The blue edge of midnight

Chapter 8

The next morning I jolted awake. The mattress was too soft. The air too cold. I didn’t know where the hell I was.
I propped myself up on my elbows, focusing on the off- white wall in front of me until I recognized Billy’s guest bedroom. After eating Billy’s superb Spanish omelets last night, we’d stayed up drinking on the patio, staring out at an invisible horizon and hashing out scenarios. Billy answered my ignorant questions about the Everglades, and admitted he was far from expert. But he knew people, Billy always knew people, that he could introduce me to. Some were guides, he said, men who knew their way in and out of the rivers and wetlands and isolated hammocks. They also knew a lot of the people who lived out on the edge of civilization, the recluses and the ones who had moved away from society.
I turned my head to look at him when he said recluses. In a way, he knew he was describing me.
“I w-will arrange a meeting,” he’d said, tipping his glass. “G-Good night.”
Now I was feeling the aftereffects of gin and air conditioning. My head was full of cotton and my throat was as dry as parchment. I dressed, went into the kitchen and downed three aspirin with a glass of water. Billy had left a note next to a bowl of sliced fruit on the counter. He’d gone to his office and would call at noon. A fresh pot of coffee was waiting and I poured a cup and went out on the patio. In the early sun the ocean stretched out like the sky itself. From this high up the horizon gave the illusion that you could actually see the curve of the earth. An easterly breeze put a corduroy pattern on the ocean’s surface and about halfway out to the horizon the water turned a deeper, oddly tinged shade of blue. The wind had been blowing from the east for two days and the Gulf Stream had shifted closer to shore. The Stream was a huge river of warm ocean water that began as a loop current in the Gulf of Mexico and then funneled up between the tip of Florida and Cuba. At a steady three knots, the vast stream pushed northward along the coast of the United States, its flow so enormous that its water would eventually mix with the North Atlantic and reach the British Isles.
The edge of the Stream was always shifting, and when the wind blew east, it slid closer to the Florida coast. Boatmen here could tell when they crossed into it by the color of the water, a deep, translucent blue unlike any other color on the planet. Scientists say that the water of the Stream is so clear that it affords three times the visibility of the water in a typical hotel swimming pool, and since its depth ranges to some six hundred feet, it is like looking into a blue outer space.
Billy had taken me sailing on his thirty-five-foot Morgan during my first few days here and when he knifed the boat into the Stream, I stared at that color in disbelief. It had an unreal way of drawing you deep into a place where you forgot your surroundings, your petty material anchors and your constant grindings. For an hour I lay on the bow deck, staring into its depths. I was sure that if I reached over and scooped it up I would have a handful of blue in my palms.
After my third cup of coffee I pulled myself away from the patio, laced up a pair of running shoes and took the elevator down. The doorman in the lobby greeted me by name:
“Nice to see you again, Mr. Freeman. Enjoy your run.”
I skirted the oceanfront pool and slogged through the sand to the high tide mark. I stretched out on the hard pack and then did three miles. The first cleared my head, the second leeched the gin from my pores and the third killed me. I finished back in front of Billy’s tower, took my shoes and sweat-soaked shirt off and waded into the surf. There I lay back and closed my eyes in the sun and let the warm waves wash over me for twenty minutes before heading back up. An attendant at the pool handed me a towel. The doorman in the lobby handed me a sealed manila envelope.
“Just arrived for you, Mr. Freeman.”
I turned the package in my hands. Large enough for a subpoena. But it held no markings.
“From Mr. Manchester?” I asked.
“No, sir. It arrived by courier, sir.”
In the elevator I punched in Billy’s code and then ripped open the envelope. I shook the contents out into my hand. Slightly bent at the corners, where the rivets had been popped, was the aluminum logo tag from a Voyager canoe. I recognized the stamped serial numbers as my own. The tag had been pried from the bow of my boat. I held the rectangle of metal by its edges and spun it. No markings. No message. A bell rang when the elevator reached the penthouse. I stepped out and stood shivering in the air conditioning.

I shaved, showered, and was working on a new pot of coffee when Billy called me past noon. Last night I’d been insistent about learning more about the areas where the other children had been found. Billy was calling to give me the name of a pilot in Broward County who was an Everglades guide and gave flyover tours of the wetlands. He would also know most of the other guides as well as the hunters and fishermen who spent serious time there.
“His name is Fred Gunther and don’t be put off if he’s a little tight,” Billy said. “These killings have a lot of people spooked. I get a feeling even the guides are looking over their shoulders.”
He gave me the address of a hangar at a small private airport.
“Use my other car in the parking garage. The keys are in my desk.”
I didn’t tell him about the canoe tag. I’d dropped it back in the envelope and tucked it in a bag along with the GPS unit, knowing I was stockpiling evidence that was either going to save me, or put me on a deep shit list with Mr. Hammonds. I had already brought Billy into it by showing him the GPS. I was getting a cop’s prickly feeling on the back of my neck and between my shoulder blades. I wasn’t going to bring my friend in any further. An hour later I was on the interstate in Billy’s Jeep Grand Cherokee, watching the rearview mirror as much as the traffic in front of me.
I followed Billy’s directions off I-95 and west on Cypress Boulevard. There were no cypress trees anywhere near the roadway. Instead it was lined with strip malls packed with places like Lynn’s Designer Nails, E-Z Liquors and Chang’s Szechuan Chinese. On the corners stood self-serve gas stations where a single clerk took cash through a drawer from the one out of four customers who didn’t pay with a credit card at the pump.
Farther west the commercial zones were broken by twenty- five-year-old housing developments. Small block homes stood row upon row with patches of green lawn separated by chain link or the occasional wood fence. Trade the palm trees for maples and the white roof tiles for shingles and it could be Lindenwold, New Jersey.
When I got onto the airport’s Perimeter Road, I looked for number thirty-six, Avics Aviation. Halfway around I found the sign on a gun-metal gray hangar and pulled into a spot at the side where I could see several small planes parked on the cracked tarmac. Bent under the wing of a single-prop Cessna was a big man dressed in loose khaki trousers and a white polo shirt. He was rummaging through a side baggage compartment. I watched him for a few minutes as he moved easily about the plane, ducking under struts and checking various spots on the exterior.
I got out of the Jeep, walked through a curtain of midday heat and called out “Hello” over the mechanical pitch of a plane moving to taxi out toward the runway. I yelled my greeting again and the big man snapped his head up, missing a nearby strut and then sliding smoothly under the wing before standing full up to face me. He was not a clumsy man.
“I’m looking for Fred Gunther?”
“That’d be me.”
“Max Freeman,” I said, extending my hand. “Billy Manchester suggested I might talk a bit with you?”
“He did,” answered Gunther, tipping down his sunglasses to look at me with pale green eyes.
He reached out and his massive palm seemed to swallow my own. His fingers were like thick swollen sausages tied at the knuckles and his skin was as dry and slick as waxed paper. I had never seen a hand so big.
“Come on inside outta this heat.”
I followed him to the hangar, matching his pace and figuring his shoe size to be about a twelve and certainly not smaller. Inside the hangar Gunther led me to a small, half-windowed office along the east wall. He closed the flimsy wood door behind us, took a seat behind a metal desk and nodded at the threadbare couch. The heat that followed us in tripped the wall- mounted air conditioner and set it to rumbling. I declined the stained couch and pulled a straight-backed chair up next to his desk.
The room held the odor of grease and high-test fuel. There were two calendars on the wall behind Gunther, one of a bikini-clad woman holding some sort of shiny tool and the other a shot of a big bass leaping from clear water.
“Billy did some favors for me a couple of years ago when some tour clients tried to sue me over a big misunderstanding. So I owe him,” Gunther said, propping his elbows on the desk and dropping his ham-sized hands in front of him. “But I don’t mind telling you, I’m not real comfortable. People out in the Glades are getting awfully touchy about this kid killing stuff. Especially when folks start saying it might be Gladesmen trying to scare off the developers.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Word gets around when lawmen come out asking questions and mentioning license renewals and county tax assessments,” Gunther said.
Hammonds, I thought. His team, the FBI, they would all be squeezing every option they could. But did they really think it was some backwoods crazy poaching suburban kids on the edge of the Glades?
“Well, I don’t know what Billy told you, but I’m really only interested in learning a little more about the landscape,” I said.
Gunther looked down at his hands and then up into my face like he was going to apologize for not being able to help me.
“Mr. Manchester said you used to be a cop?”
“Used to be. I got shot in the neck and quit,” I said, even surprising myself with my openness.
The big man’s face seemed to change on hearing my admission, as if a gunshot wound made a difference.
“Well, then,” he said, checking his watch. “My four-thirty client stood me up. Let’s go flying.”
Outside, ripples of heat shimmered off the runway as we walked to the plane. Gunther came around to the passenger side to show me how to twist down the door handle. He had just popped open the door when the distinctive double hoo notes of a barred owl sounded from behind us. Gunther snapped his head around and scanned the line of Australian pines on the other side of the roadway.
“Never heard one of those in daylight before,” he said. “And never around here.”
He stared a few seconds longer, shrugged his thick shoulders and then dipped under the wing to circle around to his side. I climbed in, shut my door, and stared off into the trees.

It wasn’t until Gunther put us into a hardbanked turn that I truly started to worry. All during the startup, the taxiing and takeoff, I had been mesmerized by the pilot’s movements. The snicking of switches and radio checks, the dialing of gauges and maneuvering of levers. His big hands moved across the panel and cockpit with an impressive grace and economy.
But I had never been in a small plane before and when we went into the first steep bank and climbed into the western sky, that old stomach-on-a-roller-coaster feeling got me. Gunther must have seen the changing pallor of my face.
“Pick out a spot on the horizon and focus,” he said over the tinny-sounding headphones. “It’s like a small boat on the ocean, but without the wave motion.”
I locked onto a radio tower in the distance and started gaining some confidence in the steady engine drone and the vibration humming through the cockpit. In the distance a few clumps of cloud moved across the blue background like ragged sails. It was one of those rare summer days when the thunder- heads were not boiling. The afternoon sun was glinting off objects below. I finally shifted my view down and watched the sprawl move under us. We were following a concrete road that lay below. I watched the small white roofs of the old developments start to show a newness. Then, farther west, they turned larger and the barrel tiles turned them orange and terra-cotta. The neighborhood streets were laid out in curving, circular patterns to fight the feel of living in a boxy grid. The homes bloomed around a series of lakes and when I asked Gunther about them he explained that they were created by the giant backhoes that scooped up the ancient limestone and then dumped it on the building sites to give some solid foundation for the housing. The holes left behind lowered the water level and were then gussied up to look semi-natural.
“Waterfront property out of a swamp,” he said. It was impossible to pick up any hint of derision in his voice over the headphones.
We flew on with little change below for fifteen minutes and then Gunther nodded ahead and announced, “There’s the border, for now.”
In the distance I could pick up the color change first. Then it sharpened at a highway running north and south. The barrel- tiled roofs and commercial plazas abruptly ended and an open field of rust-colored grasses began.
The enormity stunned me at first. The land spread out, unaltered, as far as you could see. When we passed over the roadway the terrain below lost all boundaries and was held only by the horizon. Kansas was my first thought. I’d never been west, but schoolbook descriptions of flat fields of golden grain had to come from a view like this.
Gunther eased the plane down to a lower altitude and I could pick up more detail. The sawgrass was less uniform and the green tinge of lower growth seeped through. In spots the sun reflected off streaks of exposed water, the first reminder that this was not solid ground and that a huge sheet of water covered mile after mile, and everything grew up through that liquid layer.
Without my realizing it, Gunther had turned us north and seemed to be heading for a dark green clump growing on the horizon. As we got closer I could see it was a stand of trees, sitting like an island in a sawgrass ocean.
“Hardwood hammock,” Gunther said as we approached and then circled the stand. I recognized the twisting gumbolimbo and pigeon plum trees that dotted parts of my own riverbank.
“It would take an airboat or maybe, in high water, a Glade skiff to get out here,” Gunther said. When I didn’t respond, he looked over at me.
“This is where they found the first kid’s body.”
He took the plane out of its bank and steered us back south. The sun had yellowed and was starting to backlight a new band of streaky high clouds.
“The second one was down off a prairie creek near the National Park. The third was farther north, in one of the canals to Lake Okeechobee. And I guess you know about the fourth one.”
I looked over at him, watching the pilot’s hard profile against the light of his side window. Billy had obviously explained more than Gunther had let on.
“So who would know how to get to those spots?” I said, dipping into an area he had opened up.
“Look. You have to understand there’s a lot of characters out here. Folks whose fathers and grandfathers lived a rough existence since the 1920s. They stayed away from the coast and traded progress for what they considered freedom, and it wasn’t always legal,” he said. “Hell, I’m considered an outsider, but I’ve sat around with these guys and heard them talk about sniping off the wardens and the tax men and land speculators if they threatened what they consider to be their Glades.”
“So it could be a native, somebody who knows the land out here and maybe went off the deep end?” I said.
“Maybe. But even the guides like me, and the hunters and fishermen who live on the coast and come out here all the time, could get out to those spots. Hell, even the environmentalists get out here. And they’re not always wrapped too tight when it comes to fighting development.”
Both of us fell silent. Gunther seemed to be the one focused on a distant point to keep from getting queasy.
“It’s a long way from drinking and talking about it and actually going out and killing kids to scare people away,” he finally said.
By now the sun was going orange and beginning to spin streaks of purple and red through the low clouds. We passed over a fish camp that sat isolated in the grass with a dock that stuck out into a clear-water channel. I could see the beaten- down paths in the sawgrass from airboats spoking out from the weathered building.
Gunther was banking toward the east when the first cough sounded. When the second one changed the thrumming sound of the engine I looked over at the pilot whose fingers were now moving to try and catch up to the beat.
“What the hell?” was all he said.
The third cough came with a lurch and the nose of the Cessna dipped. Gunther never said another word but I could tell from the tight web creasing at the corner of his eyes that we were going down. The horizon suddenly tilted as Gunther tried to horse the plane back toward the fishing camp. Blue sky turned to sun-tinged grass. I had time to grab a handful of the console in front of me. I never even heard the thump of impact.