her jeans and shoes on top. Then he’d pulled the load down through the trees and into the wet vegetation some forty yards from the dirt roadway. The moonlight had given him enough light to find a wet depression in the mangroves to leave her. He’d buried the first two and later he wondered why. All that forensics shit you saw on television was useless if they never find a body. And they never did. Other than that old woman running around with the posters of his second girlfriend, no one was even looking.
Christ, had it been a month? Two? He’d stayed out of the bars for a while, especially Hammermills. But he started back, had missed the air, the mix of cigarette smoke and perfume, the subtle sexual electricity—not like one of those strip places where the women were plastic and may as well have sticker prices on their asses. A place like this had real people, girls you could appreciate, women that you could fall for. He’d been growing anxious again, bored with work. The compulsion had come on faster than last time and he didn’t fight it. He was lonely. He needed to own someone.
The song ended and he watched in the mirrors while the bartender greeted a new girl. They were changing shifts. The older one was being managerial, introducing her around to the regulars. She did the foursome at the other end, some of them shook her hand. The new girl was small and seemed slightly self-conscious but had worn a short skirt on her first night. She had good legs. She’d be popular in this place, he thought.
“And this is Lou and Tommy and Liz and, I’m sorry, Absolut on the rocks, what was your name again?” said the bartender, introducing the middle group now. The unknown customer reintroduced herself and actually reached out and kissed the new girl’s hand.
“And down here at the end is Rolling Rock. Except when he’s serious and then he’s Maker’s Mark,” she said and smiled, pleased with herself.
The new girl nodded and smiled. She had blue eyes and curly blonde hair that didn’t have to be streaked to be pretty but was. He gave her his polite smile and said hello. While the other bartender cashed out and gathered her tips he watched the new girl. She had two studs in her left ear. Three rings on her hands, one with a blue stone. Her breasts were not large, but on such a small frame they appeared voluptuous. After the other girl left, she busied herself with rinsing and wiping and setting things up her own way and motioned to the empty bottle in front of him. When she extended her hand, he noted that her nails were bitten to the quick.
“Another one?” she said, and her smile seemed easier.
“Yes, please,” he said. “And a shot of Maker’s Mark on the side.”
I was up at the beach before sunrise and out on the edge of the Everglades by breakfast. Dan Griggs, the park ranger assigned to the five hundred acres designated by the state as a registered wild and scenic area at Thompson’s Point, was cooking eggs.
“I think I got that lunker snook you’ve been trying to hook over to the west side down by the shade turn,” he was saying from the back room.
“Like hell,” I answered. I was pouring coffee from the ranger’s electric maker in the office section of his dockside station.
“Yeah, I hate to say it. That crafty bastard been teasing you more’n a year now, right?”
He would not meet my eyes when he carried the pan of eggs in and pushed them onto two paper plates at his desk.
“Wasn’t my fish,” I said, setting his coffee in front of him and taking one plate. “He’s too damn wise for you, Danny.”
The ranger leaned back in his metal office chair and propped his heels on the corner of his state-issued desk. He was lean and blond and smiling when he dragged the plate of eggs onto his lap.
“He had to be twelve pounds.”
“Liar.”
He grinned and just looked at me over the rim of his cup.
“Catch and release?” I finally said.
“Of course, Mr. Freeman. I gotta leave you something to aspire to.”
Griggs and I had gotten off to a shaky start when he’d taken the job several months ago. He was replacing an old and long-revered ranger who had been killed by a man whose presence on the river had been in part my responsibility.