a hint of brownish rust was oxidizing on the edges from the humid Florida air.
I felt the thunk again. This time it seemed too purposeful. I went to the door and opened it slowly with my left hand. At the base of the staircase, with his back propped against a stanchion of the dock, sat Nate Brown. The early light caught the silver in his hair. He had one bare foot flat on the deck and the other draped over into a sixteen-foot wooden skiff. With a subtle movement of that leg he thunked the bow against the dock piling.
“Ain’t gotcha no alarm clock, eh?” he said without looking up.
I slipped the 9mm into my waistband in the small of my back and stepped out the door.
“I don’t usually get visitors,” I said, and quickly added, “this early.”
I took two steps down and sat on the top landing. Brown remained where he was. He had a sawgrass bud in his left palm and was carving out the tender white part to eat with a short knife that had a distinctive curved blade. It looked too much like the blade I’d taken from Gunther’s scabbard after the plane wreck and accidentally dropped into the mud of the glades.
“You ain’t gone need that pistol,” he said, finally looking up at me. I just stared at him, trying to see what might be in his eyes.
“I heard ya load it.”
I took the gun from behind me where it was digging into my backbone and laid it on the plank next to me. In the rising light I could see the dark stain under Brown where water had dripped off his clothes. His trousers were wet through and there was a water line that changed the color of his denim shirt at midchest. Somehow he must have walked through the thick swamp from the west to my shack and found it in the dark. There had been no moonlight in the overnight storm.
“How about some coffee?” I finally said. “I was just making some.”
“We ain’t got time,” he answered. The tone of authority that had struck me at the Loop Road bar was back in his voice. “We got to go.”
I started to ask where, but he cut me off.
“It’s the girl. The little one. You’re gonna have to come git her.”
Now I could see his pale eyes as he stood up and there was an urgency in them that seemed foreign to his face.
“The kidnapped girl? Where?” I said, unconsciously picking up my gun. “Where is she? Is she dead?”
“Yonder in the glade,” Brown answered, barely tipping his head to the west. “She ain’t real good. But she’s alive.”
“Who’s with her? Is there anyone with her? Can we get a helicopter out there?” Now the urgency was in my throat.
“Ain’t nobody with her now. An’ ain’t nobody now who can find her ’cept me. You’re gonna have to git her,” the old man said, his voice flat but still holding strength. “You alone. Let’s go.”
I walked back in the shack and laid the gun on my table and quickly dressed, taking an extra minute to pull on a pair of high combat boots I rarely used. I picked up Billy’s cell phone and punched his number, got his answering machine and left a hurried message that I was heading out into the Glades with Brown and would call him back with details. I stuffed a first- aid kit into a waterproof fanny pack and strapped it around my waist. As I clomped down the stairs I put the cell phone inside too. Brown didn’t object.
I climbed into the stern of the shallow skiff and Brown crouched on a broad seat built about a third of the way back from the bow. Using a cypress boat pole almost as long as the skiff itself, he pushed us down my access trail and onto the river.
“It’ll be faster goin’ up the canal with two,” he said, heading upstream.
The old man seemed like a magician with the boat, poling and steering his way up my river at a speed that I could match only on my best days in the canoe. Sometimes he would stand erect, working the pole its full length but suddenly slip to his knees to duck a cypress limb and never miss his rhythm. I watched him bend down and noted the short leather scabbard on his belt where he’d holstered his curved knife. It was then that I remembered my 9mm.