Текст книги "Lost"

Автор книги: Chris Jordan

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“He was never prosecuted?”

Fish tugs at his straw cowboy hat, as if intending to screw it onto his head. “You got to understand about Ricky Lang. He made that tribe. They was just a collection of nobodies, not Seminole, not Miccosukee, not white neither, until Ricky got ‘er done.”

According to Fish, the Nakosha are really more of an extended family than a tribe. Cousins within cousins, most of them called some variation of Lang, after a Methodist missionary who had been absorbed into the family at the turn of the twentieth century. In addition to fathering fourteen children with three successive Indian wives, the Reverend Robert Lang had initiated the long and arduous process of seeking tribal recognition. Robert Lang had argued that unlike the Seminole, his adopted tribe were descended from a distinct band of the original Calusa who had been living on this land when the conquistadors first splashed into the great swamp, looking for El Dorado, or the Fountain of Youth or, failing that, to copulate with the native women. Lang’s bureaucratic battle had been carried on by successive generations, and had not been resolved until ten years ago, when the tribe had been granted dominion over a hundred square miles of boggy, mosquito-infested swampland, most of which was submerged during the rainy season, and therefore of minimal interest to developers. Ricky Lang was instrumental in transforming the Nakosha bingo license into a giant casino complex, vastly enriching the tribe.

“Man was always smart, had big ideas to help his people, but he had to be the top dog, no matter what. Got away with it, too, until his crazy temper ended up killing his own children,” Fish tells us. “Tribal council finally decided they didn’t have enough to prosecute—or more likely didn’t have the stomach for it—so they deprived him of his office, took back his land, and banished him. Which, the way they think of it, is worse than the death penalty. From what I heard, Ricky thinks so, too.”

The news that my daughter’s kidnapper was responsible for the deaths of his own small children hits me like a body blow. It explains his delusional beliefs—communing with dead children—and his spiral into ever-increasing violence, but it surely does not bode well for Kelly’s survival. The man gets away with arson and manslaughter at the very least, and is then haunted into a killing madness. A psychiatrist might theorize that Ricky Lang wanted to punish Edwin Manning for the way he doted upon his own son. Or maybe he really did believe that Manning could force the tribe to take him back. Whatever his motives, however twisted by grief and guilt, it’s obvious that in Ricky Lang’s world a stranger’s child doesn’t count for much.

Never give up, Shane says. I’m trying to hold on to that as we rocket through the swampy wilderness, bumping and banging as Leo Fish punches the airboat over slick shallows, mere puddles, gunning the five-hundred-horsepower engine until it screams. The engine and the raging propellers are contained in a wire cage directly behind the raised seat where Fish sits like a mad king clinging to a throne, both hands on the rudder stick.

Shane in the seat beside him, grinning into the wind, no doubt with bugs in his teeth. Bringing up the rear, the small square boat Fish is towing. It flails around in the black wake, twitching and jumping like a thing alive.

The wild run seems like it lasts forever—fear slows the clock—but when Fish finally kills the engine and glides up on a piece of dry grassland, forty minutes have passed.

“Not bad,” he announces, hopping down from his throne. “Covered near twenty hard miles in less than an hour.”

“We’re here?” I ask, stomach in knots and ears ringing. No idea where “here” might be, barely able to distinguish land from sky.

Fish looks at me, shakes his head. “We’re still a ways from where we’re headed, missy. This as far as the airboat can take us.”

Missy? I’m not sure if that’s a term of endearment or one of contempt. Not that it matters. Teaching Leo Fish how to act civilized is not my problem. He could drag me along by my hair, caveman style, if it leads us to Kelly.

What he’s dragging, however, is not me but the little square-sided boat.

“What we call a pan,” he informs us, loading rifles, ammo, a push-pole, and fresh-water jugs into the little boat. “Every waterman got to have his pan.”

Fish puts a rope over his shoulder and marches forward, pulling the boat over the damp grass.

“I could help,” Shane offers.

“Not much, you couldn’t,” Fish says. “You follow along as best you can.”

Take that, Mr. Big FBI Man. Shane rolls his eyes but does as instructed, shortening his stride so that he’s pacing me rather than the reverse. The ground beneath us is damp under the grass and my running shoes are instantly soaked. Mosquitoes seem not the least repelled by the bug spray Fish provided, although in truth the dive-bomber buzzing in my ears is even more maddening than the actual bite. The only thing that keeps me from slapping at them compulsively is a notion that I’d have to slap myself unconscious to escape.

“You always lived out here?” Shane wants to know as we trudge along.

“Happened sort of gradual,” Fish says over his shoulder. “Always hunted and fished, everybody did. For some years I did some guiding, living off the tin canners.”

“Tin canners?”

“What we call the tourists. All that guidin’ finally decided me away from town, you might say. Now I’m so used to bein’ outside that I’d rather not be inside.”

He stops, eases his small boat or “pan” into a little creek. The water so black I’d have easily mistaken it for solid ground.

“Best you come aboard first, missy,” he says, offering a gnarled hand.

“We can’t all fit in that little thing,” I point out.

Fish laughs, which startles me. Hadn’t thought of him as the laughing type, but it’s actually quite a good laugh, makes him sound human. “Missy, I’ve had as many as a dozen sizeable gators on board. Most every one of them outweighed you.”

“What about Shane?”

“Him? Oh he’s a bigg’un, but he ain’t no more than three gators’ worth.”

There are no seats, so I have to sit on the floor or the deck or whatever they call it, instantly dampening my butt. Thinking if Kelly and I manage to survive this, I’ll celebrate by taking a long hot shower. Hours long. We’ll wrap ourselves in soft robes and lounge about in air-conditioned, bug-free rooms, eating fancy hors d’oeuvres and watching TV until our brains dissolve into mush.

Pure fantasy, but it helps me keep going. Helps keep me from screaming.

Shane clambers aboard, all arms and legs, and is instructed to crouch in the middle, to keep the boat balanced. My knees end up against his back. Once Three Gator Shane is in position, Fish jumps sprightly on board and shoves us away from hard ground, using his pole.

He remains standing, relaxed and perfectly balanced as he deftly works the pole, pushing us through the water. Looking up, a few dim stars illuminate his gaunt face. He’s smiling to himself, really smiling, and it finally dawns on me that despite his gruff way of talking, Leo Fish is actually having a good time. He gets a kick out of leading ignorant strangers through the world he knows so well. He’s not so much a people hater as a solitary man, and not without his own brand of dry humor.

“You mentioned alligators,” I say, trying to sound casual as I cling to the sides of the little boat. “Any around here, by any chance?”

Fish looks down at me and grins. “There might be one or two,” he says. “Best keep your hands inside the pan.”

Some folks hate a hospital type situation. Detective Sydell isn’t one of them. His job often takes him to one E.R. or another, and he always has pretty much the same reaction: amazement that there are so many good people dedicated to helping those in trouble. Granted they’re getting paid, and sometimes they’re grumpy or incompetent, but the overall thrust of the deal is about helping.

Plus he likes nurses. Okay, Roof likes anything in skirts, but in his opinion, nurses are top of the heap. For instance there’s a leggy E.R. nurse here in Naples who sets his old heart to beating double time. Come to raising his blood pressure, she’s better than push-ups. He’s looking around—gal by the name of Suzy Queenan—but Suzie Q. isn’t around. Probably not on duty at this godforsaken hour of the night.

Oh well, maybe next time. Roof gets right down to it, approaches the desk and asks for the duty police officer by name. That same duty officer, as he well knows, already having gone off shift.

“Got a call from Officer Morris Kendall, alerting me to the presence of a certain person. By that I mean patient. Young fella from my home town, his ailing momma wants me to check to see that he’s okay.”

A few moments later he’s ambling along, directed to a curtained area in the far corner of the E.R.

“I’ll be damned if it ain’t Roy Whittle himself,” Roof says, grinning around the curtain. “What you doin’ in here, Roy? Gettin’ some shut-eye? Sucking’ up on the free morphine?”

Roy, heavily bandaged about the throat, stares at him with dull eyes. The detective is joking about morphine, but evidently the young man has been dosed with some sort of painkiller, seems to have numbed him out considerable.

“Can I help you, Officer?” a pretty little Latino LPN wants to know.

Roof introduces himself, tips his uniform hat. “This young scamp is my cousin Roy. Second cousin is more like it, but you know how it is in Glade City. Heck, a man’s lucky if he ain’t his own grandpa, ain’t that right, Roy?”

The nurse smiles nervously—rural inhabitants having a certain reputation in the big city of Naples—says to call if he needs anything, and then hurries away, as if afraid of what his next friendly joke might be.

Roof approaches the hospital bed, lowering his voice a few decibels, and generally cutting the crap. “Here’s the thing, Roy. You show up with a piece of steel wire in your throat, dropped off by your dopey brother, that attracts my interest. Officer on duty tells me the wire they pulled outta your throat looks like it mighta sorta maybe come off a five-gallon bucket. That make sense to you, getting accidently stabbed by a bucket?”

Roy closes his eyes, doesn’t even bother shaking his head. Looks to Roof like he’s got way more problems weighing on him than a throat wound, however painful that might be.

“Thing of it is, folks have been inquiring about you, son. Official kind of folks. Could you be involved in some way with Ricky Lang? Was you at that old airstrip when a body got burned, and an airplane, too? Questions like that. I been telling ‘em you’re a good man, Roy, because I believe that to be true, more or less. Tonight it’s considerable less. Person driven to protect himself with a bucket handle, that might be because alls he’s got is a bucket. That make sense to you? A bucket like you might provide a person was he to be kept prisoner, and not have access to a proper toilet. That what happened, Roy? You went to fetch the man, or maybe it was the girl, whoever it was managed to stick you with a piece of wire? Huh? Because they tell me you’re lucky to be alive. Missed your carotid artery by a whisker.”

Roof pauses, looks around, carefully places his hand over Roy Whittle’s right wrist. The boy feels about as weak as a fresh-drowned kitten.

Roof gives him a little squeeze.

“Figure with your esophagus all swole up you’d have a hard time screaming,” says Roof, keeping his voice friendly in tone and barely above a murmur. “Nothing wrong with your hearing though, is there? My concern ain’t you, because you I can have arrested anytime. My concern is that brother of yurn who likes to torture creatures. He run away practically soon’s he dropped you off. So my question is, where’d he go? Is he off huntin’ the one did this to you? Huh? And where’d that be, exactly? Best tell me, son. Best tell old Roof everything you know.”

Poor boy wants to scream but he can’t.

13. Say Your Prayers

Never before has Kelly Garner dreaded the sunrise. Not that she’s usually up that early but still, when it does happen her heart always stirs with warmth, even if her eyes are bleary from an all-nighter. Probably because it triggers memories of childhood confinements at various treatment centers. There were a few bad nights, nurses and doctors hovering, when the prospect of witnessing another dawn seemed unlikely. So she’s keenly aware, despite what her mom may think, that each new day is a precious gift.

Kelly knows the monster man is close. Hasn’t dared rise up for a look lately, but her sixteen-year-old ears register everything. The squish of a heavy foot coming up from the damp grass. The faintest clink of something metallic—a knife or gun?

He’s out there, waiting patiently. Waiting for her to make a mistake, give herself away. Waiting for the sun to rise, when it will be easier to find them.

Seth remains feverish, quaking uncontrollably, but he’s not yet delirious. He understands the consequences of making a sound, and has kept silent, communicating, as best he can, by touch. They cling together, not daring to so much as slap away a mosquito. Kelly wondering if it’s possible to be bitten to death, to actually be bled dry by mosquitoes. They’re both so swollen with bite marks that the bugs are having trouble finding fresh spots.

Kelly takes great care not to put any pressure on Seth’s swollen arm. There’s a limit to how much pain he can stand without crying out.

Best thing, she decides, go somewhere far away in her head. Somewhere that gives her hope, makes her feel strong. For Kelly that somewhere is in the left-hand seat of Seth’s brand-new Cessna Skylane. Seth in the co-pilot’s seat, letting her have the controls for the first time. He’s still a bit uneasy about taking on the responsibility of instructing a teenage girl, one who has been badgering him unmercifully by e-mail. He’s made it clear he’s not interested in some whimsical impulse to get a free ride in a small plane. She will have to prove herself, and quickly.

Seth Manning, for all his boyish good looks, is the most serious man she’s ever met. For him flying is a vocation, not a hobby or job. He’s been flying since he was fourteen—he soloed at fifteen, long before he could legally drive—so he knows that some teens are capable of serious commitment. She knows what he must be thinking: this skinny girl in the pilot seat has made all the right noises, but the fact is she’s never even been in a small aircraft, let alone taken the yoke.

For all he knows, she might be a puker. Lots of steady, serious people can’t fly because of motion sickness. Others can’t learn because they don’t listen.

Kelly doesn’t puke. She’s a sponge, soaking up instruction and repeating it back to him word for word, if necessary. Her attention is fully engaged, firmly concentrated, and when he tells her to place her feet on the rudder pedals, find the balance between them, she does so with the confidence of someone who trusts her own physical instincts. Then she has the yoke and she’s flying the aircraft, banking firmly to the right as she follows his instructions, gradually coming back to level, finding the horizon, checking the instruments.

Flying.

The moment is, for Kelly, transcendent. For the first time in her life she’s in control of her own destiny, flying free above the earth. Her heart tells her that so long as she can fly, she’ll live forever. She can see not just her own small life, but the shape of the world below. Joy comes off her like waves of heat, and Seth knows what she’s experiencing. She can feel him studying her, judging her ability, and when she risks a quick glance the first thing that registers is the kindness in his eyes. He wants her to succeed.

“You’re a natural pilot,” he tells her that day, as if slightly disappointed.

“That’s good, right?”

“It can be. But it means you have to be extra careful, especially during the first few hours of instruction, as you develop discipline. Naturals tend to fly by the seat of their pants because they have an instinctive understanding of how the aircraft moves through the air. They concentrate on the feeling part and tend to ignore the instruments. That’s what gets them into trouble. When a plane stalls into a tailspin, there’s no ‘feel’ about it. You have to trust your instruments and your instruction, not your instincts. Most of being a good pilot is in your head, not your hands.”

“But my hands are okay?”

“Your hands are fine. If it’s any consolation, I was a natural, too. But I forced myself to become a very boring, by-the-numbers pilot.”

“By-the-numbers isn’t boring,” Kelly tells him. “By-the-numbers means staying alive.”

It was exactly the right thing to say. Once they were back on the ground—no, he wouldn’t allow her to attempt a landing the very first day—he seemed as excited about her continuing instruction as she did. He bought her a coffee at the airport’s little café and they talked for hours. He told her how he became obsessed with the notion of flying shortly after his mom died, when the idea of lifting into the air seemed like a way to escape grief, and later became something altogether different, a place where he felt whole and in control and completely alive. His mom died of cancer, he told her, and for the first time in her life Kelly found herself willingly recounting what it had been like to be a child stricken with leukemia, facing the very real possibility of death at an age when most kids’ biggest fear was invisible monsters under the bed.

They bonded big time.

Seth was different. Not like a potential boyfriend or a teacher, more like the perfect older sibling—or that’s how she, an only child, imagines it might be to have an older brother.

She can’t, she won’t, let him die.

That’s why, when the first shotgun blast explodes through the mangroves, followed by the flat bang of the discharge, Kelly Garner covers Seth Manning’s body with her own.

“Come on out, little pig,” says the monster man.

So close he might as well be whispering in her ear.

“Ain’t got all day. Quit humping your fag boyfriend.”

Kelly stays where she is, not moving. The next shot blows apart a branch not an inch from her head, spitting shredded mangrove leaves into her tightly clenched eyes.

“Two ways we can do this,” says monster man. “Crawl out and beg, or be killed where you’re at. Thing is, I need fag boy alive, so I’ll have to wing you and let you bleed to death, then drag you off him.”

He kicks at the mangroves. Kelly decides she doesn’t want to die with her eyes closed. She opens her eyes, squints up through the tangle of mangrove branches.

Monster man is no more than ten yards away.

“Make up your mind,” he says. “I ain’t got all night.”

Beneath her Seth struggles. “Leave her alone,” he says, voice muffled. “I’m the one you want!”

Feverish and weak though he is, Kelly can’t stop him from crawling out from under. Clenching his teeth, groaning in agony as his swollen arm thrashes through the branches. Finally staggers to his feet, finds himself up to his knees in the dark water surrounding the stand of mangroves. A faint blush of first light just now showing along the horizon.

“I surrender,” Seth says, straightening up, his feverish body shivering. “You got what you want. Take me and just leave her there.”

“Oh, I aim to,” says the monster man, chuckling.

He swings the shotgun from Seth to the mangroves where Kelly still lies entangled in the branches, barely able to move.

“Say your prayers, little pig,” he says.

A shotgun fires.

And part of monster man’s head turns to dark mist.

He collapses backward into the water and does not rise.

Standing behind him, a different monster. One wearing night-vision goggles and aiming a large, odd-looking shotgun.

“Get in the boat,” says Ricky Lang, yanking on the rope to an aluminum skiff. “We’re going to a party and you’re both invited.”

14. Three Shots At Sunrise

Leo Fish is beginning to grow on me. For the first hour or two in our company, he parted with very few words, but the coming dawn has warmed him up. Or maybe years of rarely speaking have left him with a lot of pent-up verbal pressure. Whatever, every stroke of the push-pole seems to bring forth another anecdote or observation.

“When I was a boy, say about seven, my daddy come upon hard times. Had a house in Glade City but lost it to the bank. So he moved us out to the shell mounds—them are the little islands made by the Calusa Indians—and we camped out for a year, living off the land. Dint have a proper tent to start out, just a piece of canvas strung over a limb. Skeeters were bad, but the fishing and the trapping was good. Daddy gimme a little.22 rifle and I become a good shot. Yessum, best year of my life, out on the mounds.”

Part of me is aware that he’s purposefully distracting me from our present situation and I’m grateful for the effort. Shane, a hulking presence in the little boat because of his size, remains mostly quiet, staring off at the dark horizon as if willing the sun to rise, and the search to resume.

“For a whole year we dint eat nothing much that wasn’t protected species nowadays. White ibis—what they call Chokoloskee chicken—and night heron and egret and such. It was that or starve. Today they might say we was homeless, but we dint think of it that way. Once Daddy got together a few gator hides, he was able to trade for staples like cornmeal and flour and beans and cooking oil. Life was hard but good. When you work yur butt off from sun comes up till sun goes down, cleaning and salting hides, you better believe Mama’s cornbread in the iron skillet smelled like heaven.

“Funny enough, we never ate gator. Just skinned ‘em and threw away the rest. They say it tastes like chicken. I say chicken tastes like alligator,” he says, chuckling at his own joke.

“How far, Mr. Fish?”

“Just Fish, or Leo if you druther. Mister makes me nervous. Not too far, missy. Around the bend a short ways. We’ll get there, don’t you worry.”

“You think we’ll find her?”

“Gonna do our very best for you, missy. Ain’t that right, Mr. Shane?”

“Just Shane,” says Shane. “For the same reason. And yes, absolutely, we’ll find Kelly.”

Can’t help notice he doesn’t specify on finding her alive.

Around the bend arrives, and Fish puts us ashore on a tidy little island he calls a hardwood hammock. Tall trees, mostly tamarind, acacia, and something called gumbo-limbo, are thick around the outside, like the walls of a fortress, the interior being mostly ferns and low-growing shade plants. Much of this has been cleared because he sometimes used it as a camp. The deep canopy of fronds and leaves makes it feel almost like a roof over our heads.

Fish looks around, smiling with contentment, and says, “Always sleep like a baby in here. I woke up once ‘cause a whitetail fawn was licking my face. Must have been the salt. Which makes me an old salt lick, I guess.”

Setting us at our ease as he unpacks a rifle from his little boat.

“What’s going on?” Shane wants to know.

His plan is to leave us here for a bit while he checks out one of Ricky Lang’s camps. Shane naturally wants to accompany him, but Fish insists on going alone.

“On my lonesome I can do it in twenty minutes,” he says, tying little bits of rope around his trouser cuffs. “With you along it’d be an hour. Plus you’ll be tough to hide on open ground. So rest yourself down on the nice soft ferns. We’re gettin’ where we need to be, even if it don’t seem so at the moment.”

Shane reluctantly agrees to let him go it alone.

“Those ropes around your pant legs, what’s that for?” I want to know.

“Keep out the leeches, missy. Don’t mind a leech or two on my ankles, but up higher they give me the willywaws, if you know what I mean.”

Moments later he’s waist deep in the dark water, holding the rifle clear, and before long I lose sight of his cowboy hat as he blends into the swamp. Leaving me with a lump in my throat and nothing to do but wait.

Shane, sensing my despair, plops himself down next to me, hugging his knees.

“I feel good about Fish,” he says.

“He knows the way,” I say, without much enthusiasm.

“Yes, he does. And in about twenty minutes the sun will come up and the search will resume. Today’s the day, Mrs. Garner.”

“Me Jane,” I respond laconically. “You Shane.”

He actually giggles. Which sounds weird coming from such a big guy. When he realizes I’m not going to join in, he clears his throat and says, “A while ago you asked me why I resigned from the FBI. I said I’d tell you about it later. Now seems like as good a time as any. You still want to hear my story?”

He, like Fish before him, seems intent on distracting me from the more immediate crisis. Obviously he’s trying to help, so I go, “Sure. Why not?” more out of politeness than interest.

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” he adds, not quite kidding about it.

“You go first,” I suggest. “The Randall Shane story. But make it quick, because Fish’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

“Won’t take me five,” he promises. “It starts, like a lot of good stories, with a beautiful wife and a beautiful child. Jean and Amy. Jean was my wife, Amy was our daughter. We had this nice little place in New Rochelle, I think I mentioned that part already, and I worked out of the New York office, mostly testifying in fingerprint cases. We’d had to reorganize the fingerprint division after a scandal—the previous expert never saw a print, any print, that he couldn’t connect to a criminal case—and I’d become the new and improved resident expert, basically reorganizing the way we identify prints. Computer stuff. Boring guy with a boring job, but I loved it.

“Anyhow, I had this long weekend, so Jean and I decide we’ll take Amy to the Smithsonian. She’s got this project for her world-studies class and the Smithsonian will really help. Plus we both like Washington. That’s where we hooked up, when I first got hired by the bureau. So we throw the bags in the car and drive from New Rochelle to D.C., four and a half hours door to door, piece of cake.

“Amy, she loves the museum. She adores it. Everybody says this about their kids, but Amy was truly amazing. Twice as smart as me, and she was only twelve years old. Jean and I had just the best weekend, watching Amy soak up all that knowledge. She was having such a great time, taking notes and collecting pamphlets that we end up staying longer than we intended. Would have made sense to stay over, and we discussed the possibility, but decided we had to get back home that night because Amy has school the next day and I’ve got work and Jean has work—did I mention Jean was a lawyer? No? She worked for the Legal Aid Society in New York. Anyhow, it’s night, heavy traffic. We’re on the New Jersey Turnpike when my eyelids start to get heavy. So I pull into the Walt Whitman rest area and let Jean take over. She’s wide-awake, fully caffeinated and raring to go. Amy’s in the back, sound asleep. Probably dreaming of her eventual Nobel Prize nomination for her sixth-grade world-studies class project.”

“Oh Shane,” I say, knowing what’s coming.

“Yeah,” he says. “It was bad. Next thing I know, I’m waking up in a wreck and I’m the only survivor. While I was asleep Jean got sideswiped by a tractor-trailer and we got dragged under his rear wheels.”

I hug the big guy, but he doesn’t really hug me back. Too tense, too focused on the pain.

“So that’s my story,” he says. “Why I resigned from the FBI.”

“What did you do?”

“What can you do? I buried them. Then, see, I was so afraid of forgetting, so unable to let go, that I spent a year or so working on a family scrapbook. Which turned out not to be such a good idea for me, mental health-wise. That house in New Rochelle? Must have looked like Howard Hughes was living there. I wasn’t saving my own toenail clippings, or worse, but I was obsessing on assembling the perfect family scrapbook that would somehow take us all back to our happy boring life together. That was my purpose in life, culling through snapshots of dead people.”

“So what happened?” I want to know. “How did you get through it? How did you survive?”

He shrugs. “Ran into someone more desperate than me. This lady in the neighborhood, she came to me because she knew I used to be FBI. Short version—she had a problem with her missing daughter and I agreed to help her if I could, and it turns out I could, and I sort of kept going from there.”

“I’m glad you did. No matter how this turns out.”

“Don’t say that. Don’t even think it.”

“Can’t help it. Sorry.”

“Try this,” he suggests. “Show me yours. The secret of who fathered Kelly. Get it off your chest.”

I want to share, really I do, but as usual, something holds me back. Something deep and veiled puts a cautionary finger to my lips and says, no, not now, not yet.

“If we get her back,” I tell him. “If Kelly survives she deserves to know what happened to her father. Knew I’d have to tell her someday. I’ll tell her first, and then I’ll tell you, promise.”

“Not if,” he says agreeably. “When.”

At that moment a gun blasts in the distance. I’m no expert on gunshots, but when you hear one go off in the middle of the Everglades you know what it is. Not a firecracker, not a backfire. A gunshot, no doubt.

Shane grips my hand, doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t need to.

Two more shots fire, and I know in my heart that someone just died.

15. Something Rises From The Black Water

Minutes go by, jagged little shards of eternity.

We’re at the edge of the hardwood island, facing the sunrise, because the thudding sounds came from that direction.

“Shotgun,” Shane decides. “Fish had a rifle, so it’s not him.”

Thing is, I’m not thinking about our guide, or what he might or might not have done. I’m thinking about an execution at dawn, because that’s what it sounded like to me. The final, deliberate, carefully aimed shots that turn a living human being into something lifeless and ugly.

“Hard to say how far,” Shane muses. “Less than a mile, that’s for sure.”

As I stare, something separates itself from the brightening horizon and begins to fly back and forth, relentless and buglike.