Strawman's Hammock (7 page)

“Fuck you.”

The chain jerked the dog a foot short of a man in gloves and overalls. The man set a pail wrapped in burlap and a pair of bolt-cutters carefully onto the dirt floor. He noted the dog's water. Still a half bucket. The bucket was strapped to the side of the shed and filled from a connecting length of PVC that ran in from the handpump outside. It was the only way to manage the water, of course. He couldn't trust the dog.

“How 'bout you? You need water?”

He strolled over to the girl.

“No! No, please! Let me go. I beg! I will not tell anyone!”

He offered a bottle of Perrier. “Take it.”

She took the water from the bottle's offered nipple like a foal sucking from its mama.

“That's enough.” He threw the bottle toward the dog, who tore the plastic containers to pieces. Then he pulled a knife from his pocket.

She screamed.

“No, no. That's not how it's gonna be.”

He took off a glove to open the knife's blade, then donned the glove and withdrew to cut the strand that bound the burlap sack.

The sack dropped to reveal a pickle bucket. He hefted the bucket. Strode purposefully to take a position just to one side of his chained trophy.

“No!”

He hoisted the bucket above her head. Tipped it. Blood splashed scarlet off her skull.

“Nook!”

It ran off her matted hair. It coursed over her shoulders—

“Please!”

Down her back. Between her breasts.

The dog's rabid howl stopped short as he lunged for the target just across the dirt-packed floor. Only the chain was there to jerk him short.

The girl was choking, too. She had swallowed some blood.

The man paused to let her get her air before taking something else from his windbreaker. It might not be obvious from first appearances that the well-machined lump emerging from that nylon pocket was a camera.

“Get her, boy.”

“No!”

She thrashed against the wall. For a moment he was concerned that the tin might actually break free. She would be exposed, then. Open to the outside world. But it was too late to worry about that. The dog lunged again and again, jerked short each time by the chain, his ass skidding across the pawed dirt. Her smell maddened the animal. Her stink.

He framed a shot carefully. Actuated the camera's lens.

“It won't be long,” he promised, backing outside. A box of sunlight silhouetted him briefly at the door. Just an outline in black, like a stick man scissored from tar paper. The door closed, the silhouette vanished, a padlock snicked home.

There were no lines of light on the floor or walls now. Only the animal's and the girl's labored breath filled the interior. Nothing else. The girl sobbed, then, quietly.

Had he gone? Had she survived the ordeal?

But a groan of metal and a square of new light appeared. A window. The dog's chain snaked beneath the wood-shuttered window through a cutout at the bottom of the tin wall to anchor on a post set outside the shack. That had been purposeful. So that he could cut the dog's chain safely, from outside.

He fitted the bolt-cutter's jaws over a link of tempered steel.

“What—? What are you doing?”

He could hear her inquiry floating from the interior, weak in the heavy air. He strained over the cutter's long handles. The jaws snapped suddenly, like a turtle.

“Sic 'em,
” he commanded loudly.

The steel links chased away. The chain rattled wildly. The mastiff inside bounded like Grendel to take the meat hanging bloody and helpless on the opposite wall.

The camera captured frame after frame from the vantage of the shack's shuttered window. It was important, the photographer told himself, for people to see. To set an example. When it was all over he tasted copper in his mouth. A lethargy fell. As if he needed a nap.

He always expected it to be better than this. It never was. He straightened stiffly. It had taken longer than he planned; the sun was already sneaking below the pines. He was pocketing his camera when some shadow cast swiftly from behind; the change in light alerted him, some fleeting interruption of the failing sun.

He traded the camera for a handgun. Stepped around to the front of the shack. Nothing moving. No one in sight. But he knew who it was who had cast the shadow, the wraith hidden now in an impenetrable shield of vine and briars and pine. How much had the interloper seen? Or heard? That was a problem he would need to solve. He returned to the shack's shuttered window for a final view. The dog was still busy. He'd like to stay and watch that. But already it was getting hard to see inside the rustic chamber. And there was another pair of eyes, he was sure, who longed to see his handiwork. Should he remain? Kill two birds, as it were, with one stone?

He looked west. The sun was well below the pines now. He'd better leave. It was a long and circuitous walk to his vehicle, and it was not safe to be alone in Strawman's Hammock after dark. Not with the bogey man about.

Four

Lou Sessions worked out of an office contiguous with the county's jail in a three-story building rigged for the purpose. It used to be a firehouse, this building. The rising doors that once portaled a pair of fire engines were converted, now, to harbor the country's cruisers and to provide a sally port to the jail.

Barrett Raines pulled his unmarked Impala into a visitor's slot before the facility's side-street entry. A wooden door, peeling paint, beckoned from just off a weed-splintered sidewalk. He rapped on the locked door of the jail and waited just long enough to start to sweat when he saw a deputy peer out through a cracked pane of glass and the barrier of a window unit whose compressor, cutting in and out, begged along with Agent Raines for attention.

Barrett heard a key turn in its lock.

“What you got, Chief?” A deputy unfamiliar to Barrett opened the door with his foot, his hand ladled over a Glock that Barrett noted was unstrapped in its holster.

“Word with the sheriff, please.” Barrett displayed identification. “Agent Raines.”

“Oh, yeah,” The deputy caught the door with his gun hand. “Come on back.”

Barrett followed the younger man past a pair of high-ceilinged rooms littered with unused desks and chairs. Barrett saw an Olympic bar loaded with rusted weight and left to bend on a cheap bench and narrow rack. A Coke machine promised relief from that recreation. The deputy's fist flashed out to bang the coin return, but without a pause in stride turned Barrett into a narrow hallway that dropped down a half-step into what might fairly be described as a bunker.

A series of four wide, short hallways converged to provide a jerry-rigged office space. Everything Barrett could see was gotten secondhand or improvised. A mailbox converted with a pair of welded plates and a padlock served as an evidence bin. A sofa rescued from Goodwill was pulled up alongside. A pair of deputies were processing what looked like traffic tickets in folding chairs that slipped under metal desks salvaged (Bear had been told) from Eglin Air Force Base.

“Get some funds for remodeling, we'll move upstairs,” the deputy explained. “Most of us look for that to happen in our next life.”

Barrett smiled. The Third Judicial District was characterized by counties chronically short of resources. There simply was never enough money for law enforcement, or for schools. For anything.

“Wait here.” The deputy deposited Barrett in a crowded hallway rigged as office space.

Hell of a place to work. Bear gathered his impressions privately: A damp cement floor spidered with fractures. A box fan. A pair of computers glowed on a laminated desk. A dispatcher's radio buzzed static from its own niche opposite. Barrett spotted a pair of mobiles deposited casually beside the deskbound wireless, their charging plates exposed for insertion into a cruiser's rejuvenator. A VCR propped atop a barstool on the far side of the radio, its too-short cord swaying upward from the stool's advantage to reach a TV wall-mounted below a ceiling Barrett guessed to be at least eleven feet high. On its screen an unrecognized starlet squawked to Regis Philbin regarding her latest tabloid ambush, while down the hall Barrett could hear, if not see, an investigator responding by phone to what Bear guessed was a reported burglary. It was hard to hear anything clearly. In addition to the investigator, the dispatcher, the roughhouse greetings of passing deputies, and the talk show's endless chatter, Bear could make out the nasal drone of a meterologist.

A cold front was expected, apparently. And rain.

There was exposed wiring up and down the hall and the twin computers required three-plug adaptors to draw current from outlets at least forty years old. A grid of text on the monitor nearest Barrett caught his attention, a shift schedule, looked like, while on the neighboring desktop a screen saver rotated from sylvan forest scenes to beachside bikinis. Barrett was wondering why Lou would risk a display of calendar girls in a workplace so vulnerable to charges of sexual harrassment until it occurred to him that there were no women down here. In fact there were no women in uniform anywhere. The secretaries and dispatchers, all women, were segregated in a single, carpeted office at street level.

Well. That was one way to avoid friction.

“Agent Raines.”

Barrett turned to see Lou Sessions leaning on the wall.

“Lou.”

“I don't have an appointment wrote down for us.”

“No.” Barrett smiled. “I just thought it'd be a good idea to talk.”

The deputy smirked. Lou cut him off with a glance, the cratered face briefly mobile.

“Come on back,” he said.

*   *   *

Lou Sessions's office was only marginally an improvement over the warren inhabited by his subordinates. A coffee maker was mounted on a pair of milk crates. Barrett could see a narrow door behind Lou's chipped desk that he suspected led to a private restroom. The state flag of Florida competed with an FSU pennant on one corner of his desk. There was no indicator of national loyalty.

Some office. Barrett glanced about.

“It ain't yours yet,” Lou growled from a lean-back roll-around repaired with duct tape.

Barrett faced him squarely.

“If I decide I want your job, Lou, you'll be the first to know.”

“No. Linton Loyd'll be first to know.”

“I'm not about to get in a pissing contest with you and Linton, Sheriff. Far as I'm concerned
you
are the authority in this county and it's my job to listen to what you have to say.”

Lou inclined his head to one side with that declaration.

“Shit,” he said after a long moment. “You want some coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

“Just tryin' to be polite.”

“I know you are, Sheriff.”

“Well, then. That be all?”

“One thing. This problem with our out-of-state workers.”

“You mean our Messicans.”

“Well, Latin Americans, at least.”

“Bullshit. Are you running for office?”

“Thought we settled that,” Barrett replied stiffly.

“Then call 'em what they are. They ain't Cuban, they ain't Puerto Rican. They're Messicans. They come over the river in Texas, haul their ass here. You know that. I know that.”

“Fair enough.”

“Plain talk, Bear. It's easiest understood.”

“Well, then, Lou, you got to let me be blunt.”

“'Bout time.”

“I'd like to look around some of the camps in the county. See if I can get to know some of these people. See if there's anything we need to be concerned about.”

“How you gonna talk to 'em? Sign language?”

“Yo hablo español,
” Barrett replied.
“Poquito,
anyway.”

“I'll be damn.”

Barrett shrugged. “Spent some time in Texas is all.”

“And you can parlay with these people?”

“Not as well as Laura Anne. She speaks well. But if I can find 'em, I can get along. Well enough, I hope, to find out if they're being blackmailed or extorted.”

“They're not gonna open up to you on that. They do, they'll wind up with their throats slit or their trucks burned or their wives hauled off.”

Barrett leaned forward.

“You know that for a fact, Sheriff?”

“Just imaginin' is all.” Lou shrugged. “Hell, ain't it what those people always do?”

Barrett settled back.

“Lou, did you ever consider making these newcomers your allies?”

“Allies? How you figure?”

Barrett frowned. “Haven't you ever looked at these people as a potentially valuable set of eyes and ears? They're working all over the county. They see everything. But nobody sees them. They're invisible.”

“Invisible?”

“You know what I mean. I've seen men get out of their trucks and piss beside the road in full view of a family of Mexicans and not give a damn.”

“No law says you cain't piss on the road.”

“You know my point, Lou. No one
cares
what these people see. Everyone assumes they won't go to the law, that they're so afraid of losing their jobs or being deported or whatever that they're never going to be a witness to anything.”

“So far they haven't.”

“Then it can't hurt for me to talk to some of 'em, can it?”

The duct-taped chair squeaked as Lou leaned back.

“It was decent of you to come in here,” he finally said.

“It's your county, Sheriff. I'm just a visitor.”

“You wasn't always,” Lou rejoined, and the hostility that had just cooled flared again.

Barrett set his jaw tight.

Lou rocked in his chair a moment longer. Judging the effect. Finally: “You wanta look around the woods, Bear, look all you want. Be my guest. But there's camps back there nobody's seen. And I'll be damned if I can spare a man to show you.”