Mortal Sin jl-4 Page 24

  I was determined to get warm. The air was cooler than the water had been. I stripped off what was left of my sopping-wet suit and stood there, stark naked, trying to figure out what to do. I walked along the beach. A great blue heron eyed me from the shallow water, then began wading. From the underbrush near the shore, I heard a rustling and saw an oppossum scurrying for cover.

  Then I found what I needed. A depression in the beach maybe two feet deep and five feet long. A gator hole. During the dry winter months, the alligators make their own swampy condos. It was filled with mud warmed by the midday sun. I stepped into the hole and started slathering the mud on my chest and arms, then legs. I reached around and did my back, finally applying a thin layer to my face. Hey, women pay big bucks for something like this at a Bal Harbour spa.

  Finally, I was warm. But thirsty.

  The water of the swamp was brackish. I headed away from the beach and into the trees. On the trunk of a gumbo limbo, I saw several pine airplants, looking like pineapples with their leaves curling up and out toward the sky. I climbed the tree and found rainwater in the cup of the plant. I had to chase a tree frog from one, but I leaned down and slurped out the moisture from each of them. Two black vultures circled overhead, drifting in the air currents. Best I could tell, neither was a member of the Bar. I figured they had spotted a dying bobcat, maybe a raccoon, or even a white-tailed deer. I hoped it wasn’t a scared, exhausted lawyer.

  I went back to the beach and began walking the circumference of the hammock. I tried to count my steps but lost track after 1,232. I found the remnants of a campfire that couldn’t have been more than a few days old, and on the far side of the hammock, another wooden dock, this one larger. What seemed to be a path led into the woods, and I wanted to follow it, but I promised myself I’d finish the trek around the island first. I did, but there were no other signs of man. No boats, no cabins, no Styrofoam cups from 7-Eleven.

  It was already afternoon by the time I got back to my starting point. I had stopped to drink from more wild pine plants, but it did nothing to alleviate my hunger. How long had it been since I had eaten?

  I knew from my secretary, Cindy the Vegan, that lots of grasses and seeds were edible. I just didn’t know which ones. She had a book with pictures. Some of the plants were gourmet delights; others were toxic one-way tickets to the emergency room.

  A few hundred yards from the shoreline was marshy ground surrounded by dark green bulrushes with stems eight feet tall.

  Brown bristly spiked flowers hung from the ends of the stems. Unless Domino’s delivered out here, I really didn’t have a choice. I broke off some shoots and sprouts and tried them. Not bad. Sort of like a health-food cereal with lots of crunch and zero taste. Nearby were greenbrier vines with woody, prickly stems. For some reason, the long leaves reminded me of a twelve-dollar salad at a trendy South Beach restaurant. I sampled the heavily veined leaves. Leathery but tasty. Some virgin olive oil and fresh garlic would have helped.

  I kept moving toward the interior of the hammock. The tree trunks were covered with colorful snails. Escargots anyone? I passed. I came upon a strand of pine trees, bursting with male pollen antlers. Maybe a burger would have tasted better, but the pollen probably had as much protein. I ate a few, then picked some cones from the tree, cracked them open, and swallowed the seeds.

  I was scurrying through the woods, sniffing leaves and flowers, nibbling this and that, when I saw the glint of sunlight off glass. It didn’t register at first. I just squinted at the glare.

  Sunlight off glass!

  I dropped a handful of acorns and padded through the brush toward the light.

  A gleaming white truck with a series of antennae and satellite dishes. On the side of the cab in black letters, ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS, INC. It was either the same truck I saw the first day I headed to Florio’s cabin or one of its brothers. But no guys in ball caps and coveralls.

  A blur of questions.

  What was it doing here, half-hidden in the trees?

  How did it get here?

  Where were the men?

  And what the heck was it anyway, this space-age machine so out of place deep in the swamp?

  I climbed to the cab. Doors locked, windows up tight. Hey, what were they expecting out here? In the underbrush, I found a decent-sized log of a live oak tree. So decent-sized, I could barely hoist it with two hands. The ship called Old Ironsides was made from this wood, and the history books say it could repel cannonballs.

  My first try, I toppled over backward and dropped the log, then sat down and laughed. There I was, naked and alone and covered with a layer of dried mud, attacking this steel-and-glass monster with a stick. The second try, I got under the log, using my legs and back for leverage, and tossed it from my shoulder squarely into the driver-side window. The glass shattered with a startling noise.

  I reached in, avoiding the jagged fragments, and opened the door. Being careful not to cut my feet, I climbed into the cab, brushed the broken glass from the seat, and sat down. A few added touches not usually found in your everyday truck. A computer keyboard, a printer, sets of dials and gauges that made no sense to me. A stack of computer paper was piled up in the printer’s receptacle. I looked at it. Sharp lines, forming peaks and valleys, like an electrocardiogram. Next to the keyboard was a map, neatly folded. I opened it. The northern part of the Everglades, including the Big Cypress Swamp.

  The hammocks were numbered. A red X on each of thirty or so hammocks, a date written in ink alongside. One of the dates was yesterday. That had to be this hammock. At least I knew where I was. Next to each date were letters and numbers that were meaningless to me.

  I got out of the cab and looked around. A canoe with two flotation devices and two paddles was stashed under some big-leafed ferns. So far, that was the best news of the day.

  And that was it. No tents, no shovels, no six-packs of beer. I followed the tire tracks through the woods to the shore. It was no more than five hundred yards. I emerged near the larger dock on the far side of the hammock from where I first set foot. But the tracks stopped where the path from the woods hit the beach. I bent down and looked closer at the sandy soil. The ground had been whisked clean by palm fronds. I had missed it my first walk around the hammock.

  Okay, smart guy, what do you know?

  Somebody hauled the truck here, either on a barge or on the back of a very large manatee. The workers were here yesterday and would likely be back soon. That was good for me, or was it? Who did they work for, and what were they doing, and why did they hide the truck like that?

  More questions than answers. I kept thinking, turning it over. The workers don’t stay overnight. They either travel by boat or helicopter. You could easily land a chopper on the beach, away from the trees. They sometimes travel offshore but not far; otherwise they’d have a powerboat and not just a canoe. They take some effort to disguise the fact they’re here. Maybe they just want to protect the truck from vandalism by fishermen or froggers or the other iconoclastic types who hang out in the Everglades. But the way the truck was jammed into the trees seemed to suggest that they didn’t want to be seen from the air, either.

  It didn’t compute. I thought of Nicky Florio. We were probably ten miles from his fishing cabin and thirty miles from his planned Las Vegas in the Swamp. This was something else, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that Nicky Florio’s grimy paws were all over that truck.

  I went back into the woods and committed a little gentle larceny. Climbing into the truck, I took the map, then hauled the canoe out of the brush. It was an old wooden model, painted green. Wooden paddles, too.

  I started out in midafternoon, watching the position of the sun and heading south. I took long, deep strokes with the paddle, counting out, “left, right, left, right.” I sang as many Nat King Cole songs as I could remember and replayed an AFC championship game in my mind. I passed through the mist of the cypress strands and what seemed to be open lakes. I paddled until just before dark, then decided t
o look for a Holiday Inn.

  I chose a hardwood hammock with a fine line of pine trees to spend the night. I slept on a bed of soft grasses and awoke at dawn, famished and dreaming of room service: fresh-squeezed orange juice, blueberry muffins, and eggs Benedict with a steaming pot of coffee. I had wrapped the map in my discarded shirt, which dried out in the sun. Now I used the shirt to wipe the dew from the plants, squeezing it out and drinking the fresh water. More pinecone seeds and pollen for breakfast.

  I paddled and drifted, paddled and drifted, the slow, easy current from north to south helping me out, but not much. I used the map to navigate south toward Tamiami Trail. Sometime before noon, I heard a thunderous explosion and looked toward a hammock to the west. A cloud of dust rose from a clump of mahogany trees, and a dozen herons croaked in protest.

  By midday, I saw airboats at a distance, lazing in the water, with fishing poles sketched against the sky. A barge went by, two more of the gleaming white trucks perched on the deck. A short time later, the water became less, and the land became more. A ragged shoreline was strung with the hated melaleuca tree. Introduced from Australia in a misguided effort to dry up the swamps, it was doing just that, squeezing out native trees and plants, sucking the water from the slough, depleting our aquifer. Now, years later, we’re importing a sawfly from Australia that likes to eat the melaleuca and Lord knows what else.

  Just before sunset, not more than a mile from Tamiami Trail, I heard the roar of an engine ahead of me. A touring airboat with perhaps a dozen tourists was headed for me. It slowed, politely, I thought, so as not to swamp me. Then it idled, and I heard the tour guide as he pointed, not so politely, at me. He was a young guy with a mustache who exuded the counterfeit charm of a used-car salesman.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, his eyes hidden under a New York Yankees cap, “coming up is an excellent photo opportunity. Here we have an authentic Micanopy brave in full…ah…war paint.”

  “War paint, my ass!” The skeptical customer was a pudgy man in plaid shorts and a Budweiser T-shirt. He had creamy sunblock on his nose and sat next to a middle-aged woman in a straw hat. “Looks like dirt to me,” the man added.

  I kept paddling and was close enough to hear the click-clicks of the cameras.

  “Yes, indeed,” the guide sang out, studying me as I got closer. “Quite right. War mud. One of the little-known practices of the remnants of the Creek Confederation.”

  When in trouble, a savvy tour guide, like a quick-witted lawyer, improvises, trying to turn shit into gold. I always appreciated the talent.

  “The mud ritual is also part of the ceremonial rain dance,” the guide continued, still winging it.

  “Bullshit,” the tourist said. “Don’t waste your film, Martha.”

  “Harold!” The middle-aged woman shushed him with a stern glare.

  “It is one of many festivals of the Seminole and Micanopy. There is the harvest dance, the high-tide ceremony, the full-moon chant…”

  “The harvest dance?” The tourist snickered and shook his head. “Sounds like Friday night at the country club.”

  I was directly alongside now. It was time to stretch anyway, so I stood up slowly, taking care not to tip the canoe. As I did, I displayed the one part of me not covered by ceremonial mud.

  Drifting by, I heard the woman gasp. “I’ll get a picture of that for the bridge club.”

  The guide didn’t miss a beat. “…and, of course, the ceremonial fertility rites.”

  Then he gunned the motor, revved up, and was gone.

  Chapter 24

  Let It Die

  I pulled the canoe onto a grassy bank, waded back into the water, and dived under, trying to get clean. It was futile. Caked into mortar by the sun, the mud had become my suit of armor. Soaking wet, I climbed the bank to a wooden dock, wrapped my T-shirt around my waist to provide a modicum of modesty, and headed off, leaving a trail of grimy footprints.

  I was in the parking lot of a small marina just off Tamiami Trail. I walked to the highway, pointed myself east toward Miami, and held up my thumb. I didn’t look any more threatening than, say, Charles Manson if he’d just escaped from prison through a sewage canal.

  A Jaguar zoomed by. So did a Mercedes and a Lexus. So did two eighteen-wheelers, a tour bus, a couple of Winnebagos, and assorted other cars, motorcycles, and vans.

  I did get plenty of looks, some catcalls, and a full can of Colt 45 that just missed my head. But it was a pig farmer from Frog City who stopped.

  He was a big man with gnarled hands on the wheel of a Chevy pickup with worn shocks and squeaky brakes. His two nephews shared the cab. In the back were a dozen pigs, a carpet of straw, and odoriferous reminders of last night’s swine feast.

  I could ride along if I didn’t mind the company of the squealers.

  If they didn’t mind me, I didn’t mind them. Somewhere under the straw, the farmer told me, was an old pair of overalls that Rufus liked to sleep on. I didn’t know if Rufus was one of his nephews or two hundred pounds of pork chops, so I just hopped into the back, rooted around until I found what had once been blue-denim bib overalls. I shook straw and pig droppings out of the creases, stepped into the overalls, and fastened the snaps. The farmer popped the clutch, and I toppled over into a pink-skinned, short-haired oinker as we clanked into gear and headed toward the city.

  I dozed off a couple of times, my head flopping toward my chest before snapping up again. I told myself it didn’t really smell so bad back here, what with the breeze blowing and all. From time to time, a pig sniffed me, didn’t like what it smelled, then backed away.

  I tried to let the wind sharpen my senses. When the cobwebs cleared, I thought about Nicky Florio. How I tried to bring him down and how I had failed so miserably. I tried to enlist an ally in the tribal chairman, but he was in Florio’s pocket. I still needed an ally, but who?

  The farmer was headed to a slaughterhouse in Hialeah. Gables Estates was twenty miles-and several social strata removed-but he took me there anyway. It was just after noon on a Monday, if I’d been keeping track of time correctly. Nicky Florio should be at a construction site or in his office. Gina would either be sleeping late or shopping.

  A dozen royal palms stood at attention on the perimeter of the circular cobblestone driveway that had a pleasant up-slope thanks to fifty tons of fill. I climbed the driveway to the four-car garage, crouched down, and peeked in through the air vents. Gina’s red Porsche was there; Nicky’s Bentley wasn’t.

  I circled behind the house, dodging the rotating water sprinklers and wending my way through six figures’ worth of landscaping. I tiptoed past a bed of birds of paradise, their orange leaves like the feathers of a parrot. I avoided the cocoplum and sea grapes and stopped to survey the scene from behind a copperleaf acalypha shrub. The back lawn, which fronted a canal that led to the sea, was framed by twin hibiscus hedges blooming with red flowers. A blue jay eyed me from the safety of the sea grapes, then flew away.

  I crawled forward toward the pool deck, which was surrounded by purple azaleas. The pool gleamed turquoise in the afternoon sun. Lying on a chaise longue, wearing the bottom of a string bikini and nothing else, was Gina Florio. Her eyes were closed, her body glistening with oil.

  I fought my way through the azaleas and padded quietly along the keystone pool deck. I passed a whirlpool large enough to accommodate an all-pro offensive line, his-and-her cabanas, a redbrick barbecue grill that looked as if it had never been used, and a bar accented with green marble inlays. I stood at the foot of the chaise longue, barefoot and befouled, wearing Rufus’s overalls. I watched a bead of sweat trickle south between Gina’s suntanned breasts.

  Either she sensed me or she smelled me. Her eyes opened, took a second to focus, and then she gasped. Her hands tried to cover her breasts. Hands won’t do the job.

  “One step and I’ll scream!” she shouted, her voice struggling for control. “My husband’s in the kitchen, and he’s got a high-powered rifle.”


  “A rifle in the kitchen?” I asked. “What, next to the Cuisinart?”

  Her mouth dropped open. She studied me. “Jake? Is that you?”

  “I’ll bet he’s no better with a rifle than he is with a shotgun.”

  “Jake! What’s happened? Why are you so…so stinky?”

  “Is Nicky here?”

  “No. I was making that up. I didn’t know what to say.” She took her hands away from her breasts and now arched her back toward me. Old habits die hard.

  Then she laughed. “Jake, if only you could see yourself. Wait here.” She ran into the cabana with little bouncy steps and came out carrying a Polaroid camera. She made me pose while she clicked off a shot of a profoundly odd-looking ex-football player, ex-public defender, ex-a-lot-of-things, including, possibly, ex-lawyer.

  “The creature from the black lagoon,” she announced, examining the photograph. “Come inside and get cleaned up. Then tell me what’s going on.”

  The house was shaped like a croissant, the architecture nuevo-Mediterranean. Cast-stone columns, terra cotta barrel-tile roof, and patinaed window frames gave the place a look of graceful aging, which was a good trick because it was three years old. Inside, the fabrics and wall coverings were eggplant, aqua, and green. The floors were rough-hewn stone. A staircase to the second floor was made of travertine marble with a sweeping iron-and-mahogany rail. Weathered woods throughout let us know we were close to the sea.

  Gina led me to a downstairs bathroom that was all rock: slate, limestone, and granite. The shower opened onto a lanai blooming with purple orchids and white jasmine. A couple of whiffs could make you dizzy. She brought me some industrial-strength soap the gardener uses and some fluffy black towels. Then she left me alone.

  For about two minutes.

  She came into the shower carrying a loofah sponge and wearing a smile and nothing else. The brush stung my skin, but the only other choice was a chisel. She scrubbed me hard and rinsed me soft. The hot water rose in billows of steam. I was clean and wet and warm when she kissed me with open lips. She pressed herself to me, our bodies squishing under the tumbling spray. She was sleek from the suntan oil, her body warm and catlike. I felt sleepy and soothed, but strangely, not aroused. The fear gone, fatigue was setting in.