"Freeman!"
I crawled to the door, staying low, but glanced up in all four directions in search of flames. I pushed the door open and a wave of fresh air hit my face, which caused my mouth to involuntarily gasp open and my eyes to tear. Down in the canal, the park ranger was waist-deep in water. He was balancing a fire extinguisher on his shoulder with one hand and using the other to pull and stroke himself forward.
"Freeman! Are you OK?"
I stood with help from the handrail and nodded. My lungs were stinging with each breath but the oxygen was clearing them. The ranger made the dock and hoisted himself up and started up the stairs.
"You all right?"
"Yeah," I said. "Yeah." The second word was clearer than the first.
"The fire's on the backside, north corner," he said, pushing my door open wide with his dripping boot. "Maybe we can knock it down from the window ledges."
He pulled the pin on his boat extinguisher and then bent low and started in. I took as deep a breath as I could and followed. The ranger crab-walked across the room to the north window and I broke for the kitchen counter, where my own extinguisher was stored.
The ranger had already figured out the inside latch system by the time I got to the east window. We pulled open the hinged mosquito screens and pushed our heads out. The flames were crawling up the sides of the shack in an odd wave of blue and orange. They licked up over the edge of the roof but there were no eaves in the design to stop them and let them gain heat. This was a good thing. I saw a billow of white chemical spray fan out from around the corner, then stepped one leg through the window and straddled the casement. I pulled the pin on my canister and let loose a shot of spray, aiming down at the base of the flames. The fire retreated but then stubbornly reignited. It looked as though the tall piling itself was on fire. I leaned farther out to get a better angle and squeezed off another blast.
It may have been ten minutes, maybe thirty. The ranger's extinguisher ran dry before mine, but we had doused all the live flame we could see. When my can was empty, he helped me back in through the window and we both stumbled out the door and down the stairs. The wash of fresh air set us both coughing again, and when we reached the dock at the bottom the ranger sat with his feet in the water and retched between his knees. I lay down on the opposite side and cupped the river water in my hands and splashed it up into my face and eyes. It was several minutes before either of us could speak.
"You OK, Freeman?"
"OK," I said, realizing I had long forgotten the ranger's name.
"Griggs," he said. "Dan Griggs."
"Thanks, Griggs."
The eastern sky was lightening, though the sun was still too low to break through the tree canopy. In time we both sat up, leaning our backs into opposite posts at the end of the dock. I finally took a solid look at the guy. He was a good ten years younger than me, lean with sandy blond hair and skin too fair for his job in the Florida sun. His ranger uniform was soaked up to a dark line across his chest. His leather boots were oozing mud. He was still wearing his belt with a knife scabbard and a flashlight holder.
"You swim out here at dawn often?"
He grinned and shook his head without looking up.
"I'm usually on dawn patrol out on the main river," he said. "I've seen white smoke rising from your stovepipe before, but when I saw it was black, I knew something was wrong and motored up here."
"Couldn't get the Whaler in," I stated.
"Had to tie her up and wade in. But I could see the flames even from deep water."
"Guess I picked a bad morning to sleep in."
Griggs still hadn't looked up into my face.
"I figured you were here 'cause I could see that your canoe was gone from the landing."
"I appreciate you looking after me," I said. "The whole place might have gone up if you hadn't been here."
This time Griggs did look over at me. The irony was not lost on him. Several months ago it was Griggs who had to serve papers from the state informing me that the Attorney General's Office was attempting to break the ninety-nine-year lease that Billy held on the old research shack. Until then I'd been left alone and had even befriended the old, longtime ranger whom Griggs had replaced. But there had been a messy business. Blood had been spilled in these waters through a violence that didn't belong in this place. Many people blamed me, and it was a point of view I couldn't argue with. That was when the state began trying to toss me out. Billy had been fighting the eviction at my request, and he had kept them tied up in legal maneuvering ever since.
"I don't suppose you noticed any lightning while you were on dawn patrol?" I asked, finally making it to my feet and looking up under the base supports of the shack.
"Nope. And I'm sure you can rule out faulty wiring." He too had gotten to his feet. "But unless you reached out and doused the back wall with kerosene and lit the match yourself, I'd say you got an enemy."
The ranger was pointing to a small slick of rainbow-colored water that seemed to float independently on the surface of my channel. Some sort of petroleum-based accelerant had spread into the water.
"Whoever they are, they don't know much about Dade County pine," he said. "It'd take a whole lot more heat than that to do anything more than just scorch that tough old wood."
While Griggs used my canoe to retrieve a camera from his Whaler, I went back inside. There had been no interior damage, and the smoke had mostly cleared, rising up through the ceiling cupola as the design had intended. Still, the place reeked of burnt oil and wood. I closed the screen frames and changed my clothes. I found my cell phone and started to call Billy, but put it off. I would need to stay at his place until the shack aired out, but the conversation I anticipated was better off held out of earshot of anyone else. I grabbed my still unpacked travel bag and rejoined Griggs below.
In the canoe we took a circle around the base of the shack. The back wall and northeast support pillar were blackened, but there was no apparent structural damage. We pushed up next to the pillar, where I used a knife to dig out a scarred piece of wood and put it into a plastic bag. Griggs had been right about the arsonist's ignorance of the pine's resistance, unless his intent was to be more psychologically than physically destructive. Maybe someone was more interested in scaring me out than burning me up.
When we finished gawking, we returned to the ranger's boat and tied a line to the canoe for towing. Griggs motored slowly down the narrow upper river, the sound of his engine sending most of the river animals I would normally see this early in the day into hiding. But just as he cleared the canopy and pushed the throttle up, I caught a glimpse of the long lazy wings of a blue heron, its yellow, sticklike legs not yet folded from its takeoff. I watched it keep time with us, then circle back toward the west and finally disappear into the distance.
CHAPTER
3
I waited until I was on the road in my truck before calling Billy on my cell.
"Jesus, Max," was his response when I filled him in on the morning's events. "Are you going to file a report?"
"What? And have cops crawling all over my stuff?" I knew the kinds of useless messes cops made. I'd made them myself.
"Besides, what good would it do? It's not like you're going to find footprints out there. And contrary to popular belief, the bad guys really don't leave torn pieces of their shirts on the thornbushes that often."