Shadow Men

by Jonathon King

  “You know what I mean, Max,” she said, cranking the chair back so her face angled up into the sun.

  She was wearing an aqua green one-piece made of some kind of Lycra that competitive swimmers wear. She was not the kind of woman who had to cover any part of her figure, but I’d never seen her in a bikini. Her hair was brushed back into a ponytail that she’d slipped through the adjustable back of her Robicheaux’s Dock & Bait Shop cap. I was content to sit and watch her, occasionally shift my attention to a lonely cloud scudding across the blue sky, and then shift back to watch more of her. She was quiet for a few minutes, then pulled a tube of suntan lotion out of her bag and started on her legs. Once covered, she again reclined. I watched a woman in a straw hat and varicose veins work her way slowly south, picking through shells. I had great practice being silent. I knew I could wait Richards out.

  “All right, Max,” she said after twenty minutes. “You win.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, what. What’s going on with your search for the trail workers, and what about the tracers?”

  I didn’t gloat. I just launched into what Billy and I had come up with, the list of clergy and my instinct on the Placid City minister.

  “How about the tail?” she said. “No more white vans?”

  “Not that I’ve noticed.”

  “You guys ever trace the numbers on that helicopter?”

  “Could never really make them out. Just a private job was all we could tell.”

  “You check with the local airports? Takeoffs of private choppers during that time frame?”

  “You’re talking like a cop, Richards. I’m not so sure the towers are going to be so forthcoming to a P.I., but no, I didn’t check. Good catch, Detective.”

  She smiled and leaned back farther in her chair.

  “I could do an NCIC on your reverend,” she said. “If he pans out and you get a DOB on the father, we could go into the archives.”

  I knew the National Crime Information Center could be accessed only by government and law enforcement agencies. “Isn’t that against policy, Officer? Using a government database for private reasons?” I said.

  She finally turned her head and lowered her sunglasses to the tip of her nose. “Yeah, it is,” she said, a smile behind the look. “But something tells me that with your track record, Freeman, this isn’t going to stay a private matter for long.”

  We sat back for awhile, letting our skin soak in the sun. She pulled a paperback out of her bag and read and I watched the movement of the ocean, the curl and boil of the waves and the catch of spray in the southeast wind. The visibility was a good ten miles and to the south I could see the gray hulk of a freighter anchored out at sea, off the inlet to Port Everglades. The financial and manufacturing lifeblood of the South American hemisphere was now moving through southeast Florida and the ports that were dredged out of the coastal rivers over the last century. The infrastructure—railroads and highways—that moved the goods of that economic foundation were first built on the muscle and sacrifice of men like Cyrus Mayes and his sons. Was it any different with the men who dug the Panama Canal? Built the Transcontinental Railroad to California? Hell, some six hundred were killed by a hurricane that hit the middle Keys in 1935, many of them workers building Henry Flagler’s impossible railway across the necklace of coral islands from the mainland to Key West. The barons and moguls and king’s names always go down in the history books tied to such projects, while the names of the dead workers disappear or are scratched on some memorial long forgotten. It is the way of history. Was there any justice in it? Maybe not, but if nearly two generations of a family were killed for trying to walk away from such a project, wasn’t some sort of justice or at least some amount of truth due? The sandy touch of her foot against mine brought my head around. I had out-waited Richards’s nonstop energy again.

  “Hey, before you go into a coma, you wanna take a run?” she said, folding her knees up. “Just an easy one?”

  We stretched out on the hard pack at the water’s edge, then started north at a loping pace. Richards had pulled on a T-shirt and was on my inside shoulder. She liked to be ankle-deep in the water as she ran. I admit I was the one who opened the conversation.

  “How’s your friend? The one with the patrolman problem?”

  She waited about fifteen strides before answering.

  “She came over to my place the other night.”

  “You made up?”

  “She needs help, Max. I mean, she’s bitching about this clown one minute, and defending him the next. She’s confused as hell.

  “I don’t want to just tell her to dump the asshole and get out. I’ll just end up pushing her away like I did last time, and she’ll just fall back with him to prove she’s not wrong.”

  Her frustration was in her pace. The angrier she got, the more energy went into her legs and the faster we both ran.

  “But I can see the shit coming, Max. She was over for a couple of hours. We were out back and her cell phone must have rung twenty times. She just kept checking the callback number and not answering. I could tell it was him doing that control thing.”

  We were pushing now, fast enough so it was becoming hard to talk and keep our breathing steady at the same time. I let her gain a bit on me and watched her from behind, the bob and swish of her ponytail, the cabled lines of muscle in her calves. She finally eased up and drifted back to me.

  “You ask any of the other guys on patrol about him? His partner maybe?” I said. I had not told her about the stop McCrary had made at the convenience store.

  “I talked with his sergeant. He said he’d look into it. Give the guy the word,” she snorted. “What word? Be careful when you’re smacking your girlfriend around?”

  She needed to blow this out. I let her grind on it for a few more strides and then challenged her to push it to the fishing pier that was coming up about three hundred yards away. We lengthened our strides and the effort stole any extra breath I had. My legs started to ache, and I think I caught a quick grin from her at the hundred-yard mark, when she caught me by surprise and opened up a sprint that put her at the wooden pillars of the pier. We pulled up in the shade underneath and circled each other, our lungs still grabbing air, our hands on our hips. When our breathing was back near normal, we turned south and she took my hand.

  “Beat you,” she said, and the smile had moved up into her blue eyes. I said nothing and we walked together back to our chairs. We spent the rest of the afternoon in the shade of the umbrella, eating ham-and-tomato sandwiches and drinking iced tea while I fulfilled a promise to her and told her the story of my father.

  She sat quietly, her legs crossed and shoulders turned close to me while I talked of the abuse that my cop dad had brought home on a regular basis from the time I was old enough to remember. I spoke of my own fear and shame at not having put an end to it myself. And I told her the secret that my mother and Billy’s mother shared. How two women, unlikely friends of different races but of similar heart, had conspired and worked together to free my mother from a lifetime of control and humiliation. It was a story that I had not shared with any other person. Billy and I had even let the secret slip back into a past that neither of us wanted to revisit. When I finished, Richards took off her sunglasses and looked at me. Not a look of sorrow or of pity. She was studying me and I raised my eyebrows in question.

  “What?”

  “Thank you,” she said, again taking my hand.

  “For unloading?”

  “No,” she said. “For giving me a piece of you, Freeman.”

  I looked out again at the color of the water and the scatter of seabirds, then back at her.

  “Fair enough,” I said, and squeezed her fingers.

  We packed away our beach things and walked up to the tiki bar and climbed the sandy ramp to the open-air restaurant. We ordered margaritas and conch fritters and watched the light of the day leak out behind us and turn the water a deep indigo and then a slate gray. My phone
had not rung. I knew I would have to make the trip to Placid City to get answers, but tonight we were going to do nothing. No cop talk. No analyzing cases. We were going to be like normal people, without any worries.

  CHAPTER

  15

  Early on a Sunday morning I packed up an overnight bag, folded a Florida map and started driving to church. Our list of clergy possibilities had been whittled by callbacks. I’d left two more messages for the pastor at the Church of God in Placid City that went unanswered. Billy and I had discussed the possibility that we might be on a fishing trip in a much larger sea. It had only been a rumor that the male descendent of our gunman Jefferson had become a preacher, and even then we were only guessing that he had stayed in the state. Billy expanded the search parameters into northern Florida and was talking about pushing it up into other Southern states. He’d even forwarded the idea that the grandson could have changed his name after leaving Everglades City in the 1970s and disappeared anywhere.

  But Mrs. William Jefferson’s accent and her affirmation that her husband had roots in southeast Florida made a visit imperative. Her single comment kept rolling in my head, the jagged edges refusing to nub down. “That part of the family has been passed on.” The reticence in the voice of the wife of a country preacher pushed me on.

  Southern Boulevard carried me through the urban sprawl of West Palm Beach, and twenty miles out, the land turned open and flat, with sugar-cane stalks, freshly tilled vegetable fields, and sod farms that lay as green and uniform as felt on a forty-acre billiard table. Route 441 took me nearly to Belle Glade, a farming town that has supported a migrant community of field-workers and seasonal pickers for more than half a century. The town sits at the southern curve of massive Lake Okeechobee, but I couldn’t see the water. A huge earthen dyke had been constructed here by the U.S. government in 1930. It was their response to the hurricane of 1926, which brought more rain in its march from the tropics than anyone had seen or imagined in their worst nightmares. The storm twisted up waves on the lake that surpassed ocean swells and sent the power of tons of water surging over the southern banks and sweeping over the town of Moore Haven. Many of the 2,500 residents killed were never found, their bodies buried in churned black muck—all that was left of the rich soil that had made the region the world’s green emerald of winter vegetable growing. In the wake of nature’s disaster, man became determined to tame her. The dyke was built and the natural flow of fresh water to the Everglades, which runs from this point for more than a hundred miles to the end of the Florida peninsula, was forever changed—many say for the worse. The same charge was raised when the Tamiami Trail builders constructed their road, when Cyrus Mayes and his sons helped put down the first unnatural barrier to the flow of shallow water to Florida Bay. If one considers such evolution to be evil, then there was enough complicity to go around.

  I cruised slowly through the sugar cane capital city of Clewiston and then northwest past a sign that read OUR SOIL IS OUR FUTURE. Then the highway opened back up. With every mile the elevation subtly changed. Pine lands, with individual, polelike tree trunks and green, tasseled tops, lined the road. The landscape was occasionally interrupted by carefully laid out orange groves, the rows running to the horizon and the close trees already showing gobs of the ripening fruit. I timed myself by the mileage signs along the way and made it into Placid City just after eight. There was little movement on the Sunday morning streets. I made two loops into commercial and residential areas that went no more than two blocks off the main highway. It was a narrow place of clapboard and red brick, pickup trucks and broom-swept sidewalks.

  When I pulled into Mel’s Placid Café, I turned off the engine and let the constant road noise of the trip leach away. There was a gray dust on the step up to the low porch of the restaurant and curtains on the windows. It was not until I reached for the door handle of the truck that I noticed a car parked across my back bumper. It took up the entire pane of my rearview mirror. “Jesus, Max,” I whispered to myself. “You do attract them.”

  When I stepped out of the truck, there was a little man leaning up against the front bumper of a Crown Victoria. It was the kind of car a big man might drive, and he looked out of place next to it. I pretended I was counting out my change from my pocket while I measured him. He was dressed in khaki, but it looked more like a style than a uniform. There was no adornment on the shirt, no epaulets or insignia, only the one single gold star pinned over the left breast. I cut my eyes through the parking lot and saw no patrol cars or backup vehicles.

  “Mornin’,” he finally said, knowing that I was stalling. “One beautiful Sunday morning.” He emphasized the observation by looking up at the treetops and sky. The man’s head was bald and tan, and if he was more than five feet seven, I was being generous.

  “You do have a gorgeous piece of country here, Sheriff,” I said, guessing.

  “And mighty quiet too, Mr.…” He bumped himself off my fender and reached out his hand.

  “Freeman,” I said, stepping forward to accept the small but firm handshake and thinking that little men in positions of power always had a habit of squeezing one’s hand a bit more strongly than needed. “Max Freeman.”

  “Mr. Freeman,” he said with a politician’s smile. “I welcome you to Placid City. You came just for the delights of Mel’s home cooking?”

  “Not solely,” I said. “Though I’m sure it will certainly be worth the trip, Sheriff, uh…”

  “Wilson,” he said. “O. J. Wilson.”

  It was difficult to judge his age. There were prominent crow’s- feet at the corners of his eyes and three rows of worry lines across his forehead. But he was fit and there was an energy coming off him that belied an older man. He was looking up into my eyes, trying to hold them, and it did not please me. I’d done the same in street interrogations and didn’t like being on the other side of the stare.

  “You former law enforcement or military, Mr. Freeman?” he asked.

  “You have a preference, Sheriff?”

  “Sorry, just the way you carry yourself,” he said. “No offense meant.”

  “None taken,” I replied. I was actually intrigued by his slightly bulldog bearing. “I was a cop, up north. I’m working as a P.I. now, mostly out of West Palm and Lauderdale.”

  “You’re on business then, up this way?”

  “Just checking on an estate matter, for an attorney,” I said.

  He nodded as if he understood and reached out to touch the side of my truck.

  “Nice truck,” he said. “You a hunter, Mr. Freeman?”

  “No, sir. Never have been.”

  “Then there wouldn’t be any firearms back behind the seats there, correct?”

  “I do have a permit for a concealed handgun, Sheriff. And that’s in a bag behind the seat.” I wasn’t sure where this was going, but I did believe O. J. Wilson had his reasons and I really was in no mood to rile him.

  “Would you like to take a look, Sheriff?” I said, and reopened the driver’s-side door and folded up the seat.

  “I would, thank you,” he said, and bent in. He was short enough so that the floorboards were above his knees, and he reached in and gave my backpack and the sleeping bag I kept there a thorough going over. While he was bent inside, a couple parked their car and walked past us into the café. They did not so much as look back, as though the sight of the local constable going through a stranger’s vehicle was as routine as the Sunday paper. When he was done he arranged the bags back the way they’d been.

  “Thank you, Mr. Freeman. I appreciate your cooperation,” he said, stepping back like some baggage security guard at the airport.

  “Mind letting me in on what this is all about, Sheriff?” I said.

  “Well, sir. I can’t really,” he said, dismissing me. “Let’s just say it’s a precaution and leave it at that if you don’t mind, Mr. Freeman. Like you said, it’s a beautiful and peaceful Sunday morning.”

  “No, sir. That was your description, Sherif
f,” I said, but the little man had already turned and headed into Mel’s, leaving me to stand and simply wonder a bit before I finally climbed the stairs and went in to have my breakfast.

  I was still frowning when a bell hanging on a curled piece of soft iron rang as I opened the door. The waitress actually said, “Howdy.” A middle-aged man with a rough and mottled complexion tipped the bill of his John Deere cap as we passed and I nodded back. I sat at an empty table in the corner that was covered in a red and white checked cloth and decorated with a single plastic geranium. The waitress was dressed in jeans, with a string apron and a flowered western blouse. She smiled as if I were a friend.

  “How you doin’ today, sir? Can I get you some coffee to start?”

  “You read my mind, ma’am,” I said, and then asked about the special. When she came back I hooked my thumb at the front of the room and said, “Your sheriff always so attentive on Sunday mornings?

  She put a wrinkle in the side of her mouth and shook her head like a mother who was just told her son was teasing the girls again.

  “Don’t y’all worry about O. J.—he don’t mean nothin’ by it,” she said. Then she lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Truth is, he’s like a protective daddy. The man got the worst luck with them gunshot killin’s, and he thinks it’s his fault they can’t solve ’em.

  “Killings?”

  She smiled again and said, “You’re not from around here, are you?

  “No ma’am.”

  “Well, sir,” she began, her voice dropping even further, “we might be the smallest place in the state with a real-life serial killer out there.” I could see John Deere pulling the brim of his hat farther down, and I guessed he’d heard the town gossip doing her thing before. “He’s been knockin’ off the bad boys of Highland County for more than fifteen years now. Every couple of years or so, another one drops, an’ everyone gets themselves all in a fuss about how we ain’t so far from the big city after all. Poor ol’ Sheriff Wilson just took on the chore of finding him. Likes to frisk every stranger that comes through here.”