Jonathon King - The Blue Edge of Midnight

I swiveled around on the stool. An alligator skin that had to be eleven or twelve feet long was tacked on a side wall above a row of booths. A stuffed, mangy-looking bobcat was snarling from his perch above the coat rack. I drained the beer and figured that when the bartender got around to granting me another overpriced drink I'd take a chance and ask for Nate Brown.

My back was to the entrance when the boys from the parking lot came in. They'd apparently gulped a few more shots of courage from a bottle in their rusty truck. They shuffled up and took up positions around me. No one else bothered to look up.

"You're fuckin' meat," the skinny cheapshot announced. The big one stood back out of range, his face still a shade pale, his breathing still raggedy.

The men at the bar turned and rag woman crossed her arms and watched like they were viewing a half interesting rerun of an old TV episode.

"Get up, meat," the big boy rasped.

I tightened my grip on the beer bottle in my hand and felt suddenly tired, the adrenaline glands confused.

"Don't you boys go breakin' stuff in here again, Cory Brooker," the bartender offered, but made no move to come closer.

The circle tightened. Cheapshot sucked in his breath and his right arm started to come up. I was a split second from bringing my foot up into his crotch when a brown wizened hand reached in and clamped the boy's forearm. He tried to fight it but when he turned to see who had hold of him, he blanched and stepped back.

The owner of the hand stepped into the circle and all eyes fell on him. His close-cropped steel-gray hair bristled up from a deeply tanned scalp and his eyes were so pale as to be nearly colorless. He still had a grip on the skinny one and I could see the ridged muscle, taut as wound cable, running up his forearm.

"Cain't have it," he said, and the tone of authority caused all four of us to flinch.

"B-But, Mr. Brown, this…," the big boy started to whine.

"Shut up," the old man explained.

All three of them exchanged glances and backed away, their necks in hangdog position. The old man watched the group move out of the entrance before turning to me.

"Nate Brown," he said, extending what I now considered a magical hand. "You're the one pulled Fred Gunther out of the swamp?"

"Max Freeman," I answered, shaking the hand, which felt for all the world like a bunch of rolled pennies wrapped in old leather.

"Walk with me, Max."

I followed him to the far corner of the room while those at the bar turned back to their card game. Back in the recesses of the room, at a round wooden table, Brown introduced me to three middle-aged men who rose to their feet in a polite fashion and shook my hand.

Rory Sims, Mitch Blackman, Dave Ashley.

I took the last wooden chair without comment. As I watched them sit I noted that all but Ashley were wearing the same small knife scabbard on their belts.

Brown settled and filled a heavy, cut-glass tumbler with two fingers of sipping whiskey and pushed it in front of me. My glass matched the other four at the table. After he refilled his own, Brown reached down and set the bottle on the floor next to his chair leg.

"Fred Gunther is a good man. And we all call him a friend. So first off, we thank you for what you done," Brown started. "And goin' on Fred's advice, we agreed it would maybe help to speak with you."

The others nodded, with the exception of Ashley, who sat staring into the amber light of the whiskey in front of him.

Brown went on. His voice had a slow Southern cadence that made me want to sip from my glass.

"Ain't none of us too fond of the law out here, least of all me. But these here chile killins got a lot of folks stirred up and we are thinkin' it might do us well to have some kinda, you know, go-between."

I looked from man to man until I was convinced they were waiting for me to answer an unasked question. I slowly turned the tumbler of whiskey in a circle on the polished table.

"I'm not sure how I can help," I said, finally giving in to the temptation and taking a drink. The whiskey burned the open cut inside my mouth but slid warm and easy down my throat. The others followed suit.

"Gunther gave us reason to believe you might be in the same sort of, uh, position that we think many folks out here are in," said Sims, a balding, bearded man whose collared shirt and manner made him seem the odd man out in the group. "That is," Sims said, "he indicated you may have been a suspect yourself at one time but seemed to have proved your way out of that."

Billy must have said more to Gunther than I knew.

"Look, Mr. Freeman," Blackman said, pronouncing my last name like it was two words. "They're riding folks mighty hard out here and we just don't want to see an innocent man get caught in some damn government frame-up."

I took another sip of whiskey and looked over the rim of my glass at him. There was an agitation in his eyes that none of the others carried.

"I mean, look. I'm in the guide business just like Gunther. I spent my whole life out here and we don't need the bad publicity either," Blackman said, in a calmer tone.

"We thought maybe you might be a sort of liaison with the authorities, you being a former officer and all," Sims said. "Our expertise may indeed be helpful."

"Do you have any guesses who might be involved?" I said, looking at Ashley, who was the only one who hadn't spoken.

"If we knowed who it was, we'd of taken care of it already our ownself," Brown said, reaching down for the bottle.

"A lot of work has gone into protecting the traditions of these Everglades, Mr. Freeman," Sims said. "Something like this can do more damage than good."

Brown was filling glasses but I put a hand over mine.

"I'm not sure that I have the kind of access to the people investigating this that Gunther thinks I do," I said. "But I'm sure anything you might offer could easily be passed along."

The table went silent for several seconds. I had played snitches and informants and hustlers too many times not to see that we had hit a delicate moment. These men too had tracked and hunted and waited patiently with lures and bait too many times to jump before they were ready. I waited a few more calculated seconds before standing up. A chorus of scraping chairs joined me.

"Well, Mr. Gunther obviously knows how to reach me."

As I walked through the room, rag woman watched me from behind the bar where my change from the single beer lay untouched. I tipped my head as I passed her and I swear she tried to smile.

When I got outside the western sky was streaked in purple and red and the remains of a rain shower was dripping off the porch roof. The big boy's truck was gone, but as I walked across the lot I could see they hadn't left easy.

The passenger side of my front windshield was smashed, a spiderweb of fissures running out from a deep divot in the middle. Three separate scratches ran down the driver's side from the front cowling to the tailgate. I figured the only reason they didn't bust out the headlights was so I could find my way out of their part of the world.

I waited until I was back on the Tamiami Trail and then called Billy, giving him a brief description of my meeting with the Loop Road group. I left out the encounter with the welcoming committee. I gave him the names of the four men at the table, knowing he could not resist his natural inquisitiveness.

Driving east into Miami, headlights and overhead streetlights flashed and splintered through my broken windshield and hampered my view of the skyline after dark. When I got up onto the interstate, I could see a curving neon light that snaked through the city, an artistic addition to the Metrorail line. The Centrust Building stood bathed in teal spotlights, a tribute to the Florida Marlins baseball team. Against the blackness of Biscayne Bay, the lights in the high-rise towers took on the look of manmade constellations. The contrast to the weathered pine of the Loop Road Hotel was not lost on me.