Acts of Nature

TWENTY-SIX

Harmon looked at the GPS in his hand and then down at what seemed like a thousand acres of trampled backyard wallowing in standing water and said: “Take her down. I think we’re here.”
The helicopter pilot looked to his right to see if the look on Harmon’s face meant he was serious and Harmon simply looked back and shrugged his shoulders. The pilot was told by whomever hired him to follow Harmon’s instructions and don’t ask questions. They were less than an hour northwest of the city and had left all civilization behind when they flew over U.S. 27, the demarcation line where South Florida changes from rows and rows of orange-tiled roofs to the gray-green world of the Everglades.
As the chopper descended, the landscape only became slightly more defined. Now they could see that those darker green blobs below were actually stands of trees. The slate- colored patches were open water, reflecting the color of the sky. And the brownish smears were acres of sawgrass beaten down at the moment by the path of the storm. Harmon pointed to a kidney-shaped island that looked more and more like a pile of pickup sticks as they got closer. Soon they could make out tall trees snapped off at their tops and vegetation and debris at their base so thick it was difficult to discern anything more. They came in lower and then from the backseat Squires called out: “Structure at eight o’clock.” The pilot swung his head down and to the left. Harmon was on the blind side.
“Bank a turn and get as low as you can,” Harmon said, climbing out of his seat and squeezing into the back with his partner. While they swung around, Harmon and Squires readied the fast ropes, tying them to U-bolts secured into the floor of the chopper. Harmon slid open a side door and looked out.
“Eleven o’clock,” he said into the microphone. “See it?”
“Yeah, I got it,” the pilot said. “I’ll get you over that decking at the rear.”
“Nice armpit they got for us to visit this time,” Squires said. “I’m not picking up any movement but that don’t mean a thing considering that ground cover. Shit, somebody coulda parked a f*cking yacht in there and you wouldn’t spot it.” The big man took the Mk23 handgun out of his operations bag and strapped it to his thigh.
When they were thirty feet over the dark wooded deck both men slung their packs over their shoulders and put their feet out on the landing runners.
“I’ll call on the satellite phone for a pickup,” Harmon said to the pilot and by turn, Squires first, they rappelled like circus artists down the ropes.

“F*ck! They are cops,” Buck said when he saw the first man slide down the rope and touch down on the deck. The guy unsnapped his line and had a nasty-looking handgun out faster than Buck had seen most men flick a switchblade. He was dressed all in black, like some goddamn SWAT dude who meant business. Then the second guy came down.
“What the hell?” he whispered to himself. This one was dressed like he was going to baseball game: a pair of jeans and a golf shirt and some kinda loose jacket flapping in the wind. He landed just as softly as the other one but as far as Buck could tell he wasn’t armed.
Buck was now waist-deep in the water and obscured by a clump of fern and downed tree branches. When they first slipped out of the cabin he eyeballed the helicopter, expecting to see a rescue decal on its belly or at least a Sheriff’s Office logo. Instead it was unmarked. From his angle he couldn’t even see the identification numbers and he had to assume it was a private chopper. Dope dealers? Owners?
Then he and the boy both slipped down into the water, using the deck as cover. When the chopper door opened and a couple of ropes came tumbling out, he’d ordered Wayne to take the shotgun around to the other side of the cabin so they could flank whoever came down, just as they’d done to Freeman. When the first man slid down he saw the SWAT getup and thought cops. Now he didn’t know what the hell was going on, but the gun in the SWAT guy’s hand jacked up the situation and he kept the stolen .45 up and ready. He just hoped Wayne could see that the dude in black was armed.
Buck stayed down, out of sight, and when the helicopter pulled up and the sound faded the place went silent again. Buck was quietly working the possibilities. If they go through the door and confront Marcus and find Freeman and his partner, what the hell happens? Maybe he should make a break for the airboat now, let the boys fend for themselves. Maybe he should wait, take a chance on these guys opening the other side of the place. He knew drugs were inside. A huge score. A once-in-a-lifetime score. A score just like his daddy couldn’t resist. If he made this work he would ride off in the sunset to Hendry County where he belonged, workin’ the open range, no more penny-ante burglaries and dodging the cops. How can you walk away? Buck watched the two men bending their heads together, talking softly, and then the one in black started moving east toward the door. No, thought Buck, this has been thought out. No turning back now.
Suddenly a scream ripped through the humid air that raised the hair on the back of Buck’s neck and dropped his jaw at the same instant. The sound was filled with more surprise and pain than Buck had ever heard even in the concrete halls of Avon Park prison and his reaction was the same as when he was inside: his legs started moving, as if you could run away from such terror even in an eight-by-ten cell.
He moved to his left, out away from his cover, his eyes focused on the men who both seemed to have been frozen by the shattering cry. Then he saw Wayne; he’d come up out of the swamp at the sound of his friend’s scream and was up on the deck, running with the shotgun held foolishly at port arms. Water was dripping off his shirt and pants legs and there was a look of anguish on the kid’s face as his mouth formed the word “Marcus!” and he slid around the corner into full view of the helicopter men.
The barrel of Wayne’s shotgun never even made it to point when the SWAT man spun with his handgun at the ready and fired twice. A spray of blood instantly mixed with the droplets of water flying off the kid’s chest and two blossoms of red bloomed on his upper chest as he went down. The shotgun clattered forward across the wooden planks and came to a sudden stop under the foot of the man with the jacket. The other one was still in a military firing position, both hands steadying his handgun and then, as if he’d seen him all along, the big man shifted the sights of the weapon onto Buck, who was thirty feet away in the swamp, his feet still, his eyes trying to decipher what had just happened.
“Don’t move, a*shole!” the SWAT guy said, and then started moving down the deck, stepping then sliding, shuffling his feet, keeping a stance and a balance as if he’d been trained and did this kind of thing every day: drop out of the sky, shoot a kid in the chest.
Buck had his hands up in response to the man’s pointed gun. He still held the .45, now high and over his head, pointing at the still-lightening sky. The man was nearly even with him when, back behind all of them, Buck saw Marcus come out from around the east corner. The kid was bent half over, his right arm extended out in front of him, the end looking like a bloody stump. The boy’s face, though, was up, and in his eyes were an odd look of shock and a plea for help.
“Jesus,” the jacket man said and the tone of his voice and maybe the look on Buck’s face caused the SWAT guy to turn his head. And that’s when Buck shot the big man in the back, the .45 roaring.
The second shot hit SWAT man as he spun, entering his face just below the cheekbone and at an upward angle exiting at his sideburn, the big caliber round removing his ear at the same time. The third shot dropped him to his knees, where he melted in a heap.
Buck did not like guns, never had. But that did not mean he was inept at their use.
After the third recoil he swung the sights back down the deck to where jacket man was. This one had been unarmed when he arrived but now he had the over-and-under twelve- gauge shotgun in one hand and bloody Marcus in the other. He had the kid’s neck in a hold and had positioned him as a shield. He seemed fixed that way, his knee down on one of the bags they’d dropped, holding the kid, figuring he was protection of some kind. Buck held the .45 on them both as he climbed out of the swamp and onto the deck. He seemed incredibly calm as he stepped over Wayne’s crumpled body. The kid was whimpering and seemed to be shrinking by the minute, gone fetal, folding up on himself, like a balloon leaking air. Buck stopped short of the SWAT man’s body and did not look down at it. Somewhere in the background he thought he heard music. But his eyes were on jacket man’s eyes.
“Well, sir,” Buck said, reverting back to what he thought of as southern charm even if it was now heavily bloodstained. Still, sometimes just the feel of the words in his own mouth made him calm, calculating. “I ain’t sure who you are, mister. But it appears we are in what they call a Mexican standoff.”
Jacket man said nothing, his finger poised on the trigger of the shotgun. Buck slid his eyes away from the gun and looked at the boy. The kid was still alive but from this distance Buck could now see that most of Marcus’s fingers on his right hand were gone, sheared off at the joints, the stubs all bleeding heavily and dripping onto his shirt. He did not feel any sympathy. Yes, they had an almost familial connection, most of the real Gladesmen from the Ten Thousand Islands did. But it wasn’t enough in these modern times. The world had gone small. People bumpin’ up into people now that they would never have known even existed before. People grabbin’ for what they considered their share. Buck had seen men turn on their own before over greed. He’d seen white supremacists shiv one another in prison. He’d seen black gang members rape other blacks. If he had to put a .45 round through the kid to take out the man behind him, he would.
“But what you don’t realize, sir,” Buck continued, “is that there is a still a cop and his partner inside that there storage bin of yours. Now I’m sure you don’t want him or her surviving to let on about your stash of cocaine or pot or meth or whatever the hell it is you got in there. And considering we’re two armed against them unarmed, maybe we could come to some kind of a share and share alike understanding?”
The man in the jacket still said nothing. Maybe he was pondering the offer. Maybe there was some hope to the situation. Then the man nodded his head as though he’d come to a decision.
“There’s nothing Mexican about this standoff, my friend,” Harmon said, his voice tired but succinct. “It’s just humans being humans.” Then he pulled the trigger and the powerful, small-patterned shotgun blast ripped Buck Morris’s leg off just above the knee.

Harmon wished he was home. He wanted to be sitting in his protected den, reading his books, enjoying the quiet air- conditioning provided by his generator and sipping a cool drink and mildly gloating over how he had beaten nature this time. Instead he was in the middle of a bloodbath.
Harmon did not trust nature and this was exactly why. The whole way out here he’d looked down to see homes and cars and buildings and roadways all skewed off balance. At two thousand feet you couldn’t see the details but everything in the wake of the hurricane looked different, the colors gone dirty, the normal flow of things stopped cold. At first it had almost seemed a relief when the landscape turned watery and open; then they’d found the cabin they were looking for and even in its own backyard nature couldn’t be trusted.
As the pilot hovered and Harmon had waited for Squires to touch down on the deck, he had chuckled a bit at his partner’s instant reaction to pull his weapon and sight the corners like they were going into Beirut again. But Harmon also noted the odd damage at the roofline of the simple shack: some missing tin panels and splintered wood that looked more like damage from a hungry animal than from the wide slap of a wind gust or falling limb. He was nervous when he slid down the fast rope and landed on the balls of his feet. When they’d unhooked, Harmon had given the pilot the high sign and then bent and pulled the electronic lock switch from his bag.
“OK, partner. Let’s check out the inside of Crandall’s mystery hole and then get the hell back out of here,” Harmon said. They started for the south side of the building and the instant he punched the button on the switch an unholy scream seemed to fill the air and Harmon looked stupidly down at the button like he’d done something wrong and could turn it back off.
Suddenly they were confronted by the sight of a young man, his face in agony, coming around the corner at them with an outstretched arm like he was offering them a bloodied portion of the devil himself. All manner of their mercenary past boiled up in Harmon’s memory and he could only think now in retrospect that Squires must have relaxed his weapon when he realized the bloodied kid was unarmed because they were both staring at the boy and wincing at the pitch of his wailing when another voice erupted behind them.
This time Squires tensed and swung, his gun at the ready, and when he saw a second young man come running around the west corner with a shotgun, the big man fired two quick rounds, dropping the assailant in his tracks. Harmon watched as the boy pitched forward and, almost without thought, he stuck out his foot and stopped the shotgun as it slid across the wooden deck by stepping on its barrel. For a moment there was silence, the crack of Squires’s pistol sucked out into the humid air around them. The only reason Harmon was not stupefied by the series of events was that he had never been stupefied by the actions of his friend or those of people in bad places and he now realized that’s exactly where they were: in a bad place. Just as automatically as he had pinned the sliding shotgun, he crouched and searched the immediate area. He and Squires were not unfamiliar with flanking military procedure. So when his friend turned at an angle and shouted: “Don’t move, a*shole!” with his gun still raised but pointed down toward the water, Harmon was not surprised that another unfriendly was in sight. He looked past the big man’s legs at a bearded, scruffy-looking guy whose arms were now raised in surrender and without taking his eyes off the threat of the big handgun in the new player’s lifted hand, Harmon reached down for the shotgun.
It was when he felt for the wooden stock of the gun that his fingers touched an uneven surface of warm goop and when he shifted eyes to his feet he realized he was touching the back of a bloodied hand, the digits cleaved off like a rack of short ribs, the white stumps of bone glowing through the red syrup and the intact thumb still twitching as it tried to grip the shotgun stock.
“Jesus,” he heard himself say. And the gunfire began again.

I was inside the cocoon of the closed room but there was no mistaking the sound of gunfire outside. I heard Marcus’s screams and already knew I was responsible. The image of those severed fingers on the floor will be in my dreams. But then came some indecipherable yelling and two quick reports. A medium-caliber handgun, I thought. Not Buck’s big .45. And then I felt more than heard something or someone tumble onto the deck just on the other side of the wall and the sound of something metal skittering across the boards. I was standing, the generator inside was humming, the air conditioning clacked on, the computer indicator lights started popping on, glowing red and green. I took a step toward the window that showed damage from Buck and his crew’s attempts last night to get in but then flinched at the sound of another shot. This time it was the .45 and it repeated itself twice more and there was another thud that vibrated the floorboards. I crouched down in exasperation. There was carnage of some form going on ten feet away from me that I couldn’t see, could only hear, but I knew instinctively that its outcome was going to determine my fate and Sherry’s.
Again there was silence and I was afraid to move but then I remembered the open hatch in the corner and sneaked to it, my ear to its edge, hoping to hear, to get some clue what the hell was happening outside. Taking a chance, I moved my head into the opening, but the sunlight outside was still so new that very little penetrated under the raised decking and I could see little more than a black shimmer on the top of the water. When I strained, I heard nothing but a high-pitched keening like an animal in deep pain.
“Max?”
Sherry was trying to get up. She had somehow risen to a sitting position on the bed but her leg was locked straight and I needed to move to her, but hesitated. She tried to swing her damaged leg over the side and was just about to fall so I made a decision. I flipped the metal port closed with a clang and rushed to her side, catching her before she tumbled to the floor.
“Was that music that I heard, Max?” she said in a delirious whisper. “Are we home, Max?”

While the skinny peckerwood with the missing leg writhed around on the deck, Harmon let go of the boy and stepped over to kick the big .45 over the edge and into the swamp. He then looked down at the man who now had his stump of a knee in both hands and was kind of spinning on one hip like one of those break dancers on TV, though they didn’t leave a smear of blood behind when they did it. He stepped over to his partner, who appeared to have lost part of the side of his head. Harmon had seen dead men before and you didn’t have to take a goddamn pulse to tell. He did not mean to be callous. He and Squires had been through a lot together. But after what had been nearly a lifetime of war and violence, Harmon’s nature was to care only about family. Squires was not family. He picked up the big man’s Mk23, checked the load, and then realized, hell, he hadn’t even taken his own Colt out of his pocket yet. He took two more steps and looked down at the kid who had come sliding around the corner yelling, “Marrcussss!” until Squires shot him. The kid’s skin was already going pale. Chest wounds will do that. Harmon shook his head. Neither of these boys was older than his kids, sitting in their dorm rooms at Notre Dame, probably having a party while the campus got it together to enjoy the weekend.
He avoided the blood pool and went back to the older hick, who was now emitting a high keening sound of serious pain. Harmon thought for a minute about what the guy had said about unarmed police officers being locked inside the shack. Why the hell would he make something like that up? Then he thought about the idiot claim that there were drugs inside. The company didn’t deal in drugs. They dealt in oil, which was much more lucrative, though sometimes the way they obtained it and bargained for it and set prices for it wasn’t any more legal than the way drug suppliers did the same thing. In fact, Harmon had been working the company angle on this trip since the minute he’d gotten off the phone with Crandall. No doubt this place was clandestine as hell. Harmon knew enough about the business to understand the company was always looking for supply. They had ways of studying deep rock formations, ways of setting off subterranean explosions and then measuring and tracking the echo effects and movement of sound waves to tell them where the oil and natural gas deposits were. That kind of shit went on all the time all over the world. It’s just that in most of this particular part of the world, in an environmentally designated part of the Everglades, such exploration was illegal as hell. That’s why you need security to check out a lonely outpost after a hurricane. That’s why you would be ordered to check its infrastructure and report if it had been seen or uncovered by anyone. He stood and looked across the deck. That’s why you clean up after yourself.
The older peckerwood was still crying when Harmon heard the clank of metal on metal. It seemed to come from under him and he felt the vibration in his shoes. Was that a door? Was it proof that this a*shole who had just killed his partner was telling the truth? Were there more men inside?
Harmon stood still for a moment, listening, assessing. He couldn’t divide his concentration now. He was alone. You focus on one situation at a time and if you can eliminate a distraction, that’s what you do.
With no more thought than that, Harmon stepped forward and shot the older man with the blown-off leg through the back of the head with Squires’s pistol. The end of the annoying whimpering. The fingerless boy took it easier. He was still wrapped up around his disfigured hand when Harmon put a round into his ear hole. Those chores done, he carefully walked around to the entrance of the cabin, noted the crowbar blade under the door, and used a single blast from the shotgun to blow away a six-inch hole around the metal tip. The hinges creaked as the door swung free and he entered at a crouch, weapon at the ready. No one greeted him. The place smelled of jerky and antiseptic, sweat and wet wood. One bed was partially disassembled on the opposite wall. A cooler and some trash were over in the corner. Sunlight was leaking through a rough opening in the roof, the damage he had seen from the air. Someone might have dropped through it, but there was nothing near it to indicate a man could have climbed unaided back out. There was no place to hide.
On the western wall he studied the door to the adjoining room. The red light was glowing on the electronic lock, and in all the confusion, he’d forgotten where he left the remote switch. He noted the damage around the door frame where attempts had been made to break in, unsuccessfully. The company was hiding its secrets well. Harmon tried the latch. Then he actually knocked.
“Hello?” he called out at the door, and even he realized how stupid he sounded. “Is anyone in there? This is the DEA, federal officers. Is anyone alive in there?”