I told him about the prints leading into the water, the obvious presence of the FBI and the dead dog. While I talked he laid out the seasoned tuna on two plates with steamed okra and put the garlic bread between them. He ate standing up, thumbed a few buttons on the remote and the Web page screen turned into a live broadcast of the local news. The abduction was the lead story.
A young reporter with glasses was doing a standup in the neighborhood, motioning back to the two-story pink stucco home. The camera had to leave him and zoom to get a grainy shot from where the press had been cordoned off more than a block away. Back in the frame the reporter scribbled circles onto a pad while giving the name of the missing girl and making the leap to put her in with the other victims of what the media had taken to calling the "Moonlight Murderer."
"Another innocent victim silently swept away from her home leaving law enforcement with nothing to do but wait," blabbed the reporter. When coverage jumped to a photo of the child and an interview with one of her teachers, I got up and started making a fresh pot of coffee. I stood at the machine and listened to the lead reporter interview neighbors, asking them if they were now afraid for their own families. One said she was trying to sell her house and knew three other friends putting theirs on the market. A man spoke cryptically about "armed security" and "you do what you have to do."
Billy punched off the report and I sat back down.
"S-So if they l-let you inside, you are at l-least off their suspect list," he said, always the attorney.
"It helps that I was with one of their own detectives when the abduction happened," I said, sipping the coffee. "But once a suspect, always a suspect."
"W-Well, y-you've got one f-fan," Billy said, handing me a message slip from his office. Fred Gunther had called from the hospital, asking me to come in and see him.
"He say how he's doing?"
"Sounded d-depressed to me. They are still not sure about the leg."
"Say why he wants to see me?"
Billy shook his head.
"Maybe he just w-wants to th-thank you."
That night I dreamt of the city, of running from my mother's Philadelphia house near St. Agnes Hospital down Mifflin Street to Front and then north. The heat of the summer is stirring a soup of gutter dust and exhaust fumes and I am pointing my face out to the Delaware River hoping to catch a breeze from the Camden side. On the water, container ships are sliding down with the current and from the sidewalk I can only see their superstructures, moving like buildings on rollers. I hit the cobblestones past South Street and my ankles are twisting and my knees are aching but I ignore the pain and push on. I know there is a fountain up ahead in the park at Penn's Landing so I keep pounding with the goal of cool water splashed up in my face and down my shoulders but when I finally reach the wide, knee-high pool I bend to the clear water and cup my hands around the face of my own reflection but it is Lavernious Coleman's cheeks that I touch, his eyes, filmed and growing sightless. I try to pull my hands away but can't get them out, my fingers are stuck in the cattails and the duckweed of the Everglades and the sawgrass is trying to pull me down.
When I woke up I was sweating. I could hear my heart thumping under the sheets in Billy's guest room. I sat up and swung my feet to the floor and rubbed my face and knew there would be no more sleeping this night. On the patio the ocean was black and murmuring against the beach and I sat waiting for the first soft light of dawn to tinge the horizon.
I needed to get my truck. Needed to get back in my own vehicle, drive at my own pace. Feel like I had some control over something instead of depending on others and spinning whichever way they determined I should be yanked.
I took a cab to the ranger's station, over Billy's protestations, and got there about ten o'clock, just as Mike Stanton was loading up the Whaler for a run out on the river. My truck was parked in the visitor's lot under a light pole. The kid saw me get out of the taxi and pay the driver, but turned back to his work.
I walked to the truck, gave it a once-over and opened the driver's door. A cab full of heat and stale air spilled out. I tossed my bags in and walked across the lot to the boat ramp.
"Nice job on the scratch, Mike. How much do I owe you?"
"About fifty dollars, Mr. Freeman," he said, finally looking up at me. "My friends and I did it ourselves."
"She run all right for you?"
"Yeah, fine. 'Cept I have never been pulled over so many times in my life," he said.
I raised as much innocence into my face as I could.
"Four times in two days by cops asking all kinds of questions about who I was and where the owner of the truck was and had you left the state. It wasn't worth it so I just parked it."
"I'm sorry for the trouble," I said, handing the kid five twenties from my wallet. He took all five without comment.
"Oh, and Mr. Freeman," he said as I started to turn away. "Cleve said to tell you to use his canoe 'round the side there if you wanted. Said yours got busted up?"
"Thanks," I said without elaboration.
I walked back to my truck feeling guilty, knowing the kid must be just shaking his head.
The noon traffic was no different from any other part of the working day, but this time sanity sat behind the wheel. No blue light, no horn, total adherence to the laws of the state. It took me more than an hour to get to the hospital, and when I asked for the room of Fred Gunther, the elderly woman at the information desk gave me a visitor's badge and directed me to follow the blue stripe on the hallway floor.
I thought I had sworn off hospitals two years ago when I. was wheelchaired out of Jefferson in Philadelphia with a bullethole in my neck and an appointment for a follow-up with a psychiatrist, neither of which I had asked for. Now I was on my second visit in five days. I hated hospitals, had watched my mother die in a hospital, eaten from the inside by cancer, refusing to end her pain with medication. Her knurled and leathery hand closed tight around my fingers, whispering a Catholic prayer with her final breath. I shook the vision. I hated hospitals. I moved through the hallways with pastel wallpaper, dodging staff dressed in blue and pink and green. It was a color-coordinated world with no place for black.
When I reached Gunther's room the door was open and he was alone. The media swirl had moved on to the next exclusive of the day. The big man was lying in bed, his eyes closed and his huge hands folded over his chest, fingers stacked in a pile. I scanned the length of the bedclothes and saw two lumps where both feet were covered. When I shifted my eyes back to his face, he was awake.
"How you doin'?" I said, covering some embarrassment.
"I've been better."
His voice was raspy and tired. I let him come full awake and watched him shift his weight using his powerful shoulders and arms.
"How much longer they going to keep you?"
"A while. They say I'll be able to keep the leg."
"I'm glad to hear it."
"Thanks to you."
I let that sit. Avoiding a trite response. We'd quickly run out of polite things to say.
"Could you close that door, Mr. Freeman?"
I shut the heavy door and when I came back the listlessness had left his face.
"I've had a lot of time to think," he started. "And I wasn't sure who to tell this to, but it seems that maybe you're the one."
I nodded and waited out his hesitation. It's a standard cop interviewing technique.
"I've got some friends, acquaintances really, out in the Glades who aren't exactly, uh, traditional folk. Some are natives. Some, like me, are just grown into the place and can't stand the way it's changing."
His voice had jumped a decibel and at least one notch of anxiety.
"So you said before," I replied, hoping to bring him back down but not shut him up.
"Before all this with the kids started, there was a history of protection from the outside among the folks who live out there. And it wasn't all pretty. A game warden was killed in the fifties. Some revenuers disappeared in the ear
ly days. We used to laugh about the old tales, but things had changed. Even the Seminoles were making money off the coastal folks, bringing them out onto the reservation to gamble at the Indian casino and all. Hell, they even let them hold a damn rock concert for 60,000 kids out there on a New Year's."
I moved to the side of the bed. Closer. Just you and me, pal.
"So these acquaintances aren't laughing so much anymore?"
"Shit started happening. A group of overnight canoeists who weren't using a guide got vandalized in the middle of nowhere. Their water was stolen. The ribs of their boats smashed. Some hikers on the canal levee stumbled into a nest of rattlesnakes in a spot where no natural rattlesnake would set up territory."
"Anybody claim responsibility?"
"No one outright."
There was a wrestling match going on in Gunther's head between conscience and fear.
"I don't think the old-timers would stand for something like this, but you can't always tell with some of the younger ones," he said.
"You have any names?" I said, taking a chance of shutting him down.
Gunther sighed, blowing air out his nose and closing his eyes for several seconds. I thought I'd taken a step too far. Then he reached over for a message pad and pen and started writing.
"You go out to this place and ask for Nate Brown. I already talked to them and they'll sit down with you."
The pen wedged between Gunther's thick sausage fingers looked like a dark sliver stuck in his huge hand.
"How come you're telling me this instead of the cops?"
"These people don't talk to cops. They've been avoiding authority out there for a hundred years."
"So why open it up now?" I said, again pushing. His wan face suddenly gained a slight flush of color. A sharp clearness came into his eyes.
"Hell, boy! Somebody tried to kill us!"
We both listened to his anger echo through the room. I took the piece of paper from his hand.
"Mr. Gunther, somebody has already succeeded in killing four kids. Kids who were a lot more innocent than you or I."
He closed his eyes again, lying there in silence like I found him. I let the door click quietly shut when I went out.
CHAPTER 15
"Nate Brown? Never heard of him. But if you're heading out to the Loop Road area, you're on your way to a different world."
As I pulled out of the hospital parking lot Billy was on the cell phone giving me directions to the Loop Road Frontier Hotel, the name Gunther had written on the message pad where Nate Brown and this group of acquaintances had agreed to meet me.
As I headed south toward Miami, he also gave me the history of the place.
Only thirty miles from the high-rise glitter, urban blight, Hispanic-dominated politics and thoroughly modern city of Miami, lay a place outside the curve of progress and, in many ways, still outside the purview of the law.
The Loop Road had first been hacked out of the Everglades in the early 1900s by dreamers, men who thought they could simply plow through what they considered useless swampland and create a link between the thriving new cities of Miami on one coast of Florida and Tampa on the other side. They were men with money and power and not a little bravery. And they made some progress.
By dredging limestone from under the water and piling it up and tamping it down, they started a road. But as is often the case, men with more power and money scuttled their plan. A roadway was eventually built across the lower end of the peninsula, at a heavy price to the laborers who died cutting the way through. Men drowned in the vast fields of water. Others were maimed in dynamite blasts. Some simply disappeared in an ancient Glades muck that could suck a boot, a leg, a worker's torso down.
But when the road from Tampa to Miami was finally finished in 1946 and dubbed the Tamiami Trail, it had effectively bypassed the first attempted roadway. The original Loop Road would remain unfinished, a trail to nowhere. And a trail to nowhere, in the middle of nowhere, draws a unique breed of resident.
For half a century the Loop Road was little more than a jump-off point for alligator hunters, exotic plume hunters and not a few moonshiners. Even in the years when killing off endangered alligators and snowy egrets became illegal and prohibition kicked in, the Loop was still a jump-off for poachers and white lightning runners, bail jumpers and criminals who needed a place where few questions were asked and authority ignored.
"It has a long tradition of being a place apart," Billy said. "The people who live there don't like strangers, government, developers, and have a special disdain for the law."
By the time Billy finished his history lesson I'd gotten off the I-95 exit to Southwest Eighth Street and headed west.
"I'm not sure I'd go out there alone if I were you."
"Yeah. Thanks," I said, punching him off.
Within a few miles I'd lost the city, the bodegas, the strip shopping centers, even the stoplights. Out here there were stretches of small orange and avocado groves, acres of tropical tree farms and open stands of slash pine. In some places the narrow roads ran under ancient stands of oak draped in moss whose limbs stretched across the roadway to form dark green tunnels that reminded me of my river. I had to cut farther south and by the time I found Loop Road the late-afternoon thunderheads were gathering in the western sky, piling up and tumbling east.
The Loop Road Frontier Hotel seemed more a backcountry Southern roadhouse than a hotel. When I found it I pulled into a shell-covered parking lot that was a quarter full with old- model pickup trucks, a few dusty sedans and a semi-tractor with its grease-covered skid plate exposed. I turned off my truck and sat listening to the heat tick off the engine, wondering if this was a mistake.
Off to one side of the building's covered entrance three men, probably in their early twenties, stood in lazy conversation, bootheels up on the bumper of a dented Ford pickup. They were dressed in jeans and tight, dark-colored T-shirts and wore baseball caps with various logos stitched on the front. They were not unlike a hundred other groups of young and uninspired locals I'd moved off the street corners of Philadelphia in my years of foot patrol. I could see them cutting their eyes my way.
I got out, locked my door, and had started toward the building when the biggest of the trio called out: "Hey, Mr. Fancytruck. You lost?"
I know I should have ignored it. I know I could have walked on and let the laughter fall behind me. A life is full of should-haves and could-haves. Instead I stopped and turned to the group.
"I don't think so."
"Well, I think so," the big one said and stepped forward as I knew he would. I'd seen it too many times.
He was my height but thirty pounds heavier and most of it fat. His chunky face was topped by a 1950s style crewcut but in his left ear was a tight looped earring. His brown eyes held an alcoholic luster. Get drunk or high so your reflexes are off and your oxygen intake is impaired and then go out and pick a fight. Idiocy knows no boundaries, I thought to myself.
"You a cop?" he sneered, moving within striking range, braver than I expected.
"No," I said. "Do you need one?"
"We don't need no fucking cops out here," one of his buddies answered from his spot behind the big one. Neither of the others had moved off their fender.
"Good," I said, turning to move on when I heard the big one suck in a quick snort of air.
Even professional fighters give away their intentions with breathing patterns. It is a natural instinct to draw in a snatch of air before expending the tight energy used to deliver a blow or make a hard move. Everyone does it. Amateurs are just louder and sloppier.
When I heard the whistle of air I turned and spun inside his first roundhouse punch, aimed at the back of my head, and caught the blow instead on my left forearm. I had blocked a lot of punches in my hours at O'Hara's Gym and this one was no light shot. His second swing I caught on my right elbow and it felt like a baseball bat. The guy knew leverage and was throwing his weight behind his swings. But he was easy to read and I knew what wa
s coming and covered up, my fists high next to my temples and elbows in to my ribs. Protect your head and heart, Frankie's dad had always coached, even to the pro boxers he trained.
With his friends rooting him on, the big boy kept throwing and I kept stepping inside, taking his best on my shoulders and arms. He was already breathing hard. I knew he'd burn himself out. Only once did he try to come in low and even though I blocked the shot with my elbow the force crunched into the ribs I'd bruised in the plane crash and the pain set a new fire in my chest.
Then one of the others decided to get in on it and came at me from the side and fired a skinny punch that caught me on the cheek and I knew this had to end before it turned into a stomping.
I circled the big one, moving away from his right hand and timed my own punch as perfectly as Frankie's dad had ever hoped to teach a rangy, whitebread football player from the neighborhood. Stepping inside just as he was drawing a deep breath, I planted my right foot and using the power of a thousand hours of river paddling and beach running I drove a short right fist into his chest. The blow caught him just below the sternum, right in the notch where the ribs meet, and the air came out of his throat like a bubble bursting on the surface of a lake.
He went down hard on the seat of his pants and sat there, arms flopped to his side, eyes open but sightless, looking like an old stuffed bear left useless in the corner of the room.
His friends were stunned and stood frozen, looking down at him while I turned and stepped up on the porch and without a word walked through the front door of the Loop Road Frontier.
Inside I stood in what passed for a lobby, leaned against a wall and shook. My knees were quivering, my hands trembled and I knew that if I could see them, the pupils of my eyes would be huge. Adrenaline. You couldn't avoid it. It's a biological reaction in every animal that ever hunted or was hunted. It surges through the blood to help you flee or fight. And it pumps regardless of the choice.
I paced a bit, flexing my hands open and closed and letting the feeling leech away. The entryway I was standing in was small and paneled in Dade County Pine similar to my river shack. But this was polished and gave off a dark glow in the light of a small chandelier hanging from the eight-foot ceiling. At an empty counter a placard with a ridge of dust along its top edge was propped up and read: No Rooms.
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