I took the last wooden chair without comment. As I watched them sit I noted that all but Ashley were wearing the same small knife scabbard on their belts.
Brown settled and filled a heavy, cut-glass tumbler with two fingers of sipping whiskey and pushed it in front of me. My glass matched the other four at the table. After he refilled his own, Brown reached down and set the bottle on the floor next to his chair leg.
"Fred Gunther is a good man. And we all call him a friend. So first off, we thank you for what you done," Brown started. "And goin' on Fred's advice, we agreed it would maybe help to speak with you."
The others nodded, with the exception of Ashley, who sat staring into the amber light of the whiskey in front of him.
Brown went on. His voice had a slow Southern cadence that made me want to sip from my glass.
"Ain't none of us too fond of the law out here, least of all me. But these here chile killins got a lot of folks stirred up and we are thinkin' it might do us well to have some kinda, you know, go-between."
I looked from man to man until I was convinced they were waiting for me to answer an unasked question. I slowly turned the tumbler of whiskey in a circle on the polished table.
"I'm not sure how I can help," I said, finally giving in to the temptation and taking a drink. The whiskey burned the open cut inside my mouth but slid warm and easy down my throat. The others followed suit.
"Gunther gave us reason to believe you might be in the same sort of, uh, position that we think many folks out here are in," said Sims, a balding, bearded man whose collared shirt and manner made him seem the odd man out in the group. "That is," Sims said, "he indicated you may have been a suspect yourself at one time but seemed to have proved your way out of that."
Billy must have said more to Gunther than I knew.
"Look, Mr. Freeman," Blackman said, pronouncing my last name like it was two words. "They're riding folks mighty hard out here and we just don't want to see an innocent man get caught in some damn government frame-up."
I took another sip of whiskey and looked over the rim of my glass at him. There was an agitation in his eyes that none of the others carried.
"I mean, look. I'm in the guide business just like Gunther. I spent my whole life out here and we don't need the bad publicity either," Blackman said, in a calmer tone.
"We thought maybe you might be a sort of liaison with the authorities, you being a former officer and all," Sims said. "Our expertise may indeed be helpful."
"Do you have any guesses who might be involved?" I said, looking at Ashley, who was the only one who hadn't spoken.
"If we knowed who it was, we'd of taken care of it already our ownself," Brown said, reaching down for the bottle.
"A lot of work has gone into protecting the traditions of these Everglades, Mr. Freeman," Sims said. "Something like this can do more damage than good."
Brown was filling glasses but I put a hand over mine.
"I'm not sure that I have the kind of access to the people investigating this that Gunther thinks I do," I said. "But I'm sure anything you might offer could easily be passed along."
The table went silent for several seconds. I had played snitches and informants and hustlers too many times not to see that we had hit a delicate moment. These men too had tracked and hunted and waited patiently with lures and bait too many times to jump before they were ready. I waited a few more calculated seconds before standing up. A chorus of scraping chairs joined me.
"Well, Mr. Gunther obviously knows how to reach me."
As I walked through the room, rag woman watched me from behind the bar where my change from the single beer lay untouched. I tipped my head as I passed her and I swear she tried to smile.
When I got outside the western sky was streaked in purple and red and the remains of a rain shower was dripping off the porch roof. The big boy's truck was gone, but as I walked across the lot I could see they hadn't left easy.
The passenger side of my front windshield was smashed, a spiderweb of fissures running out from a deep divot in the middle. Three separate scratches ran down the driver's side from the front cowling to the tailgate. I figured the only reason they didn't bust out the headlights was so I could find my way out of their part of the world.
CHAPTER 16
I waited until I was back on the Tamiami Trail and then called Billy, giving him a brief description of my meeting with the Loop Road group. I left out the encounter with the welcoming committee. I gave him the names of the four men at the table, knowing he could not resist his natural inquisitiveness.
Driving east into Miami, headlights and overhead streetlights flashed and splintered through my broken windshield and hampered my view of the skyline after dark. When I got up onto the interstate, I could see a curving neon light that snaked through the city, an artistic addition to the Metrorail line. The Centrust Building stood bathed in teal spotlights, a tribute to the Florida Marlins baseball team. Against the blackness of Biscayne Bay, the lights in the high-rise towers took on the look of manmade constellations. The contrast to the weathered pine of the Loop Road Hotel was not lost on me.
When I got back to Billy's apartment he was waiting for me with a fresh pot of coffee, a take-out order of jerk chicken and black beans and rice, and a sheaf of computer printouts, dossiers he called them, on Brown, Sims, Blackman and Ashley. He also had company.
He was on the patio with a woman he introduced as Dianne McIntyre, "a lawyer w-with an office in the s-same b-building as mine."
She was as tall as Billy and had a swimmer's figure, broad shoulders and narrow hips, and was dressed expensively in a pure silk blouse and a charcoal skirt. She was comfortable enough to have taken off her heels and was padding about in stockings.
As I ate at the counter they stood in the kitchen area, sharing a bottle of wine. When I looked up Billy was staring at me.
"W-What happened to your face?"
I self-consciously touched the swollen cheekbone.
"Door," I said.
The woman raised one of her fine dark eyebrows and indelicately probed at a molar with her tongue. Billy accepted my reticence and picked up the first page of the stack of papers.
"Dianne actually kn-knows this f-fellow Sims. S-She worked w-with him on an environmental case."
I could tell how hard Billy was trying to control his stutter and it made me anxious for him. But the woman seemed completely inured.
"It was several years ago in a dispute between a very influential developer who wanted to build some kind of mega sports complex in an area of the Everglades that had never been touched," she said, turning the wineglass in her hands. "Sims had been working with the naturalists and environmental groups for years and had marshaled some fairly strong support against the project. One of the shrewdest things he'd done was elicit the favor of the old Gladesmen by convincing them that their way of life would be threatened as much as the flora and wildlife of the area."
"N-No doubt men l-like your Mr. Brown," Billy said, leafing through the stack of papers.
"Apparently things got ugly and some of the developer's backroom people allegedly threatened Sims," McIntyre continued. "Shortly after, handmade posters started showing up at the public fishing ramps and even in some outlying suburban stores that if anyone harmed Sims, those responsible would be gutted and fed to the gators."
The attorney again seemed unruffled by the circumstances. Neither shocked nor amused. Just the facts, ma'am. I watched her closely.
"The project finally died and Sims seemed to move away from the mainstream. I haven't heard much about him for the last few years." When she finished, she sipped again at her wine.
Nate Brown's was a story in itself, much of it untold.
Billy had found some archived newspaper clippings and legal transcripts online that shed a little light on the wizened old man who could back down three pumped-up thugs with only the slightest flick of his Loop Road respect.