“Yes, why?”
“No reason. You lived here all your life?”
“Part of my life. The important part. Why?”
“It's nothing. Look, I …”
Light raked across the left side of her face. I glanced into my rearview mirror and saw headlights approaching. I said, “Car's coming. Step back, I'm pulling off the road.” I turned the Jeep's emergency flashers on and eased off the road directly behind the girl. Within seconds we were passed by a pickup truck. And three seconds later I saw the brake lights pop on.
Not a good sign.
3
I thought about my Glock. Thought about how I’d left it in the house after cleaning and oiling the pistol when I took it out of the Jeep two days ago. I glanced down at Max. Since she couldn’t see over the dashboard, she followed the movement of the truck with her head and ears.
And then she growled. Another bad sign.
The truck slowly backed up, coming parallel to my Jeep. Two men inside. There was enough light from their dashboard and the ambient glow from my Jeep to see their faces. Both wore cut-off black T-shirts. Tats on beefy forearms. Hard faces with a week’s growth of whiskers. The man on the passenger side had hooded, red-rimmed eyes that didn't blink, like a drunk at a bar staring at condensation rolling down his beer bottle. He wore a baseball hat turned backwards. The driver locked his thin lips on a bottle of Crown Royal in a wrinkled paper bag, turned it up, and took one long gulp, his face shining from sweat, cheeks blooming a shade of crimson. He stared at me through moist eyes and said, “Ya'll look like you need some help.”
I could smell diesel fumes mixed with burning weed. I said, “Thanks for stopping. Everything's okay. She just got a carsick. She wanted to get some fresh air.”
The man closest to me said, “Ya'll got all your windows down. Plenty of air in a Jeep. Maybe you and your girlfriend got into a ruckus. Maybe she don't want you no more and she's lookin' to hitch a ride.”
I said nothing. Max growled again.
The man looked at Max, grinned, and turned to the driver. “He's got a fuckin' muskrat on the seat next to him. One of 'em wiener dogs.”
“No wonder the bitch walked.” They laughed and then the guy on the passenger side gazed at the girl, like he was seeing her for the first time. He said, “Hey, sweet thing. That right? This dude botherin' you? We can make him go away. You just say the word. C'mon darlin,' get in the truck and we'll take you home.”
The girl said, “No thanks.”
The man sneered and touched the tip of his nose with a thick finger. The driver gunned the truck and quickly pulled off the road in front of my Jeep. “Get in!” I yelled to the girl. She hesitated a moment and then reached for the door handle.
Too late. The man on the passenger side moved fast, not even waiting for the truck to stop before flinging open the door and running toward the girl. He grabbed her by the forearm.
“Don't touch me!” she shouted. The man laughed and wrapped his arms, fur, ink, and muscle around her.
“She's a fighter!” he shouted, dragging her toward the truck. “This bitch got some spunk. She's gonna be real good.”
The driver, carrying a Billy club, approached me. I got out of the Jeep. He grinned, slapped the wood in the palm of his big bear paw hand and said, “Weiner dog dude, you ready for the whoppin' your daddy shoulda done years ago?” His belly hung over a belt that I couldn't see because of the girth. I guessed he was more than 290 pounds of muscles and fat, mostly fat. Plus he was stoned, very stoned. Each body movement was telegraphed before it happened.
I waited for him, never taking my eyes off of his. He raised his huge right arm and swung at my head. I easily dodged it, the Billy club missing my forehead by a few inches. The kinetic energy, the torque of the swing, threw him off balance for a half second. That's all the time I needed. I grabbed his right wrist, pulling his arm behind his back and forcing his hand up to his neck. The pop of tendons and bones separating was like the sound of eggs cracking. He screamed and went down on his knees the same time I brought up my knee hard into his nose. He fell backwards, out cold.
The other man had abandoned the girl and was reaching for a shotgun cradled in the window behind the truck seats. His hand was touching the stock when I slammed the truck's door into his legs. He yelled louder than his sleeping partner had screamed, and he tried to turn around — again an opponent losing equilibrium. It gave me a moment to draw far back and deliver a hard hit with my fist into the center of his mouth. I felt my knuckles plow through lips, front teeth and nose. I knew his jaw had dislocated. He stared at me through incredulous dull eyes, now glazed and rolling upward in his small skull. His lips were macerated, blood pouring from what was left of his mouth and nose. He smelled of weed, sour beer, and bacon fat. He tumbled forward, falling into the undergrowth, less than five feet from a canal.
I looked in the truck and lifted a cell phone from the seat and punched three digits.
The dispatcher said, “Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”
“Looks like two men got in a fight. Severe injuries. County road 314. About halfway into the Ocala National Forest. Their Ford pickup is pulled over on the side of the road. Send an ambulance.”
“Are the men breathing?”
“Yes.”
“What is your name, sir?”
I disconnected and threw the phone into the center of the canal.
Then I looked for the girl, the fog growing thicker, rising through the light from the Jeep's headlights, the bellow of bullfrogs coming from the canal. “Are you okay?” I called out to the girl, hoping she would be standing in the shadows. “Courtney!” I felt fatigue growing behind my eyes as I walked back to my Jeep. Little Max stuck her head out the side window and made a slight whimpering sound. “She ran away, Max. The girl's gone.”
4
The next morning I awoke at sunrise, poured a cup of coffee, and walked onto my screened porch to feed Max. The porch overlooked the St. Johns River, a 310-mile river of history that meandered north from Vero Beach, spilling its heart into the Atlantic Ocean east of Jacksonville. My old cabin, built in the 1930's from cypress, pine, and red oak, sat at the mid-way point of the river. My nearest neighbor was a mile away. The Ocala National Forest, with its primordial beauty, bordered the far side of the St. Johns.
I sipped coffee and watched the match-flare of dawn smolder in the horizon behind live oaks and cabbage palms. The sunrise cast the trees in silhouette, their leafy heads and shoulders stitched in the golden threads of morning light. At the base of the old oaks, and deep in the ancient forest, secrets lie buried in folklore and fauna like the watery graves of mastodon skeletons discovered at the bottom of the forest's gin-clear springs.
I thought of the girl I'd found last night, Courtney Burke. I hoped she was on a bus heading to someplace safer than where she came. My thoughts were interrupted by a cardinal, tossing back his head and singing to the new day.
A breeze danced across the river and brought the scent of wood smoke and honeysuckles. A fisherman puttered down the center of the river in a dark green Boston Whaler, a V formation from the boat's wake pitching the surface into a sea of copper pennies winking in the sunlight.
Max barked once. “Patience, little lady,” I said, pouring some food into her bowl. I watched her eat for a few seconds and then looked at the framed picture of my wife, Sherri, which I kept on a small end table next to a rocking chair on the porch. Sherri died a few years ago from ovarian cancer, but her spirit still lived with us, Max and me. When I worked as a homicide detective with Miami-Dade PD, Sherri bought Max when I was on an extended criminal surveillance. She'd named her Maxine, but with the little dachshund's feisty brown eyes and fearless heart of a lion in a ten-pound body, she took on the swagger of a Max.