Claw Back (Louis Kincaid) (9 page)

“Sure.”

“What clan do you belong to?”

She hesitated.
“Snake.”

“Not my first guess,” he said.

She gave him an odd smile and jammed the truck into drive, pulling out of the yard.

Louis watched until the tail lights disappeared down Captiva Drive then went back into the cottage.
Issy
was waiting by her empty bowl in the kitchen. He poured a bag of Tender Vittles into her bowl and sat at the counter, watching her as she ate.

When she was finished, he picked her up, grabbed a fresh beer and went back to the porch. There he
sat,
watching the silver curtain of rain move in from Gulf and stroking
Issy’s
thinning fur.

CH
APTER NINE

             
The thing was lying in the middle of the road.

             
At first Louis thought it was a big log but
after
he
slowly moved the Jeep
ahead
, he hit the brakes hard.

             
Alligator.
It was a
damn
alligator.

             
It was at least twelve feet long and it was sprawled straight across the width of the dirt road.

             
Louis inched closer until the fat tires were almost touching the thing. It didn’t move.

             
Louis stood up in the seat and scanned the sides of the road but the brush was too thick and soggy so there was no way to turn around. And by his calculations he had left the paved road at least five miles back so he wasn’t about to go back all that way in reverse.

             
He had been out here for almost two hours already, driving around in circles in the open vehicle. He had a headache from the sun baking his head and his kidneys felt like they were going to fall out from all the jostling. He wasn’t sure he was even on the right road.

             
He looked back
at
the gator and laid hard on the horn.

             
The thing still didn’t
budge
.
Didn’t even move a
slitted
eye in his direction.

             
Fuck!

             
He looked in the back for something he could throw.
Nothing but a big empty Coleman cooler.
He had a water bottle but he wasn’t about to sacrifice that.
There was probably a jack and crowbar somewhere but he’d be damned if he was going to get out and look. He glanced down at the holster on the passenger seat. With one eye on the gator, he slipped out the
Glock
, pointed it at the dirt and fired.

             
The alligator gave a loud hiss and slithered off into the brush.

             
Louis holstered the
Glock
, sat back down behind the wheel and continued down the rutted dirt road.

             
This trip had seemed like a good idea this morning
when he went
into the station to pick up the four-wheel drive Mobley had promised him.

             
The cop manning the desk in the garage was named Sergeant Sweet, but he had given Louis the same sour look all the cops
had been giving him.
The rogue PI, riding his way into the department on an EEOC horse.
That’s what they all thought.
Sweet
asked Louis
if
he
was “working the panther thing.”

             
When Louis said he was, the sergeant said his ten-year-old daughter had started a petition in her class to get the
Florida
panther named the state animal and she was sad about the
one that had gone
missing.

             
“Find the damn cat,” the sergeant said. “I don’t want to have to tell my kid the thing is dead.” 

             
Then he
handed over the keys to a souped-up Jeep that had been commandeered from a drug raid and
told Louis that he should check out “the
weirdos
out in the swamp camps.”

There were hundreds of hunting camps on private land in the
Everglades
, the sergeant explained. After the federal government created the preserves in the seventies, the camps were grandfathered in and a handful still existed, handed down from one generation to the next.  

             
Most were down south of I-75 but there was one just a few miles from where Grace had disappeared, the sergeant said. It was called Hell’s Hammock.

             
Be careful,
he
added, they’re all mouth-breathers who love their guns and hate the government. And that includes anyone wearing a badge.

             
Louis hadn’t
told anyone else where he was going. He hadn’t
even called Katy.

             
It wasn’t just the fact that the
swamp camp men were bound to be hostile to a strange black man
let alone a
woman ranger
. He was shutting her out for now because this was his world – going after
dirt bags
in a possibly dangerous situation. She didn’t belong here.

             
He would tell her later. His plan right now was simple:
j
ust quietly look around and check these guys out.

             
If he could find them.

             
Sergeant
Sweet
wasn’t sure exactly where Hell’s Hammock was. The directions were vague, just landmarks mainly. About halfway across I-75, he was supposed to watch for a gravel service road just past the first rest stop. Louis had found the road but deep into a jungle of palmetto palms it began to narrow. The brush created a tunnel so thick and close Louis had to shift in the seat toward
the
middle to keep from getting scraped.

             
The road forked and dead-ended a couple times, forcing Louis to back up and look for landmarks he had missed. The
sergeant
had said to watch for an American flag tied to a tree and turn left
,
but the only thing hanging from trees out here was Spanish moss.

             
Damn
.
Another
dead-end
.
And this one looked like he wasn’t even going to be able to back out. He glanced down at the police radio on the seat but
the signal had died miles ago.

             
He downshifted and eased the Jeep forward. There was a patch of sunlight ahead. And a tatter of a faded old flag hanging limp from a tree.

             
After a left turn, the thicke
t opened into a small clearing.
He went another twenty yards then stopped, taking stock. There were three buildings, crudely made from plywood and topped with tin roofs. The largest of the three had small windows covered with shutters and a sagging porch. The other two buildings were small, probably a storage shed and an outhouse. There were no vehicles of any kind to be seen.

             
And no sign of a human being.

             
Except...the front door of the main building was wide open.

             
Louis turned off the Jeep. In the quiet that piled in he could hear the whisper of the pines that ringed the compound and then the cry of a swallow-tail kite.

             
Maybe the men were out hunting. He got out of the Jeep, scanning the ground for tracks but saw nothing in the dirt and long grass. In fact, except for the open door, the camp looked deserted.

             
He had a sudden flashback to walking into another camp. It was years ago and thousands of miles away. Northern Michigan,
in
the dead of winter, and he was hunting a cop killer. The trail had led him to a remote camp inhabited by off-the-grid Vietnam vets. A one-armed soldier named Cloverdale had held him at bay with an AK47, endured his questions
,
then
sent him back down the snowy hill with
a
warning never to come back.

             
Louis reached into the Jeep and got his
Glock
. He slipped it into the large front pocket of his khaki vest and zipped the pocket closed. If anyone was here, he thought as he started for the open door, he didn’t want them to think he was a cop. He’d be run off
– or worse -
before he ever got his first question out.

             
At the open door, he paused. As far as he could see in the dim interior, there was no one inside. It was one big room, maybe twenty-four by fifteen feet. He could make out the outlines of a table and chairs, some bunk beds and what looked like a primitive kitchen.

             
He stepped inside.

             
The door slammed closed behind him. Something hard and heavy came down on the back of his head. Stunned and seeing white, he fell forward. His hands skid over rough wood, his palms ripped with splinters.

             
“Hit him again, man! Hit him again!”

             
Louis tried to turn over but a boot slammed into his
back.
Then again into his shoulder and a third time into the back of his head.
His hands flew up to protect his head but suddenly someone was on him, punching him and groping at his pockets.

             
“Get his wallet! Get his fucking money!”

             
Louis started swinging, feeling his fists hit flesh but the man on top of him didn’t budge.

             
It was getting hard to br
eathe and there was something -
blood - in his eyes. He felt the man’s hands roughly moving down his chest. They stopped when they got to the bulge of the
Glock
.

             
“He’s got a fucking gun!”

             
Louis grabbed at him, trying to keep him from getting to the
Glock
. The man punched him hard in the face. A flash of white light then he felt
himself
going out.
Flicking light and voices cutting in and out, like a bad radio connection.

             
Stay awake...stay
awake...

             
The man moved off him but Louis couldn’t move. He could barely breathe. There was a fire in his side and he knew his ribs were broken.   

             
“Look at this, it’s a fucking
Glock
. It’s
gotta
be worth five hundred easy.”

             
“Where we
gonna
sell it?
Tell me that, Memo!
We can’t go back to Lauderdale. We can’t go nowhere now after what you did.”

             
“The fucker wouldn’t give me the money!”

             
“He didn’t have any fucking money! It was already in the safe!”

             
Quiet. The voices were quiet for a second.

             
“Get his wallet.”

             
Louis tried to get up. He had to fight.
He had to -

             
“Don’t be stupid, man. I got your
Glock
pointed at your head.”

             
Crushing pressure of a boot on his back holding him down.
More hands digging into the back pocket of his
jeans
. 

             
“Got it.
He’s got thirteen bucks and a VISA card.”

             
“Check the other vest pockets for the Jeep keys,” the other man said.

             
The boot came off his back and one of the men rolled him onto his back.

             
Two faces blurry above him - one pale and long
,
the other dark and
round
. Ball caps, dirty t-shirts, jeans caked with mud. The dark man was padding him down and Louis fought back his rise of panic. If they found the badge he was a dead man.

             
“Got the keys.”
The man’s hands stopped. “
Hey, h
e’s got another wallet.”