Acts of Nature

TWENTY-TWO

“Goddamnit, boy,” Buck said, his gray eyes turned to ice, as hard and cold as either of them had ever seen. He was staring at Wayne but Marcus could feel the anger roll out over him as well. “What the f*ck was goin’ on in there?”
Buck took a second to look back around the door at the man and the lady on the cot. It was a second Wayne needed to gather his voice, lower his fear, and swallow some of his embarrassment so he would not bring more of it onto himself.
“She said she was a cop, man. She said it right to my face, Buck, and she wasn’t talkin’ about no back in the day either,” he said, his voice quiet but direct. Direct enough for Buck to listen.
“Why?” he said.
The boy looked at him.
“What made her decide to tell you she was a cop?”
He hesitated.
“She wanted her necklace back,” he said, just as quiet, just as direct.
Marcus let a rush of disgust escape through his teeth and Wayne cut his eyes at him. It was Buck’s turn to hesitate.
“You gonna fill me in on that one?” he said, aiming the question at either one of them.
“I found a diamond necklace at the last place. It was in one of them fanny pack-like things in that trashed-out room where we found the blood and I took it, you know, found booty like we said.”
“And he was f*cking wearing it around his neck like some kinda punk or something,” Marcus said, and the two exchanged a glance that was almost as cold as the one Buck held for the both of them.
“She went for the necklace?” Buck said.
“Like a goddamn piranha,” Wayne said. “I seen it in her eyes at the last second, man. She saw it and was pissed. I thought she was gonna take one of my eyeballs next.”
Buck again peered around the door, and Marcus might have smiled at that one about the eye but for the deep shit they were already in.
“And that’s when she said she was a cop?” Buck said, getting back to it. “After she ripped her own necklace off your neck?”
“Yeah,” Wayne said. “Then she said, ‘you messed with the wrong cop this time,’ and she f*cking meant it, Buck.”
All three of them were quiet then, Buck thinking, the others waiting. Anxiety finally won out and Marcus said: “Let’s just f*cking go, man. Let’s just get in the airboat and go. That lady ain’t gonna last long out here the way she’s hurt and that guy doesn’t even know who the hell we are, Buck. We take off, chances are they both f*cking the out here and that’s that.”
Wayne started nodding. Run. It had always worked before. Just run.
Buck looked down and shook his head, back and forth, twice, slowly.
“And if they don’t, Marcus?” Buck said without looking up. “If either one of them gets rescued by some camp owner in a couple days, you think they won’t look for a couple of shit-kicker Glades boys and a two-time ex-con with only one strike to go that been lootin’ houses and left someone to the out here? Especially if that someone really is a cop.”
Both boys were dumb with silence.
“And if the lady dies and that big guy gets so pissed he swims the hell out of here, they’ll bring felony murder charges against all three of us. The court will say she died during the commission of a felony. That’ll be your felony, Wayne, robbery of a f*cking necklace,” he said, pointing at the face of that dumbness. “And our theft.”
From their openmouthed look, the boys were losing their stupefaction and focusing on the term “felony murder.”
Buck again checked the other side of the door. He already didn’t like guns and the effort of holding the big .45 in his hand seemed to have drained his energy. I got six rounds here, he thought. Maybe I should kill all four of them and wash my own self of it all. Goddamn it. Your daddy didn’t teach you nothin’, did he, boy.
When they stepped back in I could see the change. The raised .45 was held a little tighter. Buck’s knuckles were white as he squeezed the grip. No more bluffing.
“I am truly sorry, Mr. Freeman,” he said, and I almost jumped then at the words; only the thought of what they might do to Sherry caused the muscles in my legs and back to hold. They were curtain-closing words coming from a man with eyes that now seemed to see nothing but survival, and the look was one I recognized. I now had no doubt he was an ex-con, learned from the inside.
“I’m gonna have to ask you to move over there by the door, sir, and sit,” he said waving the handgun.
“Wayne, you go on and get that roll of tape out of the bag there and strap Mr. Freeman up by the ankles and the wrists. Behind his back, boy.”
Buck had obviously grown tired of the younger one’s miscues. The identifying necklace should have never seen the light of day until some buyer somewhere was ready to remove the stones so it would be unrecognizable.
“Now whoa, whoa, hold on a minute,” I said, trying to slow things down. “What the hell, fellas. You guys got something going on out here where you’re just salvaging after the storm, we don’t give a damn. Hell, we’re not even owners of any property. We just got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Whatever you guys are doing, it’s none of our business and it can stay that way.”
The kid crossed my ankles and started strapping with a roll of waterproof packaging tape, the kind with a nylon filament running through it. Tough to tear, tougher to break. He seemed pissed now, taking out the anger that he wanted to direct at someone else onto the job at hand. I’d be lucky to still feel my toes in an hour.
“Hands behind your back,” he said, like he’d heard it on an old movie. But when I hesitated Buck cocked the big hammer on the pistol and I pressed my lips into a line and followed the order. The kid did the same angry trick on my hands, though I was ready and turned my knuckles in, forcing the tendons on the inside of my wrists to bulge as much as my strength could pop them. It would give me some room when I relaxed. I hoped it would be a voluntary relaxation and not because my brain matter was all over the wall behind me.
As much as the binding hurt it was nothing compared with having to watch the other little shithead do the same thing to Sherry.
Wayne finished with me and then started to toss the roll to his friend who was too busy staring down at Sherry’s crotch to notice.
“Yo, Marcus,” the kid said, f*cking up again, using his buddy’s name, not that it mattered anymore.
Marcus caught the tape roll and started wrapping Sherry’s ankles to the posts of the cot. She whined once when he pulled her broken leg over to strap it and I felt angry tears come into my eyes. Retribution had not been part of me as a street cop. The only person I’d ever wished death on was my own alcoholic father who almost nightly dumped his badge and revolver on the kitchen table before he started smacking my mother around with an open hand. But as I watched this kid pull Sherry’s arms up and bind them and then run his fingertips down her now unprotected chest and over her breasts, he became number two.
“Get the f*ck over here,” Buck snapped at the kid. He picked up the canvas bag by the bottom corner and let several metal tools spill out onto the floor: a stout iron crowbar, two different-sized screwdrivers, and a pair of vise grips, a claw hammer, and small axe.
“I seen by the markings on that door, you already tried to get into the other room there, Mr. Freeman,” he said without looking at me. “But maybe you just didn’t have the right tools with you, huh?”
He stepped over for a closer look at the door and the electronic locking device.
“But scootch on over out of the way there, sir. I have had some practical learning on how to get in and out of places folks don’t want you to get in or out of.”
I slid myself down the wall and didn’t say a word about the hatchway under the room that I’d left wide open in my haste to meet these a*sholes. I was trying to decide if we were better off biding our time, hoping against hope that the two immature hicks would continue to f*ck up somehow and give me an opening, or should I just tell Buck about the entry, let them loot whatever they wanted from the room and maybe he’d be satisfied and leave. The other possibility I was not yet ready to confront: that he’d simply kill us both and leave it to whomever stumbled onto our rotting bodies in a few days or weeks to piece it together. Hell, maybe he’d just kill us and haul our corpses onto his airboat deeper into the swamp to dump and let nature break us down. There are no small number of bodies dumped in the Everglades where all manner of forensic evidence is consumed by everything from alligators and wild boar right down to the billions of heat- and waterborne microbes. Sherry and I had both investigated some of those homicides. A chunk of dead biology doesn’t last long in this soup. We’d be on a missing persons report. Lost in the storm. A couple years after Katrina there are still folks missing from New Orleans, and we weren’t anywhere close to a city.
I was working on the scenarios, rolling them around in my head, when Buck took the crowbar to the doorjamb, gouging with a sharp edge at the outside of the frame, maybe figuring like a cheap thief he could bust a hole and then reach through and simply turn the lock button from the other side. The other two stood and watched, waiting like dutiful, anxious apprentices for the foreman to sic them to task.
“Know what the problem is with people like you, Mr. Freeman, who come out here in the Glades to take what you want whether it’s the fish or the game or even the fresh water for yourselves and leave nothin’ but garbage and trash behind?” Buck said while he pried at a corner.
I did not answer, sure that he would do so for me.
“Y’all think you’re entitled, you know? You think that just because this is open country and it don’t look like what you have in the cities on the coast, that it’s free and clear to just take and do what you want with. Build what you want in it. Come out here and piss in it and then go on home.
“You know, my daddy and his daddy before him spent lifetimes living out here, taking what was natural and right and working their asses off and they didn’t do it for riches, Mr. Freeman. They done it for survival and they done it for their families and really all they ever wanted was to be left alone and left to it.”
The one called Wayne shifted his weight; the axe was now in his hand, hanging by his side like he was itching to do damage with it. The other one, Marcus, was still sneaking looks at Sherry, who was silent now but I kept watching her, the rise and fall of her chest, and it was slight but steady. Both of the boys looked bored, scratching at their dirty necks like they’d heard this speech before and had little interest in it. It was getting dimmer in the room, the light now slanting through the doorway that they’d left open, the window to the east gone dark in shadow.
I had held my tongue but decided to take a chance.
“I don’t disagree with you, Buck,” I said, purposely using his first name, and it caused a flicker in his eyes. “I know a man, actually someone I would call a friend, who lived the same kind of life your own family did. I’ve heard him talk the same way many times. The name is Brown. Nate Brown. Maybe you’ve heard of him?”
The use of Brown’s name caused all three to stop moving. They may have even stopped breathing for a second. The boys looked at each other. Buck stood stock-still, staring at the end of the crowbar.
“Go on outside,” Buck finally barked. “Find a damn window to get through or somethin’.” The boys picked up the tools from the floor and left.
Buck set the crowbar aside and bent down on his haunches to look me in the face, sitting on his heels in the way of farmers and country folks who work the dirt but refuse to sit in it. He adjusted the .45 in his belt, the grip exposed and handy.
“So, Mr. Freeman. You heard about the legend of Mr. Brown from some drunk fisherman or somethin’ and now you say you know him and me? Is that it?”
I’d actually met Nate Brown during my first year in my shack. I had found the body of a child on my river who had been one of a string of abductions and murders of children from suburban homes. Brown had helped me to find the madman responsible and remove that stain from those he considered his people. I admired the old guy and his quiet ethics. But this man was nothing like him.
“I said I know Nate. I never said I know you, Mr. Morris. I said I’d heard Nate talk about the same things you just did but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t run into Nate Brown out here looting other people’s properties after a storm just for leftovers.”
Buck’s eyes took on an internal look, glassed over like he was seeing something in his own head that needed to be studied. The anger I expected didn’t come. Or the denial.
“If you know Nate Brown, Mr. Freeman, then you know he is a man who did what he had to do in his time. And it wasn’t all legal then neither. The Gladesmen do what they have to do.”
“Buck,” I said, “I know Nate as a man who holds his own ethics in high esteem. I think he does the right thing, for the people he represents and their way of living out here. Maybe you’ve got some of that in you.”
I was trying to work an angle, pry at whatever relationship this young man had with Brown and the generation of Gladesmen before him. He stayed silent.
“Maybe Nate would be salvaging. Maybe he’d be doing what he had to do to survive,” I offered. “But he wouldn’t be hurting innocent people. He wouldn’t be turning his back on someone who needed his help.”
Buck stood up and now he was looking down on me. He was still working it in his head. He was being careful. Thinking things out. But there was a tension now in the guy’s eyes and I could see his hand flexing on the handle of the .45.
“Times change,” he finally said, turning toward the door. “You might do some ponderin’ on time, sir. ’Cause you might not have a whole lot of it left.”
When he walked out the door he closed it and then, with substantial force, jammed the blade end of the crowbar into the space between the bottom of the door and the flooring planks, effectively locking it.