The kitten was fighting to get out of the towel but Jeff firmly wrapped its legs and Katy injected the last of the white liquid into the tiny pink mouth.
Louis heard a strange huffing noise and looked to the cage at his left. Grace was pacing, watching them anxiously. The second kitten, Nico, was asleep in the back of the cage.
“Okay, we’re done,” Katy said.
Louis watched as Jeff opened a small door of the cage and carefully set the kitten back inside. Grace immediately began licking it. After a moment, she grabbed it by the nape and took it back to the corner.
Louis watched them, thinking about the signs he had seen coming onto the preserve and across Alligator Alley. PANTHER CROSSING. DRIVE CAREFULLY.
“How long will you keep them here?” he asked.
“A couple more weeks,” Katy said. “Then we have to release them.”
Louis turned to look at her. He was puzzled that he didn’t see any sadness in her expression. But then he realized that any sentimentality he might have about the cats wasn’t part of Katy’s makeup. She could love the cats but she couldn’t let herself get too attached. It was like his job in a strange way. He could care about the people he helped, fight for the victims, and even mourn the dead. But if he let any of it sit in his heart too long he couldn’t do what he needed to do.
Jeff left, heading out a back door.
Katy glanced over Louis, taking in his dress slacks and shirt for the first time. “Hot date?” she asked.
“No, job interview. I’m going back in uniform.”
Her smile widened. “That’s great. I know how much you wanted it.”
“That’s why I’m here,” he said. “Want to go have a beer to help me celebrate?”
She shook her head. “I’d love to, Louis, but I can’t right now. Jeff and I have to -–”
Louis held up a hand. “Work. I get it. Some other time maybe.”
She cocked her head. “You want to come help us?”
“Help you do what?”
“We’re releasing Bruce today. Jeff has him crated and ready to go.”
“He’s okay?” Louis asked.
“Good to go.” Katy smiled. “He’ll do better out there than in here.” She pulled off her apron and looked at her watch. “We need to do it at dusk because they feel safer then. So, you want to come?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Louis said.
The setting sun was just starting to singe the tops of the cypress trees when Jeff slowed the swamp buggy. Riding in the passenger seat, Louis had a clear view of the landscape but still no idea where they were. He knew that unlike Katy, who seemed as at home in the Glades as the panthers, he would never feel like anything but an intruder in this primordial place.
He had come to appreciate its desolate beauty, come to understand its strange pull on the soul. But he still didn’t belong here.
Jeff stopped the swamp buggy. The quiet, after the roar of the engine, was almost deafening. Katy, who had been riding in the back with another ranger, jumped out and came up to Louis.
“You sure you want to mess up those nice shoes?” she asked, smiling.
“Screw the shoes. Let’s go.”
It took all four of them to lift the crate down from the buggy. It was solid wood except for the breathing holes so Louis couldn’t see Bruce. He could only hear him, hear his anxious panting.
Louis had sweated through his white dress shirt by the time they set the crate down on the marshy ground. He wiped his face, looking around.
They were somewhere deep in the preserve and Katy had chosen an isolated hammock for the release site, an island of brush and trees that sat a foot or so above the shallow water.
There was a low fringe of dark green on the far horizon and above that the sky was a huge blister of purple and orange. They had maybe ten minutes of daylight left.
“Let’s do it,” Katy said.
She went to the front of the crate and grasped the handle in the front. She gave it a hard tug upward.
“Go,” she said softly.
The panther was a brown blur and it took Louis’s eyes a second to catch up with Bruce. He was running across the open field at full speed. Then with a splash of his hind legs in the shallow water, he was gone.
Louis stared at the spot in the dark brush where the panther had disappeared.
“Where’s he going?” he said.
“North,” Katy said.
She stood staring into the darkness. “It’s still mating season,” she said. “He’ll travel hundreds of miles to find a mate if he has to.”
They stood silent for a moment then Katy let out a long breath, turned and walked back to the swamp buggy.
Louis didn’t move. He looked east, where the rising moon was a pale sliver and Venus burned bright. He looked west, where a flock of egrets seeking a roosting place slid silently across the purple sky. He looked north, where the panther had gone.
Suddenly, he knew what he had to do. He still wanted the badge but it would have to wait a little while longer. Mobley would rip him a new one and Louis knew he’d spend the next year clawing his way back to Mobley’s good side but he also knew that the sheriff understood that a good cop was first a good man.
Before he set foot in that academy Louis knew he had to go north, for just a while.
North, where Lily waited for a birthday party.
North, where maybe, just maybe, Joe waited for him.
PANTHERS ARE COOL
COLLARING A PANTHER
Using ATVs or buggies, dogs, radios and determination, the Florida Fish & Wildlife Panther Project Team collars a Florida Panther. They use information from the collars to monitor the species’ health and population to ensure its continued recovery. Some of this footage was shot with a camera strapped to a biologist’s head.
Click here to see video
PANTHER KITTENS!
Click here to see video
THE BIG CYPRESS SWAMP
A stunning film by Elam Stoltzfus that captures the desolate beauty of the Big Cypress Swamp, home of the Florida panther.
Click here to watch movie
If you’d like the read more about the Florida panther, please go to any of these sites.
FLORIDA FISH AND WILDLIFE CONSERVATION COMMISSION
Visit site
FRIENDS OF THE FLORIDA PANTHER REFUGE
Visit site
THE FLORIDA PANTHER SOCIETY
Visit site
Want to find out more about the Everglades hunting camps, the colorful inhabitants and the critters? Check out this really interesting site maintained by “Steve,” who has been frequenting the camps since 1974.
Visit site
Read about the Seminole tribe and its rich history
Visit site
READ AN EXCERPT FROM HEART OF ICE
HEART OF ICE
Louis Kincaid wants to wear a badge again. But before he can, he must return home to Michigan—and some unfinished business. He wants to bond with 10-year-old Lily, the daughter he recently learned existed, and reunited with his lover Joe Frye. But new clues to an unsolved murder put his plans on ice. A trip with Lily to enchanting Mackinac Island turns grim when the child falls on a pile of old bones. The dangerous discovery reopens the cold case of Julie Chapman, a teenager from one of the wealthy summer families, who vanished two decades ago. And when Louis is forced to cooperate with a tough state investigator who once worked with Joe, tensions skyrocket. Now, what was supposed to be a time of building lasting ties, splinters into disturbing fragments, personally and professionally, as Louis pursues a mystery entangled in dark family secrets and twists even he can't predict.
"Louis Kincaid is one of my favorite protagonists in all of crime fiction. HEART OF ICE takes him back to his Michigan roots and beyond anything he's ever experienced before. It's absolutely gut-wrenching and I loved every single page. P.J. Parrish is one of the best in the business and this book is clearly their best yet."
�
��Steve Hamilton, Edgar Award winning author of Die a Stranger
CHAPTER ONE
Wednesday, December 31, 1969
He was staring at the frozen lake and thinking about his mother lying on a table somewhere screaming in pain.
He was remembering what she told him, how they had kept her in that little room and held her down, how it felt like her insides were being torn in half and how it went on and on and on for two days until she begged to die.
He was thinking about her and how much he had loved her. But he was also thinking that if she had been able to stand the pain for two more minutes –- two damn minutes -- his life would have been so very different.
But she couldn’t. So he was pulled from her womb at two minutes before midnight on September 14, and because of that everything now had changed.
The ferry was coming in. He heard its horn before he saw it, a white smudge emerging slowly from the gray afternoon fog. It was running late. The straits had frozen over early this year because of the long bitter cold snap and the ferry was forced to stay in the narrow channel that had been cut by the coast guard icebreaker Mackinaw. It was so cold, far colder than it should be, even for December. He pulled the hood of his parka up and looked down at the duffle at his feet. Had he remembered his gloves? Everything had happened so fast he hadn’t given much thought to what he had packed. Now he was so cold he didn’t even want to open the duffle to look, so he stuffed his red hands into his armpits and watched the ferry.
It was taking a long time to get to the dock, like it was moving in slow motion. But everything was like this now, everything was moving as if time no longer existed. But it didn’t really, he thought. Not anymore. Time was nothing to him now. By tomorrow, he would have all the time in the world.
But what world?
He looked around. At the clapboard ticket house of the Arnold Line ferry, at the docks, the empty parking lot and the boarded-up pastie shack. He looked past the park benches and the bare black trees still wearing their necklaces from last night’s ice storm. He looked back toward town where the fog blurred all the places he had known during his nineteen years here, and he tried hard to burn everything into his memory because suddenly he knew that once he got on the ferry there would be no way to ever come back and he would forget all of this and the person he had been here.
He turned and looked left.
Canada. It was just fifty miles away, less than an hour’s drive up I-75. He had never been there before.
But until now he had never had a reason to.
The ferry had docked. No one came out to take his ticket so he picked up his duffle, sprinted up the gangplank and boarded. The cabin was empty and but at least it was warmer. He set his duffle on one of the long wooden benches and sat down. He wanted a hot cup of coffee but there was no one at the snack bar at the far end of the cabin. The clouded glass carafes sat empty on the coffee machines. There wasn’t a soul to be seen anywhere, and he had the weird feeling that he was the only human being left on earth.
But then the metal floor began to vibrate beneath his feet and the ferry pulled away from the dock. He leaned his head against the cold glass of the window and closed his eyes.
He slept. And for the first time in weeks, he dreamed.
Dreamed of a bald man in horn-rimmed glasses and a blue suit. Dreamed of shooting a rifle that looked nothing like the one he used to hunt deer with his dad. Dreamed of lying naked on a cold steel table in a white room with his red intestines pouring out of his gut. And then the bald man was holding up a big bright blue capsule and smiling and telling him that if he just took it all the pain would go away.
He was jerked awake by a jabbing on his shoulder.
He looked up into the red face of an old man wearing a navy pea coat with the ferry line emblem on the pocket.
“Time to get off, son.”
He rubbed his eyes and looked out the window, but it had fogged over. He rubbed it with the sleeve of his parka and saw something in the mist outside. It was the boarded-up pastie shack on the dock. They were back in St. Ignace.
“Hey!” he called out to the old man who was heading toward the door. “What happened? Why did we turn back?”
“No choice,” the old man said. “Got out aways but it was frozen solid. Got a call in to the cutter but she’s working the shipping lines and can’t get here until tomorrow morning.” He turned and started away.
“But I have to get to the island tonight!”
The old man stared at him then shook his head. “No one’s getting over there tonight, son.”
The old man shuffled off, the metal door banging behind him. The young man’s eyes went again to the window. His mind was spinning, trying to figure out his options. Stay here and wait? No, because tomorrow would be too late. Go home and try to explain? No, because he couldn’t look his father in the eye and tell him one more lie. Leave and try to start over somewhere new? No, because she wouldn’t be there.
And it was all about her.
He reached for the duffle at his feet but paused. It was an old thing and the name stenciled on the green canvas was so faded it could barely be read: CHARLES S. LANGE. It had belonged to his father, and U.S. Army sergeant Charles Lange had stuffed his life into the duffle. Everything he needed to survive was in it – heating tablets, rations, mittens, compass, bullets, and a picture of his wife and baby son. When he came home he packed it away, emptying it and himself as best he could. Even his wife couldn’t get him to talk about had happened in Korea, and when she died three years later Charles Lange withdrew into himself even more. He was there as a father, or at least as much as he could be. And when his son turned sixteen, he brought out the duffle and gave it to him.
Cooper Lange had never used the duffle. But last night he had pulled it from his closet and hurriedly packed it with the things he guessed he might need to survive. A change of clothes, matches, some Mounds bars, the three hundred and two dollars from his bank account, an extra pair of gloves, his father’s old Army compass.
He grabbed the bag and hurried from the ferry. The temperature had dropped sharply since he had boarded and the icy cold was like a hard slap against his face. He glanced at his watch. Almost four. It would be dark soon. He had to figure out something fast. The dock was deserted and there were no cars in the lot. Chartering a plane in this weather was out of the question, not that he could afford it.
The weather...it was getting bad fast. The fog had retreated but he could see a bank of heavy pewter clouds building on the horizon of Lake Huron. His eyes caught a spot of something dark on the icy lake just off shore. Then he spotted another dark spot beyond the first.
Trees. The dark spots were trees. That meant someone had started laying out the ice bridge. But was it finished?
There was no time to check. If he was going, he had to go now. He unzipped the duffle and found his gloves. He cursed himself for not bringing a flashlight and screwdrivers -– it was crazy to cross the bridge without them -- but he hadn’t planned on having to do this.
He hadn’t planned on doing any of this. But she...
Oh God, had he it forgotten it? Digging beneath the clothes, he found her picture. It was her senior class portrait. Perfect oval face framed by long straight dark hair, somber dark eyes and not even a hint of a smile. He turned it over to read what she had written even though he knew it by heart.
When love beckons to you, follow him, though his ways are hard and steep. And when he speaks to you believe in him, though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden. – Julie.
He started to put it back in the duffle but instead slipped it into the chest pocket of his parka and zipped it shut.
He put on his gloves, slung the duffle strap over his shoulder and headed across the parking lot. At the snow-covered beach, he stopped. Someone had tamped down a path that led to the shoreline, creating a crude entry to the ice bridge beyond.
The huge gray expanse of Lake Huron lay before him.
And somewhere out lost in the fog was Mackinac Island.
It was only four miles across, but he knew what he was up against. He had grown up in St. Ignace and spent the last five summers over on the island making good money slapping fudge in the shops on Main Street and cleaning the stalls at the stables. But when the tourists left in October, the island closed down and the hard winters left the couple hundred residents there isolated and dependent on the coast guard icebreakers. But sometimes, if it was cold enough, the water between the island and St. Ignace would freeze over. Someone on the island would venture out onto the lake with spud bars to test the ice’s thickness. If he made it to St. Ignace, he’d call back with the news that it was safe. The townspeople would take discarded Christmas trees and plant them in the ice to mark the safe path across.
The ice bridge brought freedom. But the swift-moving currents of the straits could cause the ice to shift at any time so the ice bridge could also brought death.
He glanced back over his shoulder at the red brick coast guard building on Huron Street. There was a light on inside. The coast guard guys didn’t want people out on the ice bridge but they couldn’t stop them so every year they sent out the same warning -- tell someone if you go out on the ice bridge. For a second, he thought about going up to the station.
But he couldn’t. He couldn’t tell anyone where he was going. That was what they had decided. She wouldn’t tell her parents and he wouldn’t tell his father. No one could know.
He hoisted the duffle and stepped onto the ice. It groaned but held firm. He pulled in a deep breath and headed toward the dark shape in the mist.
At the first tree, he stopped and looked back. The lights of St. Ignace were just yellow blurs in the mist. Looking ahead again, he spotted the next tree and started toward it.
Claw Back (Louis Kincaid) Page 12