I said, “People on the scene told you this?”
The detective said, “Squires even made nice with some gangbangers who gave him a hard time. Not Latin Kings. Probably MS-13 from Guatemala, who are bloodthirsty little shits. But even they must have been convinced.”
I told him, “This just doesn’t mesh with what I know about Harris Squires,” as Melinski talked over me, saying, “I know, I know, it’s hard to believe, but I’ve heard enough to be convinced. So you can relax, okay? Go back to your test tubes or have a beer. I’m going to bed.”
I said, “Some minister lets a thirteen-year-old girl, a stranger, get up in front of the whole congregation? Why?”
“It happened,” Melinski replied, sounding impatient, “that’s all that matters. I talked to the priest myself. He’s worked in Immokalee for nine years, which means he’s heard every possible combination of bullshit story. According to him, the girl walked in and said she had something important to say, so he let her talk. He described her as happy and relaxed, which is not the way a kidnapped kid acts.”
“The priest,” I said.
“Along with several local women, too. They offered her a place to stay, but the girl refused. Squires may have something to do with the dead body we found, who knows? But the girl’s with him because she wants to be with him. End of story.”
I said, “Harris Squires wouldn’t lift a finger to help anyone-not unless he expected to get something out of it.”
Melinski told me, “We’ll find out more when they get back to the trailer park. The girl told the priest that was their next stop, so we’ve got some uniforms there waiting.”
I had to ask, “Did your hostage-rescue people call his cell?”
“That’s the only part that bothers me,” Melinski told me. “They tried but no answer. Reception’s bad around Immokalee, which could explain it. The priest said, at first, he didn’t like the idea of a Guatemalan girl being with a gringo guy that age. He tried to talk her into staying, but the girl was so sure of what she was doing, he decided it was okay. At least for the hour or so it takes them to get back to the trailer park. Red Citrus? Yeah, Red Citrus. Maybe a little longer because the girl told the priest they might get something to eat first.”
“What time did they leave?” I asked. “I hope you have cops checking the local restaurants.”
Melinski told me, “They pulled out at little before eleven, so they should be at the trailer park in half an hour or so.” With exaggerated tolerance, he then added, “Have you heard anything I said? You can stop worrying. The priest told me some pretty wild stuff about the kid. So, finally, I maybe understand why you’ve taken an interest. You didn’t tell me the Latinos consider her some kind of saint or something.”
“The priest said that?” I asked.
“The guy sounded a little in awe of the girl, in fact. He said there were women crying, people waiting in line to ask the girl’s blessing. ‘God has taken the girl by the hand’-this is the priest talking, not me. But the man was serious. So there’s no need to worry, according to him. The priest’s exact words almost, and more than nine years he’s been working with immigrants.”
I said, “If God took missing girls by the hand, there would be a lot fewer missing girls. Please tell me you’re not buying into this baloney.”
I was relived that Tula and Squires had been spotted. But I was also feeling too restless to allow myself to be convinced. I didn’t admit this to Melinski, of course, and pretended to be satisfied when he promised to call when he got word the girl was safely back at Red Citrus.
After I hung up, I checked the luminous face of my dive watch: 11:25 p.m. I was approaching the intersection of Immokalee Road and what I guessed was Route 846, where Squires owned the four hundred acres. Continue straight and I would take yet another lap through Immokalee, then north to home-or maybe Emily’s place, if I could get her on the phone. Make a right, I would have to drive at least forty miles, round-trip, out of my way-and probably for no reason.
In my mind, though, I suddenly pictured the Mayan girl looking through the window of Squires’s trucking, seeing a sign that read IMMOKALEE 22 MILES, then texting the information to Tomlinson, a man she trusted. The image was so strong that I actually shook my head to get rid of it.
As I neared the intersection, I hesitated, my intellect telling me one thing, my instincts telling me something else. Normally, that’s seldom a cause for indecision-which is why I was a little surprised when I found myself following my intuition. I turned right onto the narrow two-lane that vectored eastward into the Everglades.
Something else my intellect and instincts argued about was whether I should call Tomlinson. If he had gone to Red Citrus, as expected, I should tell him to wait there to make sure Tula arrived.
It only made sense that I call him, but I had settled into a comfortable cocoon of solitude, focused laserlike on finding the girl. For me, that cocoon is a place rarely enjoyed when I’m Florida and I didn’t want to leave it.
It had to do with my shadow life. Solitude is what I enjoy most about it. I travel alone to Third World countries, to Everglades-dark places, and I find people. I then track those people. I become familiar with their schedules, their habits.
For the period of a week-sometimes two, depending on the importance of the assignment-I charted the subtle movements and interactions of a stranger’s life. I did it invisibly, with a laboratory precision that in the end allowed me to segregate that person from his surroundings as effectively as using tweezers to remove a bee, undetected, from its colony.
That was my specialty-my genius, Tomlinson might have called it, had he ever learned the truth. What I do, however, doesn’t demand genius. I have no illusions about my own gifts, other than to acknowledge that, since I was very young, I have had an obsessive need to identify, then define, orderly patterns in what most would dismiss as chaos.
We all have our quirks.
That’s my job when out of the country: to discern order in the chaos. To create a precision target. As creator, I am also tasked with finding the most effective method of displacing that target from his surroundings.
I am good at it.
After wrestling with the decision for a mile, I decided I wasn’t in the mood for a conversation with Tomlinson. Instead, I pulled over long enough to send a text:
Tula and Squires to arrive at Red Citrus by midnight, cops waiting. Let me know. If you’re drinking, stop now. Don’t piss off cops!
After a moment of thought, I added, Is Emily safe? then sent the text with a slow Whoosh! that told me reception was getting worse.
I got out of the truck long enough to urinate, then got back in, but left the dome light on. Out of long habit-or, perhaps, just to reestablish my focus-I took inventory of my equipment bag. First, I popped the magazines of both pistols to make certain they were loaded, although I knew they were.
I am not a gun fancier or collector, but the precision tolerances of fine machinery appeals to the same sensibilities that cause me to linger over a fine microscope. It was true of my Sig Sauer P226 pistol. The Sig was one of the first issued after the Joint Service Small Arms test trials of 1985, and I have trusted my life to it since that time. I had recently purchased a new magazine that held fifteen rounds instead of only ten. I had also added Tritium night sights, which I had yet to try on a range.
I held the Sig’s magazine in my hand, testing the mobility of the rounds with my thumb, the odor of Hoppe’s No. 9 gun solvent spreading a lingering sweetness through the cab of my truck. It reminded me of Tomlinson’s crack about smelling gun oil in the lab whenever I felt restless. An inside joke? Or was it a veiled reminder that, one way or another, my relationship with Emily was doomed as long as I continued to live my shadow life.
Whether a dig or a warning, what he’d said was true: When I get restless, it shows. After a month or two without a new mission, I find myself studying maps. I find myself at night sitting within easy reach of my Trans-Oceanic Radio, re
cleaning my weapons as if that private ceremony was an incantation that would bring a call from my handler.
After inspecting the Sig Sauer, I took the much smaller, lighter Kahr pistol in hand. It was black-matte stainless, comfortable to hold. After so many years trusting the Sig, it was tough to admit that this was now my weapon of choice. It wasn’t as tiny as another favorite-a Seecamp. 380-but the Kahr slipped just as easily out of the pocket. And it could be hidden almost as completely in the palm of my hand. Firing the Kahr, though, was a pleasure, and it had more stopping power than the Seecamp.
Like the Sig, the Kahr was loaded with federal Hydra-Shok hollow points. But the Kahr had the added advantage of a built-in laser sight that was activated whenever I gripped the thing to fire.
Unlike the high-tech Dazer Guardian, also in the bag, the laser sight was red, not green.
It was unlikely that I would use any of these weapons, just as I knew there was very little chance now that I would stumble onto Harris Squires and the Guatemalan girl. He and Tula were on their way to Red Citrus while I was out here wasting time on back roads east of Immokalee.
It didn’t matter. I was in a certain mood. To rationalize wasting time, I told myself this was training, a way to stay sharp.
I leaned to roll down the passenger window, and drove on.
Tomlinson is right. I’m not a fast driver. I slowed even more whenever I switched on the dome light and checked the satellite aerial. My pal had used a highlighter to square off the boundaries of Squires’s property, but it still wasn’t easy to pick out landmarks. I was driving through a shadowed mesa of cypress that I guessed was Owl Hammock. It meant I had at least fifteen miles to go.
Thus far, I hadn’t passed a car. Not one.
Alternately squinting at the aerial, then accelerating, my headlights tunneled through a starry silence, toward a horizon abloom with the nuclear glow of Fort Lauderdale, eighty miles to the east.
I passed through the precise geometrics of tomato fields and citrus orchards. Then more cypress domes that exited into plains of myrtle and saw grass. My eyes moved from the road, to the satellite aerial, then to my watch.
11:45 p.m.
Training exercise or not, my mind wandered back to Emily. My reaction to her had been a surprise. A shock, in fact, and now it was a new source of restlessness that was pleasure mixed with angst.
I had left Tomlinson alone with Emily for a reason-a deceit that Tomlinson had guessed correctly. It was a test. He suspected it, I knew it. I was subjecting myself, my new lover and my old friend to yet another of my relentless personal evaluations.
“Why do you set traps for people you care about when you’re the one who is inevitably hurt?” a smart but troubled woman had once asked me.
I had no answer then. I had no answer now.
It was a uncomfortable truth to admit, but that was balanced by something I believed with equal honesty: Emily Marston could be trusted. There was no rational explanation for why I trusted her, but I did. Attraction is commonplace. A visceral, indefinable unity is not. The chemistry that links two people is comprised of elements too subtle to survive dissection, too complex to permit inspection.
It was unlike me to ponder the exigencies of romance, but that’s exactly what I was doing as the miles clicked by. My mind returned to the bedroom, where I had used every gentleness to follow Emily’s physical signals, then fine-tuned what I was doing to match her respiratory and moaning guidance. Our rhythms escalated until, finally, she had tumbled over a sheer apex, crying out, then sobbing, a woman so disoriented even minutes later that she seemed as vulnerable as a creature newly born.
I’d like to believe I am a competent lover, but I knew my skills did not account for an eruption of such magnitude. It was Emily, uniquely Emily, her physical release so explosive that it was as unmistakably visual as it was audible-a jettisoning fact that only made her sob harder, and voice her embarrassment.
“That’s why I’ve always been so careful about men,” she had whispered. “I can’t help how my body reacts, and it’s goddamn embarrassing. It creeped Paul out, I think, so I almost never really let myself go. Tonight, Christ! I got carried away, I guess. I’m so sorry.”
Sorry? I had just experienced one of the most sensual couplings of my life. I did my best to reassure her and succeeded, apparently, because half an hour later it happened again.
To equate sexual release with trust was as irrational-or as sensible-as any other aspect of love play between male and female. But there it was. It was the way I felt.
Just by thinking it through, I felt better about coming to Immokalee alone. After only a day together, I had no right to expect fidelity from the woman nor a reason to demand trust. If Tomlinson or anyone else could lure Emily away, so be it. I would be disappointed. Very disappointed. But I also knew that I would be secretly relieved. Discovering the truth tonight might spare me a more painful surprise down the road-no doubt the reason why I set such traps in the first place.
It was refreshing to be able to admit that to myself. Freeing, in its way. So I closed a mental door on the subject and focused my attention on what I was doing.
A good thing, too.
By then, in the lights of my truck, I could see a curvature of tree line that indicated a bend in the road. According to the satellite aerial, it was where County Road 846 turned north as County Road 857-and marked the midway point of Squires’s acreage. To the south was saw grass and swamp. To the north, more of the fertilized geometrics that define Florida agriculture.
I slowed enough to poke my head out the window and checked an east-facing road sign that drifted past. I was not surprised by its message. It was the same sign I’d seen in my odd vision of the girl.
IMMOKALEE 22 MILES.
Almost concurrently, two Hispanic-looking men on the Everglades side of the road caught my attention. They were standing by a gate, smoking cigarettes, no vehicle in sight. The gate was chained, I noted. I also noted the way the men turned their faces away from my headlights, shielding their identities, as I drove past.
They were spotters, I decided. They were standing watch. If Squires had indeed driven Tula Choimha home to Red Citrus, why were these two guarding the gate to his Everglades acreage?
It suggested to me that I had indeed seen some kind of structure beneath the trees in the aerial photo. It suggested to me that Squires and the girl were nearby.
Slowing to a crawl, I gave the men a mild wave. In response, one of them flipped his middle finger, then turned his back. His reaction was more than just aggressive. It was stupid. Why would he invite a confrontation down here in redneck country, where a lot of pickup trucks still had gun racks?
I decided the guy was either drunk or he was aggressive for a reason. Was there something happening beyond that metal gate he couldn’t risk anyone seeing or hearing?
I shifted into neutral, letting the truck coast, as I picked up my phone to call Leroy Melinski. It was the reasonable thing to do even though I didn’t want to do it. Perversely, I hoped there was no reception or that I got the man’s voice mail. Leaving the detective out of the loop would allow me to remain invisible.
I liked the potential of that. Neither Melinski nor anyone else knew where I was. The two men at the gate had no idea who I was. I could talk to the men or slip by unnoticed and search the area alone. Do it right and no one would ever know I had been there.
I got my wish. No reception.
I lifted my gear bag onto the passenger’s seat as I shifted into reverse and swung the truck around. By the time I got to the gate, both men were standing in the road, dark bandannas now covering their faces like bank robbers in a TV western, their body language communicating a rapper’s insolence. The bandannas and the tattoos told me they were members of a Latin gang- pandilleros, in Spanish slang.
Should I stop? Or should I park a mile up the road and jog back?
I foot-flicked my high beams on long enough to convince myself that neither man was palming a
weapon. It gave me a reason to stop, which is exactly what I wanted to do-another perverse preference. I can tolerate stupidity because it is a biological condition. Ignorance and arrogance are choices, though.
I got out of the truck, engine running, lights on and my gear bag within easy reach if I needed it.
Beside the bag was the palm-sized laser I’d brought along, the Dazer Guardian. Because I had demonstrated the weapon to Emily earlier, I’d already overridden the twenty-four-hour security timer, which meant the weapon was operational, ready to use at the touch of a button.
I gave the thing a long last look, then almost stuck it in my pocket before I swung the door closed. But then I reminded myself I had never tried the light on a shark, let alone a couple of two-legged gangbangers, and now was not the time to risk a disappointing first test.
I felt confident I wouldn’t need it, or any of the other weapons in my bag.
I was wrong.
Because both men assumed I didn’t speak Spanish, I listened to them exchange nervous and profane assessments of me as I walked toward them.
I was a homosexual cowboy who had lost his hat as well as a horse that I abused anally. I was a drunken Gomer-a welfare redneck-who was too poor to buy a truck that was not inhabited by rats.
Hearing that caused me to take a closer look at the lane beyond the gate, wondering about their truck. It was all tree shadows and darkness, but my headlights were bright enough that I should have seen reflectors on their vehicle.
I did not. It confirmed what I had suspected: The dirt road led to a cabin or some sort of area where these two had parked.
Maybe Squires and the girl were there now. If not, someone else was there, because I heard radio static and then watched one of the men pull a little VHF from his pocket, saying in Spanish, “Don’t bother us now. We got a visitor. Some white Gomer-he’s probably pissed because Dedos just flipped him off.”
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