Jonathon King - The Blue Edge of Midnight

"Christ," I muttered to myself. "What the outdoors does to people."

I pushed off onto the river and right away the water felt wrong.

The new canoe seemed oddly different as I sat in the rear seat and shifted my weight, feeling the bottom roll from side to side. The new paddle felt awkward in my fist as I took the first few strokes. I'd lost my familiarity, I thought. It was that new car syndrome. Same model, but still a different feel. I shook away the uneasiness and tried to put some muscle to the paddling and worked my way out toward the middle channel. The western rain wall was moving to the coast and the light was already going gray with the cover. I concentrated on the sliding current and setting up a rhythm: Reach, pull, follow through. Reach, pull, follow through.

I could still feel the ache in my ribs and the knots in one forearm, but I fell into a pace and the sweat and flow of oxygen and blood through my veins loosened my joints and I started to get a sense of the new boat's tendencies.

But there was still something wrong. The water didn't seem to swirl in the right direction off the shallows of the mangrove banks. The eddies didn't pull right. The air from deep in the river didn't smell right.

I was tired when I got to the canopy entrance to the upper river. It had started to rain lightly and I let the boat drift in. The water was running at me harder than before. The rain, I figured. It was filling the canal and the slough at the other end, the excess water flowing heavy, looking for the easiest path to the sea. The water was a reddish color, thickened by the sediment it pulled along with it. There were no osprey overhead. No wood warblers chirping from the low limbs. No turtles standing guard on the logs.

I was thirty yards into the canopy when I saw Cleve's Boston Whaler up around a sweeping corner in the distance. Even in the low light its white hull glowed like exposed bone.

It was settled, nose first, into the crook of a downed cypress log and the current lightly rocked its stern in an unrhythmic way. I watched it roll as I approached and scanned both shorelines for movement or noise. When I got close I realized I was holding my breath. I had to back paddle some to get up beside her and when I reached up to grab the gunwale and started to stand, I could see streaks of smeared blood on the middle of the center console. My legs began to tremble and I had to sit to keep myself from falling back into the water.

I tried to breathe. I tried to blink sight back into my eyes. I tried not to push off the side of the Whaler and paddle back down the river and disappear into the night.

I don't know how long it took me to gather myself, but I finally stood again and pulled myself back up and onto the starboard side of the Whaler.

On the floor lay Cleve and young Mike Stanton. Both had been shot at least once in the head. They were in their ranger uniforms. Cleve was partially on top of the kid, as though he might still be protecting him. Blood had run from their bodies with the natural slant of the boat and had collected in the stern with the rainwater. The reddish, tea-colored mixture was sluicing out the self-bailing scuppers and into the river.

I had seen enough dead bodies and didn't need to check for thready pulses or burbling breath sounds. So I just stared. Trying to understand. But the newest stone was too jagged to grind, the edges too sharp to even let it into my head. I sat on the gunwale and pulled my fanny pack around to get the cell phone, but when I twisted 'round I began to retch and couldn't stop.

Crime scene, I thought, or maybe I said it out loud, to no one else who could hear. "Crime scene, crime scene, crime…" The mantra brought me back.

I stood up and wiped my face with the bottom edge of my sweaty T-shirt and fell back on old habit. I pulled out the cell phone. I punched in Diaz's cell phone number and he answered on the fifth ring, his voice quick and busy sounding, a thumping mix of salsa and jazz in the background.

"Yeah, Diaz here."

"It's Max Freeman, Diaz, I…"

"Max, Max, Max," he cut me off with an admonishing sing-song cadence. "Man, we're trying to get a deserved rest here, Max. It has been a long hot summer you know, and…"

"And it isn't over," I said, cutting back in on him. "You've got a double homicide out here on my river."

The silence lasted several beats and I could hear him cupping the phone.

"What? Christ! What?"

Now I had his full attention.

"Not kids, Max. Tell me it's not kids."

"Two park rangers," I said, turning to look down at the bodies, trying to be professional. "They're in their boat, just south of the entrance of the upper river. Both of them head shot from close range. I'm not sure what else."

I looked down at Cleve's hand on the deck, trying to judge the lividity, how much blood had settled to the lowest body part. His fingers were dark and bloated and there was a bullet wound in his palm where a round had gone clean through. It was a classic defense wound where he'd raised his hand in vain to stop a bullet. The entry hole left behind was the size of a middle-caliber round, quite possibly a 9mm.

"It looks like a couple of hours ago," I said into the phone, staring at my friend's hand. "And it might have been my gun."

"Christ. Hey. Hey, Mr. Freeman. Take it cool now, OK?" Diaz was trying to be calm now. And I had become a "Mister" again. The coincidences were stacking up to be way too much, even for him.

"Mr. Freeman?"

"Yeah."

"Look, we're on our way out. OK? We'll get a team out there. OK?"

"Yeah."

I could tell he was moving, could imagine him leaving a group of cops in a bar somewhere, maybe even looking around for Richards, digging for his car keys. I could hear the music begin to fade.

"Freeman?"

"Yeah."

"Look, sit tight. OK? Don't do anything. It's a crime scene, right?"

I wasn't listening now. The rain was coming heavier, starting to ping off the white fiberglass and fill the scuppers where the rangers' blood was draining.

"Mr. Freeman?" Diaz was trying to keep me talking. "What are you doing now, Mr. Freeman?"

"Going home," I said and punched off the phone.

I climbed back into the canoe and pushed out away from the Whaler. Before taking up the paddle I tucked the phone back into my pack and felt a smooth slickness of worn wood that had settled on the bottom inside. The short, curved knife from the stump was still in my possession. Had my stupid gambit with the bait led to this? I had meant to draw him to me, challenge him with the hope that he'd slip up, make a mistake, leave something more substantial than the footprint. But now he'd turned ugly, unpredictable.

I zipped the bag and spun it around on my waist and started up river, paddling hard and grinding.

It was dusk now and the light was leaving but I didn't need it to find the way. Rain was swirling through the tree canopy with a soft hissing sound as it spun through the leaves. I tried to think back to Nate Brown and yesterday morning. He had surprised me when he'd said I wouldn't need my gun after I'd tucked it in my waistband. Then I'd picked it back up after he'd told me about the girl and when I'd hurried to gather the first aid kit and get dressed, I laid it on my table and left it there. I could see it there, black and tinged with rust on the worn wood. Somehow I knew it wasn't there now.

I had also run out to join Brown and out of habit had not fastened the new door lock Cleve had installed for me. He'd been worried about the gun falling into the wrong hands after he'd seen the warrant servers find it. And now I'd made it all too easy.

I pulled the strokes harder. Twice I thunked the new boat into partially submerged cypress knees in the shadows. In twenty minutes I was sliding into the curve where the channel to my shack branched off. I glided, trying to listen. Raindrops tapped on the leaves and ferns. The current bubbled over a stump. Did it matter if he heard me? I pushed up the channel and stroked up to my dock. I was beginning not to care. My fight-or-flee reactions were gone, overridden by another cocktail of human emotion: anger and a raw dose of vengeance.