The Blue Edge of Midnight (15 page)

“It has a long tradition of being a place apart,” Billy said. “The people who live there don’t like strangers, government, developers, and have a special disdain for the law.”

By the time Billy finished his history lesson I’d gotten off the I-95 exit to Southwest Eighth Street and headed west.

“I’m not sure I’d go out there alone if I were you.”

“Yeah. Thanks,” I said, punching him off.

Within a few miles I’d lost the city, the bodegas, the strip shopping centers, even the stoplights. Out here there were stretches of small orange and avocado groves, acres of tropical tree farms and open stands of slash pine. In some places the narrow roads ran under ancient stands of oak draped in moss whose limbs stretched across the roadway to form dark green tunnels that reminded me of my river. I had to cut farther south and by the time I found Loop Road the late-afternoon thunderheads were gathering in the western sky, piling up and tumbling east.

The Loop Road Frontier Hotel seemed more a backcountry Southern roadhouse than a hotel. When I found it I pulled into a shell-covered parking lot that was a quarter full with old- model pickup trucks, a few dusty sedans and a semi-tractor with its grease-covered skid plate exposed. I turned off my truck and sat listening to the heat tick off the engine, wondering if this was a mistake.

Off to one side of the building’s covered entrance three men, probably in their early twenties, stood in lazy conversation, bootheels up on the bumper of a dented Ford pickup. They were dressed in jeans and tight, dark-colored T-shirts and wore baseball caps with various logos stitched on the front. They were not unlike a hundred other groups of young and uninspired locals I’d moved off the street corners of Philadelphia in my years of foot patrol. I could see them cutting their eyes my way.

I got out, locked my door, and had started toward the building when the biggest of the trio called out: “Hey, Mr. Fancytruck. You lost?”

I know I should have ignored it. I know I could have walked on and let the laughter fall behind me. A life is full of should-haves and could-haves. Instead I stopped and turned to the group.

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, I think so,” the big one said and stepped forward as I knew he would. I’d seen it too many times.

He was my height but thirty pounds heavier and most of it fat. His chunky face was topped by a 1950s style crewcut but in his left ear was a tight looped earring. His brown eyes held an alcoholic luster. Get drunk or high so your reflexes are off and your oxygen intake is impaired and then go out and pick a fight. Idiocy knows no boundaries, I thought to myself.

“You a cop?” he sneered, moving within striking range, braver than I expected.

“No,” I said. “Do you need one?”

“We don’t need no fucking cops out here,” one of his buddies answered from his spot behind the big one. Neither of the others had moved off their fender.

“Good,” I said, turning to move on when I heard the big one suck in a quick snort of air.

Even professional fighters give away their intentions with breathing patterns. It is a natural instinct to draw in a snatch of air before expending the tight energy used to deliver a blow or make a hard move. Everyone does it. Amateurs are just louder and sloppier.

When I heard the whistle of air I turned and spun inside his first roundhouse punch, aimed at the back of my head, and caught the blow instead on my left forearm. I had blocked a lot of punches in my hours at O’Hara’s Gym and this one was no light shot. His second swing I caught on my right elbow and it felt like a baseball bat. The guy knew leverage and was throwing his weight behind his swings. But he was easy to read and I knew what was coming and covered up, my fists high next to my temples and elbows in to my ribs. Protect your head and heart, Frankie’s dad had always coached, even to the pro boxers he trained.

With his friends rooting him on, the big boy kept throwing and I kept stepping inside, taking his best on my shoulders and arms. He was already breathing hard. I knew he’d burn himself out. Only once did he try to come in low and even though I blocked the shot with my elbow the force crunched into the ribs I’d bruised in the plane crash and the pain set a new fire in my chest.

Then one of the others decided to get in on it and came at me from the side and fired a skinny punch that caught me on the cheek and I knew this had to end before it turned into a stomping.

I circled the big one, moving away from his right hand and timed my own punch as perfectly as Frankie’s dad had ever hoped to teach a rangy, whitebread football player from the neighborhood. Stepping inside just as he was drawing a deep breath, I planted my right foot and using the power of a thousand hours of river paddling and beach running I drove a short right fist into his chest. The blow caught him just below the sternum, right in the notch where the ribs meet, and the air came out of his throat like a bubble bursting on the surface of a lake.

He went down hard on the seat of his pants and sat there, arms flopped to his side, eyes open but sightless, looking like an old stuffed bear left useless in the corner of the room.

His friends were stunned and stood frozen, looking down at him while I turned and stepped up on the porch and without a word walked through the front door of the Loop Road Frontier.

Inside I stood in what passed for a lobby, leaned against a wall and shook. My knees were quivering, my hands trembled and I knew that if I could see them, the pupils of my eyes would be huge. Adrenaline. You couldn’t avoid it. It’s a biological reaction in every animal that ever hunted or was hunted. It surges through the blood to help you flee or fight. And it pumps regardless of the choice.

I paced a bit, flexing my hands open and closed and letting the feeling leech away. The entryway I was standing in was small and paneled in Dade County Pine similar to my river shack. But this was polished and gave off a dark glow in the light of a small chandelier hanging from the eight-foot ceiling. At an empty counter a placard with a ridge of dust along its top edge was propped up and read: No Rooms.

A hotel with no rooms. I didn’t wonder. But I could hear the distinctive sound of clinking glassware around the corner and followed it to the expected barroom.

The room was dusky with heavy wood and dull sidelights on the walls sheathed in smoked yellow glass. A mahogany bar ran the length of one wall. It was backed by an impressive ten- foot-long mirror set in a scrolled wood frame that matched the hue of the mahogany. Two men sat at the bar. A broad circular table held four more and I could not see around into the darkest end of the room where booths and at least one other table sat. There were no windows to the outside.

I sat down on a stool and the bartender ignored me for a full five minutes. She was a thin woman with bleached blond hair pulled back in a tufted ponytail held by a red rubber band. She wore belted jeans with a cowboy buckle and the kind of white insulated shirt with three-quarter sleeves that up north we called long underwear. Finally she moved down the bar to me, a damp rag of a woman.

“Can I get ya?”

I had already checked the bar preference.

“Bud,” I said.

“Three fifty.”

Her face was white and stern. Her only makeup was a smear of lipstick and she kept her dull brown eyes turned away. She didn’t move until I put a ten-dollar bill on the bar top and only then went to get me a cold bottle and a wet glass. She didn’t even grunt when she made change. The other patrons two seats away never looked up from their cribbage game.

I propped my elbows on the bar. My arms and shoulders ached from the big boy’s hammering. When I looked in the mirror across from me I could see swelling already lumping up the side of my face from the other one’s cheap shot and I could feel where my teeth had gouged the inside of my mouth. I took a mouthful of beer, swished it around and swallowed the mixture of cold alcohol and blood. A sweating, shaking stranger with a fresh knot on his face didn’t seem to draw even a second look from the regulars.

I swiveled around on the stool. An alligator skin that had to be eleven or twelve feet long was tacked on a side wall above a row of booths. A stuffed, mangy-looking bobcat was snarling from his perch above the coat rack. I drained the beer and figured that when the bartender got around to granting me another overpriced drink I’d take a chance and ask for Nate Brown.

My back was to the entrance when the boys from the parking lot came in. They’d apparently gulped a few more shots of courage from a bottle in their rusty truck. They shuffled up and took up positions around me. No one else bothered to look up.

“You’re fuckin’ meat,” the skinny cheapshot announced. The big one stood back out of range, his face still a shade pale, his breathing still raggedy.

The men at the bar turned and rag woman crossed her arms and watched like they were viewing a half interesting rerun of an old TV episode.

“Get up, meat,” the big boy rasped.

I tightened my grip on the beer bottle in my hand and felt suddenly tired, the adrenaline glands confused.

“Don’t you boys go breakin’ stuff in here again, Cory Brooker,” the bartender offered, but made no move to come closer.

The circle tightened. Cheapshot sucked in his breath and his right arm started to come up. I was a split second from bringing my foot up into his crotch when a brown wizened hand reached in and clamped the boy’s forearm. He tried to fight it but when he turned to see who had hold of him, he blanched and stepped back.

The owner of the hand stepped into the circle and all eyes fell on him. His close-cropped steel-gray hair bristled up from a deeply tanned scalp and his eyes were so pale as to be nearly colorless. He still had a grip on the skinny one and I could see the ridged muscle, taut as wound cable, running up his forearm.

“Cain’t have it,” he said, and the tone of authority caused all four of us to flinch.

“B-But, Mr. Brown, this… ,” the big boy started to whine.

“Shut up,” the old man explained.

All three of them exchanged glances and backed away, their necks in hangdog position. The old man watched the group move out of the entrance before turning to me.

“Nate Brown,” he said, extending what I now considered a magical hand. “You’re the one pulled Fred Gunther out of the swamp?”

“Max Freeman,” I answered, shaking the hand, which felt for all the world like a bunch of rolled pennies wrapped in old leather.

“Walk with me, Max.”

I followed him to the far corner of the room while those at the bar turned back to their card game. Back in the recesses of the room, at a round wooden table, Brown introduced me to three middle-aged men who rose to their feet in a polite fashion and shook my hand.

Rory Sims, Mitch Blackman, Dave Ashley.

I took the last wooden chair without comment. As I watched them sit I noted that all but Ashley were wearing the same small knife scabbard on their belts.

Brown settled and filled a heavy, cut-glass tumbler with two fingers of sipping whiskey and pushed it in front of me. My glass matched the other four at the table. After he refilled his own, Brown reached down and set the bottle on the floor next to his chair leg.

“Fred Gunther is a good man. And we all call him a friend. So first off, we thank you for what you done,” Brown started. “And goin’ on Fred’s advice, we agreed it would maybe help to speak with you.”

The others nodded, with the exception of Ashley, who sat staring into the amber light of the whiskey in front of him.

Brown went on. His voice had a slow Southern cadence that made me want to sip from my glass.

“Ain’t none of us too fond of the law out here, least of all me. But these here chile killins got a lot of folks stirred up and we are thinkin’ it might do us well to have some kinda, you know, go-between.”

I looked from man to man until I was convinced they were waiting for me to answer an unasked question. I slowly turned the tumbler of whiskey in a circle on the polished table.

“I’m not sure how I can help,” I said, finally giving in to the temptation and taking a drink. The whiskey burned the open cut inside my mouth but slid warm and easy down my throat. The others followed suit.

“Gunther gave us reason to believe you might be in the same sort of, uh, position that we think many folks out here are in,” said Sims, a balding, bearded man whose collared shirt and manner made him seem the odd man out in the group. “That is,” Sims said, “he indicated you may have been a suspect yourself at one time but seemed to have proved your way out of that.”

Billy must have said more to Gunther than I knew.

“Look, Mr. Freeman,” Blackman said, pronouncing my last name like it was two words. “They’re riding folks mighty hard out here and we just don’t want to see an innocent man get caught in some damn government frame-up.”

I took another sip of whiskey and looked over the rim of my glass at him. There was an agitation in his eyes that none of the others carried.

“I mean, look. I’m in the guide business just like Gunther. I spent my whole life out here and we don’t need the bad publicity either,” Blackman said, in a calmer tone.

“We thought maybe you might be a sort of liaison with the authorities, you being a former officer and all,” Sims said. “Our expertise may indeed be helpful.”

“Do you have any guesses who might be involved?” I said, looking at Ashley, who was the only one who hadn’t spoken.

“If we knowed who it was, we’d of taken care of it already our ownself,” Brown said, reaching down for the bottle.

“A lot of work has gone into protecting the traditions of these Everglades, Mr. Freeman,” Sims said. “Something like this can do more damage than good.”

Brown was filling glasses but I put a hand over mine.

“I’m not sure that I have the kind of access to the people investigating this that Gunther thinks I do,” I said. “But I’m sure anything you might offer could easily be passed along.”

The table went silent for several seconds. I had played snitches and informants and hustlers too many times not to see that we had hit a delicate moment. These men too had tracked and hunted and waited patiently with lures and bait too many times to jump before they were ready. I waited a few more calculated seconds before standing up. A chorus of scraping chairs joined me.