The oil company of course would be publicly stunned that, due to the misreading of a survey map, they had made a mistake in operating the research station in an area off limits to such work. They would also disavow any knowledge of a “so-called” security team. They paid a fine. They were sorry But Billy had kept his feelers out, investigating on his own the identities of Harmon and Squires and although Squires’s portfolio remained thin and scattered, Billy would eventually flag an obscure civil suit brought by a woman in Coral Springs who claimed to be Harmon’s wife, which she had filed against GULFLO. The suit was asking for five million in compensatory damages for wrongful death. Billy was watching to see how long it would stay on the docket before being settled out of court.
Billy had often schooled me on the past and present way things work in Florida; two centuries of people flowing to the sunshine had brought with it the spoiling of big business, corruption, money, and crime.
“Nature knocks it back every once in a while, Max,” Billy said. “But the nature of men, I’m afraid, will always prevail.”
I did not believe I’d gained much insight into the ways of nature or the nature of man. The bodies of the boys would be returned to their mothers, and Buck Morris would be buried alone in a pauper’s grave.
Sherry and I would recount to the homicide detectives our days since the hurricane struck in as much detail as possible, as many names as we could, estimated times, conversations as close as we could recall, number of shots fired. The days we spent at the Snows’ fishing camp leading up to that night, we kept to ourselves.
After she was home, when it seemed right, I tried to return her necklace. I held it out in my hand, the chain still broken. She stared at it for a time then asked me for a tiny wooden box from her dresser top. She placed the necklace inside and then tucked it deep into a bottom drawer she used only for keepsakes and memories.
For now she swims. She is researching prostheses and has already subscribed to a Web site detailing the training involved in wheelchair marathons. The park ranger checks my cabin regularly and said its traditional Dade County pine construction weathered the hurricane with nary a damaged stairstep or busted window. When he asked when I planned to return, I had no answer.
How about, I said, we let it take its course.
A BIOGRAPHY OF JONATHON KING
Jonathon King is the Edgar Award–winning author of the Max Freeman mystery series, which is set in south Florida, as well as a thriller and a historical novel.
Born in Lansing, Michigan, in the 1950s, King worked as a police and court reporter for twenty-four years, first in Philadelphia until the mid-1980s and then in Fort Lauderdale. His time at the Philadelphia Daily News and Fort Lauderdale’s South Florida Sun-Sentinel greatly influenced the creation of Max Freeman, a hardened former Philadelphia police officer who relocates to south Florida to escape his dark past. King began writing novels in 2000, when he used all the vacation days he accrued as a reporter to spend two months alone in a North Carolina cabin. During this time, he wrote The Blue Edge of Midnight (2002), the first title in the Max Freeman series. The novel became a national bestseller and won the Edgar Award for Best First Mystery Novel by an American Author. A Visible Darkness (2004), the series’ second installment, highlights Max’s mission to identify a dark serial killer stalking an impoverished community. Shadow Men (2004), the third in the series, revolves around Max’s investigation of an eighty-year-old triple homicide, and A Killing Night (2005) tells the story of a murder investigation in which the prime suspect is Max’s former mentor. After finishing A Killing Night, his fourth book, King left journalism to become a full-time novelist.
Since 2005, King has published his fifth and sixth Max Freeman novels, Acts of Nature (2007), about a hurricane that puts Max and his girlfriend at the mercy of some of the Everglades’ most menacing criminals, and Midnight Guardians (2010), which features the dangerous reemergence of a drug kingpin from Max’s past. He has also published the stand-alone thriller Eye of Vengeance (2007), about a military-trained sniper who targets the criminals that a particular journalist has covered as a crime reporter. In 2009, King published the historical novel The Styx, which tells the story of a Palm Beach hotel at the turn of the twentieth century and the nearby community’s black hotel employees whose homes were burned to the ground amid the violent racism of the time.
King currently lives in southeast Florida, where he writes, canoes, and explores the Everglades regularly.
Jonathon King playing basketball for his high school team, the Waverly Warriors, in Lansing, Michigan, in 1972.
King’s yearbook photo from his senior year of high school in 1972.
For seven summers, from 1974 to 1980, King was a lifeguard in Ocean City, New Jersey. He’s shown here in 1974 or 1975 with his best friend and fellow lifeguard, Scott Erb.
In 1976, King worked as part of a crew hired by boat owners to deliver sailboats from New Jersey to Florida at the end of the summer. He’s shown here sailing a forty-foot vessel down the coast.
King’s children, Jessica and Adam, at ages ten and eight, respectively, with the mascot of the University of Florida in Gainesville in 2003.
A handwritten manuscript page from King’s debut novel, The Blue Edge of Midnight. Worried that his years as a reporter would make it difficult to write thoughtfully using a keyboard, King wrote his first two books with pencil on legal pads to avoid sounding like a journalist.
King’s Edgar Award for the Best First Mystery Novel by an American Author, which he won in 2002 for The Blue Edge of Midnight, the debut book in the Max Freeman series. The Edgars, which are given annually by the Mystery Writers of America, are considered the most prestigious awards in the mystery genre.
King stands inside of Kim’s Alley Bar, one of the oldest taverns in Ft. Lauderdale. Several scenes in the Max Freeman series take place here, particularly in A Killing Night, in which Max investigates the abductions of several bartenders. An actual bartender from Kim’s Alley even made an appearance in the book.
King at an isolated fishing camp in the middle of the Florida Everglades.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 2007 by Jonathon King
cover design by ORIM
ISBN: 978-1-4532-9998-2
This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
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New York, NY 10014
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Acts of Nature Page 21
