Jonathon King - Shadow Men

"I suspect it wasn't just your decision."

"But you know what the brass will do."

"They'll make him go to counseling, if they're smart. Let the shrinks at him awhile, see if he can admit his control problem or whether he denies it."

"That's it?" she said, and I was surprised by the snap of anger in her voice.

"I said that's if they're smart. They could just fire his ass and put an angry guy with weapons training out on the street."

There was a sigh of concession from her.

"What if he threatens her, or comes back at her again?"

"Have him arrested, just like anyone else. He got his chance."

This time her long silence worried me. I lay back into the ropes and closed my eyes. Soon I felt her move and do the same. She curled against me, her hair smelling of shampoo.

"Have you ever hit a woman in anger? I mean your ex-wife or a girlfriend?"

I could tell the recent revelations about my father were still tumbling in her head.

"The children of abusers becoming abusers themselves is not a blanket sociological axiom," I said. "Sometimes it works the other way. The act is so repugnant that the witnesses to abuse grow up to loathe the very idea."

I felt her wiggle herself back tighter into me, and even without seeing her face I could tell she was grinning.

"OK, Professor Freeman," she said. "But you still haven't answered the question."

I put my arm over her waist and rested my wrist on her chest, the backs of my fingers against the soft skin of her neck.

"No," I said. "The answer is no, I never have."

We did not fall asleep for at least another hour.

It would be two days before I heard from Nate Brown. The bartender from the Frontier Hotel called at noon.

"Mr. Brown says meet him at Dawkins's dock at eight tomorrow mornin'. You know that's over on Chokoloskee? Right?"

"Yeah, I know. And thanks."

"How much do y'all owe me now, Mr. Freeman?" she said with humor in her voice.

"I'll talk to you soon," I said, disappointed that she now had my cell number. I wasn't sure which I was concerned about more, the guys from PalmCo tracking my calls or the Loop Road barmaid getting friendly.

There was no trace yet of dawn in my rearview the next morning as I drove west. This time I used Alligator Alley, a straight concrete shot from the suburbs of far west Fort Lauderdale to their identical twins in Naples on the other side of the state. The Alley was the second gouge across the gut of the Everglades. It was constructed in the 1960s with better machinery, better technology, and supposedly better working conditions. It was the thirty-year span of intermittent carnage that gave the alley its reputation. Originally two lanes with nothing to break the hypnotic monotony of endless acres of sawgrass, head-on collisions were frequent and almost always fatal out here, where the sound of wrenching metal and screaming passengers was quickly lost in the silence. In the 1990s the state expanded the road. They doubled and separated the lanes, and acquiesced to the environmentalists by tunneling under the roadway to allow water and animals to pass through. Imagine the bonanza for the predators that would quickly figure out the migration flow of untold numbers of species forced to funnel through a ten-foot-wide passageway.

I kept myself on a constant flow of caffeine from my oversized thermos, and went over the search possibilities or impossibilities that I was asking Brown to undertake. I'd gone to an army/navy supply store two days ago. In the back of the truck I had a high-end metal detector similar to the kind used by anthropological investigators and emergency rescue teams; a new generation handheld GPS; an expandable trenching tool with a knife-sharp spade and a chisel-head pickax. I also brought a variety of evidence bags- optimistic-as well as Billy's digital camera and a new satellite cell phone with a different number and carrier from any of the others.

By the time I hit Route 29 I had to flip my mirror up to keep the rising sun from blinding me. The top few feet of the sawgrass had gone a fiery orange in the early rays, and for a mile I watched a trio of swallow-tailed kites swooping down into the grass. The sharp forks of their black tails and pointed wings showed hard against the clear sky, and one came up with a wriggling snake in its beak, the ribbon of flesh outlined against the birds pure-white belly. I made the exit and turned south and rode along a canal that drained the water and gave high ground to the tiny communities of Jerome and Copeland. I passed the old road prison where convicts were held after long days of clearing the roadsides of overgrowth with their bush-axes and machetes while guards stood by with their rifles at port arms. Would even a desperate man try to run out here?

Farther south the road hit a blinking-light intersection at the Tamiami Trail and then continued all the way into Chokoloskee. When I pulled into the shell-lot of Dawkins's dock, both of his boats were gone. Nate Brown was sitting out on the end of the wood- plank dock. I knew he was dangling a hand-line into the water, just as I knew he had heard me and marked my arrival. I parked out of the way of the forklift's worn path and walked out to meet him.

"Anything biting?"

"They's always somethin' bitin', Mr. Freeman."

He looked up at me and then back into the water, waiting. The early sun was dancing off the surface, the southeast wind rippling up the surface. I sat down next to the old Gladesman and unfolded one of Billy's computer-generated maps.

"This is what we figure, or what we think is possible so far," I started. Brown first looked down at the map and then up at me.

"Anythin' is possible, son."

I nodded and began.

"Let's assume that Mayes and his sons go to work for Noren somewhere about here," I said, putting my finger on the map. "The letter indicates they're some distance out of Everglades City. It's early summer and you know the heat and mosquitoes are just starting to get unbearable, making the crew more miserable by the day.

"We know through some reports and writings in local newspapers that the dredge is making about two miles of road a month when things are going well. We figure these X's here coincide with Mayes's letter of June third, when the two workers slipped out at night to make their way back and his son heard the gunshots."

Brown touched the spot with the rough tips of his fingers. It was a delicate gesture that made me pause and look up at the side of his face, wondering what he was dunking.

"These trees here an' the elevation mark means they's high ground, right?" he said.

"Yeah."

"Curlew Hammock," he said. "An' then this one here's got to be Marquez Ridge."

His fingers slid over to the spot where the three X's were marked.

"Where'd y'all get this here map?"

Now he was looking directly into my face but his own was blank.

"William Jefferson," I said. "John William's grandson."

He did not let any recognition or surprise show, but he did not take his eyes off mine, waiting, expecting more. I told him about using his information on the grandson's cleric possibilities to run down a list and then about the discovery and evasiveness of the reverend up in Placid City. I told him William Jefferson's recounting of his grandfather, his strange silence and the perception at least by the reverend, and obviously his own mother, that John William had an evil aura about him.

"They ain't nothin' you're tellin' that don't fit," Brown finally said. "I recall the boy being awful close to his religion. The girl brought him to that and a lot of folks thought of it as savin' him from what his grandfather done."

Nate waited again, not saying more, just looking out on the water, maybe remembering a small boy running a bit too scared into the trees of the island, talking a little less than any other kid, and turning away when adults and then other children began whispering his grandfather's name.