Don't Lose Her (19 page)

“I know because Charlie usually gets the bait from me,” he said, turning back to his own buildings. “I could get them anything that they need, but it's a tribal thing. Charlie says it's mostly casino people. High rollers and gaming executives who want to see the real Glades or the real Indians.”

The timbre of Jumper's voice changed when he mentioned the casino people and put a sarcastic note on the “real Indians.”

“I'd like to get as close to the place as I can,” I said, speaking for the first time. Jumper turned and held my eyes, an unusual trait for a Seminole.

“You know it is forbidden to enter reservation land without an invitation?”

I nodded.

“It's the safety of a woman friend I'm concerned with.”

Jumper looked to Nate, who gave his assent by saying nothing.

“I can put you in an airboat. But I suspect you might want a quieter approach?”

I pulled a stack of bills from my pocket. Jumper looked from the money to my eyes.

“You said there was a woman in trouble?”

“Yes.”

Jumper turned away without another glance at the cash.

“I will get you whatever you need and I can take you as close as you want,” he said, walking away toward his shed.

It took less than an hour to put together what I thought I might need from Jumper's well-stocked outfitter store: a kayak that he often rented to fishermen and frog giggers who liked to be close to the action—not your usual tourist orange or yellow, but a camouflage green and brown; bottles of fresh drinking water; some beef jerky; and a high-intensity flashlight. Since I didn't know how long I'd be, he threw in a portable GPS for those who might get lost in the tall saw grass. Then he added sunscreen and a dark, wide-brimmed camo fishing hat to ward off the direct sunlight.

I loaded all the loose items into a backpack I carried in the trunk of the car. While I was there, I took out the P226 Navy and put it in my cargo pants pocket.

Nate was out at Jumper's airboat, knee-deep in water, lashing the kayak down when I joined him. He'd been my guide on a couple of forays into the Glades when I was chasing some very bad men. But he knew my rules; I liked to work alone.

“I got my old British Enfield .303 in the truck,” he said without turning to me. “Use it for takin' bear at a distance. Could be of help.”

“Thanks, Nate, but I tend toward close work,” I said.

“So I heard.”

Jumper came striding down from his store, ready to pilot the airboat.

“I called Charlie,” he said. “He got a call two days ago to supply the camp. Said they asked for enough for six people for a couple of days. No bait. Said he didn't have to ferry the visitors out there, they'd do it themselves.”

“Helpful information,” I said. “Thanks.”

Jumper held his cell phone in his hand.

“Modernization,” he said. “The tribe put up a cell tower up on Josie Billie Road a couple of years ago. They're businessmen now. Have to keep in touch.”

I heard Nate hack up a bit of phlegm in his throat and spit in the water. Jumper and I shared a look and a grin, and we got up into the seats of the airboat. Nate might eschew the new ways, but that cell phone connection might be what we needed to save Diane's life.

Chapter 32

A
irboats are not nimble or comfortable or even a particularly fast mode of transportation. They are top-heavy. They are wobbly. They are noisy as hell and I've never been a fan. But they do go places that no other vehicle can go, and when it comes to the Everglades, they are often the only option.

Mason Jumper drove with an abandon perhaps fueled by the idea that there was a woman in peril, or maybe he always drove this way. Once we left his tiny beach and looped around some large mangrove outcroppings, he pretty much made a beeline for our destination somewhere out there on the horizon. I kept checking the GPS he'd given me, but he was guided by native memory and experience. For him, this section of the Glades was his neighborhood. If you go back home, you don't need street signs and intersections to find your way.

When the water opened up, he pushed the throttle full forward, creating his own massive windstorm. If short-grass marshes got in the path, he slid right over them. If a thick, three-foot wall of saw grass blocked us, he slowed but then plowed right through. The flat-bottom boat will simply skid right over dry land given enough power. After thirty minutes of bullet-line travel, Jumper cut back the engines and handed me a large pair of binoculars and pointed west.

“There about a mile out, you can see the ripple in the air above the marsh line. That is the exhaust, the pollution. They have the generator running for their electricity.”

In any other situation, I would have thought the man was kidding, but I took the glasses and focused on the farthest line where sky met earth. It took me a while, but finally I saw the waver in the light. It was like seeing heat waves rippling off a summer highway.

“If we get much closer, they will hear our engine and be warned,” Jumper said. I nodded and got down out of the seat beside him to begin unstrapping the kayak and settling it into the water.

“Should I wait for you? Can you give me a sign if you need help?”

I slid into the tiny boat and got my balance.

“I think you're going to know when it's safe to come in,” I said. “The federal government is on its way, and they don't do things subtly.”

Jumper nodded as if he knew, and maybe he did.

“I will stay within reach just in case.”

“Thank you,” I said, and shoved off.

“Good hunting.”

Within ten minutes, I was sweating through the camouflage T-shirt that Jumper had given me. The early sun was out full now, climbing the sky and warming the air. But even when you're above water out here, you're still in moisture. I could guess at the humidity level at eighteen inches above the waterline: 90 percent was my low-ball estimate.

It is essentially the way the Everglades and South Florida work. The one hundred thousand acres of the Glades lie out on the unshaded open plain in the center of the southern half of the state. Its water crawls constantly and ever so slowly southward, like the laziest of rivers. The daytime sun causes evaporation and moisture floats up. Clouds form and move their bulk with the prevailing winds to the coast toward the coolness of the Atlantic Ocean, where especially in summer the meeting of those two systems produces rain.

Now, I was at the bottom of that chain of events: on the skillet of the rising steam. I kept paddling, an even, steady stroke toward my destination. Compared to the roar of the airboat engine, the kayak was uncannily quiet. The occasional sound of a birdcall, the rustle of grass in an errant wind current, accompanied the rhythmic
plunk
and
swish
,
plunk
and
swish
of my paddle.

The water was flat and clear, and I could see the stalks of saw grass reaching down into the mucky bottom some two feet below. As is my habit when I take nightly canoe trips on the river where I live, I found myself counting strokes. After every five hundred, I stopped and floated, got out the binoculars, and searched the horizon for a sign of the fish camp I knew was out there. I was being careful.

I wanted to get close enough for an assessment but didn't want to run right up on the place and be spotted. Jumper had said there was a tall saw grass marsh just to the east of the camp, and I planned to use it as cover. Each time I stopped, I drank from my water bottle, knowing that dehydration was the big danger out here. The overblown myths of alligators and monster pythons are nothing compared to the deadly effects of heat stroke and dehydration.

I thought of Diane: Would her captors know this? Did they have any idea how the South Florida sun and heat could drain a person, especially a person in her condition? Jumper said the custom-built camp was luxurious by any standard. And we had seen the sign that the generator was operating, but would the people who had her be smart enough or care enough about their captive to watch over her?

I kept moving, another five hundred strokes, and another.

After my fourth set of paddling, my check of the skyline found the rippled air of exhaust vapor Jumper and I had seen from a distance. Now, I slowed and sought out the marsh edges and stayed away from open water where I might be seen. I stopped after a hundred slow strokes, checked the glasses, and picked out the plume again. Another hundred and I found a roofline. I started making my way to the east toward the cover Jumper had told me about. On my final stop, I could see partial walls above the waterline in the field glasses and knew I'd have to move deeper into the grasses to stay unseen for the rest of the way.

Silence was all around me: no distant voices, still no sound of the mechanical generator. As I stayed still and quiet in the grass, a sudden shearing of wings ripped the air and from the corner of my eye I picked up the swoop of a bird. Closer, I saw the dark body of a snail kite soar by.

All around me were tall stalks of saw grass, but in my singular focus I'd missed the rows of tiny olive-brown apple snails lining the thicker strands. I was in the middle of a feeding ground for this South Florida hawk, and it was no doubt pissed at my intrusion. I stayed still, and soon I swear I felt the beat of wings on my ears as the kite hovered and clutched onto a saw grass stalk an arm's length away, then deftly ripped a snail off the blade with its scissor-sharp beak and jumped away into the sky. Silence followed the quick strike of violence.

I stayed completely still. A living thing kills a living thing to survive—the way of nature in this place. But why was I bringing my human violence into it? I didn't have an answer, and it wouldn't help me if I did. I had one goal: to help Diane, whatever it took.

I eased forward, now using my paddle like a pole, finding purchase in the muck below and pushing my kayak forward, trying my best not to create unnatural movement in the top of the grass that an eye might pick up.

It took another half hour of slow, meticulous movement for me to come even with the camp; I finally could hear the hum of the generator. Ten yards deep into the grass, I unstrapped my fanny pack, stowed it, abandoned the kayak, and eased myself into the water. My feet touched the soft muck below. It was like walking in oatmeal, but there was enough purchase to push myself forward. The water was warm as it soaked through my clothing, but I knew that it was momentary. It wasn't 98.6 degrees. If you spent enough time in it, hypothermia would still set in.

But the immediate problem was pushing aside the saw grass stalks, so named because their blades' edges are saw-toothed and sharp. Rubbed against the grain, they will cut you like a hacksaw. You have to move with them, not against. And still they caught at my long-sleeved T-shirt and tore at my trousers.

When I got to the outside edge of the grass, I went low, my chin touching water, with only my camouflaged hat and face floating above.

There were thirty yards of open water between me and the raised platform. From here, I could see the sides of three buildings and the roofline of a fourth rising above and beyond the others. The generator noise appeared to be coming from the closest, smallest cabin. There were windows in the other two. From Jumper's description, I knew the dockage was on the far south side. I was approaching from the east as planned.

I still saw no movement, heard no voices. If there were lookouts, I couldn't spot them from here—which made me nervous. Would the kidnappers all stay inside in the middle of the day? Were they arrogant enough to think no one could find them? Which cabin would Diane be in? Could she be tied up in the generator shack? Or be kept close in the biggest structure? It was information I didn't know, but I couldn't just sit here. I needed a better angle, a cleaner vantage point.

I kept moving along the grass line in my floating camouflaged hat, with sunglasses peering up from the brim. Water skimmers skittered on the surface in front of me, and sparks of sunlight danced in their tiny wakes as I made my way south. On the other side of the generator shack, I could finally see the outline of an airboat tied up next to the edge of the deck. Just beyond it, I finally picked up movement: the figures of two men came into focus at the farthest point west, next to the largest cabin. They appeared to be dancing near the edge of the raised platform, moving to the edge and then springing back.

Neither was big enough to be the huge Indian my Yoda witness had described, but they could be Indians. I was too far to tell, but not too far now to pick up yelps and guttural whoops coming from their direction. I tucked myself back into the tall grasses and watched. I let minutes go by. What the hell were they doing? Their movements were erratic, but they seemed focused on something. No one else appeared.

Without visual confirmation, I didn't even know if Diane was here, or long gone since her mysterious text message. The others could have manned another airboat and been off to Tampa by now. And where the hell were the feds? Would they drop in on helicopters? Come by airboat or some damn black ops inflatable? Or would they come at all?

One part of me said wait for backup, let the big boys do their thing. The other part urged me forward to gather intel—to
do
something. I'd left my cell phone in the kayak. I knew it would be ruined by the water anyway. I'd learned a terrible lesson when I'd taken Sherry out to a Glades camp and a playful rollover in our canoe resulted in the destruction of our only contact with the outside world, with a hurricane bearing down on us.

But now I felt more than helpless. Water that initially felt warm had now sapped enough body heat so that my teeth were beginning to chatter. With no one else in sight but the dancing goof-offs on the far side of the camp, I abandoned my conservative side and moved out to cross the yards of open water hoping, perhaps beyond hope, that my hat would look ever so much like a sunning turtle shell or a useless clump of floating sedge grass.

I tried to move as slowly as possible—leave no wake, attract no attention. My ears were full of water, my eyes kept low. The dancing men could be standing there waiting for me by the time I reached the pilings on which the deck was built. But they weren't. I slipped into the shadows, grateful, but with an uneasy feeling about the slipshod ways of this crew. They had to know that every law enforcement group in the country would be on alert for the kidnappers of a federal judge. Yet they'd left no lookouts on guard? Were they arrogant or stupid? I was hoping for the latter.

Under the raised deck, I had better footing. Whoever built this place must have drilled into the limestone below the water and muck before pounding in the pilings. The excavated stone formed a kind of anthill around the base of each piling and spread outward to provide a sounder bottom on which to make my way. When I stood, I was in waist-high water, and the underside of the deck was barely above my shoulders, so I had to duck down to move under it.

There was enough light to see three distinct plastic catch tanks strapped underneath three of the cabins. I approached the first: waste tanks, installed to catch sewage. The Seminoles were being environmental while still giving their special guests flush toilets—how grand. There were also pipes leading to the three cabins from the generator shed that were drawing Glades water and probably running it through a filter before sending it up to faucets: a true AAA tourist destination.

I moved around all of this and made my way west and south around the pilings to where I knew the airboat was docked, thinking of sabotage and a closer look at the men on the deck. If I could disable the airboat, they'd have no escape. If I could get a better assessment of the kidnappers, I could get back to my kayak and report in to whoever might, and I mean might, be coming. I could stay here till dark, but I'd have to get out of the water. My body temperature was still dropping, and I could feel a slight numbness in my fingertips.

As I got closer to the western edge, the sounds of the voices above echoed down—that, and the occasional noise of splashing water. I crept to the sunlit edge near the airboat dock and peered carefully through wood planks toward the spot where I'd seen the men. Thirty feet away, I saw the plunk of something tossed into the water only a few feet from the dock, and then the roiling gush of water and the flash of an alligator's snout.

They were feeding the goddamn gators! They were actually tossing food into the water and then yelping at the sight of the alligators snapping it up. After each explosion of the water surface, I could hear the footfalls of the two men skittering back on the plank deck and guffawing over their game.

Jesus, maybe they were just idiots. But as I stood on the limestone marl next to a piling, I felt the distinct bump of something moving against my leg. When I looked down, I saw the disappearing slither of a gator tail. It was a small one, probably a three- to four-footer. The activity ten yards away was drawing members of the neighborhood, but as in all such encounters, the big boys were muscling out the little ones, leaving them the possible scraps. I ignored them. I didn't look like prey. I didn't look like leftovers. Even the bigger ones would have little interest in me.