alone at Jefferson Square playground or hung at Frankie O’Hara’s gym and took my turns getting pummeled by local fighters. At night I walked, streetlight to streetlight, sometimes looking up to find I’d gone miles without realizing it, having to concentrate on a corner street sign for several seconds to determine where I’d wandered to.
One night I found myself in front of the Thirteenth Street Cleaners, staring at a thimble-sized pockmark in the wall, trying to see my own spattered blood deep in the grimy brick.
The next day I honored my mother’s memory and this time used my brain. I contacted a lawyer in West Palm Beach, Florida. His family name had been scratched into my mother’s address book decades ago. She and the matriarch of his family had some kind of never-discussed relationship. The lawyer was the woman’s son, and my own mother had often urged me to “just meet him. He’s a bright boy you could learn from.”
I can’t remember how he managed to convince me to fly south to see him. Perhaps it was the confidence and pure, simple logic in his voice. It wasn’t condescending. It wasn’t presumptuous. It wasn’t overtly high-minded. He was the one who set me up in the research shack when I told him I wanted someplace isolated and completely different from where I’d come from. He’s the one who arranged to use my departmental payout to buy into the ground floor of a new South Florida Internet research site. For the first time in a long time, he became the one person I trusted, and it paid off.
Out on the river I heard the burble of Cleve’s outboard, the noise growing louder as he ferried Hammonds and his team back to the boat ramp. They’d have the child’s body with them now, still wrapped tight until they got it to some morgue and the forensics guys could go over it.
As they went by less than 150 feet away through the cypress, I heard Cleve slightly rev the engine, letting me know he’d kept my place a secret, for now. But I knew I’d be back in a squad room soon enough, answering more questions. And I also knew I needed to talk to my lawyer before I let that happen.
CHAPTER 4
I was on the interstate, back in the fumes, back in the dull bake of the sun on concrete, back in the aggressive hurry up, back in the world.
I’d spent the morning staring out at the wet forest, watching the sun leak through the canopy and spackle the ferns and pond apple leaves and haircap moss below. I hadn’t given nature much thought before coming here. I only studied the nature of humans on the Philadelphia streets, and it wasn’t anything out of the sociology department at the University of Pennsylvania. People did things for pretty basic reasons and it has been that way for a lot longer than most of us will admit. We haven’t changed much since we first gathered as tribes. Just the stuff around us changed. Hunger and fear, love and jealousy, greed and hate still rule us. You could put that down in the middle of the swamp or at the corner of Broad and Passyunk and it was still going to be the same.
I’d made a pot of black coffee on the wood stove in my shack and then sat at my empty table, sipping. Then I packed up a gym bag with clothes and a shaving kit and paddled back down to the ranger station where I used the phone to call my lawyer. Cleve was nowhere in sight.
“Gone up to headquarters,” said his assistant, a young crew-cut kid who always seemed to have a crease in his uniform and a chip on his shoulder. The only time he seemed civil was when he was asking me if he could borrow the pickup truck I left parked in the visitor’s lot for days at a time. “Didn’t say when he’d be back,” the kid said, obviously miffed at being called in to cover. “What the hell happened this morning?”
I looked at him like an adult offended by his demanding tone and his use of profanity, and answered with the same flat voice I always used with him. “I have no idea.”
I went to the campsite restrooms where I showered and shaved, and then tossed my bag into my truck and headed south for the Palm Beach County Courthouse. And now I was bunched in