Jonathon King - The Blue Edge of Midnight

"I'm sorry for the trouble," I said, handing the kid five twenties from my wallet. He took all five without comment.

"Oh, and Mr. Freeman," he said as I started to turn away. "Cleve said to tell you to use his canoe 'round the side there if you wanted. Said yours got busted up?"

"Thanks," I said without elaboration.

I walked back to my truck feeling guilty, knowing the kid must be just shaking his head.

The noon traffic was no different from any other part of the working day, but this time sanity sat behind the wheel. No blue light, no horn, total adherence to the laws of the state. It took me more than an hour to get to the hospital, and when I asked for the room of Fred Gunther, the elderly woman at the information desk gave me a visitor's badge and directed me to follow the blue stripe on the hallway floor.

I thought I had sworn off hospitals two years ago when I. was wheelchaired out of Jefferson in Philadelphia with a bullethole in my neck and an appointment for a follow-up with a psychiatrist, neither of which I had asked for. Now I was on my second visit in five days. I hated hospitals, had watched my mother die in a hospital, eaten from the inside by cancer, refusing to end her pain with medication. Her knurled and leathery hand closed tight around my fingers, whispering a Catholic prayer with her final breath. I shook the vision. I hated hospitals. I moved through the hallways with pastel wallpaper, dodging staff dressed in blue and pink and green. It was a color-coordinated world with no place for black.

When I reached Gunther's room the door was open and he was alone. The media swirl had moved on to the next exclusive of the day. The big man was lying in bed, his eyes closed and his huge hands folded over his chest, fingers stacked in a pile. I scanned the length of the bedclothes and saw two lumps where both feet were covered. When I shifted my eyes back to his face, he was awake.

"How you doin'?" I said, covering some embarrassment.

"I've been better."

His voice was raspy and tired. I let him come full awake and watched him shift his weight using his powerful shoulders and arms.

"How much longer they going to keep you?"

"A while. They say I'll be able to keep the leg."

"I'm glad to hear it."

"Thanks to you."

I let that sit. Avoiding a trite response. We'd quickly run out of polite things to say.

"Could you close that door, Mr. Freeman?"

I shut the heavy door and when I came back the listlessness had left his face.

"I've had a lot of time to think," he started. "And I wasn't sure who to tell this to, but it seems that maybe you're the one."

I nodded and waited out his hesitation. It's a standard cop interviewing technique.

"I've got some friends, acquaintances really, out in the Glades who aren't exactly, uh, traditional folk. Some are natives. Some, like me, are just grown into the place and can't stand the way it's changing."

His voice had jumped a decibel and at least one notch of anxiety.

"So you said before," I replied, hoping to bring him back down but not shut him up.

"Before all this with the kids started, there was a history of protection from the outside among the folks who live out there. And it wasn't all pretty. A game warden was killed in the fifties. Some revenuers disappeared in the early days. We used to laugh about the old tales, but things had changed. Even the Seminoles were making money off the coastal folks, bringing them out onto the reservation to gamble at the Indian casino and all. Hell, they even let them hold a damn rock concert for 60,000 kids out there on a New Year's."

I moved to the side of the bed. Closer. Just you and me, pal.

"So these acquaintances aren't laughing so much anymore?"

"Shit started happening. A group of overnight canoeists who weren't using a guide got vandalized in the middle of nowhere. Their water was stolen. The ribs of their boats smashed. Some hikers on the canal levee stumbled into a nest of rattlesnakes in a spot where no natural rattlesnake would set up territory."

"Anybody claim responsibility?"

"No one outright."

There was a wrestling match going on in Gunther's head between conscience and fear.

"I don't think the old-timers would stand for something like this, but you can't always tell with some of the younger ones," he said.

"You have any names?" I said, taking a chance of shutting him down.

Gunther sighed, blowing air out his nose and closing his eyes for several seconds. I thought I'd taken a step too far. Then he reached over for a message pad and pen and started writing.

"You go out to this place and ask for Nate Brown. I already talked to them and they'll sit down with you."

The pen wedged between Gunther's thick sausage fingers looked like a dark sliver stuck in his huge hand.

"How come you're telling me this instead of the cops?"

"These people don't talk to cops. They've been avoiding authority out there for a hundred years."

"So why open it up now?" I said, again pushing. His wan face suddenly gained a slight flush of color. A sharp clearness came into his eyes.

"Hell, boy! Somebody tried to kill us!"

We both listened to his anger echo through the room. I took the piece of paper from his hand.

"Mr. Gunther, somebody has already succeeded in killing four kids. Kids who were a lot more innocent than you or I."

He closed his eyes again, lying there in silence like I found him. I let the door click quietly shut when I went out.

"Nate Brown? Never heard of him. But if you're heading out to the Loop Road area, you're on your way to a different world."

As I pulled out of the hospital parking lot Billy was on the cell phone giving me directions to the Loop Road Frontier Hotel, the name Gunther had written on the message pad where Nate Brown and this group of acquaintances had agreed to meet me.

As I headed south toward Miami, he also gave me the history of the place.

Only thirty miles from the high-rise glitter, urban blight, Hispanic-dominated politics and thoroughly modern city of Miami, lay a place outside the curve of progress and, in many ways, still outside the purview of the law.

The Loop Road had first been hacked out of the Everglades in the early 1900s by dreamers, men who thought they could simply plow through what they considered useless swampland and create a link between the thriving new cities of Miami on one coast of Florida and Tampa on the other side. They were men with money and power and not a little bravery. And they made some progress.

By dredging limestone from under the water and piling it up and tamping it down, they started a road. But as is often the case, men with more power and money scuttled their plan. A roadway was eventually built across the lower end of the peninsula, at a heavy price to the laborers who died cutting the way through. Men drowned in the vast fields of water. Others were maimed in dynamite blasts. Some simply disappeared in an ancient Glades muck that could suck a boot, a leg, a worker's torso down.

But when the road from Tampa to Miami was finally finished in 1946 and dubbed the Tamiami Trail, it had effectively bypassed the first attempted roadway. The original Loop Road would remain unfinished, a trail to nowhere. And a trail to nowhere, in the middle of nowhere, draws a unique breed of resident.

For half a century the Loop Road was little more than a jump-off point for alligator hunters, exotic plume hunters and not a few moonshiners. Even in the years when killing off endangered alligators and snowy egrets became illegal and prohibition kicked in, the Loop was still a jump-off for poachers and white lightning runners, bail jumpers and criminals who needed a place where few questions were asked and authority ignored.