Carli stopped to think. "No. I don't think so. He wasn't gone long enough. At least, I don't think he was." She gazed off at the wall. "He tied me up before they left. He was gone awhile, and I heard him downstairs. Banging around the kitchen, fooling with the TV and stuff. Some time went by. I heard him come up the steps and open the door. That's when he tore up my clothes and got his hands in my pants."

"Carli, don't."

She shrugged and reached for her bag, but it was feigned callousness. "He's done worse."

"I know he has, Carli. But he won't anymore. I promise, n.o.body's ever going to hurt you like that again." I patted her calf. "Get dressed. Take a shower if you need to. I've got to find Susan."

As I turned to leave, Carli said my name. "Tom? The first time we met you told me it'd be easier to just walk away and forget about the murder on St. George. You know, not go to the police." She looked down at the bedspread. "When it came to it, though, you didn't walk away."

I didn't know what to say.

I was opening the door when she said, "I knew you'd come help me."

And I left my young client sitting on the bed, staring at the little collection of possessions in her backpack.

I trotted downstairs and walked quickly through each room, flipping on lights and checking closets as I went. Susan was not in the house.

Like most Americans, Susan had a flashlight in a drawer in the kitchen. I found it rolling around among batteries and matches and scissors and tape. I clicked it on and left through the back door. No one had disturbed the barn that had been Bird Fitzsimmons' studio, and the carport was empty. I could think of only one other place to lock someone up. At the rear of the house, I found four fifty-pound bags of fertilizer stacked on top of the door to Susan's bomb shelter. Susan had shown it to me six months before when I needed a place to store my dead brother's stolen money. Some prior owner had built it during the 1950s atomic-bomb scare. Susan had used it as a root cellar.

I tossed the bags aside and yanked open the door. "Susan!"

"Tom?" She walked forward into the flashlight's beam.

"Are you okay?"

Susan squinted into the light. "Poultrez is here."

"Not anymore."

Susan is tough, and she seemed unhurt. I told her Carli was inside the house, getting cleaned up and changing clothes.

"What did he do to her, Tom?"

"Maybe she should tell you about that." Susan looked scared, so I added, "He didn't rape her. Just, you know, ripped her clothes and touched her, I think."

We were up on the porch now. Susan reached over and rubbed her hand over my back and said, "Thanks." I cringed. She had managed to rub over the imprint of the business end of Poultrez's shovel on my lower back. She stopped and faced me. "What'd he do to you?"

I smiled. "Hit me with a shovel."

"G.o.d. Is that why you're holding your hand funny?"

"Yeah."

"Is it broken?"

"Well... yeah."

Susan pushed open the door. "Go in the kitchen and put some ice on that. I've got to go check on Carli. I'll come tend to you when I'm done." She looked at me. "Go!"

So I went. And, as I went, I was all but certain I heard mumbled words, containing, among other things, the words "ridiculous" and "macho," coming from Susan's direction.

In the kitchen, I found a family-size bag of Green Giant LeSeur Early Peas in the freezer, bopped it on the counter to break up the frozen peas a little, and draped the bag over my broken hand. Then I walked over to the little built-in, kitchen desk, picked up the phone, and punched in 911. I relayed my predicament to a bored munic.i.p.al employee and hung up.

Not five minutes later, I heard a loud knock on the front door.

Susan was still upstairs with Carli. I wandered through the house to the entry hall, pulled open the door, and found myself face-to-face with Deputy Mickey Burns of the Apalachicola Sheriff's Department.

chapter thirty-seven.

"You get a transfer?"

Deputy Mickey smiled. But then, he pretty much always did. "I heard the call go out about the murders on the way in. I was already headed up here to get you." He stepped forward with the obvious expectation that I would react normally and step aside. I didn't. He stopped and said, "May I come in?"

"I'm still thinking about it."

Deputy Mickey actually stopped smiling. "I'm here to take you back to Apalachicola for questioning in the murder of Willie Teeter."

This was not good. Either Captain Billy had changed his mind or the two boys who Billy and Peety Boy had plugged in their respective legs had started talking. I decided to do innocent. "What are you talking about?"

I should have been paying closer attention to his hands. I knew he had stepped back. I just hadn't noticed the service revolver in his meaty, freckled paw. "Turn around and put your hands against the door." I hesitated, and he raised his revolver level with my chest and brought up his left hand to steady the gun in firing position. "Do it!"

So I did. At least, I leaned with my left hand and kind of propped against the door with my right elbow.

"Get your feet back."

I managed to put one foot back a little and say, "My hand's broken." I listened for Susan and Carli, hoping they were locked in a bathroom upstairs taking care of each other. Just stay upstairs. The sheriff's coming. An ambulance is coming.

The deputy patted me down, lifted Joey's Walther PPK out of my pocket, and said, "Oh. Okay, turn around. I'll cuff you in front."

I pushed away from the door and turned to face him. "Cuff me? What the h.e.l.l for? Am I a suspect or something?"

His only answer was to slap cuffs on my wrists in that quick, clip-on way cops have of doing it. It hurt, and I wondered how much time he'd spent practicing that cute move on his bedpost or maybe a girlfriend.

I let the bag of frozen peas drop and said, "Can you hand me that? It's the only thing that's helping the pain."

My plan was, first, for him to bend over to pick up the peas and, second, for me to kick him as hard as I could in his friendly freckled face. But apparently he'd heard of that plan because, before he bent over to get the frozen veggies, Deputy Mickey jammed the barrel of his revolver into my stomach and kept it there until he had placed the bag back over my wrist and stepped away.

He said, "Move," and I thought I could see panic creeping into his eyes.

I had a new plan: kill time. "Look, you and I both know you don't even have jurisdiction here, and the local cops are on the way. Let's just sort this out when they get here. I grew up in this town. You probably don't know that but..."

He was panicked, and the veneer of polite professionalism disappeared. Deputy Mickey Burns reached out and clamped his gun-free hand over my broken hand and gave it a sharp squeeze and a yank. I yelped a little, which wasn't particularly dignified, and he said, "I told you to move. Now."

Another change of plans: I decided that getting the deputy away from Susan and Carli wasn't the worst thing I could do. And since I didn't have a h.e.l.l of a lot of choice, I might as well find something good about being hauled off into the night by a Florida deputy with no jurisdiction, authority, or good reason.

Deputy Burns maintained a death grip on my arm as we hurried across the porch and down the front steps. When we reached the cruiser, he pulled open the back door, put his hand on the back of my head, and shoved me inside.

Peering out through the steel screen separating the back seat from the front, I could see the flash of moonlight on the deputy's equipment belt as he sprinted around the front of the vehicle. He literally jumped inside. The motor roared, and I fell sideways as the grinding noise of tires spinning through loose gravel filled the air. I righted myself in time to see Susan's twin ponds streaming by the side windows. The trees across the way were coming too fast, and the cruiser fishtailed through a small curve as it left the ponds behind. We spun and swerved over another quarter mile of dirt road. But the deputy never lost control, and he had made it out to the highway and covered another three miles toward town before the sweeping red lights of the ambulance met us. The deputy slowed, and a quarter mile later representatives of the Coopers Bend Sheriff's Department appeared over a hill in a wash of swirling blue light. Unfortunately, they weren't interested in us. They were speeding toward the charming country farmhouse where I had just discovered one corpse and deposited another.

We had been riding for a little more than an hour. I had been trying to think. I guessed my captor had been doing the same. I decided to try a little conversation.

"Where are we going?"

"Where do you think?"

"I mean, are we going straight to the Apalachicola Sheriff's Office? Or are we going to the hospital, or what?"

He didn't answer. I was beginning to feel ignored.

A minute or two pa.s.sed. Deputy Mickey plucked his mike off the dash, looked at it like it was something he'd never seen before, and put it back. Then he reached over and punched the b.u.t.ton on the glove box. The door fell open and a little bulb lighted a haphazard collection of maps and what looked like paperback field manuals. Burns shoved a freckled hand under the maps and stuff and came out with a thick mobile phone that had a coiled wire hanging from it like an oversized tail.

I said, "Who are we going to call?"

The deputy glanced back and forth from the road to the phone as he pulled the cigarette lighter from the dash and replaced it with the phone's adapter.

I decided to try again. "You think I could use that thing to call a lawyer? It'll make things go faster when we get there."

Again, he didn't answer, and it was becoming clear that we were not going to be friends.

Instead of engaging me in dialogue, the good deputy punched a long series of numbers into his phone and then pressed it against his ear. "This is Burns. I got him." Silence. "No. No problem. We oughta be there in three hours or less." Silence. "Yeah, okay."

He punched a b.u.t.ton and put the phone on the seat beside him.

I leaned up close to the metal screen separating me from the front seat. "What's wrong with your radio?"

"Shut up, McInnes."

"I was just wondering..."

"You want a drink of water, you can get one when we get there. You need to take a leak, you can p.i.s.s your pants. You want to use the phone, well, you're s.h.i.t out of luck. Now. That's all the conversation we're gonna have. Any more questions and I'm gonna pull over on the side of the road and cuff your hands and feet together and stick a rag in your mouth. You got that?"

I said, "Got it," and lay back against the seat. Might as well get comfortable.

Three hours later, when we cruised straight through the munic.i.p.ality of Apalachicola, Florida, without stopping, I got a lot less comfortable. After Deputy Mickey Burns turned north on 65 and hung a right into Tate's h.e.l.l Swamp, I felt downright miserable.

Burns followed the same route Joey had taken the night before. We were going to Carpintero's compound. I thought about the dead nephew of a Panamanian dictatora"the corpse we had left in a smoldering wrecked cara"and I thought about the pretty young wife who I hoped had gotten far away with her fat little kid.

I wondered how Deputy Mickey planned to get his patrol car across the submerged road that led through the swamp without either drowning out the engine or sliding off into the ooze the way Willie's truck had. But, as we rounded a curve and approached the saw gra.s.s field, that question was answered with the headlights of half a dozen pickups and 4x4s.

We had a welcoming committee. And I didn't feel a d.a.m.ned bit welcome.

b.u.mping across miles of field and marsh and swamp while lying in the bed of a truck tied to a metal cleat, nursing a broken wrist, and trying to avoid any contact with the black-and-blue imprint of a shovel on your back ... Well, it sucks is what is does.

Deputy Mickey Burns had departed, leaving me in the care of eight guys with long hair, multiple tattoos, and expensive jewelry. And it quickly became obvious that the caravan of 4x4s was indeed headed for Carpintero's compound.

With each new jolt of hot pain in my wrist, my breathing grew more erratic and another ounce of hope floated away and drowned itself in the slimy black water that surrounded us.

I tried to think. I couldn't. I was too d.a.m.n scared.

Even with jarring pain, even lashed to the cleat of some redneck criminal's truck, being alive was better than what waited at the compound. So I felt no relief when the six-car caravan entered the compound and parked in perfect order beside two more off-road vehicles.

For some reason, I glanced at my watch. It was close to midnight, and the swamp was full of the sounds of crickets and frogs and night birds. I could hear the metallic clicks and thuds of truck doors being opened and closed. Someone opened the gate on the truck I was tied to and stepped into the bed. The back end sank under his weight, and the truck made creaking, complaining noises of metal against metal.

A knife clicked open. The ropes pulled against my wrists sending an electric jolt of pain shooting up to my shoulder, and I looked at the man standing over me. He wore cowboy boots like the ones Sonny Teeter's corpse was wearing that night. The ropes popped loose under the pressure of his knife blade, and he jerked me to my feet. He wore a white, western-style shirt with pink stripes and starched blue jeans with sharp creases down the front. His bald head shone in the night above a curtain of shoulder-length hair that hung from his temples and the back of his head. He looked like a malnourished Benjamin Franklin.

I asked, "What do you want?"

Ben spun me by one shoulder and shoved me over the side of the truck. I managed to spin and get my feet under me but then misjudged the ground and landed on my shovel-imprinted back.

Bald Ben hand-sprinted over the side and landed next to me. Another man joined him. They s.n.a.t.c.hed me up, and each man picked an elbow and clamped down. We headed into the large warehouse structure that I had searched earlier that same daya"although it seemed days now, maybe weeks, since I had watched Peety Boy shoot Willie Teeter and since I had disarmed Seora Carpintero and helped Captain Billy take his dead and dishonored grandson to the morgue.

Inside, overhead fixtures flooded the warehouse with yellow light. Shipping crates lined the walls. Ten feet up on a storage area that looked like a barn loft, brown cardboard boxes were stacked head high.

My escorts walked me to the middle of the wooden floor and left me.

My shattered hand shot hot jolts of electricity up my arm. My back throbbed, and the bright light stung my eyes. I looked around the warehouse. I was surrounded by cowboy boots and Air Jordans, printed T-shirts and tank tops, blue jeans and cutoffs, and, everywhere, tattooed arms and hands.

A man I recognized stepped forward. He was the on-duty deputy who had pointed his gun at Susan and me the night Purcell's killers had broken into Susan's beach house.

"This is the man who killed Leroy Purcell." He spoke like a senator addressing Congress, like a man giving a speech, except that his voice came out in a high-pitched, bluegra.s.s tw.a.n.g.

I decided to speak up. "That's not true."

The orator was quicker than he looked, or maybe I was deeper in shock than I thought. He spun on his heels and popped me across the mouth with a backhand before I saw it coming. The blow scattered my thoughts for a few seconds and the deputy resumed his speech.

"This man's name is Tom McInnes. Yesterday afternoon, he killed Tim and Elroy, Johnny and even little Skeeter out on Dog Island. He rented a boat at The Moorings, floated out there with this big white-haired a.s.shole, and they killed all four of 'em. Then he come back in and drove up to Seaside and killed Leroy." The deputy swept his open hand around the room, motioning at the rogues' gallery. "You heard about it. It ain't no secret. This rich a.s.shole lawyer from up at Mobile killed Leroy and then used a hammer to nail his ball sack to a table."

The deputy was doing a good job, and, with the mention of Purcell, murmuring began to fill the warehouse. When he reminded them of the nails, the threats became audible and graphic.

"Mickey promised you he'd bring in Purcell's killer. He done it. Mickey said he'd let all of us get a chance to question the b.a.s.t.a.r.d that done it. He done that too. Anda"as much as Mickey Burns wanted to take this piece-of-s.h.i.t b.a.s.t.a.r.d and nail his b.a.l.l.s to a tablea"he promised to bring him here and give us the pleasure of f.u.c.kin' him up any way we want before we bury him in the swamp. And Mickey done that too."

It was pretty obvious that Deputy Mickey Burns was the ambitious young man Carlos Sanchez had mentioned who wanted to replace Leroy Purcell as the head Jethro. It was also obvious that Deputy Mickey had a h.e.l.l of a campaign manager in his fellow deputy.

Now or never. "I did not kill Leroy Purcell. He was killed by a man named Carpintero. A man called 'the Hammer.'" My voice sounded hollow.

The speaker spun and slung another backhand at my mouth, and I tasted blood.

The deputy said, "Who's got theirself a question?"

The skinny Ben Franklin who had pushed me out of his truck bed spoke up. "f.u.c.k that. Only question I got is who gets to kill him."

My voice came again, almost without my knowing it would. "Listen! Listen to me, d.a.m.nit!"