“Okay, go on.”
“Earlier last night Earl came out to the barn where I was working and told a story about the old days, about a time when Hemingway and Thomas Edison and some others visited the ranch. When he was finished with the story, he told me something was about to change at Coquina and people might be upset.”
“Hemingway came here? What, to hunt rhino?”
“To meet Edison and Henry Ford. To fraternize. Back in the thirties.”
“So that’s what happens around here? Big shots hang out, sit around the campfire. Is that right? Movie stars, politicians, like that?”
“Yes. Friends of the Hammond family. It’s been a tradition for generations.”
“A good-old-boys club. Power brokers. Is that what goes on, Sergeant?”
Claire was silent, looking at the corner of the table.
“Mainly it’s old white guys,” Frisco said, “sitting around a fire bitching about their prostates. Not a lot of power brokering I’ve seen.”
Claire kept her head down, hiding a smile.
“Okay.” Donaldson fluttered her hand in Claire’s line of sight. “So back to this talk between you and Earl Hammond. What’s he referring to, what’s going to change at the ranch?”
“I don’t know. He said Browning would fill me in. He just wanted to let me know something was about to happen, and he was trying to do the right thing.”
“The right thing? You have no idea what he was talking about?”
“That’s all he told me. Things were about to change. A radical change.”
“He used that word?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s odd. I mean radical’s a pretty striking word. Kind of jumps out at you. And you’re just remembering this.”
Frisco shifted his feet, tipping forward like he was straining to hear.
“Is it normal,” Claire said, “for someone in my position, an ordinary citizen who’s just been forced to kill another human being, for that person to have perfect recall? Has that been your experience as an investigator?”
Frisco smiled.
“Don’t get agitated, Ms. Hammond. It’s not helpful.”
“But your smugness, treating me like a suspect, that’s helpful.”
Frisco was looking down at the floor, concealing a smile.
“I’m sorry if my attitude offends you, Ms. Hammond. I sincerely regret that. It’s good that you’ve let off some steam, that’s healthy. Now, let’s put that behind us and get back to work, shall we? This radical change Earl mentioned. Let’s stay on that. You think that radical change could’ve been the cost cutting, trimming overhead, firing certain employees? Earl’s decided to bring you into the loop.”
“I suppose.”
“So we’re back to the disgruntled employee. A man who’d been fired after years of faithful service. He’s going to be evicted from his house, family’s got to move. It’s something he can’t accept. He flips out.”
“But no,” Claire said. “That’s not what I witnessed.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I didn’t see an angry man. I saw someone torn apart by what he was about to do. A man terribly conflicted. Not angry. Not mad.”
“From those few seconds, standing with your shotgun, you could tell what his mood was?”
“He wasn’t angry. He was broken-hearted.”
“Desperate? Would that be a fair description?”
“Heartbroken,” Claire said.
She lay her hand on the tabletop that was etched with the grooves, scratches, and pits of a century of hard use, keeping her palm flat, as if in that way she might draw energy, unite in some meager way with the generations of tough men and women who’d come before her, who’d broken bread here, received their wages, coped with unimaginable hardships, leaving behind their delicate scars on this wood, small traces of their passing.
“You’ve got enough for now,” Frisco said. “The lady’s been going at it for hours. She needs a break.”
He came forward and put a hand under Claire’s elbow and helped her rise, then guided her to the door.
Donaldson clicked off her recorder and stood.
“Okay, fine. I appreciate your help, Ms. Hammond, but let’s be clear. When the protocol gets sorted out, the jurisdictional jockeying is finished, and all the badges get back to their respective desks, I’m confident FDLE will be taking the lead in the investigation, which means you and I will be speaking again.” She reached into the pocket of her chinos and drew out two business cards, handed one to Claire, the other to Frisco.
“I know,” Claire said. “If I remember something, I should call.”
“Check the angle of entry,” Frisco said to Donaldson.
“What?”
“Gustavo was five-two. Your guy Saperstein was well over six feet, and he took seven slugs around the sternum. In your haste to pin this on Pinto, I’d hate to see you whiz kids neglect something so obvious as angle of entry. Upward, downward, straight in. Might tell you how tall the shooter was?”
“Is it just you, Hammond, or are all Miami street cops trained crime-scene investigators?”
“My guess is you got two perps,” Frisco said. “Whoever killed Saperstein has problems with impulse control. He was getting off, unloading that whole clip. Then there’s Gustavo. Man’s so weepy he could barely bring himself to raise his pistol. To me, that sounds a lot like two different shooters.”
THIRTEEN
* * *
OUTSIDE, THE BLACK HELICOPTER HAD touched down in the pasture behind the barn. Surrounded by men in sunglasses, just beyond the prop wash, Governor Sanchez was listening to Antwan Shelton talk. The governor had his head bowed, hands behind him pressed to his kidneys. His big shoulders were humped over as if carrying some burden that taxed his strength.
Antwan had changed clothes. No longer in the paratrooper’s pants and black muscle T-shirt of the night before. Now decked out in a gleaming white button-down shirt and black trousers, whose sharp creases Claire could distinguish even from a distance. Dressed like the other security guys but somehow more stylish, bordering on flamboyant. She wondered where he’d found the time to shower and change, and shave his bald head so it gleamed like polished obsidian in the sunlight. But that was Antwan. Always buffed. The muscles rippling, the hippest sunglasses, the gold rings and bangles and necklace, the popcorn diamond in his earlobe. How dapper, how utterly composed he seemed. Amid the turmoil, the ragged confusion. All wrong.
“Our man Antwan been hanging around a lot lately?”
“No more than usual.”
“How much is that?”
“Few times a week. He and Browning are always working on some project or another. Knocking over one sandcastle, building another.”
“Bad influence.”
“Antwan?”
“Both of them,” Frisco said. “A couple of frat boys egging each other on.”
“I didn’t realize you knew Antwan.”
“I live in Miami. Antwan Shelton is unavoidable. TV, billboards. Always right there, that liar’s smile, hustling the next big thing.”
Yellow crime-scene tape wrapped the oleander bush where Saperstein’s body had fallen. Men and women in paper boots and blue smocks flowed in and out of the lodge. One of them, a young man who was carrying a paper evidence bag, stopped on the bridge to take an admiring look out at the alligator moat and the slash pines and the shadowy groves before he headed back to the white van where the other technicians were assembled.
“Where’s Browning?”
Frisco nodded to the other end of the clapboard-sided office building. “Telling his story for the third time.”
“You sat in?”
“Couple of hours ago, on his go-round with Homeland Security.”
“What are they doing here?”
“First thing everyone thought, with the governor being present, it had to be terrorism. I think by now they’ve ruled that out. DEA’s sniffing around, too, got their fingers
crossed it’s cartel related, and you’ve got FBI. Hell, even Treasury sent out a Secret Service guy. Place is sloshing over with testosterone.
“Thing like this, they’re looking for a conspiracy. Gustavo was the shooter, everybody agrees on that. But somebody could’ve pulled his strings. They’ll be taking statements from everybody within a mile of the lodge. All the ranch hands, the cooks, anybody with a connection to Gustavo or Coquina Ranch, or Earl Hammond. Like I said, it’ll take a while.”
“And that’s why Donaldson was grinding me. Like I’m part of a conspiracy?”
“Far as the feds are concerned,” Frisco said, “there’s no such thing as a lone gunman. Ever since JFK, it’s their pet theory. Don’t take it personally.”
“And what did Browning say?”
“Told it pretty much like you told it. A couple of minor differences.”
Frisco drew a fingertip across a wrinkle near his mouth, flattening it, as if trying to smooth away the inevitable.
“Browning says you came through the door with the shotgun before Gustavo said much. He’d only just got started. That squares with Antwan’s story and the governor’s. Nobody has an explanation.”
“Browning say anything about the radical change?”
“Nothing.”
“Then Earl hadn’t told him yet.”
“So it seems,” Frisco said.
“Gustavo was fired? Do you believe that?”
“Is there some reason I should doubt my brother?”
Claire watched the governor board the chopper, shoulders slumped under that invisible weight. Antwan skipped well out of range of the swirl of white dust.
She glanced at Frisco, caught him eyeing her, and his gaze shied away at once. Another in a long string of awkward moments. They’d had no practice being together without Browning. From the very start there’d been a stiff formality between them, and over the years it had only grown worse. She assumed it had to do with her embrace of Coquina Ranch, a way of life Frisco had spurned. Some blend of resentment and jealousy and suspicion of Claire’s motives, a young woman like her signing on for such hard duty. It was nothing he said, nothing he did outright, but whenever she was around him, Claire felt like a fraud, a city girl faking her role as frontierswoman.
“Governor’s not taking it well,” Frisco said. “Not his usual cheery self.”
“And you, Frisco? How’re you holding up?”
“I’m hanging in there.”
Frisco’s jaw was tense, his eyes following the rising chopper.
Claire walked across the corral to the bench just beyond the barn door and sat. Frisco followed, stayed on his feet, scanning the crime scene, the homestead where he’d grown up, overrun by foreign invaders.
In the six years she’d been a part of the Hammond family, Claire had only met Frisco a handful of times. Always in Miami, a hurried lunch while she and Browning were in town doing city errands. Joining Frisco at one of the fish joints along the river near the police department’s horse barn.
Browning would complain about his struggles at the ranch, grumble over Earl’s stubbornness, air the petty day-to-day annoyances, his efforts to turn a more substantial profit. With all that land, the greatest portion of it sitting unused, the payrolls, fuel bills, and other expenses ate up the meager profits from the modest herd of Angus and Herefords, some timber, a small sod operation, and fifty acres of tomatoes. Not that Browning was greedy. But he considered himself a businessman and couldn’t accept the backward way the Hammond men had always let those thousands of acres lie fallow. Such a waste.
Never asking for advice from his big brother and not getting any. Frisco listened, a grunt of sympathy now and again. At those lunches, as Claire observed the two brothers interact, the seven years between them seemed more like a generation. Frisco’s weighty silences, Browning’s chatter and peevishness.
Back home at the ranch, Browning never mentioned Frisco, never brought up their common childhood, as if such a thing had not existed. If Claire hadn’t pestered Deloria, the cook, for more information on her brother-in-law, Frisco would have remained a blank.
In his teens, he’d been a rising rodeo star. Spent two years on the Florida circuit, did a few of the national events, Las Vegas, Oklahoma City. He rode broncs and bulls, did some calf roping, won a few silver buckles some decent prize money, even got a promotional deal with a blue jeans company. Then, for reasons he never shared, he quit the main events and spent his last two seasons as a pickup rider.
Since Browning was a rodeo fan, Claire had attended her share in the last few years, and because of what she’d heard about Frisco, she’d focused on the pickup guys, watched them work their quiet magic. If a bronc rider made it to the eight-second buzzer without being thrown from the bucking horse, a pickup rider galloped alongside to pull the cowboy off and set him safely on the ground. The pickup men had to time their approach perfectly, keep their own horse under strict control, and in a single swipe rescue the rider.
It was obvious to Claire that pickup guys were the most skilled horsemen at the rodeo, yet they stayed just beyond the limelight and got none of the crowd’s applause. From what she could tell, only a few insiders and the other cowboys seemed to appreciate their heroics. On one occasion when she made an admiring comment about one pickup rider’s skill, Browning laughed at her. “Those guys lost their nerve for broncs and bulls. Bunch of has-beens.”
As she sat and watched the swarm of law-enforcement personnel move in and out of the lodge, Claire felt another dry clutch of air in her throat and a dark weight settling in her chest. For the last few hours these surges of despair and guilt had been coming in unexpected waves as she digested the loss of Earl Hammond, her own culpability in the matter, and stared ahead at the long, desolate stretch of days. She shut her eyes until the moment passed. When she looked up, Frisco was watching her again.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Nothing to apologize for.”
“No, listen to me. Donaldson was right. I really fucked up.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I should’ve shot Gustavo the minute I walked in the door, saw him holding that gun. Earl would still be alive.”
Frisco watched Donaldson step outside onto the covered porch of the offices and light a cigarette.
“You’re a goddamn hero, Claire. Get used to it. If you hadn’t come in like that, guns blazing, everyone in that room might be dead right now. That’s how you got to look at it. Because you didn’t fuck up. A guy with twenty years on the street couldn’t have done better.”
“Browning will never forgive me. He worshipped Earl.”
“Browning’s a big boy,” Frisco said. “He’ll get over it.”
“I don’t know if I can forgive myself.”
“Cut it out. Now you’re wallowing.”
She came to her feet, stared sharply into his eyes.
“What’d you say?”
He looked at her, faintly amused.
“There, that’s better. That’s more like it.”
He turned his attention back to Donaldson. The FDLE officer took a last drag, sucking the life out of her cigarette, and flicked the butt into the dusty corral.
“You know, Frisco, sometimes you can be one cold son of a bitch.”
“And the other times?”
“I haven’t seen any of those,” Claire said.
A quick smile crossed his lips, then he motioned toward the interior of the barn.
“Need to show you something,” he said.
Still stinging, she followed him into the shadowy building that reeked of fresh hay and manure and the damp rot of ancient wood. They passed down the length of stalls past the five marshtackies, small, tough horses that were descendants of those left behind by Spanish explorers. The early Florida crackers had appropriated the breed to manage their large herds of free-ranging cattle on land all around these parts. In the last century, marshtackies had all but disappeared. A shame, for those tough, tire
less horses were so perfectly suited for working in the thick scrubland, pine forests, and rough and sloppy terrain.
The one time her father, the skin doctor, had visited Coquina Ranch, she’d brought him out to see these horses and explained their history. He simply nodded, beaming the same as he had all day, speechless and bewildered, like a man unable to match up the memories of his suburban Connecticut daughter with this woman in soiled jeans and shit-spattered riding boots. Claire’s mother, Ellen, would have been less charitable about the ranch. Firing off catty remarks about the grungy world her daughter had descended into. Ellen, last Claire heard, was on her fifth husband, even younger and richer than the previous ones. Living on the beach in Hawaii, a yearly Christmas card with an illegible signature her only communication.
Frisco led her past the marshtackies to the last stall, where a roan Tennessee walker was backed up against the rear wall, head held high, peering at them warily. With its mouth closed, the big horse snorted twice.
Claire stopped and turned to Frisco.
“Her name is Big Girl. She hasn’t adjusted to city life. I thought she could board here till I figured out what to do with her. If that’s okay with you.”
She took a second, then nodded.
“By the way,” he said. “That story Earl told about Edison and Hemingway.”
“Yeah?”
“He give you both halves?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Where’d the story stop? When little Earl left the campfire, went back to the lodge and got in bed?”
“That’s right.”
Frisco nodded like he’d assumed as much.
“What’s the rest?”
Shifting his gaze away from her, Frisco said, “Have to tell you later.”
He drew a peppermint stick from his jeans, peeled the cellophane off, and held it out to the horse. Shyly it came over and took the candy from his hand.
“Tell me now.”
Frisco looked past her, fixing his eyes on the entrance.
“Later,” he said.
She turned and saw Browning coming into the barn with Antwan at his side.
“All right, then,” said Claire. “Later.”
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