Acts of Nature

TWENTY-SEVEN

I was still at Sherry’s side, easing her back onto the bed, repeating to her, “It’s OK, baby. It’s OK. We’re almost out of here, Sherry. We’re almost home.”
Her eyes were open but the way they were twitching in her head, the irises never stopping long enough to absorb the light, made me wonder what she was seeing or what those images were telling her. I didn’t think the pain was even registering anymore. She’d forgotten the leg, I thought. Now she was struggling with another demon and the only thing keeping her from it was her own internal strength.
Two more small-caliber gunshots sounded after I’d clapped the porthole door closed and both made me flinch. Then I heard the roar of the shotgun next door. But who was firing. Buck? Wayne? Was Marcus coming to pay me back for taking his fingers?
When I heard someone twisting the knob on the door, I pulled my knife and moved to the hinges. They’d have to come through here. I might wound one; everything else would fall from there. My face was close to the metal when I heard a stranger’s voice identify himself as a DEA agent.
“Is anyone alive in there?”
I let him wonder while I tried to sort out the possibilities. This place was obviously not a drug storage bin. Buck’s dreams were just that, a small-time thief’s dream of a big score. So why the hell would DEA be out here two days after a hurricane? It might have been a good flush technique, but I wasn’t going for it.
“Do you know Jim Born, the agent-in-charge for the Broward office?” I said, loud enough for him to hear it. There was a hesitation on the other side of the door.
“Yeah. But I just transferred in from Virginia. Look, you need to come out there with your hands raised, OK?” the voice said, exasperated. “If you’re armed, you need to throw your weapons out first. Understand?
Jim Born was an FDLE agent I’d been introduced to by Sherry. He hadn’t worked for DEA in several years.
“F*ck you,” I said. “There’s an officer from the Broward sheriff’s office in here so why don’t you come in here with your hands up and toss the shotgun and the handgun in first.” I was guessing the weapons based on the last sounds I’d heard. It might throw the guy, wondering how I knew.
Would some of Buck’s shithead friends have joined him on their merry looting party, maybe even started a shootout to cut down on the number of shares in the proceeds? That’d be a lot of homicide for a little profit. Or was this another group altogether? I didn’t have time to wait the guy out. Sherry was dying next to me. He didn’t know that. But I wasn’t taking the chance of having him come through the door with backup behind him. I’d be outflanked again. So I worked out logistics, coveted the high ground, and took a gamble. If it was someone with the ability to help us, friendly or not, I’d have to take the chance.
“You already know you can’t get through these windows. People have been trying to chop into them all night.
“And you probably also know there’s one other entrance. The escape hatch through the floor in here. So here’s the deal. You go below. I open the hatch. You show me some kind of identification. I let you come up.”
There was silence. A whispered discussion? A plan being prepared? I was flying blind but if I minimized the space, made it impossible to be rushed by bodies and force, I might at least be able to put more information together than I could through a door. I was hoping this guy was cagey enough to be thinking the same thing.
“Yeah, OK,” the voice said. “The surveillance intel shows that hatch. Open it and I’ll toss my badge up.”
I listened as intently as I could, heard one set of solid footsteps move away. The sound of the air conditioner drowned out anything once the voice moved to the outside. I got up, found the switch, and turned the machine off. I had not registered the coolness in the room until then. The chill in my skin had started with the first sound of gunfire and had stayed. I now moved to the hatch and yanked it open so I could at least hear or maybe see the ruffle of the water when one or three men sloshed under the decking. When I peered in over the edge there was already a telltale swirl, some kind of eddy on the dark surface that seemed to have been pushed up from the bottom. Then I heard the slosh of someone lowering themselves into the swamp.
“OK. Where’s this hatch?” The man’s voice echoed up from the porthole.
“West side. In between the last two stringers,” I said. There was more movement on the surface, expanding arcs of water like rings moving away from the plunk of a rock.
“Look. Tell me your name, friend. Let’s make this easier,” the voice said, loud now as if he was already in the room, his tone booming from the space between water and wood like it was coming from a wet basement.
“Freeman,” I said. “Max Freeman.”
“You’re a cop?”
“No. Private investigator working with a cop,” I said, maybe giving too much away if they were drug hunters following a rumor.
“OK, Freeman.”
Looking down through the circular hatch at an angle, I caught a glimpse of fabric.
“Here’s my ID.”
I sneaked another look. He only showed a forearm and hand, holding a wallet. I noted it was his left hand. Most people are righties. His gun hand was hidden.
“Toss it up,” I said.
He underhanded it high but I did not follow its trajectory and instead watched the circle of water. The man’s face, ruddy, middle-aged, slipped into the space and we made eye contact. If I’d had a gun I would have had the muzzle over the edge pointing down. I hoped that didn’t give him courage.
I moved around in a half circle and picked up the wallet: Edward Christopher Harmon. Florida private investigator. The photo was similar enough to the glimpse I’d just had. The lie about DEA didn’t surprise me. Admitting it did.
“So now we’re on the same field,” Harmon said from below. “Two PIs doing a job. You yours. Me mine.”
“It doesn’t exactly make us brothers, Harmon,” I said. “What’s your job and what the hell happened out there?”
I heard him slosh. But I’d been down there myself. There was no way to suddenly leap up off that mucky bottom. I was tall enough to reach up and just get my fingers over the edges. Unless he was seven feet, he wasn’t coming up until I let him.
“Your friends, I’m afraid, got a little trigger happy. Probably jumpy after that boy came screaming around the corner with half of his hand gone. I’ll assume that was your work, Freeman. Maybe he wasn’t your friend?”
“Never was,” I said.
“Won’t ever be now,” Harmon said.
“Since we’re assuming, let me take my turn,” I said. “Everybody out there is dead. Or everyone except your team?”
“My partner got his face blown off. He’s gone,” Harmon said and the tone was actually somber, like it meant something to him. “It’s just you and me, Freeman. Or is your cop alive?”
I looked up at Sherry, concentrated on her chest, thought I could see it rise and fall, but for a second I didn’t think I could truthfully answer him.
“What’s your job?” I said instead and again I heard him, or something, slosh in the water.
“My company owns this research facility. They sent me out to secure it after the hurricane, make sure it was still standing.”
“It’s illegal as hell to have a drilling field in this part of the Glades,” I said. You didn’t have to be an environmentalist to know that spoiling the Glades and threatening the water supply was a raw nerve in Florida. The profiteers would get a foothold any way they could. The computer systems behind me, the plotting desk, the seismic charts, the security lock on the door. No other explanation made sense.
“No one’s drilling that I know of, Freeman. You see a drill up there? F*cking thing would have to be six stories high on a metal platform. You know anything about oil drilling?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You set some charges down in the substrata first, doesn’t take a big drilling operation. Then you fire off explosions that no one hears or sees and you measure the underground reaction, sometimes with lasers and the sensitive kinds of computerized equipment you’ve got up here in your little den, Harmon. And that’s illegal too.”
This time the voice took a long break. Making a decision. Or making me think he was making a decision.
“OK. OK, Freeman. We can debate all day. It’s a f*cking job for me and it ain’t worth this much shit. My partner’s dead. All the a*sholes who started firing on us when we came to check out a company project are dead. I have no knowledge of the legal status of this place. But I do have a satellite phone and I’m gonna call my pilot, have him do a pickup and I’m outa here.
“You wanna go with me or sit up there with your cop friend, who I’m assuming is a corpse by now or he would have said something. What I’m not going to do is stand here in this f*cking soup any longer.”
This time I was the one hesitating. This guy might be our last chance. He leaves, Sherry dies. I’m certain of it. There’s not much of a choice left.
“Toss up the guns,” I said. “I’ll help you load your friend’s body.”
This time there’s no discussion.
“Stand away so you don’t think I’m trying to shoot you,” he said, and an over-under shotgun came up, stock first, and he pushed it hard enough for the gun to clear the opening and clack onto the floor. I dragged it away. Then an MK pistol flipped up out of the space and clattered to the floor.
“That’s what I got,” Harmon said.
This time when I peered over the edge he was standing in full view, empty palms raised, fingers spread wide.
“Give me a hand,” he said.
I braced myself on either side of the porthole and reached down. He locked on with a grip on each of my wrists and I did the same. It was an old climber’s technique I learned long ago and it surprised me that he knew it.
“OK,” he said and I yanked him up and over the edge of the hatch. While he was still on all fours I picked up the Mk23 and held it loosely in one hand. He stood and did not seem to care that I was now armed. He was a man of medium build, probably in his early fifties but in good shape. His grayish hair was matted from the moisture, his clothes soaking wet. He first looked me in the face, seemed to study my eyes until he’d made some kind of assessment, and then scanned the rest of the room, nodding, like it was familiar and he was pleased that everything appeared to be in shape. He stopped when he sighted the cot and Sherry behind me.
“How’s your officer friend, if she is indeed an officer?” he said.
“She needs help,” I said.
“Then it’s a good thing we made a deal.”
“Did we?”
He refocused on my eyes. It is an old cop trick that was probably taken from the art of magicians. Most people, even shy people and especially criminal people, will try to be brave and look you in the eye when you first start talking to them. And if you are engaging, with a smile and a purpose, you can hold their attention for the second it takes to do the sleight of hand you need to do.
“Actually, I’m going to have to take a little time here to do some documenting. Simple tasks like pulling some computer memories and such,” he said, turning just slightly to his right, but with his feet still planted, a solid foundation. His move might have even worked if his jacket had not been so wet, the heft of the soaked fabric pulled just hard enough to expose a hard edge in his right pocket, and when I saw his shoulder raise to slip his hand inside I shot him.
The round hit him in the hip and must have made solid contact with bone because he spun, just a quarter turn, but when he stepped back to gain his balance, he put his foot directly into the hole of the open space of the escape hatch and went down. Trying quickly to straddle the void, he landed with one leg hanging and the other spread out at floor level. His rib cage and right underarm scraped hard against the inside edge of the hatch and then came to a hard halt. He was wedged in the hole, looking suddenly like a human pair of scissors, doing a painful split. He was awkwardly stuck; his right arm pinned and left one flailing. I changed position and circled. I had to give the guy credit. He hadn’t cried out, though I knew it had to hurt, both the bullet into bone and the fall. I looked down at him and his lips were pressed tight into a hard line. Might have been pissed, might have been pain. The look said either. Through the space between his back and one edge, I could look down and see the lump in his pocket was still there, hanging heavily in his pocket and impossible for him to reach.
“Is that a pistol in your pocket or did I just shoot you for trying to get a two-pound pack of cigarettes out of your jacket?” I said.
“F*ck you, Freeman.”
The strain in his face increased. His breathing started to go ragged. He might have broken some ribs going down, possibly punctured a lung. But still his eyes were flashing left and right, trying to figure a move. Guy like him had probably saved his own ass a dozen times and was still confident he could do it again.
I heard Sherry moan behind me, the first sound she’d made since Harmon started banging on the door, and we were wasting time.
“OK, Harmon. Now you’ve got a reason to work with me here. You gotta get to the hospital, my partner has to get to the hospital,” I said. “You tell me how to call back your helicopter pilot and all three of us fly out together.”
He looked up and saw me pointing the gun in his face and thought about the alternatives for less than ten seconds.
“Out in my bag on the deck there’s a satellite phone. Pilot’s on the same frequency. Get me up out of here and get the phone. I’ll make the call.”
I had to give him credit; he was still working the advantages for himself, slim as they were.
“No, I’ll get the gun out of your pocket. Then we’ll get you up,” I said.
With the doorway jammed, I knew the only way to get outside now was through the hatch. I figured I’d have to get him up and tied securely to a stanchion before I could climb down and get to the phone. Then I’d be calling Billy. His pilot’s job was over. I circled him again, kept the MK in my hand, and then knelt down.
“I’m going to reach down into your pocket, Harmon. You move, I’ll put a round through the back of your head. It won’t make a difference to me. You’re out of my way regardless.”
I went down on the floor behind him, my face next to his back, and I could see the stain of blood spreading down the side of his pants where I’d shot him. I was hoping that I hadn’t hit the femoral artery, but the bleeding was already extensive enough that droplets were falling into the water below.
I extended my arm down and with a little trouble found the pocket opening and reached inside to touch the hard metal of a short-barreled pistol. I came up with a new-looking Colt revolver and slid it across the floor toward Sherry’s cot.
“All right, Harmon,” I said, standing. “Now I’m going to get you under the arms here and lift you up. From the looks of it you’re gonna bleed out if I don’t get you out of there now and get a patch on that wound. So don’t f*ck with me. I’m the only one left here to save your ass.”
He grunted once and then said: “You think I’m afraid of you, Freeman? Don’t flatter yourself.”
“No. I doubt you’re afraid of anything,” I said and meant it.
First I put the MK in the waistband at the small of my back and then bent behind him, got him under both armpits and started to lift. He seemed surprisingly light at first, and I had his rump almost over the edge of the hatch when he suddenly got heavy and his eyes got suddenly big and the man who feared nothing started to scream.

They call them prehistoric, the alligators of Florida. And they have survived so many thousands of years because they are nature’s superior predators in their world. Their jaw muscles are machine strong when they are biting down and weaker but much quicker when they are opening the mouth. It’s the quickness that’s astonishing.
The first yank pulled Harmon back down through the hole and I almost followed him. Over his shoulder I could see one black eye, like a shiny marble, mounted on the rumpled, gray-green snout. Unemotional, limbic, it stared up at me with no recognition that a man’s leg from the knee down was in its mouth. The other eye was missing, the socket where it should have been was a bloody hole, as if it had been drilled or merely gouged out by the shaft of a sheared-off golf club. Then like a whiplash the gator flashed its tail and threw its thousand- pound body into an S shape and Harmon went down through the hole like he’d been flushed. I heard the crack of bone and snap of ligament over the man’s deep-throated scream and tumbled back, landing on my ass. I scrambled back to the edge only in time to see that classic roll of the big reptile’s spin, showing its light-colored belly and black, mottled back as it pulled its prey down under the water where it cannot breathe and will soon give up. It is all very natural. And nature is sometimes a terrible thing to watch.