Jonathon King - Shadow Men

"Beat you," she said, and the smile had moved up into her blue eyes. I said nothing and we walked together back to our chairs. We spent the rest of the afternoon in the shade of the umbrella, eating ham-and-tomato sandwiches and drinking iced tea while I fulfilled a promise to her and told her the story of my father.

She sat quietly, her legs crossed and shoulders turned close to me while I talked of the abuse that my cop dad had brought home on a regular basis from the time I was old enough to remember. I spoke of my own fear and shame at not having put an end to it myself. And I told her the secret that my mother and Billy's mother shared. How two women, unlikely friends of different races but of similar heart, had conspired and worked together to free my mother from a lifetime of control and humiliation. It was a story that I had not shared with any other person. Billy and I had even let the secret slip back into a past that neither of us wanted to revisit. When I finished, Richards took off her sunglasses and looked at me. Not a look of sorrow or of pity. She was studying me and I raised my eyebrows in question.

"What?"

"Thank you," she said, again taking my hand.

"For unloading?"

"No," she said. "For giving me a piece of you, Freeman."

I looked out again at the color of the water and the scatter of seabirds, then back at her.

"Fair enough," I said, and squeezed her fingers.

We packed away our beach things and walked up to the tiki bar and climbed the sandy ramp to the open-air restaurant. We ordered margaritas and conch fritters and watched the light of the day leak out behind us and turn the water a deep indigo and then a slate gray. My phone had not rung. I knew I would have to make the trip to Placid City to get answers, but tonight we were going to do nothing. No cop talk. No analyzing cases. We were going to be like normal people, without any worries.

Early on a Sunday morning I packed up an overnight bag, folded a Florida map and started driving to church. Our list of clergy possibilities had been whittled by callbacks. I'd left two more messages for the pastor at the Church of God in Placid City that went unanswered. Billy and I had discussed the possibility that we might be on a fishing trip in a much larger sea. It had only been a rumor that the male descendent of our gunman Jefferson had become a preacher, and even then we were only guessing that he had stayed in the state. Billy expanded the search parameters into northern Florida and was talking about pushing it up into other Southern states. He'd even forwarded the idea that the grandson could have changed his name after leaving Everglades City in the 1970s and disappeared anywhere.

But Mrs. William Jefferson's accent and her affirmation that her husband had roots in southeast Florida made a visit imperative. Her single comment kept rolling in my head, the jagged edges refusing to nub down. "That part of the family has been passed on." The reticence in the voice of the wife of a country preacher pushed me on.

Southern Boulevard carried me through the urban sprawl of West Palm Beach, and twenty miles out, the land turned open and flat, with sugar-cane stalks, freshly tilled vegetable fields, and sod farms that lay as green and uniform as felt on a forty-acre billiard table. Route 441 took me nearly to Belle Glade, a farming town that has supported a migrant community of field-workers and seasonal pickers for more than half a century. The town sits at the southern curve of massive Lake Okeechobee, but I couldn't see the water. A huge earthen dyke had been constructed here by the U.S. government in 1930. It was their response to the hurricane of 1926, which brought more rain in its march from the tropics than anyone had seen or imagined in their worst nightmares. The storm twisted up waves on the lake that surpassed ocean swells and sent the power of tons of water surging over the southern banks and sweeping over the town of Moore Haven. Many of the 2,500 residents killed were never found, their bodies buried in churned black muck-all that was left of the rich soil that had made the region the world's green emerald of winter vegetable growing. In the wake of nature's disaster, man became determined to tame her. The dyke was built and the natural flow of fresh water to the Everglades, which runs from this point for more than a hundred miles to the end of the Florida peninsula, was forever changed-many say for the worse. The same charge was raised when the Tamiami Trail builders constructed their road, when Cyrus Mayes and his sons helped put down the first unnatural barrier to the flow of shallow water to Florida Bay. If one considers such evolution to be evil, then there was enough complicity to go around.

I cruised slowly through the sugar cane capital city of Clewiston and then northwest past a sign that read OUR SOIL IS OUR FUTURE. Then the highway opened back up. With every mile the elevation subtly changed. Pine lands, with individual, polelike tree trunks and green, tasseled tops, lined the road. The landscape was occasionally interrupted by carefully laid out orange groves, the rows running to the horizon and the close trees already showing gobs of the ripening fruit. I timed myself by the mileage signs along the way and made it into Placid City just after eight. There was little movement on the Sunday morning streets. I made two loops into commercial and residential areas that went no more than two blocks off the main highway. It was a narrow place of clapboard and red brick, pickup trucks and broom-swept sidewalks.

When I pulled into Mel's Placid Cafe, I turned off the engine and let the constant road noise of the trip leach away. There was a gray dust on the step up to the low porch of the restaurant and curtains on the windows. It was not until I reached for the door handle of the truck that I noticed a car parked across my back bumper. It took up the entire pane of my rearview mirror. "Jesus, Max," I whispered to myself. "You do attract them."

When I stepped out of the truck, there was a little man leaning up against the front bumper of a Crown Victoria. It was the kind of car a big man might drive, and he looked out of place next to it. I pretended I was counting out my change from my pocket while I measured him. He was dressed in khaki, but it looked more like a style than a uniform. There was no adornment on the shirt, no epaulets or insignia, only the one single gold star pinned over the left breast. I cut my eyes through the parking lot and saw no patrol cars or backup vehicles.

"Mornin'," he finally said, knowing that I was stalling. "One beautiful Sunday morning." He emphasized the observation by looking up at the treetops and sky. The man's head was bald and tan, and if he was more than five feet seven, I was being generous.

"You do have a gorgeous piece of country here, Sheriff," I said, guessing.

"And mighty quiet too, Mr…" He bumped himself off my fender and reached out his hand.

"Freeman," I said, stepping forward to accept the small but firm handshake and thinking that little men in positions of power always had a habit of squeezing one's hand a bit more strongly than needed. "Max Freeman."

"Mr. Freeman," he said with a politician's smile. "I welcome you to Placid City. You came just for the delights of Mel's home cooking?"

"Not solely," I said. "Though I'm sure it will certainly be worth the trip, Sheriff, uh…"

"Wilson," he said. "O. J. Wilson."

It was difficult to judge his age. There were prominent crow's- feet at the corners of his eyes and three rows of worry lines across his forehead. But he was fit and there was an energy coming off him that belied an older man. He was looking up into my eyes, trying to hold them, and it did not please me. I'd done the same in street interrogations and didn't like being on the other side of the stare.