Jonathon King - The Blue Edge of Midnight

I eased myself out of the canoe and looped a line from the platform post around one seat to secure it. I could see the outline of the staircase in the dark, but it was useless to try to detect any footprints. I went up quietly. The door creaked when I pushed it open.

This time I didn't miss it. The first place I looked was the table where I'd left my gun. Lying in its place was a GPS unit, same as the one in Ashley's cabin, same as the one planted here only days ago. I took another step inside and glass crunched under my feet. Another step and I kicked a piece of silverware across the floor. When my eyes were fully adjusted, I found my battery powered lamp and snapped it on. This time whoever did the searching had been just as thorough as the warrant team, but carried an exotic anger. Drawers were emptied onto the floor. Shelves yanked from the walls. The armoire was ransacked and then toppled. The bunk-bed mattresses shredded. This time he hadn't bothered with soft-soled booties either. My coffee pot lay crushed on the floor, stomped under a heavy boot.

The destruction didn't bother me. I had little attachment to any of it although I desperately wanted a mug of coffee. I knew he had not found what he came for. But the GPS was a bad sign.

I picked up a chair and sat at the table in the ring of lamplight to study the unit. The numbers displayed on the readout were familiar. They pinpointed the spot upriver where I'd found the wrapped body. The air went out of my throat again. Was there another child there now? Had Cleve and Mike Stanton interrupted his work and been killed for it? Was he trying to leave more evidence to put Hammonds back on me? Or did he just want what I had? I didn't have the time to work it out. The answers were upriver. If I went now.

In minutes I was back on the water, working the canoe south, digging the paddle on my reach and splashing the follow- through. I was hot and inefficient, unmindful of what could happen and purely driven by anger. I was breathing hard and foolish most of the way and barely noticed that the rain had stopped and sprays of moonlight were sneaking through the ragged cloud cover.

I slowed more from fatigue than from good sense and in the dark I could hear the sound of the water rushing over the old dam. Thirty yards more and I could see its outline. Then a sliver of moonlight broke through, illuminating a white line of foam at the base of the falls. I fought against the spinning eddies and with some effort made it up to the stained concrete. I rested for a full minute, listening to the hiss of spilling water, then set my feet and yanked the canoe up over the abutment and onto the upper river.

With the canoe floated, I stepped in and pushed out onto quiet water. I took six or seven strokes to get upriver from the falls and looked deep into the tangle of root and ferns for the spot where I'd first seen the floating bundle. The moon broke away again from its cover and flickered on the river surface.

Hoo, hoo.

The double notes of a barred owl sounded so close behind me the skin on my neck shivered.

I half turned my shoulders to look but my weight shifted in the unfamiliar boat and it started to roll. At the same instant, the first gunshot roared out of the darkness and I let the momentum of the canoe spill me into the water.

It was an ungodly noise in this quiet place and even though I was three feet underwater I heard the second shot explode the air. The round crackled through the shell of my overturned canoe and I swear I heard it sizzle through the water before it smacked hard into my thigh. The bullet felt like a dull iron poker. I could feel it sear through muscle and stop, trapped there. I thought about my neck. How I hadn't even known the first time I'd been shot. The pain in this one was different, hot and cutting, but I stayed under, holding my breath, waiting for the next one.

He was up high, I thought. Maybe in the trees. I knew that with the moonlight, he'd see my white face the instant I came up, if he hadn't already.

I looked up but could see nothing through the surface water. Blackness. A soft swirl of moonlight that wiggled and disappeared. I was still underwater, my lungs starting to ache. I couldn't stay down but how do you raise your head when you know a bullet's waiting for it? I felt for the canoe and my fingertips found the gunwale.

Could I come up under it? He had to think of that. My feet were in the soft river bottom. Could I push the boat to the river bank where I'd have some cover? My lungs were burning now. All the choices were bad.

I reached to touch the other side of the canoe and took the chance he knew I would, and came up into the trapped pocket of air. Now I was truly blind. But he didn't fire.

"Just like shootin' fish in a barrel, Mr. Free-man. Isn't this just how the tourists like it?"

His voice sounded dull and muffled, bouncing off the hull of the canoe, echoing in the air inside. But there was no mistaking it. The smartass inflection. The way he broke my name into two words. I could see his bearded face in my head. The hard, sharp cheekbones. The dark sullen eyes with the flash of anger. It was Blackman.

"How's it feel in there from the fish's side of things, Freeman? You know, the tourists want to think it's sport. But there ain't much sport to it, is there?"

It was impossible from under the shell of the boat to tell the direction of his voice. But I could feel the current swirling around my legs. He would logically be upriver of the dam. I hung onto the edges of the boat and let it slowly drift.

"All them folks out for the wilderness experience. Hell, they don't know wild until it comes up and really bites them. Right, Free-man? How's wild feel under there, Free-man?"

His voice sounded different now. Louder. But closer? I was on my knees now. My foot caught on a root as I moved back with the current. The bullet wound was singing with pain. My right knee ground into a rock.

"Oh, they all want to feel the wild. 'Take us out in the Glades so we can feel what it's like.' Shit. They don't belong out here any more than you do, Free-man. All they do is steal it. Piss in it and spoil it. You're no different, Free-man. Coming out here trying to live in my country."

I could hear the water spill at the falls behind me. I couldn't tell how close I was. I dug my feet into a wedge of rock. Shit. Why didn't he just shoot?

"How about it, Free-man? You pissin' in there?"

Thump!

Something hard and heavy hit the canoe hull and the trapped noise cracked inside and snapped in my ears.

"Huh? How about it, tourist?"

The force of wood on the hull rang again. This time dead center on a middle rib. It had to be the paddle, I thought. He had to be knee-deep in the water in front of me. He had to be close. I could hear him sloshing in the water, setting his feet. I cocked my knees and gripped the sides and imagined him on the backswing, wielding the paddle like an axe.

"HOW ABOUT IT, FREE-MAN!" he screamed again and I waited for that hard fraction of a second, the draw of breath that always betrays the amateur fighters before they swing.

I powered the boat up, driving its weight up with my legs and back and launching it forward with a spray of water. When I felt it hit something solid, another gunshot rang up into the cypress canopy and I turned and dove away.

My arm hit the top edge of the dam with a sickening thud. Momentum and current took me over the side and I fell the four feet, landing hard on a concrete edge below.

My feet seemed to scramble on their own and I pushed myself back inside the curtain of falling water and onto the shelf of concrete. I froze for several seconds, maybe in fear, maybe in pain. I was lying on one hip but when I tried to use my arms to prop myself up against the inside wall the left one buckled and I heard an ugly wail escape from my own throat. I reached for the arm and felt the bone sticking up under my shirt like a broken broomstick handle in a sack. I leaned back against the wall of the dam and held the arm in my lap. The hiss of falling water was all around me. I could see nothing beyond the moving film of the falls.