P. Parrish - Claw Back

It wasn’t just the fact that the swamp camp men were bound to be hostile to a strange black man let alone a woman ranger. He was shutting her out for now because this was his world — going after dirt bags in a possibly dangerous situation. She didn’t belong here.

He would tell her later. His plan right now was simple: just quietly look around and check these guys out.

If he could find them.

Sergeant Sweet wasn’t sure exactly where Hell’s Hammock was. The directions were vague, just landmarks mainly. About halfway across I-75, he was supposed to watch for a gravel service road just past the first rest stop. Louis had found the road but deep into a jungle of palmetto palms it began to narrow. The brush created a tunnel so thick and close Louis had to shift in the seat toward the middle to keep from getting scraped.

The road forked and dead-ended a couple times, forcing Louis to back up and look for landmarks he had missed. The sergeant had said to watch for an American flag tied to a tree and turn left, but the only thing hanging from trees out here was Spanish moss.

Damn. Another dead-end. And this one looked like he wasn’t even going to be able to back out. He glanced down at the police radio on the seat but the signal had died miles ago.

He downshifted and eased the Jeep forward. There was a patch of sunlight ahead. And a tatter of a faded old flag hanging limp from a tree.

After a left turn, the thicket opened into a small clearing. He went another twenty yards then stopped, taking stock. There were three buildings, crudely made from plywood and topped with tin roofs. The largest of the three had small windows covered with shutters and a sagging porch. The other two buildings were small, probably a storage shed and an outhouse. There were no vehicles of any kind to be seen.

And no sign of a human being.

Except…the front door of the main building was wide open.

Louis turned off the Jeep. In the quiet that piled in he could hear the whisper of the pines that ringed the compound and then the cry of a swallow-tail kite.

Maybe the men were out hunting. He got out of the Jeep, scanning the ground for tracks but saw nothing in the dirt and long grass. In fact, except for the open door, the camp looked deserted.

He had a sudden flashback to walking into another camp. It was years ago and thousands of miles away. Northern Michigan, in the dead of winter, and he was hunting a cop killer. The trail had led him to a remote camp inhabited by off-the-grid Vietnam vets. A one-armed soldier named Cloverdale had held him at bay with an AK47, endured his questions, then sent him back down the snowy hill with a warning never to come back.

Louis reached into the Jeep and got his Glock. He slipped it into the large front pocket of his khaki vest and zipped the pocket closed. If anyone was here, he thought as he started for the open door, he didn’t want them to think he was a cop. He’d be run off — or worse — before he ever got his first question out.

At the open door, he paused. As far as he could see in the dim interior, there was no one inside. It was one big room, maybe twenty-four by fifteen feet. He could make out the outlines of a table and chairs, some bunk beds and what looked like a primitive kitchen.

He stepped inside.

The door slammed closed behind him. Something hard and heavy came down on the back of his head. Stunned and seeing white, he fell forward. His hands skid over rough wood, his palms ripped with splinters.

“Hit him again, man! Hit him again!”

Louis tried to turn over but a boot slammed into his back. Then again into his shoulder and a third time into the back of his head. His hands flew up to protect his head but suddenly someone was on him, punching him and groping at his pockets.

“Get his wallet! Get his fucking money!”

Louis started swinging, feeling his fists hit flesh but the man on top of him didn’t budge.

It was getting hard to breathe and there was something — blood — in his eyes. He felt the man’s hands roughly moving down his chest. They stopped when they got to the bulge of the Glock.

“He’s got a fucking gun!”

Louis grabbed at him, trying to keep him from getting to the Glock. The man punched him hard in the face. A flash of white light then he felt himself going out. Flicking light and voices cutting in and out, like a bad radio connection.

Stay awake…stay awake…

The man moved off him but Louis couldn’t move. He could barely breathe. There was a fire in his side and he knew his ribs were broken.

“Look at this, it’s a fucking Glock. It’s gotta be worth five hundred easy.”

“Where we gonna sell it? Tell me that, Memo! We can’t go back to Lauderdale. We can’t go nowhere now after what you did.”

“The fucker wouldn’t give me the money!”

“He didn’t have any fucking money! It was already in the safe!”

Quiet. The voices were quiet for a second.

“Get his wallet.”

Louis tried to get up. He had to fight. He had to -

“Don’t be stupid, man. I got your Glock pointed at your head.”

Crushing pressure of a boot on his back holding him down. More hands digging into the back pocket of his jeans.

“Got it. He’s got thirteen bucks and a VISA card.”

“Check the other vest pockets for the Jeep keys,” the other man said.

The boot came off his back and one of the men rolled him onto his back.

Two faces blurry above him — one pale and long, the other dark and round. Ball caps, dirty t-shirts, jeans caked with mud. The dark man was padding him down and Louis fought back his rise of panic. If they found the badge he was a dead man.

“Got the keys.” The man’s hands stopped. “Hey, he’s got another wallet.”

Louis felt the guy pull out the small leather wallet that Mobley had given him.

“He’s a cop!”

“What?”

“Look at this, Marv. He’s a fucking cop.”

The pale man’s eyes went from the badge down to Louis.

“How’d you find us, cop?”

Louis was silent.

“Where are the others?”

“No others,” Louis said. He felt blood in his mouth and spat it out. “I wasn’t looking for you.”

“We need to get the fuck out of here, Marv. Shoot the fucker and — ”

“Shut up, Memo! I need to think.”

Louis pushed to a sitting position and tried to focus on the two men. If he got out of this cabin alive he wanted to remember enough to catch these bastards.

Marv was six-foot and slender, shaved head, horsey face and prominent bad teeth. The t-shirt, Louis could see now, had a Harley emblem on it. The other guy, the one called Memo, was dark, Hispanic maybe, and gone to fat. His faded orange Miami Dolphins t-shirt had the sleeves cut off. He had a scorpion tattoo on his neck.

The bald guy tossed the badge wallet to the floor then leaned over and pressed the barrel of the Glock to Louis’s temple.

“You kill me, you die in the chair,” Louis said.

The man’s breath was like sewer water. “I don’t like niggers and I don’t like cops.”

He eased the Glock away from Louis’s head. He threw the badge wallet into a corner. “But I ain’t no murderer.”

He moved away. Louis shut his eyes in relief. He could hear the creak of the floorboards as the man moved around the room.

“Find something to tie him up with.”

Louis watched the dark man as he rummaged through the kitchen. When he came back, Louis saw a loop of old rope in his hands. The bald man pointed the Glock toward the bunk beds.

“Move your ass over there.”

Louis crawled to the bunks. They were heavy wooden things, built into the wall. He leaned back against a post, his ribs on fire.

The dark man forced Louis’s hands behind his back. Louis grimaced as the man wrapped the rope tight around his wrists, tying it off high on the top bunk. The dark guy was smiling when he stepped back to admire his handiwork.