feeder road forking off into the marsh through a heavy thatch of wild sugarcane and bramble. We waited until their lights disappeared, then closed the distance and turned across a cow bridge. An overgrown cement culvert thrust up from the earth by the cow bridge, ringed by chain link to protect pipes and fittings and what looked in the darkness to be pressure gauges. Abandoned oil company gear. I said, "If this was anymore nowhere, we'd be on the dark side of the melon."
The little road narrowed and followed the top of a berm across the marsh, moving in and out of cane thickets and sawgrass and cattails, occasionally crossing other little gravel roads even more overgrown. We had gone maybe half a mile when a wide waterway appeared on the left, its banks overgrown but precise and straight and clearly manmade. I said, "Looks like an industrial canal."
Pike said, "They turn and head back on us, we've got a problem."
"Yeah." When we came to the next crossing road, we stopped and backed off the main road, far enough under the sawgrass to hide the car, then went on at a jog. Once we were out of the car we could hear the rain slapping the grass and the water with the steady sound of frying bacon. We followed the little road for maybe another quarter mile and then an enormous, corrugated tin building bathed in light rose up from the swamp like some incredible lost city. It stood on the edge of the canal, a huge metal shed, maybe three stories tall, lit with industrial floodlamps powered by a diesel generator. Rusted pipes ran in and out of the building, and some of the corrugated metal panels were hanging askew. The isolation and the technology lent a creepy air to the place, as if we had stumbled upon an abandoned government installation, once forbidden and now best forgotten.
The Polara and the Cadillac were at the foot of the building, along with a couple of two-and-a-half-ton trucks. Both of the trucks were idling, their exhausts breathing white plumes into the damp air like waiting beasts. Pike and I slipped off the road and into the sawgrass. I said, "Pod people."
Pike looked at me.
"It's like the nursery Kevin McCarthy discovers in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The one where the pod people are growing more pods and loading them onto trucks to be shipped all over the country."
Pike shook his head and turned back to the building. "You're something."
A huge, hangarlike door was set into the side of the building. Three guys in rain parkas climbed out of the trucks, opened it, then climbed back into the trucks, and drove them inside. A couple of minutes later, the steady burping of a diesel grew out of the rain and a towboat came up the canal, running without lights and pushing a small barge. It reduced speed maybe a hundred meters from the mouth of the big shed, and the Hispanic guy walked to the water's edge and waved a red lantern. The towboat revved its engines, then came forward under power and slipped inside the building. LeRoy and René and the guy from the Cadillac hurried in after it. Pike and I skirted the edge of the lighted area until we could see through the truck door. I had thought that we'd see people loading bales of marijuana onto the barge or maybe forklifting huge bricks of cocaine off the barge, but we didn't. Inside, maybe three dozen people were climbing off the towboat and into the trucks. Many of them looked scruffy, but not all. Many of them were well dressed, but not all. Most of them were Hispanic, but two were black, three were white, and maybe half a dozen were Asian. All of them looked tired and ill and frightened, and all of them were carrying suitcases and duffel bags and things of a personal nature. Pike said, "Sonofabitch. It's people."
When the trucks were full, the guys in the parkas pulled down canvas flaps to hide their cargo, climbed back into the cabs, pulled out of the building, and drove away into the rain. When the trucks were gone, a couple of hard-looking guys came up out of the barge dragging a skinny old man and carrying something that looked like a rag doll. The old man was crying and pulling at the hard guys, but they didn't pay a lot of attention to him. The old guy