“This is the Everglades?” I want to know.

“The edge of it,” he says, consulting the map. “Pull over at the next rest stop.”

It’s not so much a rest stop as a narrow strip of baked earth. When I shove open the heavy door and step out, the sudden blast of heat takes my breath away. Shane is already peering off into the great flat distance, using a rock-steady hand to shade his eyes.

“There,” he says, pointing.

Half a mile away, on a little man-made island in the grasslands, a sky-blue tower juts up like a rude finger.

“Got it,” I say, squinting into the brightness. “But what good does it do us?”

Can’t say I ever before actually noticed a cell tower. Why would I? Normally all I care is if the phone works, not the technical aspects. But here we are, in the middle of the soggy forever, staring up at this huge thing that bristles with what Shane says are microwave transponders.

“Cell phone transmission is basically line of sight,” he explains. “What you carry in your purse is a small radio transmitter with a range of only a few miles. The nearest tower picks up your transmission, beams it to a base station, where the call is shunted into the normal phone lines we all know and love. Think of it as a much bigger way of doing what your cordless phone at home does, providing radio connection between the bases. Pretty simple, really.”

Yeah, sure, pretty simple if you happen to be a techno-freak. Some of us have never figured out how electricity comes out of those little receptacles in the wall, let alone how cell phones, or TVs or radios work. Mostly because we don’t really care how stuff works, just so long as the toaster oven gets all hot when you push the button.

I’m thinking about heat and toasters and ovens because it feels like we’re being baked alive. When the big trucks roar by, the gusts of wind hit like a hot slap in the face. I’m going to need a hat or a visor, and most of all a pair of big, wraparound sunglasses—or maybe one of those welder’s masks, to shield me from the brutal sun.

Shane smiles, showing his teeth. Looks like a handsome shark, pleased to be out of water. “The most recent calls from your daughter’s cell phone were made in line of sight from here, via that tower. Figure the height of the tower, that means a radius of up to ten miles.”

“Yeah, I get it. But if someone else is using her phone, then she isn’t necessarily within the same area, right? Plus there’s nothing out here. Maybe the kidnappers were driving along this road when they made the call. Maybe they’re a hundred miles from here by now. Or a thousand, if they stole the flyboy’s airplane.”

Shane nods, still shielding his pale eyes. “Agreed, lots of maybes. But we have to start somewhere. I wanted to get a physical look at the area before I start working from maps and aerial photographs.”

The heat is curdling my brain, making me cranky. “Okay, you had a look,” I say. “What do you see but a whole lot of nowhere?”

He seems to take the question seriously, has another slow scan around the area. “I see hundreds of birds. Mostly cattle egret—those are the little guys—but some heron and ibis and at least one osprey. I see miles and miles of waterway that would be navigable in a flat-bottomed boat, or even better by an airboat. I see a man in a straw hat fishing with a cane pole. I see a small alligator.”

“What!” I do a little involuntary dance step, as if something is nipping at my heels.

“On the canal bank,” he says gently. “Over there.”

Blame it on the blinding light, but I really hadn’t noticed much of anything but the sky and the grass. Shane is right, of course. The little white splotches are birds, I can see that now. A lot of birds, some of them circling high overhead, which probably means the place is teeming with life, right? Nor had I noticed the canal that runs along the road, because it looks more like a wide irrigation ditch, and who pays attention to ditches? Most shocking, there really is a small alligator—maybe three feet long—on the opposite bank, as motionless as a moldy log. Never saw it. And the old man with the really long fishing pole, how did I miss him? Or the rusty old pickup that must have brought him here? If I didn’t notice a man and a truck and an alligator all out in the open, what else haven’t I noticed? Did I expect to find my missing daughter waving her arms, shouting “Over here, Mom!”?

“This whole area, it was a major drug smuggling destination some years back,” Shane explains. “You can’t see it from the road, but within a few miles of here there are remote airfields, old storage buildings, trailers, bunkers, you name it. Lots of secret places to run a criminal enterprise, hide an abductee, whatever.”

Lots of places, I’m thinking, to bury a body.

“Those birds up there,” I say, pointing. “The ones way up high. Are those vultures?”

“Buzzards.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Not sure. Vultures are bigger.”

“But they both eat dead things, right? Dead things out in the swamp?”

Shane nods to himself. “I think we’re done here,” he says gently.

5. Pretty Little Thang

The only thing Roy Whittle likes about the Glade City Hunt Club is the stuffed wolverine perched atop the old wooden phone booth in the lobby. The nasty beast, big as a dog, is in full weasel snarl, teeth bared, glass eyes flat with a hatred of all creatures not itself. In the wild, a fifty-pound wolverine in a bad mood can take down a moose, fueled by sheer tenacity and scalpel-sharp claws. As a kid Roy used to imagine the stuffed wolverine coming to life, leaping on the fat neck of Buster Nyles, the Collier County sheriff who took bribes with both hands, and then betrayed low-level drug smugglers like Roy’s father. The good old boys who ran the show walked away, burying their millions in pickle jars and offshore investments while swamp-cracker chumps like Pappy shuffled into cells at Raiford. And yet the old man, dumb as a load of cinder blocks, always aspired to be one of the regulars who drank with Sheriff Nyles and his minions, impressing the hell out of the sunburned tourists and occasional movie stars who flocked to the fabled Hunt Club for a taste of Old Florida ambiance. The huge gator hide nailed to the red-cedar paneling, darkened by a century of cigar smoke. The lovingly framed photo of Hemingway standing at the famous veranda bar, his arm thrown over the shoulders of a very young Buster, then a lowly game warden who told lies outrageous enough to impress a famous novelist. The formal menus signed by Clark Gable and Harry Truman, the fat, exuberant tarpon mounted over the entrance to the immense screened-in porch where the movers and shakers, the elected and the anointed, had for generations gathered to gorge on blackened redfish caught by their guides.

In the glory days more bullshit flowed through the Glade City Hunt Club than in all the saloons of Texas. The days when local fishing guides moonlighted on the wrong side of the law, jacking protected gators, piloting airboats full of forbidden marijuana bales, and then bragging on it to Donny Nyles, the Hunt Club bartender, Buster’s little brother, and himself a coke-sniffing smuggler and dissembler of some note.

Buster and Donny are both dead now—cancer and self-administered gunshot respectively—but Roy still hates their rotting bones. Hates them for sneering at Pappy, then shining him on, setting him up. Wrecking his pathetic life because they could, and because it amused them. Roy’s is a prideful hatred, a blood hatred, the Whittle family having settled in these parts at about the same time as the Nyles clan, difference being the Whittles, barefoot and willfully ignorant—Pappy bragged he’d never dirtied his mind by reading a newspaper—the Whittles kept to their hidden whiskey stills and their secret gator holes and never ran for office, or secured employment with law enforcement agencies. Therefore never had the leverage to enrich themselves at the public trough, or avoid serving time because they controlled both the jails and the courts.