Endangered Species (33 page)

The sameness had struck her as tedious.  After countless forays up and

down this stretch of coast, she'd come to know its ways: where the

alligators liked to come down to fish the tide pools, the paths that

snaked out from the woods where cabins or camps once existed, dunes that

hid lush interdune meadows where horses and deer grazed, a rise of earth

held in place by oat grass where the loggerheads had laid their eggs and

where every day Marty Schlessinger checked her precious treasure, each

hoard marked on a map and jealously guarded from harm.

South of the nesting ground a wrinkle of sand beckoned and Anna parked

the pumper behind its sheltering crest, safe from view either by land or

by sea.  Keeping to the valleys between the dunes, she made her way

toward the woods.  In her pack she carried water and a flashlight.  A

compass was in her pocket.  The need to stay close to the truck in case

there was a fire call-out, coupled with heat, ticks, and general

lethargy, had kept Anna from exploring this four-mile-square chunk of

official wilderness in the heart of the park.  From the maps, she knew

it was free of private lands, roads, inholdings, campgrounds, trails, or

any other form of "improvement" that might hamper its wilderness status.

Having been religiously protected from the cleansing qualities of

wildland fire, the area was dense with palmetto, oak, and pine.  Robbed

of sunlight by the forest canopy, it allowed little else to grow.

According to the topographical map Wayne and Shorty had used to plot the

location of the wrecked Beech, the plane had gone in a mile south and

I.7 miles east of the loggerhead nesting ground.  An educated guess put

Hanson and his grader slightly further north, almost on a straight

east-west line with the nest sites, near where Shawna estimated they

were when Guenther was shot.

As soon as she reached the cover of the woods, Anna walked north along

the tree line, keeping a practiced eye on the dunes .

When she reached the place just inland from the turtles' nests, she

pulled out her compass.  The forest closed overhead and she waited for

her eyes to adjust.  Live oak branches, grown wide in their search for

light and air, created a living ceiling, but such was the spread of the

branches that enough light trickled down so that, with care, Anna could

make her way with only occasional assistance from her flashlight.

Her estimate of an hour's outing had been overly optimistic .

Burdened as she was by the need to move silently and without light,

circumnavigating thickets of palmetto and stands of pine, the mile she

had to walk took on the dimensions of a serious cross-country hike.

Still, if it hadn't been for the mosquitoes, she would have enjoyed

herself.  The dark, the stealth, the knowledge that she was the hunter

and not the hunted, gave her a sense of power and freedom.  She thought

of Hanson and his pig rifle, of hunters out for sheep and elk and deer,

and wondered that they could find this same thrill with such helpless

prey in their sights.

Complying as rigidly to her westward heading as the vagaries of nature

would allow, she eventually reached the clearing she knew had to be

there.  When strung together, hints as to its existence had formed a

compelling picture.  Hanson had evicted Dot and Mona from Stafford's

basement so he could store fertilizer, weed killer, and PVC pipe there.

On the edge of Lake Whitney, the only reliable freshwater source on this

end of the island, was a line straight as a die.  Guenther had been shot

but had neither seen nor heard his assailant.  Days later Hanson was

"removing something from earth and trees in the same part of the forest.

A marijuana field was the only explanation that fit all the facts .

The PVC pipe laid into Lake Whitney provided the needed water, the

hapless U.S.  taxpayers the fertilizer, the farmer's time, and

undoubtedly much of the equipment used in the cultivation and the

building of booby traps to scare off marauders-both accidental and those

intent on stealing the illegal crop.  It would have been one of these

traps the Austrian had stumbled into: a shotgun shell rigged to a

trigger device buried beneath the duff.  With the plane crash and the

shotgun incident focusing attention on this part of the island, Hanson

must have decided to remove his booby traps, begin to fold his tents

preparatory to slipping quietly into the night.  That was what he'd been

in the process of doing when Dijon and Anna had come upon him.

She secreted herself in shadow, a live oak between her and the moon, and

studied the operation ." Clearing" was too grandiose a term.  What lay

before her was more accurately an opening in the woods.  Trees were

scattered throughout-enough for camouflage, but widely spaced so

sunlight could make it down through the canopy to the plants.  For the

space of an irregular acre, planted in a hodgepodge so as not to call

attention to themselves from the air as a man-made cultivation, were

cannabis plants.  It looked as if Hanson had begun prudently.  There

were only ten or twelve mature plants and they'd been placed in careful

disarray, most snuggled up to a palmetto or tucked in a grove of

immature pines to disguise their nature from casual eyes and their

bolder green foliage from calling attention to itself from the air.

Hanson hadn't built any telltale structures.  He either carried the

tools he needed in with him each time or had them cleverly

cached-probably in a shallow underground bunker.

A plot this size-of sinsemilla, a prime strain-carefully husbanded and

harvested, would augment one's salary considerably.  At a guess, Anna

put the profit at about thirty thousand dollars annually.  If he kept it

on a small scale, Hanson probably could have gotten away with it for the

seven years until he could once again retire and pick up pension number

two.

Fortunately for law enforcement officers, enough is seldom enough.

Apparently Hanson was running true to form and getting greedy.  Dozens

of immature plants had been planted in the open areas between the mature

cannabis, quadrupling the size of the original plot, calling for more

pipe for water, more fertilizer, making booby traps a necessity, and

soon becoming obvious to low-flying aircraft.  When this many plants

matured, all but the most braindead pilot would question the dark green

cancer spreading ])Cneath the dusty gray of oak leaves.

Until Slattery Hammond started flying drug interdiction, Mitch's little

operation would have been fairly secure.  Had Hammond seen the plot?

Told Todd as the island's law enforcement ranger?  Was their last flight

the one in which he would show 'Fodd the plants?  'That seemed likely

enough.  As Alice Utterback said in the beginning, the job of drug

interdiction brought with it its own cadre of enemies.

Considering Slattery's less than spotless reputation, it wasn't too

great a leap of logic to picture him demanding a slice of the profits in

return for his silence.  Hanson, just absorbing the cost of expanding

his business, chose to add murder to his credit list rather than

blackmail to the debit column.  Or Hammond saw nothing, knew nothing,

and Belfore was the victim, the blackmailer, or both.

As Anna's mind opened to the possibilities, the details of the clearing

began to manifest themselves.  In the open area, a grassy place around a

single lightning-blasted oak, was a derelict hog pen, its weathered

boards falling together to form a ramshackle lean-to .

On either side of this structure, maybe twelve feet away, was a pile .

At first glance Anna took them for branches and other forest litter that

had been cleared away to make room for the new marijuana seedlings.

The careful way they'd been stacked, in neat bonfire cones, intrigued

her.  Ten minutes motionless in shadow, eyes and ears open, convinced

her she was alone.  Rising to the obnoxious cracking of knees and

ankles, she ventured out into the dappling of moonlight.  The cones were

of marijuana plants, young plants, rudely pulled up by the roots and

tossed on what looked for all the world to be burn piles.  A drug war?

Villain number two destroying villain number one's cash crop for spite

or business?  On a plot as small and inaccessible as this one, that

struck Anna as highly unlikely, but stranger things had happened in the

history of the war on drugs.  A war the average American was losing and

the politicians and drug dealers were winning.  Fear buys votes and

drugs are a politically correct evil to rail against.

Voices, low and murmuring but unmistakably human, rooted Anna to the

spot.  On the tail end of the sound came a slash of light, two

flashlights probing her darkness like Darth Vader's sword.

Instinctively, she dropped to the ground.  Footfalls and light

approached rapidly.  Whoever it was moved without any attempt at

concealment, probably unaware they were not alone.  Anna was determined

to keep it that way.

Directly in front of her, offering its questionable refuge, was the

derelict hog pen.  Choosing not to think about what other life-forms

might have taken up residence within, Anna crawled beneath the rotting

boards.  Inside, there was just room to sit up, her head brushing the

lumber.  The sticky touch of spiders' webs trailed across her left cheek

and she steeled herself for visitations from many species.

Trapped in the close dark of a sty, the Golden Orb, for all her

impressive proportions, was preferable to brown recluses or black

widows.

Contemplation of arachnids was pushed aside by the arrival of

potentially more injurious beasts.  Anna arranged her legs in a

halflotus beneath her and folded her hands loosely in her lap, mimicking

the attitude of meditating swamis.  It was a position she could maintain

for several hours if need be.  In front of her was a triangle where the

boards of her makeshift hiding place opened out onto the clearing.

Though she felt exposed, she knew she sat far enough back in the shadow

that, short of a direct beam of light shined in at ground level, she

would remain invisible.

With a discipline born of long practice, she evened out her breathing

and emptied her mind.  In the forced calm the voices became

recognizable.  Hanson-as she had surmised-and one other, a woman.  If

she'd ever heard her voice before, she couldn't place it, and she

settled down to listen.

"What a shame," the woman said.

"It was a crazy-ass thing to do anyway." Hanson ." Cost is no object

when it's not you paying."

" Still and all-"

"Hand me that."

These fragments were accompanied by the crisscrossing beams of light and

the noises of rummaging: something metal, a chunk of wood or hard

plastic, shoes stomping through dead leaves.  The pocket of noise moved

from the edge of the clearing toward Anna's shelter.  Bars of light fell

through the rude wood as the beams scratched over the tumbled-down hog

pen.  Anna cringed as if the light burned, but the touch was fleeting.

Discovering her hiding place was not the goal of this nocturnal