Claw Back (Louis Kincaid) (11 page)

             
Louis followed the man out to one of the small outbuildings and waited until the man unearthed a heavy black trash bag. Louis opened it, grimaced at the smell, but dug through it until he found a butt.

             
He squinted, unable to see a brand name on it
without his reading glasses
. “You see a name?” he asked, holding it out the man.

             
The guy came took it.
“Viceroy.”

             
Louis let out a painful breath.

             
“That mean something?” the man asked.

             
“Maybe.
The guy who abducted the panther smokes Viceroys.”

             
The man tossed the butt back in the trash and secured the lid. “Your ribs broken?” he asked Louis.

             
“I hope not.”

             
“Well, we better get you someplace where we can find out.”

             
Louis nodded and they started toward the swamp buggy. The seat was a good four feet off the ground and when Louis hesitated, holding his side, the man set his rifle in the back and helped Louis up into the seat.

             
“Thanks.” Louis paused. “What’s your name?”

             
“Gary. Gary Trujillo.”

             
“Thanks, Gary.”

             
The man jumped into the driver’s seat and started the engine. The swamp buggy roared to life. Louis spotted a CB radio mounted on the dash.

             
“I need to get an APB out on the guys from Lauderdale,” he said. “Can I use your radio?”

             
Gary pulled sunglasses out of his pocket and slipped them on. “You get a good look at the scumbags?”

             
“Yeah,” Louis said. He gave Gary a quick description.

             
Gary keyed the CB, calling someone named
Otter
. Louis listened as Gary described the two men who had violated their hunting camp and ordered a swamp buggy posse to hunt them down.

             
“We got it,
Tru
,”
Otter
answered and signed off.

             
Gary put the swamp buggy in gear but before he pulled out he looked at Louis.

             
“We’ll find the guys who did this to you,” Gary said. “I only want one thing in return.”

             
“What’s that?”

             
“No publicity. We just want to be left alone, okay?”

             
Gary pulled out of the compound. Neither man said anything as Gary expertly maneuvered the buggy over the rutted roads. Louis sat silent, holding his ribs against the bouncing, thinking about what was going to happen if one of Gary’s friends found the two men who had jumped him.

             
He didn’t care. Marv and his little friend
Memo
had done something over in Lauderdale that was bad enough to drive them into the stinking bowels of the Everglades. And he knew that when the two dirt
bags were caught –- and as Louis looked over at Gary’s profile he had no doubt they would be
-
– Louis would get the credit for the collar of two fugitives.

             
“Gary,” Louis shouted over the engine’s din.

             
“What?”

“I can try to keep you and
Otter
out of things, but what if
the scumbags
talk
a
bout you?”

             
Gary gave him a crooked smile. “Don’t worry. They won’t.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“Four days, Kincaid,” Mobley said. “Four days and already you’ve managed to get your name in the paper.”

Louis looked beyond Mobley to the window, to the cloudless blue sky with its searing white sun. There was no way he could explain what had really happened out at the hunting camp. It was like something out of a James Dickey novel.

Marv had done exactly what Gary predicted: found the westward road that was paved enough to lull Marv into thinking he was on his way to
Immokalee
where he’d be able to fill his belly with beer and his head with hopes of making a clean getaway.

But Old Bucket Road
was
one of those roads Louis had gotte
n
turned around on coming in. He had almost ended up in a ditch of black water and needed to slowly reverse his way out. Sure enough, that was where
Otter
had found the Jeep, only Marv had been too stupid to try to back up and had driven the Jeep door-high into a gator hole. When
Otter
and the other men surrounded the Jeep with rifles drawn, Marv and Memo -– covered with mosquito welts and fear-sweat -- had surrendered without a fight. By the time Gary and Louis arrived, the dirt
bags were tied
to
a tree and
Otter
had pulled the Jeep from the bog. Louis’s
Glock
was laying on the driver’s seat.

“Remember our deal,” Gary said
. And
he and the others were gone in a cloud of noise and gas fumes.

As soon as Louis was able to get radio contact driving back to Fort Myers, he informed the sheriff’s dispatcher that he was en route with two fugitives from Fort Lauderdale. He made sure he used the frequency the local reporters monitored because even though he didn’t really want the publicity he needed it.
Needed everyone
, not just Mobley,
to see this notch his belt
.

A WINK
news truck was sitting in the sheriff’s lot when
Louis
shoved the handcuffed Marv and Memo through the station door
s
. The story about a local PI, working for the sheriff’s department, busting two fugitives who had robbed a 7-Eleven and sent the clerk to the hospital with a ruptured spleen was a big story on slow news day. By morning the papers had the story.

And
this morning,
when Louis walked in the station on his way to Mobley’s office, for the first time the cops he passed gave him a nod of acceptance.

Louis looked from the window back to Mobley. It was hard not to smile.

“I don’t believe you got me into something like this,” Mobley said, tossing the
News-Press
to the desk.
“Who the fuck is going to believe this crap?”

“Look, sheriff, I told you the truth about what happened, but I don’t think you really want the truth out there,” Louis said. “They’ll ridicule you over this whole lost cat thing and this good PR will go away.”

Mobley ran a hand through his hair and turned his chair toward the window. Louis stayed standing, his gaze drifting to the newspaper. He hadn’t mentioned something else to Mobley, a story he had read in the same paper while he waiting for Mobley to come in. An article on the upcoming EEOC civil trial Lee County was facing in federal court. Worse, there were whispers
of a recall election for the sheriff in the wind at O’Sullivan
’
s.

Mobley spoke without turning his chair. “Goddamn, you’re a pain in my ass.”

“We still got a deal?”

Mobley
swung
his chair around and gave Louis a long look. “Yeah,” he said. “But now you need to bump these fucking Lauderdale shitheads out
of
the news cycle before some reporter starts digging deeper. You need to find me that cat.”

“I’m working on it.”

“You got any leads?”

“
M
aybe,” Louis said. “The hunter told me there was a fellow hanging around the camp
.
He didn’t get a good look at him but he said he was dark skinned with long black hair.”

“That’s it?”

“No, we found pack of cigarettes
at Grace’s crime site and I’m hopi
ng to get prints off the
cellophane
,
but the lab’s taking its time.
The
cigarettes were purchased on the reservation.”

“No tax stamp.”

“Right.”

“So, you’re linking the smokes with this guy with the long black hair and thinking you might have a Seminole for a perp.”

“There’s
another
connection
,
” Louis said. “The Seminoles believe the panther is the Creator’s favorite animal and endowed with special powers --”

“Spare me the Jungle Book shit,” Mobley said. “What you’re telling me is that you want to take a trip to the
rez
and ask around about some weirdo who wanders the Glades and might be stealing the panthers, even though the damn cats are sacred to his tribe?”

“Yes, sir.”

Mobley sighed. “Do you know how unwelcome we are there?”

“Yes.”

“And you realize that even if the cat-
napper
pops out of a teepee with the damn cat on a leash, you have no authority there to arrest him
?
”

“I know that, too.”

“Then why are you going?”

“I just want to ask some questions,” Louis said. “I believe that if the panthers are as special as I’ve been told, I might get someone to talk to me.”

Mobley was quiet, his eyes drifting to the newspapers before they came back to Louis. “Okay, but I want you to take an Indian with you.”

“Excuse me?” Louis asked.

“I said, I want you to take an Indian with you so you don’t get yourself shot or something,” Mobley said. “I have one down in the traffic division. I’ll call down and get him up here.”

“No thanks, sir.”

             
“Why the hell not?”

             
Louis paused, thinking of Katy. He had ignored her advice about the camps and got his ass kicked. Now he was about to ask her to help him go after one of her own people. No way
she
would
help.
But
there’s was
no way could he do this without her.

“I have my own Indian, sir,” Louis said.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The smell wasn’t strong but it was
enough to take him back decades. Suddenly, he was
eleven years old
again
and staring at a lion.

             
It was a very old lion but a lion nonetheless and he had been scared, hiding behind
his foster father
Phillip’s leg. It was his first trip to the Detroit Zoo and the smell of the lion house was heavy in his nostrils, like nothing he had ever smelled before, like nothing he would ever smell again.

             
Until now.

             
Louis stood at the entrance of the room, his eyes roaming over the line of large cages to his left. All four were occupied by panthers, two lying down,
two
pacing. He wondered which one was Bruce but there were only numbers on the paperwork hanging on each cage and he couldn’t remember Bruce’s.

             
A door banged open at the far end and Katy came toward him. She was wearing a plastic apron over her uniform and a look of derision on her face.

             
She stopped before him, hands on hips. “You should have called me,” she said.

             
“I know. Did you see it on TV?”

             
“No, Gary called me not long after he left you.” She shook her head. “What the hell were you thinking going out there alone?”

             
“Look, Katy, I had reason to believe those guys at the hunting camps –-”

             
“No you didn’t!” She took a deep breath. “Those guys would never hurt a cat,” she said. “They hunt, yeah, and they’re a little off the grid, yeah. But they know more about the Glades and
care
more about the Glades and the animals there than any half-assed tree-hugger. Gary and his guys helped us get the panthers declared endangered, for God’s sake.”

             
She fell quiet. Louis noticed the two panthers had stopped pacing and were watching her.

“I’m sorry,” Louis said
. “I made an assumption about –
”

             
“Yeah, cops tend to do that a lot about people they don’t know.”

             
“I’m not a cop, Katy.”

             
She was quiet. He was wondering how he was going to bring up going to the reservation. Wasn’t that another assumption about people he didn’t know much about?

             
“How’s Bruce doing?” he asked finally.

             
“Come see for yourself.” She led him to the last cage. Bruce was lying in the corner, his back leg splinted. The cat raised his big head to look at Louis then put it down again, closing his eyes.

             
“Is he okay?”

             
“Turned out
it’s
just a bad sprain,” Katy said. “But he’s depressed. He wants to get out of here and go home.”

             
Louis thought of his six hours in the emergency room last night waiting for the pimple-faced intern to send him on his way with a pain prescription and the pronouncement that there was no cure for his two bruised ribs except rest.

             
“I know how he feels,” Louis said.

             
Katy looked up at him, eyeing his swollen lip. “Gary says they roughed you up pretty good.”

             
Louis just nodded.

             
“You’re damn lucky Gary came by.”

             
Louis nodded again.

             
Katy let out a sigh and waved a hand. “Come on. Let’s go to my office and talk about where we’re going next.”

             
Her office was a corner of a cramped room with file cabinets, four desks – all vacant right now – and walls covered with maps, photographs, and notices about the panther conservation program. One bulletin board showed photographs of school kids posing with a panther and the kids’ hand-written notes and drawings of cats.

             
Katy moved a pile of files and motioned for Louis to take the chair next to her desk. She scanned a stack of message slips, tossed them down and swiveled her chair to face Louis.

             
“So what’s our next step?”

             
Louis pulled in a breath so deep it hurt his ribs. “You aren’t going to like it.”

             
“I want Grace back. Try me.”

             
Louis told her what Gary had said about the man breaking into the camp, adding the detail about the cigarettes with no tax stamp and the physical description Gary had provided. He watched her expression go from comprehension to a sort of weary sadness.

             
“You aren’t thinking of going out to the
rez
alone, are you?” she asked.