my right hand to twist down my handle and pushed loose the passenger door. Each movement sent a spike of pain up my side, but I was able to crawl up on the seat cushion and pull myself out onto the wing. I stood. My left knee was creaky. An ankle throbbed. Over the wall of sawgrass I could see the roofline of the fish camp in silhouette against the pink glow of sunset that still lightened the horizon. Gunther had brought us to within 150 yards or so. I didn't know how I'd get him the rest of the way.

  I crab walked across the fuselage to the other wing and wrenched open the pilot's door. Gunther's seat belt was either unhooked or had snapped. If he had a neck injury, I couldn't help it now. We were both soaking wet. It was getting dark and even a seventy-five-degree South Florida night was going to play hell with our body temperatures. Gunther had an open fracture and was probably bleeding internally. I'd taken enough emergency medical courses as a cop to know we were in deep shit. I looked again at Gunther. He was 230 pounds and unconscious. Even if I could get him out, I'd never be able to carry him 150 yards. I got that old cop feeling of hearing shots and wanting to go the other way. Fight or flee. Self-preservation. The sky still glowed in the west. I bent over, got a grip under the pilot's arms and started pulling.

  It took another twenty minutes to get him out. My rib cage screamed. Part of me was glad the big man was out cold. At least he couldn't consciously feel the pain of his broken femur as I jerked him out onto the wing. He groaned only once and I saw his eyes roll up. I bent my face to his mouth and felt the whisper of breath on my cheek. Still breathing. I sat, resting and trying to figure out my next move.

  "OK, Fred. What's next?" I said out loud. If I was taking him, it had to be a joint effort. If I wanted him to live, I had to convince myself he could. I knew that if I didn't believe it, I'd give up.

  I stood and took another bearing on the fading roofline of the fish camp and tried to imagine the route in my head. Once we were down in the sawgrass there'd be no sight line. The straight edge of the wing pointed just to the right of the building, about fifteen degrees off. I could use that at first.

  I eased myself down at the crook of the wing and the fuselage and onto the matted sawgrass. The footing was shaky, but I sank only knee deep into water. But when I stepped away from the flattened grass I was suddenly up to my waist. The bottom felt slick and doughy and sucked at my Reeboks when I took a step. I'd never be able to drag Gunther through this. I stood there, warm water filling my jeans, staring down at the water and grinding. The grass was my enemy. Could I avoid it? No. The muck was my enemy. Could I avoid it? No. The water and Gunther's weight were my enemy.

  Float him, I thought. It was the only way.

  Would a plane this size have a raft? Doubtful. And I hadn't seen anything that resembled a life vest in the cockpit. I worked my way back to the fuselage and found the handle to the side co
mpartment where I'd seen Gunther rummaging when I first pulled up at his hangar. The recessed handle twisted out and I popped the door and wrenched it open. Inside the space was dark and I had to reach in and start pulling out whatever I could reach: a rolled-up length of canvas tarpaulin, some fishing gear, a sleeping bag jammed deep in one corner, and a large zippered black bag with a U.S. Diver's logo on the side.

  I hesitated only a second to look at the new cream-colored canvas tarp, then pulled the bag into the opening and unzipped it. A mask and snorkel, a breathing regulator and mouthpiece, a set of huge fins, a sleeveless wetsuit top and the piece of luck I was hoping for, a buoyancy compensator.

  "You're a scuba diver, Fred," I said aloud. Gunther probably ferried clients down the Keys, where the only living coral reefs in the continental U.S. lay just off shore.

  I'd seen the guys from rescue-and-recovery use scuba equipment in Philadelphia, watched them slip down the banks of the Delaware River one morning in their slick black wetsuits and ease themselves into the water looking for the remains of a homicide victim. Strapped across their chests and attached to the air tanks were buoyancy compensators, inflatable vests that they could fill with air or empty out, to keep them afloat or let them dive.

  I took the vest and wetsuit out of Fred's bag and climbed back onto the wing.

  "OK, Fred. We're going on a hike, man. Help me out with this and I promise we're gonna make it."

  I checked Gunther's pulse. Maybe I was kidding myself, but it seemed stronger. I wrestled his arms into the vest and clipped it over his chest. I found a stem labeled "manual inflate" and started blowing. My ribs screeched twice with each breath, when I sucked in air and when I blew it out. Ten minutes of pain got it done.