I nodded and waited out his hesitation. It's a standard cop interviewing technique.
"I've got some friends, acquaintances really, out in the Glades who aren't exactly, uh, traditional folk. Some are natives. Some, like me, are just grown into the place and can't stand the way it's changing."
His voice had jumped a decibel and at least one notch of anxiety.
"So you said before," I replied, hoping to bring him back down but not shut him up.
"Before all this with the kids started, there was a history of protection from the outside among the folks who live out there. And it wasn't all pretty. A game warden was killed in the fifties. Some revenuers disappeared in the early days. We used to laugh about the old tales, but things had changed. Even the Seminoles were making money off the coastal folks, bringing them out onto the reservation to gamble at the Indian casino and all. Hell, they even let them hold a damn rock concert for 60,000 kids out there on a New Year's."
I moved to the side of the bed. Closer. Just you and me, pal.
"So these acquaintances aren't laughing so much anymore?"
"Shit started happening. A group of overnight canoeists who weren't using a guide got vandalized in the middle of nowhere. Their water was stolen. The ribs of their boats smashed. Some hikers on the canal levee stumbled into a nest of rattlesnakes in a spot where no natural rattlesnake would set up territory."
"Anybody claim responsibility?"
"No one outright."
There was a wrestling match going on in Gunther's head between conscience and fear.
"I don't think the old-timers would stand for something like this, but you can't always tell with some of the younger ones," he said.
"You have any names?" I said, taking a chance of shutting him down.
Gunther sighed, blowing air out his nose and closing his eyes for several seconds. I thought I'd taken a step too far. Then he reached over for a message pad and pen and started writing.
"You go out to this place and ask for Nate Brown. I already talked to them and they'll sit down with you."
The pen wedged between Gunther's thick sausage fingers looked like a dark sliver stuck in his huge hand.
"How come you're telling me this instead of the cops?"
"These people don't talk to cops. They've been avoiding authority out there for a hundred years."
"So why open it up now?" I said, again pushing. His wan face suddenly gained a slight flush of color. A sharp clearness came into his eyes.
"Hell, boy! Somebody tried to kill us!"
We both listened to his anger echo through the room. I took the piece of paper from his hand.
"Mr. Gunther, somebody has already succeeded in killing four kids. Kids who were a lot more innocent than you or I."
He closed his eyes again, lying there in silence like I found him. I let the door click quietly shut when I went out.
CHAPTER 15
"Nate Brown? Never heard of him. But if you're heading out to the Loop Road area, you're on your way to a different world."
As I pulled out of the hospital parking lot Billy was on the cell phone giving me directions to the Loop Road Frontier Hotel, the name Gunther had written on the message pad where Nate Brown and this group of acquaintances had agreed to meet me.
As I headed south toward Miami, he also gave me the history of the place.
Only thirty miles from the high-rise glitter, urban blight, Hispanic-dominated politics and thoroughly modern city of Miami, lay a place outside the curve of progress and, in many ways, still outside the purview of the law.
The Loop Road had first been hacked out of the Everglades in the early 1900s by dreamers, men who thought they could simply plow through what they considered useless swampland and create a link between the thriving new cities of Miami on one coast of Florida and Tampa on the other side. They were men with money and power and not a little bravery. And they made some progress.
By dredging limestone from under the water and piling it up and tamping it down, they started a road. But as is often the case, men with more power and money scuttled their plan. A roadway was eventually built across the lower end of the peninsula, at a heavy price to the laborers who died cutting the way through. Men drowned in the vast fields of water. Others were maimed in dynamite blasts. Some simply disappeared in an ancient Glades muck that could suck a boot, a leg, a worker's torso down.
But when the road from Tampa to Miami was finally finished in 1946 and dubbed the Tamiami Trail, it had effectively bypassed the first attempted roadway. The original Loop Road would remain unfinished, a trail to nowhere. And a trail to nowhere, in the middle of nowhere, draws a unique breed of resident.
For half a century the Loop Road was little more than a jump-off point for alligator hunters, exotic plume hunters and not a few moonshiners. Even in the years when killing off endangered alligators and snowy egrets became illegal and prohibition kicked in, the Loop was still a jump-off for poachers and white lightning runners, bail jumpers and criminals who needed a place where few questions were asked and authority ignored.
"It has a long tradition of being a place apart," Billy said. "The people who live there don't like strangers, government, developers, and have a special disdain for the law."
By the time Billy finished his history lesson I'd gotten off the I-95 exit to Southwest Eighth Street and headed west.
"I'm not sure I'd go out there alone if I were you."
"Yeah. Thanks," I said, punching him off.
Within a few miles I'd lost the city, the bodegas, the strip shopping centers, even the stoplights. Out here there were stretches of small orange and avocado groves, acres of tropical tree farms and open stands of slash pine. In some places the narrow roads ran under ancient stands of oak draped in moss whose limbs stretched across the roadway to form dark green tunnels that reminded me of my river. I had to cut farther south and by the time I found Loop Road the late-afternoon thunderheads were gathering in the western sky, piling up and tumbling east.
The Loop Road Frontier Hotel seemed more a backcountry Southern roadhouse than a hotel. When I found it I pulled into a shell-covered parking lot that was a quarter full with old- model pickup trucks, a few dusty sedans and a semi-tractor with its grease-covered skid plate exposed. I turned off my truck and sat listening to the heat tick off the engine, wondering if this was a mistake.
Off to one side of the building's covered entrance three men, probably in their early twenties, stood in lazy conversation, bootheels up on the bumper of a dented Ford pickup. They were dressed in jeans and tight, dark-colored T-shirts and wore baseball caps with various logos stitched on the front. They were not unlike a hundred other groups of young and uninspired locals I'd moved off the street corners of Philadelphia in my years of foot patrol. I could see them cutting their eyes my way.
I got out, locked my door, and had started toward the building when the biggest of the trio called out: "Hey, Mr. Fancytruck. You lost?"
I know I should have ignored it. I know I could have walked on and let the laughter fall behind me. A life is full of should-haves and could-haves. Instead I stopped and turned to the group.
"I don't think so."
"Well, I think so," the big one said and stepped forward as I knew he would. I'd seen it too many times.
He was my height but thirty pounds heavier and most of it fat. His chunky face was topped by a 1950s style crewcut but in his left ear was a tight looped earring. His brown eyes held an alcoholic luster. Get drunk or high so your reflexes are off and your oxygen intake is impaired and then go out and pick a fight. Idiocy knows no boundaries, I thought to myself.
"You a cop?" he sneered, moving within striking range, braver than I expected.
"No," I said. "Do you need one?"
"We don't need no fucking cops out here," one of his buddies answered from his spot behind the big one. Neither of the others had moved off their fender.