Shadow Men

CHAPTER
19

Brown was looking west when he narrowed his eyes. I caught the bobbing figure in the distance an instant later. Above the grass the dark shape seemed to rise and fall erratically, like a black bird at first. As we watched, it grew in size and the jerking turned into a more fluid movement. A man's torso soon took shape against the backdrop of the sky and then the gridwork of the circle-shaped engine cage became visible. I could barely hear the low, harmonic burring of the machine, but it too was growing. Brown waited a full five minutes and then started poling again toward the small hammock. He pushed us at a slower speed than before. When we were finally up against the edge of the hammock, Brown shipped the pole and jumped out.

"Got to hope they'll follow us in," Brown said. "Bring in your supplies so's they'll figure we're workin' it."

I shouldered one pack and Brown took the satchel with the metal detector and we worked our way through the low grass and muck to the tree line of the hammock and stood in the shade of a clump of cabbage palms and looked back. Now I could see the body of the driver, sitting up on the raised driver's seat. Below him I could make out the heads of two other men who must have been crouched on the deck, down a bit out of the wind, their billed caps pulled hard on their brows.

"They seen us," Brown said. "Let's go."

The old man seemed to have a destination in mind. He moved efficiently in under the trees and about forty yards later stopped and surveyed the layout.

"Hold up there, son," he said, and I watched him walk off to the north, stepping into a pile of brush and shuffling his feet around, then moving off to a downed poisonwood trunk and stopping to deliberately scrape his boot sole against the mottled bark. He moved on another twenty feet and took off the satchel I'd given him and laid it carefully at the base of a tall pine in full view. Then he returned.

"If they is half-dumb, they'll move that way an' you can take a look at 'em from back here," Brown said to me. I turned in a circle, not seeing a way to hide.

"Down there in the gator hole," Brown said, pointing to a low, half-exposed depression filled with mud and standing pools of water. He stepped down into the pit and showed me how the gators had burrowed down below the roots of the trees and swept out a shallow cave. It was dark in the shadows and I could not see the back wall.

"They ain't in there now, son. Water's high enough for 'em out on the plain. They use this here one when it's the only wet place left for 'em. I hunted it plenty of times. Took three or four six-footers outta here in '63."

I was still looking down at him, trying to work out the logistics. If we tucked ourselves down in the gator hole and the airboaters moved past us to the spot where Brown had baited them with the satchel, I might get a look at them. One more piece to work with. A visible threat is always better than one you've never seen.

The sound of the airboat engine put off my grinding. The rough mechanical noise echoed into the hammock even after the motor was suddenly shut down, until the shadows and greenness swallowed it and the place fell silent.

I slipped down into the gator hole with Brown and we both crouched below the cover of leaves and ferns and listened. My knees and the toes of my boots pushed six inches down into the mud, and the water began to soak the back of my jeans. Brown was also getting soaked but he didn't move a single muscle, save for his almost imperceptible breathing. His eyes were focused. I shifted my hips uncomfortably, but he didn't react. After several silent minutes, at some unseen or heard signal, Brown turned and motioned me deeper into the gator hole. He went to his hands and knees and slid himself down under the rough lip of the root line and into the darkness. I followed. The muck squeezed up between my fingers and the dripping root tendrils dragged across the back of my neck. The hole smelled of wet, rotted wood and decayed leaves and an odor I could not identify. My imagination placed it as the cold, fetid breath of some reptile, lying in the back, his mouth starting to salivate with this sudden home-delivery of a fleshy meal.

I had to go lower as the cave narrowed. It was pitch-black now and I was on my elbows and knees when I felt my hip bump against something that bumped back. "Got to listen for their voices," Brown whispered. I could feel his breath on my cheek when he spoke and then the touch of air disappeared. Outside I heard the rustle of vegetation. A branch snapped under the pressure of something heavy. I closed my eyes and envisioned the three men moving along the same path we had, looking down at our tracks and then several yards ahead. One of them spoke, the words indistinguishable. The slap of hands against palm fronds and the soft sucking sound of a boot being pulled out of the muck were audible. They had to be just above the gator hole opening. More movement and then silence. They had gathered at one spot, and I could tell it was the same plot of land where I had stood watching Brown plant the satchel. I could hear more mumbling, too low to make out, but then one of them raised his voice: "They didn't just leave it behind for no goddamn reason!" The man got shushed by another. "Oh, fuck you, Jim. That's probably the damn spot right there and they went off to scout a way out. Shit, I'm gettin' tired of this fucking boar hunt."

"Let's go get a reading on it and then get the hell out of here," said another voice.

"Hell, let's get a reading and then cap these two fucks and put a real lid on it," said the first voice.

The water was up to my hips now and had gone cold. Loose dirt from the root system above crumbled and fell across my face. Still we did not move, but we heard them begin to. Footfalls vibrated through the ground, and the voice of yet another response was muted and farther off in the distance. I heard the sound of a dull, solid thump on wood and in my head saw the downed poisonwood trunk. Brown moved and started to slurry out toward the light and we both got back to our positions just below the leaves and ferns and looked out at the backs of the three men.

Two of them were next to the satchel. One, the smaller, was twenty feet away, next to the poisonwood trunk, inspecting Brown's scuff marks and then looking up to sweep the area left to right but not behind. He was in blue jeans and high rubber boots and an off- white, long-sleeved shirt. The driver, I thought. The others were bigger, in black cargo jeans and vests with pockets like they were on safari or on some photo shoot for an outdoor clothing magazine. They were older men, both thick in the shoulders and waist. One was taller and I could see the silver in his hair. I'd heard one name used, "Jim," and put it on the taller one.

I didn't like the look and could feel the adrenaline moving hot into my ears. I slipped my hand down into my mud-covered pack. I was feeling for the Glock and my fingers found an unfamiliar shape, a metallic box the size of a cigarette pack. I flashed back to Ramon the bug man and the cheap tracking device he'd removed from my truck They'd gotten it into my bag without my knowing. I'd brought them right to us. It pissed me off even more. I found the handle of my gun and pulled it out. Brown looked at the weapon, looked into my face, and like the old infantryman he once was, mouthed the words "I'll flank 'em" and started to move silently off to the left.

I gave him time to get into position, watching the closer man who was now rubbing the chafed bark of the downed tree and again swinging his head from side to side, tilting his head up like a bird dog trying to catch a whiff of game in the air. The others appeared to come to some agreement and walked back to the driver, and when all three began moving in my direction, I came up out of the gator hole, the gun in both hands in a combat position and yelled, "Police! Don't fucking move, boys! Just freeze it and don't…fucking…move!"

I probably didn't have to swear, or tell them to freeze. The sight of me, a tall, lanky man covered head to foot in slimy black muck coming up out of the ground with a 9 mm pointed and ready to fire was enough to shock their nervous systems into a temporary lockup. They didn't move until I did. When I took a few steps forward I saw the bigger man's arm start to move behind his partner to use its cover for whatever he was thinking, and I fired. The barrel of the 9 mm jumped and the round struck the poisonwood trunk with a whack, spitting up splinters of wood and jerking all three of their heads to the left. The sound of the gun echoed through the trees and was quickly swallowed up.

"One step away from each other, now!" I said, locking on to the big man's eyes. "No fucking way you win, fella. You're the first one to die." I could hear the anger in my own voice, and wondered briefly why I was letting it build.

Both of them were city men. Their clothes were too new. The boots were the type a hiker or a weekend woodsman would wear. The big man's complexion was newly burned from the sun, and his eyes had a hardness that said former cop, or former felon. I put the sight bead on his chest. When he stepped away from the other man, his hand was still empty.

"You ain't no police," said the other one, the driver. In just four words I could tag the country in his voice, and it was familiar. He cocked his head to the side, again like a retriever that didn't understand. "I know all the law round here an' you I ain't never seen," he said. His naivete might have made me chuckle under different circumstances, but I could sense the muscles in the other two tensing. Whatever they might have been thinking was again scrambled by a voice from the side.

"Shut the hell up, Billy Nash," said Brown, and now the heads of all three spun to the right. "You already in this deep, boy. Don't y'all keep diggin', jest listen to what the man tells you."

The young one's eyes went big, just like the kid on Dawkins's dock when he recognized Brown.

"Lord o' Goshen," he whispered. "Nate Brown? Gotdamn, that's Nate Brown," he said in an awe that had little effect on the two men beside him when he looked back to spread his recognition.

Nash looked back at the old Gladesman, bowed his head a bit and slowly turned it back and forth. I could see a grin come to the corners of his mouth.

"Damn, Nate Brown. I shoulda figured. I knew we was trackin' somebody special," Nash said, looking up again at Brown in admiration. "Ain't a man alive could move a outboard through the channels like that. It was too fast and too damn smooth. It was like we was going after a Glades otter or somethin'.

"Didn't I tell you boys," he said, again looking back. But the others were not listening. They had turned their silent attention back to me and the Glock and did not care to know about some old mud-covered fisherman. "When you two jumped to the skiff an' I seen you all the way over to here, I knew somebody was handlin' that thing like the olden days."

Then Nash seemed to realize that no one, not even Brown, was paying any attention to him. He also seemed to realize that he was suddenly on the wrong side of his world.

"An' they didn't tell me it was you, Mr. Brown. Honest. They never said a word that I was supposed to be trackin' a Gladesman. I didn't know, sir. I didn't."

"Shut up, Billy Nash," Brown answered.

Brown had not moved. There was a thick swatch of palm fronds obscuring him from the waist down and he carefully did not show his hands, keeping the other two men from determining whether he was armed or not. I also had not lowered the 9 mm.

"Tell me exactly what they did ask you to do for them," I said to Nash, who stepped away from his old partners and turned to face them. He looked once over at Brown before he spoke.

"They come out to the Rod and Gun askin' for a guide who knew the area. First said they was followin' some migratory bird, but I could tell they weren't no birders. Then when we got out of Chokoloskee this mornin', they kept secret, like checkin' some electronic thing in their bag. Tol' me it was a GPS but hell, I use one them my own self and I knew it was some kinda tracker. Then they got nervous when we found you'd ditched your boat, Mr. Brown, and after that they didn't want to lose sight of y'all.

"And I didn't. Y'all almost slipped me through the Marquez, but I caught ya," he said with a kid's overblown pride in his voice as he looked over shyly at Brown.

"How much they pay you, Billy?" I asked.

"Five hundred."

"And whose name is on the expense account, Jim?" I said turning back to the other two without focusing on either one, so my use of the overheard name would put them off guard.

"Fuck you, Freeman," said the big one. "You're just a hired P.I.- you know we don't give up the name of a client. Besides, nothing illegal has occurred out here unless you consider you pointing that piece at us is worth an aggravated assault charge that we could file against you."

"All right then, boys. What's the name of your licensed agency and I'll be glad to get a hold of you at a later date after I get my equipment scanned and figure out where you planted your directional tracker. You two were the ones watching me have dinner the other night in Fort Lauderdale, yes?"

The other one moved to his left, as if he was starting to sit down on the poisonwood trunk, and I snapped, "Hey!" and bobbled the tip of the gun to keep him on his feet. He was well out of his element. Beads of sweat had formed across his pate and the heat was flushing his face a dull red. But his eyes were as black and hard as marbles when he stared back at me from under the bill of his cap. He reached back and put his right hand on the tree trunk and then turned back to me.

"Hey, fuck you, Freeman. And that hot little cop you're hosing on the side." He was all New Jersey, the accent, the tough guy thing. But like a bad magician, the mouth was supposed to distract me. He made it look like he was sitting down, a motion that shielded his right hand, but I saw the crook in his elbow go high.

I'd like to say it was the disparagement of Richards that got me. I'd like to say I was thinking of Cyrus Mayes and his boys. I'd like to say I could control the bloom of violence that was spreading in my chest at the sound of another street asshole somehow tied to the death of good men. But I couldn't. It was just a guess.

I shot him in the right thigh. The 9 mm jumped slightly. I had been aiming for the knee. Both of the guy's hands went to his leg, like he could cover the new hole there and make it go away. The other one's hand went to his vest and I had the warm muzzle of the Glock in his face before he could get through the unfamiliar zipper.

"No, no, no, Jim," I said. "Bad move, considering that you now know I don't give a shit about your rules, or your standing with the Better Business Bureau, or your lives at this point." I'd used the name right, guessed which one it belonged to. I could see it in his eyes.

"Now, hands on your heads, boys, fingers laced together."

I heard Brown move in the brush beside me. The Nash kid had been frozen again by the second gunshot of the afternoon. The big man put his hands on his head and I went in close and took a.38 from a shoulder holster under his vest. Then I stepped behind him and patted him down, found a cell phone and put it in my pocket. Satisfied, I moved the other one. He'd laced his bloodied fingers together on top of his hat. He was breathing short, whistling breaths through his mouth and his jaw was clenched up with the pain. He'd stumbled back against the tree trunk when I shot him and was now leaning with his good haunch against it. I found the 9 mm Beretta I'd guessed he was reaching for still clipped to his belt in the small of his back.

"All right, let's start with names," I said, moving back in front them. Neither said anything.

"Jim?" I said, pointed the gun at his face again.

"Cummings," he said in a tone void of resignation.

"Jesus Jim, don't…," said the other one through his teeth.

"It's only money, Rick. It isn't worth it," Cummings said.

"Yeah? Since when isn't money worth it to you?"

I switched my aim to Rick's face.

"He's a smart man, Rick. I could shoot the two of you just like you would me and leave you to rot out here in the middle of nowhere and nobody would know-forever and ever," I said, not once considering the irony of what I was saying.

"Rick Derrer," Cummings said, and his partner scowled at him.

"Who hired you?"

Again silence, but this time it felt tighter.

"OK, then," I said to Brown. "Let's go."

The old man was looking from me to them but did not hesitate to move back toward the way we'd come.

"Y'all are with us, Nash," Brown ordered the young man, who'd been unsure of what ground he'd landed on, but knew to answer to a legend.

"Yes, sir, Mr. Brown," he said, and moved with the Gladesman.

I held my Glock in my left hand and with my right heaved Cumming's.38 and then Derrer's Beretta out into separate parts of the wet hammock. Without a metal detector, neither was ever going to be found.

"Now, I figure big Jim there might make it the fifteen miles through the swamp to the trail. He looks fit enough. Probably did some hunting in his time. But your boy Rick here, he's in for a long trek with that leg. He makes it a mile and it'll be something," I said.

"But fuck you, Freeman. That's what you both said, right? Ought to cap both of us, right?"

I turned and walked away and Brown and Nash walked with me. We were ten steps away when Cummings spoke up. "All right, Freeman. It was the PalmCo attorneys."

I took a couple of steps back and waited.

"They hire us on occasion, when their regular loss-prevention guys can't handle the job. They're lawyers so they don't tell us it's for PalmCo, but we've done enough shit for them over the years, we know who pays the bills."

Derrer had taken off his belt and vest and was strapping the Eddie Bauer ripstop cloth over his wound.

"What was the job?" I said.

"To tail you. Find out where you went, who you talked to. Typical stuff. The only twist was trying to follow you out here. Not exactly our neighborhood," Cummings said, raising his hands. The movement caused me to raise the Glock to his chest. He turned his palms out and continued.

"We figured you knew about something that PalmCo wanted. That's the usual story. When you picked up the old guy and started moving around in the Glades, we figured you had the location of some damn oil deposit or something.

"We were supposed to map everywhere you went and record any spot where you spent much time. They said if you started digging anywhere, we were to contact them right away and record the location."

He wasn't cowering. He wasn't spilling his guts. This was business for him, and he was playing out his hand with the goal of not being left in the swamp with little chance of getting himself and his partner out alive.

"What about the guns, the chopper, the cell intercepts and bugs on my truck?"

"Standard corporate security procedures," Cummings said. "I saw your jacket, Freeman. You were a street cop for a long time. The corporates, they've got stuff we never dreamed of back then."

My guess that he was former P.D. had been right.

"You the guys who went to the Loop Road bar and took the picture off the wall?"

He was silent for a few seconds, thinking, I knew, trail of evidence. Everything he had said so far could be denied by the company lawyers. Something physical couldn't be. I turned again to walk away.

"They told us to pick up anything we ran across that had to do with construction of the road, especially the old stuff," he said to turn me around. "We turned it over to them."

Now it was my turn to be silent. It was a cruel game because I knew I had the better cards this time. And he didn't know it was more than just business to me. I called the young airboat driver back to me and frisked him to be safe.

"Help your clients get to your boat, Nash," I said. The kid looked at Brown once and when the old Gladesman gave him a nod, he moved.

Brown and I watched as they shouldered Derrer and walked him like an injured player between them off the field. I shouldered our satchel with the metal detector. When they were far enough ahead I searched the ground where I had been standing and found the spent cartridge that had ejected from my gun when I shot Derrer. When I stood ready to go, I caught Brown staring at the side of my face, an unusual act for him. I caught his eyes.

"You're a hard man, Freeman. I knowed men like you," he said. "All of 'em in the past."

I could find no way to respond. If it was a compliment, I didn't take it as such.