started. “And I wasn’t sure who to tell this to, but it seems that maybe you’re the one.”
I nodded and waited out his hesitation. It’s a standard cop interviewing technique.
“I’ve got some friends, acquaintances really, out in the Glades who aren’t exactly, uh, traditional folk. Some are natives. Some, like me, are just grown into the place and can’t stand the way it’s changing.”
His voice had jumped a decibel and at least one notch of anxiety.
“So you said before,” I replied, hoping to bring him back down but not shut him up.
“Before all this with the kids started, there was a history of protection from the outside among the folks who live out there. And it wasn’t all pretty. A game warden was killed in the fifties. Some revenuers disappeared in the early days. We used to laugh about the old tales, but things had changed. Even the Seminoles were making money off the coastal folks, bringing them out onto the reservation to gamble at the Indian casino and all. Hell, they even let them hold a damn rock concert for 60,000 kids out there on a New Year’s.”
I moved to the side of the bed. Closer. Just you and me, pal.
“So these acquaintances aren’t laughing so much anymore?”
“Shit started happening. A group of overnight canoeists who weren’t using a guide got vandalized in the middle of nowhere. Their water was stolen. The ribs of their boats smashed. Some hikers on the canal levee stumbled into a nest of rattlesnakes in a spot where no natural rattlesnake would set up territory.”
“Anybody claim responsibility?”
“No one outright.”
There was a wrestling match going on in Gunther’s head between conscience and fear.
“I don’t think the old-timers would stand for something like this, but you can’t always tell with some of the younger ones,” he said.
“You have any names?” I said, taking a chance of shutting him down.
Gunther sighed, blowing air out his nose and closing his eyes for several seconds. I thought I’d taken a step too far. Then he reached over for a message pad and pen and started writing.
“You go out to this place and ask for Nate Brown. I already talked to them and they’ll sit down with you.”
The pen wedged between Gunther’s thick sausage fingers looked like a dark sliver stuck in his huge hand.
“How come you’re telling me this instead of the cops?”
“These people don’t talk to cops. They’ve been avoiding authority out there for a hundred years.”
“So why open it up now?” I said, again pushing. His wan face suddenly gained a slight flush of color. A sharp clearness came into his eyes.
“Hell, boy! Somebody tried to kill us!”
We both listened to his anger echo through the room. I took the piece of paper from his hand.
“Mr. Gunther, somebody has already succeeded in killing four kids. Kids who were a lot more innocent than you or I.”
He closed his eyes again, lying there in silence like I found him. I let the door click quietly shut when I went out.
CHAPTER 15
“Nate Brown? Never heard of him. But if you’re heading out to the Loop Road area, you’re on your way to a different world.”
As I pulled out of the hospital parking lot Billy was on the cell phone giving me directions to the Loop Road Frontier Hotel, the name Gunther had written on the message pad where Nate Brown and this group of acquaintances had agreed to meet me.
As I headed south toward Miami, he also gave me the history of the place.
Only thirty miles from the high-rise glitter, urban blight, Hispanic-dominated politics and thoroughly modern city of Miami, lay a place outside the curve of progress and, in many ways, still outside the purview of the law.
The Loop Road had first been hacked out of the Everglades in the early 1900s by dreamers, men who thought they could simply plow through what they considered useless swampland and create a link between the thriving new cities of Miami on one coast of Florida and Tampa on the other side. They were men with money and power and not a little bravery. And they made some progress.
By dredging limestone from under the water and piling it up and tamping it down, they started a road. But as is often the case, men with more power and money scuttled their plan. A roadway was eventually built across the lower end of the peninsula, at a heavy price to the laborers who died cutting the way through. Men drowned in the