When I got onto the airport's Perimeter Road, I looked for number thirty-six, Avics Aviation. Halfway around I found the sign on a gun-metal gray hangar and pulled into a spot at the side where I could see several small planes parked on the cracked tarmac. Bent under the wing of a single-prop Cessna was a big man dressed in loose khaki trousers and a white polo shirt. He was rummaging through a side baggage compartment. I watched him for a few minutes as he moved easily about the plane, ducking under struts and checking various spots on the exterior.
I got out of the Jeep, walked through a curtain of midday heat and called out "Hello" over the mechanical pitch of a plane moving to taxi out toward the runway. I yelled my greeting again and the big man snapped his head up, missing a nearby strut and then sliding smoothly under the wing before standing full up to face me. He was not a clumsy man.
"I'm looking for Fred Gunther?"
"That'd be me."
"Max Freeman," I said, extending my hand. "Billy Manchester suggested I might talk a bit with you?"
"He did," answered Gunther, tipping down his sunglasses to look at me with pale green eyes.
He reached out and his massive palm seemed to swallow my own. His fingers were like thick swollen sausages tied at the knuckles and his skin was as dry and slick as waxed paper. I had never seen a hand so big.
"Come on inside outta this heat."
I followed him to the hangar, matching his pace and figuring his shoe size to be about a twelve and certainly not smaller. Inside the hangar Gunther led me to a small, half-windowed office along the east wall. He closed the flimsy wood door behind us, took a seat behind a metal desk and nodded at the threadbare couch. The heat that followed us in tripped the wall- mounted air conditioner and set it to rumbling. I declined the stained couch and pulled a straight-backed chair up next to his desk.
The room held the odor of grease and high-test fuel. There were two calendars on the wall behind Gunther, one of a bikini-clad woman holding some sort of shiny tool and the other a shot of a big bass leaping from clear water.
"Billy did some favors for me a couple of years ago when some tour clients tried to sue me over a big misunderstanding. So I owe him," Gunther said, propping his elbows on the desk and dropping his ham-sized hands in front of him. "But I don't mind telling you, I'm not real comfortable. People out in the Glades are getting awfully touchy about this kid killing stuff. Especially when folks start saying it might be Gladesmen trying to scare off the developers."
"Where did you hear that?"
"Word gets around when lawmen come out asking questions and mentioning license renewals and county tax assessments," Gunther said.
Hammonds, I thought. His team, the FBI, they would all be squeezing every option they could. But did they really think it was some backwoods crazy poaching suburban kids on the edge of the Glades?
"Well, I don't know what Billy told you, but I'm really only interested in learning a little more about the landscape," I said.
Gunther looked down at his hands and then up into my face like he was going to apologize for not being able to help me.
"Mr. Manchester said you used to be a cop?"
"Used to be. I got shot in the neck and quit," I said, even surprising myself with my openness.
The big man's face seemed to change on hearing my admission, as if a gunshot wound made a difference.
"Well, then," he said, checking his watch. "My four-thirty client stood me up. Let's go flying."
Outside, ripples of heat shimmered off the runway as we walked to the plane. Gunther came around to the passenger side to show me how to twist down the door handle. He had just popped open the door when the distinctive double hoo notes of a barred owl sounded from behind us. Gunther snapped his head around and scanned the line of Australian pines on the other side of the roadway.
"Never heard one of those in daylight before," he said. "And never around here."
He stared a few seconds longer, shrugged his thick shoulders and then dipped under the wing to circle around to his side. I climbed in, shut my door, and stared off into the trees.
It wasn't until Gunther put us into a hardbanked turn that I truly started to worry. All during the startup, the taxiing and takeoff, I had been mesmerized by the pilot's movements. The snicking of switches and radio checks, the dialing of gauges and maneuvering of levers. His big hands moved across the panel and cockpit with an impressive grace and economy.
But I had never been in a small plane before and when we went into the first steep bank and climbed into the western sky, that old stomach-on-a-roller-coaster feeling got me. Gunther must have seen the changing pallor of my face.
"Pick out a spot on the horizon and focus," he said over the tinny-sounding headphones. "It's like a small boat on the ocean, but without the wave motion."
I locked onto a radio tower in the distance and started gaining some confidence in the steady engine drone and the vibration humming through the cockpit. In the distance a few clumps of cloud moved across the blue background like ragged sails. It was one of those rare summer days when the thunder- heads were not boiling. The afternoon sun was glinting off objects below. I finally shifted my view down and watched the sprawl move under us. We were following a concrete road that lay below. I watched the small white roofs of the old developments start to show a newness. Then, farther west, they turned larger and the barrel tiles turned them orange and terra-cotta. The neighborhood streets were laid out in curving, circular patterns to fight the feel of living in a boxy grid. The homes bloomed around a series of lakes and when I asked Gunther about them he explained that they were created by the giant backhoes that scooped up the ancient limestone and then dumped it on the building sites to give some solid foundation for the housing. The holes left behind lowered the water level and were then gussied up to look semi-natural.
"Waterfront property out of a swamp," he said. It was impossible to pick up any hint of derision in his voice over the headphones.
We flew on with little change below for fifteen minutes and then Gunther nodded ahead and announced, "There's the border, for now."
In the distance I could pick up the color change first. Then it sharpened at a highway running north and south. The barrel- tiled roofs and commercial plazas abruptly ended and an open field of rust-colored grasses began.
The enormity stunned me at first. The land spread out, unaltered, as far as you could see. When we passed over the roadway the terrain below lost all boundaries and was held only by the horizon. Kansas was my first thought. I'd never been west, but schoolbook descriptions of flat fields of golden grain had to come from a view like this.
Gunther eased the plane down to a lower altitude and I could pick up more detail. The sawgrass was less uniform and the green tinge of lower growth seeped through. In spots the sun reflected off streaks of exposed water, the first reminder that this was not solid ground and that a huge sheet of water covered mile after mile, and everything grew up through that liquid layer.
Without my realizing it, Gunther had turned us north and seemed to be heading for a dark green clump growing on the horizon. As we got closer I could see it was a stand of trees, sitting like an island in a sawgrass ocean.
"Hardwood hammock," Gunther said as we approached and then circled the stand. I recognized the twisting gumbolimbo and pigeon plum trees that dotted parts of my own riverbank.
"It would take an airboat or maybe, in high water, a Glade skiff to get out here," Gunther said. When I didn't respond, he looked over at me.
"This is where they found the first kid's body."
He took the plane out of its bank and steered us back south. The sun had yellowed and was starting to backlight a new band of streaky high clouds.
"The second one was down off a prairie creek near the National Park. The third was farther north, in one of the canals to Lake Okeechobee. And I guess you know about the fourth one."