Acts of Nature - By Jonathon King Page 0,3

the small GPS unit on which I had recorded the coordinates of the Snows’ place. I wasn’t that good of a Gladesman to be wandering around in that open acreage without some help. While I sorted through some old rain gear and special books that I kept in the duffle, I pulled out the leather bag that held my oilcloth-wrapped Glock 9mm service weapon from my days on the Philadelphia Police Department. I hefted it in one hand, feeling the weight of it, but as soon as the memories of its use started leaking into my conscience, I pushed it back into the duffle, deep to the bottom. Don’t go there, Max, I said to myself. I finally found the GPS, left the gun inside the duffle and shoved it back under the bed. New time. New memories.

In a waterproof backpack I stored the GPS and extra batteries along with some camping tools including a razor-sharp fillet knife I kept in a leather sheath for the fish I hoped we’d catch and the small steel first aid kit I always took with me on trips. I thought of myself as a careful man. I knew enough about alligators and water snakes and poison vegetation, and after four years out here, how one never underestimates that shit can happen, even without the source of its usual progenitor: people. We were ready within an hour’s time and though I thought about it twice, given the pristine vision of where we were heading, I decided to take my cell phone. Sherry said she’d left hers at home because she didn’t want to talk to a soul or get called into work on some damned so-called emergency. I didn’t want to spoil the sense of just she and I, the way I’d planned it, so I tucked it deep into the bag out of sight.

Just after noon, with Sherry settled in the front seat of my canoe and me in the stern, we pushed off.

TWO

Edward Christopher Harmon looked into the muzzle of the man’s blue-steel Python handgun and took a step forward. Adrenaline was swirling into his bloodstream as it had so many times before and with a pure force of mind he stopped it before it reached his eyes.

You don’t show fear in such instances. You don’t show panic, or emit even the scent of wildness. You bring your heart rate down with deep, measured breaths. You consciously keep the irises of your eyes from growing wide. Harmon’s wife once described him as having “safe” eyes. He tried to achieve that look now. When they think they have you, when they think they’re going to make you beg, you must present yourself as being the one in control. And at the moment, they definitely had him.

“Colonel, you and your men are presently on private property. I am a representative of the oil company that owns this land and I am here to retrieve certain items belonging to my company,” Harmon said to the small dark man holding the gun on him.

“Silencio!” the man hissed, his own eyes giving away the wildness that Harmon was working to avoid. The little colonel had already achieved one goal, taking Harmon and his partner, Squires, by surprise. The rebel militia officer and his six-man squad had embedded themselves among the dozens of locals from the town of Caramisol and the surrounding Venezuelan mountains who were looting oil from a spigot that had been tapped into the company pipeline. A dozen old, rusted tanker trucks snaked in a line that ran down the roadway, waiting their turn to pay cash to the bandits, a third of what they would pay through a government outlet, for loads that they could easily resell on the open market. The armed rebels were the paid protection for the bandits who gave them a percentage and an occasional fresh group of teenagers from their villages for their antigovernment militia. The little colonel matched Harmon’s step forward and lowered the beautiful .357-caliber revolver just so, turning it sideways and bringing it forward so that the end of the six-inch barrel must have been scant centimeters from touching Harmon’s throat.

“Come on, man,” the colonel said quietly, abandoning his Spanish for perfect American street English. “Don’t diss me in front of my crew, oil man. We can work this shit out.”

Now all Harmon could see was the rear sight of the Python and the burled walnut grip in the young man’s hand. The Colt Python truly