Tampa Burn (18 page)

As I sped along, passing slower cars and pickups with bass boats in tow, camper trucks and the occasional semi, I mulled over the possibilities and the potential.

What
were
the options if law enforcement came between me and the Chevy . . . ?

I considered different scenarios, weighing risks.

Beyond the levee at Chekika's Hammock, the road straightened through a dome of cypress trees, water and lily pads on both sides. I slowed for another Indian village. There were thatched huts around a gravel parking lot and a sign that read JAMES TIGER'S FAMOUS REPTILE SHOW AND AIRBOAT RIDES.

James is a friend of mine—and there he was, using a wrench on an airboat engine, the sleeves of his rainbow-colored Seminole shirt rolled high, his old black cowboy hat battling the sun.

I was tempted to stop. If a man lives a long and lucky life, he may meet a handful of people he can trust under any circumstance, in any situation, life or death. James Tiger is one of those rare men.

Still slowing, looking at James, my mind flashed on a different plan, and on how I could work it. I could slide into the parking lot, stuff the satellite phone in one pocket, the Sig Sauer pistol in another, and tell James that the bad guys were after me. Tell him I needed to borrow an airboat, or ask to hitch a ride on his boat to some remote island a couple of miles out in the swamp.

He'd do it. No questions.

Then I'd wait for my pursuers to find me. It might take a while. A couple of hours. Maybe a couple of days. But they'd track me. For half-a-million dollars, they'd figure a way.

I'd be waiting out there with the Sig Sauer, and I'd take them. Put the bodies in a gator hole, never to be found.

It could work . . . if I was willing to do something so extreme.

Which I
was.
If I had to. I've taken similar action before in my life. Hated doing it; loathed myself at the time and for a long while afterward. Despised myself because I was capable of such action, and also because it scared me to the core.

When those memories come slipping back, they produce a sickening and sweaty unpleasantness—which is why I make every effort to live in the present, not the past.

But I've now come to terms with who I am, and what I am. Occasionally for better, often for worse, I have come to terms with that truth.

I sometimes wonder if focusing on marine biology as a life's work isn't a way of justifying, or at least validating, a specific and unsentimental view of existence. From biology's elemental view, human beings, like all species, are not only guided by the tenets of natural selection, we are mandated. In such a world, eliminating enemies, or behavioral anomalies, isn't a decision to be made. It is a necessary process.

I've participated in that process. I can do it again if required. Of that there is no doubt.

Something else, though, was necessary to make my airboat escape work. I also had to be willing to involve my friend James Tiger in what amounted to cold-blooded murder.

That was something I would
not
do.

I touched my foot to the accelerator and sped on.

 

 

ONCE,
on a long and open stretch of highway, I got a glimpse of the Chevy way, way back there, still on my tail. I wondered if they'd decided to try and catch me.

To find out, I reduced my speed from 75 to 65. The dark car closed briefly, then dropped back.

No. I guessed they'd decided there was still too much traffic. Too many passing witnesses. They were content to stay close. Were probably waiting, hoping there'd be a reason for me to stop in this rural region.

I'd been thinking about doing exactly that, my brain scanning furiously, continuing to inspect variations of what might be a plausible plan, defining, rejecting, then refining.

I could hear Tattoo saying,
If my people catch them tailing you again, the deal's off.
Could hear him saying,
It's your problem, not ours.

I had to come up with a way not just to shake them, but to lose them. I didn't have to get rid of them permanently, but I did have to make them disappear for a sizeable block of time—several days, and probably longer.

Finally, I settled upon something that might work. I thought about it some more, then finally committed myself to putting the plan into action.

Decision made, I began anticipating details, which presented me with a whole other stack of problems. Not the least of which was, I didn't know how many people were in the car.

So I chose a figure. I chose five because that was the worst-case scenario. It gave me something to work with.

Another troubling possibility was, assuming they
had
entered the country illegally, they could've smuggled in some heavy firepower with them. The prospect of facing a carload of men carrying automatic weapons made my stomach roll.

No matter how many there were, though, and whatever they were packing, I needed to get it right the first time. I needed to pick the ideal place, make a good guess at the timing, and then keep the timing tight.

Ahead, road signs now warned, was an abrupt right curve in what is otherwise a straight road—Forty Mile Bend.

Forty Mile Bend is part of Everglades mythos. It is said that back in the early 1900s, when construction crews were using floating dredges to build the Tamiami Trail across the great sawgrass river, one team started from Miami, to the east. Another started building from below Naples, in the west. The plan called for the two construction crews to meet in the swamp's middle—but the engineering was way off and they missed by many, many miles. Thus a great bend was required to join the two sections of road.

Traveling from east to west, where Forty Mile Bend angles northward, Dade County, which is home to Miami, becomes Collier County, which is home to Naples. Just as Miami and Naples are polar opposites in style and population, so are the two counties. The same is true of the infrastructures that keeps them operating.

Dade County sheriff's deputies, I knew, tend to be metropolitan, even international in demographic. A fair percentage of Collier County deputies, however, are still multigenerational Floridians, proud of their heritage.

Both departments have good reputations, are staffed by competent professionals, according to what I've read and heard.
Most
law enforcement agencies are competent. They must be, because they receive daily, critical public scrutiny of an intensity that few professions would tolerate or could weather.

But between the two agencies, and for my purposes, I favored the cops from Collier County. We had more in common. Our antecedents were similar. I had a better shot at predicting how they thought, how they would react under certain circumstances.

So I took the big curve at Forty Mile Bend, tires squealing, and drove fast across the Collier County line. I kept the accelerator down until, in what seemed to be a horizon of sawgrass and swamp, I came to an old abandoned two-story house built of clapboard, its white paint peeling. The house sat back on a gravel parking lot on the south side of the road, windows boarded.

Because as a teen I'd spent a few years living near the area with my crazed old uncle, Tucker Gatrell, I knew that the place was called Monroe Station. I knew it was built originally to house highway construction crews, then troopers who patrolled the Tamiami Trail, and that finally it was purchased by a family named Lord who operated it for years as a barbecue restaurant.

I'd eaten there many times.

I also knew about the single-lane gravel road just beyond the old house. Known by locals as the Loop Road, it cut deep, southward, into the 'Glades, then circled out twenty-seven miles later.

There were a lot of dead-end trails that exited from the Loop; plenty of remote land eddies that were weighted in silence and shadow.

I was headed for the Loop Road. I knew just the spot where I hoped to stand face to face, alone with the men who were after me. If that place still existed . . . and
if
I could find it.

After checking my watch and noting the time, I slowed and turned left down the road. It was 6:05 P.M.—plenty of daylight before sunset.

Then I picked up Tomlinson's cell phone. I began to dial . . .

 

 

MY
Uncle Tuck had lived at the edge of the Everglades, on a dilapidated ranch, mostly mangrove and palmetto. He spent his final years bragging to anyone who'd listen that he was among the last of old Florida's cowboys—cow hunters as they were known—and about the many famous actors and politicians he'd introduced to Florida during his years as a fishing and hunting guide.

It's true that he built a reputation as a guide. He became better known, though, as a smuggler, a shyster, and a transparent con man. Yet Tucker, for reasons I've never unraveled, still sustained the devoted friendship of several good, decent, and remarkably gifted men.

So he must have had some redeeming qualities. Maybe the day will come when I'll discover what those qualities were.
Maybe.
So far, I've never felt the need to try and find out.

One of Tucker's closest friends lived miles deep in the 'Glades, on the road I was now driving. He was a bluegrass fiddler and composer by the name of Ervin T. Rouse. Ervin wrote one brilliant, enduring American classic before retreating to this place to drink whiskey and swap tales with the likes of Tuck and similar 'Glades dwellers. The song was “The Orange Blossom Special.”

As a teen, I'd come with Tuck many times to visit; had never heard anyone before or since play a fiddle like that great old man. So I knew the road, and I knew the area well, though it had been years since I'd been here.

As I drove, I felt a curious mix of tension and déjà vu, bouncing along, both hands on the wheel of the Ford, fighting the potholes, unable to see much behind me because of the dust cloud blooming in my wake. The sensation was that of having lived two distinct and separate lives; lives that were now intersecting on this bad road, in this isolated space. That I had returned dragging trouble behind me seemed an additional irony. That there was the potential for violence added to the irony.

I remembered Ervin's shack—for that's what it was, a shack, a plywood and tin shack. I remembered that it was on a sharp curve near a long-abandoned hunting outpost called Pinecrest. I wanted to find it because I needed a section of road that could be easily described to a stranger over the phone, and just as easily found.

If my memory was accurate, the curve was sufficiently distinctive to serve. Not that I expected the shack still to be standing. Didn't need to be. Ervin was long dead, and it was now illegal for people to live in this section of the 'Glades. But I felt confident I'd recognize the curve once I got to it.

Or would I . . . ?

I came to a bend that seemed about right, but I wasn't sure. Opposite it, on my left, was a canal shaded by tall cypress trees. On its mud-slick banks, turtles and small alligators lay in sunlight or shade, regulating body temperature beneath a glittering mobile of dragonflies.

I stopped the car and stepped out.

Visitors don't think of wilderness when they think of Florida, but this was wild country, deep swamp. Insects created an oscillating synthesizer backdrop to chattering, whistling birds and a hammering frog percussion. When I slammed the car door, I also slammed the frogs silent. The silence created a momentary void in the water-weighted air.

I jogged toward an open patch of scrub that once might have been a clearing, and began to kick through rotting wood, limbs, trash. In the weeds, I found chunks of tin. Nearby, I found a wooden sign that read:

It was the sign that had hung on the old bar and restaurant that flourished for years near here. It'd burned, I'd heard.

Then I began to find ruined pieces of album covers, country music titles, and photographs grown over by weeds. The photos were of country music stars.

The walls of Ervin's shack had been papered with the things.

This was his old home site, no doubt.

I was hurrying, but I still took the time to lean and retrieve a fragment of photo that showed a grinning, toothless Ervin T. Rouse posing with a country music icon. Even I recognized Johnny Cash.

The photo had been violated by rain, insects, sun, time. That this once treasured memento had been reduced to roadside litter catalyzed in me a startling sense of transience. Since my early years living near this place, I'd traveled to regions few have been. I'd seen and experienced things few could imagine. Seeing the photo keyed a surprising and reassuring fatalism: If I screwed up, if my life ended here while trying to save my son, that wasn't a bad way to go.

It was the kind of emotional reaction I seldom experience.

Ervin was that kind of man. He was a good one. A real character.

I almost slid the bit of photo into my pocket, but stopped when I realized I couldn't risk the chance of it being found on me and later connected with this location. Instead, I turned and sailed the paper into the canal where he'd once loved to fish. A sort of private farewell.

Jogging back to the rental car, I still felt a powerful tension, but my anxiety over whether the strategy would work or not was gone.

If nothing else, I had that . . .

From beneath the front seat, I retrieved my handgun, the 9 mm Sig Sauer. A Sig Sauer is weighted steel-dense, blue-black, and has a look of industrial efficiency that implies precise engineering, exact tolerances. I shucked a round into the chamber as I walked toward the right side of the road. At the sharpest bowing of the curve, I looked both ways before firing three rounds harmlessly into the canal.