up north. Out here they’ve got panther-crossing areas.”
Carly thought about it for a moment. “Cats don’t walk across the street where you tell them to,” she finally said. “They go where they want to so they can hide and do what they want. Remember Dash?”
Dash had been the girls’ tiger-striped tomcat. The thing would disappear for days, somehow getting into the house through a torn screen just to eat and then slink back out. The only way you knew he was still around was by the empty food dish.
Nick got off an exit and then turned south on U.S. 29.
“We’re not going to see any panthers,” Carly said, not with disappointment or cynicism, just a little girl’s statement of fact.
“You’re probably right, but you’ll still see the signs,” Nick said and looked back and smiled at her, but she was staring out the window.
The road was flanked by a line of trees on the west and a canal on the east. Nick knew from experience that there was little to see and the arrow-straight two-lane was a boring strip cutting through nowhere. His head moved back to snipers, no signs to let you know where they were, where they would strike next. The D.C. killers proved that. Every so-called expert in law enforcement had blown that one from the beginning, working the old scenarios, searching for connections between victims, some sort of pattern so they could predict the sniper’s movements. They took a witness’s statement about a white van and went crazy pulling over every white van they could find.
Now Hargrave too had a witness who’d seen a man in black who looked like a SWAT cop. Would he pull over every SWAT cop he could find and question them and their whereabouts on Thursday morning? Maybe he would. Maybe he already had.
“Dad?”
Carly brought him back and Nick chastised himself. Pay attention, man. Don’t do this to her again.
“Yeah, sweetheart?”
“Can we stop someplace to go to the bathroom?”
He smiled, had known it was coming all along.
“Absolutely,” he said. “I’ve got just the place. Can you hold on for another ten minutes, sweetie?”
“If I have to. Yes.”
In five minutes he was at the junction of 29 and the Tamiami Trail and headed back east, past the airboat ride signs, the Miccosukee Indian village signs. He tried to divert Carly’s mind by telling her about how men long ago had built the trail as the first road across the great Everglades by scooping up the dirt and muck and limestone with a huge dredge and dumping it alongside the canal they were creating as they moved forward.
“See the water over here on my side? That’s where they dug, and this road is where they piled the stuff.”
“Uh-huh.”
Nick looked out beyond the canal at the occasional spread of saw-grass meadow spotted by islands of cabbage and silver thatch palms. Then the hammocks of dwarf cypresses, wild tamarind and rimrock pine would fill up the space with a thin greenness. And always there was the heat, bubbling the mixture to a deep simmer. He admired the men who had worked through this relentless nature and wondered if they had ever taken an appreciation of its bare beauty while they tried to tame it.
After another ten minutes, Nick pulled over at a sign reading: CLYDE BUTCHER’S BIG CYPRESS GALLERY. He parked next to the small pond that bellied out from a culvert running under the roadway. The water was dark and coppery and lay like an unrippled tarp around several gigantic water cypress trees, their branches strung with Spanish moss.
Carly got out on the other side while Nick gathered up his thermos, balanced a cup on the roof and poured.
“We can go inside and use the bathroom, baby,” he said and when he got no answer he stepped forward and looked over the hood for his daughter. She had forgotten all about her need and was staring out into the near water, her arm outstretched and a slightly crooked finger pointing.
Nick followed the line of her finger and saw the rumpled black nose of a gator cutting slowly through the water, leaving a growing V behind it. The eyes were like two disfigured lumps on the trunk of a tree with their centers buffed smooth and glassy.
“That’s a good-sized one,” Nick said, injecting a lightness into his voice as he moved around the front of the car to Carly’s side. His daughter took a step back, but her eyes did not leave those of the