Claw Back

CHAPTER NINE

The thing was lying in the middle of the road.

At first Louis thought it was a big log but after he slowly moved the Jeep ahead, he hit the brakes hard.

Alligator. It was a damn alligator.

It was at least twelve feet long and it was sprawled straight across the width of the dirt road.

Louis inched closer until the fat tires were almost touching the thing. It didn’t move.

Louis stood up in the seat and scanned the sides of the road but the brush was too thick and soggy so there was no way to turn around. And by his calculations he had left the paved road at least five miles back so he wasn’t about to go back all that way in reverse.

He had been out here for almost two hours already, driving around in circles in the open vehicle. He had a headache from the sun baking his head and his kidneys felt like they were going to fall out from all the jostling. He wasn’t sure he was even on the right road.

He looked back at the gator and laid hard on the horn.

The thing still didn’t budge. Didn’t even move a slitted eye in his direction.

Fuck!

He looked in the back for something he could throw. Nothing but a big empty Coleman cooler. He had a water bottle but he wasn’t about to sacrifice that. There was probably a jack and crowbar somewhere but he’d be damned if he was going to get out and look. He glanced down at the holster on the passenger seat. With one eye on the gator, he slipped out the Glock, pointed it at the dirt and fired.

The alligator gave a loud hiss and slithered off into the brush.

Louis holstered the Glock, sat back down behind the wheel and continued down the rutted dirt road.

This trip had seemed like a good idea this morning when he went into the station to pick up the four-wheel drive Mobley had promised him.

The cop manning the desk in the garage was named Sergeant Sweet, but he had given Louis the same sour look all the cops had been giving him. The rogue PI, riding his way into the department on an EEOC horse. That’s what they all thought. Sweet asked Louis if he was “working the panther thing.”

When Louis said he was, the sergeant said his ten-year-old daughter had started a petition in her class to get the Florida panther named the state animal and she was sad about the one that had gone missing.

“Find the damn cat,” the sergeant said. “I don’t want to have to tell my kid the thing is dead.”

Then he handed over the keys to a souped-up Jeep that had been commandeered from a drug raid and told Louis that he should check out “the weirdos out in the swamp camps.”

There were hundreds of hunting camps on private land in the Everglades, the sergeant explained. After the federal government created the preserves in the seventies, the camps were grandfathered in and a handful still existed, handed down from one generation to the next.

Most were down south of I-75 but there was one just a few miles from where Grace had disappeared, the sergeant said. It was called Hell’s Hammock.

Be careful, he added, they’re all mouth-breathers who love their guns and hate the government. And that includes anyone wearing a badge.

Louis hadn’t told anyone else where he was going. He hadn’t even called Katy.

It wasn’t just the fact that the swamp camp men were bound to be hostile to a strange black man let alone a woman ranger. He was shutting her out for now because this was his world — going after dirt bags in a possibly dangerous situation. She didn’t belong here.

He would tell her later. His plan right now was simple: just quietly look around and check these guys out.

If he could find them.

Sergeant Sweet wasn’t sure exactly where Hell’s Hammock was. The directions were vague, just landmarks mainly. About halfway across I-75, he was supposed to watch for a gravel service road just past the first rest stop. Louis had found the road but deep into a jungle of palmetto palms it began to narrow. The brush created a tunnel so thick and close Louis had to shift in the seat toward the middle to keep from getting scraped.

The road forked and dead-ended a couple times, forcing Louis to back up and look for landmarks he had missed. The sergeant had said to watch for an American flag tied to a tree and turn left, but the only thing hanging from trees out here was Spanish moss.

Damn. Another dead-end. And this one looked like he wasn’t even going to be able to back out. He glanced down at the police radio on the seat but the signal had died miles ago.

He downshifted and eased the Jeep forward. There was a patch of sunlight ahead. And a tatter of a faded old flag hanging limp from a tree.

After a left turn, the thicket opened into a small clearing. He went another twenty yards then stopped, taking stock. There were three buildings, crudely made from plywood and topped with tin roofs. The largest of the three had small windows covered with shutters and a sagging porch. The other two buildings were small, probably a storage shed and an outhouse. There were no vehicles of any kind to be seen.

And no sign of a human being.

Except…the front door of the main building was wide open.

Louis turned off the Jeep. In the quiet that piled in he could hear the whisper of the pines that ringed the compound and then the cry of a swallow-tail kite.

Maybe the men were out hunting. He got out of the Jeep, scanning the ground for tracks but saw nothing in the dirt and long grass. In fact, except for the open door, the camp looked deserted.

He had a sudden flashback to walking into another camp. It was years ago and thousands of miles away. Northern Michigan, in the dead of winter, and he was hunting a cop killer. The trail had led him to a remote camp inhabited by off-the-grid Vietnam vets. A one-armed soldier named Cloverdale had held him at bay with an AK47, endured his questions, then sent him back down the snowy hill with a warning never to come back.

Louis reached into the Jeep and got his Glock. He slipped it into the large front pocket of his khaki vest and zipped the pocket closed. If anyone was here, he thought as he started for the open door, he didn’t want them to think he was a cop. He’d be run off — or worse — before he ever got his first question out.

At the open door, he paused. As far as he could see in the dim interior, there was no one inside. It was one big room, maybe twenty-four by fifteen feet. He could make out the outlines of a table and chairs, some bunk beds and what looked like a primitive kitchen.

He stepped inside.

The door slammed closed behind him. Something hard and heavy came down on the back of his head. Stunned and seeing white, he fell forward. His hands skid over rough wood, his palms ripped with splinters.

“Hit him again, man! Hit him again!”

Louis tried to turn over but a boot slammed into his back. Then again into his shoulder and a third time into the back of his head. His hands flew up to protect his head but suddenly someone was on him, punching him and groping at his pockets.

“Get his wallet! Get his fucking money!”

Louis started swinging, feeling his fists hit flesh but the man on top of him didn’t budge.

It was getting hard to breathe and there was something — blood — in his eyes. He felt the man’s hands roughly moving down his chest. They stopped when they got to the bulge of the Glock.

“He’s got a fucking gun!”

Louis grabbed at him, trying to keep him from getting to the Glock. The man punched him hard in the face. A flash of white light then he felt himself going out. Flicking light and voices cutting in and out, like a bad radio connection.

Stay awake…stay awake…

The man moved off him but Louis couldn’t move. He could barely breathe. There was a fire in his side and he knew his ribs were broken.

“Look at this, it’s a fucking Glock. It’s gotta be worth five hundred easy.”

“Where we gonna sell it? Tell me that, Memo! We can’t go back to Lauderdale. We can’t go nowhere now after what you did.”

“The fucker wouldn’t give me the money!”

“He didn’t have any fucking money! It was already in the safe!”

Quiet. The voices were quiet for a second.

“Get his wallet.”

Louis tried to get up. He had to fight. He had to -

“Don’t be stupid, man. I got your Glock pointed at your head.”

Crushing pressure of a boot on his back holding him down. More hands digging into the back pocket of his jeans.

“Got it. He’s got thirteen bucks and a VISA card.”

“Check the other vest pockets for the Jeep keys,” the other man said.

The boot came off his back and one of the men rolled him onto his back.

Two faces blurry above him — one pale and long, the other dark and round. Ball caps, dirty t-shirts, jeans caked with mud. The dark man was padding him down and Louis fought back his rise of panic. If they found the badge he was a dead man.

“Got the keys.” The man’s hands stopped. “Hey, he’s got another wallet.”

Louis felt the guy pull out the small leather wallet that Mobley had given him.

“He’s a cop!”

“What?”

“Look at this, Marv. He’s a fucking cop.”

The pale man’s eyes went from the badge down to Louis.

“How’d you find us, cop?”

Louis was silent.

“Where are the others?”

“No others,” Louis said. He felt blood in his mouth and spat it out. “I wasn’t looking for you.”

“We need to get the fuck out of here, Marv. Shoot the fucker and — ”

“Shut up, Memo! I need to think.”

Louis pushed to a sitting position and tried to focus on the two men. If he got out of this cabin alive he wanted to remember enough to catch these bastards.

Marv was six-foot and slender, shaved head, horsey face and prominent bad teeth. The t-shirt, Louis could see now, had a Harley emblem on it. The other guy, the one called Memo, was dark, Hispanic maybe, and gone to fat. His faded orange Miami Dolphins t-shirt had the sleeves cut off. He had a scorpion tattoo on his neck.

The bald guy tossed the badge wallet to the floor then leaned over and pressed the barrel of the Glock to Louis’s temple.

“You kill me, you die in the chair,” Louis said.

The man’s breath was like sewer water. “I don’t like niggers and I don’t like cops.”

He eased the Glock away from Louis’s head. He threw the badge wallet into a corner. “But I ain’t no murderer.”

He moved away. Louis shut his eyes in relief. He could hear the creak of the floorboards as the man moved around the room.

“Find something to tie him up with.”

Louis watched the dark man as he rummaged through the kitchen. When he came back, Louis saw a loop of old rope in his hands. The bald man pointed the Glock toward the bunk beds.

“Move your ass over there.”

Louis crawled to the bunks. They were heavy wooden things, built into the wall. He leaned back against a post, his ribs on fire.

The dark man forced Louis’s hands behind his back. Louis grimaced as the man wrapped the rope tight around his wrists, tying it off high on the top bunk. The dark guy was smiling when he stepped back to admire his handiwork.

“Let’s get out of here,” the bald guy said.

The other man grabbed a backpack off the counter, paused, then reached over Louis to snag a pack of cigarettes from the bunk.

As they left, the dark guy started to pull the door closed. The bald man slapped a hand against it.

“Leave it open. Maybe a gator will crawl in and eat him.”

Louis could hear them laughing until it was drowned out by the sound of the Jeep coming to life. It built to a roar as they revved the engine then slowly it faded to a low growl as they pulled out of the camp.

Louis strained against the rope. No give. His hands were going numb.

He looked to the open door, trying to estimate what time it was. He had signed out the Jeep at ten-thirty this morning but in all the twisting and turning trying to find this place he had lost track of time.

Sergeant Sweet…he was the only one who knew where he had gone. But there was no reason for him to sound the alarm if Louis didn’t come back. The Jeep was signed out for indefinite use.

Louis tugged at rope then laid his head back against the post.

It was quiet. A terrible, empty quiet.