Trapped (43 page)

Dug has an old carbide Autolite affixed to his hat, the iden-

tical kind he uses when night hunting for alligator—pop that

light on and you see the eyes looking back at you from the

dark—but decides not to fire it up unless absolutely neces-

sary. Pop a light, she’ll know he’s coming and he prefers an

element of surprise. Plus, as he knows from experience,

human eyes don’t show red in the dark.

Best way to night hunt, move slowly, keep an ear cocked.

Many’s the time he’s heard a pig panting in the underbrush.

The pig is fearful, knows it’s being hunted and should be

silent, but it can’t help itself. It will pant, sometimes even

grunt like a person will grunt, thinking things over. Wants to

get downwind and that’s the challenge, to keep the scent ad-

vantage. Even a night like tonight, with the air so still, there’s

motion, a direction to carry smell.

Once, hunting raccoon at night, Dug killed one with his

knife, just to see if he could. Was it possible to stab a moving

coon in the dark? Turned out to be not that difficult, just hafta

know which way the coon would jump.

Dug has always known which way a hunted creature will

jump. He has no doubt he’ll know which way the girl will

jump, when it comes to that. He carries with him, into ter-

ritory he knows like the landscape of his own flesh, a skin-

ning knife, a pump shotgun, and his vast experience killing

things.

He crouches, using the tips of his fingers to find the ragged

trail they’ve left. He sniffs, holding the air in his nose, loving

the flavors. Flavor of swamp, flavor of grass, flavor of girl.

Kelly lies flat on her belly, sucking dirt. Her right arm hugs

Seth, keeping him down. He’s not exactly delirious but she

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can feel the heat of his fever and knows he isn’t thinking

clearly. How could he, after what he’s been through?

After the first dash to freedom it became clear that Seth

wouldn’t be going anywhere fast. She could help him along,

carry most of his weight, but that made for slow going over

uneven terrain in the dark.

“I was supposed to rescue you,” he’d mumbled, when

they finally stopped running and collapsed to the ground.

“Next time,” she’d said brightly, still high on adrenaline.

“I thought you were dead.”

“Me, too. I mean, I thought you were dead.”

“They cut me,” he’d said, showing her the wound.

Amazingly enough, it didn’t repulse her. Maybe in day-

light it would, but in the close darkness it didn’t really seem

all that bad. A little finger missing, no big deal. The rest of

him was half-starved and filthy, but intact. The problem was

that the wound had become infected and the infection had

spread most of the way up his arm. He was in terrible pain,

shivering from the fever, and it was absolutely essential that,

with the monster man so close, Seth remain absolutely mo-

tionless.

That’s how she thought of him, monster man. Obviously

she hadn’t hit him hard enough to do any real or lasting

damage.

When first she realized they were probably being followed,

she’d found a cluster of mangroves on a little mound of soggy

ground surrounded by water. The water was shallow, no more

than ankle deep, but she figured it would help cover their

tracks. That’s how they always did it in the movies. Some-

times in the movies they submerged under the water, breath-

ing through reeds, but Kelly was pretty sure that wouldn’t

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work in real life, and anyway this water wasn’t deep enough

for that.

The cluster of mangroves is thickly overgrown on the

outside, less so on the inside, and she believed that once she

and Seth had wormed their way inside their little hideaway

they’d be as good as invisible. There were lots of these small

overgrown areas dotting the area, hundreds probably, and

monster man couldn’t possibly search all of them. They’d be

safe so long as they didn’t move, didn’t give themselves

away.

Or maybe not. She has no idea how he managed it so

quickly, but monster man prowls along the water’s edge a

mere fifty yards from where they’re hiding.

Kelly touches Seth’s lips with her fingers, meaning

silence, and he nods that he understands.

Monster man blends into the darkness. He seems to be

going away, following the wrong track. She feels some of the

tension drain and hauls Seth closer.

Hot and muggy as it is, he’s shivering. With all her experi-

ence as a long-term patient in intensive care, she knows the

signs. She has to get Seth to a hospital in the not too distant

future or there’s a chance he will die from a raging blood in-

fection. Septicemia they call it. They’ll need to hang a bag,

drip him full of antibiotics.

In a few hours time Kelly Garner, age sixteen, has gone

from being totally focused on saving her own life to being

totally focused on saving the life of her best friend.

Best friends, as she knows, are not easy to come by.

When Kelly met Seth in the flesh for the first time her im-

pression was, the guy is too good to be true. Too handsome,

too smart, too kind, too generous, too everything. Later, after

he’d been tutoring her for several weeks, demonstrating in his

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calm clear way exactly how to fly safely, she decided that

sometimes first impressions are correct. He was the real deal,

a decent guy who wanted to help her without trying to get into

her pants.

Later on, when he’d finally taken her into his confidence—

he really had no one else to turn to—Kelly realized she’d

never been in any danger from Seth Manning. Not that kind

of danger, anyway. Not that being gay had diminished his

perfection in her eyes. If anything he was more perfect because

he was unobtainable, even if she’d decided to cross the age

barrier.

To see him like this, shivering in the heat, weak as a kitten,

his left hand wrapped in a bloody rag, it makes her want to

weep.

“Hang on,” she whispers. “We’re gonna make it, I promise.”

“Leave me,” he says. “Get away while you can.”

“Never,” she says. “You’re my favorite flyboy and I’m

keeping you. That’s final. Now try to snuggle closer.”

Monster man holds the air in his mouth. He’s picked up

the faintest whiff of human perspiration not his own. He

forces himself to relax, to melt his way into the landscape.

Not only smelling the smells, but sorting through the back-

ground noise of birds, water frogs, tree frogs, whining mos-

quitoes, scrabbling raccoons, splashing baitfish, gators small

and large, the whole wilderness mishmash.

What can’t be heard can help, too. A place where the

animals have left to make room for human. And he’s picking

up a beacon of silence, a quiet zone in one of the smaller

mangrove islands.

Thinking, as he glides into motion, you’re mine, little pig.

The squealing time is here.

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12. Best Keep Your Hands Inside The Pan

Zooming through the Everglades on an airboat at night is

like riding a dirt bike full speed through a pitch-black forest.

Not that I’ve ever been on a dirt bike, or in pitch-black forest,

for that matter. But it has to be something like this, the sheer

exhilarating terror of not knowing what’s out there and when

it might suddenly crash into you. Shadows, mangroves,

grasslands, open water, all blending into one dark and scary

blur. Every bump and scrape and feral swoosh of grass

against the flat bottom of the aluminum boat hits me like a

jolt of electricity, frying my nerves.

Leo Fish says not to worry. Fine. What I’m experiencing

isn’t so much worry as paralytic fear. Clinging to the little

seat, mouth tightly closed so the bugs can’t get in (more

advice from our improbable guide) muscles so tense they’ve

petrified, I can’t even scream.

First impression of Mr. Fish, he’s not exactly a people

person. He listens to Shane’s pitch—help us find my daughter

by finding Ricky Lang—nods his unenthusiastic assent, and

then gravely tells us that chances are we’re already too late.

“I can find him for you,” he says with a shrug. “But I can’t

fix what might already be done. Just so’s you know that from

the get-go.”

Shane apparently decides that the best thing is to be

affable. Ignore the morbid, misanthropic streak and engage

the man in conversation. The window of opportunity being

the trek between the motel and the Hunt Club dock, where

Ponytail has obligingly loaned his airboat to Leo Fish. On

foot, because Fish makes it clear he “can’t abide a car,” mean-

ing he won’t ride inside a vehicle. Too soon to say whether

that means he’s claustrophobic or just plain weird.

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Chris Jordan

“We understand that Ricky was married to your sister,”

Shane begins.

“Yup. My half sister Louisa Mae. My daddy took up with

a Seminole woman in his old age, and little Louisa Mae was

the result. Beautiful child. Beautiful woman, too. Ricky never

seen fit to marry her, being as she wasn’t Nakosha, but they

made ’em some babies. Two lovely girls and the cutest little

boy you ever did see.”

“I understand they died in a fire.”

“Died in a fire, yup, all of ’em.”

“And Ricky blames the tribe?”

The question stops Leo Fish in his tracks—he has the

look of a man who’s taken a surprise punch to the gut. “He

tell you that?”

“No, sir. Got it from the FBI, who got it from his girl-

friend.”

“So that’s what he told his girlfriend? The tribe did it?”

“Apparently.”

Leo Fish grunts, spits copiously. He stares down at his

naked feet, as if trying to decide who to kick. “That’s a damn

lie. Tribe ain’t had nothin’ to do with it. Ricky Lang set fire

to that house himself. Killed Louisa and the kids, whether he

meant to or not. It’s on him, all that death.”

Now it’s Randall Shane who looks stunned. “Lang killed

his own children?”

Fish responds with a curt nod and says, “He’d had this

fancy new house built on the reservation, and then he and

Louisa Mae got to fighting—might have been over this girl-

friend you mentioned. Upshot is, she refused to let Ricky into

his own house, and that’s when he said he’d sooner burn it

down then let her live there. Louisa Mae, she’s a feisty one,

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she called the tribal police, but they refused to intervene

’cause Ricky was the big man.”

“So he burned the house down with them in it?”

“Not exactly. Man always had a crazy temper. What

happen, he come out one night when they were all in bed,

woke ’em up, and forced ’em all out of the house. Standing

there in their pajamas, the three kids, and Louisa Mae cursing

him for the devil. Then he sets the place afire with gasoline,

to prove he can do what he likes with his own house. After

he throws the match and sees the fire spreading, he takes off

in his boat, in case the tribal police showed up after all.

Leaves the kids weeping but alive. What he didn’t figure on,

after he was gone, little Troy ran back inside to get his new

puppy, they had it in one of those puppy crates for training

purposes, and Louisa and the two girls ran after him. The roof

came down and they all perished.”

“He was never prosecuted?”

Fish tugs at his straw cowboy hat, as if intending to screw

it onto his head. “You got to understand about Ricky Lang.

He made that tribe. They was just a collection of nobodies,

not Seminole, not Miccosukee, not white neither, until Ricky

got ’er done.”

According to Fish, the Nakosha are really more of an ex-

tended family than a tribe. Cousins within cousins, most of

them called some variation of Lang, after a Methodist mis-

sionary who had been absorbed into the family at the turn of

the twentieth century. In addition to fathering fourteen chil-

dren with three successive Indian wives, the Reverend Robert

Lang had initiated the long and arduous process of seeking

tribal recognition. Robert Lang had argued that unlike the

Seminole, his adopted tribe were descended from a distinct

band of the original Calusa who had been living on this land

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when the conquistadors first splashed into the great swamp,

looking for El Dorado, or the Fountain of Youth or, failing

that, to copulate with the native women. Lang’s bureaucratic

battle had been carried on by successive generations, and had

not been resolved until ten years ago, when the tribe had been

granted dominion over a hundred square miles of boggy,

mosquito-infested swampland, most of which was sub-

merged during the rainy season, and therefore of minimal

interest to developers. Ricky Lang was instrumental in trans-

forming the Nakosha bingo license into a giant casino