built into the counter. I wondered if I should do the same.
“They knew you were there,” he said, turning as he dried his hands with a paper towel and reading the flash of confusion that must have shown in my eyes. “At the hotel bar. I don’t know how, but I’m positive they already knew it. They just wanted to know why.”
It took me a second to gather myself. Of course they knew. Why the hell wouldn’t Hammonds know? He’d been trailing me ever since I pulled up to the ranger’s dock with news of a killing.
“I don’t doubt it,” I said to Sims. “I’d still like to know myself why it was that I was there.”
The environmentalist seemed to consider the question for a few seconds as he oddly and carefully folded the damp brown paper towel in his fingers. Then he tossed the square into a wastebasket, walked over to grip both handles of the ice chest and lifted it off the table. He nodded his head to the door.
“Let’s go drop this off,” he said and I followed, holding open the door and wondering why I was letting him lead again.
We loaded the cooler into the back of the van and as Sims drove out to an empty asphalt road leading east he explained, as best he could according to him, what he knew of my invitation to Loop Road.
“You’ve got to understand, Mr. Freeman, there are generations of folks out there in the Glades that have lived lives far different than what modern-day people think of as Floridians.”
“Yeah, I got that lesson from Gunther,” I said, watching the road stretch out in a straight line into nothing but low-hanging green brush. Sims had no air conditioning in the old van and even the wind spilling through the open windows was hot. I was thinking about the warming state of the rattlesnake sliding around in the cooler behind us.
“What I mean is that, for some of them, the Glades is their neighborhood and you can’t just move into the neighborhood without being noticed and without becoming suspect.” He let the statement sit, waiting for my response.
“You mean my place in the old research shack?” I finally said.
“Glades folks notice something like that. People have used that old place for years when it was empty. But they also have respect. Your presence was known but no one was really sure what you were up to. They knew you weren’t a hunter, or a fisherman. There was speculation that you were doing some kind of night research, but the professor and I couldn’t come up with anybody who knew you.”
“And how exactly did all this discussion come up?” I asked.
By now Sims had turned off the pavement and pulled onto a dirt road. It too was posted with a no-trespassing sign and bore the logo of the power company. Sims downshifted and started south down a lane that was flanked on either side with mangroves and long finger islands that stretched out into standing water.
“These are cooling canals. Man-made for discharging the water from the reactor,” Sims said, answering the question I hadn’t asked and avoiding the one I had.
“The company has acres and acres of property out here but although they can keep the people out, they can’t easily control the animals that find their way in here. That’s why they employ Professor Murtz and myself. To keep track of the native populations and monitor their growth and migrations. It makes them look environmentally concerned and benefits us at the same time. We have even developed a breeding ground for the American crocodile in here that almost singlehandedly rejuvenated a species that was very much on the endangered list only a few years ago.”
As we jounced down the rutted road I tried to pull him back to my invitation to Loop Road.
“And the discussion about me being the new mystery man living in the old research shack?”
“I don’t know who brought it up first. Word gets passed along out there and you rarely know the source, or even the truth of the stories. But it got to the bar. And then Blackman said he’d heard that you had been questioned by the police in connection to the killings of the kids.”
“I suppose that eased some of the pressure among the natives.”
“I don’t deny that,” Sims said as he slowed and then stopped the van in the middle of the road, in the middle of nowhere. When he got