The men in the other boat had already begun to move. The forklift operator gunned the engine. There was still a smile on Captain Dawkins's face.

"OK," I said. "Where do you want me?"

My height dictated that I catch and stack down on the boat deck with Dawkins. The boxlike stone crab traps were made of slatted wood and wire. In their bottoms was a two-inch-thick slab of poured cement to keep them down on the ocean floor. They weighed about forty pounds apiece. I learned quickly how to grip the top edge from the man pa.s.sing the trap down and then use the weight of the box to swing it down and up and catch it with the other hand. While we worked the deck together, Dawkins told stories.

"My granddaddy was the first to come down here. He was a deck hand on a merchant ship that made the trip from New Orleans to Key West and then north up the Gulf Stream to the Eastern Sh.o.r.e and New York. His own daddy had done the same all the way back to the days of sails and schooners.

"He was a G.o.d-fearing man, Mr. Freeman, and loved to fish. G.o.d, my grandmother Emma May an' fishin', them was his priorities."

Dawkins looked up at his crew and winked. We were falling into a rhythm now and even if they'd all heard it before, the story was like a nip of soothing whiskey on the brain while the muscles strained.

"It was here that he met my grandmother, right over at Smallwood's Store, and she anch.o.r.ed him. They said he could unload mullet on these docks like a machine. He'd get done with a day's work and go home, dig up the rows in the little garden they had out back and then spend the night hand-fixin' catch nets."

"And he had oxen?" I said, trying to lead the story without putting any spin on it.

Dawkins never wavered, just kept stacking and talking and I was grateful not to have to waste my own breath, which was in short supply.

"He got the oxen from some freight captain in 1918. Daddy said grandpa figured that captain had to have been drunk to agree to take the animal in the first place. He was supposed to ship it to Key West, but when he stopped here for a load of fish, the animal had already gone crazy tearin' up the hold and he was beggin' somebody to take it off his hands.

"Was a mean sumb.i.t.c.h and Daddy said n.o.body but Grandpa would dare go near it. He took and hand-built him a cart and then used 'em both to haul fish from the smaller boats from the docks up to the fish house."

"So when the road crews came in to work the trail to Miami, your grandfather used that cart to haul dynamite for blasting?" I said. My arms and shoulders were aching, the lactic acid building up as I tried to keep pace with Dawkins. Each row of traps we stacked as high as the wheelhouse, and pressing the forty pounds up onto that six-foot top row was soon going to be impossible for me.

"They say there was plenty of work around Everglades City when the road crews were working. But Daddy used to say it was on and off, and the local folks didn't take too kindly to outsiders coming in to a place they didn't know or give a d.a.m.n about.

"But Grandpa just wanted the work, and when they said they needed somebody to take the dynamite out there on the roadway to the dredge site, he took 'em up on it.

"h.e.l.l, most of the locals didn't know dynamite 'cept to use a quarter stick to stun a school of fish once in awhile. An' most of them company boys was scared to be out in the Glades at night. So Grandpa, he just loaded up the cart and he and the ox made the trip by themselves. Sometimes Daddy said it would take him days to get out and back when the rains turned the trail into nothin' but slop mud."

"And it was on these trips that your grandfather picked up mail?" I said.

Dawkins tossed up one more trap and whistled sharp and hard through his teeth.

"Y'all take a break now, fellas. Jordie, go on get us some water."

The boy ran off and the men found places to sit in the shade. Dawkins picked up a small towel from the gunwale and mopped the sweat from his face and neck. I sat, exhausted, on one of the short rows of traps, trying to hide my heavy breathing.

"That was Ms. Emma's story," Dawkins said, letting his voice go softer as he sat against the gunwale. "Only Grandma would tell it."

I said nothing and waited on him.

"When Grandpa hauled the dynamite out there, the foreman in Everglades City would have him deliver some kind of pouch to the job boss at the end of the line. Grandpa had never learned to read so he didn't know what the stuff was, but he did take a look-see, men bein' natural nosey, and they was only papers and doc.u.ments and maps and such.

"Sometimes out at the dredge site, if it was late, he would stay overnight and he was allowed to eat with the workers. They was a raggedy bunch. Most of 'em down and out. Some runnin' from the law, but that wasn't unusual out here.

"Granddaddy wasn't much for unG.o.dly men, so when he met a fellow out there prayin' before mealtime with his sons, they struck a friendship. He's the one who would give granddaddy the letters, and as soon as he got back, he'd go an' mail 'em out from the post office at Smallwood's, kind of secret-like."

When Dawkins took a pause, I interrupted, the possibility too close.

"Was the man's name Mayes?" I asked. "Cyrus Mayes?"

"Granddaddy wasn't much on names, Mr. Freeman. Like I said, he didn't read."

I sat for a beat, thinking about another identifying mark, some way to tie Cyrus Mayes with Dawkins.

"There was mention in one of the letters of a gold watch," I said.

"He gave it back," Dawkins said, and his tone was suddenly defiant and defensive at the same time. The captain's tone stopped the young boy in his tracks as he was approaching with the water. Dawkins stood up and smiled at the boy and took the two spouted coolers from him.

"Thanks, Jordan." He handed me one of coolers and I could feel the ice b.u.mping inside it.

"Ms. Emma told the story of the day Grandpa come back from a trip to the road crew and set down to show her a big gold pocket watch. Said the man who had him deliverin' the letters gave it to him in payment.

"Them were tough times, and it didn't bother Ms. Emma till she opened the watch. Inside the place for a little picture was empty but there was an inscription. Grandpa couldn't read it, but when Ms. Emma saw it was scripture and engraved to a man's son, she told him he had to give it back lest the Lord take it as a sin."

Dawkins took a long drink of his water. There was a look in his eyes and I waited until he had enjoyed the memory of his family.

"These were stories, you know?" he said. "Just stories of the old times told around the fire at night to us kids. Granddaddy tol' 'em. My daddy tol' 'em. I tell them to my own kids. They ain't written down."

Dawkins stood up and let loose his whistle and the crews got up again and moved to their positions. As the lift driver rolled up with another pallet, I pulled on my own gloves.

"Captain Dawkins. There was one name that did appear in these letters. He might have been a local, name of Jefferson. That mean anything to you?"

For the first time, a darkness clouded the big man's face and he did not look at me when he spoke.

"I don't mind tellin' my family stories, Mr. Freeman, because they're mine. But other folk's families, those are their stories. If others are tellin' 'em, it's just rumor and I ain't gonna hurt n.o.body with rumor."

While we finished the stacking, Dawkins engaged us with the story of the day Al Capone came to Everglades City on a fishing trip and stayed at the Rod & Gun Club, and the embarra.s.sment of the staff when they realized they'd put the famous mobster in the same room earlier occupied by President Truman. He chuckled and we all sweated and chuckled with him.

When the loading job was finally finished, the captain thanked me for my help and asked if I wouldn't mind spending the next thirty-six hours with the crews as they went to sea and dropped the traps for the first true and legal night of stone crab season. I declined.

"Well then, you can come back next week when we start pullin 'em up," he said, smiling again. "Then you'll see the real work. And the payoff."

"I'll see the payoff at a restaurant in Fort Lauderdale," I said.

"Then pray for a high price, Mr. Freeman, and maybe we'll break even this year," he said, and shook my hand.

As I walked away, the forklift driver was just pulling up with a load of frozen chicken parts and trash fish. Dawkins took up an ax, and the sound of his chopping blade faded behind me.

The captain had given me directions to the cafe. It was a fifteen- minute walk, and even though I'd taken only three or four steps at a time back and forth across Dawkins's boat deck, my legs felt rubbery and my hamstrings tight from the two hours of work. My arms and shoulders ached like I'd rowed the fifty-footer to Key West and back. When I got to the cafe, Nate Brown was sitting out front on a pinewood patio in the shade. He'd already eaten and had his heels up on a small wooden keg with a huge bowl of ice cream in his lap. I sat down at a table near him without a word. Within a few seconds, a middle-aged woman came out with a large ceramic cup of hot coffee and when I smiled up at her she said, "Mr. Brown said ya'll would be coming. Can I get you something to eat, sir?"

I ordered a fresh grouper sandwich and when she left I watched Nate working his bowl of vanilla like a careful child who'd been warned it would be his last if he wasn't polite. From the cream- colored pile in his bowl the old man carved off a spoonful and then took only parts of it into his mouth at a time, sanding off the lump with his cracked lips three or four times before it was gone.

"You an' Captain Dawkins have a talk?" he finally said between his sculpting.

"He work that hard all the time?" I said.

"Yep," Brown said. "All his life. Ain't no other way for a man like him to git a two-boat operation like that and keep her goin'."

If there was a racial implication in the "man like him" statement, I couldn't hear it.

"His daddy was like that and his granddaddy before that. Handed it down just like the name."

I asked him about the scars, the scrolled lines of damaged flesh on the captain's forearm.

"From the trap lines," he said. "When they start to pullin' them traps, they got the trap line on that power winch an' she don't never slow down. A man got to hook the trap when she comes up from the bottom, s.n.a.t.c.h out the crab, throw the new bait in, lock it down an' dump her over agin, just in time to hook the next trap. Got to do it like clockwork, and it goes on for hours.

"You get your glove or your movin' hands caught in that line, it'll wrap on you and pull your arm off. Every stone crabber takes that chance."

I took another deep sip of my coffee and silently chastised myself for whining about sore muscles.

"He wasn't willing to talk about this Jefferson character Mr. Mayes mentioned in the letter," I said. "But it sounded like he might have known the family."

"Oh, everybody knowed of the family," Brown said, and went quiet, concentrating on his spoon. Across the road a half-dozen pure white ibis worked a low patch of gra.s.s. A heron let loose a high "quark" somewhere behind us.

"First time I seen ice cream I was eighteen years old," Brown said, staring at a new lump on his spoon. "It's still like a miracle to me."

Brown kicked the throttle up, heading out through Chokoloskee Pa.s.s. The Gulf was green in the late afternoon light, and out to the southwest low clouds were scudding just above the horizon.

"We'll take her on the outside an' beat that line a squall," Brown said, looking out in the same direction. "Course, a bit of rain never hurt. An' it'll maybe keep them folks in the helicopter out of the air."

His words made me look back and scan the sky. It was empty except for a line of pelicans, their crooked wings fanned out as they cruised north over a long lump of mangroves. Brown swung us toward the east and pushed the boat up on plane and we began slapping over the light chop. I stood up next to him, gripping the console, and asked him why he had not told me that he recognized Jefferson's name when I'd first read him the Mayes letters.

"I was thinkin' on it," he said.

The old Gladesman kept his eyes fixed ahead and seemed to squint them down even though the sun was mostly to our backs. He was looking back, and then started putting words to what he remembered.

"He was a small, mean fella. Least that was what folks said, and that's what they believed. Even my own.

"It wasn't easy to avoid people out this way back in them days. But my daddy always said he stayed clear of the Jeffersons. Fact was, Mr. Jefferson was about the same age as my daddy, and the talk that gets told is that the two of them was the best shots with rifles that there ever was in these parts.

"Now, I seen my daddy shoot the eye out of a rac.o.o.n at fifty yards. Seen him drop a squawk on the wing out of the sky at more 'n that. An' you know how boys are. We'd ask him if Mr. Jefferson could match him, an' he'd go quiet on us. Never said yep. Never said no."

Brown looked back over his shoulder and I did the same. The cloud line had darkened and ma.s.sed up into a curtain that was soon going to shut out the sunset. It was another twelve miles or so to the entrance of Lost Man's.

"So the rumors just kept on a growin'. Some said Jefferson learnt to shoot as a criminal, others that he'd been a hired gun and come out this way to lay low. Then there was some killin's. A game warden who watched over the plume hunters was found shot out in the rookery. A state revenue agent workin' the illegal stills come up missing. Course, we'd hear the men, speculatin' around the fires at night and Jefferson's name would come up, him havin' the talent and all."

"So no one would have been surprised to hear that this Mr. Jefferson signed on with the road-building crew to be the company sharpshooter to clear the way of alligators or panthers so the men could work?" I said, watching Brown's face for a reaction. He let the sound of the outboard and the erratic smacking of the hull on water fill the silence.

"To some, like Daddy, it just made sense to put a man with a gun out there. But to others it just hardened up the rumor. They said Jefferson was a hired gun who'd shoot anything for money, an' that's just the job the road company hired him for."

"Captain Dawkins said something about family that Jefferson had. Are there relatives still around?" I asked.

"Long gone," Brown said. "They lived in a place on the Chatham River an' left it. His one son was in the war and when he got back he stayed a bit until the old man pa.s.sed and they sold out. They was a grandson and rumor had it that he moved north up by the lake and become a preacher. That one must have been about the same age as Captain Dawkins, but I ain't never seen him."

The western sky had turned a pearl gray by the time we made the river entrance and we headed north onto a winding path. As the light continued to fade, I watched as hundreds of white egrets came in and thickened the sky like a noisy cloud and began their nightly spinning and dancing above the tall mangroves. The squawking rose to a crescendo as the birds picked out a roosting spot for the night, and within minutes they had settled in the branches. Brown cut back on the throttle to match their noises and we watched the last of the day's light get caught in the globs of white feather and the trees take on the look of tall cotton rows in a darkening field. To my city-bred eyes it was an unreal display. But even the old Gladesman seemed momentarily transfixed. We slid on through the growing shadows and did not share another word for some time. After an hour or so, Brown shut down the motor and the boat glided into a patch of cattails. From inside the console, he reached down and came out with a flashlight. He flipped on the beam and pointed it out ahead. I was surprised to see it reflect off something chrome.

"Yonder is your truck, Mr. Freeman. 'Bout twenty yard or so," he said, handing me the light.

Again I eased myself over the gunwale and into the thigh-deep water.

"How do I get in touch with you?" I said.

"When you're ready, son, y'all let the girl at the hotel know. They'll get me the word."

I never heard him crank the motor back to life, and by the time I got to my truck a light rain was falling. I used the flashlight to find the door lock, and it wasn't until the interior lights came on and I slid in behind the wheel that I noticed the bullet hole.

A single shot had been fired into the windshield, face high on the driver's side. A spray of spidery cracks webbed out from the hole. I stared through the opening and my fingers went involuntarily to the scar on my neck and stayed there.

CHAPTER 12.

It was nearly ten when I got back to Lauderdale. There had been no other damage to the truck and I had not bothered to report the incident to the local police. It would have been written off to rural vandalism, the sort visited on stop signs, or even a hunter's stray round. And it could have been just that, but I didn't believe it.

I pulled over for gas and made a call to Richards from a pay phone. Maybe she could hear the exhaustion in my voice. Maybe she was intrigued by the short description of my day.

"I'll start some coffee and a hot bath, Freeman," she said before I could gracefully invite myself.

When I arrived she was able to keep any look of disgust out of her face but directed me to the outside shower by the pool. Under a steady spray I peeled off the salt-caked clothes and waterlogged boots and washed some of the Glades stink off my skin. I was standing naked on the pool deck when she came back out with a steaming mug of coffee.

"Shall I just burn these, nature boy?" she said, picking at the pile of wet clothes with her toe. I was too tired to think of anything clever.

"OK. Into the bath then, Freeman."

After an hour of soaking in water as hot as I could stand it, I finally got out and dressed in a pair of canvas shorts and a T-shirt I'd left on a previous visit. Richards had cooked up a plate of scrambled eggs with ranchero sauce. She poured more coffee and we sat at the kitchen table. I ate and talked and she listened until I was through.

"Your truck has been bugged and shot. You've been followed by vans and a helicopter. You've been warned off and Billy's been offered a bribe. And you still don't have anything more to go on but a few old letters and a bunch of old Everglades campfre stories," she said, trying to rake it together.

"I'd offer some advice, Max. But imagine spilling out that missing-person's case onto a detective squad's table: 'Well, sir. We think we've got an eighty-year-old murder case going here in which a multibillion-dollar development corporation is trying to cover up the forced labor and a.s.sa.s.sination of its own reluctant workers. All we need to do is find the remains of one of these bodies somewhere along the sixty miles of road that cuts through the middle of the Glades and hope he's got a pay stub in his pocket and a detailed note identifying his killer."'

"It might still be premature to call in any official inquiry," I said.

My legs and arms were rubbery from fatigue. My head was equally spent. I'd like to say I remembered getting up and making it to her bed. I'd like to say I remember lying with her, curled up like spoons under a single sheet in the soft breeze of the ceiling fan. I'd like to say I was aroused by the smell and touch of her warm skin. But I fell asleep, stone asleep, and did not wake until nearly noon the next day, by which time she had long ago left for work. She'd left me a note saying she'd call a detective friend in Collier County on the west coast where the other side of the Tamiami Trail first enters the great swamp. She described him as an "old-timer who might have collected some rumors of his own." I dressed and went outside. The sun was already warm in the trees and when I opened the truck cab the huff and odor of sweat and salt and tracked muck spilled out. In the daylight I could see the sprinkle of gla.s.s on my front seat and without too much trouble I found the flattened slug that had pa.s.sed through the windshield and probably ricocheted off the back cab wall and ended up on the floor behind my seat. It was misshapen, and I had to guess that the caliber was anything from a .38 to a .45. Not hunting rifle material. I picked it up with a paper towel and put it into a plastic Baggie from my glove box and stored it away. I then drove over to Federal Highway with the windows rolled down to make a call to Billy on a pay phone. I no longer trusted the cell and refused to use Richards's home phone again. Inside a convenience store I got Billy at his office and told him I would stop at his apartment and then meet him for dinner at Arturo's on Atlantic about eight. He said I might be getting too paranoid, and I might have believed him, but out of the store's plate-gla.s.s window I watched a squad car pull up behind my truck and stop, blocking my way out.

"I'll see you at eight, or call you from jail," I said to Billy, and before he could ask, I hung up. I bought a large coffee and a box of plain doughnuts and went outside.