Bitter End (Seychelle Sullivan #3) (26 page)

“Thanks, B. J.,” I said, stepping onto the dock and hurrying past him.

The young woman who worked for Gramma Josie picked up the phone, but by the sound of it, Zale must have been standing right next to her when it rang. He came on just seconds after I identified myself.

“Hang on a minute,” he said. I heard footsteps, then the sound of a door closing in the background. His voice was low and secretive when he spoke again. “You’ve got to come get me,” he said.

“Zale, your mom thinks—”

“No, listen. I’m scared. Somebody tried to kill me today.”

B. J. offered to drive Lightnin’, and I gladly took him up on it. I preferred to take my Jeep for going out to Big Cypress, but I’d already driven out to the Glades once that week and, besides, I wanted his company. My phone conversation with the boy had been cut short when someone on his end wandered into the room. He didn’t want to say any more. It was clear he no longer trusted anyone out there. Concerned as I was about Zale’s safety, I really wanted to talk to B. J. about Molly. I was worried about her health, both physical and mental. The way she had just walked away from that visiting table scared me. It was possible that whatever chance we had of reconciliation had already died.

I was climbing into the Jeep’s passenger seat out in the Larsens’ driveway when I heard the rumble of a powerful engine driving too fast on the quiet Rio Vista street. When I turned around, I saw Amoretti pull his Corvette to the curb with a flashy spray of gravel. I closed the door to the Jeep and walked out to meet him.

“Hey, Amoretti, what’s up?”

The door flew open and he leaped out. “What the devil did you send that lawyer of yours downtown for?”

To my surprise, LaShon climbed out of the passenger-side door. I would not have thought it possible for anyone to have teeth whiter than Amoretti’s, but the smile on that girl’s face definitely put her in the running. “What are you talking about?”

“Rich took me down to the station,” LaShon said, “and your friend Jeannie was there. She was kinda hard on him.” Again she laughed up and down the scale.
 

“Rich?” I said to LaShon. “Well, well.”

“That woman’s a menace,” Amoretti said. “She’s got no taste in men, either.”

“That’s just because she likes that other detective more than you,” LaShon said. “I think he’s kinda cute, too.”

“That hippo? That uncouth, uncultured behemoth?”
 

“Come on, guys,” I said. They were obviously having a good time playing these little verbal jousts that had become part of whatever relationship was starting up here, but I had to get out to the Big Cypress to get Zale. “I know you didn’t come out here to discuss Detective Mabry’s social skills.”

“No,” Amoretti said, “you’re right. After talking to LaShon here, and hearing from your lawyer friend, I realized you’ve been running around playing Nancy Drew. I’m here to tell you to stop.”

“I’d be more than happy to stop if you guys would start looking at some other suspect besides Molly Pontus. There’s no way she killed Nick.”

“Give us cops a little more credit than that, Ms. Sullivan. We never stopped looking. I never liked that woman for the crime in the first place. But we gotta go through the motions, do the job. Now, based on the information from Ms. Thompson here, we’ve set up an appointment this afternoon to meet with Kagan over at TropiCruz. We’re going to use this slots information. He may or may not be aware of this enterprise, and we don’t know what repercussions our conversation will create. One thing I do know, and it’s why I came over here personally. I don’t want you going anywhere near those ships or anyone involved with TropiCruz. Do you understand?”

“Sure. No problem, Detective. My friend and I are just on our way out to the Everglades—about as far from the ocean as you can get in Florida.” At that point I realized I hadn’t even introduced B. J. He’d been patiently sitting in the driver’s seat of the Jeep. “B. J., I’d like to introduce you to these friends of mine.”

He climbed out and shook hands with the detective and LaShon. “We need to get moving,” he said to me.

“Yeah, I know. If there’s nothing more, Detective, we need to get out there before dark.”

LaShon said, “Can I talk to you for a minute?” She motioned for me to walk aside onto the grass in front of the Larsens’ house.

“LaShon, I’m so sorry that I dragged you into all this.” She wasn’t even looking at me. Her eyes were focused on B. J., where he was leaning against the side of the Jeep.
 

“He is so hot,” she said.

I grabbed my head. “LaShon, we don’t have time.”

“I know. I just didn’t know if I’d ever see you again, and I wanted to thank you.”

“Why?”

“I’d been wanting to leave TropiCruz for a long time. It had started to feel dirty working there. But to tell the truth, I was afraid to leave. Rich assures me that he’ll keep me safe over the next few days, and once things blow over, maybe I will go find a job consulting. Maybe it’s time to try that out.”

“That’s a really good idea, LaShon. And, hey, what’s this about you and Rich?”

She glanced over her shoulder. “Him? I just like to flirt. Day may come when I find the one man, but until then, flirting’s all I do.”

I embraced her. “Listen, you be safe,” I said.

“You, too.”

As we drove out the interstate through the western suburbs, I kept replaying my conversation with Molly at the jail. I wanted to rewind time and take back the words I’d said. I didn’t know why I’d pushed her like that. She’d been married to the man for over ten years, he’d just died, and there I was questioning her love for him. Way to go, Miss Sensitivity. I went there to try to help her, cheer her up, console her, and I ended up insulting her.

Right after we’d exited onto 1-75, when the strip malls and look-alike subdivisions were starting to retreat behind us, B. J. spoke for the first time. He startled me. “What?”

“I asked you how Molly was doing. You said you went by the jail, but you didn’t really say much about it.”

A chain-link fence separated the mown berm along the side of the road from the canal running parallel to the highway. I watched as a blue heron came gliding in over the sawgrass, his legs dropping behind him like landing gear as he neared the shallows.

“What’s to say? She’s in jail.”

“Right. So you guys had an argument?”

“What do you mean? Why do you say that?”

“Listen, I know you. When a topic makes you uncomfortable, you avoid talking about it.”

I stared out the windshield at the long asphalt path that stretched ahead through the endless green grasses. “I pushed her. I don’t really understand why. I pushed her to explain to me how she could have just walked away like that back in high school. And in the process I may have pushed her away for good.”

“No, I don’t think so. Give her more credit than that. Molly’s a pretty amazing woman.”

I turned to look at him. His profile was so familiar. The straight line of the bridge of his nose, the swell of the cheekbones below his eyes, the strong jaw. Just looking at his smooth brown skin made me long to reach over, touch him, caress him. And often it made me terrified of losing him.

“How do you know? You haven’t really known her very long,” I said.

“No, but there are some people with whom we are naturally in tune. I feel that with Molly. We don’t have to know each other well to feel the harmony. She has a strong spirit and an inner beauty. Losing her freedom must be incredibly painful for a person like her, but she’ll survive it. Probably better than most.”

“Huh,” I said, but I was thinking
inner beauty, my ass
. “You and Molly really seem to have hit it off.”

He took his eyes off the road for a moment and flicked them in my direction. “Yeah. And is that a problem?”
 

“No, no, of course not.”

The rest of the drive up Snake Road toward the reservation passed in silence, or at least with no conversation. No trip in my Jeep was ever silent. As we roared through the cattle pastures, past the lakes and the distant stands of cypress trees, I tried to put the visions of Molly and B. J. together out of my mind. I tried to think about Nick’s murder and his frightened son. I wasn’t terribly successful.

When we pulled into the dirt drive at Gramma Josie’s house, Zale burst out of the door as soon as we turned off the engine. He had been watching for us. He ran around to my side of the Jeep and said, “Let’s go. I’ve gotta get out of here.”

“Zale, you can’t just leave like that,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Well, it’s not polite, for one thing. We have to go inside and say good-bye to Gramma Josie, at least.”

“I don’t want to go back in there. I just want to leave.” I put my hand on his shoulder and walked him out into the middle of the front lawn, away from earshot of the house. “What happened, Zale? Why are you so spooked?”

“I
told
you. Someone tried to kill me.”

I shook my head. “I need a few more details. What exactly happened?”

He jerked his head, indicating that I should follow him. We walked to the far side of the yard and he pointed back behind the house. “See the lake back there?”

The thicket of trees was dense, but in one spot a glint of blue water was showing through. “Yeah.”

“I got bored. Gramma Josie suggested I go riding on the ATV. I did that for a while, but that was boring, too. Gramma had mentioned a canoe, so I came back here and asked her if I could take it out, paddle around a little. While I was out there on the lake, somebody tried to shoot me.”

I stopped breathing for several seconds. I was picturing Molly’s face while I tried to explain that her son had been shot. Only when I started to feel light-headed did I remember that I needed to breathe.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. It’s kinda hard to make a mistake about something like that.”

“Maybe it was an accident or something.”

“Yeah, right. Two bullets came this close.” He held up his fingers only inches apart.

“This happened a while ago, right?”

He nodded. “This morning.”

“And did you tell anybody else about it?”

“No,” he said, kicking a toe of his sneaker at the ground, digging a hole in Gramma Josie’s lawn. When he looked up at me, I saw the panic that was just below the surface. In a matter of days this boy had lost his father and his mother, and now he believed someone was trying to kill him.

I put my arm around his shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “Show me where it happened,” I said.

I motioned to B. J. that we were going out behind the house. He nodded and gave me the okay sign. I followed Zale across the mowed grass of the back lawn and off onto a path through the scrub to the trees by the lake.

When we reached the edge of the trees, Zale turned and looked back at me, his eyes questioning whether or not we should be doing this.

“Whoever was around here this morning is long gone. I’m with you now. It’s okay.” I hoped I was right.

The stand of cypress trees did an excellent job of hiding the lake from the house. The Seminoles called these cypress domes. Years ago, most of the dry land on which we were standing was once Everglades marshland. Hammocks were the high, dry places where slash pines and mahogany trees grew in the drier soil. Those mounds were like tree islands in the river of grass. Cypress trees, on the other hand, thrive in water. They grew in depressions where the soil would stay soaked, even in the drought years. In the middle of the depression, where the water was deepest, the trees would grow tall and thick, while at the outer edges of the dome, where the water was scarcer, the trees would be shorter, hence the appearance on the horizon of a dome-shaped stand of trees. The earth under this canopy was drier than most, leading me to believe that the lake had been dredged, draining some of the water out of the swamp.

It was much cooler in the shade of the trees, and if someone hadn’t cleared the trail we were on, the brush would have been impenetrable. The faint breeze rustling the palmetto fronds smelled like damp, rotting vegetation. Patches of white lichen on the trunks of the thin cypress trees looked like snow, and in the golden evening light, with the greens of palmettos and ferns growing among the bushy shrubs, tall grasses, and mossy pools, I thought, this is a place where myth and magic are bom, where the imagination can invent almost anything— even murderous gunmen. I hadn’t realized how big the lake was until we broke out into the sunlight on the far side of the woods.

I was expecting the boy to take me to a canoe that looked something like the old hunter-green aluminum model Red had bought me at Sears when I was a kid. Instead, the boat he led me to was nearly invisible, drawn up onto the knobby beach of cypress knees: a handmade dugout canoe. A ten-foot-long wood pole, knotted where the branches had been lopped off, rested in the bottom of the canoe. I ran my hand over the boat’s rough surface. You could still feel the cut marks from the small axe the canoe carver, probably Henry John Billie, had used to shape the canoe out of a tree.

Zale walked up into the trees, near the boat’s bow. “See here?” He pointed to two splintered holes in the wood. One bullet had entered up near the bow where the boat builder had hardly dug out any of the tree’s center core. The wood was probably ten inches thick there. The other bullet had entered about three feet aft, and an exit hole showed where it had gone clean through the side of the boat.

Zale pointed out to the center of the lake. “I had poled out there, in the middle. The sun felt good and I lay down to watch the hawks and just drift for a while. I heard—”

From the direction of the path came a sharp crack, like the sound of someone stepping on a piece of wood. Zale stopped talking, and we both turned to look through the sunlight-dappled woods in the direction of the sound. I couldn’t see anyone, but the trees were so thick it would be easy to hide. My heart rate doubled and I motioned Zale to get around behind the canoe and crouch down. The old canoe had stopped one bullet. Maybe it could do it again.

The seconds dragged past and I was almost ready to stand up when we heard a distinct crunching sound, like a person stepping on a pile of limestone rock and crumbling it underfoot. That was followed by another snap of breaking twigs. Definitely footsteps. I found myself thinking that these modern Indians had certainly lost some of that tracking ability their forefathers were known for. This guy was making a hell of a racket.