Fallen Out: Jesse McDermitt Series, The Beginning (16 page)

I woke at 0530 and filled my thermos with coffee. After I secured the
Revenge
and set the alarm I got in the Bronco and drove the three blocks to Billy’s house. He was waiting on the porch and rose as I pulled up. He walked down the sidewalk, carrying a Remington 700 rifle. The 700 is the platform that the M40 is built on. Chambered for .308 ammunition, it’s a very accurate rifle, favored by deer hunters.

When he opened the back door I said, “There’s an empty fly rod case that’ll fit into on the back seat.”

Without a word, he opened the case and put the rifle in it. I figured he’d be bringing his dad’s old rifle. I helped him lift his wooden canoe up onto the roof and strap it down next to mine. Then we got in the truck and started driving. We were both quiet. No words needed to be spoken. We didn’t have very far to go.

Growing up in Lee
and Hendry Counties, both of us loved the outdoors. We fished and hunted together as soon as we were old enough. Billy was a great, natural tracker and could follow a feral hog or deer for miles through the dense forest. But, today we were hunting the most dangerous animal in the forest. Man.

Thirteen miles due south o
f LaBelle on Highway 29 we drove. The road was straight as the proverbial arrow, like many roads in Florida. There just weren’t any obstacles to road building in the early days, besides swamp and trees, which were pretty much everywhere. The early road builders laid out grids and built roads in straight lines. I turned off onto Keri Road, which goes through the State Forest from the west, to the park office. We had no intention of registering to camp, though. After four miles on the paved road, I turned south onto Sic Island Road, which is really just two overgrown ruts, that wound its way south, deeper into the cypress forest.

As we bounced over the rough terrain, there were occasional glimpses of pasture land to the west, but everything to the east was shrouded in
dark shadows from the dense cypress trees, the ground soft and spongy. After a half mile the road ended at the trailhead of Sic Island Loop. Billy, myself, and many of our friends have hiked the trails through the forest many times and as teenagers, we’d brought our dates to this very spot, deep in the forest. Although it had been many years since I was last here, nothing had changed. The swamps, like the stars above are timeless. We knew that on a weekday morning, there wouldn’t be anyone around to see us unpack and there wasn’t.

I’d chosen this spot well in advance
, as it’s not a popular hiking area, most hikers preferred the manicured trails on the east side of the slough, near the park office. Here, in the center of the west side of the park we had all of Okaloacoochee Slough State Forest to the east of us.

Without need of direction, we both climbed from the truck and
unloaded the two canoes. Within ten minutes we had everything unpacked from the truck and pushed off into the dark, tannin water. I let Billy lead the way.

We
paddled south, rounded Sic Island and made our way to the southern tip of the island. Being the beginning of the rainy season, the water was low and we had to get out and portage a very shallow spit to deeper water. Once across, we paddled south, our goal being a small island just south of Sic Island on the western fringe of the forest. The whole forest is covered with small lakes and ponds, all joined together in the rainy season. In dry season, like now, you had to know your way through the endless tangle of shallow and deeper waters unless you didn’t mind getting out and dragging your canoe across the shallows.

We were completely enveloped in
the shadowy, primordial swamp, paddling slowly and quietly between towering bald cypress trees that created a nearly impenetrable canopy above. The slough was home to thousands of alligators and we saw quite a few, hauled up on logs, or shallow flats. It was also home to black bears and Florida panthers, a distant cousin of the cougar. Few people ever left the well-marked trails as we were doing, for just that reason. Another reason that made me think this was where we’d find Hailey.

After
another hour of paddling, we set up camp. Tents were too dangerous out here. We strung hammocks high up in the cypress trees, with netting that would keep the mosquitoes out. We ate a cold lunch of MRE’s, meals-ready-to-eat.

“We’ll head out just after sunset,” I told Billy. “It’d be a waste of time to search in daylight.”

“How certain are you that this man killed the Snodgrass’s?”

“His last words to me, when I stranded him up Shark River were,
‘One of these days. When you least expect it.’ An obvious threat. I was told that during the trial, the news talked about me being a witness, showed a picture of me and said I was from Fort Myers. I haven’t renewed my license since Pap died and it still has my old address on it. Wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out where to look for me.”

“So he went there to settle the score and the Snodgrass’s just got in the way?”

“That’s the way I have it figured,” I replied. “He used to live way back in the bayou up in Louisiana. A man like that would be at home out here. Plenty of game to trap, no prying eyes, and easy to come and go.”

“Why not the swamps along the Peace or Caloosahatchee?”

“Not much left,” I said. “People canoe both rivers, lots of boat traffic on the Caloosahatchee, and it’s a short distance to civilization, just steps from the river.”

“And Big Cypress is too far away from Fort Myers, where he thinks you are.”

“That leaves Okaloacoochee, or Corkscrew,” I said.

“Hu
mph, Corkscrew ain’t much these days. Most of the land’s been drained and planted.”

“Which puts us right here,” I said.

“You say this man killed a prison guard and another convict to get away?” he asked.

I knew what Billy was trying to do. He was trying to
justify, in his own mind, what we were about to do. He suspected that I hadn’t come out here to capture Earl Hailey.

“Yeah,” I said. “
That was after he’d been convicted of attempting to murder a man out pleasure cruising with his family, then kidnapping and raping his wife and their two daughters, over a three week period, with three of his friends. And those were just the ones they could prove. I’d bet there were others, before that. He was planning to sell the mother and girls in the sex slave market. The daughters were thirteen and fifteen.”

I knew that would help ease his mind on what we were going to do. Bill
y had three daughters and a son, all in their early teens and pre-teens. I watched as I saw the steely resolve transform his dark eyes into smoldering embers. Billy was a basic infantryman back in the day and had served in Grenada with the 22
nd
Amphibs. Though he never talked about it, I knew he was not a stranger to the taking of a man’s life.

“We should get some rest,” he finally said.

We climbed up into the trees and got comfortable in our hammocks. It wasn’t very hot and there was a light breeze blowing. I’d never had trouble sleeping during the day. I’d learned over the years to get rest anytime and anywhere possible.

The alarm on my watch woke me a few hours later. The sun was just slipping below the invisible horizon and it was already quite dark under the cypress canopy. I could hear Billy stirring in his hammock. I climbed down
, and by the last paltry light filtering through the trees, I made my way over to the canoes. I barely heard Billy as he dropped from the tree and didn’t hear his footsteps at all. Then he was suddenly standing right beside me, as though he was some kind of silent apparition. I opened a watertight box in my canoe and took out five MRE’s, handing four to Billy.

“Stow all but one for later,” I whispered. “If we don’t find him before dawn, we’ll meet back here.”

We sat on the bows of the two canoes, eating the cold food. We’d already decided that while we were out here, we’d run a cold camp. No fire. It got dark really fast and within minutes I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.

I felt around in the canoe and opened another watertight box and handed Billy one of the night vision headsets and a UHF radio. We donned the headsets and switched them on. Looking around, I could see everything clearly, though with a
grainy, grayish green tint. We opened the fly rod cases and inspected and loaded the weapons. Outside of the M40 having a fiberglass stock and Billy’s Remington having a wood stock, they were identical.

“I brought backup sidearms
, if you want one,” I said.

“Got my own,” he replied, opening a case an
d removing an old 1911 Colt .45 semiautomatic and thrust it in the back of his jeans. “What do we do if and when we find this man?”

Billy was still having some misgivings. “If you find him, call me on the radio and I’ll do the same. We’ll rendezvous and give him a chance to give up.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“I’ll kill him and feed him to the gators.”

“Just like that?”

“Yeah, Billy. Just like that.”

He looked out over the swamp for a moment and then turned toward me and said simply, “Okay.”

We shoved off, going in opposite directions. The state forest land covered almost 35,000 acres, but
the wetland part on the west, the densest and least accessible part, was only a couple miles wide and six miles long. It was still a huge area to cover in canoes.

I went south, paddling slowly through the dense forest. Both of us had explored these wetlands by canoe and kayak hundreds of times, so there was little chance of either of us getting lost. What I was hoping for was that Earl would be holed up on one of the thousands of tiny islands and would have a small fire going. A fire, that with the aid of the night vision goggles, would be visible for quite a distance.

After more than three miles of paddling, I reached the southern part of the wetlands, where it narrowed and flowed into Big Cypress Swamp and Fakahatchee Strand. I was outside the state park boundaries and in Collier County.

I picked up the small UHF and keyed the mic. “Billy,” I whispered. I heard only a click in return.

“At the south end,” I said. “I’m turning and going up the east side now.”

“
Past Sears. I’m north of Oil Well Pad, heading south,” came his whispered reply, meaning he’d reached the northernmost part of the wetlands, where the abandoned sawmill town of Sears was located and had crossed over to the east side where an old oil well head was located. He’d covered a lot more ground than I had, but I figured he would.

An hour
after I started heading north, the radio clicked once. I picked it up and listened for a moment and then keyed the mic, “Was that you, Billy?”

He replied in a faint whisper, “I see light.”

“Where?” I whispered back.

“South end of Butterfly
,” he whispered, meaning Butterfly Island, right in the center of the forest. I’d passed the western side of it going south and should have seen it.

“Meet me on the west side of Patterson Hammock,” I said and then put the radio down and started paddling. I was a mile away.

When I got to within a half mile of Butterfly Island, I could see light filtering through the trees ahead. I struck out to the northeast, where I figured Billy would already be waiting. Twenty minutes later, the radio clicked again.

I stopped paddling and whispered, “Go.”

Billy whispered back, “You whites make too much noise. Look to your one o’clock.”

Ahead about a hundred yards
and just off to the right, I could see Billy sitting in his canoe. I paddled toward him as quietly as I could. Once alongside, he whispered, “He’s not alone.”

“How many?

“Just him and a young woman,” he replied. “I don’t think she’s there by choice. Don’t look directly at the fire. Lean over here and look to the right of the light and wait for the optics to adjust.”

I leaned over his
canoe, which put a cypress tree between me and the fire, blocking most of the light. The campsite came into sharp focus after a few seconds. It was Earl, alright. I checked my watch, it was almost 0100. Looking back at his camp, I saw the woman. I couldn’t see much of her as she had her back to me, doing something over the fire. Earl was sitting on a log a few feet away. There was a small tent behind him. While he might know the Louisiana bayous, it didn’t seem he was aware of the concentration of panthers in this area.

“How do you want to play this?” Billy asked.

I thought it over for a moment. For Billy’s sake, I wanted to give the man at least half a chance. If it were just me, I’d put the cross hairs on his forehead and pull the trigger from here.

“What made you say she wasn’t out here by choice?”

“Look closer,” he said. “She has a chain around her left ankle.”

I watched, but still couldn’t see a chain. Then she stood up and carried what looked like a pan over toward Earl. She held the pan in one hand and a
length of chain in the other that hung down and was shackled to her ankle.

“Another captive,” I whispered. “Damn.”

“So, how you want to do this?” Billy asked again.