Deep Shadow

PROLOGUE

TUESDAY MORNING, KING WAS WATCHING THE SKY, relieved there were no search helicopters plowing the horizon, like the day before, and he thought, Good.

Maybe Florida cops had arrested someone else for the murders.

King was about to tell Perry, “Let’s get the bikes and head south,” meaning Homestead or Key West. Anywhere but here, where they’d been hiding for two days, sleeping with ants and mosquitoes, near a teardrop-shaped lake, black water and cypress trees, in the boonies of central Florida, sixty miles south of Orlando.

Perry had shushed him, though, flapping his hands, saying, “Listen. You hear that? Someone’s coming.” A moment later, Perry had crouched lower, hissing, “Listen!”

Perry, a man with small hands and a small brain but good ears.

Shit. He was right.

Twenty minutes later, King and Perry were in the trees, south of the lake, watching four men with machetes hacking a path for a diesel pickup, a truck that made a whining sound when it accelerated. Three men plus a teenage boy, actually. Indian-looking kid in jeans, a red wind band around his head, black hair long, like an Apache in a TV western.

Miles from the nearest dirt road, but here they were. Perry’s expression read Can you believe this crap?

The truck crept forward . . . stopped . . . bounced over palmetto stumps, then stopped again, while a crabby old redneck sitting behind the wheel yelled orders.

“Fifty more yards, Doc, we got her licked!”

Doc? King studied the men. Unlikely that it was the hippie-looking dude, skinny with ribs showing, or the Apache teenager, which left the man who was doing most of the work. He was a nerdy-looking guy with glasses tied around his neck, but he had a set of shoulders on him. Forearms, too. A doctor, maybe, but the teacher variety, not a real doctor, because, sometimes, when they spoke to the guy, they called him Ford.

Perry whispered, “You think they’re cops? They don’t look like cops.”

No. Cops wouldn’t be driving a truck loaded with scuba diving gear, a generator and a bunch of other stuff that Perry and King watched the men unload, half an hour later, interested now instead of worried.

Nice-looking Dodge with oversized tires, the tow-rig package. Easy to steal, once the men put on those wet suits and went into the lake, which it appeared they were going to do—as long as they left the keys in the damn truck.

It should have put Perry in a better mood. Instead, when King said, “Looks like the King was right. Our luck’s changing,” Perry stared at him, then spit in the direction of King’s feet, before saying, “You haven’t been right since we left Indiana.”

Not something King would have admitted, but it was true.

From the bus station, downtown Bloomington, an Arctic low had followed the two men south like bad luck, blowing snow across parking lots from Nashville to Atlanta, then Macon, too, which caused Perry to finally say, “Maybe Florida’s not such a hot idea. I feel like we’re being chased into a corner.”

To which King had replied, “What? You’re blaming me for the shitty weather now?”

A little later, thinking about it, King added, “A corner has walls. That was a stupid thing to say about Florida.”

Perry said, “What do you call an ocean? The damn state’s surrounded on three sides.”

It took King a moment. Surrounded by water, Perry meant.

King said, “You ever seen a wall that could take you to Mexico? Costa Rica, maybe. I hear that’s sweet. Stick with the plan, Jock-a-mo. With enough money, a man can live like a king in those places. Personally, the King’s ready for a change. Or maybe you’re getting homesick for Joliet?”

It had irritated Perry, at first, the way the man spoke of himself, the King this or the King that, like he was speaking of a third person, but Perry was used to it now, and said, “How much, you think?”

Money, Perry meant.

King knew what Perry wanted to hear, so he went over it again, saying, “We each put a couple hundred grand in some Mexican bank, the word will get out. That’s millions, when you convert dollars into pesos. How you think that would feel, to be a millionaire?

“Cops will protect us, for a change. No questions, no trouble. We do this right, you’ll have yourself maids, a cook, hell, a driver, if you want. Be pretty nice, wouldn’t it, wake up and have a pretty little Mexican maid standing there, ready to give you the big finish before your day even starts.”

King smiled, his expression asking, Is the King right?

Perry liked that, no matter how many times he heard the story, but then he had to go and spoil it by looking around the truck stop, beyond the eighteen-wheelers parked in rows, and saying, “Snow’s sticking on the damn palm trees! You believe this shit? The leaves are silver, like ice.”

King told him, “Dude, that’s not snow. It’s neon light that does that, the way the wind hits the trees. An optical illusion.”

King, the know-it-all, an expert on everything.

Perry had lit a cigarette, his expression saying, What-ever, as he shifted from foot to foot, the two of them standing near gas pumps, waiting for the Greyhound to load. Two a.m. Damn, it was cold.

“When you talked Florida, you never mentioned snow. I’m starting to wonder if you’ve really been here before.”

King, who had never been south of St. Louis in his life, said, “Believe what you want. Backstage at a Buffett concert, maybe Jimmy will help me convince you. Besides, Macon’s not Florida. Orlando, that’s Florida.”

Perry was twenty-three, King, thirty-one or thirty-two, he wasn’t sure. Both men skinny with Adam’s apples showing, combs in their pockets, King carrying his belongings in a Army duffel, Perry with his in a backpack stolen from a playground. The men had been cell mates at Statesville Correctional, near Joliet, which worked out okay because neither of them was into the butt-buddy thing. At Statesville, sleeping on your belly could be interpreted as an invitation, so having a cell mate who dug only girls was worth a hell of a lot more than friendship. They had both worn their pants low, kept their mouths shut, and done their time kicking around ways to get rich when they finally made parole.

It was at Statesville that they met Julie, a black dude, who told them about a man he’d worked for in Winter Haven, which was near Orlando, doing lawn maintenance, picking oranges—an old man, he said, who had a coin collection worth a fortune and paid his help in cash, usually twenty-dollar bills. Older bills, Julie told them, the picture of Jackson small on the front, which suggested to King, the thinker, that the old man didn’t use banks.

“How’d he make his money?” King had asked.

“Family owned a thousand acres of citrus,” Julie had told them. “Then Disney came along. The old man still owns a hundred acres—six years ago, he still owned it, anyway. You’d need a calculator to count that much money.”

Julie was doing life but wasn’t a typical con, because the man he’d killed was a one-time thing, and he had it coming, from the way Julie told it.

“I wasn’t drunk, never used a damn drug in my life, but when I heard what the son-bitch did to my wife, I sort of went nuts. I used a shotgun, four rounds of bird shot. It took a while. I wanted to give the son-bitch time to review the rules.”

When King had asked, “Why didn’t you go for the old man’s money while you were at it?,” the look of contempt on Julie’s face said more than any parole board would ever know.

“I worked for that man. The man paid me on time and he treated my family fair. What kinda punk-ass question is that?”

After that, Julie wouldn’t give King or Perry the time of day, but they’d learned enough by then. They knew the old man’s name, and that what was left of the citrus farm was set back off Green Pond Road and Route 27 on property north of Winter Haven, most of it probably golf courses and trailer parks by now, but the big white house still there, Julie guessed, hidden by trees.

It took a few weeks thinking about it before King really latched on to the idea of Florida, heading south, scoring big, then buying their way out of the United States and into foreign lives. It wasn’t until then that King mentioned he’d once lived in Florida. He claimed he’d worked as a lifeguard in Palm Beach, hustling rich old women, wearing custom-sewn jackets—he’d even done some scuba diving, he said, when he wasn’t sitting on the beach, eating mangoes and drinking orange juice, every morning.

Six months they’d been cell mates, and it was all news to Perry.

“You ever had fresh squeezed? Not the crap that comes out of a can, the real thing. Sun’s hot, tan all year round, but with a nice cool breeze off the ocean—try to picture it. And the girls, they’ve got no reason to wear clothes. Before you even say hello, Jock-a-mo, you’re halfway home.”

King, a tropical expert all of a sudden, particularly on Florida. He’d been reading about Mexico and Central America, too.

Perry suspected King was full of shit, but the man had ideas, he was ten years older, always thinking, so maybe it was okay. Perry wasn’t a thinker. Perry was a doer.

King processed out three months before Perry, but he was there in the visitors’ parking lot, waiting, carrying a magazine, Florida Travel & Life, that was folded open to an article entitled “Winter Haven’s Stubborn Son.”

It was a story about the old man, whose name was Hostetler, refusing to sell the last fifty acres of his property, even though the county was pissed off because they were losing taxes that Disney or Comfort Suites were eager to pay. The picture showed a sour-looking old man with bitter, superior eyes, sitting next to a dog, some kind of pointer that looked more crippled up than the old man.

Damn, the guy was real. Just like Julie had said.

King had flipped to a page that showed another photo, the man inside his house, pointing at a painting. The magazine said it was the old man’s grandfather, the property’s original owner. There was something else, in the background, that was of more interest to King, who’d brought along a magnifying glass.

“A mint set of American gold eagles,” he had told Perry, an authority on coins now, too.

“How you know they’re mint? The picture’s blurry.”

Patiently, King had explained, “Because they’re framed, for chrissake. The photographer was focusing on the painting of the dude in the old Army uniform, not the coins. A set like this is worth twenty grand, easy. How many more you guess he’s got stashed away in that big old house?”

Twenty grand was more money than Perry had ever had in his life, but it was a figure he could get his mind around. Two hundred grand, or two million, those numbers came into his brain as blank pages. But if King said it was possible, maybe it was . . .

Perry, the doer, had said to King, “The dog looks too old to cause trouble. But we can’t just bust in there and expect Hostetler to fill a bag.”

King had already thought of that, too. “I got my hands on a little Hi-Point three-eighty,” he said.

When Perry asked, “You ever shoot a gun?,” King snapped, “I was in the Army for a year, wasn’t I?,” but he wasn’t convincing.

The men had taken a bus back to where King was rooming because Perry, who read gun magazines, wanted to see the little palm-sized pistol—black on silver; five rounds in the clip, one in the chamber—for himself.

The gun was a cheapie, it couldn’t be very accurate, but it would do the job. Same with the two plastic-handled switchblade knives, all in a box.

“One old man, one old dog,” King had said. “House-sitting out there all alone, full of gold coins and twenty-dollar bills. Hell, like the article said, we’d be doing Florida’s taxpayers a favor to free up that shitty excuse for a farm. It’s such an easy setup, I’m surprised someone hasn’t tried it before.”

On the thirteen-hundred-mile trip, Bloomington to Orlando, Perry wondered about that. Three times they switched buses—Evansville, Nashville and Atlanta—and, at each stop, because there was still an opportunity to buy a ticket home, he’d brought up the subject with King, saying “Why you think that is?”

Why hadn’t anyone tried to rob the man? Perry meant.

King and Perry arrived at the Orlando Greyhound terminal, North Magruder Avenue, an hour before midnight on Saturday, only a few hours ahead of the Arctic low. They stepped off the bus into a balmy, orange-scented night that caused Perry to say, “Maybe this wasn’t such a bad idea after all.”

By Sunday morning, though, at first light, the Arctic wind was silver in the palms. By midnight, it was so cold Perry could see King’s breath pluming as he used a screwdriver to lever a window open, then stepped back so Perry could be the first to climb into the old man’s house.

It wasn’t as easy as they imagined because Perry was even drunker than King, plus he’d scored a bottle of Adderall behind the Greyhound station—20-milligram tablets, pure pharmaceutical speed.

Inside the house, when Perry finally found his balance, and his eyes had adjusted, he had his question answered—“Why’d no one ever try to rob the guy before?”

Alfred Hostetler was standing there, shouldering a shotgun, squinting with his bitter, superior eyes, ready to pull the trigger. Cowering behind him was what looked like a Mexican family, a woman and a couple of kids—no, three kids, two snot-nosed boys and a pretty little girl who was maybe thirteen.

It took Perry a moment to arrange it in his mind. He had climbed into the mother’s bedroom, he realized, probably the maid.

“You better be carryin’ more than a damn screwdriver, you expect to rob a man like me and walk out alive,” the old man said to him, sounding pissed off, with no hint of fear, like he had more important things to do.

Even so, that struck Perry as an odd thing to say because it was King who had the screwdriver. Perry was carrying the gun. One of the switch-blades, too.

Clack . . . clack-clack. It was the sound the shotgun made, both barrels misfiring on 12-gauge shells that might have been as old as old man Hostetler. Perry had thrown both arms over his head, terrified, but recovered fast enough to shoot Hostetler twice, in the stomach, as the Mexican maid and her brats screamed, then ran for their lives into the darkness of the big wooden house.

Perry sprinted after them, but shoved the gun into his pocket in favor of the switchblade he was carrying.

A knife would be quieter, he decided. More hands-on and personal, too.

That little pistol was loud.

Two hours later, riding in what was probably the maid’s car—a beat-up old Subaru that smelled of diapers and Taco Bell—Perry was now getting pissed off himself because King, who was driving, kept saying to him, “Jesus Christ, I can’t believe this is happening!”

Because of the Adderall, the man’s voice was abrasive in Perry’s brain, as penetrating as the orange caution lights flashing down MLK Drive at three a.m. on this morning, with a black wind scattering trash across the asphalt.

Perry said, “It happened, so get over it. What was I supposed to do? The guy was pointing a gun at me! The shithead tried to shoot me, goddamn it. I could be dead right now!” He had been scrubbing at his hands and jeans with a towel. Now he cranked down the window, let the wind take the towel, and couldn’t help grinning as he yelled, “That was wild, man! Talk about a fuckin’ high! I was that close to dying, dude!”

Perry had never experienced what he was feeling. It was an overwhelming rush, a screw-it-all freedom that was like soaring, a complete letting go. His brain was flashing postcard images of what he’d done: colors bright, dripping like fresh paint, startled faces, screaming wide eyes, five people, the old man, the woman, then the kids, finding them hidden in closets, under a bed, one by one, the girl last—settling into it then, taking some time to enjoy how her muscles responded to the point of the switchblade—but he hadn’t touched the dog.

Nice dog.

In fact, Perry had said that as he left, walking out the front door, using the towel so they wouldn’t leave prints.

“Nice dog. Good doggy . . .Yes you are!”

King had repeated what he’d said about not believing this was happening, then made a show of calming himself, before saying, “Okay, okay, here’s what we do. You sober enough to at least listen?”

Perry was crashing from the speed, his nerves sparking, but he was sober enough.

What they did was park the Subaru near a pool hall, keys on the dash, and walked fast down MLK to where it became Lake Silver Drive, the wind pushing them along like leaves beneath streetlights. They kept right on walking, even when a cop slowed, cruising past, but the cop never stopped, so they did seven or eight miles before first light, finally buying coffee and doughnuts at the Perkins on Cypress Gardens Drive, both men spending some intense time in the washroom first.

Three miles later, they saw a dozen bicycles racked outside Candlelight Christian Academy off Highway 17. It was early Sunday—probably a soccer team or something doing an overnight, King decided, before saying, “Make sure you take a helmet, too.”

Christ, a bike helmet? After murdering five people?

Perry responded, “Whatever,” keeping watch as King chose a nice Trek, then grabbed a bike for himself.

The two men pedaled south, not too fast—“Like we’re sightseeing,” King kept reminding Perry—riding until noon, which was when they noticed two helicopters flying search patterns to the north, and King said, “We gotta find trees to hide under. A place to camp, maybe, for a few days, where there’s cover—and water. I want to wash this shit off me.”

King’s slacks and shirtsleeves were stained, too. He was the one who had pulled the girl from beneath the bed, then held her so Perry could use the knife, but not before saying first, “Give the King about five minutes alone with this pretty little thing. Okay?”

Perry did it—but only because one of her brat brothers was making a wheezy, crying sound, still breathing.

Where?

It took Perry a while, maybe five full minutes, down on his hands and knees, crawling with the bloody knife in his hand, searching until he found the kid under a blanket.

Perry guessed the brat thought he would be safe there. But he wasn’t.

For a couple of hours, the men hiked inland, ducking branches, until they found a lake so far from the road that there was no sound of cars, only wind blowing through the high trees where a hawk screeched, but not another living thing around.

Near the lake was a hunters’ storage shed, padlocked, about the size of a Porta Potti. Inside were cans of food in Tupperware tubs, and military Meals Ready to Eat, dense as cheese blocks in their rubberized brown bags.

“No one will bother us here. You think?” King said to Perry, as he collapsed, cross-legged, in the shade.

Perry was walking toward the lake, where trees threw shadows along the southern perimeter. The water was black and clear in a way that reminded him of looking through smoked glass, like a black marble he’d had as a kid.

Perry answered, “I ain’t going back to the joint.” Meaning no one had better try to come after them. He had lost the switchblade during all the excitement, but he still had the pistol.

King had held on to his knife. He used it now to slit open an MRE, took a few bites of a fig bar, then decided to recount the gold coins that had come spinning onto the floor when the fancy frame busted.

Eleven gold eagles, and seven hundred dollars, cash, in twenty-dollar bills, that’s all they’d found worth a damn—but it wasn’t like they’d spent much time searching the place after doing what they’d done.

Perry was staring at the lake—it was teardrop shaped, sharp edged, like a bowl—seeing fish nosing among roots that protruded, knee-high, from the water.

“Weird-looking trees,” Perry said. “Sort of like in comic books, the fantasy ones, you know—girls with big boobs, carrying spears.” He lit a cigarette, crumpled the pack, then watched the wind sail it across the lake.

“They’re cypress trees,” King told him, looking at the sky, before adding, “This cold front’s moving south. By tonight, it’ll get warmer here, but cold as hell in Miami. Probably the Sarasota area, too.” An authority on the weather now.

Perry was still staring at the lake, his eyes suddenly wider, as he whispered, “What the hell was that . . . ?”

He had seen something so unexpected that it startled him. A huge fish or something from beneath the surface, something dark with a tail, had stirred a refrigerator-sized swirl beneath the Marlboro pack. Like it had swum up through the black water intending to eat the glittering wrapper but had changed its mind.

Goddamn, it was big. Seven or eight feet long, at least.

Perry almost said something to King, but decided no, there was a chance he had imagined it. Could be. He had swallowed two more tabs of Adderall and could feel his edges sharpening, the chemical sparkling through his brain, brightening dark threads and creating halos around trees where wind was blowing the waxy light.

There was another matter Perry had been waiting to address. The topic was creating pressure inside his skull and needed to get out. Perry was still fuming about the way King had almost bolted, back there at the old man’s house, instead of joining in and doing what had to be done. There was something else, too.

“The next time we steal bicycles,” Perry said over his shoulder to King, “I take first pick. I wanted that Trek, but you took it. Didn’t even ask.”

He gave the man a hard look, adding, “Bikes or anything else. The King don’t get first pick anymore. Understand?”

King swallowed without making eye contact, afraid of his cell mate for the first time since Statesville.

“Sure,” he said, “whatever.” He was chewing the fig bar, letting his attitude say, No big deal, settling himself by turning his attention to practical matters. Thinking was his job; Perry was a two-time loser, nothing but a punk.

King took some time to review. How safe was this place?

The hunters’ shed was a quarter mile away, no path cut to the lake—like the hunters didn’t know the lake existed. There was a swamp, remnants of a barbed-wire fence cutting through—private property. Maybe that was the reason.

Today was . . . Monday?

Yes, Monday. He and Perry had food, and they could find a place to sleep beneath the cypress trees. Tomorrow, regular people would be working, no hunters to worry about. With any luck, a couple of Perry-dumb punks had spotted the Subaru on MLK, keys on the dash, and would give the cops something to do besides search the area again with helicopters.

King could picture it, the cops spotting the stolen car—Smart—and he let himself relax a little. Couple of days sleeping near the lake, then back on the bicycles and head south. Key West, just like regular tourists.

Safe. Yeah . . . And it got even better the next morning, Tuesday, when the men with the scuba gear and pickup truck appeared out of nowhere.

Perry and King watched the men from the distance. Watched the skinny hippie, with his ribs showing and ponytail, and the Apache-looking teenager and the nerdy-looking guy with glasses and shoulders take their sweet damn time before suiting up in their scuba gear, wearing short-sleeved wet suits, then walking their fins into waist-deep water before submerging, one by one.

That left the old redneck man, the one who’d been driving the truck, alone onshore.

Perry looked at King, but King took his time acknowledging Perry—back in charge now, and he wanted the punk to know it.

“Dude,” Perry whispered, “I wouldn’t go in that water. No fucking way, dude. What you think they’re after?” He still hadn’t told King what he had seen yesterday afternoon, the large dark shadow swirling beneath the surface.

King didn’t answer. An executive silence, that was the way to handle punks on speed.

“Maybe fishing, huh?” Perry said. “Or looking for something. How long you think they’ll be down?”

King held his hand out until Perry finally figured out what it was he wanted.

“Long enough,” King said, as Perry handed him the pistol. “You know what’s funny? They’re down there having fun, thinking nothing in the world can go wrong. But here we are.”

King was smiling, picturing the divers’ faces when they surfaced, finding their truck gone, and the old redneck dude shot or cut up—probably dead, knowing Perry.