Jonathon King - Shadow Men

They propped Derrer up against the gang box at the base of the elevated driver's chair and Nash climbed up and started the big airplane engine. The one called Cummings did not look back at me. His business was done. The mist of spray kicked up as the airboat pulled away felt cool against my face, and Brown and I waited until the sound faded. Then the old man stood up on the skiff to get a higher angle to watch them. I sat on the deck, my legs crossed, and took out the map and my GPS and Derrer's tracking unit.

"You ain't worried about that feller goin' back and tellin' the police you shot him?" Brown said, continuing to look out after the airboat. I scrolled through the unit's stored coordinates and could not find anything that coincided with the longitude and latitude of John William's records.

"There would be a lot of explaining to do. Some jurisdictional matters. Permission from the men who hired those two. My guess is he'll be compensated and quiet. PalmCo isn't going to want to bring any more scrutiny out here, especially law enforcement scrutiny."

Brown just nodded and watched me working the map and the GPS. The encounter with Cummings and Derrer had thrown me off and I realized the spot we'd been looking for was back toward Marquez Ridge. We had passed it while leading the airboat to the hammock.

"We've got to backtrack," I said to Brown as he stepped down into the muck to spin the skiff.

"Yep," he said, and did not offer another word, or ask a question about where we needed to go. Instead he poled us through the open grass between the two mounds of trees, and I actually lay back in the skiff and stared into the sky. My head was throbbing. I was trying not to replay the last hour through my head. I'd shot a man, maybe out of necessity, maybe out of anger or frustration. When you're a cop, you're trained that whenever you fire your gun, it's a use of deadly force, meant to kill. You aren't on TV. You don't try to wound. When the citizens start whining after every fatal police shooting about why the cop couldn't have just winged the asshole with the knife, they're out of our loop. Danger is a pissed off guy with a knife and only a wound. The killer in the subway and now some P.I. who just happened to piss me off. Somewhere inside me I had that capacity, and I wasn't sure what that fact told me.

I registered the change in light on my closed eyelids before I felt the skiff slide up into thicker grass and come to a halt. Brown had poled us into the shadows. We would once again have to pull the boat by a line to follow the riverbed path. I checked the GPS and looked ahead. Brown wasn't waiting for instructions. I put the unit away and we pulled together.

After twenty minutes, he stopped. I knew it wasn't because he was tired. I found my water bottle and took a long drink and sat on the edge of the skiff. Brown was still standing, staring at the stand of ancient pine, the single limb that had been broken but remained alive as it fell perpendicular through the crotch of another. The knot where they met had grown together, and now that I looked at it as a whole, it was the perfect representation of a cross.

"This is it, Freeman," Brown said. "Git out yer map or your metal finder. This is it."

I checked the GPS and plotted it on the map. The alignment was close but not perfect, but I wasn't arguing. I assembled the metal detector and adjusted the settings while Brown gave me his rationale, a lot of it based on his gut instinct, which I had long learned to trust out here where everything, even the earth herself, had a way of shifting and moving.

"If them last letters were written in the summer, then it'd be the rainy season," Brown said, scanning the area around the trees, but looking up anxiously at the form of the cross.

"The rains'll raise this water another four, five inches and this here bed'll fill up. We ain't but two mile from the Tamiami Trail," he said.

I'd known how close we were because I had been working the map as we came up from the south. I thought of how disappointed Cummings was going to be when and if he found out how close they'd actually been to civilization when I threatened to leave them.

"If Jefferson had loaded them dead men into his skiff, he'd of been able to pole his way down here on the high water and come right on in here on that current."

I climbed up to the tree formation and then started working the metal detector from the base of the cross in a circular motion. I was slow and careful and exact in my movements.

"If he knew these Glades as well as my daddy, he could of made it easy in the dark, even without a moon," Brown said. "It's the way I woulda done 'er."

I expanded the concentric circles with the tree base as my epicenter. Nothing showed on the attached screen. It was all vegetable, no hard mineral. The detector was designed to pick up anything impenetrable-a belt buckle, a necklace, coins, a pocketknife.

"You think John William snapped that pine limb and marked the grave?" I finally asked Brown, knowing it was on both our minds. The old man let his eyes rest on the image.

"I ain't a religious man, Freeman. That there coulda formed up on its own like that. Maybe it's got God's hand on it. Maybe not. They's things I seen in war and nature and men that made me swing both ways over the years. Best I can say is, it don't hurt not to discount the Almighty altogether."

I was eight feet out from the tree base, due south, when the detector beeped under my hand. I stopped and swung the pad back to a cover of maidenhair fern and it beeped again. The readout showed a depth of two and a half feet. Brown brought the trenching tool over while I cleared a big square of vegetation and studied the cover of slick muck and plant roots. I got down on my knees and scraped away the top layer with my hands, watching for anything foreign, anything out of place, anything. After a few minutes I started in with the shovel, carefully coming up with one spade of thick, wet earth at a time and flopping it onto a rain poncho that Brown had brought from the skiff. The old man scanned the pile with the detector like I'd shown him and then went through it with his fingers. He knew what bone looked like. Every couple of spadefuls we would sweep the hole I was creating, and the beep still registered.

My digging was a good two feet down when Brown said, "Bone." He held up a dull gray chunk between his dirt-stained fingers. It was the size of a poker chip and about the same thickness. We both stared at it-the possibilities, the reassurance that we were not wrong, and the dread that came with it.

"Could it be an animal?" I asked.

"Could be," he said. "I ain't no expert."

We swept the hole again. Still beeping.

We found four more pieces of bone, which Brown carefully put aside in one of the plastic evidence bags I'd brought. I made sure we marked the depth of each one taken from the hole. Then the shovel blade hit something tough, but not hard. I reached down and felt with my fingers and found fabric. In one of Billy's books I'd come across a study of the Glades that remarked on the preservation power of the thick muck. Because the layers were set down by rotting, microbial vegetation, the muck was so dense that little air penetrated the lower levels. If it was airless, the breakdown of any nonorganic material would be greatly slowed. I set aside the shovel and went down with both hands, using my fingernails to scratch away the dirt, exposing more and more of what I soon realized was leather.

It took another thirty minutes or so for me to free the remnant of a work boot from the muck. The thick sole was nearly intact, but the leather upper was the fragile consistency of wet cardboard. I brought it up with a layer of muck from beneath its resting place and placed it on the poncho. Brown waved the detector over it. It beeped.