Strawman's Hammock (9 page)

Jarold shook his narrow head.

“Some kind of go-between, maybe?”

“Maybe,” Barrett nodded. “But you notice they weren't about to give us anything but his street name.”

*   *   *

They made perhaps a half-dozen camps that day. The stories were all about the same. Workers waiting for work. Waiting for salvation. Waiting for Godot. Only one camp seemed regularly employed. When Barrett asked if the contract came through El Toro, the younger Latin denied it so furiously that Bear knew it was true.

Clearly, Señor the Bull was someone well known to the migrants in these isolated camps. Barrett made a note to call the county clinic, see if they couldn't get somebody out to check up on the children. A sort of depression had set in, which he did not expect. These desperate residents, their hollow homes carved in the woods, stirred memories Barrett would just as soon forget.

Barrett knew what it was like to be raised in a shack. He knew what it was like to wake up in the night sweating hot, or shaking cold, depending on the season. Barrett knew what a piss bowl was, and a thunder jug. But that beat the hell out of running to an outhouse where the first thing you did before you squatted was to rattle the box with a stick to scare off the snakes. Barrett Raines had lived as these people had lived. He was surprised and ashamed, therefore, to find himself resenting these poor people for making him remember.

*   *   *

It was late afternoon by the time Barrett and Jarold Jeeped back along the sinuous sandy roads that would take them to the warden's seaside residence and alternate transportation. Jarold had become positively garrulous in the course of the day's work, explaining to Barrett the labyrinthine roads that spidered all over the flatwoods, giving him details of the region's camps and the easiest ways to reach them.

They were in the middle of one of these explications when the game warden shivered his Jeep to a sudden stop.

“The hell?” Barrett stiff-armed the dash.

“Sorry.” Jarold was out of the still-running Willys and squatting on the road before Bear could get out of his seat belt.

“Got something?” Barrett caught up to the warden.

Jarold nodded. “See for yourself.”

They were tire tracks. Some vehicle, very wide, had left the sand road for offroad pursuits, apparently. Grass and vines, pressed at some point into ruts, already rebounded.

“Some four-wheeler?” Barrett offered.

“Yeah.”

“See this all the time, don't you? Somebody wanting to go offroad?”

“Not this particular somebody.”

“What do you mean?”

“You spent some time in the military, didn't you, Bear? Army was it?”

“It was.”

“Take another look at those tracks. Take a good look.”

Barrett kneeled to the soft earth to see a stretch of sand crumpled indistinctly into two widely spaced ruts.

“Big tire print,” Bear grunted.

Something familiar there. In that print.

“Heavy, but not a truck,” Jarold pointed out. “You see that? Got the wheelbase of a damn tractor, but it ain't no tractor. Damn sure ain't no Jeep.”

“Be damned,” Barrett exclaimed. “I know what is. Sure I do.”

It was a Humvee. The all-purpose vehicle introduced to Americans in CNN footage of the Gulf War was now available to civilians. You could get plush seats, digital sound, and A/C in your customized Macho Machine. For a price, of course. Humvees were astronomically expensive. In fact, there were only two Humvees to Barrett's knowledge in his six-county district. One belonged to a car collector in Madison. And the other—

Belonged to Linton Loyd's only and sullen son.

Barrett stood.

“Think this goes anywhere?”

Jarold turned back to his own offroad accommodation.

“Let's just see.”

*   *   *

The limbs of trees slapped their needles onto the windshield of Pearson's Jeep as the warden and the FDLE investigator left the safe, sandy boulevard to follow the fading, wide-tracked trail offroad.

There was a change in topography, Barrett noted. The trees, for one thing, no longer stood in rows. The pines were taller, thicker, their limbs stretched out in elegant panoplies showered with starbursts of needles and pods of cones.

“Yellowheart pine.” Jarold anticipated Bear's question. “Last natural stand I know of, around here. God knows how they got missed.”

There was straw everywhere underfoot, fallen in ages of accumulated carpet. Made Barrett want to leave the Jeep and walk barefoot. But then the trail dipped abruptly and with the slap of limbs on the windshield the Jeep foundered axle-deep in something not quite like mud.

“Oh, shit.” Bear reached for his seat belt.

“I got it.” Jarold swapped cogs and the four-cylinder Jeep reversed field.

Four wheels spun for traction. A rooster tail of mud.

“Give her a chance.” Jarold remained calm.

The Jeep lurched free of the bog.

Barrett allowed a pony keg of air to exhale from his lungs.

“Be a good idea to keep an eye out for quicksand,” Jarold commented drily as he detoured around the bed.

Barrett could no longer make out even the trace of a trail, but Jarold pushed on, pausing briefly at intervals to inspect the torn bark on a water oak, or point to a broken vine of wild grapes.

Suddenly, abruptly, the canopy of pine gave way to an open, ruddy sky. Jarold slammed on the brakes and skidded to a sliding halt before a smooth, freshwater pond.

Barrett released his seat belt.

“Where the hell exactly are we?”

“I'd guess one and a half, maybe two miles off the sand road. Not too far from the coast.”

“There a name for this place?”

“Mmmhmm.” Jarold nodded. “Strawman's Hammock.”

Barrett paused. He had heard of the Hammock. There were all sorts of stories. Ghosts, bogey men. Witches.

You don't behave, young'un, I'm agonna take you down to the Hammock, leave your black ass onna stump!

Barrett followed Jarold's lead to debark from the Jeep.

“Looks like it'd be a hunter's paradise,” he remarked.

“No,” the warden disagreed shortly.

“No? Why not?”

“'Cause hunters have got lazy, Bear. They won't get off the road fifty yards if they can help it. And nobody stalks game on foot anymore. Not even bowhunters. They just get in their blinds or up a tree and wait for it.”

“If you leased this land somebody'd hunt it. They'd put in roads. And blinds.”

Jarold nodded. “Paper mill in Perry wants to do just that. They been tryin' to buy this land, what I understand, for months. But there's some legal problem with title, or squatter's rights. I don't know the details.”

Barrett gazed over the pond.

“Maybe our man just came in to fish.”

“He'd've had to know there was a pond,” Jarold pointed out. “Outside aerial photography, I don't know how he'd find this one.”

“Accident, maybe.” Barrett slapped a gnat off his face. “Or maybe he was just exploring.”

Jarold remained quiet.

“Something botherin' you, Jarold?”

“This ain't the first fellah took a sudden interest in exploring Strawman's Hammock. I was driving out this way a month, maybe a month and a half ago, on the Suwannee side, and I saw where maybe four or five vehicles had pulled off the road and into these woods. I followed the tracks right to this pond, pretty sure it was this pond. If it is, there's a shack on the other side. Some old cracker shack.”

“Sounds like a place for hunters to me.”

The warden shook his narrow head. “Nuh uh. You find hunters camping, you're gonna see things. There's gonna be a latrine. Someplace to bury the skinnings. Usually toilet paper or beer cans—they never clean up right.

“But this place looked scrubbed. I didn't see a soda can or a campfire, much less any sign of field dressing. But I did find a condom.”

“Condom?” Barrett fell in beside Pearson as the warden stepped out to follow the water's edge. “Long way to come for poontang.”

“Long way for anyone,” Jarold agreed without looking back. “And there must've been three … four vehicles come in here. I thought, well … if you wanted to have a party … be hard to find a place much more out of the way than this.”

“Probably.” Barrett found he had to stretch to keep up with the game warden. “But Jarold … you don't mind … I'm mostly interested in Mexicans.”

Again without breaking stride or looking back, Jarold pulled what looked like a credit card from the breast pocket of his olive green and handed it back.

“It's a phone card,” the warden tossed over his shoulder. “The migrants, they all get 'em. To call back home, I guess. Or Texas.”

Barrett took the card. “You found this at the shack?”

“Ways off from it. On the way back to the county road.”

It was a Sprint calling card. Barrett pocketed the item.

“We should be able to see who made the purchase. See where they called. But unless the place is being used now—”

“Oh, it's being used,” Jarold said. “I'm just about positive of that. I just don't know for—Hold up. Hold!”

Barrett stumbled to a stop.

“You hear that?”

The wind in the pines moaned. But then Barrett did hear it. Something beneath the wind. A long, mournful wail.

“Come on.” Jarold broke into a jog.

*   *   *

They had to break through another cordon of pine and vines to find a rusting, tin-paneled shack lying just behind the pond, shrouded in the shadows cast by a sun that settled below the treeline. All metal, to appearances. Not a scrap of wood showing. Some sort of animal bayed from inside. A hound?

“Is that PVC?”

Barrett edged to one side to see a white length of pipe running from the house to a handheld pump.

The dog was barking now, snarling, furious.

“He smells us.” Jarold pulled the safety strap off the hammer of his .357. “You armed, sir?”

A sudden, professional detachment.

“Yes.” Barrett slipped his Glock from its holster.

“All right, let's just do this by the numbers—
Hello!”
Jarold called.
“Anybody in there?”

The hound or mastiff or whatever it was bayed in reply. Nothing else.

“This is Lieutenant Pearson, Fish and Game. If you are inside, please come out with your hands on your head. Come out now, please.”

The breeze shifted in response. An awful putrid odor carried to the two lawmen.

Barrett had smelled that smell before.

And then something inside the shack smashed into the wall. The shack shook with the impact like a cube of jelly.

“Jesus.” Barrett jumped, startled.

Jarold remained steady as a rock.

The animal charged again into the interior wall and the shack shivered again. A shingle broke off the roof and fell as slowly as a snowflake to the sand beneath.

“I see a shutter above the PVC line. Do you, sir?”

“I do,” Barrett nodded. “Window.”

“Roger. Looks like there's a steel slipbolt holding it. I'm going to try and open 'er. Give us a look inside.”

“Be careful,” Barrett advised.

“Yes, sir.” Jarold nodded, swapping from a Weaver's stance to a single arm. The warden held his weapon like a flashlight, straight ahead in one hand, easing to one side of the shuttered window.

The dog or whatever it was howled as though he was being branded. Then the howl disintegrated at the warden's approach into a high-pitched whimper.

“I'm opening up.” Jarold shot the bolt—

And a hundred and twenty pounds of dog burst through the shack's solitary window like a tiger through a hoop of fire. Jarold swiveled his weapon to take the rottweiler—

But Barrett was in the line of fire!

“Shoot, Bear!”

Barrett emptied the clip of his weapon into the center of the dark blur of foam and fangs bearing down. The dog leaped.

Nine shots. Quick as he could pull.

The dog fell in a heap to one side. Bear could smell the rank of his breath.

“God!”

He clutched his stomach.

Jarold kept his weapon free.

“You all right?”

“Yeah … yeah … Jesus.”

Jarold stepped up calmly and put a round at the occipital of the animal's skull.

The fluid in Barrett's ears compressed with the added concussion. His knees were weak as he nodded to the shack.

“What … what we got inside?”

“Haven't exactly had time to look.” The warden seemed insulted.

“Sorry,” Bear apologized. “Why don't we check it out together?”

They kept their weapons extended as they approached the shack. There could be another animal posing a threat inside. Conceivably an assailant. That smell, Barrett knew, was not altogether the dog's.

Barrett kicked the door open. Flies buzzed like bees inside. Light filled the room brown and amber and slow as syrup. Portions of a carcass, could have been more than one, emerged into view. It was all over the floor. At first Bear thought the scraps of meat he saw were come from a deer, the smell and recent disembowelment he had witnessed being so familiar. But then he saw something that made him know this was not the case.

“Oh, Lord. Up there. On the wall.”

Pine studs formed a skeleton to support the shack's metal skin. A pair of arms hung from that wooden anatomy, arms ripped from their shoulders. Lots of bone showing. Lots of meat stripped off or rotting. The hands remained untouched in their steel cuffs. You could still see the fingernail polish. Down below—the feet. Nothing else. Whatever remained was scattered in shreds over the floor.

“Make a hole!”

A plague of flies chased Barrett outside. Jarold Pearson emerged moments later. The warden passed the rim of his Stetson over his forehead.