Lost (31 page)

To be honest, Shane’s silence is freaking me out. Has the big guy given up? Even with the FBI finally on the case, I still want him on my side, searching for Kelly.

“Randall?” I ask. “Are you okay? Do you need to go to the E.R.?”

Healy and Manning have departed. Leaving us with Agent Salazar, who seems to share my concern for Shane’s well-being.

“Place like this probably has a doctor on call,” she suggests.

“I’m fine,” he says gruffly, waving us off. “Just a broken nose, no big deal. It’s not the first time and it won’t be the last.”

Somehow I couldn’t square the image of Shane getting beaten to the punch by another man. Which is ridiculous, especially if the other guy had a gun. Except the egg man had a gun and Shane had taken it away in the blink of an eye, no problem. So I’m confused. What happened?

Speaking of superheroes, how did mine fall to earth?

“I’m sorry, Jane,” he says, a world of hurt in his eyes. “What can I say? I blew it.”

“But you found out who took Kelly,” I remind him. “He confessed to you. We finally know who did it.”

“It was an error in judgment on my part,” says Shane, as if obliged to make his own confession. “I never should have gone onto his property, or into his house. I should have waited for backup, done it by the book.”

“The book?” Salazar rolls her eyes. “That would have taken hours. And based on what—your gut saying Lang might be involved? Because his name had been mentioned by a casino security cop? It was a good hunch, but it was thin. Sean would have slow-played it. You did the right thing.”

“Sometimes observation is more effective than action,” Shane says miserably. “I went in there so quick, I never noticed the suspect was on the property.”

“In a boat,” I remind him.

“Yeah, but there all the same. Once he saw me enter that house, he knew that we knew. It set him off.”

“So he punched you.”

“No, no,” says Shane, shaking his head. “That’s not what I mean. Taking a punch is no big deal. What concerns me is that my careless actions may have put your daughter into more peril. Once I showed up, Ricky Lang went over the edge.
I set him off.
He’s in end-game mode, and that’s on me.”

I’d like to slap some sense into the big guy, but don’t want to reinjure his poor swollen nose. “So it’s your fault, what he did to Kelly? What he intends to do to her? You going to sit here feeling sorry for yourself, is that your plan?”

“I’m really sorry.”

“Get up, you big lug,” I tell him, hands on my hips. “I know you’re not Superman, even if this crazy bastard thinks he is. But you’re the best I’ve got, and that will have to do.”

Thirty minutes later we’re checked out of Europa—thank God for plastic—and on the road again. Even better, Randall Shane has finally quit apologizing. Possibly because driving requires all of his considerable concentration.

Honestly, you’d think he was piloting the space shuttle, not a rental sedan.

The plan is, agents Healy and Salazar and the rest of the FBI will be doing their thing while we do ours. The tribal police have been informed of a suspected violation of federal statute—kidnapping, abduction by force—and are expected to cooperate in a reservation-wide manhunt for Ricky Lang and his victims.

The arrangement is that FBI helicopters will search by air, coordinating with the Nakosha cops below. One of the choppers will carry a tactical assault team, who will be landed and deployed the moment the FBI has a clear lead as to the location.

The hunt for Kelly that started out with me alone, and then Shane, has at long last expanded to more than two hundred law enforcement agents, all of them focused on recovering the captives alive.

It’s happening. The big guns are out. Part of me is jubilant, part terrified. Bottom line, it’s a great relief to have all these people searching for her, even if the search itself might make the perpetrator do something drastic. Waiting has never been a viable option, and now that we know Ricky Lang is taking trophies, it’s even less so.

Taking trophies.

Don’t think about that. Think about Kelly, how much you want to find her safe and sound. How good it will be when it happens, when I have her back. Which reminds me of a line
from a song my own mother used to love, about a mother and child reunion. Beach Boys? Joni Mitchell? I cycle through Mom’s favorite bands, trying to think of the song. Helps the “taking trophy” thing recede to where it’s manageable.

We’re about fifteen minutes from the hotel, heading for a place called Glade City, on the far end of the Everglades. Shane wants to “run down a person of interest”—not literally, he promises—check out the owner of the truck who was messing with the Beechcraft. He says in Glade City I can rent an entire motel for the price of a suite at Europa. Plus we’ll be closer to the search area, good to go when the search teams locate my baby.

“Simon and Garfunkel,” I say suddenly.

“‘Scuse me?”

“One of my mom’s favorite bands. Never mind, just thinking.”

“Think away,” he says, concentrating on traffic. “I can always use the extra brain power.”

My cell rings. Fern with news.

“You’ll never guess” are the first words out of her mouth. “Jessica knows all about Kelly and Seth Manning.”

“Jess?” I say, amazed. “I thought Jess and Kelly never talked.”

“Ancient history, apparently,” says Fern with a chuckle. “Now they do.”

One of the great regrets of our friendship is that our daughters never clicked. Never really bonded, despite sharing a crib for a time and having moms who lived in each other’s pockets. Whether it’s the age difference—Jess is fifteen months older—or a difference in personality, we never knew. Three years hadn’t kept Fern and me apart. If anything it made the bond stronger because I always looked up to her,
went to her for guidance, admired her tenacity and her toughness. Not that Jess and Kelly hated each other, or worried about competing for our affections. It’s just that we kept pushing them together and they kept going their separate ways. By the time Jess was in middle school—a crucial two grades ahead—they might as well have been living on different planets. They ran with totally different crowds and never seemed to be more than indifferently polite to each other.

Secretly I’d always wondered if Jess found Kelly’s cancer off-putting. Not that she was ever mean, but that she found the whole subject icky, something she preferred not to think about. Like maybe Kelly’s situation was a constant reminder that kids her age can die, and who needed that? Plus there was the added complication of her parent’s marriage breaking up, dealing with her bereft and needy father, not to mention the consequences of her own wild behavior.

Fern’s talk about chaining her to a radiator, that wasn’t without cause. Let’s just say Jess went boy-crazy in a dangerous way and leave it at that. Then, miracle of miracles, she somehow manages to graduate from high school and within a few months her behavior changes radically. Steady boyfriend, a new outlook on life, and good grades in community college, where she’s studying to be a nurse. The sweet child reemerging as an adult. But it never occurred to me that one of the changes might have involved a connection with my daughter.

“Kelly never mentioned it,” I say. “I had no idea.”

“They never tell us anything,” Fern says. “We don’t exist. Not in their little world we don’t.”

“How did it happen?”

“According to Jess, Kelly bumped into her at the mall—they were shopping in the same store. Kelly had some really
sweet things to say about a skirt Jess was trying on. So they ended up doing a mind-meld at Starbucks. Caffeinated girl talk. Yakking about their childhoods, and Kelly’s illness, and how their clueless mothers were always pushing them together, which they both hated. Not the other girl, but the pushing. Anywho, Jess talks about her relationship with Tim—they’re living together, did I mention that?—and Kelly tells her about this cute older guy she met online. From there it’s all about how Kelly wants to learn how to fly, which by the way doesn’t surprise Jess one bit, and how she’d be willing to sleep with her instructor, he’s that cute, but it turns out he’s gay.”

Fern waits for my reaction.

“Seth Manning is gay?” I ask, my voice rising. “Are you sure?”

Shane glances at me, shrugs, as if indifferent to the information.

“How could I be sure?” Fern says. “I never met the guy. Even then, who can tell if they don’t advertise? But my point is, Kelly told Jess he was gay. Deeply in the closet, too, because he adores his father and doesn’t want to disappoint him. Very conflicted. That’s the word Kelly used. Told Jess that in a few short months Seth had become her closest friend in the world. He was teaching her to fly and she was trying to help him deal with his father. Or deal with his own feelings about his father. Whatever, Jess was really impressed, said Kelly was having her first adult relationship, even if it didn’t involve sex. I blame that on the psych course she took last semester—now she’s an expert on adult relationships! As if! She came away thinking Kelly Garner is, in her words, really cool for her age. Like Jess is so much more grown-up, right?”

“Did she know about them flying to Florida?”

“Sorry, no. As far as Jess knew, the farthest Kelly had flown was to some airfield in upstate New York. Kelly said she wanted to solo in the mountains.”

“You’re amazing, Fern.”

“What’s amazing? I mentioned Kelly to Jess, she told me all about it. Wasn’t like I had to pry.”

Fern pauses, then asks, very lightly, “Any news?”

“Tons,” I say, and fill her in.

3. Papa Has A Plan

The helicopters look like giant dragonflies sweeping over the eastern edge of the rez, along the grassy shoreline. Busy things, buzzing around, scaring the birds, flattening the grass when they swoop down for a closer look at what, some old gator sunning himself? A wrecked vehicle abandoned to the elements? A roofless chickee hut from the bad old days when the people were poor?

Figure a few more hours of daylight, they’ll go back to wherever they came from, none the wiser.

Ricky isn’t worried because he’s willed himself invisible. Chopper could be right overhead, they’d never see him. White eyes don’t know how to look, wouldn’t know a man from a stump post. Might be fun to shoot one down. Why not? He’s got the firepower. Fully automatic Breda M37 machine gun with a full belt, a thousand rounds. Full-auto AA-12 shotgun with enough shells to melt the barrel. Couple of classic M16 semis that come with cool-looking bandoliers. A fully equipped M40, the Marine Corps standard issue sniper rifle, with day/night scope. Deadly up to a half mile, which is going to come in handy. Various pistols and revolvers, all.45 caliber so he doesn’t have to screw around with
different shells for the handguns. And just for fun, a brace of Russian-made RPG-7s with fuel-air warheads capable of exploding a good-size house, or, for that matter, a noisy helicopter.

Oops, kaboom. Talk about wow factor.

Not now, though. For the moment he’ll remain unseen and unseeable. Thigh deep in the warm water, muck between his toes, pushing his flat bottom aluminum skiff ahead of him, following a shallow channel only he knows. The stash of weapons in the skiff, under a flat gray tarpaulin covered with grass. He’s coming in the back way with a little surprise for his brothers. He’ll cache the weapons, enough to arm a full platoon of warriors, then pop up where they least expect him, surprise, surprise.

What the council doesn’t know, Joe Lang and his little club, is that they’ve given him the power. Saying he doesn’t exist, that he’s dead to them, that’s what makes him invisible.

Soon he will be a ghost among ghosts, making amends to some, seeking revenge of others.

Letting the tall white man live, he’d wondered at his own generosity. Seeing the helicopters made him understand. Because the time has come, and the tall white man serves as the messenger, the go-between.

No more secrets, no more subterfuge. No more begging.

Ricky likes it that the choppers are over the rez, searching for him, for a needle in a hundred square miles of haystack. He likes that the tribal police have mustered a team in support of the federal invaders. Or pretended to. He’s noticed that none of the Nakosha uniforms have seen fit to leave their brand-new cruisers. They know Ricky Lang is out there and they’d rather stay on the roads, thank you very much. Doesn’t help that very few of them know the back-country,
not like Ricky does. Most of the young officers would hesitate to get their feet wet, let alone hunt for an armed and dangerous enemy who could be anywhere.

Superman becomes Swamp Thing, that’s how his legend will be amended. The idea makes him laugh because he is, indeed, a thing of the swamp. Even his breath smells like a bog, a bull gator’s breath. The sour funk of all the bad things he’s done, and for which he must atone or risk being a ghost forever.

He hears a splash, sees that his children have come to play in the boat. Tyler, the baby, splashing gleefully while his older sisters wear the pirate costumes he bought them last Halloween.

“Hi, kids,” he says. “Papa’s happy to see you.”

The children stare at him, saying nothing.

“Soon we’ll talk,” he assures them, shoving along the boatload of weapons. “Papa has a plan.”

4. Blood Relations

“They not bad boys, understand, they just too poor to be good.”

Another folksy remark from Detective Rufus T. Sydell, of the Glade City Police Department.

Roof, as he asks to be called, is a skinny, small-boned gentleman with a sun-damaged complexion and a slightly goofy, frequently deployed smile that’s about as wide as his face. Deeply crinkled, flat-gray eyes, set wide apart, as if he can see around corners. Wears his silvery hair in a military burr cut and began his second career as cop after retiring from the United States Marine Corps.

“Sydell a cracker name, like Whittle is a cracker name,” Roof explains, weaving his fingers together as he speaks.
“Go back far enough we got relatives in common, guaranteed. Them old boys got up to all kinds of mischief out in the islands, fathering children and what all. Young lady, I am referring to the Thousand Islands, an area runs along the west side of the Glades. Sydells lived on a shell mound out in the Glades, just like the Whittles. Mound is a little island made by the Calusa Indians long time ago—heaps of oyster shells piled in the mangroves till it gets to be a foot or so above flood level. Just barely in this world, you might say.”