Shane flashes a conspiratorial grin, a man-to-man kind of smile. “There’s this lady, okay? Got a place not far from here, out behind the store. Cute little trailer park.”

“A woman?” the driver says, starting to relax.

“Special lady,” Shane says, nodding. “We need to keep it sort of quiet, okay? No strange cars in her driveway. No limousines arriving in the middle of the night.”

“A woman.”

“Yup, a real fine woman. I might be a while. How about if you come back in, say, three hours? Another hundred to drive me back to Miami, plus the regular fee on my card at the hourly rate, keeps the owner happy. Can you do that?”

The driver buys it. Cherchez la femme, that he understands, accepts. It’s agreed that the horny, woman-chasing passenger will call when he’s ready to be picked up.

“Glad we got that settled.”

“Yessuh. You call me, I meet you right heah, this place.”

“Deal.”

Shane shakes the driver’s limp hand, then returns to the Town Car, retrieves his drawstring backpack. The backpack having been left for him at the hotel desk by a former associate—not Sean Healy—in the Miami Division. The backpack’s contents, difficult if not impossible to clear through airport security, and therefore obtained locally, include a KA-BAR fighting knife, military-grade night-vision goggles, and a handheld Garmin GPS unit. Plus a small, powerful flashlight and a hand-dandy roll of duct tape. Because you never know when duct tape will come in handy. He leaves the driver with the impression that the backpack perhaps contains an assortment of sex toys for the lady’s pleasure.

“Better check my batteries,” Shane says with a leer, hefting the pack.

It’s all the driver can do not to roll his eyes.

12. Welcome To The Bat Cave

A few hundred yards behind the all-night convenience store there is, indeed, a small, decrepit trailer park. Maybe thirty units, most of them set on wobbly concrete blocks in the previous century, and now slowly sinking into the dirt and weeds. Half again as many vehicles, high-riding pickups and fat-bottomed sedans, some functional, many under repair or abandoned. The abandoned vehicles have a feral look, as if they might slink away like furtive animals. More likely, they will erode and dissolve into the sandy soil, leaving nothing behind but iron oxide and tinsel-size flakes of chrome.

A few dim lights are exuded from the trailers themselves, but there is no activity that signals wakeful occupants.

No matter, Shane has no business here.

He moves purposefully up the little pathway that winds among the trailers. Actually walking beside it, so as not to make the gravel crunch underfoot. If the Haitian driver happens to be checking out his passenger—unlikely—he will see Shane blend into the shadows, bound for Airstream glory.

On the far end of the clearing, a row of tall, wispy casuarinas that either survived the last hurricane or have sprung up since. Sometimes called she-oak or ironwood, the pinelike casuarinas are more than sufficient cover for a man who wants to vanish into the wilderness, and who knows how to use the patchy shadows as camouflage. Within a few strides the wispy trees give way to a vast scrub of slash pine and saw palmetto, sturdy and sharp, and it will stay this way, Shane knows, for miles and miles. The ground elevation is a crucial foot or so higher than the great river of grass the white folk call the Everglades, and is therefore perfect for sandy pinelands. Which does not mean there will not be a few wet, low-lying spots among the saw palmetto, and pocket gopher holes just right for snapping ankles.

Most of the bigger and more lethal life forms—snakes, gators, panthers—gravitate to the water’s edge. Larger animals aren’t keen on the serrated, bladelike leaves of the well-named saw palmetto. Deer and wild boar sometimes stray into the scrub, but tend to be reclusive, fleeing from the sounds of interlopers. Pythons, the exotic Glades invaders that started out as house pets, prefer thicker vegetation, bigger trees, and tend to feed on various rodents and small pigs. Much more dangerous are the lesser snakes, the diamondback and the coral, which explains Shane’s sturdy, high-cut hiking boots. A panther would have to be crazy with hunger to take on prey Shane’s size, so the big cats don’t worry him half as much as the hidden holes and fissures underfoot.

Now that he’s clear of the trailer park and prying eyes, Randall Shane makes no effort to be stealthy. Better to let the wildlife know he’s stomping through their world, give ‘em a chance to hide or flee. By his calculation, as indicated on Google Earth’s remarkably detailed satellite images, he has slightly more than a mile to the first waypoint.

All he has to do is head straight west for two thousand paces. Nothing to it. Except it turns out he can’t proceed in a straight line, not without cutting his limbs on spiny fronds of saw palmetto. So for every yard west he has to dodge one north or south, or back himself up and find a new path when the scrub gets too thick.

One mile becomes two, and that makes him hurry. At this point he has not bothered to don the night-vision goggles, mostly because he knows from experience that moving quickly in NV gear can be more dangerous than traveling blind. It’s like running while looking through binoculars. Plus there’s a quarter moon a few degrees above the horizon and the air itself, moist and tangy, seems slightly luminous. Hurrying is never a good idea at night, in a dangerous locale, and a low-lurking palmetto frond finally snags him only yards from the waypoint.

Amazingly nasty plant. It sliced right through his jeans just below the knee, and blood seeps from his shin. A mere flesh wound but it itches something fierce. Cursing himself for not being more careful, Shane removes the roll of duct tape from the backpack and quickly wraps it around his leg, molding denim over the gash. Stop the bleeding for now, deal with cleaning up the small but nasty wound later.

Temporary repair complete, he studies the terrain, carefully weaves his way though the last few yards of palmetto, and at long last finds himself standing on a narrow dirt road. Not dirt, actually, but the limestone marl that forms the brittle base of most of southern Florida. He’s pleased to see that the white gravel road—little more than a path wide enough for one vehicle—heads northwest, just as indicated on the satellite imagery.

The hand-held GPS calculates the he’s 3.12 miles from his destination. The same unit also informs him that it’s been fifty-five minutes since he left the comfortable leather seat of the Town Car. In a little less than four hours the sun will rise. Time to put the pedal to the metal.

He adjusts the pack, finding the sweet spot between his shoulder blades, increases his respiration until his lungs are fully filled with the warm, humid air, and then begins to run.

Randall Shane is a large man, too big and heavily muscled to make a good long-distance runner—a marathon is out of the question, it would pound his joints to dust. But with his long stride eating up the yards he figures he should be able to cover a mere three miles in a little less than twenty minutes, no problem.

Half an hour later, lungs aching, heart slamming, drenched in sweat, he finally staggers to the edge of the hidden landing strip, collapses to his aching knees and vomits copiously into the gravel.

From the refuge of the tall grass he surveys the terrain through the NV goggles. It’s no accident that the landing strip doesn’t look like much. Just a slash through the pinelands, a mile in length but less than a hundred feet wide. From altitude it looks like a short stretch of unfinished highway, maybe, or the remains of some abandoned canal or drainage project. Years ago there were dozens of similarly camouflaged landing roads cut into the wilderness west of Miami. Even from the air they were hard to locate, mere slices in the firmament, but if the gravel was packed and graded properly a sizable aircraft could land and take off, provided the exact coordinates were known to the pilot. Some cases it wasn’t even necessary to take off again—the value of the illicit cargo was such that the aircraft could be abandoned, or dragged into the swamp to make room for the next flight.