Lost (36 page)

“Uh-huh. So you had your suspicions.”

Roof grins ruefully. “I’m a suspicious kinda fella, Mr. Shane. But until I know a fact I tend to keep it to myself. Made a call or two, and it seems like Roy and Dug and Stick was seen in Naples, at an airfield there, purchasing two drums of aviation fuel for cash money.”

Shane looks puzzled. “And what, they burned the plane? Getting rid of evidence?”

“Don’t need no drums of expensive fuel to torch a plane, all you need’s a match,” he points out. “I figure, they go to all the trouble to buy fuel for a turboprop, they intended to use it.”

“Move the plane?”

“More likely steal it. Wouldn’t be the first time Stick Davis involved himself in a stolen aircraft. That particular one, a nearly new King Air 350, they tell me that’d be worth two or three million on the black market. Sell it no problem whatsoever in Colombia or Venezuela, or maybe closer to home. All they do is swap out the transponder, change the tail numbers, and keep on aflyin’. Long as it don’t come back into the U.S. for inspection, no problem.”

“So what went wrong?” Shane asks. “You have a theory on that?”

“Not so much a theory as a guess, you might say. I ask myself a question, what if Ricky Lang found out they was hijacking that plane? Maybe he was in on the deal, maybe he wasn’t, I ain’t got clue one in that regard. But I ask you, Mr. Shane, who else do we know is crazy enough to burn a milliondollar aircraft?”

“No sign of the Whittle brothers?”

“Nope. They ain’t showed their face. Maybe they dropped off Stick and skedaddled. Or could be I got it wrong altogether.”

“Is there enough left to DNA the body?”

Roof gives me a careful look. “Expect there will be, when they get down to it. You know how it is with crispy—’scuse me, ma’am, charred victims. Sometimes it takes months to make a positive ID. Sometimes never.”

He stands up, plops the hat on his head, gives me an avuncular nod. “Glad I wasn’t bearing bad tidings, ma’am. Search
resumes at dawn, I’m sure they’ll find your girl. Right now I’m off to locate me a beer, else I won’t be able to sleep.”

We again retire to our respective rooms, cuckoos retreating inside the clock. And the clock keeps ticking, increasing the sense of dread with every passing moment. A severed finger, a burned body, a psycho on the loose—try to make something good out of those ingredients. Try to find hope. Who said that, keep hope alive? Whoever it was must have known how easily hope fades, how the very idea becomes a cruel joke. As if we have the power to change events by thinking good thoughts, and therefore when bad things happen it’s through our own weakness.

As if, say, cancer is caused by bad thoughts instead of bad cells! Reasoning like that used to drive me crazy when Kelly was in the hospital. Doctors and nurses will tell you a positive attitude is important, but succumbing to the disease isn’t a sign of mental weakness—it’s proof that that human beings are frail vessels.

That’s where I’m at, here in Glade City. Back to the cancer ward, praying that my child may live. Bargaining with death. Take me if you must but please, please, let my daughter live. Take another child, not mine, please please please. She’s barely nine years old, she’s already suffered enough for any ten grown-ups. And now she’s barely sixteen, on the cusp of being an adult, her whole life ahead of her.

Let her live, God, or I will claw my way into heaven and bring you my full fury. You think fallen angels are trouble? Wait until you meet plain Jane Garner, mother of Kelly. Let her live, God, or I swear I’ll just close my eyes and die and make You miserable.

Close my eyes and dream I’m searching for Kelly in the hospital. She keeps fleeing down the long white corridors,
hiding and laughing because she thinks death is a game she can win; she’s already won once, she says. I’m trying to warn her but my voice is too small, it barely gets beyond my lips, and my feet are so heavy I can’t run fast enough to catch her. My beautiful daughter running away, laughing at death.

Waking up is a shock because there’s no awareness of having fallen asleep. But suddenly it’s two in the morning and someone is knocking on my door. Politely but insistently knocking.

I crawl from the saggy bed fully clothed, stagger to the door, throw it open.

First thing I notice are his eyes, glaring at me from under the wrinkled brim of a cowboy-style straw hat with a curled brim. Eyes so pale and cool they make me want to slam the door and go back to sleep. Eyes that couldn’t care less, not about me or anyone who lives in my world.

The rest slowly comes into focus. The leathery, weathered face that could be forty or sixty. A lean, compact body that seems entirely composed of sinew and bones, and the powerful, sloping shoulders of a pole vaulter. His hands, kept loose and ready at his side, are out of scale, too big for the rest of him. His feet are bare, and so splayed that no normal shoe would ever fit. Thick toenails curve like ivory claws, as if the part of him that touches earth wants to cling there, like a bird on a branch. He’s a man from another time, and everything about him says he’s not pleased to be here, tapping on my door in the middle of the bug-infested night.

“Leo Fish,” he says gruffly. “State your business.”

11. The Squealing Time Is Here

In the darkest hour of a moonless night, ten miles from the nearest incandescent light, Dug Whittle hunts the girl like
he’d hunt a wild pig. By stealth and cunning and by using his nose. You can smell out a pig from heavy cover, if you know what to sniff for, and Dug figures sniffing out a sweaty, unwashed female should be easy.

True, she and the fag boy have about a two-hour head start. But that makes no never mind in the backcountry, which he knows and she don’t. The girl is weak because that’s the way females are, plus she’ll be slowed down by the fag boy, who is bleeding and feverish. Supposed to be the boy he’s after, turn him over to Ricky Lang, but the blow to the head has given Dug other ideas. More to the point it’s given him one very powerful idea: he will kill the girl and gut her like a pig. Maybe gut her first, see how long she lasts.

He’s pretty sure Roy would agree. His brother being kind of soft when it comes to women and animals, but surely getting his throat tore up will have hardened him some. Dug said as much on the race to the E.R., flooring that Dodge for all it was worth, but of course Roy couldn’t express his opinion because of the wire in his throat. Dug not wanting to pull it out for fear he’d spout like a fountain.

All Roy had to say was gah, gah, like a baby, his eyes wet with tears. Dug can’t recall a time when Roy didn’t speak for him, so it’s both a shock but also sort of exciting that he’s now in charge, making decisions.

He starts, like any good tracker, from the last known location. The spot where she clobbered him with that chunk of rock. Easy enough to find where the escaped captives lay in the saw grass, her and him, and how they then moved off west. Probably no idea where they’re going, just wanting to get away. As it happens moving closer to the watery part of the Glades, where gators prey on anything they can get their jaws around.

Dug has an old carbide Autolite affixed to his hat, the identical kind he uses when night hunting for alligator—pop that light on and you see the eyes looking back at you from the dark—but decides not to fire it up unless absolutely necessary. Pop a light, she’ll know he’s coming and he prefers an element of surprise. Plus, as he knows from experience, human eyes don’t show red in the dark.

Best way to night hunt, move slowly, keep an ear cocked. Many’s the time he’s heard a pig panting in the underbrush. The pig is fearful, knows it’s being hunted and should be silent, but it can’t help itself. It will pant, sometimes even grunt like a person will grunt, thinking things over. Wants to get downwind and that’s the challenge, to keep the scent advantage. Even a night like tonight, with the air so still, there’s motion, a direction to carry smell.

Once, hunting raccoon at night, Dug killed one with his knife, just to see if he could. Was it possible to stab a moving coon in the dark? Turned out to be not that difficult, just hafta know which way the coon would jump.

Dug has always known which way a hunted creature will jump. He has no doubt he’ll know which way the girl will jump, when it comes to that. He carries with him, into territory he knows like the landscape of his own flesh, a skinning knife, a pump shotgun, and his vast experience killing things.

He crouches, using the tips of his fingers to find the ragged trail they’ve left. He sniffs, holding the air in his nose, loving the flavors. Flavor of swamp, flavor of grass, flavor of girl.

Kelly lies flat on her belly, sucking dirt. Her right arm hugs Seth, keeping him down. He’s not exactly delirious but she
can feel the heat of his fever and knows he isn’t thinking clearly. How could he, after what he’s been through?

After the first dash to freedom it became clear that Seth wouldn’t be going anywhere fast. She could help him along, carry most of his weight, but that made for slow going over uneven terrain in the dark.

“I was supposed to rescue you,” he’d mumbled, when they finally stopped running and collapsed to the ground.

“Next time,” she’d said brightly, still high on adrenaline.

“I thought you were dead.”

“Me, too. I mean, I thought you were dead.”

“They cut me,” he’d said, showing her the wound.

Amazingly enough, it didn’t repulse her. Maybe in daylight it would, but in the close darkness it didn’t really seem all that bad. A little finger missing, no big deal. The rest of him was half-starved and filthy, but intact. The problem was that the wound had become infected and the infection had spread most of the way up his arm. He was in terrible pain, shivering from the fever, and it was absolutely essential that, with the monster man so close, Seth remain absolutely motionless.

That’s how she thought of him, monster man. Obviously she hadn’t hit him hard enough to do any real or lasting damage.

When first she realized they were probably being followed, she’d found a cluster of mangroves on a little mound of soggy ground surrounded by water. The water was shallow, no more than ankle deep, but she figured it would help cover their tracks. That’s how they always did it in the movies. Sometimes in the movies they submerged under the water, breathing through reeds, but Kelly was pretty sure that wouldn’t
work in real life, and anyway this water wasn’t deep enough for that.

The cluster of mangroves is thickly overgrown on the outside, less so on the inside, and she believed that once she and Seth had wormed their way inside their little hideaway they’d be as good as invisible. There were lots of these small overgrown areas dotting the area, hundreds probably, and monster man couldn’t possibly search all of them. They’d be safe so long as they didn’t move, didn’t give themselves away.

Or maybe not. She has no idea how he managed it so quickly, but monster man prowls along the water’s edge a mere fifty yards from where they’re hiding.

Kelly touches Seth’s lips with her fingers, meaning silence, and he nods that he understands.

Monster man blends into the darkness. He seems to be going away, following the wrong track. She feels some of the tension drain and hauls Seth closer.

Hot and muggy as it is, he’s shivering. With all her experience as a long-term patient in intensive care, she knows the signs. She has to get Seth to a hospital in the not too distant future or there’s a chance he will die from a raging blood infection. Septicemia they call it. They’ll need to hang a bag, drip him full of antibiotics.

In a few hours time Kelly Garner, age sixteen, has gone from being totally focused on saving her own life to being totally focused on saving the life of her best friend.

Best friends, as she knows, are not easy to come by.

When Kelly met Seth in the flesh for the first time her impression was, the guy is too good to be true. Too handsome, too smart, too kind, too generous, too everything. Later, after he’d been tutoring her for several weeks, demonstrating in his
calm clear way exactly how to fly safely, she decided that sometimes first impressions are correct. He was the real deal, a decent guy who wanted to help her without trying to get into her pants.

Later on, when he’d finally taken her into his confidence—he really had no one else to turn to—Kelly realized she’d never been in any danger from Seth Manning. Not that kind of danger, anyway. Not that being gay had diminished his perfection in her eyes. If anything he was more perfect because he was unobtainable, even if she’d decided to cross the age barrier.

To see him like this, shivering in the heat, weak as a kitten, his left hand wrapped in a bloody rag, it makes her want to weep. “Hang on,” she whispers. “We’re gonna make it, I promise.” “Leave me,” he says. “Get away while you can.” “Never,” she says. “You’re my favorite flyboy and I’m keeping you. That’s final. Now try to snuggle closer.”

Monster man holds the air in his mouth. He’s picked up the faintest whiff of human perspiration not his own. He forces himself to relax, to melt his way into the landscape. Not only smelling the smells, but sorting through the background noise of birds, water frogs, tree frogs, whining mosquitoes, scrabbling raccoons, splashing baitfish, gators small and large, the whole wilderness mishmash.

What can’t be heard can help, too. A place where the animals have left to make room for human. And he’s picking up a beacon of silence, a quiet zone in one of the smaller mangrove islands.

Thinking, as he glides into motion, you’re mine, little pig. The squealing time is here.

12. Best Keep Your Hands Inside The Pan

Zooming through the Everglades on an airboat at night is like riding a dirt bike full speed through a pitch-black forest. Not that I’ve ever been on a dirt bike, or in pitch-black forest, for that matter. But it has to be something like this, the sheer exhilarating terror of not knowing what’s out there and when it might suddenly crash into you. Shadows, mangroves, grasslands, open water, all blending into one dark and scary blur. Every bump and scrape and feral swoosh of grass against the flat bottom of the aluminum boat hits me like a jolt of electricity, frying my nerves.