Acts of Nature mf-5 Read online

  Acts of Nature

  ( Max Freeman - 5 )

  Jonathon King

  Jonathon King

  Acts of Nature

  ONE

  I have my arms around her, my chest pressed into her back, the tops of my thighs against her hamstrings, and I can feel a vibration from deep inside of her. Or maybe it is my own trembling. She has been quiet for what seems like an hour now, but time is hard to judge. There should be heat building from our shared body temperatures, so close together. But instead of a trickle of sweat between my shoulder blades there is a feeling of coldness on the back of my neck. It is a reaction that I recognize from too many police ops and I don't have to ask Sherry if she is feeling the same thing. Clinging together against the kitchen counter in this unfamiliar Everglades encampment, we are about as physically close as a man and woman can be but it has nothing to do with love at the moment and everything to do with fear.

  "Jesus, Max," she says when yet another violent crack, louder and more menacing than a rifle shot, rips the air inside the one-room cabin and we can only assume another piece of the structure has peeled off the roofline or the southern wall. Another gust of unholy wind attacks and the entire place shudders and the creak of wood twisting against its own grain sounds like an animal's whine.

  "Jesus."

  I squeeze Sherry harder, the muscles of my arms starting to ache from holding her so tightly but I cannot help it.

  "She'll hang together, babe," I say yet again, maybe trying to convince myself as much as Sherry. We have already heard parts of the second building or maybe the deck planking itself come ripping off, hard-bitten nails screeching as they were yanked at an angle from the trusses. We have heard sheets of the tin roofing being peeled off by the fingers of the wind and sent flipping away with the almost musical waffling sound of an old flopping saw blade and then the cymbal crash of it smashing against something.

  "She'll hold together," I say again.

  But it is not the sharp collisions or heavy cracks that make me doubt my own words. It is that humming, the low throb of the wind that makes it sound like it comes from the deep bowels of an enormous beast. It has been getting deeper for the last hour and I know that we are in the middle of one hell of a hurricane. I have been stupid before, but never so blissfully.

  For the past week, Sherry Richards and I had been treating ourselves to a late fall of isolation and escape that most South Floridians and perhaps most of civilized North America would think impossible in the first decade of the new millennium. Sherry's a cop. Some might say too obsessed, too dedicated, and too hard-edged. Some might fall back on that knee-jerk explanation that a woman has to be that way to make it in her profession. Those some are the ones who don't know her. I know her.

  "I'm taking ten days off starting the eighteenth of October," she announced one morning at a staff meeting of the major crimes division of the Broward County Sheriff's Office, where she is a detective.

  Heads turned. Eyebrows rose. Questions spilled forthwith. Her answers were curt and simple:

  "Vacation."

  "Can't tell you where."

  "No. I'll be unavailable by phone or radio."

  "Diaz has my back on ongoing cases."

  "None of your business."

  She left the care of her home in Fort Lauderdale to a young woman named Marci whom she had managed to rescue from a serial abuser and killer several months ago. After that case Sherry took the woman in and worked hard at making a friendship out of what was meant as rehabilitation. I finally talked her into taking the time off.

  "Give Marci some space and yourself a break."

  "I'm not going on some cruise, Max."

  "Never entered my mind. I was thinking of something much more therapeutic."

  I'd worked Marci's case from a different angle, and although the ending was perhaps acceptable, Sherry and I had been at odds while searching for her stalker and hadn't come together until the end. In the dark nights that followed, sitting in the turquoise blue light of Sherry's backyard pool, we had decided that if we were going to make it as lovers and friends we were going to have to do some mutual discovering. The idea of a short hibernation, in that sense, was shared.

  So six days ago Sherry gathered enough clothing and oddities for a week in the wild. At my river cabin on the edge of the Everglades I had packed in as much additional food as I thought necessary. I had been living out here on and off for four years and although the amount of work I was now doing for my lawyer friend, Billy Manchester, put me out into the world more than when I first arrived, I still kept the place provisioned enough to get by for at least a few weeks if I had the need or desire. The cabin can only be reached by small boats; in my case, a canoe. To the west are the wide-open Everglades, more than four thousand square miles of flat land, most of it covered in sawgrass, and it often looks like a million acres of prairie grass running to the horizon. But instead of rich soil, the surface of the Glades is a moving layer of water that quietly follows the pull of gravity and runs south from Lake Okeechobee to the sea. Some find it forbidding, others naturally and uniquely beautiful. For the first few days anyway, we were members of the latter. Sherry is tall and long-legged and can whip my ass in a distance run. I've seen her hold an excruciating yoga pose longer than I'd thought humanly possible and I have also seen her kill a sexual predator, pulling the trigger on her service weapon at nearly point-blank range. Her toughness is unquestionable. But isolation in someplace like the Glades takes a different degree of mettle. I have no running water in my cabin, just a hand pump at the old cast-iron sink where botanists used to wash away the detritus and entrails and stomach contents of whatever species they were studying in the late 1800s. I have a rain barrel at the roofline to which a gravity showerhead is attached. In a small corner closet I have a chemical toilet like the kind used on board a small, seagoing boat. I cook mostly on the pot-bellied, wood-burning stove though there are a few bottles of propane and an ancient green Coleman stove under the kitchen cabinet. I read by kerosene lamplight. It is not paradise, but you know that going in.

  For the first couple of days we were satisfied to fish lazily on the southern area of the river that is wide and flat and bordered by sedge grasses and tupelos, red maple and bald cypress. Sherry had fished here before with me and it's an easy enough activity that fits most people's sense of normality in the wild.

  "You know, Max. This thing about incentive, motivation, greed," she started on the second morning when we were sitting in my canoe on a wide and open stretch of river near a green edge where the color of the water goes suddenly dark and the bigger fish lurk. "Does a fish have that? Maybe we just have to figure out how to jack that up somehow. Make 'em more greedy."

  Her line had been dormant for about an hour, lying like a single silvery string on calm water.

  "They aren't much different than people, love," I said, encouraging this little banter thing we'd become comfortable with over the years. "They'll always want more. Dangle stuff in front of them and wait till they want it bad enough, they'll take it."

  She might have been pondering the thought, or figuring out a way to tell me I was full of shit, when a big tarpon hit her line and bent the pole like a whip.

  "Wooooo haaaaa!" she cried out and the instant enthusiasm and joy on her face caught me so off guard that I was slow to react to the sudden shift in the boat's balance and nearly let us roll over. The tarpon immediately turned from the edge where it'd taken her bait and shot toward deep water. Sherry spun with it, her arms high, waist revolving, butt properly planted. I jammed my reel under my own seat and grabbed the gunwales with both hands, steadying the canoe. I'd learned from a dozen dunkings that fishing from a canoe is a different sport, a challenge of balan
ce and concentration between shifting weight and anticipation of a strong animal's moves.

  Sherry's reel was grinding with the sound of an electric can opener but the tarpon's strength still turned her end of the boat and started it moving. I countered the shift with my weight. Sherry let the big guy run, let it wear itself out a bit. She was working it like a pro. The line was tight as a guitar string, sizzling with water spray, but suddenly went slack. Sherry nearly fell back off her seat, her face shocked. Furrows started in her forehead, and bordering on disappointment, she started to look back at me. All I could do was point out where the fish was doubling back and yell out a warning.

  "Reel!" I shouted and she turned back and started cranking just as the silver-sided tarpon broke surface, flashed in the sun as it violently twisted its body in an attempt to throw the pain of the hook, and then crashed back into the river.

  "Holy, holy!" Sherry yelped with delight. She got a dozen spins on the reel to take up slack when again the line zipped taut and the fight was on.

  Three times over the next ten minutes I had to reach out and grab a handful of her waistband to keep Sherry from standing and going overboard as she battled the fish, her determination sometimes overtaking pragmatism.

  Twice I said: "Don't let her get to the mangrove roots in the bank. She'll try to swim into them and cut the line."

  The second time I said it Sherry took her focus off the fish, shot me a "shut up" look, and slapped my hand away after an offer to take over.

  She finally reeled the exhausted fish to the side of the canoe and I reached over with a net and scooped it aboard. She let me hook my fingers into the gill slits and hold it up like a trophy. The tarpon seemed to be smiling and she mocked it with her own.

  "Tough little bastard," she said.

  "She's not so little," I said, removing the hook from the tarpon's mouth and then easing it back into the water. "And she's gorgeous."

  When I looked back up Sherry was watching me.

  "She, huh?"

  Those first days while the iced beer was still cold, we sipped and ate onion and tomato sandwiches and napped in the quiet roll of the boat or stretched out on the small dock landing at the foot of my stilted shack. Sherry listened to the sounds of the animals that always surrounded us. I was surprised when she started asking me to name them that I could only guess a few. Splash of a red-bellied turtle. Kee uk of an osprey. Grunt of a mating gator. During the day we sat in the speckled light that passed through the tree canopy as though it were green cheesecloth. At night I read to her aloud from Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses and we made love on the mattress I'd pulled from the bunk bed down onto the floor.

  But by the third morning, I detected a twitch in Sherry's ankle or a couple of extra sighs while we were lounging on the dock.

  "How you doin'?" I asked.

  "I'm fine," she said. But I knew the difference in tone between "I'm fine" with half a glass of beer and "I'm fine" and getting bored by the minute.

  "Hey, I've got a friend, Jeff Snow, who has a place out farther west in the Glades and down south a bit," I said early in the day. "It'll take a three- or four-hour paddle in the canoe, but it's out in the wide-open marsh field and very different than here."

  She cut her eyes at me, a look of interest, maybe in a change of scenery, maybe the challenge of a good physical workout.

  "I mean, it's October, a perfect time out there because the temperature, even in the full sun, is pretty tolerable. In the summer I won't even go out there."

  "Oh, not even you, eh? Mr. tough-guy Gladesman." She was smiling when she said it, but I had been right about the challenge. Sherry did not thrive long without a challenge.

  "And the stars are amazing," I added, just for incentive. "Horizon to horizon without any of the city lights to muck it up."

  She took another sip of late morning coffee and acted like she was pondering the possibilities.

  "Sold," she finally said, stretching out her long legs, flexing and showing the hard cut in the muscles of her thighs. "Let's go."

  We packed up a cooler of food and plenty of water. The plan was to stay a couple of nights, maybe three, at the Snows' fishing camp and then make it back for a final day at the shack before returning to civilization. I was digging around in my duffle bag for the small GPS unit on which I had recorded the coordinates of the Snows' place. I wasn't that good of a Gladesman to be wandering around in that open acreage without some help. While I sorted through some old rain gear and special books that I kept in the duffle, I pulled out the leather bag that held my oilcloth-wrapped Glock 9mm service weapon from my days on the Philadelphia Police Department. I hefted it in one hand, feeling the weight of it, but as soon as the memories of its use started leaking into my conscience, I pushed it back into the duffle, deep to the bottom. Don't go there, Max, I said to myself. I finally found the GPS, left the gun inside the duffle and shoved it back under the bed. New time. New memories.

  In a waterproof backpack I stored the GPS and extra batteries along with some camping tools including a razor-sharp fillet knife I kept in a leather sheath for the fish I hoped we'd catch and the small steel first aid kit I always took with me on trips. I thought of myself as a careful man. I knew enough about alligators and water snakes and poison vegetation, and after four years out here, how one never underestimates that shit can happen, even without the source of its usual progenitor: people. We were ready within an hour's time and though I thought about it twice, given the pristine vision of where we were heading, I decided to take my cell phone. Sherry said she'd left hers at home because she didn't want to talk to a soul or get called into work on some damned so-called emergency. I didn't want to spoil the sense of just she and I, the way I'd planned it, so I tucked it deep into the bag out of sight.

  Just after noon, with Sherry settled in the front seat of my canoe and me in the stern, we pushed off.

  TWO

  Edward Christopher Harmon looked into the muzzle of the man's blue-steel Python handgun and took a step forward. Adrenaline was swirling into his bloodstream as it had so many times before and with a pure force of mind he stopped it before it reached his eyes.

  You don't show fear in such instances. You don't show panic, or emit even the scent of wildness. You bring your heart rate down with deep, measured breaths. You consciously keep the irises of your eyes from growing wide. Harmon's wife once described him as having "safe" eyes. He tried to achieve that look now. When they think they have you, when they think they're going to make you beg, you must present yourself as being the one in control. And at the moment, they definitely had him.

  "Colonel, you and your men are presently on private property. I am a representative of the oil company that owns this land and I am here to retrieve certain items belonging to my company," Harmon said to the small dark man holding the gun on him.

  "Silencio!" the man hissed, his own eyes giving away the wildness that Harmon was working to avoid. The little colonel had already achieved one goal, taking Harmon and his partner, Squires, by surprise. The rebel militia officer and his six-man squad had embedded themselves among the dozens of locals from the town of Caramisol and the surrounding Venezuelan mountains who were looting oil from a spigot that had been tapped into the company pipeline. A dozen old, rusted tanker trucks snaked in a line that ran down the roadway, waiting their turn to pay cash to the bandits, a third of what they would pay through a government outlet, for loads that they could easily resell on the open market. The armed rebels were the paid protection for the bandits who gave them a percentage and an occasional fresh group of teenagers from their villages for their antigovernment militia. The little colonel matched Harmon's step forward and lowered the beautiful.357-caliber revolver just so, turning it sideways and bringing it forward so that the end of the six-inch barrel must have been scant centimeters from touching Harmon's throat.

  "Come on, man," the colonel said quietly, abandoning his Spanish for perfect American street English. "Don't diss me in fro
nt of my crew, oil man. We can work this shit out."

  Now all Harmon could see was the rear sight of the Python and the burled walnut grip in the young man's hand. The Colt Python truly is the finest in American arms design and it pained Harmon to see the colonel holding the beautiful gun sideways, its grip turned parallel to the ground like some gangsta movie amateur, which went totally against the firearm's function. The thing was engineered to fire straight up, butt end level with the floor, barrel sighted along the line of vision. Idiot couldn't hit the side of a barn holding it like that. Harmon could also see that the gun's hammer mechanism was not cocked. Maybe the kid simply didn't know the difference between a 9mm and a revolver and how much time it would take to roll that hammer back and fire.

  Harmon's own version of the Colt, the smaller one with the easier to conceal two-and-a-half-inch barrel, was in his hand tucked deep into his jacket pocket, the trigger more appropriately cocked and hot.

  "Interesting accent for a Venezuelan rebel, Colonel," Harmon said, not moving his eyes off the other man's.

  "University of Miami 1998. Business administration major. Go 'Canes," the colonel said, leaning in, smirking this time. Being a smartass. Losing focus. Harmon knew that Squires would be watching the others. All six of the colonel's men were carrying Kalashnikov rifles, weapon of choice for paramilitary around the world. But none of them would be as experienced and comfortable with killing as Squires was. It takes a few times before you get used to shooting the hearts of out of other men. Squires had been there more than a few times.

  "I will take whatever it is that you have in the briefcase, Mr. American Oil Man, and then we will see what we can work out in the way of a negotiation," the young man said, now a bit louder so his comrades could hear.

  Harmon could sense rather than see what his partner was doing behind him. They had been in situations that varied on this theme before, though it had been a few years. They'd both been in hot zones. Lawless wars. Military actions as soldiers themselves as well as being the hired guns on the other side. They had both faced the possibility of death. Now that they were considered to be "security executives" on a corporate payroll did not mean that their world was all about passing out business cards and making contracts. They'd been sent down here to retrieve a computerized analysis device from the pump room across the way. This zone was becoming far too hot with all the paramilitary action, and the diminishing political landscape between the United States and the new Venezuelan government dictated that a bit of company creativity be used. They usually called Harmon when it came to such creativity.