The blue edge of midnight

Chapter 16

I waited until I was back on the Tamiami Trail and then called Billy, giving him a brief description of my meeting with the Loop Road group. I left out the encounter with the welcoming committee. I gave him the names of the four men at the table, knowing he could not resist his natural inquisitiveness.
Driving east into Miami, headlights and overhead streetlights flashed and splintered through my broken windshield and hampered my view of the skyline after dark. When I got up onto the interstate, I could see a curving neon light that snaked through the city, an artistic addition to the Metrorail line. The Centrust Building stood bathed in teal spotlights, a tribute to the Florida Marlins baseball team. Against the blackness of Biscayne Bay, the lights in the high-rise towers took on the look of manmade constellations. The contrast to the weathered pine of the Loop Road Hotel was not lost on me.
When I got back to Billy’s apartment he was waiting for me with a fresh pot of coffee, a take-out order of jerk chicken and black beans and rice, and a sheaf of computer printouts, dossiers he called them, on Brown, Sims, Blackman and Ashley. He also had company.
He was on the patio with a woman he introduced as Dianne McIntyre, “a lawyer w-with an office in the s-same b-building as mine.”
She was as tall as Billy and had a swimmer’s figure, broad shoulders and narrow hips, and was dressed expensively in a pure silk blouse and a charcoal skirt. She was comfortable enough to have taken off her heels and was padding about in stockings.
As I ate at the counter they stood in the kitchen area, sharing a bottle of wine. When I looked up Billy was staring at me.
“W-What happened to your face?”
I self-consciously touched the swollen cheekbone.
“Door,” I said.
The woman raised one of her fine dark eyebrows and indelicately probed at a molar with her tongue. Billy accepted my reticence and picked up the first page of the stack of papers.
“Dianne actually kn-knows this f-fellow Sims. S-She worked w-with him on an environmental case.”
I could tell how hard Billy was trying to control his stutter and it made me anxious for him. But the woman seemed completely inured.
“It was several years ago in a dispute between a very influential developer who wanted to build some kind of mega sports complex in an area of the Everglades that had never been touched,” she said, turning the wineglass in her hands. “Sims had been working with the naturalists and environmental groups for years and had marshaled some fairly strong support against the project. One of the shrewdest things he’d done was elicit the favor of the old Gladesmen by convincing them that their way of life would be threatened as much as the flora and wildlife of the area.”
“N-No doubt men l-like your Mr. Brown,” Billy said, leafing through the stack of papers.
“Apparently things got ugly and some of the developer’s backroom people allegedly threatened Sims,” McIntyre continued. “Shortly after, handmade posters started showing up at the public fishing ramps and even in some outlying suburban stores that if anyone harmed Sims, those responsible would be gutted and fed to the gators.”
The attorney again seemed unruffled by the circumstances. Neither shocked nor amused. Just the facts, ma’am. I watched her closely.
“The project finally died and Sims seemed to move away from the mainstream. I haven’t heard much about him for the last few years.” When she finished, she sipped again at her wine.
Nate Brown’s was a story in itself, much of it untold.
Billy had found some archived newspaper clippings and legal transcripts online that shed a little light on the wizened old man who could back down three pumped-up thugs with only the slightest flick of his Loop Road respect.
Nathaniel Brown had been born in the Glades and learned the skills of the back country with one motivation: survival. There was no record of his parentage and no official documentation of his life until a war record placed him in an infantry division in the army in WWII. There were notations of his award of two silver stars, for bravery beyond the call when he had taken out a group of specialized German mountain troops during an ambush, “single-handedly causing a number of casualties upon the enemy.” He had then doctored a group of his own squad members wounded in the fight and kept them alive in the woods for nearly two weeks until they were found.
After his discharge, his name didn’t surface again for more than a decade until he was arrested and charged in the death of a game warden. By then Brown had built a small reputation as an alligator poacher whose knowledge of the Glades made him impossible to catch.
But court transcripts showed that on a night in the early 1970s a warden was chasing Brown, whom he suspected of carrying several fresh gator skins in his outboard runabout. The boat chase led into a series of twisting tributaries on the edge of Florida Bay, and Brown reportedly lured the warden into an area of sand bars. Even in the dark the Gladesman was able to read the fine currents, water he had grown up on and traveled his entire life. The game warden was not. The officer ran his boat into a sand spur at high speed and was thrown from the boat, breaking his neck. Brown disappeared into the mangroves.
Three days later, after supposedly hearing of the warden’s death, Brown turned himself in. His public defender pleaded him out to a charge of involuntary manslaughter. He served six years, his final two at a road prison near the isolated Ten Thousand Islands section of Florida’s southwest coast. After his release, his official tracks again disappeared. No driver’s license. No property holdings. Nothing.
“And you saw this guy?” Dianne McIntyre said, her first true sign of piqued interest. “He’d have to be near eighty.”
Billy filled the wineglasses and I watched the woman cup her hands around the crystal. She had a near-perfect profile and her auburn hair fell across her cheek as she bent to the glass. She was oddly standing on one foot, her other brought up behind her like one of those 1950s movie starlets during a kiss. I guessed she liked her wine.
“This B-Blackman I actually kn-know of,” said Billy, paging through the documents. “He is, or w-was, a guide like Gunther.”
Billy said he’d tried to depose Blackman when he was handling the client suit against Gunther.
“Fred said he was w-working with him at the t-time. That he was the b-best guide in the G-Glades, but had an attitude.”
Billy had sent several certified requests to Blackman’s business P.O. address but got no response. When the people suing Gunther dropped the suit, he never pursued it.
Blackman had the typical paper trail of licenses, social security and business permits, but court records showed little in the past. But in the last few years he had had a handful of complaints filed against him by clients, including a charge of aggravated assault in which an upstate New York man accused Blackman of whipping him across the face with a fly rod during an angry outburst on a fishing excursion.
Blackman said it was an accident. The New Yorker settled for a plea of no contest to a misdemeanor assault charge and court costs. I set Blackman’s face in my mind, recalled the agitation in his voice and the almost mocking pronunciation of my name.
Dave Ashley was an unknown. The silent member of Brown’s cabal had no paper trail. Variations of his name and my estimate of his age in the early forties brought nothing. No licenses, addresses, court appearance, nothing. In this day and age, the blank sheet stunned the attorneys. It was difficult to believe any person could exist without leaving some imprint in the modern electronic tracking of every soul from birth to school to work to death.
“There was an Ashley gang, a notorious criminal family that roamed the South Florida region in the early nineteen hundreds,” McIntyre said.
Both Billy’s and my faces must have taken on the look of blank dumbness. A crinkle came to the woman’s eyes, she took a sip of wine and began.
The Ashleys were a family of Crackers who had come to Florida near the turn of the twentieth century and found work providing the muscle and sweat to build Henry Flagler’s railway line into then frontier South Florida. While the father and older boys chopped railroad ties, young John Ashley became a skilled hunter and trapper in the Glades. Then came a day in 1911 when the body of a Seminole Indian named DeSoto Tiger floated up in a canal. Word had it young John was the last one seen with Tiger, who was on his way to Miami to sell twelve hundred dollars in otter skins. The skins were eventually sold— by young John.
Ashley was eventually arrested and jailed but escaped and for the next ten years he and his family took up the business of robbing banks, running illegal rum from the Bahamas, and using their criminal wealth to buy off the local law.
“Then some old-time Palm Beach sheriff became the Ashley gang’s sworn nemesis,” McIntyre said. “He tracked them down for years and once came close, but one of his deputies, his cousin, was killed in a shootout.
“Then sometime in 1924 he laid an ambush on the Sebastian River bridge. When John and three of his gang went for their guns, all four were cut down. The rest were eventually killed or captured or run out of the state. But who knows about their descendents?”
When she was done, both of us stared at her in appreciation.
“Be a long stretch, huh?” she said, smiling over the rim of her wineglass.
I thought of Ashley, sitting slumped in his chair at the table, looking into the glow of his whiskey and turning the crystal glass in a circle as he’d seen me do. Could a genetic hate for the law and a throwback’s love of a wild place fester into homicide? There have been lesser reasons.

I cleaned Billy’s kitchen while he and his lawyer friend finished their wine on the patio. I flicked on the wall- mounted video screen and watched the news. A manhunt was growing. The lake behind the two-story pastel house in Flamingo Lakes was still being searched for any scrap of clothing or footprint or sign of a boat or body being dragged ashore. Neighborhood groups had rallied and, as in the other cases, were organizing to pass out leaflets with a photo of the missing girl.
News of the dead dog had been leaked and one reporter had “a source close to the investigation” confirming that a quick necropsy of the animal had been done and determined that a “razor-sharp blade” had been used to slash through the shepherd’s throat and instantly silence the dog.
“My sources tell me that such an attack would have required great strength and a knowledge of animal anatomy to have been done so quickly and efficiently,” the reporter said, laying it on with just the right tone of professional knowledge and solemn warning before tossing it back to the studio.
In the other abductions it had been three or four days before the GPS coordinates were sent to the police, and I knew Hammonds’ people had to be scrambling. The feds were in full strength now and I vaguely remembered the craziness in Atlanta years before when they finally closed in on Wayne Williams after twenty-two children and young adults had been killed. Twenty-two.
I switched off the television report when Billy and Dianne McIntyre came back inside. She retrieved her suit coat from the back of the couch and slipped on her shoes while Billy set their glasses in the sink. I was caught in a bad place. The roommate that shouldn’t be there, intruding.
“Billy,” I started, “I was just thinking of going…”
“Max, it was a pleasure to meet you,” the woman deftly interrupted. “I absolutely must go. Depositions at eight o’clock sharp.”
She shook my hand and smiled. There was an intelligent sheen in her dark eyes that was not alcohol-induced. They went out into Billy’s lobby, closing the door behind them. I filled a cup of coffee and went out onto the patio. A half moon, balanced on its tip, was sitting high in the summer sky and the clouds nearby picked up its light at their edges. The air was still. Below I could faintly hear the uniform rhythm of surf washing the sand.
Billy joined me in less than five minutes. He’d retrieved his glass from the sink and sat down hard in a chair, saying nothing. I stood at the railing.
“Nice lady,” I finally said. More silence.
“Brilliant,” he answered without a hint of stutter.
When I looked at him he was staring at the moon. I didn’t ask which he was referring to and after letting it set awhile he finally took a sip of wine and changed whatever subject we might have been on.
“How d-did you get that n-nasty bruise?”
I told him about the backwoods boys, the altercation in the parking lot and how Brown had held an obvious provenance in the Loop Road world.
“So d-do you really th-think they need you to take the heat off them?”
“No. There’s something else working there. Blackman’s angry, Ashley’s sullen, Sims is caught in the middle and Gunther’s carrying around a load of guilt,” I said, trying to grind the stones down to their essence. “And Brown is trying to save them all.”
“Man in a foxhole full of w-wounded,” Billy said.

In the morning I called a local auto-glass repair service out of the yellow pages. They came to you, so I gave them the tower address and the model of my truck. When I hung up the phone, my cheekbone seemed to ache more. There was a knot in my left forearm that felt like a small group of marbles under the skin. I took another sip of coffee and called Fred Gunther’s hospital room.
“Yeah. Sorry about that. Sometimes with strangers it can get a little rough out that way,” Gunther said after I spilled a little venom on him about my parking lot encounter and the vandalism of my truck.
“Hell, they still talk about the time some city boy came out there and started calling somebody at the bar a Cracker. Before he knew what hit him he had a blade cut from his scrotum to his rib cage, right through his clothes. There was a barroom full of people and of course when the cops got there, no one saw a thing.”
“They do seem to have a thing for knives,” I said.
There was a silence on the other end of the line that seemed heavy with meaning but hard to read. I wished I’d gone to talk to Gunther in person so I could see his face. He had not yet asked what his “acquaintances” had told me.
“You’ll have to excuse my denseness, Mr. Gunther,” I finally said. “But I’m not real sure why you sent me out there or what your friends want me to do for them.”
“Acquaintances,” Gunther snapped, the first response so far that hadn’t been chewed and measured in his head before letting it out of his mouth.
“You never worked with Blackman?”
“That was a while back,” he said. “I worked with him some because he’d been here forever and knew every damn fishing hole and hog-hunting patch in the Glades. But he wasn’t so good working with people.”
“So you were his partner?”
I could feel myself slipping into my old police interrogation mode but couldn’t help myself.
“We shared some clients,” Gunther said, getting careful again. “I would help him out with outfitters and new equipment that came on the market. He flew with me sometimes so we could spot out places to take sightseers and such.”
“And that ended?”
“He started getting hinky with people, was less tolerant of folks. Clients didn’t like him. It started hurting my business more than helping.”
“But you were still friends.”
“Acquaintances. Yeah.”
I could tell I was starting to lose Gunther’s tolerance, or sense of indebtedness, or whatever it was that had motivated him to confide in me. But I wanted more.
“What’s with this guy Ashley?”
“Nobody knows much about Ashley but Nate. He lives somewhere out near Myersons Hammock in the middle of the northern Glades and just seems to show up, usually to trade off skins and to let the guides know what the fish and game are doing. He lives like the old-timers. Supposedly he’s related to the old Ashley gang but no one knows if that’s true. He’d hang around with the group at the Loop bar if Nate was there, and listen to the bull. I don’t even know why he was there to tell the truth.
“Hell, I’m not real sure why any of us were there,” he added. I could feel him tasting his words. “Doesn’t matter, I’m outta here anyway.”
“Out of the hospital?”
“Out of the state,” he said. “I’ve got family back in upstate New York and I’m going home.”
Now it was my turn to measure my words. There was more going on in the big man’s head than just getting out. Two days ago he was angry that someone had tried to kill him. Today he was chucking it all and running.
“Do you think any of your acquaintances have anything to do with these child killings?”
I could hear him breathing on the other end of the line.
“Thank you for saving my life, Mr. Freeman. Goodbye.”
The line went dead.

I was putting my cup to my lips when the phone rang back to life and caused me to jump, sloshing hot coffee down my chin. The desk manager downstairs was on the line.
“Mr. Freeman, there is a gentleman from AA Auto Glass here. He is in need of your keys, sir.”
When I walked outside through the front entrance, a step van with the Auto Glass logo was parked in the visitor’s lot next to my truck. On the other side, Detective Diaz was leaning against the front bumper of his sedan.
He was dressed in his now familiar uniform: dark canvas Dockers and a white oxford shirt rolled up at the sleeves. His tie was pulled down, his sunglasses low on the bridge of his nose. He was talking with the glass installer like they were buddies, killing time in the shade of a bottlebrush tree.
“Good morning, Mr. Freeman,” Diaz greeted me with too much familiarity.
“Detective,” I nodded.
The use of his law enforcement title caused the installer to frown and cut his eyes at Diaz, who probably hadn’t mentioned his status while asking the workman questions.
“What brings you way up here on such a hot and no doubt busy day for you?”
Diaz did not answer, and only motioned to the other man with a nod of his head.
I talked with the glass guy, gave him my keys. When he went back to his van I returned to Diaz, who was still leaning on his front bumper. He had backed into the parking space. It was standard practice for someone using an unmarked police car. If the detective needed to get his shotgun or bulletproof vest out of the trunk, his hardware wasn’t so easily seen by passers-by.
“So what’s up? You get any prints off that stuff?” I asked.
“No. None at all,” Diaz answered. “They’re still trying to trace the retailer on the GPS unit, but it could be hundreds of places and the guy would have paid cash. Hell, it was probably stolen anyway.”
I nodded, waiting.
“So,” I repeated. “What’s up?”
“You have some trouble?” he asked, answering my question with a question, waving the back of his hand at my injured truck.
“Diaz,” I said, losing patience. “What the f*ck do you want?”
The windshield guy peeked up from his work. Diaz put his back to the workman and looked into my face.
“We’ve got a suspect, Max. He’s in the house right now. Being interviewed.”
The information wasn’t something Hammonds would have necessarily shared with an outsider or that Diaz needed to drive here to tell me.
“Seems that during the interview, your name came up,” he continued.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Hammonds wants you to join us down at the office.”
“May I ask who this suspect is?”
“Name is Rory Sims. Some kind of environmental activist,” Diaz said. “Familiar?”
I didn’t answer. A new rock was in my head, its edges sharp and irregular. I uncrossed my arms and stood up.
“You want me to ride in front or in back?”