“Christ, that’s repulsive,” I said.
“It’s called spin, Max. And due to the fact that w-we don’t have anything sp-specifìc to tie their old company Noren to John William Jefferson, it m-might be the b-best we can do.”
“And that’s going to be enough for you?” I said, wondering if my friend had gone soft. But I should have known.
“No. We’ll d-demand that they continue to f-fund any extra c- costs for the forensics investigation into the other b-burial spots on John William’s m-map. And if there is anyw-way to identify them, their f-families will also have t-to be compensated.
“We will also ask that a m-memorial to the men who lost their l-lives d-during the building of the Trail be purchased by them and s- set in a prominent p-place on land that they will provide.”
“And that’s going to be enough for you?”
I had succeeded in dampening some of his gloating.
“We will m-most likely n-never see their internal documentation from that time. If it even ever existed, they would have sh-shredded it by now.
“They may even h-have the n-names of the other m-men Mayes’s letters sp-spoke of. But I doubt that even a h-homicide investigation is g-going to find them.”
When Billy mentioned Mayes’s letters I thought of the young man. At the church I’d asked him if he would be driving back to the coast. He said he didn’t know. When I stood to go, he handed his great-great-grandfather’s watch back to me.
“You’ll need this for evidence, yes?”
I told him he’d get it back as soon as possible.
“Yes, I know.”
When I left he was still sitting in the front pew, his head bent forward in prayer, but I didn’t know for whom—his family or the Jefferson’s.
“How much is he going to get in compensation?” I asked Billy.
“I’ll ask for a m-million, and they’ll give it,” he said. “But it won’t m-matter to him, you know? He c-called to say he’d enrolled in the seminary.
“Yeah, I figured,” I said. “The truth shall set you free.”
I spent the next two days at the beach, swimming in the surf, reading travel books I stole from Billy’s shelves, and then falling asleep with warm salt air in my lungs and uneasy thoughts in my head. I talked with Richards on the phone and gave her a recitation of the details of my wounding of the P.I., the revelation of the reverend’s own possible killing spree, and the discovery of his suicide.
She told me about the removal of McCrary’s body from her front lawn. That she had spent two hours with internal affairs, documenting what she knew of his relationship with her friend, Deputy Harris. It was shop talk, and even over the phone I could sense an uncomfortable hesitation in her voice. I asked if I could drive down and see her. I asked if she could come up, get away for a day in the sun. She said Harris was now staying with her and she didn’t want to be far away. They were talking late into the night, and the woman was in a fragile place.
“You OK?” I asked the last time we spoke.
The phone felt awkward in my hand and I could hear her breath in the receiver.
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about lives caught in circles, Max,” she said, without offering more. I tried to out-wait her again and kept swallowing back words.
“We could talk about it together,” I finally said. The phone was quiet on the other end, and I winced with a physical ache in my chest that I was losing something.
“Yeah, maybe,” she said. “Gotta go.” And the line went softly silent.
I wiped the sweat from my left eye with the shoulder of my shirt on the upstroke. When I switched to the other side of the canoe, I did the same on the right. I was pounding down the midline of the river in the open water, reaching and pulling with a ferocity I thought I’d left behind long ago. The sun was high and hot and even my raptor friend in the dead stalk of the tall palm was hiding somewhere in the cool shadows. I’d packed the boat with extra supplies. My intention was to make it a lengthy stay this time. I had had enough of bodies and bones, concrete and air-conditioning, recollections and remembrances. I needed to get back onto my river.
I didn’t stop my angry paddling until I reached the cavelike mouth of the upper river, and by then I was gasping to fill my overwrought lungs and the blood was pounding in my ears, and when I finally gave it up I bent forward and was nearly sick in the bow. The canoe coasted along with my final kick-stroke and drifted into the shadows. I laid the paddle handle on one gunwale, the blade on the opposite side, and crossed my arms over it. I rested my head on my slick forearms and closed my eyes. I could smell the leaves and roots rotting on the banks, taste the tannin in the tea-colored water, and feel the shady greenness cooling my back. I wanted to stay in that position forever. Then I heard the distinctive sound of a hammer on hard wood coming from the distance.
I took up the stroke again, and along with it, my head began its speculation. I couldn’t work up the same speed as before; the winding trail of the water through the cypress knees and clustered oak tree trunks slowed me. My exhausted shoulder muscles would not loosen again.
The hammering became louder, overwhelming any other sound in the forest. It had no rhythm—six or eight hard strikes, then quiet, then four more. I knew where it was coming from, but not why. When I got to the columned oaks that marked the water trail to my shack, the hammer reports stopped. I turned the canoe in and strained my eyes through the cover of tree limbs and ferns to see if I could catch any movement and surprise whoever was chopping at my home. I crept in slowly, taking care not to let water drip from the paddle blade. Thirty feet from the dock I could make out a rowboat through my cover. It was tied and anchored at one of the rear support pillars. Oddly, an aluminum extension ladder was set in its stern, and I could see that it was leaning up onto the northeast wall and was lashed to the column. Straddling the top of the ladder was Ranger Griggs. He had a plank of newly cut wood in his hand, and I watched him place it carefully against the corner wall of the shack and then take out his hammer from a ring on his tool belt. Before he could set another nail I called out to him.
“How much you charge for this kinda work?” I said.
My voice startled him. The ladder shifted and swayed and started the wide rowboat to rock.
“Jesus!” he yelped.
I paddled over while he settled his own heartbeat and waited for him to climb down. I lashed the canoe on his stern cleat. He was obviously embarrassed, and I made him more so by not saying anything.
“I, uh, came across some Dade County pine and, well, I figured I could use it,” he said, stumbling on his words.
“Yeah?”
“Well, I saw the state order warning that the building may not be inhabitable after the fire, and being somewhat familiar with the code, I figured it wouldn’t take that much to fix.”
“Yeah?”
He sat down on the port gunwale and reached down to open a small cooler. He hooked his fingers around the necks of two iced Rolling Rocks and offered me one. I took it.
“I had the day off with not much else to do so…I hope it’s OK.”
I twisted the top off the beer and tipped my head back as I drank.
“It looks like you know what you’re doing,” I said, keeping my eyes up on the corner where he had already set three planks after tearing out the blackened remains of the originals.
“Well, my father was a carpenter, and his father before him,” Griggs said. “So I come by it honestly.”
We sat in an uneasy silence for a few seconds, both looking up and avoiding what truth might be in either of our eyes. The boats were gently rocking below us both. The quiet was a shared salve.
“Well, then,” I finally said. “Let’s carry on.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the following people for their fine work and support. Many thanks to Mitch Hoffman, a young editor with an old editor’s work habit of making stories better, and to his colleagues at Dutton, particularly Erin
Sinesky, the finest publicist in the business. Also to my agent, Philip Spitzer, for including me in his legendary stable.
My wife and children for their sacrifices to my mental and physical absence. My friend Michael Connelly, for his inspiration and immeasurable help. My longtime newspaper editor, Earl Maucker, for giving me the freedom to make this happen. And Richard Hall, my grassroots marketing machine.
I would also like to thank the many booksellers I’ve met in these first few years who have introduced my stories to their readers, especially my local friends Joanne Sinchuk and Rob Hittel.
A Biography of Jonathon King
Jonathon King is the Edgar Award–winning author of the Max Freeman mystery series, which is set in south Florida, as well as a thriller and a historical novel.
Born in Lansing, Michigan, in the 1950s, King worked as a police and court reporter for twenty-four years, first in Philadelphia until the mid-1980s and then in Fort Lauderdale. His time at the Philadelphia Daily News and Fort Lauderdale’s South Florida Sun-Sentinel greatly influenced the creation of Max Freeman, a hardened former Philadelphia police officer who relocates to south Florida to escape his dark past. King began writing novels in 2000, when he used all the vacation days he accrued as a reporter to spend two months alone in a North Carolina cabin. During this time, he wrote The Blue Edge of Midnight (2002), the first title in the Max Freeman series. The novel became a national bestseller and won the Edgar Award for Best First Mystery Novel by an American Author. A Visible Darkness (2004), the series’ second installment, highlights Max’s mission to identify a dark serial killer stalking an impoverished community. Shadow Men (2004), the third in the series, revolves around Max’s investigation of an eighty-year-old triple homicide, and A Killing Night (2005) tells the story of a murder investigation in which the prime suspect is Max’s former mentor. After finishing A Killing Night, his fourth book, King left journalism to become a full-time novelist.
Since 2005, King has published his fifth and sixth Max Freeman novels, Acts of Nature (2007), about a hurricane that puts Max and his girlfriend at the mercy of some of the Everglades’ most menacing criminals, and Midnight Guardians (2010), which features the dangerous reemergence of a drug kingpin from Max’s past. He has also published the stand-alone thriller Eye of Vengeance (2007), about a military-trained sniper who targets the criminals that a particular journalist has covered as a crime reporter. In 2009, King published the historical novel The Styx, which tells the story of a Palm Beach hotel at the turn of the twentieth century and the nearby community’s black hotel employees whose homes were burned to the ground amid the violent racism of the time.
King currently lives in southeast Florida, where he writes, canoes, and explores the Everglades regularly.
Jonathon King playing basketball for his high school team, the Waverly Warriors, in Lansing, Michigan, in 1972.
King’s yearbook photo from his senior year of high school in 1972.
For seven summers, from 1974 to 1980, King was a lifeguard in Ocean City, New Jersey. He’s shown here in 1974 or 1975 with his best friend and fellow lifeguard, Scott Erb.
In 1976, King worked as part of a crew hired by boat owners to deliver sailboats from New Jersey to Florida at the end of the summer. He’s shown here sailing a forty-foot vessel down the coast.
King’s children, Jessica and Adam, at ages ten and eight, respectively, with the mascot of the University of Florida in Gainesville in 2003.
A handwritten manuscript page from King’s debut novel, The Blue Edge of Midnight. Worried that his years as a reporter would make it difficult to write thoughtfully using a keyboard, King wrote his first two books with pencil on legal pads to avoid sounding like a journalist.
King’s Edgar Award for the Best First Mystery Novel by an American Author, which he won in 2002 for The Blue Edge of Midnight, the debut book in the Max Freeman series. The Edgars, which are given annually by the Mystery Writers of America, are considered the most prestigious awards in the mystery genre.
King stands inside of Kim’s Alley Bar, one of the oldest taverns in Ft. Lauderdale. Several scenes in the Max Freeman series take place here, particularly in A Killing Night, in which Max investigates the abductions of several bartenders. An actual bartender from Kim’s Alley even made an appearance in the book.
King at an isolated fishing camp in the middle of the Florida Everglades.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 2004 by Jonathon King
cover design by ORIM
ISBN: 978-1-4532-9982-1
This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
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