Shadow Men

by Jonathon King

  I brushed a strand of hair off her face with my fingertips, then got up quietly and went to the kitchen to start the coffeemaker. I got through one cup and then took a shower. I was dressed and finishing my third cup on the patio when she stepped out to join me. The sky had lightened and she was dressed for work. She put a hand on my shoulder and looked up into the oak at the sound of a trill made by a Florida scrub jay.

  “You sleep all right?”

  “Not much,” I said, kissing the back of her hand.

  “You wanna go to Lester’s for breakfast and tell me about it?”

  I didn’t respond, so she added, “About whatever you wanted to talk about when you called yesterday. It’s your turn.”

  I shook my head and smiled. This intuition thing. It was one of the things about women that always amazed and befuddled me.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  After breakfast in a booth at Lester’s, after I told her about the fire and the long-shot speculation that at least a few eighty-year-old disappearances in the Glades might be suspicious, I dropped her at work. She had listened, like a good investigator. I’ve found that most people in conversation listen only to the voice of the person they’re talking to, waiting for it to stop so they can throw out their own thoughts and speculations. Richards listened to my words and then weighed them before answering. She pointed out that finding evidence of a homicide in the Glades, if that’s what Mr. Mayes was talking about, would be close to impossible. Criminals had been dumping bodies in the lonely stretches of muck and sawgrass for a hundred years. Her own unit worked the disappearance of a young prostitute last month whose dismembered body was found in a Glades canal by an unlucky fisherman. Nature had a way of eating up evidence out there.

  She was more concerned about the fire. Who knew what wacky environmentalist or mouth-breathing Glades cracker might want him out of there.

  “Maybe it’s time to move back into the civilized world, Freeman,” she said as she got out of the truck in front of the sheriff’s office. It wasn’t the first time she or Billy had brought up the suggestion.

  “Maybe,” was now my standard reply.

  “Bullshit,” she said, and waved as she walked away, always getting the last word.

  I drove north to Billy’s building, where the concierge with the fake English accent greeted me formally and then electronically buzzed me into the penthouse elevator. The doors opened upstairs onto a private foyer with no other entrances but the one to the apartment. I always left some clothes and a pair of running shoes in the guest suite. My old faded Temple University T-shirt had been pressed by Billy’s laundry service. I put on a pair of shorts and laced up the shoes. I went back down, waved at the doorman, passed the pool out back and walked out to the beach. I sat on my towel in the hard sand below the high-tide mark and stretched my hamstrings, then left the towel as a motivating finish line and started jogging south. The first fifteen minutes I took it easy, pulling the sea air deep into my lungs, judging if there had been any real damage from the smoke I’d inhaled during the fire. Then I opened up my stride a bit, staying down on the hard-pack and occasionally getting caught by a high, running wave. After thirty minutes I turned around and pushed it. I had to dodge a couple of shell gatherers but kept a steady pace. I couldn’t help stealing glances at Billy’s growing building, trying to judge the distance. My heart was banging and the blood was pulsing in my ears when I saw the towel and started sprinting. I squeezed my eyes shut over the last ten yards and pulled up only when I felt my foot hit the terry cloth. I jogged to a stop and felt a rasp at the end of each exhalation; could taste the acidic smoke in the top of my mouth. I pulled off my shirt, kicked off the shoes and waded into the surf, letting the breakers wash over my head and the water leach away my body heat. I stood facing east, at the rumpled line of the horizon. I was preparing for something that I did not want to catch me flat-footed, or out of breath, or weak. I couldn’t see it yet in my head, but it was there, a tingle of violence that vibrated low in my spine. Something was coming, and even though I could not name it, I knew I would not welcome it.

  I shook the sand out of the towel and mopped myself off before attempting to get back into Billy’s building. I even slipped my shoes back on. The concierge nevertheless gave me one of those closed- eyes, shake-your-head gestures that says, “Riffraff these days. What can you do?” Upstairs I showered and dressed in a clean pair of canvas pants and a white polo shirt. I drank one more cup of coffee while standing at the rail outside and watched the wind set down a corduroy pattern across the Atlantic. I knew why Billy loved it up here. He had been born and raised in the ghetto of north Philadelphia. By the strength of his own intelligence and his mother’s refusal to accept any preset station in life, he had risen. Captain of his public school chess team, a group of black kids who annually kicked ass in national competitions. Top of his class at Temple Law School and the same when he took an advanced degree in business at Wharton. The only thing that kept him from being one of the finest trial lawyers in the East was his inescapable stutter. His background had also turned him into a staunch capitalist. He was never going to settle for academia. Instead he left Philly and came here. He quickly built a client base and a range of contacts that was enormous. He got rich and moved high above the streets into the fresh ocean air and sunlight, determined never to live below the horizon again.

  With his shrewd business sense, Billy had invested my disability buyout from the police department and created for me a sizable portfolio. Last year he’d counseled me to leave the shack. “Hiding” he now called it, and he wasn’t completely wrong. Maybe I had even considered it, but not now. I drained my cup, grabbed my keys and the plastic bag in which I’d placed a charred sliver of wood from the cabin piling. If I left my river, it wasn’t going to be because I had been forced. If someone was trying to scare me out, I’d find out who.

  CHAPTER

  5

  I drove south on Dixie Highway, and at a section of commercial buildings between coastal cities, I turned off and pulled into a warehouse complex near the Florida East Coast Railway tracks. I rolled down in front of a long, corrugated steel building lined with garage-style doors and simple entrances. Some had trucks backed up to open garage bays. Others were unmarked and shuttered. I found a space in front of a door with a small unobtrusive sign that read GLOBAL FORENSICS INC.

  I stepped out into the midday heat that reflected off the concrete and the steel walls. Across the way some kind of rap music was thumping out of an open bay. A low-ride Honda Civic with those little toy-sized wheels was jacked up outside, with a pair of skinny legs sticking out from under the front end. Inside the bay two young guys wearing either real long shorts or real short pants were bent halfway into the open hood of an old Pontiac GTO. Three inches of underwear was showing above their belt loops, and both had black and blue tattoos on their lower legs, the details of which I couldn’t see from here.

  I locked my doors. Riffraff these days. What can you do?

  The door to Global Forensics was open, and I stepped into a small reception area that was devoid of any clutter, dust or human presence, and that was freezing cold. When I entered I heard a muffled buzzer ring somewhere behind another inside door, and thirty seconds later a baritone voice sounded over a small white speaker mounted high in one corner: “Hey, give me a minute. I’ll be right with you. Have a seat.”

  There wasn’t a chair in the room, just a single metal desk with nothing on its surface. There were no pictures on the pale walls. No calendar. No license. I was sitting on the corner of the desk, dangling one leg, when I heard a gunshot ring out from behind the inside walls. It was a heavy report, large caliber. I’d jumped at the initial crack, but stayed seated. I knew what kind of business went on here.

  A minute or so later the inside door opened and the large head of a whiskered man appeared. He was wearing a pair of safety glasses and had a set of protective earmuffs pulled down around his thick neck.

  “Well, Ma
x Freeman,” he said. “Come on in, boy. What can I do for you?”

  William Lott is a big lout of a man with opinions on everything but a true knowledge and specialty in only one: forensics science. At one time, despite his irascible personality and love of good scotch, he was one of the best in his field at the FBI labs at Quantico. He says that he quit just before the media exposed the myriad problems and botched cases of that unit. He said he had ducked out so that his own “sterling reputation” wouldn’t be sullied by the government administration “hacks” and management “drones” who left the true scientists “hung out to dry.” He opted to set up his own private forensics lab in Florida. It would amaze you, he said, how many people mistrusted the government and the cops. Since O. J. his practice was booming with clients wanting independent DNA tests, chemical analysis and crime-scene reanalysis of evidence gathered against defendants. “And you don’t even wanna know how many sheet samples I get in here from the wives or the husbands in Palm Beach and East Boca,” he was fond of telling me. He was also quick to add, “All I do is the science. What they do with the results is their gig.” Lott was one of Billy’s many acquaintances, and on that recommendation alone he would have prospered. Billy had introduced us at lunch one day, and I sat humorously amazed while the scientist downed three dozen hot chicken wings and a six-pack of Old Milwaukee and never lost a beat in conversation.

  “Let me put this old cannon away, Max,” he said, and I followed him inside. As we passed a dimly lit room off to the right, I could smell the stink of cordite drifting out. Lott was carrying a military .45 loosely in his right hand, and his white, long-sleeved glove meant he was capturing blow-back residue from firing the weapon. We entered a large white room that looked like a cross between an industrial kitchen and the biology lab I had in high school. Glass- fronted cabinets, sinks with long, swan-necked faucets, hooded workstations and three different microscopes set up against one wall, along with rows of numbered drawers.

  Lott was a big man, as tall as me at six feet two but carrying sixty more pounds than my 205. Still, he moved about the place with a grace that came from familiarity and a perhaps unconscious efficiency. He laid the gun on a countertop and then carefully took off the glove and placed it under one of the lighted hoods. He then unlocked one of the drawers, placed the gun inside and relocked it.

  “OK, Max,” he finally said, taking my hand in his big palm and shaking it. “What’s our boy Billy got you on now?”

  “Nothing, yet,” I said. “But he will. You know Billy.”

  “Yeah. Smart little bastard, ain’t he? Sweet move you getting in with him, Freeman. Got ethics up to his eyeballs. Not like them other scum-sucking lawyers out to line their own damn pockets creatin’ a fuckin crisis a minute that, of course, only they and their own brethren can solve at three hundred dollars an hour plus expenses.”

  I nodded, fully prepared to let Lott go on even though I’d heard his line before. But he stopped on his own accord.

  “Gettin’ on to lunchtime here, Max. What can I do for you, unless you wanna join me over to Pure Platinum, where they have got the finest little buffet and boobs lunch special goin’ on. They is a little honey from one of them daytime soaps struttin’ her stuff you would not believe.…”

  “No thanks, Bill,” I said, pulling the plastic bag with the charred wood sliver from my pocket. “This one’s for me. A matter of accelerant, I believe.”

  Lott took the sample, his eyes and demeanor instantly changing with the challenge. He turned the bag in the light, then opened it and took a careful smell, like some fine-wine connoisseur.

  “Gasoline,” he said. “But with an additive.”

  He turned and walked over to another hooded workstation, sat down on a metal stool and opened a drawer. I knew enough to stay where I was. Bill Lott was not the kind of guy who let someone look over his shoulder while he worked. It took him only five minutes.

  “Marine fuel,” he said, getting up and bringing the sample back to me. “Mixture of gas and oil. The kind you use in outboard motors on small boats. Impossible to tell what brand ’cause you can buy regular gas and mix it yourself.”

  I took the sample back from him.

  “Piece of old hardwood there, Max.”

  “Piling,” I said, not elaborating.

  Lott nodded and smiled.

  “All I do is the science,” he said.

  I was headed back to Billy’s when I turned off into the parking lot of a convenience store and called him on the cell. I left a message that I’d been there during the day but was going back to the shack to spend the night. I would call to confirm our meeting with Mayes in the morning. After punching off, I went into the store and bought a prewrapped sandwich, a cheap Styrofoam cooler, a bag of ice and a six pack of Rolling Rock, and headed for the river.

  I’d finished the sandwich by the time I pulled into the landing parking lot. I flipped my canoe and set the cooler of iced beer in the center. The wind had died, and in the high sun the surface of the water looked like a sheet of hot glass. The ranger’s boat was cleated hard against the dock, and I noted the red, five-gallon auxiliary fuel tank stored in one corner of the well. I floated the canoe, put my right foot on the center line inside, and with both hands on either gunwale, pushed off and glided, balancing, onto my river.

  I paddled in a slow rhythm: reach, pull through, and a little kick- out at the end. The river’s banks were still. I watched the high clouds in the west sit like smeared white paint on the sky. An osprey seemed frozen at the frondless top of a dead cypress tree. The raptor’s white head did not move; its yellow eye was locked on something below in the water. I shipped the paddle and let the canoe glide in the sun. I popped a cold beer and sat back to watch the bird. The osprey is a true hunting bird, an animal with magnificent patience and aerobatic skill. And unlike the bald eagle—which has all the public relations but nowhere near the same hunting pride—he will take only live prey. The eagle will eat another’s carrion and will also get his ass kicked in flight by an osprey. I kept as motionless as my sipping would allow. I was on my second beer when the bird lifted off its perch and made a strong, graceful swing to the south, then looped back. The aluminum against my palm was cold, but I didn’t change my grip as I watched the osprey come hard and fast back to the north. The bird seemed to lay back its wings as it increased its speed and tilt at a steep angle to the glassed-out water. It looked like a suicide run, but at the last second I watched his talons stretch open as he pulled them forward into the attack position. The movement stalled his air speed just inches above the water, and then, in a flash of tendon and muscle and the light splash of sun- brilliant water, he struck deep. His body lurched slightly forward from the instant water drag, but with two strong flaps of his wings he climbed up with a small, silver-sided snook in his grasp, the fish’s tail vibrating in a death throe. The bird soared out over the tree canopy and disappeared, and as I watched I switched the beer can into my other hand and pressed the cold of my palm against the small of my back, where the tingle of something waiting to drive me off my river had started on the beach.

  When I finally got back to the shack I didn’t bother to paddle around to look at the black smear on the north wall, but I did take extra care to look for prints on the stairway. If an arsonist had wanted to harm me, why wouldn’t he have set the staircase leading to my door aflame? It would at least have forced me to jump. I tied up the canoe and went up. The air had cleared some of the burnt stench from the shack but there was still an odor inside. I coughed on the first lungful, almost as though it had tripped a memory. I started coffee and then stripped naked and stepped back out on the landing, where I showered off under my jury-rigged rain barrel. The barrel was mounted just below the roofline, and the gutter system refilled it with fresh rainwater. A rubber hose clipped above a perforated garden nozzle gave me enough flow to rinse off a film of sweat. I heard the low grunt of an anhinga but couldn’t see it hiding back in the foliage. I dressed, but my clean T-s
hirt had taken on the smoke smell. I tried to ignore it while I moved one of my straight-backed chairs over to the window, where an early evening breeze was sifting in. I don’t remember finishing the coffee or falling asleep. But I remember the light change and then the burnt odor too, and then the sight of a young woman sitting in a Philadelphia hotel room chair, a pillow held tightly in her arms. The look on her face made her appear both quiet and terrified at the same time. I even asked her a question before I realized she was dead.

  My partner, Scott Erb, and I were working Center City on the two-to-eleven shift and got a dispatch call at 10:45. The security manager had requested our presence at the Wyndham Hotel ASAP. We both winced at the language, and then the dispatcher added her own sardonic, “He reports that discretion is advised.” We were only a few blocks away and had no calls holding. The security guy met us in the lobby, introduced himself and led us straight to the elevators. He waited until the doors closed before saying, “I think we’ve got a murder-suicide, and you’re not going to like the shooter.” We looked at each other while he punched in a code and lit a floor button near the top. Scott took out a pad, checked his watch, and started scratching in notes. The hallway was empty when the doors opened on the eighteenth floor. It was a nice place, less than ten years old and pricey. There were fresh flowers in the foyer, even at 11 :00 P.M. The security man led us to the end of the hall.