The old man was looking from me to them but did not hesitate to move back toward the way we'd come.
"Y'all are with us, Nash," Brown ordered the young man, who'd been unsure of what ground he'd landed on, but knew to answer to a legend.
"Yes, sir, Mr. Brown," he said, and moved with the Gladesman.
I held my Glock in my left hand and with my right heaved Cumming's.38 and then Derrer's Beretta out into separate parts of the wet hammock. Without a metal detector, neither was ever going to be found.
"Now, I figure big Jim there might make it the fifteen miles through the swamp to the trail. He looks fit enough. Probably did some hunting in his time. But your boy Rick here, he's in for a long trek with that leg. He makes it a mile and it'll be something," I said.
"But fuck you, Freeman. That's what you both said, right? Ought to cap both of us, right?"
I turned and walked away and Brown and Nash walked with me. We were ten steps away when Cummings spoke up. "All right, Freeman. It was the PalmCo attorneys."
I took a couple of steps back and waited.
"They hire us on occasion, when their regular loss-prevention guys can't handle the job. They're lawyers so they don't tell us it's for PalmCo, but we've done enough shit for them over the years, we know who pays the bills."
Derrer had taken off his belt and vest and was strapping the Eddie Bauer ripstop cloth over his wound.
"What was the job?" I said.
"To tail you. Find out where you went, who you talked to. Typical stuff. The only twist was trying to follow you out here. Not exactly our neighborhood," Cummings said, raising his hands. The movement caused me to raise the Glock to his chest. He turned his palms out and continued.
"We figured you knew about something that PalmCo wanted. That's the usual story. When you picked up the old guy and started moving around in the Glades, we figured you had the location of some damn oil deposit or something.
"We were supposed to map everywhere you went and record any spot where you spent much time. They said if you started digging anywhere, we were to contact them right away and record the location."
He wasn't cowering. He wasn't spilling his guts. This was business for him, and he was playing out his hand with the goal of not being left in the swamp with little chance of getting himself and his partner out alive.
"What about the guns, the chopper, the cell intercepts and bugs on my truck?"
"Standard corporate security procedures," Cummings said. "I saw your jacket, Freeman. You were a street cop for a long time. The corporates, they've got stuff we never dreamed of back then."
My guess that he was former P.D. had been right.
"You the guys who went to the Loop Road bar and took the picture off the wall?"
He was silent for a few seconds, thinking, I knew, trail of evidence. Everything he had said so far could be denied by the company lawyers. Something physical couldn't be. I turned again to walk away.
"They told us to pick up anything we ran across that had to do with construction of the road, especially the old stuff," he said to turn me around. "We turned it over to them."
Now it was my turn to be silent. It was a cruel game because I knew I had the better cards this time. And he didn't know it was more than just business to me. I called the young airboat driver back to me and frisked him to be safe.
"Help your clients get to your boat, Nash," I said. The kid looked at Brown once and when the old Gladesman gave him a nod, he moved.
Brown and I watched as they shouldered Derrer and walked him like an injured player between them off the field. I shouldered our satchel with the metal detector. When they were far enough ahead I searched the ground where I had been standing and found the spent cartridge that had ejected from my gun when I shot Derrer. When I stood ready to go, I caught Brown staring at the side of my face, an unusual act for him. I caught his eyes.
"You're a hard man, Freeman. I knowed men like you," he said. "All of 'em in the past."
I could find no way to respond. If it was a compliment, I didn't take it as such.
CHAPTER
20
Nash had run the airboat up onto the grass only yards from our skiff. I climbed aboard first and searched through their supplies. I left them their fresh water and food and the first aid kit. I took another 9 mm from one pack and an old but beautifully preserved 16-gauge shotgun from a scabbard strapped up behind the driver's seat. Nash whined about the gun, begging that it had been passed down from his father, but Brown again informed him to shut up.
They propped Derrer up against the gang box at the base of the elevated driver's chair and Nash climbed up and started the big airplane engine. The one called Cummings did not look back at me. His business was done. The mist of spray kicked up as the airboat pulled away felt cool against my face, and Brown and I waited until the sound faded. Then the old man stood up on the skiff to get a higher angle to watch them. I sat on the deck, my legs crossed, and took out the map and my GPS and Derrer's tracking unit.
"You ain't worried about that feller goin' back and tellin' the police you shot him?" Brown said, continuing to look out after the airboat. I scrolled through the unit's stored coordinates and could not find anything that coincided with the longitude and latitude of John William's records.
"There would be a lot of explaining to do. Some jurisdictional matters. Permission from the men who hired those two. My guess is he'll be compensated and quiet. PalmCo isn't going to want to bring any more scrutiny out here, especially law enforcement scrutiny."
Brown just nodded and watched me working the map and the GPS. The encounter with Cummings and Derrer had thrown me off and I realized the spot we'd been looking for was back toward Marquez Ridge. We had passed it while leading the airboat to the hammock.
"We've got to backtrack," I said to Brown as he stepped down into the muck to spin the skiff.
"Yep," he said, and did not offer another word, or ask a question about where we needed to go. Instead he poled us through the open grass between the two mounds of trees, and I actually lay back in the skiff and stared into the sky. My head was throbbing. I was trying not to replay the last hour through my head. I'd shot a man, maybe out of necessity, maybe out of anger or frustration. When you're a cop, you're trained that whenever you fire your gun, it's a use of deadly force, meant to kill. You aren't on TV. You don't try to wound. When the citizens start whining after every fatal police shooting about why the cop couldn't have just winged the asshole with the knife, they're out of our loop. Danger is a pissed off guy with a knife and only a wound. The killer in the subway and now some P.I. who just happened to piss me off. Somewhere inside me I had that capacity, and I wasn't sure what that fact told me.
I registered the change in light on my closed eyelids before I felt the skiff slide up into thicker grass and come to a halt. Brown had poled us into the shadows. We would once again have to pull the boat by a line to follow the riverbed path. I checked the GPS and looked ahead. Brown wasn't waiting for instructions. I put the unit away and we pulled together.
After twenty minutes, he stopped. I knew it wasn't because he was tired. I found my water bottle and took a long drink and sat on the edge of the skiff. Brown was still standing, staring at the stand of ancient pine, the single limb that had been broken but remained alive as it fell perpendicular through the crotch of another. The knot where they met had grown together, and now that I looked at it as a whole, it was the perfect representation of a cross.
"This is it, Freeman," Brown said. "Git out yer map or your metal finder. This is it."
I checked the GPS and plotted it on the map. The alignment was close but not perfect, but I wasn't arguing. I assembled the metal detector and adjusted the settings while Brown gave me his rationale, a lot of it based on his gut instinct, which I had long learned to trust out here where everything, even the earth herself, had a way of shifting and moving.