A Hard Death (8 page)

A
fter pushing the dog out of his cabin, Jenner walked through the parking lot; Rudge's Taurus was still there, parked under the slash pines. Rudge had the driver's seat down; in the moonlight, Jenner could make out the round white billow of the detective's shirt as it rose and fell with his breathing. As he got closer, he heard ghastly, throat-plowing snores, and decided to let the man sleep. He walked on to his own car, feeling vaguely noble, and then sorry for himself and his aching head—and face and hand.

He stopped at the 24-Hour Super Wal-Mart. At the ATM, he cleaned out his checking account, and then bought a pair of waders and a flashlight. He pounded down a cup of black coffee at the Dunkin' Donuts counter, and when that kicked in, walked the bright space until he found the bug spray. As he was passing the ammo counter, it occurred to him that he'd left his gun at the motel; too late to go back. He picked up a gallon jug of water from a stand near the cash register.

As Jenner drove north up I-55, Port Fontaine gradually faded away. The housing developments, hidden behind tonsured bushes and landscaped terraces, grew farther apart, then the McDonald's and Waffle Houses and Taco Bells died out, and soon he was driving through the night, the Gulf somewhere off to his left, the Everglades to his right. The moon, low in a cloud-streaked maroon sky, flooded the low expanse of grass and scattered islands of gnarled trees choking in undergrowth. In the silver light, the dark trees were sharp-edged and vivid, shapes of cypress and palm punched out of tin and stuck into the marshy ground.

He rolled down the window, felt the air stream against his face, warm and humid. He was sober now. Mostly sober.

He rolled the window back up and turned on the radio, skipping
across evangelical talk radio and Golden Oldies and Latin music until the twanging sitar of Tom Petty's “Don't Come Around Here No More” welled out of the speakers. He sang along a few lines, even turned it up, but his head throbbed, so he turned the radio off and watched the road in silence, feeling the onrushing ribbon of floodlit asphalt disappear under his hood, the trees and bushes whip past.

Half an hour out of Port Fontaine, Jenner sailed past High Lock Road, braking too late for the turning. The highway was empty, so he reversed slowly along the shoulder and took the turn. For a while he drove through orange groves, the land on either side carved into slabs by drainage canals, each block filled with hundreds of rows of low, dark citrus trees, thousands upon thousands of them. He drove through the groves for about five minutes before he saw high fencing that marked the line where the reclaimed farm land stopped and the marsh began; a Department of Parks and Fisheries sign identified the land beyond as part of the Everglades National Park.

There was a bump, and the road abruptly turned to gravel. He rolled forward slowly, headlights flaring the rising clouds of dust. On either side, scrubby bushes pressed in on the road, and beyond the arc of his high beams Jenner could see nothing, just immense darkness.

He ran out of road. The roadway ended in a small turning oval, a low black-and-white-striped metal retaining barrier protecting vehicles from a foot and a half drop down into the River of Grass. Jenner slowed to a stop, heard the crunch of the gravel under his tires.

He peered into the night, but couldn't see much beyond the barrier in the glare of reflected light. He turned his headlights off, and was plunged into darkness.

The heat soaked him as he climbed out of the car, swallowing him, immediately wet on his air-conditioned skin. He walked to the metal barrier, sat, and stared out into the darkness. The moon slipped from behind its wreath of cloud, and light poured across the flooded plain. The Glades had never seemed so vast, the thousands of acres of saw grass stretching out like an unfurled blanket, bare-trunked cypress and royal palms, thickets of live oak and bustic scattered across it like abandoned toys.

A few years back, Jenner, visiting from New York, had gone out with Marty on an airboat to recover three victims from a single-engine plane crash. The park ranger who led them to the crash site had explained to Jenner that what looked like a grassy prairie was not solid at all, but a cloak of pale yellow sedge covering a huge, slow-flowing river; under the grass, the water was always moving, sliding down the infinitely gentle slope to the sea. And Jenner had learned that, while the blades of the saw grass seemed lush and thick, they were literally blades, their sawtoothed edges capable of cutting clothing and flesh.

As he looked into the marsh, Jenner remembered something else about the crash: while he and Marty had waded over to the crumpled Cessna, one of the deputies had stayed on the airboat, sitting in the high driver's chair, binoculars hung around his neck, cradling a carbine. With a grin, Marty told Jenner he was looking out for alligators, which, with their thick skin, thrived in the dense mesh of razor-sharp grass.

As he stared out toward the horizon, Jenner tried to remember what the park ranger had said about how to spot an alligator nest.

There was movement out over the water. No, not movement, but a white light in the distance.

It was gone.

Jenner stared, squinting.

And then it blinked again. Jenner stood, concentrating, until his eye found the light. It was a flashing signal, almost invisible in the undergrowth of a large hammock maybe a quarter-mile out into the marsh.

So, no hoax, then. Weiss wasn't lying about the bodies.

Christ. Why hadn't he woken Rudge?

He checked his cell phone. No signal.

Jenner went back to the car, pulled out the big white Wal-Mart bag, and dumped his purchases onto the backseat. He sprayed himself with insecticide until his clothes were sodden. He wasn't sure if the waders went over clothes, or if he was supposed to get rid of his pants to get in the waders.

He decided to keep his pants on, even if that wasn't right. Earlier that week, he'd listened to state troopers swapping snake stories. Rattlers,
they said, didn't take you by surprise—the sound let you know you were dealing with a rattler. It was the cottonmouths that scared the hell out of them. Cottonmouths would charge you, would come slithering right at you once they got your scent. And they were incredibly fast, and they just kept on coming. And once you got bitten by a cottonmouth, you died slow, the flesh of the bitten limb blistering and oozing, your blood rotting in your veins before the coma took you away.

Jenner looked back out to the hammock. It looked like a long walk.

A
t first, he made pretty good time. The sedge was compact and springy; he'd heard it had been a pretty dry season, and he wondered if the irrigation pumps dropped the water level near the fields. But as he continued, it got wetter, and Jenner found himself slowing, each footstep sinking deeper into the thick mat of grass and mud.

Soon, he had to lean into his step, the marsh sucking at his feet and ankles as he clambered forward, struggling to keep his scene bag up out of the damp. The Miccosukee and Seminole had lived in the Glades for centuries, but they had to know their way, had to have had trails through. And they did it during daylight, without twenty pounds of camera equipment and swabs and tape lifts.

Most of all, he thought glumly, the Miccosukee could tell a clump of bushes from an alligator nest.

Jenner stopped, the sweat pouring down his face, his shirt soaked, the rubber waders keeping in as much moisture as they kept out. Now the insects caught up with him; despite his chemical reek, the air around him was suddenly furred with tiny gnats. Swatting them away was pointless—more insects instantly gushed back into the bug vacuum he'd just created.

He gulped down water; the gallon jug seemed heavier with each pace. But ahead, the flashing signal looked brighter.

Then he heard a slow, dry rustling somewhere to his left, the noise of something large moving through undergrowth. He jerked his torch beam around, but saw nothing in the dense knot of bushes covering the low mound.

Jenner pushed forward faster now, and behind him he heard the quiet splash of something slipping into the water.

He didn't wait to see what it was, just kept going, heading toward the hammock. The water was deeper now, sometimes reaching his knees; he splashed through it loudly, hoping the commotion would drive away anything that might find him interesting.

Now the hammock loomed over him, a hulking black shadow, a ghost ship at anchor. He shone the torch ahead and saw that the banks rounded up to a solid wall of undergrowth, a dense tangle of vegetation that blocked any sight of the interior, the tree canopy overhead thick and dark. But he could see the signal clearly now, and it was bright.

How had they made their way to the island to set up the signal? Boat, airboat? A swamp buggy seemed unlikely—he doubted Weiss's contacts would do anything that flashy if they were, in fact, illegals. Or that expensive. Beyond the bushes, toward the far side of the island, Jenner could make out a slough or a small channel, standing water probably deep enough for a canoe or an outboard.

Nearing the hammock, he saw small gaps in the thick mesh of plants that surrounded it, areas of exposed mud where some animal had slid off into the water.

Jenner was close enough now to see that the signal was a bicycle safety light, its strap Velcroed to a thin tree trunk. He grabbed the trunk with relief, and tried to pull himself up to land. But he slipped, and struggled for a second on the steep incline, his waders smearing across the slick mud as he fought to drag himself onto the drier land. He rolled up onto the edge of the hammock, swinging the bag across his chest and into the bushes.

He lay there panting, chest heaving, sweaty and filthy.

And then he smelled it, that familiar stench, the nauseatingly sweet fog rolling in under the reek of brackish mud and swamp grass.

No. Weiss hadn't been lying about the bodies.

J
enner stood in the mud, peering into the hammock as he tried not to slip back down into the sedge. Tangled undergrowth pressed all the way to the banks, the entire island packed tight as a bird's nest. In an hour or so, the dawn light would help, but he couldn't keep his footing on the bank until then.

From the water behind him, he heard soft splashing, and in the gloom, he imagined a huge water moccasin writhing through the saw grass, coming at him like a heat-seeking missile.

Time to go in.

There was a tentative spatter of rain, then a thick mist of tiny droplets ticked at the leaves and branches near him. The sound swelled quickly to a rattling roar, the drops striking him hard, flowing down his face, washing the mud from his skin. He held his face up, then his hands, the raindrops pressing into his palms like cold, tiny fingers.

Off to the east, lightning flared the sky purple, each flash illuminating the endless expanse of marsh, the grass garish green-yellow, the naked trunks bleached white, the slate-gray water shirred silver by the driving rain.

Jenner leaned over to get the bicycle light, then thought better of it; fingerprints. He turned slightly, stretched his right leg out into the undergrowth, then wedged himself into the thicket, pushing between two slender trees, the branches poking and scraping as he eased forward, crushing the plants at his feet.

Within a couple of yards, the vegetation thinned, and he moved more easily. A little farther and he entered more open space. He wrestled his scene bag through the gap behind him, then shone his flashlight.

The narrow beam fell off sharply in the gloom, but Jenner found himself surrounded by old-growth mahogany and gumbo-limbo, the trees almost completely hidden by the writhing, choking strangler figs coiling around them, their wet trunks black and glistening in his light. The ground was damp, slippery with moss, but firm. High overhead, the canopy hid the sky but let the rain pass.

He lifted his small MagLite, the thin beam feeble in the black. The pinpoint of white hovered and bounced across trunks and saplings as he moved forward into the grove, scanning the mud and the moss, searching for the curve of a head, the sharp angle of a bent arm, the contour of a shod foot. Inside the hammock, the smell of wet, dark earth competed with the odor of putrefaction.

Jenner reached the center of the hammock; he'd found nothing. Perhaps he should be looking for the turned-earth hillock of a fresh grave, a low mound of dirt covering something rotten. Half-covering, more like—the reek of decay was too strong for a completely buried body. Maybe something had dug up the corpse.

Not too long and it would be light. How much light would break through the branches and leaves to reach the hammock floor? It was cooler inside the hammock, almost cold.

A rusty metal chair.

He moved the light. Two rust-pocked metal chairs, folded, leaning against the foot of a big mahogany.

He stepped toward the tree, and his light leaped up, jumping over four dangling legs, hanging in the dark. He stepped back quickly in surprise.

The bodies are on fire.

They swam before Jenner's eyes, brilliant orange and smoke-black in the flashlight glare. But there was no flame, no smoke, no smell of burning: as he drew close, Jenner saw the bodies were covered by thousands of small, tiger-striped snails, thousands of glistening orange-and-black shells swarming over the torsos, coating the heads and arms, dripping in clumped orange gouts to the moss beneath. A million eyes staring back at him; a low breeze shifted the body and the
slight sway refracted the flashlight's beam, turning each cadaver into a twisting column of fire.

The bodies hung back to back, so close that they seemed to form a four-legged creature. Jenner let the beam play over the first body, then up the snail-encrusted rope. He followed its loop around the branch, and back down to the second body, where it disappeared under the grotesquely tilted neck.

The two men had been hanged together, the weight of each body used to strangle the other across the fulcrum of the branch.

And they had to have been killed—this wasn't suicide. He'd seen a dual-suicide hanging before, a pact where twin brothers had hanged themselves neck-to-neck over a door. But it was vanishingly rare, and if they had killed themselves, who'd folded the chairs and stacked them against the tree afterward?

From their size, build, and clothing, both victims were men. Between the snails and the putrefaction, Jenner couldn't form an impression of age or race; they looked neither particularly old nor particularly young. The wrists were not tied—how had the killers immobilized the men to string them up? It would have taken more than one attacker, probably several, to do it—to corral the two victims, lead them to the site, wrestle them down, tie the rope, loop it around the branch, get the men onto the chairs, then push them off. Even at gunpoint, the killers' intentions would've been quickly obvious, and the victims would've fought back.

The two folding chairs were generic; they could have come from any church basement or school auditorium. They were rusty—how long had they been out here?

Jenner looked back at the bodies. The rain had picked up again, spitting through the canopy and down into the dark emerald moss.

Both men were pretty putrefied; it had been hot in Douglas County, so they would have rotted quickly. Then again, they had hung in the shade cast by the woven branches of a hundred trees; even at night, it was cooler in the heart of the hammock than out on the sedge.

Jenner would have a clearer idea when he saw the bodies up close, in good light, but he figured they'd been there a good week or two.

So why were the chairs rusty? Even with the rain and humidity, two weeks wasn't very long.

He walked toward the other end of the hammock, looking for the point where the men had come ashore—there had to be some kind of entrance, some place to land a boat where a group of men wouldn't have had to fight through the undergrowth.

The clearing narrowed, and the trees and undergrowth pressed in again, but Jenner could still make out a muddy path leading through the dense bushes at the edge. He kept going, keeping off the path in case there were salvageable footprints.

He stopped, unsure why. He hadn't seen a motion, or a flash of color, hadn't heard a noise, at least not consciously, but something had made him stop.

He turned slowly back to the clearing and shone his flashlight once more over the bushes and trees.

As Jenner swung the beam up, his flashlight lit up two more hanging bodies; these had been suspended much higher off the ground, the feet drooping down to the level of his head. This pair had been reduced almost to skeletons, the floating shapes slathered with snails, a coating of bright orange and black that clung like candle wax drippings to the clothes sagging from the emerging bones.

There was a low drumming sound above him, and then again the roar of rain, and the leaves bowed and spread, and the water spattered down and flowed through the canopy to collect into slender waterfalls, which poured down into the clearing, glittering like silver ropes in his flashlight.

Jenner shone the beam up, then back at the other two victims. He walked the length of the hammock carefully, methodically scanning the branches for other bodies hanging in the orchard of death.

He found no more. He walked back to the center of the clearing and stood still, looking back and forth between the two pairs of murdered men. Standing alone there in the silence, in the stillness and the cool,
the smell of dark earth and crushed plants and decaying bodies pressing against his skin, Jenner felt as if Death had sidled up beside him to whisper in his ear.

He laughed out loud at himself, the sound of his voice feeble and hollow under the spattering rain. But even though the first light of day would soon be edging onto the island, Jenner suddenly realized he was afraid to turn off his flashlight.