“Call Operations,” Vickery ordered. “Tell ’em we need everybody who’s anywhere near that road. Stevenson might be the nearest, but I don’t know where he is.”
“Hang on, hang on, it’s slowing down!” James’s voice was loud, distorted. “It’s stopping! It’s stopped! Wait. Oh, crap, it’s gone. We’ve lost it again.”
“Out of range?” asked Vickery. “How’d it go out of range, if it was stopped?”
“Oh, wow. The place where it stopped? It’s a bridge over a river. . . . Let’s see . . . the Miccosukee River. I betcha the collar’s drifting down to the bottom of the river right now.”
“Shit,” cursed Vickery. “Call Operations. Give ’em the location. See if we can seal off that road. Get ’em to pull in the local cavalry, too. Which county?”
“Uh . . . Bremerton on one side of the river, Miccosukee on the other.”
“Shit. Same jurisdictional mess we’re in out here in the woods. Okay. Tell Operations we need help from both counties. We need to question anybody who’s on that road, anybody who might’ve been.”
As Vickery was winding up the conversation with Nat James, the pair of recruits who’d jogged downstream returned with good news. A large tree had fallen across the stream only a few hundred yards away, they reported; the trunk was two feet in diameter, with branches that could be held for balance most of the way across.
Angie tied a strip of crime-scene tape to a tree trunk beside the muddy notch in the bank, to make sure we could pick up the trail again directly across from where we stood. Five minutes later, when the other pair of trainees returned from their search in the opposite direction, we headed downstream to the fallen tree. It was indeed a fine makeshift bridge, I thought.
Stu didn’t think so. He sized up the trunk nervously. “I thought it would be fatter.”
“Jesus, Stu,” said Angie, “it’s as wide as a sidewalk.”
“But not as flat. And a lot higher up.”
“Tell you what,” she offered. “You can watch everyone else go across and see how they do. Then, if you’re still nervous, you don’t have to do it.”
He considered this only briefly. “Nah, that’s okay. It’s like jumping off the high dive the first day of swimming season. The longer you think about it, the scarier it gets. Might as well get it over with.” With that, he plucked the cigar from his mouth and hoisted himself onto the trunk, making the move with surprising agility for a sixty-year-old with a bit of a belly. He walked quickly, on the balls of his feet, extending both arms for balance, making small circles in the air with the cigar to compensate for his occasional wobbles. When he reached the opposite bank, he pivoted on the trunk. “Okay, quit stalling, you yellow-bellied, lily-livered cowards,” he called. “We’re burning daylight here.”
Angie was the last to cross. Before hopping off the trunk, she tied a long streamer of tape as high in a branch as she could reach so we could find our bridge more easily in the dark, if need be. We walked quickly up the Miccosukee bank of the stream until the yellow tape, the paw prints, and the GPS confirmed that we were back on the dog’s trail. “Okay,” Angie told the group, “from here, we’ve got about another half mile or so where he was moving pretty straight and fairly fast. So line up, spread out, and let’s go.”
Our progress was slower on this side of the creek; at some point the land here had been cleared, and what had grown back, in place of pines and live oaks, was a field of briars. Game trails, including the one the dog had followed, formed low, narrow tunnels through the stickers, but without crawling on all fours, we were forced to pick our way through, and our progress was punctuated by a chorus of curses and yelps.
There were supplemental curses from Vickery when he learned that Stevenson, two other agents, and four county deputies had failed to apprehend any vehicles within miles of the bridge across the Miccosukee River, and a network of side roads made it impossible to seal the area. Vickery looked close to flinging his phone into the briars; he settled instead for snapping his cigar in two and then hurling it away.
Thirty sweaty, scratchy minutes after we’d entered the briar patch, the stickers thinned out, giving way once more to live oaks, pines, and waist-high ferns. Angie called a halt and scrutinized the GPS screen. “Okay, we’re getting close to an area where the dog hung out and wandered around awhile,” she said, “so look sharp.”
We’d barely started forward again when she held up a closed fist—the “stop” signal—and pointed. Ten yards ahead, directly in her path, was a low heap of dead ferns and freshly scattered dirt. Angie crept forward, motioning for me to join her. I moved slowly, inspecting the ground carefully before each step. Angie reached the spot before I did; when I joined her, she was staring down into a shallow hollow, roughly a foot in diameter and a foot deep. Paw prints and claw marks edged its rim. Within the hole, I saw shreds of black plastic sheeting. And jutting from the tattered plastic and the clumped dirt, I glimpsed the ends of three ribs.