Fallen Out: Jesse McDermitt Series, The Beginning

by Wayne Stinnett

  “And you dug into my background?”

  “As much as I could, legally.”

  “Then you know I’m not one to follow advice very well.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “You really should take his advice and stay out of it,” Julie said after I recounted my meeting with Dietrich from earlier in the day. When Jimmy and I left Bonita Springs, we cruised at twenty-five knots all the way back to Marathon. The Revenge runs most economically at that speed and we arrived before dark.

  “Yeah, he should,” Rusty agreed. “But he won’t. Not in the man’s nature.”

  “Look,” I said. “If Earl wants to find me, he’ll find me.”

  “He’s a dangerous man, Uncle Jesse.”

  Rusty laughed. “He might be, in his own circle.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Julie asked, looking from her dad to me.

  “It means we’re running low on Red Stripe, hon,” Rusty said. “Why don’t you run out to the cooler and bring another case in for me, would ya?”

  When she left, Rusty leaned over the bar and asked, “What’re you gonna do?”

  “Thought I might take a camping trip,” I replied.

  “A camping trip?”

  “Yeah, Pap used to take me way out in the swamp for weekends, when I was a kid.”

  “I remember them swamps,” Rusty said.

  “That’s right,” I remembered. “You came out there with us that one time, back in what, ’81?”

  “It was ’82,” he said. “Got me in a world of shit with Juliet. Woman never had any qualm about me fishing for sharks, but gators? She always thought they were the spawn of Satan himself.”

  That night, I sat in the salon with a notepad and pencil. I put together a list of everything I might need for a week living in the swamp. It was a long list. I had to assume Earl had some means of getting around out there, either an airboat, canoe, or skiff. There was plenty of swamp land along both the Caloosahatchee River and the Peace River. He’d also need a vehicle stashed somewhere to move around the city. I ruled out the two rivers, not remote enough. Southeast of Fort Myers is Corkscrew Swamp, home to one of the largest bald cypress stands in the world. I hiked the boardwalks through there many times, with Pap and Mam. When it was just me and Pap though, we canoed far out into it and other swamps. Corkscrew is relatively small and a popular place for bird watchers, though.

  West of the city is the vast Okaloacoochee Slough State Forest land. The slough itself is over twenty square miles, surrounded by a dense cypress forest covering hundreds of square miles. While there are crushed shell roads and a few hiking trails, most of it is accessible only by canoe or kayak. I added a small canoe to my shopping list. If I were on the run, had no fear of deep, dark swampy areas, and wanted to be near Fort Myers, my choice of hiding places would be the recesses of the cypress forest surrounding Okaloacoochee Slough.

  Ground transportation was easy. I had a longtime friend, Billy Rainwater, a year behind me in high school and who I later served with, that now lived and worked in the small town of LaBelle, east of Fort Myers. Billy was a Seminole Indian and his passion was off-roading. He owned several powerful four wheel drive pickups and had taken me off-roading a number of times, whenever I was home on leave.

  I found his number and made a quick phone call. He still had some off-roaders and when I explained my need to be inconspicuous, he offered me the use of a plain Jane, white, ’85 Ford Bronco, no questions asked.

  The next day, I fired up the old International and for once, it was amenable to the task at hand. By noon, I’d completed my shopping and had everything stored aboard the Revenge. Jimmy saw me moving the 14’ canoe to the foredeck and came over as I was lashing it down.

  “What’s with the canoe?” he asked.

  “We need to reschedule the charters for about a week,” I said by way of reply.

  “A week?” he asked. “That’s gonna be some pissed off picture takers, man.”

  “I have to go somewhere,” I said

  “You’re going after that Earl dude, aren’t you?”

  “Just keep that to yourself, Jimmy.”

  “Sure, man. When are we leaving?”

  “I’m leaving in an hour,” I replied. “You’re staying here.” I could see by his expression it hurt him. “I’m going way back in the swamps and it could be dangerous.”

  “You’re the boss, man. Hey, I could help ya get across, then just stay on the boat, while you go play Tarzan.”

  “Could be dangerous on the boat, too,” I said. “I know you can look out for yourself, but I’d still be worried.”

  That seemed to satisfy him. “I’ll take care of rescheduling the clients. You’ll be gone a whole week?”

  “Hopefully less. But, if I can’t track him down in a week, I’ll give up,” I lied. The truth was, I was going to find Hailey, no matter how long it took.

  “Vaya con Dios, Jeffe,” he said as he started to walk away.

  “Gracias, mi amigo. Voy a regresar muy pronto,” I said back with a grin.

  “Aw, now you’re just showing off,” he called back over his shoulder as he walked back to the houseboat.

  Forty minutes later, I had everything aboard and stowed away. I started the engines and climbed down to untie the lines. A few minutes later I was idling away from the docks and heading toward the bridge. Once I cleared the inlet to the harbor, I brought the boat up on plane. Dark clouds were building to the east, but they seemed to be moving away.

  Keeping at cruising speed, I got to San Carlos Bay in five hours and started up the Caloosahatchee River to LaBelle. Once past the I-75 bridge, the river narrowed and I had to drop down off plane. I still had another twenty-five miles to Port Labelle Marina, where I’d made arrangements to dock the Revenge. Arriving just after sunset, I called the Dockmaster on channel 16 and requested directions to the fuel dock.

  After fueling up, he assigned me a slip with shore power, water, cable TV, and a phone line. Once I was tied up and connected, I called Billy and told him where I was staying for the night. He said it was only a few blocks away and he’d drive the truck over with a cooler full of beer and some steaks and then he could walk home.

  When I saw him pull into the parking lot, I flashed the cockpit lights on and off. He parked the truck and walked down the dock carrying a cooler in one hand and a plastic bag in the other. He was wearing blue jeans, a white tee-shirt, a cowboy hat, and his feet were bare. Nearly as tall as me, he looked to have put on weight, which was good. He’d always been a gangly, thin man.

  “Good to see you, Billy,” I called out.

  “Same here, Kemosabe. Been what, ten years?”

  I took the cooler he handed me and placed it on the deck. “Nine, I think. Just before I left for Beirut. How’ve you been?”

  He leaped over the gunwale and took my forearm in his hand, shaking hands Indian style. “Making my way in the white man’s world as best I can, Jesse. You look fit. I thought you said you were retired?”

  “Yeah, two years ago. What’s being fit got to do with retired?”

  “Nothing. But, you’re still wearing that high and tight. Let your hair grow, man.”

  I laughed and said, “Some habits die a little harder than others. Come on inside.”

  I opened the hatch and we stepped up into the salon. Billy was never one to be impressed by much of anything and I didn’t expect any reaction. “Where you want me to put these steaks?” he asked.

  “Just set ‘em on the counter there. I just put some potatoes in the oven, we can grill the steaks out in the cockpit in a bit.”

  He set them down and turned around. In a serious tone he asked, “What kinda man are you hunting and where?”

  “Who said I was hunting someone?” I asked.

  “You got a canoe strapped to your foredeck, you want to borrow an inconspicuous truck, there’s a box of 7.62s in that partially open drawer, and well, you’re you.”

  “Have a seat,” I said, matching
his seriousness. “You hear about a liquor store robbery a couple days ago, over in Fort Myers?”

  “I knew it!” he exclaimed. “The news said he was an escaped convict, recapped his trial and your face popped up on the screen.”

  “What the news didn’t say was that he broke into the house I used to live in.”

  “The one you sold to the Snodgrass’s?”

  “They’re dead,” I said bluntly.

  Billy plopped down on the cushion of the settee, like he’d been poleaxed. Will and Jane were very close friends with his parents. Probably the only white people way back in the day that were.

  “Dead?” he asked. “I just saw them last week. Mister Snodgrass visited dad in the home, while I was there.”

  “How is your dad?” I asked.

  He seemed to shake his whole body and replied, “About the same. He stares out the window all day and never says anything.”

  Billy’s dad, William ‘Leaping Panther’ Rainwater, was a Chieftain among his people, one of the few Calusa Indians left in the area. They once covered most of southwest Florida until the Spaniards arrived with their diseases. In the fifties, the Calusa were forced onto the Seminole reservation, where Leaping Panther met Billy’s mother, a Seminole. They were in a car wreck about twelve years ago, his mother was killed and his father was in a coma for weeks. When he came out of it and Billy told him his wife of thirty years was dead, he never spoke again. Although alert to what happened around him, he seemed to choose to ignore it.

  “I’m going with you,” Billy whispered.

  “I can’t ask you to do that.”

  “You don’t have to. The Snodgrass’s were like family. Besides your people, they were the only whites that didn’t see color.”

  I considered it a moment. Will and Jane never had children and treated myself and Billy like their own. He was right, we were family. I nodded and said, “Okay, we leave at first light.”

  While we drank beer and grilled the steaks on a grill mounted on a pole that fit into a rod holder, I explained what I knew about Hailey and where I thought he might be hiding out.

  “That’s over two hundred square miles,” he said when I finished. “Most of it inaccessible to any kind of vehicle, except canoes or kayaks. Airboats ain’t allowed in there.”

  “They’d be too noisy for him anyway,” I said. “I brought something along that might make it a little easier.”

  I went up into the salon and came back out a moment later with the night vision headsets Rusty and I used to ambush Earl and his crew up on Shark River.

  Handing one to Billy, I said, “At night, he’s got to have a fire, probably very small, just to cook on and keep the bugs at bay. With these, we can see that fire from half a mile away. I also have a pair of handheld UHF radios.”

  We ate the steaks and then climbed up on the bridge with a couple more beers. We talked about old times for a while then Billy said he had a couple things he’d need to get from his house and gave me directions to it, preferring to walk home. We agreed that I’d pick him up at 0600 and we’d head out to Okaloacoochee Slough from there. After he left, I took advantage of the darkness and loaded the Bronco with everything I’d brought.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I woke at 0530 and filled my thermos with coffee. After I secured the Revenge and set the alarm I got in the Bronco and drove the three blocks to Billy’s house. He was waiting on the porch and rose as I pulled up. He walked down the sidewalk, carrying a Remington 700 rifle. The 700 is the platform that the M40 is built on. Chambered for .308 ammunition, it’s a very accurate rifle, favored by deer hunters.

  When he opened the back door I said, “There’s an empty fly rod case that’ll fit into on the back seat.”

  Without a word, he opened the case and put the rifle in it. I figured he’d be bringing his dad’s old rifle. I helped him lift his wooden canoe up onto the roof and strap it down next to mine. Then we got in the truck and started driving. We were both quiet. No words needed to be spoken. We didn’t have very far to go.

  Growing up in Lee and Hendry Counties, both of us loved the outdoors. We fished and hunted together as soon as we were old enough. Billy was a great, natural tracker and could follow a feral hog or deer for miles through the dense forest. But, today we were hunting the most dangerous animal in the forest. Man.

  Thirteen miles due south of LaBelle on Highway 29 we drove. The road was straight as the proverbial arrow, like many roads in Florida. There just weren’t any obstacles to road building in the early days, besides swamp and trees, which were pretty much everywhere. The early road builders laid out grids and built roads in straight lines. I turned off onto Keri Road, which goes through the State Forest from the west, to the park office. We had no intention of registering to camp, though. After four miles on the paved road, I turned south onto Sic Island Road, which is really just two overgrown ruts, that wound its way south, deeper into the cypress forest.

  As we bounced over the rough terrain, there were occasional glimpses of pasture land to the west, but everything to the east was shrouded in dark shadows from the dense cypress trees, the ground soft and spongy. After a half mile the road ended at the trailhead of Sic Island Loop. Billy, myself, and many of our friends have hiked the trails through the forest many times and as teenagers, we’d brought our dates to this very spot, deep in the forest. Although it had been many years since I was last here, nothing had changed. The swamps, like the stars above are timeless. We knew that on a weekday morning, there wouldn’t be anyone around to see us unpack and there wasn’t.

  I’d chosen this spot well in advance, as it’s not a popular hiking area, most hikers preferred the manicured trails on the east side of the slough, near the park office. Here, in the center of the west side of the park we had all of Okaloacoochee Slough State Forest to the east of us.

  Without need of direction, we both climbed from the truck and unloaded the two canoes. Within ten minutes we had everything unpacked from the truck and pushed off into the dark, tannin water. I let Billy lead the way.

  We paddled south, rounded Sic Island and made our way to the southern tip of the island. Being the beginning of the rainy season, the water was low and we had to get out and portage a very shallow spit to deeper water. Once across, we paddled south, our goal being a small island just south of Sic Island on the western fringe of the forest. The whole forest is covered with small lakes and ponds, all joined together in the rainy season. In dry season, like now, you had to know your way through the endless tangle of shallow and deeper waters unless you didn’t mind getting out and dragging your canoe across the shallows.

  We were completely enveloped in the shadowy, primordial swamp, paddling slowly and quietly between towering bald cypress trees that created a nearly impenetrable canopy above. The slough was home to thousands of alligators and we saw quite a few, hauled up on logs, or shallow flats. It was also home to black bears and Florida panthers, a distant cousin of the cougar. Few people ever left the well-marked trails as we were doing, for just that reason. Another reason that made me think this was where we’d find Hailey.

  After another hour of paddling, we set up camp. Tents were too dangerous out here. We strung hammocks high up in the cypress trees, with netting that would keep the mosquitoes out. We ate a cold lunch of MRE’s, meals-ready-to-eat.

  “We’ll head out just after sunset,” I told Billy. “It’d be a waste of time to search in daylight.”

  “How certain are you that this man killed the Snodgrass’s?”

  “His last words to me, when I stranded him up Shark River were, ‘One of these days. When you least expect it.’ An obvious threat. I was told that during the trial, the news talked about me being a witness, showed a picture of me and said I was from Fort Myers. I haven’t renewed my license since Pap died and it still has my old address on it. Wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out where to look for me.”

  “So he went there to settle the score and the Snodgrass’s just got in
the way?”

  “That’s the way I have it figured,” I replied. “He used to live way back in the bayou up in Louisiana. A man like that would be at home out here. Plenty of game to trap, no prying eyes, and easy to come and go.”

  “Why not the swamps along the Peace or Caloosahatchee?”

  “Not much left,” I said. “People canoe both rivers, lots of boat traffic on the Caloosahatchee, and it’s a short distance to civilization, just steps from the river.”

  “And Big Cypress is too far away from Fort Myers, where he thinks you are.”

  “That leaves Okaloacoochee, or Corkscrew,” I said.

  “Humph, Corkscrew ain’t much these days. Most of the land’s been drained and planted.”

  “Which puts us right here,” I said.

  “You say this man killed a prison guard and another convict to get away?” he asked.

  I knew what Billy was trying to do. He was trying to justify, in his own mind, what we were about to do. He suspected that I hadn’t come out here to capture Earl Hailey.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That was after he’d been convicted of attempting to murder a man out pleasure cruising with his family, then kidnapping and raping his wife and their two daughters, over a three week period, with three of his friends. And those were just the ones they could prove. I’d bet there were others, before that. He was planning to sell the mother and girls in the sex slave market. The daughters were thirteen and fifteen.”

  I knew that would help ease his mind on what we were going to do. Billy had three daughters and a son, all in their early teens and pre-teens. I watched as I saw the steely resolve transform his dark eyes into smoldering embers. Billy was a basic infantryman back in the day and had served in Grenada with the 22nd Amphibs. Though he never talked about it, I knew he was not a stranger to the taking of a man’s life.

  “We should get some rest,” he finally said.

  We climbed up into the trees and got comfortable in our hammocks. It wasn’t very hot and there was a light breeze blowing. I’d never had trouble sleeping during the day. I’d learned over the years to get rest anytime and anywhere possible.