“Well, that’s the damn truth,” I acknowledged ruefully, and conversation came to an abrupt halt. Colt just idled there at the counter. Finding another seam of Formica.
“Is there something I can help you with, Sheriff?”
“Prolly not. Cain’t make up my mind.”
I felt the familiar tingle along the nape of my neck that often presages a breaking story, but I did not press. I did not follow up with a bracket of questions.
A good reporter has to know when to listen.
“Awright, then,” the sheriff resumed. “Start with Jenny O’Steen. Little green men, whatever. Ya’ll ran a line or two couple weeks back?”
I nodded.
“Well, there’s a rumor startin’ to mill.”
“Kind of rumor?”
“Gettin’ around that Butch McCray was the ‘little man’ Jenny O’Steen saw.”
“Butch said himself that he found her with Isabel,” I said with a shrug. “Good thing, too, because according to Doc the Pepsi that Butch gave Jenny probably saved her life.”
The sheriff nodded.
“But the story takin’ a turn on Facebook an’ the like is that Butch had something to do with Jennie before he gave her the soda.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Randall protested.
“You don’t believe that crap, do you, Colt?” I asked.
“Ain’t what I believe that’s a problem. It’s what other people believe—or more likely want to believe. The Lamb brothers ain’t the only ones would love to see Butch lose his store.”
“This have anything to do with the construction proposed for the school?” Randall asked. “Because there are boatloads of folks chasing that grant.”
“There are,” I affirmed. “And Butch’s store is right smack dab in the way.”
Sheriff Buchanan smiled. “Nuthin’ gets by you, does it, Clara Sue?”
Was I blushing? Crying out loud!
“I only know what people tell me, Sheriff.”
“Well, if you hear anything that involves Butch, I’d ’preciate your passing it along.”
“Anything but my source,” I promised.
“Goes without sayin’,” he agreed. “Meantime, have ya’ll got any more reports similar to Jenny’s?”
“Ran that story Barbara Stanton gave me,” I answered. “Senator Stanton raised from the dead apparently.”
“Saw that one.”
“Rod Hamlin called in this morning,” Randall spoke up. “Swears he saw a ball of light floating over his place.”
“Ball of light, was it? Not a fire?”
“No fire, why? You getting similar reports, Sheriff?”
“Two or three a week,” Colt admitted. “Dead relatives. UFOs. One alien abduction. It’s like the damn X-Files.”
“Randall thinks it’s just homecoming week,” I offered. “E.T. and the power of suggestion.”
“Beats meth, I reckon.”
The sheriff falling silent as he trailed a finger along the brim of his Stetson.
“Colt, what is it?” I prodded. “What?”
He reached a decision apparently.
“Grab your camera, cuz,” he told me finally.
“Something I need you to see.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Pickett Lake Slaughter
The Clarion
Last year the county cut three special-education teachers and four classroom assistants from the school’s budget, but when time came to update our cop cars there wasn’t a whisper of dissent, the old, reliable, and relatively cheap Crown Vic Interceptors replaced on a voice vote with a fleet of Dodge Chargers, each boasting more than 370 horsepower in a hemi engine with variable cam timing that might get twelve miles to the gallon in town with brake pads that have to be replaced as often as socks.
But talk about fun. Every time Sheriff Buchanan brings me along to some crime scene or accident I feel like I’m cruising in the Batmobile, a computer mounted on the cruiser’s dash beeping information, calls squawking over radios and chirping from a cell phone mounted amidships with a twelve-gauge pump and radar gun. You look along the door panels you can see where keys and belts and holsters have chewed up the plastic. The smell of leather and sweat. Pine-Sol wafting from behind the welded grille to compete with the effluvium of some felon’s vomit.
You can navigate the county by the steeples and boneyards of our churches. Colt and I passed the First Baptist Church at the only traffic light in town. Four miles down Highway 27 we shot by the Church of God, and then Airline Redeemer at which intersection we turned off 27 for a series of S-curves to slalom past Midway Pentecostal at eighty miles an hour.
I was pulling Gs like a fighter pilot under ribs of bruised sky. A front of autumn air redolent with ambrosias of pasture and woodlands rushing through the prowler’s open windows.
Colt as casual at the wheel as though inching through a car wash.
“WHERE WE HEADED?” I shouted.
“PICKETT LAKE.”
Pickett Lake. Our teenage haunt. Our getaway. I’d bicycle to Hatch Bend, stopping along the way to snatch grasshoppers or grunt worms, and then trundle another mile or so to the lake. Colt would meet me with a long pair of cane poles. We’d bait our hooks live on a monofilament line weighted with buckshot, set our corks and our poles.
Then we’d retreat behind the water oaks to neck beneath a bower of moss.
Finding ourselves as minnows nibbled.
We almost always brought home some catch or another. The lake teemed with bass and perch and bream in those years. The water ran clear and cold, routed through countless numbers of sloughs and hammocks and creeks to the lake’s sandy-bottomed reservoir. I once landed an eight-pound largemouth bass on a cane pole, and that catch did not rate much above average attention.
Pickett Lake was a magnet for all manner of wildlife. Go early in the morning you could spot gators trolling for breakfast, their snouts leaving wakes that converged in a lazy zigzag on water smooth as glass. Panthers would emerge stiff legged from a canopy of Spanish moss to drink along the shore with white-tailed deer and black bears. You’d see osprey in the one or two tidewater cypress remaining on the lake’s northern shore, those singular predators waiting to talon a fish or snake below. And heron stalked pollywogs and crawfish by the dozens beneath a grove of water oaks that ringed the lake in a breathing architecture as old as Stonehenge. Sometimes we’d fall asleep in that ancient cathedral, Colt and I. Two innocents with fishing poles. That was then.
But now I am married. Colt is widowed.
And Pickett Lake is dry as nun’s dust.
We turned off the hard road and lumbered over a cattle gap, the sun breaking through ribs of clouds.
“How long since the lake’s held water?” I asked when we arrived.
“Been ten years since it was full,” he replied.
In fact, nearly all the lakes that seemed limitlessly fecund in my salad years are now dead, the casualty of a changing climate and the destruction of hardwood forests evolved to shelter a concatenation of natural aqueducts that recharged the lakes and ponds of the region.
My grandfather worked for one of the last gangs to harvest hardwood in northern Florida, a crew of men who for pennies a day braved snakes and insects and unbearable heat to wrestle giant logs from the swamp with nothing more than peaveys and axes and two-man saws. I have a tintype photo of papa manning an old Clyde skidder to drag in a single tidewater cypress that required an entire boxcar for transport. Trees thirty or even forty feet in girth were common.
Timber was king and a city sprang up overnight, complete with stores and bunkhouses and even hospitals, all built in a virtual swamp for the thousands of men who cut, dried, and stacked the dimensioned lumber that gorged the holds of vessels headed to Jacksonville or Havana or farther afield.
But by the end of World War II there was nothing left to cut. Stands of hardwood cypress and pine that took centuries to mature had been harvested to extinction. Local economies died with the trees, lumberj
acks and sawyers and yard men losing jobs that would not be replaced until the 1950s when the hardwood forests of northern Florida were replanted with a softer, faster-growing species tailored and tweaked for the production of pulp.
Every paper product you can imagine from transcripts to traffic tickets comes from pulpwood, and it did not take long for slash pine to replace its long-leafed cousin. In less than a decade land once dense with hardwood was carved into a virtual drain pan for vast tracts of pinus elliottii, the storied acres interrupted at intervals by fire lanes that stretched in veritable canals to sever the feeding creeks and waterways and divert increasingly fickle falls of rain to the Gulf of Mexico.
Pickett Lake followed Koon Lake and Garner Lake and Sears Lake to become a saucer of blinding white sand ringed with a dark and stubborn sentinel of water oak and scrub that clings to the old shoreline like druids around a pyre.
Bowls of sand dead of thirst.
It had become a graveyard, had Pickett Lake, and its demise was a catastrophe so gradual in the making as to go unnoticed. By the time I finished college, the shore had widened to a boundary of white-hot sand yards distant from any shade. Mallard ducks that used to land in the lake in squadrons for the feast of acorns along the shore altered their timeless migration. Colt told me that in the lake’s final days you’d see people dragging baskets to salvage fish dying from lack of oxygen, their gills pleading silent agony.
I had not actually visited Pickett Lake in years. Didn’t look like much now. A ragged boundary of distressed water oaks. A shallow crater of loam beyond.
Colt parked the cruiser beneath a beard of hanging moss.
“We’ll walk her in from here.” He snapped off his safety belt and killed the engine. “Unless you wanta chance getting stuck.”
“I can walk,” I replied testily.
Colt leaned over to break the shotgun from its stanchion. I grabbed my Canon and within seconds both of us were ankle deep in soft, soft sand. I should have worn boots. I could feel grains of sand working warmly through my socks, my shoes. Colt rolling along with no apparent effort. Heading for the center of the lakebed.
“Am I looking for anything special?” I asked.
“Let you be the judge of that.”
I staggered to keep up. “I don’t see anything.”
“There,” he pointed straight ahead. “Right along there.”
I tried to follow the line of his sight.
“What the hell—?”
It looked at first like somebody had poured oil in a narrow ribbon across the sand. Just a dark stain, maybe six inches wide and stretching to either side. But on approach I saw that this was not a line at all, but a circle poured dark as tar around the center of the lake.
“What is this shit, Colt? Some kind of asphalt?”
“Some damn kind,” he replied.
“Kind of circumference we got here?”
“Quarter mile, at least,” he replied.
“It is a circle, then?”
“Goddamn perfect, far as I can tell. And see those lines running in to the center?”
The lakebed was so flat I had trouble seeing it.
“Oh, there,” I finally confirmed.
“They’re like spokes on a wheel,” Colt supplied. “’Cept only one goes all the way across.”
We broke off to make a short arc around the formation and I saw that Colt was right. The lines ran like spokes in a wheel from the rim to the axle, but were not completely symmetrical.
I laughed.
“It’s a peace symbol!”
“Be damn,” he said, smiling. “I believe you’re right.”
“We used to see ’em on those old VW vans, remember?”
“Hippie vans we called ’em,” Colt said, reminiscing, and for a moment we were face-to-face.
A long moment. With memories.
I directed my attention back to the lake’s bed. Colt cradled his shotgun to pinch a chew of Red Man from a pack tucked inside his belt.
“I don’t see any tire tracks, do you?” he asked, directing the conversation to safer topics.
“No footprints either. Other than ours,” I said, following his lead.
“It’s easy to cover tracks on sand,” Colt said, speaking as if from experience.
I unlimbered my camera. “Prob’ly was kids from the school did this. Seniors painted the water tower, didn’t they? It is homecoming week, after all.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” he warned.
“Not jumping. To anything.”
I walked over to the nearest spoke and took a knee. It looked like a perfectly uniform strip of coal-black tar, just a straight line over blazing white sand. I slid my hand along the deposit.
“Asphalt, I’m guessing. Or something like it.”
Colt nodded. “I scraped off a sample, but whatever this is—”
Doffing his hat to indicate the larger formation.
“—has got nothing to do with anything peaceful.”
“Makes you say that, Colt?”
He extended the barrel of his shotgun toward the center of the formation.
“See for yourself.”
We shuffled through the sand to where the separate lines finally converged and at first all I saw was what looked like a large garbage bag and a pair of shovels. That, and a roost of buzzards.
Colt pulled his nine-millimeter from its holster and a couple of rounds later the vultures were dispersed. Slowly, casually.
That’s when I saw the gore, the blood.
“Jesus Christ.”
A dog was staked out on the hot white sand. Or rather what was left of a dog.
“Jesus, Colt, he’s gutted! Disemboweled!”
“Looks like.”
The sheriff took off his hat to shoo off a swarm of flies.
“Could have been hogs, I guess.” I gagged on the smell as I knelt for a better look.
“Except hogs don’t usually paint peace symbols on lake beds,” Colt replied drily.
“Coulda been somebody high on drugs. Meth, maybe? Somebody really fucked up.”
“Fucked up, for sure.”
Colt spit.
“But ain’t no druggie went to this trouble. This here is too elaborate. Too damn much work for a hophead.”
“Well, then, maybe it actually was a hog got him, or a bear, maybe. Somebody finds a disemboweled dog out in the flatwoods or wherever and brings him here for some kinda weird ritual or burial.”
“You got an active imagination for a reporter, Clara Sue.”
“Then you tell me where the dog came from.”
“From Roscoe Lamb’s deer camp.”
“This is Roscoe Lamb’s dog?! You’re sure?”
“Yep. Roscoe paid a thousand dollars for him too.”
I can barely tell my own dogs apart, let alone somebody else’s.
“I killed me a ten-point buck behind this here hound,” Colt went on.
“Have you told Roscoe?”
“Not yet.”
My cousin doffed his Stetson briefly. Turned his face to the brooding sky.
“How ’bout forensics? Can you get the FDLE out here?”
I was referring to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, that intrastate agency famous for assisting sheriffs and police chiefs all over the state.
But Colt was shaking his head.
“Them boys don’t come for dogs, Clara Sue.” Colt resettled his hat. “Hard enough to get ’em out to homicides.”
A breeze stirred. Colt snapped his fingers.
“Doc Trotter,” he said.
Dr. D. O. Trotter is a longtime fixture in the county, a semiretired physician and Sunday School teacher.
“I’ll take the dog to Doc.” Colt spit. “See what he can tell me.”
“And what d’you want me to do?” I asked.
“I want a few words and a picture or two in your paper, and I want you to tell anybody that has information to call in. For fucking sure somebody knows what went on here.
Maybe we’ll get lucky. Can you do that for me, Clara Sue?”
“Certainly. But leave Roscoe out of it?”
“For now, yeah.”
“Anything else?”
“Get done with your pictures, you can help me police this mess up.”
“You mean—the dog?”
“Well, I cain’t just leave him out here.”
“Colt, if you’d warned me I’d be shoveling guts in a bag I might’ve told you to take your own goddamn pictures.”
“But I didn’t tell you, did I, cuz? And yet we remain such good damn friends.”
I had to laugh. “Friends or not, if you’d told me there was a dead hound staked out in a peace symbol in the middle of Pickett Lake, I wouldn’t have believed you.”
“Kind of thing you have to see to believe.”
“I see and I’m still not sure I believe it.”
“You’re a doubting Thomas, Clara Sue. Always have been.”
“I’d have made a bad disciple, no doubt about that.”
“Makes you a good reporter though.”
“Made me,” I amended. “Made me a good reporter. Not sure what I am now.”
Colt produced a pair of RayBans to filter a breaking sun.
“Why don’t you just get the pictures?” he suggested. “I’ll manage the rest.”
CHAPTER SIX
Field of Dreams
The Clarion
After dropping off his cousin at the Clarion, Sheriff Buchanan drove straight to the site of the county’s largest employer. The Laureate Correctional Institute and Annex was a state-run prison, but as the sheriff well knew there were Florida legislators eager to see a change of management. These were private-sector zealots who insisted that anything the state managed could be done more cheaply and efficiently by the private sector. Colt never bought into that theory. For one thing, running prisons for profit created a huge incentive to find prisoners. Build a prison and then fill it.
A field of dreams.
Colt left town on Highway 27 heading west and within minutes saw the glint of sunlight off a high fence topped with razor wire. The fence and prison within were situated in the midst of an open field that provided a wide boundary of exposure on all sides. There was nowhere for a would-be escapee to hide on that veldt—no culvert, no trees, no shrubbery. The grass was always cut short and as Sheriff Buchanan slowed his prowler to a crawl, he noted the clear fields of fire for the armed guards mounted on towers set like deer blinds along the perimeter. A series of Jersey barriers forced the sheriff into a maze of turns so tight that it made speeding impossible. Visitors to the prison were routed along the way to a designated lot sprinkled with street lamps and surveillance cameras. A guard waved Colt through to a parking lot that was only slightly more convenient. Visitors were routed to a double-doored lounge inside the fence where they would surrender a driver’s license and shoes. The sheriff of Lafayette County was only asked to surrender his sidearm.
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