Shadow Men.

by Jonathon King

PROLOGUE.

They picked a moonlit night to make their escape because it was the only way. And now it was killing them. The first shot sizzled through the humid air as if it were underwater, and he heard it a millisecond before it found the muscled flesh of his son's shoulder blade and made the ugly sound of a wet, dull punch.

The boy gasped and stumbled, and his father caught him under the arm before he went down.

"Papa?" his other son said from a few steps ahead the fear in his young voice like an uncharacteristic cry. The father could see the pale glow of the younger boy's face in the moonlight and the outline of his body against the sky above the horizon, and he realized he had made targets of his sons.

"Down, Steven!" he called out. "Down in the ditch!"

All three scrambled off the piled hump of Everglades muck and limestone marl and slid down the embankment to the edge of the water below. Two of them were breathing hard; the third was bubbling wet air and blood through the new hole in his lung. They did not need to speak. They had known instantly from the sound of the report who was hunting them, and they knew the odds of surviving.

"Robert?" the father whispered, holding his seventeen-year-old son to him, now pressing his hand over the exit wound in the boy's chest to stop the ragged sound of death coming through his sweat-soaked shirt. "Oh, G.o.d Robert, forgive me for what I have brought you to."

The other boy moved across the dirt to them, his face so close he could feel his father's breath on his cheek.

"Papa? Is Robert OK, Papa?" he said and the father could feel the tears in his son's voice but could not answer. He had never lied to his children, and he did not want to break that vow this close to the end.

The father looked up to the high edge of the earthen berm they had all helped build, the foundation of the road they had all worked to create. Beyond it was a canvas of stars that had stunned them their first few nights out here in the wild Glades and then comforted them far weeks with a seeming physical closeness to G.o.d himself. But the clear crescent moon had betrayed them. The elevated roadbed was the only way back through the swamp to civilization. On a cloud-locked night it would have melded into the darkness and been impossible to follow to freedom. So they picked this night, planning to use the glint of moonlight on the ca.n.a.l water to guide them and the ribbon of black dirt to walk upon.

"We need to move, now, Steven," the father said. "Across the water. You are the strongest swimmer. Take your brother's good arm and I will get his belt and we will sidestroke together. If we can get to the mangroves on the other side, G.o.d will give us cover."

He could feel his son's head nod. He was the determined one, the one who thought all things possible, the one with the optimism and strength of youth. He would believe. The father took his shirt off, knotted it in the middle and put the lump of fabric over his son's exit wound then tied the ends over the entrance hole on the boy's back. His own tears were running now.

"Get ready, Steven, we have to move quietly," the father said, and then hesitated once more, feeling in his pocket for the gold watch of his own father and then slipping the thick disk deep down into his leather boot, hoping it might be protected there from the water.

They slipped into the warm water and pushed slowly out. The satchels they carried floated at first. Their underwater strokes were both smooth and strong despite the load of the older boy's weight. They caught a rhythm and began to make progress.

The second shot was from closer range and it tore through the father's satchel, causing the bundle to bob in the water. The marksman had mistaken it. They were more than halfway across, and as the other boy stroked harder, the father kicked stronger. In seconds their boots touched mud. The father's next stroke touched the slick root of a mangrove. The boy let go with a soft exultation, "We made it, Papa!" and the third shot entered the back of his neck and opened a gaping wet hole in his throat that yawned like the ragged mouth of the devil himself.

The father looked back once and saw the outline of the rifleman and the tilt of his hat against the stars. He was standing in the bow of the shallow Glades skiff he'd always used for hunting. He had tracked them by water, letting his low angle paint their moving bodies against the sky just as his was now. When he heard the familiar clack of the big Winchester's lever action, the father wrapped his arms around his boys in a final act of protection, whispering a prayer in their ears and refusing to believe he had seen the eyes of his killer glow red under the brim of his hat.

CHAPTER 1.

I was sitting in a chaise longue on the patio of Billy Manchester's penthouse apartment. The multihued blue of the Atlantic lay out before me. Close to sh.o.r.e its color today was a green-tinted turquoise, then the darker blues at the reef lines and then an almost steel blue out to the horizon. From this height the layers were sharply bordered, and the smell of the salt still carried up on the southeastern breeze. was sitting in a chaise longue on the patio of Billy Manchester's penthouse apartment. The multihued blue of the Atlantic lay out before me. Close to sh.o.r.e its color today was a green-tinted turquoise, then the darker blues at the reef lines and then an almost steel blue out to the horizon. From this height the layers were sharply bordered, and the smell of the salt still carried up on the southeastern breeze.

"This is really eighty years old?"

I should have known better. Never question Billy after he has presented you with something as fact, unless you crave silence from the man.

"I mean, it's interesting stuff, but isn't it kind of incredible that no one's seen it since, what, 1923?" I said, trying to redeem myself.

"Mayes said no one had ever opened his great-grandmother's hope chest. He said he wasn't even sure anyone in the family even knew it existed," Billy answered from inside the apartment, on the other side of the threshold to his sliding gla.s.s doors.

In my hand was a computer printout of what Billy called the last letter. Mark Mayes, a college student in Atlanta, had sent it to Billy with an inquiry asking him for representation in a legal action based on a handful of originals. Mayes had found them, yellowed and nearly dried to crumbling in his great-grandmother's attic in the family home. With great care he had unfolded each letter and read it. When he was done he had a new and profound respect for his long-dead great-grandfather and the two uncles he had rarely heard mentioned. He was also convinced that they had perished in the Everglades in the summer of 1923 while working for a private company trying to build the first highway across the great swamp. It wasn't a lark. The kid had offered up a small family inheritance to pay Billy's retainer.

This had all been explained to me during my first two beers from Billy's refrigerator. I suspected my friend and attorney was loosening me up.

"Another R-Rolling R-Rock?" Billy said, stepping out onto the patio with a sweating green bottle in hand.

"So you went and took a look at the originals," I started, but caught myself, "and they're convincing. I mean, there's no way to fake something like this?" I reached out and accepted the beer, smiling. Billy only raised his eyebrows.

"I stopped at M-Mr. Mayes's family home while v-visiting an acquaintance in Atlanta," Billy said. "He's a difficult young m-man to d-disbelieve, Max. And although I'm n-no expert, if these are f-fakes, he went to a lot of t-trouble preparing them."

Billy's stutter flowed through my ears now with only the most subtle recognition. It was something I'd gotten used to. Billy is a stress stutterer. His speech is flawless when he talks to you over the phone or even from the other side of a wall. But face-to-face, even among friends, his words jam up behind his teeth, always left behind and trying to keep up with his brilliant mind.

"The original sc-script is very faded. But the d-dates are compatible. The building of the Tamiami Trail had b-been off and on b-but wasn't completed until 1926."

Billy sat down in the chaise next to mine. He was wearing a pair of shorts and a silk shirt of some expensive designer brand. He stretched out his trim legs and crossed his ankles. His chocolate- colored skin was smooth and tight, and his profile was equal to any GQ GQ model or film actor as he looked out onto the horizon. model or film actor as he looked out onto the horizon.

"Now, whether his c-conjecture about the f-fate of his relatives is correct, will t-take us time to investigate," he said.

I stopped tipping my bottle just at that point where the first swallow is down your throat and you are breaking the bubble for the next.

"Us?" I said, separating the bottle from my lips by only inches.

The twitch of a grin started at one corner of his mouth, but Billy's eyes did not leave the sea.

I was driving into the sun, leaving the coast behind, all the noise and heat, traffic and clutter, convenience and luxury that it inevitably drew. After a relatively short commute on the seventy-mile- an-hour b.u.mper-car ride called I-95, I headed west on a two-lane asphalt road and then turned into the entrance to the state park. I pulled my pickup truck into a designated visitor's spot and clipped my officially purchased parking pa.s.s on the rearview mirror. It took me three trips to carry my supplies across the crushed-sh.e.l.l parking lot to my canoe, which was flipped under a group of sand pines near the boat ramp to the river.

On each trip across the lot I cut my eyes to the front door of the park ranger's station. I could detect no movement behind the windows, although the ranger's Boston Whaler was tied up at the dock and I knew he was still on duty.

More than three years ago I had walked away from a ten-year career as a cop on the streets of Philadelphia. In a shootout during a cheap Center City stickup, I had killed a child. The fact that I had taken a round in the neck and that the kid had been a tagalong with the stickup man made the shooting team rule the death as "justified." But I could never find a place for that term in my own head. I took a disability payout and moved here, to a place completely different from the city where I'd been born and raised. It did not take me long to realize that sometimes it's more what you bring with you than what you leave behind. I also found out that what I had brought was not welcome.

I locked the truck, and with my supplies of canned food, some extra water and Billy's new reading material secured in the bow, I pushed my boat off onto the dark water of the river. Without looking back I took three strong strokes to gain momentum and began gliding farther west. In minutes I was into a rhythm, reaching out with the paddle, digging into a purchase of water and pulling long strokes, then following through with a subtle feathering of the blade that sent a small funnel trailing behind.

The river is wide here, bordered by rimrock forests of slash pine. Farther west the water narrows and the land flattens into a low collection of mangroves spiked with an occasional bald cypress. The late afternoon sun had already begun to spin the clouds with pale streaks of pink and orange, and the air was losing its scent of salt as the mix of ocean water was overwhelmed by fresh spilloff from the Everglades. Two miles in, the banks narrowed again and I slowed my pace and eased into the tunneled canopy of the upper river. I stopped stroking and let the canoe drift into the shadowed silence. Here the deep green of oak, red maple and pond apple trees dominated, and when the water is high the place seems more like a flooded forest than like a river. A traveler learns to read the currents and flow in order to follow the natural trench, but I have paddled the river's length in both moonlight and s.p.a.ckled daylight so many times, I know every turn by rote.

In the deep shade the temperature dropped several degrees and I stripped off my sweat-soaked T-shirt and pulled a long-sleeved version from my bag. With my arms up and elbows wrapped in the material I stopped at the sight of a great blue heron standing on a moss bank only twenty feet away. The bird was nearly four feet tall, with a third of its length in the S-curve of its neck. He stared at me with one angry yellow eye, and I stared back. The instant I pulled the shirt down over my face the animal squawked once, and by the time my head popped through the collar he had already taken flight, his long, crooked wings flapping elegantly through the tunnel of foliage and out toward open sunlight.

I was now working south against a light current, and about a mile in, I came to the two tall, gnarled oaks that marked the entrance to my shack. The shallow water trail behind them was obscured by an overgrowth of filigreed maidenhair ferns. Thirty yards back from the river I stroked up to my small dock, looped a line over a four-by-four piling and climbed out. I bent and checked the first three steps leading up the staircase to the stilted cabin. Out here there was always a film of moisture on any flat surface. Had anyone used the stairway, they would have left a print. I don't get many visitors, and those I do get, I don't like unannounced. The steps were untouched, and I shouldered the first load of supplies and went up to the single room I called home.

The shack dated back to the 1930s, when a rich northerner built it as a hunting lodge. It was later abandoned for several years and then reopened as a research station for biologists studying the water flow and animal life on the edge of the Glades. Billy had somehow picked up the lease from one of his innumerable contacts and offered it to me when I first came to South Florida.

Most of the place was constructed of Dade County pine, possibly the densest, toughest wood in nature. Legend has it that frontiersmen in Miami had to cut and nail the wood while it was still green because it was impenetrable after it dried. A row of cabinets hanging on one wall may have dated back to the original owner. Windows are centered in all four walls, and the high ceiling is shaped like a pyramid with a cupola at the apex, which lets the warm air rise and escape while drawing cool air up from the shade below.

I started a pot of coffee on the shack's single-burner propane stove. There was also an ancient potbellied stove in one corner, but stoking it took time and I do not do well waiting on coffee. While it was brewing I put away supplies, then put my clean clothes in the old oak armoires that lined one wall, and added two new books to the stacks on the top mattress of the bunk bed. It was an odd collection that included new and old Florida history, travel books that I'd read and reread while waiting out the rain as a bored cop on night patrol, and some Southern literature, including a masterpiece by an old Philadelphia Daily News Philadelphia Daily News columnist that I always carried with me. The only other pieces of furniture were the two straight- backed wooden chairs and an enormous slab of butcher-blocked mahogany that served as a table. columnist that I always carried with me. The only other pieces of furniture were the two straight- backed wooden chairs and an enormous slab of butcher-blocked mahogany that served as a table.

By the time the coffee was ready only a weak light was leaking through the western window. I poured a cup, lit the clear gla.s.s oil lamp and set both on the table. I picked up the sheaf of transcribed letters that Billy had given me, and in the silence of my own corner of the Glades began to reread the sketchy account of Cyrus Mayes, an out-of-work schoolteacher whose eighty-year-old story had set a rough stone of unknown truth rolling in my head. My familiar but often unhealthy grinding had begun.

My Darling Eleanor, Forgive me for my past letters if they have caused you distress or undue worry for us. This time I send you good news.

After our long and fitful train journey we arrived at the port of Tampa. It was my hope that here the boys and I would find work, at least on the docks as we are strong and physically able and eager. Alas, we find that here too is a crush of laborers in our same predicament. By gathering with a common group of men at daybreak, Steven and Robert or I have been picked for a single day's work, but it is not enough to sustain us or gain on our economic station. We were on our final dollars of savings when G.o.d's face shone on us this day.

At the gathering, a foreman who seemed to be careful in his selections singled all three of us out to join another twenty men. "We were loaded into trucks and our future labors explained. The foremen offered us all two months of steady work for the Noren company on a road building project to the South. We will be given room and board and $75 a week each. The project is some distance away, but we are promised to return in eight weeks or to sign on for additional time if we wish.

We shall be leaving at dawn tomorrow my darling, and in my heart I believe this is our chance to gain the capital we need to start a new life for us all.

I have used some precious few cents to secure stationery and postage, but I do not know when I might have the chance to write again.

Steven and Robert send their love and know that we think of you and young Peter always. Join us in prayer that this new opportunity will bring us our dreams.

Your loving husband, Cyrus

I got up and refilled my cup. Billy, in his role as my personal Florida historian, had told me of the back-busting efforts of men and machines to build a road across the southern Everglades. In the the first two decades of the 1900s, Miami had become a thriving frontier city. Real estate, tourism, trade with Havana and the constant import of money from the Northeast on the new rail lines to New York had given the miracle city a growing reputation. Entrepreneurs on the west coast of Florida were jealous. They wanted a piece of the action, and a few were convinced that a road connecting Tampa and Miami would be the golden pipeline. first two decades of the 1900s, Miami had become a thriving frontier city. Real estate, tourism, trade with Havana and the constant import of money from the Northeast on the new rail lines to New York had given the miracle city a growing reputation. Entrepreneurs on the west coast of Florida were jealous. They wanted a piece of the action, and a few were convinced that a road connecting Tampa and Miami would be the golden pipeline.

Mayes's following letters were only a glimpse of how the plans of businessmen had underestimated the Everglades. In long dispatches written at night by candle or lamplight, Mayes described how he and his teenage sons had been taken by boat to Everglades City, a fishing village that had become the supply depot for the road project. From there the men were taken several miles out into the swamp along a crude earthen berm to the worksite. At the end of the line was the monstrous Moneghan dredge, manned and serviced by the laborers. The dredge was an ever-moving, forty- thousand-pound beast sent to dig into the muck and water and tangle of wild jungle that was the Glades. The men cleared the way and the dredge scooped up a deep ca.n.a.l of earth and crushed limestone and piled it onto the ever-lengthening berm that would become the future roadbed.

"It is a horrific and awesome machine," Mayes wrote. "As it digs, its power rattles the very ground for fifty yards in all directions, shaking the world like a ma.s.s of jelly."

The workers lived at the work site, sleeping in wooden barracks, and Mayes's first letter from the camp listed the new and exotic dangers.

"At night when the dredge goes silent, the snakes come out from their hiding. Just last night Robert pounded some unknown species to death with his boot heel after finding it in his bedding."

A man called Jefferson was mentioned as the designated sharpshooter, a.s.signed to kill any of "the numerous alligators that creep in while we are in the water trying to move and secure the machinery." In their first two weeks Mayes reported witnessing the death of two workers. One fell from the high dredge rigging and into "a ma.s.s of watery muck which quickly sucked him into the earth before any of us could reach him. No attempt was made by the foremen to recover his body and we do not know if the incident was even recorded." The second death was the result of a dynamite explosion, "of which there are several each day to crumble the limestone bed below us for dredging."

"We learned early to constantly be attuned to the call of 'fire in the hole.' Yet, some oblivious crewman was at work too near when the blast ripped his arm away from his body. Despite our efforts to retrieve him and the crew doctor's attempts, the blood ran from the poor man until he expired."

Mayes wrote that the man's wrapped corpse was loaded onto the cart that delivered the very dynamite that killed him and sent on the trip back to Everglades City. It was by this same means that Mayes had been able to surrept.i.tiously send out his letters. Early on he "befriended the elderly Negro who regularly delivered the tons of explosives to the camp. I ascertained immediately his admiration for my father's pocket watch and though it was a heavy price to pay, my darling, he has promised that in exchange he will deliver my letters to the post office at Everglades City and we will so value the knowledge that you receive our love and news of our well being."

I got up from the table, poured the last of the coffee and stepped outside onto the small landing at the top of the stairs. Up through the trees I could see a quarter moon pinned to the sky like a pewter brooch, a film of cloud giving it a dull, unfocused shine. The backlit leaves were black, and below the treeline it was darker still. It had taken some time for my eyes to adjust to the darkness out here after a lifetime in the city, where one is never without some source of electric glow. But now I can pick up the glint of pale moonlight caught by the water below, make out varied shades of darkness, or distinguish a solid tree trunk from a thick stand of common fern. I have stood listening to the unique hum of night insects and the occasional movement of predators. At night I have paddled out into the endless acres of sawgra.s.s and marsh of the flooded Everglades, where it is not unlike a trip to sea except that the thick heat is inescapable and the clouds of mosquitoes intolerable. In the 1920s, without the respite of cool, clean lodging or even a drop of cold water to drink, working in such conditions would quickly have grown exhausting. Was it enough to cause a mutiny of laborers like the Mayeses, despite their desperate need of work? Mayes's final letter raised too many possibilities and questions.

My Dearest Eleanor, I do not wish to unduly alarm you my darling, but our situation here has become increasingly troubling. For now the boys and I are still in good health despite the hardships that I have written of earlier. Both Robert and Steven have in fact been my inspiration in all this, watching them outwork most of this crew and holding their deserved complaints for my ears only. Still, I sense both a fear in them and a rising anger. They are looking to me for answers and I too believe it has come time for drastic measures.

By my own rude calculation we are now the furthest point into the swamp from civilization at either end of this planned roadway. Our supply depot at Everglades City must now be thirty miles behind us. It is an impossible trek on foot for a man without supplies in the G.o.d forsaken heat and the constant natural dangers that abound. Still, three more men in the crew left late last night after the foreman again refused them any aid in abandoning their work and their so-called legal contract.

Steven has told me that the three had stolen fresh water bags and when he felt them raise the mosquito netting and heard them leave, he woke us and we lay listening for more than an hour. Then we heard Mr. Jefferson's rifle, three separate reports, echoing from some distance to the west. The sound put the fear of G.o.d in us and we prayed quietly together. This morning when one of the crew asked Mr. Jefferson if he were out gator hunting again in the night the silent man only nodded his head under the brim of his hat and climbed back up to his lookout perch. Like the few discouraged but brave workmen who have left on their own previously, we know that we will not see the three from last night again and we pray that they returned safely to civilization and their families.

I dream my darling wife, that these letters have reached your hand. We have been ten weeks now in this h.e.l.l called the Everglades and we also dream that the wages that await us when our time here is done will give us all a way to the future. Our way is through perseverance, but I do not know how much more strength we have.

Love from us all, Cyrus

I went back inside the shack, turned out the lamp and peeled off my shirt. In the dark I lay in the bottom bunk, listening to the living Glades noises outside, staring into the blackness of the mattress above me and finding only my own visions of the glistening white yawn of poisonous snakes and the smell of sun-baked flesh.

CHAPTER 2.

The stinging odor in my nose woke me. Or the rising sound of someone calling my name. When I came partially awake I could hear "Mr. Freeman! Mr. Freeman!" being shouted from a distance, a panic building behind the words. When my eyes finally cleared, the sight of white smoke curling and thickening in the ceiling made the panic my own. My house was on fire. I rolled out of bed onto one knee and caught a lungful of the acrid smell and coughed it back out. A weak light was making it through the windows, along with the shouting and the sound of a man splashing.

"Freeman!"

I crawled to the door, staying low, but glanced up in all four directions in search of flames. I pushed the door open and a wave of fresh air hit my face, which caused my mouth to involuntarily gasp open and my eyes to tear. Down in the ca.n.a.l, the park ranger was waist-deep in water. He was balancing a fire extinguisher on his shoulder with one hand and using the other to pull and stroke himself forward.

"Freeman! Are you OK?"

I stood with help from the handrail and nodded. My lungs were stinging with each breath but the oxygen was clearing them. The ranger made the dock and hoisted himself up and started up the stairs.

"You all right?"

"Yeah," I said. "Yeah." The second word was clearer than the first.

"The fire's on the backside, north corner," he said, pushing my door open wide with his dripping boot. "Maybe we can knock it down from the window ledges."

He pulled the pin on his boat extinguisher and then bent low and started in. I took as deep a breath as I could and followed. The ranger crab-walked across the room to the north window and I broke for the kitchen counter, where my own extinguisher was stored.

The ranger had already figured out the inside latch system by the time I got to the east window. We pulled open the hinged mosquito screens and pushed our heads out. The flames were crawling up the sides of the shack in an odd wave of blue and orange. They licked up over the edge of the roof but there were no eaves in the design to stop them and let them gain heat. This was a good thing. I saw a billow of white chemical spray fan out from around the corner, then stepped one leg through the window and straddled the cas.e.m.e.nt. I pulled the pin on my canister and let loose a shot of spray, aiming down at the base of the flames. The fire retreated but then stubbornly reignited. It looked as though the tall piling itself was on fire. I leaned farther out to get a better angle and squeezed off another blast.

It may have been ten minutes, maybe thirty. The ranger's extinguisher ran dry before mine, but we had doused all the live flame we could see. When my can was empty, he helped me back in through the window and we both stumbled out the door and down the stairs. The wash of fresh air set us both coughing again, and when we reached the dock at the bottom the ranger sat with his feet in the water and retched between his knees. I lay down on the opposite side and cupped the river water in my hands and splashed it up into my face and eyes. It was several minutes before either of us could speak.

"You OK, Freeman?"

"OK," I said, realizing I had long forgotten the ranger's name.

"Griggs," he said. "Dan Griggs."

"Thanks, Griggs."

The eastern sky was lightening, though the sun was still too low to break through the tree canopy. In time we both sat up, leaning our backs into opposite posts at the end of the dock. I finally took a solid look at the guy. He was a good ten years younger than me, lean with sandy blond hair and skin too fair for his job in the Florida sun. His ranger uniform was soaked up to a dark line across his chest. His leather boots were oozing mud. He was still wearing his belt with a knife scabbard and a flashlight holder.

"You swim out here at dawn often?"