Never give up, Shane says. I’m trying to hold on to that as we rocket through the swampy wilderness, bumping and banging as Leo Fish punches the airboat over slick shallows, mere puddles, gunning the five-hundred-horsepower engine until it screams. The engine and the raging propellers are contained in a wire cage directly behind the raised seat where Fish sits like a mad king clinging to a throne, both hands on the rudder stick.

Shane in the seat beside him, grinning into the wind, no doubt with bugs in his teeth. Bringing up the rear, the small square boat Fish is towing. It flails around in the black wake, twitching and jumping like a thing alive.

The wild run seems like it lasts forever—fear slows the clock—but when Fish finally kills the engine and glides up on a piece of dry grassland, forty minutes have passed.

“Not bad,” he announces, hopping down from his throne. “Covered near twenty hard miles in less than an hour.”

“We’re here?” I ask, stomach in knots and ears ringing. No idea where “here” might be, barely able to distinguish land from sky.

Fish looks at me, shakes his head. “We’re still a ways from where we’re headed, missy. This as far as the airboat can take us.”

Missy? I’m not sure if that’s a term of endearment or one of contempt. Not that it matters. Teaching Leo Fish how to act civilized is not my problem. He could drag me along by my hair, caveman style, if it leads us to Kelly.

What he’s dragging, however, is not me but the little square-sided boat.

“What we call a pan,” he informs us, loading rifles, ammo, a push-pole, and fresh-water jugs into the little boat. “Every waterman got to have his pan.”

Fish puts a rope over his shoulder and marches forward, pulling the boat over the damp grass.

“I could help,” Shane offers.

“Not much, you couldn’t,” Fish says. “You follow along as best you can.”

Take that, Mr. Big FBI Man. Shane rolls his eyes but does as instructed, shortening his stride so that he’s pacing me rather than the reverse. The ground beneath us is damp under the grass and my running shoes are instantly soaked. Mosquitoes seem not the least repelled by the bug spray Fish provided, although in truth the dive-bomber buzzing in my ears is even more maddening than the actual bite. The only thing that keeps me from slapping at them compulsively is a notion that I’d have to slap myself unconscious to escape.

“You always lived out here?” Shane wants to know as we trudge along.

“Happened sort of gradual,” Fish says over his shoulder. “Always hunted and fished, everybody did. For some years I did some guiding, living off the tin canners.”

“Tin canners?”

“What we call the tourists. All that guidin’ finally decided me away from town, you might say. Now I’m so used to bein’ outside that I’d rather not be inside.”

He stops, eases his small boat or “pan” into a little creek. The water so black I’d have easily mistaken it for solid ground.

“Best you come aboard first, missy,” he says, offering a gnarled hand.

“We can’t all fit in that little thing,” I point out.

Fish laughs, which startles me. Hadn’t thought of him as the laughing type, but it’s actually quite a good laugh, makes him sound human. “Missy, I’ve had as many as a dozen sizeable gators on board. Most every one of them outweighed you.”

“What about Shane?”

“Him? Oh he’s a bigg’un, but he ain’t no more than three gators’ worth.”

There are no seats, so I have to sit on the floor or the deck or whatever they call it, instantly dampening my butt. Thinking if Kelly and I manage to survive this, I’ll celebrate by taking a long hot shower. Hours long. We’ll wrap ourselves in soft robes and lounge about in air-conditioned, bug-free rooms, eating fancy hors d’oeuvres and watching TV until our brains dissolve into mush.

Pure fantasy, but it helps me keep going. Helps keep me from screaming.

Shane clambers aboard, all arms and legs, and is instructed to crouch in the middle, to keep the boat balanced. My knees end up against his back. Once Three Gator Shane is in position, Fish jumps sprightly on board and shoves us away from hard ground, using his pole.

He remains standing, relaxed and perfectly balanced as he deftly works the pole, pushing us through the water. Looking up, a few dim stars illuminate his gaunt face. He’s smiling to himself, really smiling, and it finally dawns on me that despite his gruff way of talking, Leo Fish is actually having a good time. He gets a kick out of leading ignorant strangers through the world he knows so well. He’s not so much a people hater as a solitary man, and not without his own brand of dry humor.

“You mentioned alligators,” I say, trying to sound casual as I cling to the sides of the little boat. “Any around here, by any chance?”

Fish looks down at me and grins. “There might be one or two,” he says. “Best keep your hands inside the pan.”

Some folks hate a hospital type situation. Detective Sydell isn’t one of them. His job often takes him to one E.R. or another, and he always has pretty much the same reaction: amazement that there are so many good people dedicated to helping those in trouble. Granted they’re getting paid, and sometimes they’re grumpy or incompetent, but the overall thrust of the deal is about helping.

Plus he likes nurses. Okay, Roof likes anything in skirts, but in his opinion, nurses are top of the heap. For instance there’s a leggy E.R. nurse here in Naples who sets his old heart to beating double time. Come to raising his blood pressure, she’s better than push-ups. He’s looking around—gal by the name of Suzy Queenan—but Suzie Q. isn’t around. Probably not on duty at this godforsaken hour of the night.

Oh well, maybe next time. Roof gets right down to it, approaches the desk and asks for the duty police officer by name. That same duty officer, as he well knows, already having gone off shift.

“Got a call from Officer Morris Kendall, alerting me to the presence of a certain person. By that I mean patient. Young fella from my home town, his ailing momma wants me to check to see that he’s okay.”

A few moments later he’s ambling along, directed to a curtained area in the far corner of the E.R.

“I’ll be damned if it ain’t Roy Whittle himself,” Roof says, grinning around the curtain. “What you doin’ in here, Roy? Gettin’ some shut-eye? Sucking’ up on the free morphine?”

Roy, heavily bandaged about the throat, stares at him with dull eyes. The detective is joking about morphine, but evidently the young man has been dosed with some sort of painkiller, seems to have numbed him out considerable.

“Can I help you, Officer?” a pretty little Latino LPN wants to know.

Roof introduces himself, tips his uniform hat. “This young scamp is my cousin Roy. Second cousin is more like it, but you know how it is in Glade City. Heck, a man’s lucky if he ain’t his own grandpa, ain’t that right, Roy?”

The nurse smiles nervously—rural inhabitants having a certain reputation in the big city of Naples—says to call if he needs anything, and then hurries away, as if afraid of what his next friendly joke might be.

Roof approaches the hospital bed, lowering his voice a few decibels, and generally cutting the crap. “Here’s the thing, Roy. You show up with a piece of steel wire in your throat, dropped off by your dopey brother, that attracts my interest. Officer on duty tells me the wire they pulled outta your throat looks like it mighta sorta maybe come off a five-gallon bucket. That make sense to you, getting accidently stabbed by a bucket?”

Roy closes his eyes, doesn’t even bother shaking his head. Looks to Roof like he’s got way more problems weighing on him than a throat wound, however painful that might be.

“Thing of it is, folks have been inquiring about you, son. Official kind of folks. Could you be involved in some way with Ricky Lang? Was you at that old airstrip when a body got burned, and an airplane, too? Questions like that. I been telling ‘em you’re a good man, Roy, because I believe that to be true, more or less. Tonight it’s considerable less. Person driven to protect himself with a bucket handle, that might be because alls he’s got is a bucket. That make sense to you? A bucket like you might provide a person was he to be kept prisoner, and not have access to a proper toilet. That what happened, Roy? You went to fetch the man, or maybe it was the girl, whoever it was managed to stick you with a piece of wire? Huh? Because they tell me you’re lucky to be alive. Missed your carotid artery by a whisker.”