Shadow Men (6 page)

The kid had more going on in his head than just curiosity about his great-grandfather and uncles. He was putting most of his grandmother’s inheritance on the line to find answers. But maybe his real questions had more to do with what he had inherited from the men he never knew. That icon around his neck wasn’t there as a style statement. Something was chewing at the young man. I didn’t know what, but I could almost feel his need for the truth. Maybe he was pushing my buttons, too.

CHAPTER

7

E
arly the next morning I heard the “thunk” of wood on wood before I felt the shiver in the foundation. My physical sense of touch has always been less sensitive than my sense of smell or taste or even hearing.
Thunk.
But still, it was the vibration that finally popped my
eyes
open. From my bed I looked to the east window and could tell that it was not much after dawn.
Thunk.
Someone was on my dock. The unexpected visitor. I rolled off my mattress onto all fours and instantly the ache in my shoulders from last night’s paddling almost caused me to cry out. I thought about the 9 mm stashed in the armoire, still wrapped tight in oilskin since it had last been fired in anger and then recovered from the river bottom. I’d tried to put it out of my head, the feel of it in my hand, the violence of it. But still it was there. I hadn’t thrown it out, despite what it represented in me. Leave it, I thought, and then stood and moved quietly to the door.
Thunk.

I held the knob and eased pressure up into the old hinges to keep them from squeaking and opened the door enough to see. Down on the landing, sitting with one foot in his wooden skiff and his hands working a small line in the water was Nate Brown. He moved his leg and the skiff banged lightly against the dock piling.
Thunk.

“Mornin’, Mr. Freeman,” he said in a slow drawl that was pure dirt Georgia. “Your memory is ’predated.”

He was dressed in a long-sleeved, light-colored work shirt and denim overalls. His steel gray hair was cut short to a scalp that was as tanned as the rest of his skin. His wiry build seemed folded and angled and delicate, but I knew better. He diverted his eyes from the water and looked up the stairs.

“I heard y’all was lookin’ for me?”

I made morning coffee and brought two large tin cups with me and sat on the bottom steps. Nate nodded a thanks for the coffee and took a deep draw from the cup without flinching from its steaming heat. I blew air across mine.

“How’s the river running this morning,” I said, attempting small talk and knowing better.

“Prolly high, what with that rain yestiday,” he said. “Don’t rightly know. I come in from the west.”

I looked into the homemade flats skiff, a workmanship long forgotten from a time when the Gladesmen used the small boats and hand-shaved poles to push themselves over miles of channels and shallow, grass-filled water. There was a single small bundle tucked in one corner and a long, canvas-wrapped object I knew would be Brown’s old Winchester rifle.

“Just out on a little hunting trip?” I said, making my mistake twice. I had not seen the man in two years, the last time being when he had saved my life.

“No, sir,” he said, his clear eyes working into mine from over the rim of the coffee cup. “I heard you was lookin’ for me.”

After that I talked for an hour, telling Maye’s story while the old man listened to each word, looking up from his fishing line to judge my face when I hesitated or to correct my assumptions of the years or the locations of the road-building project that had ripped the land he and his family had known all their lives.

“So, I thought you might have some ideas, some recollection or knowledge of what happened to these men,” I finished.

Browns eyes came up from the water and took in the cover of foliage above us. The sunlight was now spackling the oak leaves and ferns with spots of leaking light.

“My daddy an’ his brothers mostly tol’ them stories,” he said, not looking at me. “Was before my time, but we heard about them days whilst sittin’ round the buttonwood fires out on coon hunts and such.

“Folks then wasn’t too welcomin’ on the idea, bringing a road through some of the finest huntin’ pieces in the Glades. But they was payin’ money and it was tough times then. The construction boys brought bidness down to Everglades City, an’ the locals didn’t seem to mind when they got they pockets full.

“Even daddy’s brother, Mitchell, went out an’ worked on the dredge rig with some other local men, but not for long. He tol’ stories ’bout how miserable them city boys was with the swamp angels, what we call mosquitoes, an’ the heat and all. He said some of them boys like to abandon ship after just a couple of days, and some of ’em did.

“Mitchell and them finally just walked away—Course they knew them Glades since they was kids, so’s it was easy for them.”

Brown stopped and searched the water again, tickling the line, weighing his words.

“Wasn’t till later, after they’d pushed ’er out near Shark Valley that Daddy said they heard stories ’bout men goin’ out on the job and not comin’ back in.

“Mitchell would tell a story ’bout a dead man’s island where they buried them quittin’ boys up to they necks in muck an’ marked the spot with a Christ cross, but us kids thought he was just tryin’ to scare us round the campfire.”

“And nobody ever said anything?” I asked. “No sheriff or any authority?”

Brown let a wry grin pull at the corner of his mouth.

“Hell, weren’t never no law out there to speak of. Besides, Daddy always said them boys didn’t have no bidness comin’ into our country anyways, an’ what happened to ’em weren’t none of our bidness either. Daddy said the Glades weren’t never meant to have no road over it anyways.”

I went back upstairs for fresh coffee and came back with Mayes’s letters. When I offered them to Brown, he cut his eyes away, and I felt a flush of embarrassment at my own assumption that he could read warm my throat and ears. When I read the pages, Brown listened without interruption. When I was done, both of us went quiet and the old man rewrapped his line. When he got to the end, I noticed that the barbless hook was bare.

“So, what do you think? Just a fireside tale? Or are there bodies out there?” I said while he stood, preparing, I knew, to leave. He stepped into his skiff and took up the long pole.

“Y’all come down and meet me at the hotel,” he said.

“When? Tomorrow?”

“Gon’ take me a couple days, son. Might even do a little huntin’ on the way,” he said, and pushed off to the west.

I was too anxious to spend another day fishing. I have a vision of truth in my head and it is a smooth, logical, ethical stone that occupies my brain. But the chunk there now was growing more and more jagged despite my chronic grinding, and it was just about to sprout another flawed edge.

I had just gotten off the cell with Billy when I spotted the guys following me. White van, dark lettering on the side. I’d first noticed the van back at the on-ramp in West Palm, and I didn’t pay any more attention than I usually did in traffic. I was on my way to Richards’s house in Lauderdale to pick her up for a Diana Krall concert and dinner at our favorite Cajun place, just to forget about swamps and fires and the unmarked graves of tired men for a while. When I saw the van take the same off-ramp, I got more interested. I’d just finished filling Billy in on my conversation with Nate Brown, and that I’d planned to meet up with him in two days.

“Does Brown think any of this is feasible?” Billy said.

“He’s hard to read.”

“Do you think it’s possible?”

“I think it’s going to take more than old letters and fireside ghost stories,” I said.

“That’s why I’m record-hunting, Max. We might not even be able to prove the great-grandfather and his sons were even out there.”

I punched off with Billy and saw the white van speed up to catch a light with me. Maybe I was paranoid, nervous about leaving the shack. Maybe it wasn’t even the same van. God knows how many white vans are on the road—just ask the sniper task force up in D.C. and suburban Virginia. Still I did a figure-eight through the tight blocks of Victoria Park before finally backing into Richards’s driveway. I watched both ways for ten minutes and had just reached for the door handle when a sharp rap sounded on the passenger side window and made me jump. Richards opened the door and pushed her head in. Her eyes glowed blue and her hair was down.

“Forget the stakeout, Freeman, the neighbors already know,” she said, sliding into the seat.

“Know what?”

“Know the nice policeman’s widow next door is seeing some unemployed swamp guy with a pickup truck,” she said.

We drove through her quaint neighborhood and into what had over many years comfortably become the downtown area of Fort Lauderdale—small one- and two-story condos and side streets of old, motel-style apartments whose days were now numbered by the rising value of the land they sat on. For the last fifty years the population flood into South Florida had surged west off the beach and into the drained swamp to create suburbia. But somehow a barrier—both political and environmental—had been raised, and the new and supposedly final boundary of the Everglades established. Now, like a wave started at one end of a pan of water, the still- growing number of new arrivals was sloshing back toward the sea. The only place left to go was vertical. Turning west on Las Olas Boulevard, the city’s venerable shopping lane, we were soon surrounded by high-rises.

“Are we being followed, Freeman?” Richards suddenly asked.

Her question caught me off guard, but shouldn’t have.

“You’ve been checking the rearview since we left the house,” she said. “Bad form for a cop not to let his partner in on the game.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I thought I picked up somebody on the way down. White van. But I could be wrong.”

“The fire starter? Or this other doing you’ve got going with Billy?” she asked, using the remote control on her own rearview side mirror to take a glance behind.

“Maybe I’m just skittish these days,” I said.

“So what kind of car does this park ranger drive?”

“You know, I don’t know why I’m not more suspicious of him,” I said, stopping for yet another red light. “It’s way too easy, him being there, his access to marine fuel, the state trying to roust me. It doesn’t feel right.”

Richards reached over and put her hand flat on my thigh. “Stop grinding, Max. Let’s go out and have a good time.”

I leaned over and kissed her, got distracted by the smell of her perfume and the touch of her lips, and the guy behind me popped his horn.

“Green light,” she murmured.

We rolled on. But before we got to the old post office parking lot on Second Street, I’d caught her checking her rearview mirror twice. Always a cop. 24/7.

Richards had great seats at the Broward Center. The jazz was superior and the piano riffs were still in my head afterward as we walked down Second Street, holding hands and debating which of Krall’s talents was better, the interestingly malleable voice, or the equally eclectic keyboard work. The street was in its late-night lively mode. With restaurants and clubs on either side, the concept of a crosswalk was long forgotten. One of the corner bars had stainless coolers filled with iced beer for sale right out on the sidewalk. Cocktail chatter floated on the warm night air, and somewhere a saxophone wailed. All along the way, patrons stood with one foot in the street and the other up on the curb, as though it were a bar rail.

We crossed to the other side and were a door away from Creolina’s when Richards was greeted by a pair of guys with brown beer bottles in hand. I tried to read them, but the signals were mixed. The clear eyes and expectant demeanor said friends. The longer- than-regulation hair and comfort in street clothes said maybe cops, maybe not.

“Hi, Sherry,” the tall, better-looking one said.

“Hey,” she responded, and stepped forward to give him a kiss on the cheek. “How’re you doing?”

I could read a slight hesitation in her voice, and automatically watched the eyes of the other one, who was doing the same to me. I nodded. He nodded back.

“You’re not working?” Richards asked, using an innocuous tone in the question like it could have been posed to anyone.

“No, no, I’m sorry. No, we just finished a job over in the isles. Just stopping off,” the friendly one said. Richards relaxed.

“Dennis Gavalier, Max Freeman,” she said in introduction. I shook his hand.

“The P.I. from the Eddie Baines case? Pleasure. This is Russ Parks, transferred in from robbery last month,” Gavalier said, bringing the other guy in. “Sherry Richards from MIU.”

The guy smiled one of those twenty-five-year-old “glad to have you meet me” smiles. Richards asked about the job. Gavalier was vague but obviously pleased. The conversation stopped and the four of us shuffled our feet.

“We were just heading in for dinner,” Richards finally said.

“Hey, good to see you, enjoy,” Gavalier said. “Good to meet you, Max.”

I nodded. “You too.”

We stepped away in different directions. “Dennis is narcotics, probably one of the best undercover guys in the country,” Richards said. “I’ve never seen him in uniform, and you never know how to say hello to the guy because he might be working something.”

“Partner’s nice,” I said.

She just looked at me, then shook her head.

“What?”

She shook her head again. I opened the door to the restaurant.

“You guys and your alpha-male thing. You all get the same hydrant out there?”

I just smiled. What could I say?

Rosa put us at the corner table, by the front window with the wall at our backs.

“Mr. Max. You out with this fine young lady again? You keep this up, baby, I’m a get jealous you cheatin’ on me.”

Rosa is a big, joyful, teasingly profane woman. She is a special spice at Creolina’s, and you let her have her way.

“Ms. Rosa, I would never take the chance of hurting you and be denied your gumbo,” I said.

“Its all right, honey,” she stage-whispered to Richards. “All the mens lovvve my gumbo.”

Richards laughed with her and ordered the étouffée. I got the jambalaya. We opened a bottle of wine. Richards took a sip and I caught her thinking.

“Guy with Dennis,” she said.

“Yeah, Parks?”

“I think he’s a friend of McCrary’s.”

“Your friend’s control freak?” I said, digging the name out of my head. “How’s that going, anyway?”