Wayne started nodding. Run. It had always worked before. Just run.
Buck looked down and shook his head, back and forth, twice, slowly.
"And if they don't, Marcus?" Buck said without looking up. "If either one of them gets rescued by some camp owner in a couple days, you think they won't look for a couple of shit-kicker Glades boys and a two-time ex-con with only one strike to go that been lootin' houses and left someone to the out here? Especially if that someone really is a cop."
Both boys were dumb with silence.
"And if the lady dies and that big guy gets so pissed he swims the hell out of here, they'll bring felony murder charges against all three of us. The court will say she died during the commission of a felony. That'll be your felony, Wayne, robbery of a fucking necklace," he said, pointing at the face of that dumbness. "And our theft."
From their openmouthed look, the boys were losing their stupefaction and focusing on the term "felony murder."
Buck again checked the other side of the door. He already didn't like guns and the effort of holding the big.45 in his hand seemed to have drained his energy. I got six rounds here, he thought. Maybe I should kill all four of them and wash my own self of it all. Goddamn it. Your daddy didn't teach you nothin', did he, boy.
When they stepped back in I could see the change. The raised.45 was held a little tighter. Buck's knuckles were white as he squeezed the grip. No more bluffing.
"I am truly sorry, Mr. Freeman," he said, and I almost jumped then at the words; only the thought of what they might do to Sherry caused the muscles in my legs and back to hold. They were curtain-closing words coming from a man with eyes that now seemed to see nothing but survival, and the look was one I recognized. I now had no doubt he was an ex-con, learned from the inside.
"I'm gonna have to ask you to move over there by the door, sir, and sit," he said waving the handgun.
"Wayne, you go on and get that roll of tape out of the bag there and strap Mr. Freeman up by the ankles and the wrists. Behind his back, boy."
Buck had obviously grown tired of the younger one's miscues. The identifying necklace should have never seen the light of day until some buyer somewhere was ready to remove the stones so it would be unrecognizable.
"Now whoa, whoa, hold on a minute," I said, trying to slow things down. "What the hell, fellas. You guys got something going on out here where you're just salvaging after the storm, we don't give a damn. Hell, we're not even owners of any property. We just got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Whatever you guys are doing, it's none of our business and it can stay that way."
The kid crossed my ankles and started strapping with a roll of waterproof packaging tape, the kind with a nylon filament running through it. Tough to tear, tougher to break. He seemed pissed now, taking out the anger that he wanted to direct at someone else onto the job at hand. I'd be lucky to still feel my toes in an hour.
"Hands behind your back," he said, like he'd heard it on an old movie. But when I hesitated Buck cocked the big hammer on the pistol and I pressed my lips into a line and followed the order. The kid did the same angry trick on my hands, though I was ready and turned my knuckles in, forcing the tendons on the inside of my wrists to bulge as much as my strength could pop them. It would give me some room when I relaxed. I hoped it would be a voluntary relaxation and not because my brain matter was all over the wall behind me.
As much as the binding hurt it was nothing compared with having to watch the other little shithead do the same thing to Sherry.
Wayne finished with me and then started to toss the roll to his friend who was too busy staring down at Sherry's crotch to notice.
"Yo, Marcus," the kid said, fucking up again, using his buddy's name, not that it mattered anymore.
Marcus caught the tape roll and started wrapping Sherry's ankles to the posts of the cot. She whined once when he pulled her broken leg over to strap it and I felt angry tears come into my eyes. Retribution had not been part of me as a street cop. The only person I'd ever wished death on was my own alcoholic father who almost nightly dumped his badge and revolver on the kitchen table before he started smacking my mother around with an open hand. But as I watched this kid pull Sherry's arms up and bind them and then run his fingertips down her now unprotected chest and over her breasts, he became number two.
"Get the fuck over here," Buck snapped at the kid. He picked up the canvas bag by the bottom corner and let several metal tools spill out onto the floor: a stout iron crowbar, two different-sized screwdrivers, and a pair of vise grips, a claw hammer, and small axe.
"I seen by the markings on that door, you already tried to get into the other room there, Mr. Freeman," he said without looking at me. "But maybe you just didn't have the right tools with you, huh?"
He stepped over for a closer look at the door and the electronic locking device.
"But scootch on over out of the way there, sir. I have had some practical learning on how to get in and out of places folks don't want you to get in or out of."
I slid myself down the wall and didn't say a word about the hatchway under the room that I'd left wide open in my haste to meet these assholes. I was trying to decide if we were better off biding our time, hoping against hope that the two immature hicks would continue to fuck up somehow and give me an opening, or should I just tell Buck about the entry, let them loot whatever they wanted from the room and maybe he'd be satisfied and leave. The other possibility I was not yet ready to confront: that he'd simply kill us both and leave it to whomever stumbled onto our rotting bodies in a few days or weeks to piece it together. Hell, maybe he'd just kill us and haul our corpses onto his airboat deeper into the swamp to dump and let nature break us down. There are no small number of bodies dumped in the Everglades where all manner of forensic evidence is consumed by everything from alligators and wild boar right down to the billions of heat- and waterborne microbes. Sherry and I had both investigated some of those homicides. A chunk of dead biology doesn't last long in this soup. We'd be on a missing persons report. Lost in the storm. A couple years after Katrina there are still folks missing from New Orleans, and we weren't anywhere close to a city.
I was working on the scenarios, rolling them around in my head, when Buck took the crowbar to the doorjamb, gouging with a sharp edge at the outside of the frame, maybe figuring like a cheap thief he could bust a hole and then reach through and simply turn the lock button from the other side. The other two stood and watched, waiting like dutiful, anxious apprentices for the foreman to sic them to task.
"Know what the problem is with people like you, Mr. Freeman, who come out here in the Glades to take what you want whether it's the fish or the game or even the fresh water for yourselves and leave nothin' but garbage and trash behind?" Buck said while he pried at a corner.
I did not answer, sure that he would do so for me.
"Y'all think you're entitled, you know? You think that just because this is open country and it don't look like what you have in the cities on the coast, that it's free and clear to just take and do what you want with. Build what you want in it. Come out here and piss in it and then go on home.
"You know, my daddy and his daddy before him spent lifetimes living out here, taking what was natural and right and working their asses off and they didn't do it for riches, Mr. Freeman. They done it for survival and they done it for their families and really all they ever wanted was to be left alone and left to it."
The one called Wayne shifted his weight; the axe was now in his hand, hanging by his side like he was itching to do damage with it. The other one, Marcus, was still sneaking looks at Sherry, who was silent now but I kept watching her, the rise and fall of her chest, and it was slight but steady. Both of the boys looked bored, scratching at their dirty necks like they'd heard this speech before and had little interest in it. It was getting dimmer in the room, the light now slanting through the doorway that they'd left open, the window to the east gone dark in shadow.