The Blue Edge of Midnight

CHAPTER 24

The late afternoon rain clouds had walled off the western sky by the time we reached the ranger station boat ramp and the air blew warm and moist out of the Glades. No one was at the station and Cleve's Boston Whaler was gone from the dock. It seemed odd that he'd be out on the water this late.

My truck was parked over in the visitor's lot. I had to smile when I saw that the scratches from my Loop Road encounter had been buffed out and the chrome was shiny and even the wheel hubs had been cleaned. I'd have to give the kid an extra fifty bucks when I saw him.

Billy helped me take the new canoe down and we set it at the water's edge. He'd tried to convince me to stay at his place, but it hadn't worked. A good hunter, even an urban one, doesn't bait too close to the things he cares about.

Billy said he'd turn the information about Blackman and the encounter with the tourist over to Diaz.

"M-Maybe they will w-work it."

"Maybe," I said.

I loaded my bags, strapped the fanny pack with Billy's cell phone inside and stood taking the measure of the new polished pinewood paddle I'd bought.

"You're s-supposed to christen a new boat on it's m-m-maiden voyage," Billy said.

"Yeah?" I shrugged, looking at the boat as if I was actually considering it.

Then Billy stepped up, spit in the palm of his right hand and slapped the triangular bow plate with a wet smack.

It was the most uncharacteristic thing I'd ever seen him do. My mouth was probably still agape like a beached wahoo when he grasped my hand with the same damp palm and said, "Luck," and then turned and walked away.

"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.

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.