"Tell me exactly what they did ask you to do for them," I said to Nash, who stepped away from his old partners and turned to face them. He looked once over at Brown before he spoke.

"They come out to the Rod and Gun askin' for a guide who knew the area. First said they was followin' some migratory bird, but I could tell they weren't no birders. Then when we got out of Chokoloskee this mornin', they kept secret, like checkin' some electronic thing in their bag. Tol' me it was a GPS but h.e.l.l, I use one them my own self and I knew it was some kinda tracker. Then they got nervous when we found you'd ditched your boat, Mr. Brown, and after that they didn't want to lose sight of y'all.

"And I didn't. Y'all almost slipped me through the Marquez, but I caught ya," he said with a kid's overblown pride in his voice as he looked over shyly at Brown.

"How much they pay you, Billy?" I asked.

"Five hundred."

"And whose name is on the expense account, Jim?" I said turning back to the other two without focusing on either one, so my use of the overheard name would put them off guard.

"f.u.c.k you, Freeman," said the big one. "You're just a hired P.I.- you know we don't give up the name of a client. Besides, nothing illegal has occurred out here unless you consider you pointing that piece at us is worth an aggravated a.s.sault charge that we could file against you."

"All right then, boys. What's the name of your licensed agency and I'll be glad to get a hold of you at a later date after I get my equipment scanned and figure out where you planted your directional tracker. You two were the ones watching me have dinner the other night in Fort Lauderdale, yes?"

The other one moved to his left, as if he was starting to sit down on the poisonwood trunk, and I snapped, "Hey!" and bobbled the tip of the gun to keep him on his feet. He was well out of his element. Beads of sweat had formed across his pate and the heat was flushing his face a dull red. But his eyes were as black and hard as marbles when he stared back at me from under the bill of his cap. He reached back and put his right hand on the tree trunk and then turned back to me.

"Hey, f.u.c.k you, Freeman. And that hot little cop you're hosing on the side." He was all New Jersey, the accent, the tough guy thing. But like a bad magician, the mouth was supposed to distract me. He made it look like he was sitting down, a motion that shielded his right hand, but I saw the crook in his elbow go high.

I'd like to say it was the disparagement of Richards that got me. I'd like to say I was thinking of Cyrus Mayes and his boys. I'd like to say I could control the bloom of violence that was spreading in my chest at the sound of another street a.s.shole somehow tied to the death of good men. But I couldn't. It was just a guess.

I shot him in the right thigh. The 9 mm jumped slightly. I had been aiming for the knee. Both of the guy's hands went to his leg, like he could cover the new hole there and make it go away. The other one's hand went to his vest and I had the warm muzzle of the Glock in his face before he could get through the unfamiliar zipper.

"No, no, no, Jim," I said. "Bad move, considering that you now know I don't give a s.h.i.t about your rules, or your standing with the Better Business Bureau, or your lives at this point." I'd used the name right, guessed which one it belonged to. I could see it in his eyes.

"Now, hands on your heads, boys, fingers laced together."

I heard Brown move in the brush beside me. The Nash kid had been frozen again by the second gunshot of the afternoon. The big man put his hands on his head and I went in close and took a .38 from a shoulder holster under his vest. Then I stepped behind him and patted him down, found a cell phone and put it in my pocket. Satisfied, I moved the other one. He'd laced his bloodied fingers together on top of his hat. He was breathing short, whistling breaths through his mouth and his jaw was clenched up with the pain. He'd stumbled back against the tree trunk when I shot him and was now leaning with his good haunch against it. I found the 9 mm Beretta I'd guessed he was reaching for still clipped to his belt in the small of his back.

"All right, let's start with names," I said, moving back in front them. Neither said anything.

"Jim?" I said, pointed the gun at his face again.

"c.u.mmings," he said in a tone void of resignation.

"Jesus Jim, don't...," said the other one through his teeth.

"It's only money, Rick. It isn't worth it," c.u.mmings said.

"Yeah? Since when isn't money worth it to you?"

I switched my aim to Rick's face.

"He's a smart man, Rick. I could shoot the two of you just like you would me and leave you to rot out here in the middle of nowhere and n.o.body would know-forever and ever," I said, not once considering the irony of what I was saying.

"Rick Derrer," c.u.mmings said, and his partner scowled at him.

"Who hired you?"

Again silence, but this time it felt tighter.

"OK, then," I said to Brown. "Let's go."

The old man was looking from me to them but did not hesitate to move back toward the way we'd come.

"Y'all are with us, Nash," Brown ordered the young man, who'd been unsure of what ground he'd landed on, but knew to answer to a legend.

"Yes, sir, Mr. Brown," he said, and moved with the Gladesman.

I held my Glock in my left hand and with my right heaved c.u.mming's .38 and then Derrer's Beretta out into separate parts of the wet hammock. Without a metal detector, neither was ever going to be found.

"Now, I figure big Jim there might make it the fifteen miles through the swamp to the trail. He looks fit enough. Probably did some hunting in his time. But your boy Rick here, he's in for a long trek with that leg. He makes it a mile and it'll be something," I said.

"But f.u.c.k you, Freeman. That's what you both said, right? Ought to cap both of us, right?"

I turned and walked away and Brown and Nash walked with me. We were ten steps away when c.u.mmings spoke up. "All right, Freeman. It was the PalmCo attorneys."

I took a couple of steps back and waited.

"They hire us on occasion, when their regular loss-prevention guys can't handle the job. They're lawyers so they don't tell us it's for PalmCo, but we've done enough s.h.i.t for them over the years, we know who pays the bills."

Derrer had taken off his belt and vest and was strapping the Eddie Bauer ripstop cloth over his wound.

"What was the job?" I said.

"To tail you. Find out where you went, who you talked to. Typical stuff. The only twist was trying to follow you out here. Not exactly our neighborhood," c.u.mmings said, raising his hands. The movement caused me to raise the Glock to his chest. He turned his palms out and continued.

"We figured you knew about something that PalmCo wanted. That's the usual story. When you picked up the old guy and started moving around in the Glades, we figured you had the location of some d.a.m.n oil deposit or something.

"We were supposed to map everywhere you went and record any spot where you spent much time. They said if you started digging anywhere, we were to contact them right away and record the location."

He wasn't cowering. He wasn't spilling his guts. This was business for him, and he was playing out his hand with the goal of not being left in the swamp with little chance of getting himself and his partner out alive.

"What about the guns, the chopper, the cell intercepts and bugs on my truck?"

"Standard corporate security procedures," c.u.mmings said. "I saw your jacket, Freeman. You were a street cop for a long time. The corporates, they've got stuff we never dreamed of back then."

My guess that he was former P.D. had been right.

"You the guys who went to the Loop Road bar and took the picture off the wall?"

He was silent for a few seconds, thinking, I knew, trail of evidence. Everything he had said so far could be denied by the company lawyers. Something physical couldn't be. I turned again to walk away.

"They told us to pick up anything we ran across that had to do with construction of the road, especially the old stuff," he said to turn me around. "We turned it over to them."

Now it was my turn to be silent. It was a cruel game because I knew I had the better cards this time. And he didn't know it was more than just business to me. I called the young airboat driver back to me and frisked him to be safe.

"Help your clients get to your boat, Nash," I said. The kid looked at Brown once and when the old Gladesman gave him a nod, he moved.

Brown and I watched as they shouldered Derrer and walked him like an injured player between them off the field. I shouldered our satchel with the metal detector. When they were far enough ahead I searched the ground where I had been standing and found the spent cartridge that had ejected from my gun when I shot Derrer. When I stood ready to go, I caught Brown staring at the side of my face, an unusual act for him. I caught his eyes. eyes.

"You're a hard man, Freeman. I knowed men like you," he said. "All of 'em in the past."

I could find no way to respond. If it was a compliment, I didn't take it as such.

CHAPTER 20.

Nash had run the airboat up onto the gra.s.s only yards from our skiff. I climbed aboard first and searched through their supplies. I left them their fresh water and food and the first aid kit. I took another 9 mm from one pack and an old but beautifully preserved 16-gauge shotgun from a scabbard strapped up behind the driver's seat. Nash whined about the gun, begging that it had been pa.s.sed down from his father, but Brown again informed him to shut up.

They propped Derrer up against the gang box at the base of the elevated driver's chair and Nash climbed up and started the big airplane engine. The one called c.u.mmings did not look back at me. His business was done. The mist of spray kicked up as the airboat pulled away felt cool against my face, and Brown and I waited until the sound faded. Then the old man stood up on the skiff to get a higher angle to watch them. I sat on the deck, my legs crossed, and took out the map and my GPS and Derrer's tracking unit.

"You ain't worried about that feller goin' back and tellin' the police you shot him?" Brown said, continuing to look out after the airboat. I scrolled through the unit's stored coordinates and could not find anything that coincided with the longitude and lat.i.tude of John William's records.

"There would be a lot of explaining to do. Some jurisdictional matters. Permission from the men who hired those two. My guess is he'll be compensated and quiet. PalmCo isn't going to want to bring any more scrutiny out here, especially law enforcement scrutiny."

Brown just nodded and watched me working the map and the GPS. The encounter with c.u.mmings and Derrer had thrown me off and I realized the spot we'd been looking for was back toward Marquez Ridge. We had pa.s.sed it while leading the airboat to the hammock.

"We've got to backtrack," I said to Brown as he stepped down into the muck to spin the skiff.

"Yep," he said, and did not offer another word, or ask a question about where we needed to go. Instead he poled us through the open gra.s.s between the two mounds of trees, and I actually lay back in the skiff and stared into the sky. My head was throbbing. I was trying not to replay the last hour through my head. I'd shot a man, maybe out of necessity, maybe out of anger or frustration. When you're a cop, you're trained that whenever you fire your gun, it's a use of deadly force, meant to kill. You aren't on TV. You don't try to wound. When the citizens start whining after every fatal police shooting about why the cop couldn't have just winged the a.s.shole with the knife, they're out of our loop. Danger is a p.i.s.sed off guy with a knife and only a wound. The killer in the subway and now some P.I. who just happened to p.i.s.s me off. Somewhere inside me I had that capacity, and I wasn't sure what that fact told me.

I registered the change in light on my closed eyelids before I felt the skiff slide up into thicker gra.s.s and come to a halt. Brown had poled us into the shadows. We would once again have to pull the boat by a line to follow the riverbed path. I checked the GPS and looked ahead. Brown wasn't waiting for instructions. I put the unit away and we pulled together.

After twenty minutes, he stopped. I knew it wasn't because he was tired. I found my water bottle and took a long drink and sat on the edge of the skiff. Brown was still standing, staring at the stand of ancient pine, the single limb that had been broken but remained alive as it fell perpendicular through the crotch of another. The knot where they met had grown together, and now that I looked at it as a whole, it was the perfect representation of a cross.

"This is it, Freeman," Brown said. "Git out yer map or your metal finder. This is it."

I checked the GPS and plotted it on the map. The alignment was close but not perfect, but I wasn't arguing. I a.s.sembled the metal detector and adjusted the settings while Brown gave me his rationale, a lot of it based on his gut instinct, which I had long learned to trust out here where everything, even the earth herself, had a way of shifting and moving.

"If them last letters were written in the summer, then it'd be the rainy season," Brown said, scanning the area around the trees, but looking up anxiously at the form of the cross.

"The rains'll raise this water another four, five inches and this here bed'll fill up. We ain't but two mile from the Tamiami Trail," he said.

I'd known how close we were because I had been working the map as we came up from the south. I thought of how disappointed c.u.mmings was going to be when and if he found out how close they'd actually been to civilization when I threatened to leave them.

"If Jefferson had loaded them dead men into his skiff, he'd of been able to pole his way down here on the high water and come right on in here on that current."

I climbed up to the tree formation and then started working the metal detector from the base of the cross in a circular motion. I was slow and careful and exact in my movements.

"If he knew these Glades as well as my daddy, he could of made it easy in the dark, even without a moon," Brown said. "It's the way I woulda done 'er."

I expanded the concentric circles with the tree base as my epicenter. Nothing showed on the attached screen. It was all vegetable, no hard mineral. The detector was designed to pick up anything impenetrable-a belt buckle, a necklace, coins, a pocketknife.

"You think John William snapped that pine limb and marked the grave?" I finally asked Brown, knowing it was on both our minds. The old man let his eyes rest on the image.

"I ain't a religious man, Freeman. That there coulda formed up on its own like that. Maybe it's got G.o.d's hand on it. Maybe not. They's things I seen in war and nature and men that made me swing both ways over the years. Best I can say is, it don't hurt not to discount the Almighty altogether."

I was eight feet out from the tree base, due south, when the detector beeped under my hand. I stopped and swung the pad back to a cover of maidenhair fern and it beeped again. The readout showed a depth of two and a half feet. Brown brought the trenching tool over while I cleared a big square of vegetation and studied the cover of slick muck and plant roots. I got down on my knees and sc.r.a.ped away the top layer with my hands, watching for anything foreign, anything out of place, anything. After a few minutes I started in with the shovel, carefully coming up with one spade of thick, wet earth at a time and flopping it onto a rain poncho that Brown had brought from the skiff. The old man scanned the pile with the detector like I'd shown him and then went through it with his fingers. He knew what bone looked like. Every couple of spadefuls we would sweep the hole I was creating, and the beep still registered.

My digging was a good two feet down when Brown said, "Bone." He held up a dull gray chunk between his dirt-stained fingers. It was the size of a poker chip and about the same thickness. We both stared at it-the possibilities, the rea.s.surance that we were not wrong, and the dread that came with it.

"Could it be an animal?" I asked.

"Could be," he said. "I ain't no expert."

We swept the hole again. Still beeping.

We found four more pieces of bone, which Brown carefully put aside in one of the plastic evidence bags I'd brought. I made sure we marked the depth of each one taken from the hole. Then the shovel blade hit something tough, but not hard. I reached down and felt with my fingers and found fabric. In one of Billy's books I'd come across a study of the Glades that remarked on the preservation power of the thick muck. Because the layers were set down by rotting, microbial vegetation, the muck was so dense that little air penetrated the lower levels. If it was airless, the breakdown of any nonorganic material would be greatly slowed. I set aside the shovel and went down with both hands, using my fingernails to scratch away the dirt, exposing more and more of what I soon realized was leather.

It took another thirty minutes or so for me to free the remnant of a work boot from the muck. The thick sole was nearly intact, but the leather upper was the fragile consistency of wet cardboard. I brought it up with a layer of muck from beneath its resting place and placed it on the poncho. Brown waved the detector over it. It beeped.

Brown crouched nearby while I carefully separated dirt from leather. I went inside the boot with my fingers. It had filled with muck, and I brought out a handful at a time. Brown went through each small pile, studied it, and then swept it away. But as I got farther in toward the sole, he began to find bone; small phalanges that he recognized as foot bone. I was deep into the front of the boot, where the hard toe cover was remarkably intact, when my fingers touched metal. I curled them around the object and came out with a rounded, ancient, pocket.w.a.tch.

I stared at the piece lying in the palm of my hand. Brown exhaled deeply and then went to the skiff. I hadn't moved when he came back with his jar of water and poured it over my hand, washing away the dirt while I turned and rubbed the timepiece with my fingers. The metal was a dull yellow gold. I pushed the locket release but had to work my fingernails in under the lid to finally pry it open. Brown poured more water in to wash out the dirt that had penetrated inside, and I rubbed my fingertips over the inside of the lid to expose an inscription:

The Lord is thy Shepherd my son, let him lead you, and the Kingdom of G.o.d will by thine forever.

Your loving father, Horace Mayes

I sat with the disk of gold in my hand for some time, trying to connect the little I knew of Cyrus Mayes with this, his final resting place. A good and righteous man and his innocent sons had lost their lives to another being who was their polar opposite. If John William Jefferson had marked this death bed with a cross for some deeply warped recognition of a G.o.d, he had gained no mercy. If that deeply buried sense of religion had pa.s.sed into his future gene pool and led his progeny to swing to his moral opposite, perhaps there was some hope in evolution. But his own son had ended his own life, and I could not help but think that the stain of John William's acts had stopped spreading.

Brown and I packed up the boat. I recorded the GPS coordinates of the gravesite in the unit as well as on paper tucked away where it wouldn't be lost or electronically wiped out. We were obviously overmatched by the crime scene. Billy would convince law enforcement to bring their own forensic paleontologists out to grid the sight and recover the remains of the Mayes family, and to try and determine the details of their murders. We made a feeble attempt to stake the the poncho over the three-foot-square excavation we'd completed, but all we could hope for was a day or so without rain. I dropped the watch into another evidence bag, wrapped it up with the boot and the bone fragments, and tucked the whole thing into my pack. We pulled the skiff south to the spot where Brown had tied up his boat, and I was mildly surprised to see that it had not been scuttled by the PalmCo P.I.s. poncho over the three-foot-square excavation we'd completed, but all we could hope for was a day or so without rain. I dropped the watch into another evidence bag, wrapped it up with the boot and the bone fragments, and tucked the whole thing into my pack. We pulled the skiff south to the spot where Brown had tied up his boat, and I was mildly surprised to see that it had not been scuttled by the PalmCo P.I.s.

We made the boat switch, tied off the skiff, and then Brown cranked up the engine and turned her back toward Chevalier Bay. I sat on the transom and calmly dropped the tracking device that had been planted in my satchel into the water behind us. The vibration of the engine hummed through my bones and told me how every tendon and muscle ached. When we finally hit open water the sun was slipping down and the blueness of the sky was already darkening. I focused on the old man for the first time in hours and noticed the crusted mud and grime and stink that covered his clothing. He appeared to be some caricature on a kid's slime show. Then I looked down at myself and saw that we were twins, and I began to laugh. Brown hadn't said a word since I'd pulled Cyrus Mayes's pocket watch from the rotting boot. He now turned to look at me with as close a look of merriment on his face as I had ever seen him carry. He then turned back into the sun, pulled down the brim of his hat and began to whistle. "It's a Long Way to Tipperary." And he stayed with the melody for a good part of the trip back to the docks in Chokoloskee.

CHAPTER 21.