Eye of Vengeance

by Jonathon King

  “We’re not going to see any panthers,” Carly said, not with disappointment or cynicism, just a little girl’s statement of fact.

  “You’re probably right, but you’ll still see the signs,” Nick said and looked back and smiled at her, but she was staring out the window.

  The road was flanked by a line of trees on the west and a canal on the east. Nick knew from experience that there was little to see and the arrow-straight two-lane was a boring strip cutting through nowhere. His head moved back to snipers, no signs to let you know where they were, where they would strike next. The D.C. killers proved that. Every so-called expert in law enforcement had blown that one from the beginning, working the old scenarios, searching for connections between victims, some sort of pattern so they could predict the sniper’s movements. They took a witness’s statement about a white van and went crazy pulling over every white van they could find.

  Now Hargrave too had a witness who’d seen a man in black who looked like a SWAT cop. Would he pull over every SWAT cop he could find and question them and their whereabouts on Thursday morning? Maybe he would. Maybe he already had.

  “Dad?”

  Carly brought him back and Nick chastised himself. Pay attention, man. Don’t do this to her again.

  “Yeah, sweetheart?”

  “Can we stop someplace to go to the bathroom?”

  He smiled, had known it was coming all along.

  “Absolutely,” he said. “I’ve got just the place. Can you hold on for another ten minutes, sweetie?”

  “If I have to. Yes.”

  In five minutes he was at the junction of 29 and the Tamiami Trail and headed back east, past the airboat ride signs, the Miccosukee Indian village signs. He tried to divert Carly’s mind by telling her about how men long ago had built the trail as the first road across the great Everglades by scooping up the dirt and muck and limestone with a huge dredge and dumping it alongside the canal they were creating as they moved forward.

  “See the water over here on my side? That’s where they dug, and this road is where they piled the stuff.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Nick looked out beyond the canal at the occasional spread of saw-grass meadow spotted by islands of cabbage and silver thatch palms. Then the hammocks of dwarf cypresses, wild tamarind and rimrock pine would fill up the space with a thin greenness. And always there was the heat, bubbling the mixture to a deep simmer. He admired the men who had worked through this relentless nature and wondered if they had ever taken an appreciation of its bare beauty while they tried to tame it.

  After another ten minutes, Nick pulled over at a sign reading: CLYDE BUTCHER’S BIG CYPRESS GALLERY. He parked next to the small pond that bellied out from a culvert running under the roadway. The water was dark and coppery and lay like an unrippled tarp around several gigantic water cypress trees, their branches strung with Spanish moss.

  Carly got out on the other side while Nick gathered up his thermos, balanced a cup on the roof and poured.

  “We can go inside and use the bathroom, baby,” he said and when he got no answer he stepped forward and looked over the hood for his daughter. She had forgotten all about her need and was staring out into the near water, her arm outstretched and a slightly crooked finger pointing.

  Nick followed the line of her finger and saw the rumpled black nose of a gator cutting slowly through the water, leaving a growing V behind it. The eyes were like two disfigured lumps on the trunk of a tree with their centers buffed smooth and glassy.

  “That’s a good-sized one,” Nick said, injecting a lightness into his voice as he moved around the front of the car to Carly’s side. His daughter took a step back, but her eyes did not leave those of the reptile. When the beast took a turn to the south from its dead-on path, Nick felt Carly move up into the side of his leg.

  “Wow,” was all she said.

  Now that they knew what they were looking for, Nick pointed out two other motionless snouts and Carly found two others among the cypress knees poking up through the water.

  “Won’t they come up and, you know, bite the tires or something?”

  “I think they’re used to company by now,” Nick said. “As long as some idiot doesn’t start feeding them from the parking lot, they don’t have much reason to come out of the water when people are around.”

  They stood and watched for a bit, Carly now giggling at each perceived movement. After several minutes she seemed to have her fill and started looking around. The simple wood deck of the studio took her interest.

  “Pictures?”

  “Yeah, your other love,” Nick said. “Let’s go in.”

  When they stepped inside Butcher’s studio, Carly’s reaction to the large black-and-white photograph of the Big Cypress Reserve had the same effect as her initial spotting of the gator—her eyes froze on the photo. But this time she stepped forward. The frame that greeted them was one of Clyde’s shots of spreading clouds building in the limitless sky over the Glades. Their movement and tumble and growth from drawing up the water below had been frozen in his lens. Below was a sheet of still water, reflecting the image of the clouds as if on a hot mirror. Bordering the open pond were marsh grasses and hammock trees, and bisecting it was a small sliver of island. The textures, in pure black-and-white, made the viewer forget even the possibility of color.

  Carly stepped even closer and reached out to touch the photograph with the tips of her fingers as she might a sleeping animal. “Daddy,” she said. “How does Mr. Butcher do this?”

  Nick was looking at the photograph with only slightly less wonder than his daughter. He had always been as mesmerized by the man’s skills as she was now.

  “He’s just very, very good at what he does, honey. He’s like an artist, only with a camera, you know, who can see things in a way that other people can’t,” Nick said, but he knew he too was flummoxed. “Let’s look at his other stuff.”

  Carly uncharacteristically took his hand and they drifted into the gallery, every wall filled with portraits of the wild and majestic Glades, from a small frame of a rare and intricate ghost orchid to a broad, wall-sized print of the moon rising over land no man had stepped on for thousands of years.

  Nick had been absorbed by the guy’s photos ever since a newspaper colleague had profiled Butcher years before. But only recently had he been drawn out to the studio, to stand and look again. Nick knew Butcher’s story. The photographer, already a recognized talent, had been stunned by tragedy when his seventeen-year-old son was killed in a terrible car crash. Butcher and his wife closed in on themselves. And then, in a way maybe he himself could not describe, Butcher slipped alone into the ancient and otherworldly land of the Everglades swamp. He spent days and weeks alone in the pristine wilds with his big eight-by-ten-inch box camera and let the energy of his grief spread out in a place where other people did not reach. Out there he would stand waist-deep in the water, then focus and wait, enduring heat and mosquitoes and loneliness until the perfect moment of light and shadow could be captured. And out here he let his talent, the thing that defined him, grow in spite of his anguish and it redefined him. Nick felt a sliver of that now, and it made more sense to him, and he was pulled to it.

  “OK,” he finally said to Carly after they’d wandered through the entire exhibit. “Which one do you like best?”

  She looked up at him with that delicious look in her eye she used when she knew her father was about to do something she would adore, and then dropped his hand and he had to follow her around a wall to a far corner.

  “This one, Dad.”

  She chose not a photo of the Everglades, but a shot from behind a white-sand dune on one of Florida’s empty coasts. The sun was rising, the wind bending sea oats, the tiny ridges of swept sand so clear in relief you swore you could see the individual grains.

  Nick studied it, giving the shot his appreciation, but he sneaked a look at the huge dark makeup of a silent river bend draped in a canopy of cypress. His daughter caught the look
.

  “I like this one because Mom would like it,” she said. “It’s like her.”

  Nick quickly shifted back to the seascape.

  “Yeah, you’re right, sweetheart.”

  “That one’s lonely, Dad,” she said, gesturing toward the river that she knew was drawing her father.

  “Yeah,” he said. “You’re right.”

  Nick had the gallery keeper wrap up the seaside print.

  In the car, he took a detour south to Chokoloskee Island and treated Carly to a visit of the one hundred-year-old Smallwood Store, where the original owner’s descendants, with the help of the historical society, had maintained the stilted trading post, one of the first in southwest Florida. She touched the old hand-wringer washtubs and the tanned pelts of otters and raccoons still hanging on the walls. Nick read to her from the original ledger that Ted Smallwood had kept in the twenties when his clients paid him in gator skins. Carly especially liked the Seminole Indian dolls, even though she never would have admitted that she was still into that sort of thing. Afterward Nick treated both of them to a stone-crab dinner at a restaurant in Everglades City. The meat of the stone crab claws is the most delicious seafood ever discovered, and having it fresh off the Everglades City docks where the crabbers came in from the Gulf was one of the wonders of the world.

  On the trip back across Alligator Alley, it was only twenty minutes before Nick looked back through the rearview mirror to see Carly sound asleep. His cruise control was set at eighty, and he was feeling pretty good about himself. He’d spent the day with his daughter. She’d been relatively pleased with their adventure. He was being the dad he was sure he was supposed to be, the dad he promised to be over and over on moonlit nights when he went to his family’s grave site and sat in the grass, and whispered to Julie and Lindsay, “I will do the right thing by her, guys. I will do the right thing by all of you.”

  When his cell phone rang Nick’s shoulders jumped as if a trumpeter had sneaked into the passenger seat and ripped a high C into his ear.

  “Jesus!” he hissed and reached over to snatch up the phone. He didn’t recognize the number on the readout. He knew no one at the paper would bother him on the weekend, but it wasn’t a paper prefix anyway.

  He was about to let the cell take a message but then pushed the answer button. Sources, he thought. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.

  “Nick Mullins,” he said, businesslike.

  “Mr. Mullins. This is Detective Hargrave.”

  Mr. Uncooperative, Nick thought. No use for the press.

  “Detective. What’s up?”

  “I’d like to have a sitdown with you, Mr. Mullins. Go over some things that might benefit the investigation.”

  Despite his reticence, Hargrave knew exactly how to dangle possibilities in front of a reporter. Even if the ploy was new to him in dealing with the media, Nick was sure Hargrave had used it with informants and inmates before.

  “I would be more than happy to meet wherever you’d like on Monday, Detective,” Nick said.

  “You know JB’s on the Deerfield Beach oceanfront? Just north of the pier?”

  “Yeah,” Nick said, picturing the place.

  “I figure it’s close enough to your home. We could meet there about eleven tonight.”

  Nick didn’t answer. Why would Hargrave know where he lived? And though Nick knew how easy it was to find someone’s private cell number, it was unusual for a cop to check out the address and phone of a reporter.

  “Detective, I don’t usually work on weekends. I like to be with my family.”

  Nick checked the rearview The sun was going down in the west behind him. Carly was still asleep, her head flopped to one side against the door panel, her mouth slightly open.

  “So eleven o’clock, then,” Hargrave said and Nick could picture the man’s hatchet face, impassive, unaffected by anything Nick had said. The detective had not called to ask. He was ordering, like he would if Nick were a suspect, or a confidential street source, or an underling. Nick didn’t like any of those labels. He was about to get pissed off and open his mouth again but stopped himself. A sentence seemed to slip into his head from the back seat: You’re not the boss of me! It was the girls’ favorite answer to each other when they’d argue and Nick recalled it as being cute. Petty. But cute.

  “OK, Detective. If it’s that important, I’ll see you at eleven,” he finally said. Hargrave did not answer and simply hung up.

  Chapter 15

  Elsa met him at the door. Always vigilant when her Carly was away, she had watched for the sweep of headlights coming into the drive. Nick checked his sleeping daughter and then got out and opened the back door. He slipped his hand under Carl’s legs and as he lifted her from the seat she instinctively wrapped her arms around his neck and lay her head on his shoulder, her eyes still shut. He carried her in as Elsa held open the door: “Aaayyy, pobrecita, esta cansada,” Elsa. said.

  In Carly’s bedroom, the covers were already turned down. Nick laid her in her bed, took off her shoes and watched her scrunch her body into the pillows and heard her exhale contentedly. He bent to kiss her forehead, then turned out the dimmed lamp and started to leave.

  “Good night, Daddy.”

  Nick turned back.

  “Faker,” he whispered and knew her smile was there in the dark. “Thanks for going with me.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  In the hall, he asked Elsa to make him some coffee and then went out to empty the car. It was ten o’clock when he sat alone at the kitchen table and ate the salteñas from the cooler and sipped his coffee. Why did Hargrave want to meet with him in a seaside bar, of all places? Not in his office. Not with Joel riding shotgun. He had been rolling the possibilities in his head since the detective had hung up and wasn’t any closer to a solid guess. It was well out of character for the guy, and Nick kept running the conference-table scene through his head, trying to pick out who in that room had gotten the worst of Hargrave’s skepticism and distrust, and decided it hadn’t been him.

  “You are OK, Mr. Mullins?” Elsa said, breaking the silence with her quiet voice.

  “Huh? Oh, yes, yes, Elsa. I’m fine,” Nick said, shaking his head back into the present. “We had a good day. But I have to go out again.”

  The housekeeper pointedly looked up at the kitchen clock.

  “I’ll lock up when I leave.”

  Elsa did not bother hiding her worried brow.

  “It’s OK, Elsa,” Nick said. “I’m OK.”

  “You are going to talk to Ms. Julie and Lindisita?”

  Nick had once confided in Elsa, told her of his night trips to the cemetery. He guessed that her heritage, her acceptance of the souls and ghosts of the dead, led her to be wary, but not overtly concerned. She wasn’t going to call the loony bin to come take him away.

  “You will be home to take Carlita to church, yes?”

  Sunday was the one day of the week that Elsa spent with her own family since the accident. Her grown daughter and now teenage grandsons would be expecting her. She’d given so much to Nick, he would never deny her that. But he was also feeling an apprehension in the old woman’s eyes. His late nights before the accident. The heavy drinking she had witnessed afterward.

  “Yes, Elsa,” Nick said. “I will be back.”

  Nick let the valet park his old Volvo because it was the only way at JB’s. Nobody in South Florida puts a parking lot on the waterfront, so restaurants and bars were forced to purchase alternative spots for their clientele, and they sure weren’t giving it out for free.

  Nick took the stub, walked into the restaurant foyer and immediately wished he’d taken a shower and shaved. JB’s was an upscale place and the late diners looked wealthy and hip. A scruffy-looking guy in blue jeans and a polo shirt didn’t get so much as a look from the maître d’. That was OK by Nick. He figured Hargrave for the outdoor bar and walked right on by the WAIT TO BE SEATED sign and worked his way back. As he stepped out thro
ugh the glass doors, the live, the slightly sour scent of the ocean washed up into his face and although the smell of low tide was pleasant enough to Nick, he wondered how the to-be-seen people could dine with the odor washing over their food on the humid breeze. He moved toward the bar and let his eyes go first to the corners, where he knew a cop like Hargrave would have his back against a wall. He found him there, sitting on a stool, his thin back straight as a stick, his pointed elbows stuck into the bar top. Nick thought of a praying mantis and then walked over in full view so the detective could see him coming. The burly sergeant was nowhere to be seen.

  “Hey, how’s it going?” Nick said, never knowing for sure how plainclothes detectives wanted to be greeted out in the civilian world. He noted that Hargrave did not unlace his fingers to offer a handshake and he slid onto the open stool.

  “Sticky,” Hargrave said.

  Nick thought what multiple meanings that statement held and then fell back on the weather.

  “Yeah, pretty humid,” he said and listened for a moment to the sound of the surf brushing up onto the sand fifty yards out into the darkness.

  “Buy you a drink?” the detective said.

  “Just iced tea.”

  Hargrave’s hands hovered over a bourbon glass and with a nod of his head got the attention of the bartender and ordered Nick’s tea. Nick had not taken a drink of alcohol since he’d gone on a six-month bender after the accident, but he did not begrudge others their habits.

  “Thanks,” he said to Hargrave when the tea arrived and they went quiet, both having run out of manners.

  “You seem to have some kind of relationship with Ms. Cotton, Mullins. We’re the ones that caught Ferris, but she wants to talk to you first. What’s that all about?”

  Nick waited until he finished ripping a couple of sugar packets and dumping their contents in his tea. A stalling tactic, to get his answer straight.

  “Can’t say that I know,” he finally said. “I talked with her a few times when it happened and then only a little during the trial. She seemed to like the stories I wrote. I got the sense she liked being, you know, respected.”