The Blue Edge of Midnight

by Jonathon King

  When the cab pulled away I pushed a buzzer next to the metal door frame and Sims’ voice crackled through an intercom. I answered and he buzzed me through.

  Inside was a two-room lab: white tile floors, fluorescent lighting, sterile-looking walls. In one room two desks were knocked together and stacked with papers and folders and computers that were a few generations behind the ones Billy used in his office. The other room was lined with glass-fronted cabinets stacked with books and vials, plastic models and labeled containers. In the middle was a long, stainless steel table. Sims was standing there, next to a large blue and white ice chest.

  I tried to look imposing, but my threatening manner on the phone was impossible to keep up in person. So I kept my mouth shut and let my silence build up on him.

  “I, uh, could use your help here,” he said, tapping the top of the cooler.

  His request caught me off guard. He was either too nervous to talk or was effectively spinning our roles. Me help him?

  He was wearing a long-sleeved denim shirt rolled up at the cuffs, jeans, and thick-soled hiking boots. My guess was about a size nine.

  “Sure,” I said, stepping up to the table.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Freeman. I didn’t know how long it would take you to get here and my inopportune visit to the sheriff’s office this morning has thrown me off schedule. I’ve already started this procedure and I’m afraid it really can’t wait,” Sims said, moving to one of the counters and pulling open a drawer. From inside he brought out a tray of instruments and a box of latex gloves and put them on the table next to the cooler.

  “We’re tracking as many of our resident rattlesnakes as we can and this one is due to be released back where we found him,” he said, tapping the top of the cooler. “So I’ve got to get this chip in him while he’s still cold and slow.”

  Sims snapped on the gloves and then unwrapped a small package that contained a tiny microchip and a large-bore hypodermic needle. He explained how his study of the snake’s movements was done by inserting the chip into its layer of scales. I nodded at the logic. It didn’t take a detective to know what my role in all this was going to be. Sims loaded the chip into the needle and laid the syringe on the corner of the table.

  When he was ready, he carefully opened the cooler a few inches and peered inside and then reached one hand into the space. His movements seemed too slow for what I knew was inside, but his arm came out with the spade-shaped head of an adult rattlesnake gripped in his hand. When three feet of the animal was out of the chest, he grabbed the middle with his other hand and gestured at me to hold on to the last three feet.

  “Tight. But not too tight,” he said. “Just keep him from wriggling while we stretch him out on the table.”

  I don’t know why I followed his instructions. But now I had half of a six-foot poisonous snake in my hands. The skin of the animal was smooth and the body felt as hard as a giant hose under full pressure. As I worked to pin it against the stainless table it flexed, and when I tried to keep it from curving, my hand slid up against the grain of its scales and the edges scraped roughly across my palm. When I repositioned my hand, I laid it higher and then slid it smoothly down the cool body.

  “He’s been on ice for about fifteen minutes so he’s feeling pretty sluggish,” Sims said. “Just hold him here while I get this chip in.”

  I couldn’t see the snake’s head. Sims kept his left hand locked just behind the flanged jaws which, I assumed, kept the animal from twisting around and biting him.

  “I honestly did not intend to raise more scrutiny from the police by revealing our meeting, Mr. Freeman,” Sims suddenly said. He obviously wasn’t as focused on the snake as I was.

  “I guess it just sort of spilled out as they were questioning me. They are very persuasive. In an unsettling way.”

  “They do have that effect on people,” I said, trying to concentrate on both the environmentalist’s words and the shift in the lump of muscle under my hands. “But why do you think they called you in to begin with?”

  “That’s a bit of a mystery in itself,” he answered. “They’d already talked to Professor Murtz, who is the head of the lab. They wanted to know about the milking of snake venom, which we do some of right here. The process is really quite easy. You see, the fangs are really like big needles themselves,” he said, twisting up the head of the snake in his hand and somehow squeezing the jaws to make them open to expose the half- inch gleam of needle-sharp bone.

  “You get them over a funnel with some rubber-like membrane stretched over it and let them sink their fangs in. They think it’s something’s skin and pump away.

  “Most of the time they’re more than anxious to bite. A snake is a survivalist, the venom is its protection and its means to a meal, so they’re instinctive with it. You anger them, they’re going to hit you. So the hard part is handling them over and over because, eventually, you’re not going to be quick enough.”

  I watched Sims pick up the hypodermic and then hold the syringe in his own mouth while he probed the snake’s skin, running his hand over the cream-colored diamonds, looking for a spot to stick it. He motioned for me to bend up the tail and decided on a place near the base. As he held the animal’s head away, he slid the needle under a scale and pumped the chip in. When he finished, he swabbed the spot and then motioned to the cooler and we lifted the snake back into the ice chest and closed the lid.

  “Professor Murtz already gave the police all of that information the first time, and how dozens of people from scientists to snake hobbyists to any good Southern snake hunter could do it,” Sims continued as he stripped off the gloves. “We could never figure why they were so interested and I thought that was why they called me in this time. But somehow they kept turning me toward the meeting at Loop Road and when your name came up I got the impression that I wasn’t telling them anything that they didn’t already know.”

  “Yeah. My name just happens to come up a lot in places where I’d just as soon it didn’t,” I said, rubbing my palms together, still feeling the slick smoothness of the snake and the cool tingle of my own nerves.

  Sims wrapped up the hypodermic and put the package back in the drawer and then washed his hands in a stainless steel sink built into the counter. I wondered if I should do the same.

  “They knew you were there,” he said, turning as he dried his hands with a paper towel and reading the flash of confusion that must have shown in my eyes. “At the hotel bar. I don’t know how, but I’m positive they already knew it. They just wanted to know why.”

  It took me a second to gather myself. Of course they knew. Why the hell wouldn’t Hammonds know? He’d been trailing me ever since I pulled up to the ranger’s dock with news of a killing.

  “I don’t doubt it,” I said to Sims. “I’d still like to know myself why it was that I was there.”

  The environmentalist seemed to consider the question for a few seconds as he oddly and carefully folded the damp brown paper towel in his fingers. Then he tossed the square into a wastebasket, walked over to grip both handles of the ice chest and lifted it off the table. He nodded his head to the door.

  “Let’s go drop this off,” he said and I followed, holding open the door and wondering why I was letting him lead again.

  We loaded the cooler into the back of the van and as Sims drove out to an empty asphalt road leading east he explained, as best he could according to him, what he knew of my invitation to Loop Road.

  “You’ve got to understand, Mr. Freeman, there are generations of folks out there in the Glades that have lived lives far different than what modern-day people think of as Floridians.”

  “Yeah, I got that lesson from Gunther,” I said, watching the road stretch out in a straight line into nothing but low-hanging green brush. Sims had no air conditioning in the old van and even the wind spilling through the open windows was hot. I was thinking about the warming state of the rattlesnake sliding around in the cooler behind us.

  “What I mean
is that, for some of them, the Glades is their neighborhood and you can’t just move into the neighborhood without being noticed and without becoming suspect.” He let the statement sit, waiting for my response.

  “You mean my place in the old research shack?” I finally said.

  “Glades folks notice something like that. People have used that old place for years when it was empty. But they also have respect. Your presence was known but no one was really sure what you were up to. They knew you weren’t a hunter, or a fisherman. There was speculation that you were doing some kind of night research, but the professor and I couldn’t come up with anybody who knew you.”

  “And how exactly did all this discussion come up?” I asked.

  By now Sims had turned off the pavement and pulled onto a dirt road. It too was posted with a no-trespassing sign and bore the logo of the power company. Sims downshifted and started south down a lane that was flanked on either side with mangroves and long finger islands that stretched out into standing water.

  “These are cooling canals. Man-made for discharging the water from the reactor,” Sims said, answering the question I hadn’t asked and avoiding the one I had.

  “The company has acres and acres of property out here but although they can keep the people out, they can’t easily control the animals that find their way in here. That’s why they employ Professor Murtz and myself. To keep track of the native populations and monitor their growth and migrations. It makes them look environmentally concerned and benefits us at the same time. We have even developed a breeding ground for the American crocodile in here that almost singlehandedly rejuvenated a species that was very much on the endangered list only a few years ago.”

  As we jounced down the rutted road I tried to pull him back to my invitation to Loop Road.

  “And the discussion about me being the new mystery man living in the old research shack?”

  “I don’t know who brought it up first. Word gets passed along out there and you rarely know the source, or even the truth of the stories. But it got to the bar. And then Blackman said he’d heard that you had been questioned by the police in connection to the killings of the kids.”

  “I suppose that eased some of the pressure among the natives.”

  “I don’t deny that,” Sims said as he slowed and then stopped the van in the middle of the road, in the middle of nowhere. When he got out, I followed. “There’d been a lot of talk since the child killings started. Some of it working off the same whiskey-inspired threats that had gone on for years about stopping the western flow of the suburbs,” Sims said as he opened the back doors of the van and hauled out the ice chest.

  “It was crude stuff at first. Like ‘It’s about time’ and ‘More power to ’em.’ But then the investigators and agents started questioning people at their camps and ranches and folks started getting nervous.”

  He set the chest down in the dust about ten yards away and came back to the van. I watched the lid like it was going to pop open like some jack-in-the-box.

  “They would have loved to have an outsider like you get blamed. But then we heard about you and Gunther. And as far as I know, it was Gunther who said you’d been in law enforcement up north. That’s when Nate Brown decided we ought to talk to you ourselves.”

  I watched as Sims reached into the van and pulled out a golf club. A putter I thought at first. Then I looked closer at the head and saw that the shaft had been sheared off and the end had been bent to form a hook.

  He walked back to the cooler, and using the hook, flipped open the lid. I could hear a bone rattle echoing inside. The snake had warmed up. Sims stepped closer and probed in the cooler for a few seconds and then lifted the rattler out. Its body was cupped on the hook about one-third of the way down its length. The tail was curling and twisting in the air with a motion independent of the head, which stuck out straight as a stick from Sims’ club.

  With the animal dangling, he walked it closer to the edge of the road. The embankment dropped several feet down into the water weeds and mangroves. When he set it down, the snake curled into an immediate coil and the rattle intensified.

  “He’ll probably just set there awhile until the sun warms him up,” Sims said, standing far too close to the beast if its strike range really was the ten feet that I’d read about. “This is about the spot that we found him a couple of days ago. So we’re just hoping he’s close to home.”

  We stood watching the snake’s tongue flick the air and listened to the click of the rattles. Finally, it began to unwrap itself. We watched as it then slid softly into the grass and down the embankment. First the body disappeared, and then the rattling sound went quiet. I stood behind Sims as he walked over and peered over the edge.

  “Gone,” he said, and then turned to me. “I still don’t know why they had any interest in the snake venom.”

  I was still looking into the grasses and mangroves, a bit amazed at how quickly the animal had simply disappeared.

  “The first dead child,” I said. “Died from an injection of rattlesnake venom.”

  I looked up at Sims. His mouth was slightly open, his face was caught in a mask of pure, dumbfounded thought. Yes, he had computer access. Yes, he had a van and enough knowledge of the Glades and enough expertise with tracking devices to make a GPS seem like a toy. He even had size-nine feet. But the look in his eye told me he hadn’t known about the snake venom. He might have been in on it at some point, but not when the real killing began.

  CHAPTER 19

  My truck was waiting for me in the lot when the cab dropped me at Billy’s tower. The new glass was shining but the three gouges in the paint brought up a taste of anger I couldn’t keep down. My keys were at the lobby desk and the assistant manager cleared me to the penthouse. I made a pot of coffee, drank half of it while I put my bags together and then poured the rest in a huge, wide-bottomed sailing mug. I threw the bags in my truck and drove out west to the ranger station.

  When I pulled into my usual parking space, I could see Cleve and his assistant had pulled the Boston Whaler out of the water on a trailer and were washing the hull, scrubbing the algae and dirt stain from the water line. Cleve tossed his brush into a galvanized pail, wiped his hands on his trousers and greeted me with a handshake.

  “Max. Good to see you back.”

  The assistant was looking past us at my truck, his mouth had dropped open a bit and then he snapped it shut and turned away, shaking his head in disgust. Cleve and I walked up toward the office.

  “I don’t have a new canoe yet. But if the offer still stands, I’d like to borrow yours to get out to the shack,” I said.

  “No problem. But I’ll have to get you the key,” Cleve answered, moving through the office to his desk.

  “After everything going on, I went out and put a hasp and lock on the door. Figured it might keep your stuff safe,” he said, putting the key in my palm and then looking at it a second too long. “First time I ever had to do that.”

  I felt a pang of responsibility, like I’d taken something from him.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Ain’t your fault,” he answered. “Things change.”

  We carried his canoe to the water. I loaded my bags from the truck and just before pushing off I called out to Mike Stanton, who was still working the waterline of the Whaler.

  “If you want to fix her up again, I’ll pay you.”

  He looked off across the ramp at my truck.

  “OK. Yeah. Maybe.”

  I nodded, put my right foot in the middle of the canoe, grabbed the gunwales and pushed off.

  My ribs were sore from the plane crash. My arms and shoulders knotted from the parking lot fight. And my lungs were dry and constricted from too much air conditioning and not enough exercise. Cleve’s canoe seemed awkward and the paddle felt strange in my hand. I tried to get a rhythm going and got deeper into the flow of the current and around the first mangrove curves, but it wasn’t working. I couldn’t get the feel of someone
else’s boat. The trim felt wrong. The balance was off. The only thing that wasn’t different was the river.

  I still worked up a heavy sweat and a running heartbeat by the time I entered the mouth of the canopy. Inside the shade I stopped paddling and drifted into the coolness. A Florida red belly turtle stood guard on a downed tree trunk, his neck stretched out as if sniffing the air, the yellow, arrow-shaped marking on his snout pointing up the river. The white summer sky peeked through the leaves, its rays spattered the ferns below and in the distance I heard the soft roll of thunder. I resettled myself in the seat and moved on.

  By the time I reached the shack it was raining, hard. The leaf canopy sounded like cloth ripping and lightning sent a flash through the undergrowth and for an instant stole the color from the trees. I lashed the canoe to my platform and ran the bags up the stairs but when I twisted the knob and pushed, the door rattled and stuck.

  I’d forgotten Cleve’s new lock and dug through my pockets for the key. Once inside I dragged the bags through the doorway and stood dripping on the pine floors and squinting through the dusk. I had seen too much of Billy’s airy and fashionable apartment.

  I found my way to the kerosene lamp and lit the wick. Hammonds’ warrant servers had been civil. With the exception of a few counter items out of place, it was the same as I’d left it. I started a wood fire in the stove and set up a pot of coffee. I found my old enameled cup that some officer had misplaced on the drain board.

  Outside the lightning snapped and I could hear the water sluicing off the roof and onto the cinnamon fern below the windows. I took off my dripping clothes and sat naked in my wooden chair, tipped back on two legs, put my heels on the table and listened to the rain.

  I lay in my bunk that night half dreaming and half recalling, my skin moist in the humidity, and every time I closed my eyes I could see blue and red lights flashing through the trees. I was back in Philadelphia. The concrete sidewalk was still wet from some early-morning drizzle and up high at the top of the hill in the distance loomed the huge, yellowish back wall of the Museum of Art. In front were the tiered steps that the Rocky character had charged up and then shaken his fists at the world. In back was the Schuylkill River winding out through an urban park of maple trees and wooded lanes and granite cliffs. On that morning, between the museum and boathouse row, under a thicket of azaleas, lay a young woman with her running suit muddied and half pulled off, her Nike cross trainer on one foot but without a partner, and her throat cut from ear to ear.