Acts of Nature

by Jonathon King

  From their openmouthed look, the boys were losing their stupefaction and focusing on the term “felony murder.”

  Buck again checked the other side of the door. He already didn’t like guns and the effort of holding the big .45 in his hand seemed to have drained his energy. I got six rounds here, he thought. Maybe I should kill all four of them and wash my own self of it all. Goddamn it. Your daddy didn’t teach you nothin’, did he, boy.

  When they stepped back in I could see the change. The raised .45 was held a little tighter. Buck’s knuckles were white as he squeezed the grip. No more bluffing.

  “I am truly sorry, Mr. Freeman,” he said, and I almost jumped then at the words; only the thought of what they might do to Sherry caused the muscles in my legs and back to hold. They were curtain-closing words coming from a man with eyes that now seemed to see nothing but survival, and the look was one I recognized. I now had no doubt he was an ex-con, learned from the inside.

  “I’m gonna have to ask you to move over there by the door, sir, and sit,” he said waving the handgun.

  “Wayne, you go on and get that roll of tape out of the bag there and strap Mr. Freeman up by the ankles and the wrists. Behind his back, boy.”

  Buck had obviously grown tired of the younger one’s miscues. The identifying necklace should have never seen the light of day until some buyer somewhere was ready to remove the stones so it would be unrecognizable.

  “Now whoa, whoa, hold on a minute,” I said, trying to slow things down. “What the hell, fellas. You guys got something going on out here where you’re just salvaging after the storm, we don’t give a damn. Hell, we’re not even owners of any property. We just got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Whatever you guys are doing, it’s none of our business and it can stay that way.”

  The kid crossed my ankles and started strapping with a roll of waterproof packaging tape, the kind with a nylon filament running through it. Tough to tear, tougher to break. He seemed pissed now, taking out the anger that he wanted to direct at someone else onto the job at hand. I’d be lucky to still feel my toes in an hour.

  “Hands behind your back,” he said, like he’d heard it on an old movie. But when I hesitated Buck cocked the big hammer on the pistol and I pressed my lips into a line and followed the order. The kid did the same angry trick on my hands, though I was ready and turned my knuckles in, forcing the tendons on the inside of my wrists to bulge as much as my strength could pop them. It would give me some room when I relaxed. I hoped it would be a voluntary relaxation and not because my brain matter was all over the wall behind me.

  As much as the binding hurt it was nothing compared with having to watch the other little shithead do the same thing to Sherry.

  Wayne finished with me and then started to toss the roll to his friend who was too busy staring down at Sherry’s crotch to notice.

  “Yo, Marcus,” the kid said, fucking up again, using his buddy’s name, not that it mattered anymore.

  Marcus caught the tape roll and started wrapping Sherry’s ankles to the posts of the cot. She whined once when he pulled her broken leg over to strap it and I felt angry tears come into my eyes. Retribution had not been part of me as a street cop. The only person I’d ever wished death on was my own alcoholic father who almost nightly dumped his badge and revolver on the kitchen table before he started smacking my mother around with an open hand. But as I watched this kid pull Sherry’s arms up and bind them and then run his fingertips down her now unprotected chest and over her breasts, he became number two.

  “Get the fuck over here,” Buck snapped at the kid. He picked up the canvas bag by the bottom corner and let several metal tools spill out onto the floor: a stout iron crowbar, two different-sized screwdrivers, and a pair of vise grips, a claw hammer, and small axe.

  “I seen by the markings on that door, you already tried to get into the other room there, Mr. Freeman,” he said without looking at me. “But maybe you just didn’t have the right tools with you, huh?”

  He stepped over for a closer look at the door and the electronic locking device.

  “But scootch on over out of the way there, sir. I have had some practical learning on how to get in and out of places folks don’t want you to get in or out of.”

  I slid myself down the wall and didn’t say a word about the hatchway under the room that I’d left wide open in my haste to meet these assholes. I was trying to decide if we were better off biding our time, hoping against hope that the two immature hicks would continue to fuck up somehow and give me an opening, or should I just tell Buck about the entry, let them loot whatever they wanted from the room and maybe he’d be satisfied and leave. The other possibility I was not yet ready to confront: that he’d simply kill us both and leave it to whomever stumbled onto our rotting bodies in a few days or weeks to piece it together. Hell, maybe he’d just kill us and haul our corpses onto his airboat deeper into the swamp to dump and let nature break us down. There are no small number of bodies dumped in the Everglades where all manner of forensic evidence is consumed by everything from alligators and wild boar right down to the billions of heat- and waterborne microbes. Sherry and I had both investigated some of those homicides. A chunk of dead biology doesn’t last long in this soup. We’d be on a missing persons report. Lost in the storm. A couple years after Katrina there are still folks missing from New Orleans, and we weren’t anywhere close to a city.

  I was working on the scenarios, rolling them around in my head, when Buck took the crowbar to the doorjamb, gouging with a sharp edge at the outside of the frame, maybe figuring like a cheap thief he could bust a hole and then reach through and simply turn the lock button from the other side. The other two stood and watched, waiting like dutiful, anxious apprentices for the foreman to sic them to task.

  “Know what the problem is with people like you, Mr. Freeman, who come out here in the Glades to take what you want whether it’s the fish or the game or even the fresh water for yourselves and leave nothin’ but garbage and trash behind?” Buck said while he pried at a corner.

  I did not answer, sure that he would do so for me.

  “Y’all think you’re entitled, you know? You think that just because this is open country and it don’t look like what you have in the cities on the coast, that it’s free and clear to just take and do what you want with. Build what you want in it. Come out here and piss in it and then go on home.

  “You know, my daddy and his daddy before him spent lifetimes living out here, taking what was natural and right and working their asses off and they didn’t do it for riches, Mr. Freeman. They done it for survival and they done it for their families and really all they ever wanted was to be left alone and left to it.”

  The one called Wayne shifted his weight; the axe was now in his hand, hanging by his side like he was itching to do damage with it. The other one, Marcus, was still sneaking looks at Sherry, who was silent now but I kept watching her, the rise and fall of her chest, and it was slight but steady. Both of the boys looked bored, scratching at their dirty necks like they’d heard this speech before and had little interest in it. It was getting dimmer in the room, the light now slanting through the doorway that they’d left open, the window to the east gone dark in shadow.

  I had held my tongue but decided to take a chance.

  “I don’t disagree with you, Buck,” I said, purposely using his first name, and it caused a flicker in his eyes. “I know a man, actually someone I would call a friend, who lived the same kind of life your own family did. I’ve heard him talk the same way many times. The name is Brown. Nate Brown. Maybe you’ve heard of him?”

  The use of Brown’s name caused all three to stop moving. They may have even stopped breathing for a second. The boys looked at each other. Buck stood stock-still, staring at the end of the crowbar.

  “Go on outside,” Buck finally barked. “Find a damn window to get through or somethin’.” The boys picked up the tools from the floor and left.

  Buck set
the crowbar aside and bent down on his haunches to look me in the face, sitting on his heels in the way of farmers and country folks who work the dirt but refuse to sit in it. He adjusted the .45 in his belt, the grip exposed and handy.

  “So, Mr. Freeman. You heard about the legend of Mr. Brown from some drunk fisherman or somethin’ and now you say you know him and me? Is that it?”

  I’d actually met Nate Brown during my first year in my shack. I had found the body of a child on my river who had been one of a string of abductions and murders of children from suburban homes. Brown had helped me to find the madman responsible and remove that stain from those he considered his people. I admired the old guy and his quiet ethics. But this man was nothing like him.

  “I said I know Nate. I never said I know you, Mr. Morris. I said I’d heard Nate talk about the same things you just did but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t run into Nate Brown out here looting other people’s properties after a storm just for leftovers.”

  Buck’s eyes took on an internal look, glassed over like he was seeing something in his own head that needed to be studied. The anger I expected didn’t come. Or the denial.

  “If you know Nate Brown, Mr. Freeman, then you know he is a man who did what he had to do in his time. And it wasn’t all legal then neither. The Gladesmen do what they have to do.”

  “Buck,” I said, “I know Nate as a man who holds his own ethics in high esteem. I think he does the right thing, for the people he represents and their way of living out here. Maybe you’ve got some of that in you.”

  I was trying to work an angle, pry at whatever relationship this young man had with Brown and the generation of Gladesmen before him. He stayed silent.

  “Maybe Nate would be salvaging. Maybe he’d be doing what he had to do to survive,” I offered. “But he wouldn’t be hurting innocent people. He wouldn’t be turning his back on someone who needed his help.”

  Buck stood up and now he was looking down on me. He was still working it in his head. He was being careful. Thinking things out. But there was a tension now in the guy’s eyes and I could see his hand flexing on the handle of the .45.

  “Times change,” he finally said, turning toward the door. “You might do some ponderin’ on time, sir. ’Cause you might not have a whole lot of it left.”

  When he walked out the door he closed it and then, with substantial force, jammed the blade end of the crowbar into the space between the bottom of the door and the flooring planks, effectively locking it.

  TWENTY-THREE

  As soon as I heard Buck’s footsteps leave the deck I started crawling up the wall, shoulder and head pressing hard against the panel, pushing hard off my heels to gain an angle, then working it like a big old inchworm, a foot at a time until I was able to get my feet under me, and then stand. I was breathing hard. There was no doubt a raw abrasion now on the side of my forehead and my ear burned from the scraping pressure. Tough shit. I stood in silence and now nearly in darkness. When Buck closed and locked the door the only sunlight that sneaked in was from the northside window. I listened for movement outside and was just about to move when I heard the CHUNK! sound of the axe blade against the south wall. The boys were probably trying to chop their way through a window and I knew that it would be a few minutes before they uncovered the fiberglass skin that wrapped the room next door. It would puzzle them for a bit, but I wasn’t sure it would stop them. As the noise and the steady blows increased, I used the cover to jump on the ball of one foot to the refrigerator, steady myself and crouch. Twisting my wrists, I got my freed fingers around the handle and pulled the fridge door open at the same time as I rolled to the floor on one shoulder. I didn’t give a damn how awkward I was. I had one goal in mind.

  Scuffing back over on my hip I was able to position myself with my back to the opening and then flex my arms into it and use my fingers to search the low corner of the fridge. My trick with the tendons had given me a fraction of space under my taped wrists to work with and the effort to get over here alone had loosened it even more. It took some repositioning, some sweat running down into my eyes, but my fingers found the bottle of water and the rest of the wrapped chocolate I’d left there. The boys either missed it or didn’t care enough even to check it out. Anything without value to them was considered useless. But Sherry needed water and she needed some form of energy to keep her brain synapses from shutting down further. I snagged the bottle and chocolate and cupped them in my fingers and then rolled, shoulder to shoulder, to reach her side.

  “Sherry,” I said. Trying to whisper, but in the empty room my voice still sounded loud. When the chopping began again I hissed hard.

  “Sherry. Come on, baby. Wake up! You gotta drink, baby. You need the water.”

  I rolled to my knees and again, using a shoulder for leverage, I got a hip up onto the bedside and then straightened to a sitting position.

  “Sherry!” This time I spoke in a full hard voice and luck was with me. At the same moment, the sound of a splitting piece of wood vibrated through the shack and then in the silence that followed whatever progress they’d made outside I heard my name next to me.

  “Max,” Sherry said, though I did not recognize the awful timbre of her wounded voice. “Max. Don’t let him kill you too. Don’t let that little bastard take you away from me.”

  I looked down from over my shoulder and her face was barely visible in the dark but what light there was caught the tear on her cheek. She was hallucinating, confusing one of the boys here with the teenager who killed her husband. But she’d somehow slipped me into the muddled equation.

  “I won’t, baby. No one’s going to take me away, Sherry. But you have to eat, honey. You need to get strong.”

  While I talked, I used my free fingers behind me to unwrap the chocolate and then looked over my shoulder and moved it to her mouth. I rubbed it against her lips and then sighed when I felt her tug at it. The busyness outside continued but even if one of the crew came back in now I didn’t care. When Sherry stopped nibbling I went down and retrieved the water bottle and tipped it onto her lips. Most of the water ran down over her chin and neck but I could hear swallows and just the sound of it made my own throat cooler. With my hands tied it took a few minutes, hell, maybe more than a few, before I heard her say, “More.” Again I gave her the chocolate first, then the water, and the pull was stronger and the swallows more full.

  “She dead?”

  It was the first thing Buck said after someone kicked away the pry bar and all three walked in. His flashlight beam had swung first to the wall where I’d been and then to Sherry where I now crouched. I had to turn my face away from the brightness and I could tell through the open door that it had gone full dark outside. The boys were carrying a big cooler and an old Coleman lantern and set them down in front of the makeshift kitchen counter.

  “No. Not yet,” I said. “And if she does die, you boys move up the line from simple looters to murderers. That’s going to look real nice on your résumé up at Raiford, Buck.”

  The young ones snickered. They’d gained some bravado since they’d been outside, hacking at the windows of the next room, maybe even gaining entrance. More likely, though, they’d realized how isolated we all were. If a tree falls in the woods with no one to hear it, does it make a sound? I heard one of them pumping the lantern and then the flash of a match. Wayne lit the mantle and turned up the gas and the throaty, hissing noise was accompanied by a brightening glow that nearly filled the small room.

  Unexpectedly, Buck stepped over to me and grabbed a fistful of my shirt over the shoulders and with a strength that surprised me he used his leverage to yank me halfway up and then drag-toss me to the western wall. I rolled over once and tumbled into the electronically locked door. Without a word he then pulled Sherry’s bed out away from the wall and positioned himself at the foot and shoved it across the plank floor until the head of it banged against the wall beside me.

  “There you go, Freeman. Take care of your woman over there,
” he said. No more “mister,” no more “sir.” Buck had turned mean. The boys looked a bit shocked at the sudden outburst, but then those subtle, that’s-what-I’m-talkin’-about grins came to their faces. Tough guys now. All three of them.

  “All right,” I said, wincing at the sting of the new abrasion where my face had met the floor. “Cut my hands loose and give me that first aid kit so I can change her bandages.”

  Buck stared at me for a moment. The light was behind him, his eyes in shadow and too obscured for me to see what was in them. Then he reached into his back pocket and came out with a knife in his hand. He flicked open the blade with his thumb and a snap of his wrist and then motioned to the one called Marcus to take it.

  “Cut loose his hands,” he said. When the boy hesitated, he turned on him. “I ain’t repeatin’ myself to you little fuckers again. That shit’s done. You do what I say, when I say!”

  The boy took the knife and stepped over to me, bent behind me and sawed through the tape between my wrists. At the same time Buck picked up the first aid kit off the counter and tossed it across the room at me.

  “I ain’t decided whether the two of you are gonna live or die tonight,” he said and it was a statement of authority, not indecision. “So you keep her goin’ if you can.”

  Then he turned his back on me and pulled one of the two chairs over and sat down. “Let’s eat, boys.”

  I turned my attention to Sherry. She had not uttered a sound when Buck shoved the bed across the room and her eyes were closed now. I massaged my hands and fingers, getting the blood back into them, and bent so my lips were to her ear.

  “I’m going to change your bandage, Sherry,” I whispered. “I know it’s going to hurt. But it’s got to be done.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw her tighten her eyelids. She was conscious and at least partially alert. With my fingernails I went to work on the tape that held the splint and then started to unwrap the gauze. I had to pull her hip toward me to unroll the bandages. Under two layers it was stained with blood. The third time I rolled her hip toward me she opened her eyes and deliberately cut them down toward her side. I thought at first it was a gesture of pain but when she furrowed her brow and did it again I followed her sight fine. Under her back I saw the wooden handle of my knife. I’d laid it next to her when I first changed her bandage and she’d been lying on top of it ever since. Buck and his crew had come in to this friendly, with no reason to search us for weapons or consider us a threat. Things had changed, but their mistakes hadn’t. I glanced over at the trio but they were intent on their food from the cooler. I slipped my hand under Sherry and gripped the razor-sharp knife. Now I was armed.