he kept cold drinks for his rental customers. He peeked out from under the hood of his yellow rain slicker and spat a brown string of tobacco juice into the wet grass when he saw me coming.
“Hey, Ham. How’s it going?”
The old Georgian set the cooler down and looked up.
“Hey, Max,” he answered, sneaking a look at Diaz coming up behind me. “I truly am sorry about your boat.”
He let another string of juice fly and then led us around to the back of his trailer. There lay the carcass of my canoe.
“I pulled her ’round so’s the customers wouldn’t see her,” he explained.
The boat was flipped on its gunwales like I’d left it, but someone had stomped her. Gaping holes in the center of the hull yawned like twisted black mouths in the rain. Each rib had been methodically snapped. It had taken a malicious effort to do that kind of damage to its tough outer skin.
I went around to the bow and checked the port side where the tag had been. The pulled rivets had left four small jagged holes behind.
All three of us just stared at the broken shell for several long minutes.
“That’s how she was the other mornin’ when I come in,” Mathis finally said. “I ain’t never had no vandalism out here before.”
“Anything else damaged?” Diaz asked.
“’Cept your paddle,” Mathis answered, looking at me. “Snapped it like a twig and tossed it down the bank.”
I showed Diaz where I’d set the canoe five nights before. We agreed there wasn’t much of a chance of picking up any footprints or latents off the canoe skin. Mathis had called the county sheriff’s office the morning he’d found the mess and a patrol deputy had come by and written up a report. When Diaz went into the small trailer with Mathis to get a reference number, I walked down to the river. The water had turned dark green in the fading light and was pocked with raindrops. Large circles grew in the spots under the cypress boughs where heavier drops fell from the branches. The air smelled thick and green, an odor I had never known until I came here from the city. A heron sat perched on a log on the opposite shore, searching the water for a meal. Suddenly it raised its head, then croaked its distinctive keyow and flew off as if something in the shadow behind had scared it. I stared into the dark patches but if something had flushed the bird, I couldn’t pick it up.
“Angry?”
Diaz’s voice startled me. He’d come down from the trailer and was standing behind me, fingers in his pockets and shoulders hunched against the drizzle.
“Guy that smashed that canoe didn’t just want to let you know he was following. He was pissed,” Diaz said.
“Yeah,” I said, turning back to the river and looking into the shadows. “But not enough to show himself.”
As we stood there Diaz’s beeper went off and he retreated to his car to use his phone. A minute later he flashed his headlights and punched the horn. I yelled to Mathis that I’d come back later with my truck and he waved me off. When I climbed into Diaz’s car he put the sedan in gear before I could close the door.
“That was dispatch,” he said, setting his lips in a hard line. “They got another missing kid.”
CHAPTER 13
Diaz spun a circle through the grass along the edge of the access road and the rubber yelped when he hit the Seminole Road pavement. As he sped east I knew he wasn’t planning to drop me off.
He had his blue light on the dash by the time we made the interstate and despite the rain-slick roadway he hit the southbound entrance ramp hard. I kept my mouth shut and cinched up my seatbelt. I’d been on a few car chases in the city but despite how Mel Gibson and the boys make it look in the movies, you rarely get above fifty miles an hour on urban streets. When Diaz merged onto the interstate he was already doing sixty-five. When he got to the outside lane he pushed it to eighty-five and started talking.
“They got the call out from dispatch fifteen minutes ago, same as the last ones, some new housing development called Flamingo Lakes out in Westland,” he said as if I knew the layout. He powered past a low ride Honda as the driver picked up Diaz’s blue light in his rearview and jumped