JL04 - Mortal Sin (31 page)

More questions than answers. I kept thinking, turning it over. The workers don’t stay overnight. They either travel by boat or helicopter. You could easily land a chopper on the beach, away from the trees. They sometimes travel offshore but not far; otherwise they’d have a powerboat and not just a canoe. They take some effort to disguise the fact they’re here. Maybe they just want to protect the truck from vandalism by fishermen or froggers or the other iconoclastic types who hang out in the Everglades. But the way the truck was jammed into the trees seemed to suggest that they didn’t want to be seen from the air, either.

It didn’t compute. I thought of Nicky Florio. We were probably ten miles from his fishing cabin and thirty miles from his planned Las Vegas in the Swamp. This was something else, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that Nicky Florio’s grimy paws were all over that truck.

I went back into the woods and committed a little gentle larceny. Climbing into the truck, I took the map, then hauled the canoe out of the brush. It was an old wooden model, painted green. Wooden paddles, too.

I started out in midafternoon, watching the position of the sun and heading south. I took long, deep strokes with the paddle, counting out, “left, right, left, right.” I sang as many Nat King Cole songs as I could remember and replayed an AFC championship game in my mind. I passed through the mist of the cypress strands and what seemed to be open lakes. I paddled until just before dark, then decided to look for a Holiday Inn.

I chose a hardwood hammock with a fine line of pine trees to spend the night. I slept on a bed of soft grasses and awoke at dawn, famished and dreaming of room service: fresh-squeezed orange juice, blueberry muffins, and eggs Benedict with a steaming pot of coffee. I had wrapped the map in my discarded shirt, which dried out in the sun. Now I used the shirt to wipe the dew from the plants, squeezing it out and drinking the fresh water. More pinecone seeds and pollen for breakfast.

I paddled and drifted, paddled and drifted, the slow, easy current from north to south helping me out, but not much. I used the map to navigate south toward Tamiami Trail. Sometime before noon, I heard a thunderous explosion and looked toward a hammock to the west. A cloud of dust rose from a clump of mahogany trees, and a dozen herons croaked in protest.

By midday, I saw airboats at a distance, lazing in the water, with fishing poles sketched against the sky. A barge went by, two more of the gleaming white trucks perched on the deck. A short time later, the water became less, and the land became more. A ragged shoreline was strung with the hated melaleuca tree. Introduced from Australia in a misguided effort to dry up the swamps, it was doing just that, squeezing out native trees and plants, sucking the water from the slough, depleting our aquifer. Now, years later, we’re importing a sawfly from Australia that likes to eat the melaleuca and Lord knows what else.

Just before sunset, not more than a mile from Tamiami Trail, I heard the roar of an engine ahead of me. A touring airboat with perhaps a dozen tourists was headed for me. It slowed, politely, I thought, so as not to swamp me. Then it idled, and I heard the tour guide as he pointed, not so politely, at me. He was a young guy with a mustache who exuded the counterfeit charm of a used-car salesman.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, his eyes hidden under a New York Yankees cap, “coming up is an excellent photo opportunity. Here we have an authentic Micanopy brave in full…ah…war paint.”

“War paint, my ass!” The skeptical customer was a pudgy man in plaid shorts and a Budweiser T-shirt. He had creamy sunblock on his nose and sat next to a middle-aged woman in a straw hat. “Looks like dirt to me,” the man added.

I kept paddling and was close enough to hear the
click-clicks
of the cameras.

“Yes, indeed,” the guide sang out, studying me as I got closer. “Quite right. War mud. One of the little-known practices of the remnants of the Creek Confederation.”

When in trouble, a savvy tour guide, like a quick-witted lawyer, improvises, trying to turn shit into gold. I always appreciated the talent.

“The mud ritual is also part of the ceremonial rain dance,” the guide continued, still winging it.

“Bullshit,” the tourist said. “Don’t waste your film, Martha.”

“Harold!” The middle-aged woman shushed him with a stern glare.

“It is one of many festivals of the Seminole and Micanopy. There is the harvest dance, the high-tide ceremony, the full-moon chant…”

“The harvest dance?” The tourist snickered and shook his head. “Sounds like Friday night at the country club.”

I was directly alongside now. It was time to stretch anyway, so I stood up slowly, taking care not to tip the canoe. As I did, I displayed the one part of me not covered by ceremonial mud.

Drifting by, I heard the woman gasp. “I’ll get a picture of that for the bridge club.”

The guide didn’t miss a beat. “…and, of course, the ceremonial fertility rites.”

Then he gunned the motor, revved up, and was gone.

I
PULLED THE CANOE ONTO A GRASSY BANK
, waded back into the water, and dived under, trying to get clean. It was futile. Caked into mortar by the sun, the mud had become my suit of armor. Soaking wet, I climbed the bank to a wooden dock, wrapped my T-shirt around my waist to provide a modicum of modesty, and headed off, leaving a trail of grimy footprints.

I was in the parking lot of a small marina just off Tamiami Trail. I walked to the highway, pointed myself east toward Miami, and held up my thumb. I didn’t look any more threatening than, say, Charles Manson if he’d just escaped from prison through a sewage canal.

A Jaguar zoomed by. So did a Mercedes and a Lexus. So did two eighteen-wheelers, a tour bus, a couple of Winnebagos, and assorted other cars, motorcycles, and vans.

I did get plenty of looks, some catcalls, and a full can of Colt 45 that just missed my head. But it was a pig farmer from Frog City who stopped.

He was a big man with gnarled hands on the wheel of a Chevy pickup with worn shocks and squeaky brakes. His two nephews shared the cab. In the back were a dozen pigs, a carpet of straw, and odoriferous reminders of last night’s swine feast.

I could ride along if I didn’t mind the company of the squealers.

If they didn’t mind me, I didn’t mind them. Somewhere under the straw, the farmer told me, was an old pair of overalls that Rufus liked to sleep on. I didn’t know if Rufus was one of his nephews or two hundred pounds of pork chops, so I just hopped into the back, rooted around until I found what had once been blue-denim bib overalls. I shook straw and pig droppings out of the creases, stepped into the overalls, and fastened the snaps. The farmer popped the clutch, and I toppled over into a pink-skinned, short-haired oinker as we clanked into gear and headed toward the city.

I dozed off a couple of times, my head flopping toward my chest before snapping up again. I told myself it didn’t really smell so bad back here, what with the breeze blowing and all. From time to time, a pig sniffed me, didn’t like what it smelled, then backed away.

I tried to let the wind sharpen my senses. When the cobwebs cleared, I thought about Nicky Florio. How I tried to bring him down and how I had failed so miserably. I tried to enlist an ally in the tribal chairman, but he was in Florio’s pocket. I still needed an ally, but who?

The farmer was headed to a slaughterhouse in Hialeah. Gables Estates was twenty miles—and several social strata removed—but he took me there anyway. It was just after noon on a Monday, if I’d been keeping track of time correctly. Nicky Florio should be at a construction site or in his office. Gina would either be sleeping late or shopping.

A dozen royal palms stood at attention on the perimeter of the circular cobblestone driveway that had a pleasant up-slope thanks to fifty tons of fill. I climbed the driveway to the four-car garage, crouched down, and peeked in through the air vents. Gina’s red Porsche was there; Nicky’s Bentley wasn’t.

I circled behind the house, dodging the rotating water sprinklers and wending my way through six figures’ worth of landscaping. I tiptoed past a bed of birds of paradise, their orange leaves like the feathers of a parrot. I avoided the cocoplum and sea grapes and stopped to survey the scene from behind a copperleaf acalypha shrub. The back lawn, which fronted a canal that led to the sea, was framed by twin hibiscus hedges blooming with red flowers. A blue jay eyed me from the safety of the sea grapes, then flew away.

I crawled forward toward the pool deck, which was surrounded by purple azaleas. The pool gleamed turquoise in the afternoon sun. Lying on a chaise longue, wearing the bottom of a string bikini and nothing else, was Gina Florio. Her eyes were closed, her body glistening with oil.

I fought my way through the azaleas and padded quietly along the keystone pool deck. I passed a whirlpool large enough to accommodate an all-pro offensive line, his-and-her cabanas, a redbrick barbecue grill that looked as if it had never been used, and a bar accented with green marble inlays. I stood at the foot of the chaise longue, barefoot and befouled, wearing Rufus’s overalls. I watched a bead of sweat trickle south between Gina’s suntanned breasts.

Either she sensed me or she smelled me. Her eyes opened, took a second to focus, and then she gasped. Her hands tried to cover her breasts. Hands won’t do the job.

“One step and I’ll scream!” she shouted, her voice struggling for control. “My husband’s in the kitchen, and he’s got a high-powered rifle.”

“A rifle in the kitchen?” I asked. “What, next to the Cuisinart?”

Her mouth dropped open. She studied me. “Jake? Is that you?”

“I’ll bet he’s no better with a rifle than he is with a shotgun.”

“Jake! What’s happened? Why are you so…so stinky?”

“Is Nicky here?”

“No. I was making that up. I didn’t know what to say.” She took her hands away from her breasts and now arched her back toward me. Old habits die hard.

Then she laughed. “Jake, if only you could see yourself. Wait here.” She ran into the cabana with little bouncy steps and came out carrying a Polaroid camera. She made me pose while she clicked off a shot of a profoundly odd-looking ex-football player, ex-public defender, ex-a-lot-of-things, including, possibly, ex-lawyer.

“The creature from the black lagoon,” she announced, examining the photograph. “Come inside and get cleaned up. Then tell me what’s going on.”

The house was shaped like a croissant, the architecture nuevo-Mediterranean. Cast-stone columns, terra cotta barrel-tile roof, and patinaed window frames gave the place a look of graceful aging, which was a good trick because it was three years old. Inside, the fabrics and wall coverings were eggplant, aqua, and green. The floors were rough-hewn stone. A staircase to the second floor was made of travertine marble with a sweeping iron-and-mahogany rail. Weathered woods throughout let us know we were close to the sea.

Gina led me to a downstairs bathroom that was all rock: slate, limestone, and granite. The shower opened onto a lanai blooming with purple orchids and white jasmine. A couple of whiffs could make you dizzy. She brought me some industrial-strength soap the gardener uses and some fluffy black towels. Then she left me alone.

For about two minutes.

She came into the shower carrying a loofah sponge and wearing a smile and nothing else. The brush stung my skin, but the only other choice was a chisel. She scrubbed me hard and rinsed me soft. The hot water rose in billows of steam. I was clean and wet and warm when she kissed me with open lips. She pressed herself to me, our bodies squishing under the tumbling spray. She was sleek from the suntan oil, her body warm and catlike. I felt sleepy and soothed, but strangely, not aroused. The fear gone, fatigue was setting in.

She kissed me again, and we traded tongues for a long minute. Still no reaction.

She rested her head on my chest and looked down. “Where’s the Jake I know so well?”

“Somewhere in the Big Cypress,” I said, my words drowned out by the blast of water on tile. “Somewhere on the back of a manatee or on a hardwood hammock. I don’t know, Gina. Too much has happened, and it’s not over yet.”

“Hush. You think too much, and you talk too much.” Keeping her breasts pressed against me, she slithered lower, her tongue cleaning a path down my neck, my chest, my abdomen, and lower still. She stayed crouched there, like a catcher behind the plate, the water bouncing off the top of her downturned head.

After a moment, she looked up, smiling. “Ah, there we are, darling. There’s the Jake I know.”

The master suite had a fine view of the canal and the bay beyond. I was on my back on soft pink sheets in a canopied bed. Gina was curled next to me, her head resting on my chest.

“What did you mean about the shotgun?” Gina whispered.

I told her.

I told her everything I had left out before and added what had happened since. She listened, wincing when I got to the part about a machete and Rick Gondolier, but she didn’t act surprised, and if she grieved, she kept it to herself. I told her how Nicky framed me, and how I misjudged Henry Osceola, and how, when it came down to Jim Tiger or me, I’m the one who got lucky. I told her about diving into the water with shotgun pellets spraying an arc above my head, and I told her about a hardwood hammock with a shiny truck. Then I asked her a question.

“What’s the missing piece of the puzzle? What’s ‘the rest of it’?”

I had the sensation that she was shaking her head, the long butterscotched hair tickling my chest. “I can’t, Jake. Nicky’s still my husband.”

“And you’re loyal to him? After everything I’ve told you? After all you know? After this?” My gesture encompassed the bed. It was a little clumsy, but she knew what I meant.

“It’s too dangerous,” she whispered. “None of this would have happened if you had backed off after the trial. You should have let it die.”

“Nice choice of words.”

“You know what I mean. Why are you stirring everything up?”