Everglades Assault (19 page)

It wasn't until I heard the low roar of the Chesapeake that I knew for sure. The dog came out of the darkness and across the shell drive in about four long strides and knocked the fourth man backward. He had been drenching the trailer in gas. With Benny and Louie dead, Mickey Rather sprinted toward the idling jeep with its big balloon wheels. He had been smoking a cigar. He tossed it behind him, and the whole place went up with a
pewsh.

I didn't see the fourth man run into the fire. But I heard his scream. I was too busy trying to roll away from the sudden searing heat of it.

Rather punched the jeep into gear and roared away toward the cypress head. The dog bounded after him, but there was a shrill whistle and he stopped in his tracks.

Hervey came charging out of the brush. He looked like a creature from hell in the blazing light of the fire. The sawed-off twelve-gauge was still smoking. He knelt beside me and cut the ropes.

“Are you okay?”

“Bruised. And thankful. Very thankful. Thanks for showing up.”

“Didn't have anything better to do,” he said laconically.

I got to my feet, trying to work the muscles back to life.

“Let's get that other jeep started,” I said.

“No way. From the way your head looks, you need a doctor. Now.”

“Fine,” I said. “Get a doctor. Bring two of them. I'll be back after I take a chunk or two out of Mickey Rather.”

Hervey grinned. “Okay, okay—you drive. I'll reload.”

The swamp buggy he had left us was no speed wagon. And we never got close enough to get a shot. It pounded and creaked dutifully through the swamp and over the high ground at a screaming fifteen miles an hour.

But it was easy enough to stay on Rather's track. His big four-wheel drive left a snaking line of seeping ruts in the marsh, visible in the beam of our headlights.

“This thing won't go any faster?”

“For the fifth time—no.”

“If he gets out on a road we've lost him.”

“The last place he wants to be is on a road. And if he keeps on heading south we've got him. The'glades doesn't go on forever.”

A full moon, snow-bright, lifted in the east, and the marsh broke into plains of sawgrass, vast and golden like wheat. For the first time, we got a brief look at Mickey Rather. His jeep was a red speck of tail lights in the distance, at least two miles ahead of us.

Above him, stars glimmered like icy scars against the sky. Panther James would have seen them as omens....

We drove on and on for another hour . . . maybe two. Small Everglades deer flushed before our headlights. And once we saw a hulk of a black bear amble across a flag pond and glare back at us. Behind us, the Chesapeake growled—but kept his seat.

Twice we almost got stuck and had to leave Rather's trail for higher ground. But each time we circled back on it. The ground kept getting marshier, breaking into sporadic islands of buttonwood and black mangrove. A gathering of laughing gulls in the moonlight told me we were getting near the Gulf.

“It's no use, Dusky. There's an old charcoal maker's road down here—Pahayokee Cross. He'll find it and be long gone by the time we get there.”

“No way, Hervey. No way. You haven't noticed?”

He looked at me, perplexed. “Noticed what?”

“He's heading
west
all of a sudden. I don't know why. Maybe it's just temporary. But if he keeps on going he's going to run out of land real quick.”

Hervey looked quickly around, trying to get his bearings.

“Damn,” he said, “you're right.”

“Mickey Rather may be a slick man in a business deal. But the only thing he knows about the wilderness is how to bulldoze it. I think our boy is lost. Lost and desperate—and that makes him dangerous.”

“I'm not in a particularly good mood myself,” said Hervey through tight lips.

He had told me about Panther James's funeral. And about how he had skipped out on the feast after Myrtle had told him where I had gone.

“Figured if you weren't back by dinnertime, you needed help bad. I know how much you hate to miss a meal.”

Hervey had played it a little more cautiously than I had. He had parked his borrowed car just off the Tamiami Trail and walked the whole way to the mobile home through the back country. He had seen my car and reasoned that I was either inside or dead. So he had waited in the bushes, hoping they would make a move.

“I figured if you was still alive, I'd just hold them at gunpoint and take them to the law. But they sort of forced my hand when they decided to shoot you right then and there.”

I told Hervey about Billy Cougar and the whole gambling scenario which had brought us to be winding our way through the Everglades in the moonlight.

“The bastards,” he muttered when I had finished. “I never much liked Billy, but I'm sorry he got tied up with creeps like that. They're the kind who are ruining this state. Selfish. Selfish and money-hungry and stupid. They'll stop at nothing. And they won't be satisfied until it's all gone.”

The moon was higher now; so bright you could see the pale outline of trees and the shadows of sloughs without the headlights.

Bullfrogs rumbled, and nocturnal birds squawked, and once, above the whine of the jeep, we heard the haunting scream of a Florida panther. There was a terrifying force in the noise, and had I not known what it was, I would have guessed that somewhere in the depths of the swamps, some woman had gone mad.

We came around a mangrove thicket to find the unexpected: Mickey Rather's jeep caught fender-deep in a tidal creek. Billy Cougar's body was still beneath the tarp in the back. Hervey and I jumped out, followed by the dog. Hervey held the shotgun at ready, thinking it might be a trap.

But it wasn't.

Through the steaming beams of the jeep lights we could see his tracks, two inches deep in the muck, trail off down the creek bed.

“After him on foot now?” I asked.

Hervey shook his head. “I'll back our jeep up and try to find a way through these mangroves. We'll let Gator track him from here.”

The dog didn't need to be told. He was already casting back and forth in Rather's tracks.

In four-wheel drive, we idled on through the moonlight. A grassy slough paralleled the creek. We could hear the Chesapeake crashing through the water, searching.

Mickey Rather wasn't far away now. We saw him once in the sweep of our headlights. He looked back over his shoulder, the desperation strange and gray on his face. The gauze on his neck had come undone, and it fluttered by the ends of the tape. When he saw the dog coming after him, he took off at a heavy run. He stumbled once, fell, and pulled himself to his feet, already running again.

Then, suddenly, he just disappeared.

It didn't take us long to find out how. The slough ended abruptly at a black swath of water. It took us both a moment to get our bearings. We jumped out of the jeep, trying to make the water and islands and the vast moonlit desert of open Gulf make sense.

We looked at each other and said at the same time,
“The Shark River. . . .”

Mickey Rather was a better swimmer than I would have guessed. We could see him clearly in the tunneling jeep lights. The Chesapeake dove in headlong after him, but Hervey whistled him back abruptly.

“I ain't sending him in there,” Hervey said firmly.

And suddenly I knew what he meant.

“If Rather makes it across, he'll work his way to the beach on Cape Sable. He might be able to hijack a boat there.”

“I don't care. I about lost that dog once. I ain't gonna take the chance again.”

“Then I'll go.”

I turned my back on Hervey's objections, kicking off my shoes. Mickey Rather was about halfway across. He was a fair swimmer, but he was no SEAL, and I knew I could catch him before he made it to the island on the other side. I ran into the water until it was waist-deep, then dove after him, swimming with head up, watching the dim shape in the distance.

About fifty yards out I saw it. I had thought it was the sort of thing you see once in a lifetime and never see again.

But I was wrong.

At first I thought it was just a fallen tree drifting in the moonlight.

But trees don't drift
up
current.

I stopped in the water, sculling, hypnotized by the size of the thing.

It was midway between Mickey Rather and me. I reached for the Randall knife on my belt and realized I hadn't worn it—and if I had, Rather's men would have taken it.

I should have sprinted back toward Hervey. But I couldn't. I was mesmerized—and it may have saved my life. Rather still splashed noisily across the river. The creature seemed to pause between us, as if deciding.

Then, suddenly, it submerged. I felt my breath coming soft and shallow, wondering if it was swimming along the bottom toward me—knowing that it was too late now to try to escape, because even I couldn't outswim such a magnificent thing.

There was a long minute of silence. Hervey was calling something behind me, but the words came to me in a jumble. They made no sense. Suddenly, Panther James's dream popped into my mind:
“You were in the water fighting a creature with many teeth. You thought it was a shark. But it wasn't a shark. . . .”

So maybe this was another of his dreams coming to pass....

But sometimes an old man's dreams aren't to be trusted, or maybe blind luck can alter a prescribed fate, or maybe nature just has its own sense of inevitable justice, because the giant saltwater crocodile didn't choose me that night.

Suddenly, through the silence, came a wild explosion from the water beyond me. The jeep lights showed a frothing geyser followed by a terrible scream. It was almost like a woman's scream—or the scream of a Florida panther.

The croc came halfway out of the water with Mickey Rather looking strangely small between its jaws. There was a look of confusion on his face, like that of a small boy. The bandage had been knocked from his neck, and he held his arms outstretched, as if bracing himself for a fall.

The croc took him back into the water, rolling him around and around. All you could see was the croc's tree-trunk tail and the rag-doll figure of Mickey Rather through the black froth.

And then there was silence.

A dark and total silence that echoed in the ears.

“Dusky—damn it, Dusky, get the hell out of there! Now!”

It was like waking up. I shook myself and headed back for shore in a long strong crawl. Hervey was there to pull me up on the bank. The dog trotted nervously beside him as if he, too, had realized for the first time that there are things on this earth for which no other creature is a match.

“You stupid bastard, why did you stay in there so long?”

Hervey had been scared—and the fear had made him mad.

I spit brackish water, touching the bruises on side and stomach from the beatings I had taken.

“It had Rather. He was food enough. I had no reason to worry.”

“Yeah? Then there must be two of them.”

He swung me around and pointed. There, where I had crawled up the bank, was the croc. His head was the size of a tapered coffee table. A chunk of Mickey Rather's pants protruded from the jumble of teeth. His eyes glowed in the jeep lights, blood-red and menacing, challenged but undefeated....

On a September afternoon filled with saffron light and the smell of jasmine, I rode my ratty ten-speed bike through old Key West, then along Roosevelt Boulevard, and turned right down the dirt road, to Yarbrough's Marina and Boat Service.

He had stayed on in the Everglades for a few days to comfort Myrtle and to talk to the law-enforcement boys. He had insisted that I have nothing to do with it; assured me that it would be a simple matter of answering questions and explaining just why there were four new corpses in south Florida and one man who had disappeared completely.

He was right—or so he told me over the phone from Monroe Station.

My blind lie to Mickey Rather that the feds were after him had hit the mark. They were—but we had beaten them to the punch.

So they called it self-defense and buried them and their files away. Myrtle, said Hervey, had at first been shocked by Billy Cougar's murder, but then just relieved. She finally reasoned that he would have drunk himself to death anyway, and besides, it was time that Eisa had a proper father. And when the right man came along, she said, she would know. Until then, Johnny Egret's third unmarried son had returned from Immokalee to comfort her....

So I hadn't seen Hervey since he'd returned. And I hadn't even bothered to call April—for reasons I couldn't verbalize. I just knew it had something to do with her youth in conflict with my own lethal lifestyle.

Whatever the reasons, I knew that she wouldn't be any too happy with me.

I leaned my bike against one of the draping oaks in the yard by the board house. Chickens scratched and bickered in the sand, and the Chesapeake thumped his tail lazily at me from the shade and lifted his head, showing the bare racing-stripe scar between his eyes. He got to his feet, gave me two grudging licks, on the hand, then collapsed in the shade.

Hervey met me at the door. His wife, small and squat with her Indian good looks, smiled at me from the kitchen. But there was a nervousness to the smile—and then I noticed the nervousness in Hervey.

“Dusky . . . hey—good to . . . ah . . . see you!”

I looked at him strangely. “What's wrong with you, Yarbrough? You look as if I just caught you stealing something.”