Later on, when he’d finally taken her into his confidence—he really had no one else to turn to—Kelly realized she’d never been in any danger from Seth Manning. Not that kind of danger, anyway. Not that being gay had diminished his perfection in her eyes. If anything he was more perfect because he was unobtainable, even if she’d decided to cross the age barrier.

To see him like this, shivering in the heat, weak as a kitten, his left hand wrapped in a bloody rag, it makes her want to weep. “Hang on,” she whispers. “We’re gonna make it, I promise.” “Leave me,” he says. “Get away while you can.” “Never,” she says. “You’re my favorite flyboy and I’m keeping you. That’s final. Now try to snuggle closer.”

Monster man holds the air in his mouth. He’s picked up the faintest whiff of human perspiration not his own. He forces himself to relax, to melt his way into the landscape. Not only smelling the smells, but sorting through the background noise of birds, water frogs, tree frogs, whining mosquitoes, scrabbling raccoons, splashing baitfish, gators small and large, the whole wilderness mishmash.

What can’t be heard can help, too. A place where the animals have left to make room for human. And he’s picking up a beacon of silence, a quiet zone in one of the smaller mangrove islands.

Thinking, as he glides into motion, you’re mine, little pig. The squealing time is here.

12. Best Keep Your Hands Inside The Pan

Zooming through the Everglades on an airboat at night is like riding a dirt bike full speed through a pitch-black forest. Not that I’ve ever been on a dirt bike, or in pitch-black forest, for that matter. But it has to be something like this, the sheer exhilarating terror of not knowing what’s out there and when it might suddenly crash into you. Shadows, mangroves, grasslands, open water, all blending into one dark and scary blur. Every bump and scrape and feral swoosh of grass against the flat bottom of the aluminum boat hits me like a jolt of electricity, frying my nerves.

Leo Fish says not to worry. Fine. What I’m experiencing isn’t so much worry as paralytic fear. Clinging to the little seat, mouth tightly closed so the bugs can’t get in (more advice from our improbable guide) muscles so tense they’ve petrified, I can’t even scream.

First impression of Mr. Fish, he’s not exactly a people person. He listens to Shane’s pitch—help us find my daughter by finding Ricky Lang—nods his unenthusiastic assent, and then gravely tells us that chances are we’re already too late.

“I can find him for you,” he says with a shrug. “But I can’t fix what might already be done. Just so’s you know that from the get-go.”

Shane apparently decides that the best thing is to be affable. Ignore the morbid, misanthropic streak and engage the man in conversation. The window of opportunity being the trek between the motel and the Hunt Club dock, where Ponytail has obligingly loaned his airboat to Leo Fish. On foot, because Fish makes it clear he “can’t abide a car,” meaning he won’t ride inside a vehicle. Too soon to say whether that means he’s claustrophobic or just plain weird.

“We understand that Ricky was married to your sister,” Shane begins.

“Yup. My half sister Louisa Mae. My daddy took up with a Seminole woman in his old age, and little Louisa Mae was the result. Beautiful child. Beautiful woman, too. Ricky never seen fit to marry her, being as she wasn’t Nakosha, but they made ‘em some babies. Two lovely girls and the cutest little boy you ever did see.”

“I understand they died in a fire.”

“Died in a fire, yup, all of ‘em.”

“And Ricky blames the tribe?”

The question stops Leo Fish in his tracks—he has the look of a man who’s taken a surprise punch to the gut. “He tell you that?”

“No, sir. Got it from the FBI, who got it from his girlfriend.”

“So that’s what he told his girlfriend? The tribe did it?”

“Apparently.”

Leo Fish grunts, spits copiously. He stares down at his naked feet, as if trying to decide who to kick. “That’s a damn lie. Tribe ain’t had nothin’ to do with it. Ricky Lang set fire to that house himself. Killed Louisa and the kids, whether he meant to or not. It’s on him, all that death.”

Now it’s Randall Shane who looks stunned. “Lang killed his own children?”

Fish responds with a curt nod and says, “He’d had this fancy new house built on the reservation, and then he and Louisa Mae got to fighting—might have been over this girlfriend you mentioned. Upshot is, she refused to let Ricky into his own house, and that’s when he said he’d sooner burn it down then let her live there. Louisa Mae, she’s a feisty one, she called the tribal police, but they refused to intervene ‘cause Ricky was the big man.”

“So he burned the house down with them in it?”

“Not exactly. Man always had a crazy temper. What happen, he come out one night when they were all in bed, woke ‘em up, and forced ‘em all out of the house. Standing there in their pajamas, the three kids, and Louisa Mae cursing him for the devil. Then he sets the place afire with gasoline, to prove he can do what he likes with his own house. After he throws the match and sees the fire spreading, he takes off in his boat, in case the tribal police showed up after all. Leaves the kids weeping but alive. What he didn’t figure on, after he was gone, little Troy ran back inside to get his new puppy, they had it in one of those puppy crates for training purposes, and Louisa and the two girls ran after him. The roof came down and they all perished.”

“He was never prosecuted?”

Fish tugs at his straw cowboy hat, as if intending to screw it onto his head. “You got to understand about Ricky Lang. He made that tribe. They was just a collection of nobodies, not Seminole, not Miccosukee, not white neither, until Ricky got ‘er done.”

According to Fish, the Nakosha are really more of an extended family than a tribe. Cousins within cousins, most of them called some variation of Lang, after a Methodist missionary who had been absorbed into the family at the turn of the twentieth century. In addition to fathering fourteen children with three successive Indian wives, the Reverend Robert Lang had initiated the long and arduous process of seeking tribal recognition. Robert Lang had argued that unlike the Seminole, his adopted tribe were descended from a distinct band of the original Calusa who had been living on this land when the conquistadors first splashed into the great swamp, looking for El Dorado, or the Fountain of Youth or, failing that, to copulate with the native women. Lang’s bureaucratic battle had been carried on by successive generations, and had not been resolved until ten years ago, when the tribe had been granted dominion over a hundred square miles of boggy, mosquito-infested swampland, most of which was submerged during the rainy season, and therefore of minimal interest to developers. Ricky Lang was instrumental in transforming the Nakosha bingo license into a giant casino complex, vastly enriching the tribe.

“Man was always smart, had big ideas to help his people, but he had to be the top dog, no matter what. Got away with it, too, until his crazy temper ended up killing his own children,” Fish tells us. “Tribal council finally decided they didn’t have enough to prosecute—or more likely didn’t have the stomach for it—so they deprived him of his office, took back his land, and banished him. Which, the way they think of it, is worse than the death penalty. From what I heard, Ricky thinks so, too.”

The news that my daughter’s kidnapper was responsible for the deaths of his own small children hits me like a body blow. It explains his delusional beliefs—communing with dead children—and his spiral into ever-increasing violence, but it surely does not bode well for Kelly’s survival. The man gets away with arson and manslaughter at the very least, and is then haunted into a killing madness. A psychiatrist might theorize that Ricky Lang wanted to punish Edwin Manning for the way he doted upon his own son. Or maybe he really did believe that Manning could force the tribe to take him back. Whatever his motives, however twisted by grief and guilt, it’s obvious that in Ricky Lang’s world a stranger’s child doesn’t count for much.