Keeping my eyes on Denton and traffic, I tried the cell phone again, as if it might have resurrected itself. It was still dead. I had the feeling that it was glad I was being punished for not charging it, like its nasty little electric innards were saying, See what you made me do?
I sped up to get through a yellow light before it turned red, and got closer to Denton to make sure I hadn’t lost him. That was him, all right. That was Leo Brossi in the passenger seat and that was Reggie standing muzzled and forlorn in the backseat. We were going south on Tamiami Trail. At Clark Road, which leads to Interstate 75 or the Myakka River, Denton turned.
I got a sick taste in my mouth. Birdlegs had said Gabe Marks lived in the country near the Myakka River. Now Brossi’s crude jibe about throwing Reggie to the alligators seemed even more cruel, because he probably meant it literally. The Myakka River is full of brooding alligators waiting for new flesh to eat.
After a few miles, Denton crossed 75 and continued southeast. Toward the Myakka. Perhaps toward Gabe Marks’s place.
I slowed the Bronco and pulled to the shoulder. This was insane. I should turn around now. I should go home and make my afternoon rounds. I should go home and plug in my dead cell phone and recharge its battery. I should wait for Guidry to bring a transmitter for me to wear when I accosted Denton Ferrelli.
But Denton had Reggie with him, and he planned to kill him. Reggie wasn’t a fellow human being, but he was a fellow being, and he was a damn sight more deserving of respect than a lot of humans.
While Denton’s car got smaller and smaller in the distance, I sat and debated with myself. Then I took my foot off the brake and drove straight ahead. In the end, it all boiled down to one thing—if I didn’t try to save Reggie, I would never be able to live with myself.
Out of the city, Clark Road becomes State Highway 72. There was enough traffic to keep me from feeling conspicuous, but I stayed three or four cars behind Denton. After about ten miles of orange groves and vegetable and plant farms, he left the highway, turning right on a side road. To let him get farther ahead, I stopped on the highway shoulder for a couple of minutes before I turned. The new road was a paved farm-to-market that cut between densely wooded pinelands interspersed with occasional cattle farms. The pines had once been farmed for turpentine, but when the turpentine market bottomed out, trees were cut to make way for cows.
Denton’s Land Rover was a black dot ahead of me. I imagined him laughing with Leo Brossi as they planned Reggie’s murder. The black dot turned left and disappeared, and I stomped on the gas. When I reached the turn, he was already half a mile away. If he had been observant, he might wonder at a car taking the same route. On the other hand, he was headed directly toward the Myakka River and the popular Myakka River State Park. The park comprises almost thirty thousand acres of prairie grasses and wildflowers that have been obliterated in the rest of Florida, so it’s a state treasure. The Myakka flows through twelve miles of the park on its way to Charlotte Harbor. Outside the park, a few farmers and ranchers cling to a way of life that in just one generation has become an anachronism.
Denton turned right, bouncing down a sandy road and whipping a high cloud of white dust. I pulled to the side of the road and watched the dust. After about half a mile, the dust cloud stopped, and the black dot that was Denton’s Land Rover emerged, going slowly toward a group of frame buildings set far back on the left side of the road. He had reached his destination.
I moved forward, turning at a snail’s pace to keep from exciting the dust. Wide ditches lay on each side of the narrow road. On the right was a wilderness of pine, oak, palmetto, and palm above a morass of saw palmetto, wax myrtle, gallberry, fetterbush, and staggerbush teeming with deer and wild hogs. Ospreys perched in the trees, and a red-shouldered hawk watched my passage from the top of a runner oak. On the left, a barbed-wire fence enclosed thick yellow cordgrass, tall as a man. The grass hid the house where Denton and Leo Brossi had taken Reggie. I prayed it hid me too.
27
Well back from the driveway leading to the house, I pulled to the side of the road and got out of the Bronco. I managed to bound across the ditch without getting bitten by any critters hiding in its vines and grasses, and balanced on the ditch’s edge while I pushed down the lowest string of barbed wire. Gingerly, I stretched my leg over it, whispering ouches and shits when sharp barbs punctured my flesh. At least I managed to crawl through without snagging my shirt or my hair on the top wire.
I crouched low and began swimming through the cordgrass, parting it with outstretched arms, praying I didn’t step on a snake. Swarms of gnats and mosquitoes rose like steam, and a fine mist of pollen covered me from the grass heads. I felt a sneeze coming on and pinched my nose. The sneeze imploded inside my head, causing lightning flashes across my cortex.
Something sticky brushed my bare shoulder. I instinctively slapped it away and then gave an involuntary shriek when I saw it was a furry tarantula. The thing scurried away into the grass, while I rubbed my skin and remembered all the stories I’d heard as a child about how a tarantula’s bite will cause your flesh to rot away and leave a big cavity down to your bones. I couldn’t see a bite mark, but for all I knew a tarantula’s bite might be invisible. Shuddering, I moved on, wanting to get to the end of this teeming field.
I could hear men’s voices now, and a heavy laugh floated over the grass. I couldn’t see anything except the pale grass stems, but I didn’t dare stand up. All I could do was press on, hoping my movement through the sea of grass wasn’t an obvious trail the men were watching. With luck, I would come out behind one of the sheds. If I weren’t lucky, death might be waiting for me on the other side of this ocean of grass. Oddly enough, it wasn’t death that I feared, but turning coward and running away without saving Reggie.
After what seemed an eternity, I got close enough to the end of the field of cordgrass to see a dilapidated shed directly in front of me, one of a number of similar buildings scattered behind and to the side of a battered old house. A wall of stacked lumber stood at the end of the driveway, with logs piled higher than my head. Gabe either sold wood to people nostalgic for fires roaring inside while snow fell outside, or he just kept trim by felling trees and chopping logs. Several snakeskins hung with their top ends nailed to logs in the stack, and a long alligator hide was stretched on a plywood board raised on sawhorses.
The front yard was littered with abandoned furniture, parts of cars that had been there so long that grass grew on them, and rusted pieces of farm equipment. On the far side of the sandy driveway, the weathered frame house had a sagging front porch and a pile of garbage beside the porch steps. Not a compost heap, just a pile of garbage. Eggshells and egg cartons, plastic milk bottles and bread wrappers and greasy KFC boxes, all rotting and stinking in the glaring heat and probably being aerated by roaches the size of small mice. The garbage pile made Gabe seem even more dangerous. He really was as dumb and primitive as he looked, and a violent nature in a stupid man makes a lethal combination.
Gabe himself was apparently having some kind of standoff with Denton and Leo. They were below him next to the car, while Gabe stood on the porch with his hammy arms folded over his chest and his chin defiantly tilted to show he didn’t defer to any man. Anybody looking at the three men would immediately have known they came from different worlds. Denton was dressed like a lawyer, dark trousers, white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled partway up his arms. Leo looked like the pimp he had been. A foot shorter than Denton, his pinkish beige pants were too tight and too shiny, and an expensive palm-printed silk shirt still managed to look cheap on him. Gabe wore a dark mesh muscle shirt that emphasized his defined chest, and stained jeans that hugged thighs thick as tree trunks. He stood with legs spread, feet firmly planted in knee-high leather boots. I didn’t have to be any closer to know he smelled like the garbage heap below him.