Shadow Men

by Jonathon King

  “You’re a hard man, Freeman. I knowed men like you,” he said. “All of ’em in the past.”

  I could find no way to respond. If it was a compliment, I didn’t take it as such.

  CHAPTER

  20

  Nash had run the airboat up onto the grass only yards from our skiff. I climbed aboard first and searched through their supplies. I left them their fresh water and food and the first aid kit. I took another 9 mm from one pack and an old but beautifully preserved 16-gauge shotgun from a scabbard strapped up behind the driver’s seat. Nash whined about the gun, begging that it had been passed down from his father, but Brown again informed him to shut up.

  They propped Derrer up against the gang box at the base of the elevated driver’s chair and Nash climbed up and started the big airplane engine. The one called Cummings did not look back at me. His business was done. The mist of spray kicked up as the airboat pulled away felt cool against my face, and Brown and I waited until the sound faded. Then the old man stood up on the skiff to get a higher angle to watch them. I sat on the deck, my legs crossed, and took out the map and my GPS and Derrer’s tracking unit.

  “You ain’t worried about that feller goin’ back and tellin’ the police you shot him?” Brown said, continuing to look out after the airboat. I scrolled through the unit’s stored coordinates and could not find anything that coincided with the longitude and latitude of John William’s records.

  “There would be a lot of explaining to do. Some jurisdictional matters. Permission from the men who hired those two. My guess is he’ll be compensated and quiet. PalmCo isn’t going to want to bring any more scrutiny out here, especially law enforcement scrutiny.”

  Brown just nodded and watched me working the map and the GPS. The encounter with Cummings and Derrer had thrown me off and I realized the spot we’d been looking for was back toward Marquez Ridge. We had passed it while leading the airboat to the hammock.

  “We’ve got to backtrack,” I said to Brown as he stepped down into the muck to spin the skiff.

  “Yep,” he said, and did not offer another word, or ask a question about where we needed to go. Instead he poled us through the open grass between the two mounds of trees, and I actually lay back in the skiff and stared into the sky. My head was throbbing. I was trying not to replay the last hour through my head. I’d shot a man, maybe out of necessity, maybe out of anger or frustration. When you’re a cop, you’re trained that whenever you fire your gun, it’s a use of deadly force, meant to kill. You aren’t on TV. You don’t try to wound. When the citizens start whining after every fatal police shooting about why the cop couldn’t have just winged the asshole with the knife, they’re out of our loop. Danger is a pissed off guy with a knife and only a wound. The killer in the subway and now some P.I. who just happened to piss me off. Somewhere inside me I had that capacity, and I wasn’t sure what that fact told me.

  I registered the change in light on my closed eyelids before I felt the skiff slide up into thicker grass and come to a halt. Brown had poled us into the shadows. We would once again have to pull the boat by a line to follow the riverbed path. I checked the GPS and looked ahead. Brown wasn’t waiting for instructions. I put the unit away and we pulled together.

  After twenty minutes, he stopped. I knew it wasn’t because he was tired. I found my water bottle and took a long drink and sat on the edge of the skiff. Brown was still standing, staring at the stand of ancient pine, the single limb that had been broken but remained alive as it fell perpendicular through the crotch of another. The knot where they met had grown together, and now that I looked at it as a whole, it was the perfect representation of a cross.

  “This is it, Freeman,” Brown said. “Git out yer map or your metal finder. This is it.”

  I checked the GPS and plotted it on the map. The alignment was close but not perfect, but I wasn’t arguing. I assembled the metal detector and adjusted the settings while Brown gave me his rationale, a lot of it based on his gut instinct, which I had long learned to trust out here where everything, even the earth herself, had a way of shifting and moving.

  “If them last letters were written in the summer, then it’d be the rainy season,” Brown said, scanning the area around the trees, but looking up anxiously at the form of the cross.

  “The rains’ll raise this water another four, five inches and this here bed’ll fill up. We ain’t but two mile from the Tamiami Trail,” he said.

  I’d known how close we were because I had been working the map as we came up from the south. I thought of how disappointed Cummings was going to be when and if he found out how close they’d actually been to civilization when I threatened to leave them.

  “If Jefferson had loaded them dead men into his skiff, he’d of been able to pole his way down here on the high water and come right on in here on that current.”

  I climbed up to the tree formation and then started working the metal detector from the base of the cross in a circular motion. I was slow and careful and exact in my movements.

  “If he knew these Glades as well as my daddy, he could of made it easy in the dark, even without a moon,” Brown said. “It’s the way I woulda done ’er.”

  I expanded the concentric circles with the tree base as my epicenter. Nothing showed on the attached screen. It was all vegetable, no hard mineral. The detector was designed to pick up anything impenetrable—a belt buckle, a necklace, coins, a pocketknife.

  “You think John William snapped that pine limb and marked the grave?” I finally asked Brown, knowing it was on both our minds. The old man let his eyes rest on the image.

  “I ain’t a religious man, Freeman. That there coulda formed up on its own like that. Maybe it’s got God’s hand on it. Maybe not. They’s things I seen in war and nature and men that made me swing both ways over the years. Best I can say is, it don’t hurt not to discount the Almighty altogether.”

  I was eight feet out from the tree base, due south, when the detector beeped under my hand. I stopped and swung the pad back to a cover of maidenhair fern and it beeped again. The readout showed a depth of two and a half feet. Brown brought the trenching tool over while I cleared a big square of vegetation and studied the cover of slick muck and plant roots. I got down on my knees and scraped away the top layer with my hands, watching for anything foreign, anything out of place, anything. After a few minutes I started in with the shovel, carefully coming up with one spade of thick, wet earth at a time and flopping it onto a rain poncho that Brown had brought from the skiff. The old man scanned the pile with the detector like I’d shown him and then went through it with his fingers. He knew what bone looked like. Every couple of spadefuls we would sweep the hole I was creating, and the beep still registered.

  My digging was a good two feet down when Brown said, “Bone.” He held up a dull gray chunk between his dirt-stained fingers. It was the size of a poker chip and about the same thickness. We both stared at it—the possibilities, the reassurance that we were not wrong, and the dread that came with it.

  “Could it be an animal?” I asked.

  “Could be,” he said. “I ain’t no expert.”

  We swept the hole again. Still beeping.

  We found four more pieces of bone, which Brown carefully put aside in one of the plastic evidence bags I’d brought. I made sure we marked the depth of each one taken from the hole. Then the shovel blade hit something tough, but not hard. I reached down and felt with my fingers and found fabric. In one of Billy’s books I’d come across a study of the Glades that remarked on the preservation power of the thick muck. Because the layers were set down by rotting, microbial vegetation, the muck was so dense that little air penetrated the lower levels. If it was airless, the breakdown of any nonorganic material would be greatly slowed. I set aside the shovel and went down with both hands, using my fingernails to scratch away the dirt, exposing more and more of what I soon realized was leather.

  It took another thirty minutes or so for me to free the remnant of a w
ork boot from the muck. The thick sole was nearly intact, but the leather upper was the fragile consistency of wet cardboard. I brought it up with a layer of muck from beneath its resting place and placed it on the poncho. Brown waved the detector over it. It beeped.

  Brown crouched nearby while I carefully separated dirt from leather. I went inside the boot with my fingers. It had filled with muck, and I brought out a handful at a time. Brown went through each small pile, studied it, and then swept it away. But as I got farther in toward the sole, he began to find bone; small phalanges that he recognized as foot bone. I was deep into the front of the boot, where the hard toe cover was remarkably intact, when my fingers touched metal. I curled them around the object and came out with a rounded, ancient, pocketwatch.

  I stared at the piece lying in the palm of my hand. Brown exhaled deeply and then went to the skiff. I hadn’t moved when he came back with his jar of water and poured it over my hand, washing away the dirt while I turned and rubbed the timepiece with my fingers. The metal was a dull yellow gold. I pushed the locket release but had to work my fingernails in under the lid to finally pry it open. Brown poured more water in to wash out the dirt that had penetrated inside, and I rubbed my fingertips over the inside of the lid to expose an inscription:

  The Lord is thy Shepherd my son, let him lead you, and the Kingdom of God will by thine forever.

  Your loving father, Horace Mayes

  I sat with the disk of gold in my hand for some time, trying to connect the little I knew of Cyrus Mayes with this, his final resting place. A good and righteous man and his innocent sons had lost their lives to another being who was their polar opposite. If John William Jefferson had marked this death bed with a cross for some deeply warped recognition of a God, he had gained no mercy. If that deeply buried sense of religion had passed into his future gene pool and led his progeny to swing to his moral opposite, perhaps there was some hope in evolution. But his own son had ended his own life, and I could not help but think that the stain of John William’s acts had stopped spreading.

  Brown and I packed up the boat. I recorded the GPS coordinates of the gravesite in the unit as well as on paper tucked away where it wouldn’t be lost or electronically wiped out. We were obviously overmatched by the crime scene. Billy would convince law enforcement to bring their own forensic paleontologists out to grid the sight and recover the remains of the Mayes family, and to try and determine the details of their murders. We made a feeble attempt to stake the poncho over the three-foot-square excavation we’d completed, but all we could hope for was a day or so without rain. I dropped the watch into another evidence bag, wrapped it up with the boot and the bone fragments, and tucked the whole thing into my pack. We pulled the skiff south to the spot where Brown had tied up his boat, and I was mildly surprised to see that it had not been scuttled by the PalmCo P.I.s.

  We made the boat switch, tied off the skiff, and then Brown cranked up the engine and turned her back toward Chevalier Bay. I sat on the transom and calmly dropped the tracking device that had been planted in my satchel into the water behind us. The vibration of the engine hummed through my bones and told me how every tendon and muscle ached. When we finally hit open water the sun was slipping down and the blueness of the sky was already darkening. I focused on the old man for the first time in hours and noticed the crusted mud and grime and stink that covered his clothing. He appeared to be some caricature on a kid’s slime show. Then I looked down at myself and saw that we were twins, and I began to laugh. Brown hadn’t said a word since I’d pulled Cyrus Mayes’s pocket watch from the rotting boot. He now turned to look at me with as close a look of merriment on his face as I had ever seen him carry. He then turned back into the sun, pulled down the brim of his hat and began to whistle. “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” And he stayed with the melody for a good part of the trip back to the docks in Chokoloskee.

  CHAPTER

  21

  When we got to the docks the sun was down and the last clouds on the horizon were bloodred. Dawkins’s boats were still out on the water. I pulled out some clean clothes and a towel from the cab of my truck and showered off with a hose that the boat captain used to spray the salt off his decks. I tossed my ruined jeans and shirt and boots into the truck bed. When I was dressed and half human again, I sat in the cab and called Billy.

  “I don’t quite know what to say, Max,” Billy said when I told him of our discovery of the grave, as well as the PalmCo investigators and their admission that they were working for the attorneys who had offered him the bribe. “I suppose I had little optimism that it would go this far when we started. I’m pleased, but saddened.”

  I told him I was convinced the investigators didn’t know about the grave and were just following instructions to follow and mark me. I also told him that we let the P.I.s leave before finding the grave and that I doubted they’d be able to find it on their own. I didn’t mention the shooting.

  “I have some prosecutor friends in Collier County,” he told me. “With the evidence, I should think we can get a recovery team and a group of forensics people out there tomorrow.”

  “All right. I’ll stop over in Lauderdale and see if Sherry has any pull with the homicide guys over in Collier—she can get them excited about an eighty-year-old cold case.”

  “Speaking of Richards, she left a message earlier today, something about one of her fellow deputies getting a call about you from the sheriff up in Highlands County. That’s the Reverend Jefferson’s region, right?”

  “Yeah. I ran into the sheriff while I was up there. Curious guy. Paranoid about some string of shootings in his jurisdiction.

  “Well, he’s apparently curious about you and was checking out your credentials,” Billy said. “Richards said it might be nothing, but she was anxious to tell you about it. I tried calling her back, but I haven’t been able to get through.”

  “All right, I’m heading that way. Let me know about the forensics response. I don’t think we’re gonna have to worry about intercepts anymore.”

  “Be careful driving back, Max,” Billy said, and clicked off.

  I went back down to the dock to say good-bye to Nate Brown. The old man had removed his shirt and used the hose to soak his head and chest. I tossed him my half-wet towel and he thanked me. While his face was in the towel I noted the scars on his back and under his rib cage. His chest hair was thick and snow white, and a stark tan line ran around his neck where his collar protected him from the sun. The wrinkles in his loose skin were pronounced and his stomach looked sunken and unhealthy.

  “I’m heading back, Nate. I want to thank you for helping me, and I want to tell you not to worry about what happened out there with those company men. You’re clear.”

  He did not answer.

  “There will probably be some cops and scientific people out there tomorrow, and they’d probably pay to have you guide them back to the site,” I said, even though I could anticipate his answer.

  “Don’t bother bringin’ my name into it if you don’t mind,” he said. “Them boys’ll take that GPS and find ’er just fine. Take ’em a while, but they’ll get it.”

  He gathered up his shirt and tossed it into his boat, then handed my towel back to me.

  “I’m a go check on that Nash kid. Like to get his daddy’s shotgun back to ’im if I can.”

  I watched him lower himself down the ladder into his boat as smoothly as a surefooted cat. But I had the definite feeling that Nate Brown was not long for this world. He’d seen too much of what I had flippantly called progress. He didn’t like it, and I had a feeling he was ready to leave it.

  He started his engine and tossed off a line and the boat drifted back into open water. He pulled the bill of his cap, pushed up the throttles, and was gone.

  During the drive back across the state I tried Richards’s phone three times. I let it ring eight or nine times before hanging up. Her answering machine didn’t come on. I set the cruise control on the truck when I got into the eas
tbound lanes of Alligator Alley, but the cut of my headlights through the middle of the vast darkness on either side ended up hypnotizing me instead of keeping me alert. Twice I caught myself drifting out of my lane, my head snapping up with the realization that even though my eyes were open, I was seeing nothing. I rolled down both windows and turned off the cruise so I would have to concentrate on the speed, then searched for a Stevie Ray Vaughn CD that I had buried in the glove compartment. I popped it in, loud.

  By the time I hit the traffic of west Broward County, it was after nine, but the city lights and the bustle recharged me. I drove straight into Fort Lauderdale, and when I pulled around the corner to Richards’s street and saw the kaleidoscope of spinning red and blue emergency lights, my heart felt like it had suddenly doubled in mass and dropped down into my rib cage.

  I didn’t remember parking. I tried to control myself, like a cop, a professional. I walked around the news trucks and patrol cars and gawking clumps of neighbors. I caught a glance of a yellow tarp draped over a body on Richards’s front lawn. I passed two uniformed officers who must have mistaken my demeanor and stride as belonging to their brotherhood, but before I got to the house someone grabbed my elbow.

  “Excuse me, sir,” said the man’s voice. “Do you have an I.D., sir?

  I could not take my eyes from the yellow sheet, and I instinctively pulled my elbow out of the questioner’s grip.

  “Who is it?” I said, still not looking at the cop behind me.

  “I’m gonna need some I.D., sir. This is a secure crime scene, and…”

  I spun on him and the kid took a step back, a touch of alarm in his face. Then I heard her voice behind me, from up on the front porch.

  “It’s OK, Jimmy. He’s with me.”