I kept myself on a constant flow of caffeine from my oversized thermos, and went over the search possibilities or impossibilities that I was asking Brown to undertake. I'd gone to an army/navy supply store two days ago. In the back of the truck I had a high-end metal detector similar to the kind used by anthropological investigators and emergency rescue teams; a new generation handheld GPS; an expandable trenching tool with a knife-sharp spade and a chisel-head pickax. I also brought a variety of evidence bags- optimistic-as well as Billy's digital camera and a new satellite cell phone with a different number and carrier from any of the others.
By the time I hit Route 29 I had to flip my mirror up to keep the rising sun from blinding me. The top few feet of the sawgrass had gone a fiery orange in the early rays, and for a mile I watched a trio of swallow-tailed kites swooping down into the grass. The sharp forks of their black tails and pointed wings showed hard against the clear sky, and one came up with a wriggling snake in its beak, the ribbon of flesh outlined against the birds pure-white belly. I made the exit and turned south and rode along a canal that drained the water and gave high ground to the tiny communities of Jerome and Copeland. I passed the old road prison where convicts were held after long days of clearing the roadsides of overgrowth with their bush-axes and machetes while guards stood by with their rifles at port arms. Would even a desperate man try to run out here?
Farther south the road hit a blinking-light intersection at the Tamiami Trail and then continued all the way into Chokoloskee. When I pulled into the shell-lot of Dawkins's dock, both of his boats were gone. Nate Brown was sitting out on the end of the wood- plank dock. I knew he was dangling a hand-line into the water, just as I knew he had heard me and marked my arrival. I parked out of the way of the forklift's worn path and walked out to meet him.
"Anything biting?"
"They's always somethin' bitin', Mr. Freeman."
He looked up at me and then back into the water, waiting. The early sun was dancing off the surface, the southeast wind rippling up the surface. I sat down next to the old Gladesman and unfolded one of Billy's computer-generated maps.
"This is what we figure, or what we think is possible so far," I started. Brown first looked down at the map and then up at me.
"Anythin' is possible, son."
I nodded and began.
"Let's assume that Mayes and his sons go to work for Noren somewhere about here," I said, putting my finger on the map. "The letter indicates they're some distance out of Everglades City. It's early summer and you know the heat and mosquitoes are just starting to get unbearable, making the crew more miserable by the day.
"We know through some reports and writings in local newspapers that the dredge is making about two miles of road a month when things are going well. We figure these X's here coincide with Mayes's letter of June third, when the two workers slipped out at night to make their way back and his son heard the gunshots."
Brown touched the spot with the rough tips of his fingers. It was a delicate gesture that made me pause and look up at the side of his face, wondering what he was dunking.
"These trees here an' the elevation mark means they's high ground, right?" he said.
"Yeah."
"Curlew Hammock," he said. "An' then this one here's got to be Marquez Ridge."
His fingers slid over to the spot where the three X's were marked.
"Where'd y'all get this here map?"
Now he was looking directly into my face but his own was blank.
"William Jefferson," I said. "John William's grandson."
He did not let any recognition or surprise show, but he did not take his eyes off mine, waiting, expecting more. I told him about using his information on the grandson's cleric possibilities to run down a list and then about the discovery and evasiveness of the reverend up in Placid City. I told him William Jefferson's recounting of his grandfather, his strange silence and the perception at least by the reverend, and obviously his own mother, that John William had an evil aura about him.
"They ain't nothin' you're tellin' that don't fit," Brown finally said. "I recall the boy being awful close to his religion. The girl brought him to that and a lot of folks thought of it as savin' him from what his grandfather done."
Nate waited again, not saying more, just looking out on the water, maybe remembering a small boy running a bit too scared into the trees of the island, talking a little less than any other kid, and turning away when adults and then other children began whispering his grandfather's name.
"So that's where you got these here coordinates and such?" he said.
I told him about the crate and its contents. His face only changed when I mentioned the rifle, the infamous gun that outshot his own father and gave the community a solid tiling to tie all the rumors to.
"You think John William Jefferson was capable of killing these men for three hundred dollars?" I finally asked him.
"Men out here in them days done a lot of things for that kind of money," Brown said, and I knew that included him. In my encounter with the old Gladesman three years ago, Billy had run what background there was on him and found that he had done time in prison on a manslaughter charge. In the late sixties an Everglades National Park ranger had been chasing Brown through the islands, trying to arrest him for poaching gators. Snaking his boat through the dizzying waterways just as he had done with the helicopter, Brown had led the pursuing ranger into a submerged sandbar. The government boat slammed into the unforgiving sand. The ranger pitched forward out of the cockpit and broke his neck. Brown turned himself in three days later when word spread that he was being sought for killing the man.
"I s'pose I know why ya'll asked me to help you, Mr. Freeman. If you're askin' if these here X's are the graves of them boys and their father, they is only one way to know," he said, standing up and rewinding the fishing line around his palm. "So let's go."'
Brown's boat was cleated at the dock and this time he had his homemade Glades skiff tied off on the back. I loaded my supplies and then locked up my truck. Within minutes we were moving north, the skiff slapping behind us on the end of a line. We headed into the sun, its early brightness burning white-hot. Brown pulled his billed cap low, shading his eyes so they were difficult to read, and I thought of the similar description of John William. They were men who worked and lived in water-reflected sunlight all their lives. They chose to exist in a desolate place where sociability was not a part of their everyday existence. The reasons they came may have been different, but why they stayed was not: they didn't like anyone else's rules or some other leader's vision or expectation. Eighty years of that independent blood had not yet been washed out by the generations.
"Yonder is where my daddy run a still in the twenties," Brown said, interrupting the drone of the motor and the slap of water against the hull. "Him and a half-dozen others had their fixin's on the smaller shell mounds. First they was in by Loop Road. Then the law started crackin' 'em an' they had to come further out. Daddy and them weren't too acceptin' of others comin' into their territory."
I'd learned to let Brown talk on the few occasions that he cared to. He was making his own point, under his own logic.
"Same thing happened to the gator hunters. You could take a dozen gators in a three-night trip. Sell the hides for a dollar fifty apiece for the six- to eight-footers.
"Then in '47, Harry Truman hisself come down and they drew up the boundaries for the Park and one day the best gator-huntin' spots was now illegal, and to hell with you if you and your daddy before you been livin' off that for forty years."