Jonathon King - The Blue Edge of Midnight

When I got back to Billy's apartment he was waiting for me with a fresh pot of coffee, a take-out order of jerk chicken and black beans and rice, and a sheaf of computer printouts, dossiers he called them, on Brown, Sims, Blackman and Ashley. He also had company.

He was on the patio with a woman he introduced as Dianne McIntyre, "a lawyer w-with an office in the s-same b-building as mine."

She was as tall as Billy and had a swimmer's figure, broad shoulders and narrow hips, and was dressed expensively in a pure silk blouse and a charcoal skirt. She was comfortable enough to have taken off her heels and was padding about in stockings.

As I ate at the counter they stood in the kitchen area, sharing a bottle of wine. When I looked up Billy was staring at me.

"W-What happened to your face?"

I self-consciously touched the swollen cheekbone.

"Door," I said.

The woman raised one of her fine dark eyebrows and indelicately probed at a molar with her tongue. Billy accepted my reticence and picked up the first page of the stack of papers.

"Dianne actually kn-knows this f-fellow Sims. S-She worked w-with him on an environmental case."

I could tell how hard Billy was trying to control his stutter and it made me anxious for him. But the woman seemed completely inured.

"It was several years ago in a dispute between a very influential developer who wanted to build some kind of mega sports complex in an area of the Everglades that had never been touched," she said, turning the wineglass in her hands. "Sims had been working with the naturalists and environmental groups for years and had marshaled some fairly strong support against the project. One of the shrewdest things he'd done was elicit the favor of the old Gladesmen by convincing them that their way of life would be threatened as much as the flora and wildlife of the area."

"N-No doubt men l-like your Mr. Brown," Billy said, leafing through the stack of papers.

"Apparently things got ugly and some of the developer's backroom people allegedly threatened Sims," McIntyre continued. "Shortly after, handmade posters started showing up at the public fishing ramps and even in some outlying suburban stores that if anyone harmed Sims, those responsible would be gutted and fed to the gators."

The attorney again seemed unruffled by the circumstances. Neither shocked nor amused. Just the facts, ma'am. I watched her closely.

"The project finally died and Sims seemed to move away from the mainstream. I haven't heard much about him for the last few years." When she finished, she sipped again at her wine.

Nate Brown's was a story in itself, much of it untold.

Billy had found some archived newspaper clippings and legal transcripts online that shed a little light on the wizened old man who could back down three pumped-up thugs with only the slightest flick of his Loop Road respect.

Nathaniel Brown had been born in the Glades and learned the skills of the back country with one motivation: survival. There was no record of his parentage and no official documentation of his life until a war record placed him in an infantry division in the army in WWII. There were notations of his award of two silver stars, for bravery beyond the call when he had taken out a group of specialized German mountain troops during an ambush, "single-handedly causing a number of casualties upon the enemy." He had then doctored a group of his own squad members wounded in the fight and kept them alive in the woods for nearly two weeks until they were found.

After his discharge, his name didn't surface again for more than a decade until he was arrested and charged in the death of a game warden. By then Brown had built a small reputation as an alligator poacher whose knowledge of the Glades made him impossible to catch.

But court transcripts showed that on a night in the early 1970s a warden was chasing Brown, whom he suspected of carrying several fresh gator skins in his outboard runabout. The boat chase led into a series of twisting tributaries on the edge of Florida Bay, and Brown reportedly lured the warden into an area of sand bars. Even in the dark the Gladesman was able to read the fine currents, water he had grown up on and traveled his entire life. The game warden was not. The officer ran his boat into a sand spur at high speed and was thrown from the boat, breaking his neck. Brown disappeared into the mangroves.

Three days later, after supposedly hearing of the warden's death, Brown turned himself in. His public defender pleaded him out to a charge of involuntary manslaughter. He served six years, his final two at a road prison near the isolated Ten Thousand Islands section of Florida's southwest coast. After his release, his official tracks again disappeared. No driver's license. No property holdings. Nothing.

"And you saw this guy?" Dianne McIntyre said, her first true sign of piqued interest. "He'd have to be near eighty."

Billy filled the wineglasses and I watched the woman cup her hands around the crystal. She had a near-perfect profile and her auburn hair fell across her cheek as she bent to the glass. She was oddly standing on one foot, her other brought up behind her like one of those 1950s movie starlets during a kiss. I guessed she liked her wine.

"This B-Blackman I actually kn-know of," said Billy, paging through the documents. "He is, or w-was, a guide like Gunther."

Billy said he'd tried to depose Blackman when he was handling the client suit against Gunther.

"Fred said he was w-working with him at the t-time. That he was the b-best guide in the G-Glades, but had an attitude."

Billy had sent several certified requests to Blackman's business P.O. address but got no response. When the people suing Gunther dropped the suit, he never pursued it.

Blackman had the typical paper trail of licenses, social security and business permits, but court records showed little in the past. But in the last few years he had had a handful of complaints filed against him by clients, including a charge of aggravated assault in which an upstate New York man accused Blackman of whipping him across the face with a fly rod during an angry outburst on a fishing excursion.

Blackman said it was an accident. The New Yorker settled for a plea of no contest to a misdemeanor assault charge and court costs. I set Blackman's face in my mind, recalled the agitation in his voice and the almost mocking pronunciation of my name.

Dave Ashley was an unknown. The silent member of Brown's cabal had no paper trail. Variations of his name and my estimate of his age in the early forties brought nothing. No licenses, addresses, court appearance, nothing. In this day and age, the blank sheet stunned the attorneys. It was difficult to believe any person could exist without leaving some imprint in the modern electronic tracking of every soul from birth to school to work to death.

"There was an Ashley gang, a notorious criminal family that roamed the South Florida region in the early nineteen hundreds," McIntyre said.

Both Billy's and my faces must have taken on the look of blank dumbness. A crinkle came to the woman's eyes, she took a sip of wine and began.

The Ashleys were a family of Crackers who had come to Florida near the turn of the twentieth century and found work providing the muscle and sweat to build Henry Flagler's railway line into then frontier South Florida. While the father and older boys chopped railroad ties, young John Ashley became a skilled hunter and trapper in the Glades. Then came a day in 1911 when the body of a Seminole Indian named DeSoto Tiger floated up in a canal. Word had it young John was the last one seen with Tiger, who was on his way to Miami to sell twelve hundred dollars in otter skins. The skins were eventually sold- by young John.

Ashley was eventually arrested and jailed but escaped and for the next ten years he and his family took up the business of robbing banks, running illegal rum from the Bahamas, and using their criminal wealth to buy off the local law.