The buzz of getting the job was still there. After almost six years without one, after all these years working in the shadows as a PI, he was finally going to feel the sweet weight of a badge again.
Damn, he wanted to share this moment with someone.
Mel. But then he remembered that he had gone to Atlanta with his girlfriend Yuba to meet her mother. It had surprised him that things had gotten that serious for his friend, but he was happy for him.
Susan Outlaw and her son Ben. They wouldn’t really understand how important this was.
Sam Dodie. His old chief from Mississippi would get it but Sam and Margaret were roaming around out west somewhere in their motor home.
Phillip. But his foster father was thirteen-hundred miles away up in Michigan and this wasn’t something that could be celebrated over the phone.
Joe…
More than anyone she would know what this meant to him. But he wasn’t ready to talk to her yet, wasn’t ready to find out if her trip to Montreal had been her way of moving on after their argument last Christmas.
Louis looked over the hood of the car toward the station, watching as two cops come out in street clothes, laughing as they headed toward their cars, probably bound for O’Sullivan’s and after-shift unwinding. For a second he considered going there but he decided to wait until he had a badge, until he was finally one of them.
He got in the Mustang, started it up and turned the air on high. For a moment he just sat there, hands on the wheel, squinting out the windshield into the low-slung white sun.
Katy.
Katy would get it.
He glanced at his watch. She’d still be at her office for at least another hour. He slammed the Mustang in gear and peeled out of the lot.
Her desk was empty but there was a full cup of steaming coffee sitting amid the mess of papers. There was no one else in the office, so Louis headed back toward the area holding the panther cages.
There was Katy, standing behind a metal table holding a plastic baby bottle. Jeff was beside her, a wadded up towel in his hands.
“Louis!” Katy said, looking up.
“Hey Katy,” he said. “How’s it going, Jeff?”
“Fine, Mr. Kincaid.”
“Louis, it’s Louis, okay?” As he came forward he realized Jeff was cradling a panther kitten in the towel. It was squirming and making raspy mewing noises.
“Oh man,” Louis said. “Is that Lou?”
“Yup,” Katy said.
“He’s gotten big in a week.”
Katy nodded. “He’s going to be a really big boy, maybe over one-forty.” She held up the bottle. “Hold him tight, Jeff. Let’s give him the rest of his vitamins.”
The kitten was fighting to get out of the towel but Jeff firmly wrapped its legs and Katy injected the last of the white liquid into the tiny pink mouth.
Louis heard a strange huffing noise and looked to the cage at his left. Grace was pacing, watching them anxiously. The second kitten, Nico, was asleep in the back of the cage.
“Okay, we’re done,” Katy said.
Louis watched as Jeff opened a small door of the cage and carefully set the kitten back inside. Grace immediately began licking it. After a moment, she grabbed it by the nape and took it back to the corner.
Louis watched them, thinking about the signs he had seen coming onto the preserve and across Alligator Alley. PANTHER CROSSING. DRIVE CAREFULLY.
“How long will you keep them here?” he asked.
“A couple more weeks,” Katy said. “Then we have to release them.”
Louis turned to look at her. He was puzzled that he didn’t see any sadness in her expression. But then he realized that any sentimentality he might have about the cats wasn’t part of Katy’s makeup. She could love the cats but she couldn’t let herself get too attached. It was like his job in a strange way. He could care about the people he helped, fight for the victims, and even mourn the dead. But if he let any of it sit in his heart too long he couldn’t do what he needed to do.
Jeff left, heading out a back door.
Katy glanced over Louis, taking in his dress slacks and shirt for the first time. “Hot date?” she asked.
“No, job interview. I’m going back in uniform.”
Her smile widened. “That’s great. I know how much you wanted it.”
“That’s why I’m here,” he said. “Want to go have a beer to help me celebrate?”
She shook her head. “I’d love to, Louis, but I can’t right now. Jeff and I have to — ”
Louis held up a hand. “Work. I get it. Some other time maybe.”
She cocked her head. “You want to come help us?”
“Help you do what?”
“We’re releasing Bruce today. Jeff has him crated and ready to go.”
“He’s okay?” Louis asked.
“Good to go.” Katy smiled. “He’ll do better out there than in here.” She pulled off her apron and looked at her watch. “We need to do it at dusk because they feel safer then. So, you want to come?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Louis said.
The setting sun was just starting to singe the tops of the cypress trees when Jeff slowed the swamp buggy. Riding in the passenger seat, Louis had a clear view of the landscape but still no idea where they were. He knew that unlike Katy, who seemed as at home in the Glades as the panthers, he would never feel like anything but an intruder in this primordial place.
He had come to appreciate its desolate beauty, come to understand its strange pull on the soul. But he still didn’t belong here.
Jeff stopped the swamp buggy. The quiet, after the roar of the engine, was almost deafening. Katy, who had been riding in the back with another ranger, jumped out and came up to Louis.
“You sure you want to mess up those nice shoes?” she asked, smiling.
“Screw the shoes. Let’s go.”
It took all four of them to lift the crate down from the buggy. It was solid wood except for the breathing holes so Louis couldn’t see Bruce. He could only hear him, hear his anxious panting.
Louis had sweated through his white dress shirt by the time they set the crate down on the marshy ground. He wiped his face, looking around.
They were somewhere deep in the preserve and Katy had chosen an isolated hammock for the release site, an island of brush and trees that sat a foot or so above the shallow water.
There was a low fringe of dark green on the far horizon and above that the sky was a huge blister of purple and orange. They had maybe ten minutes of daylight left.
“Let’s do it,” Katy said.
She went to the front of the crate and grasped the handle in the front. She gave it a hard tug upward.
“Go,” she said softly.
The panther was a brown blur and it took Louis’s eyes a second to catch up with Bruce. He was running across the open field at full speed. Then with a splash of his hind legs in the shallow water, he was gone.
Louis stared at the spot in the dark brush where the panther had disappeared.
“Where’s he going?” he said.
“North,” Katy said.
She stood staring into the darkness. “It’s still mating season,” she said. “He’ll travel hundreds of miles to find a mate if he has to.”
They stood silent for a moment then Katy let out a long breath, turned and walked back to the swamp buggy.
Louis didn’t move. He looked east, where the rising moon was a pale sliver and Venus burned bright. He looked west, where a flock of egrets seeking a roosting place slid silently across the purple sky. He looked north, where the panther had gone.
Suddenly, he knew what he had to do. He still wanted the badge but it would have to wait a little while longer. Mobley would rip him a new one and Louis knew he’d spend the next year clawing his way back to Mobley’s good side but he also knew that the sheriff understood that a good cop was first a good man.
Before he set foot in that academy Louis knew he had to go north, for just a while.
North, where Lily waited for a birthday party.
North, where maybe, just maybe, Joe waited for him.