“I surrender,” Seth says, straightening up, his feverish body shivering. “You got what you want. Take me and just leave her there.”

“Oh, I aim to,” says the monster man, chuckling.

He swings the shotgun from Seth to the mangroves where Kelly still lies entangled in the branches, barely able to move.

“Say your prayers, little pig,” he says.

A shotgun fires.

And part of monster man’s head turns to dark mist.

He collapses backward into the water and does not rise.

Standing behind him, a different monster. One wearing night-vision goggles and aiming a large, odd-looking shotgun.

“Get in the boat,” says Ricky Lang, yanking on the rope to an aluminum skiff. “We’re going to a party and you’re both invited.”

14. Three Shots At Sunrise

Leo Fish is beginning to grow on me. For the first hour or two in our company, he parted with very few words, but the coming dawn has warmed him up. Or maybe years of rarely speaking have left him with a lot of pent-up verbal pressure. Whatever, every stroke of the push-pole seems to bring forth another anecdote or observation.

“When I was a boy, say about seven, my daddy come upon hard times. Had a house in Glade City but lost it to the bank. So he moved us out to the shell mounds—them are the little islands made by the Calusa Indians—and we camped out for a year, living off the land. Dint have a proper tent to start out, just a piece of canvas strung over a limb. Skeeters were bad, but the fishing and the trapping was good. Daddy gimme a little.22 rifle and I become a good shot. Yessum, best year of my life, out on the mounds.”

Part of me is aware that he’s purposefully distracting me from our present situation and I’m grateful for the effort. Shane, a hulking presence in the little boat because of his size, remains mostly quiet, staring off at the dark horizon as if willing the sun to rise, and the search to resume.

“For a whole year we dint eat nothing much that wasn’t protected species nowadays. White ibis—what they call Chokoloskee chicken—and night heron and egret and such. It was that or starve. Today they might say we was homeless, but we dint think of it that way. Once Daddy got together a few gator hides, he was able to trade for staples like cornmeal and flour and beans and cooking oil. Life was hard but good. When you work yur butt off from sun comes up till sun goes down, cleaning and salting hides, you better believe Mama’s cornbread in the iron skillet smelled like heaven.

“Funny enough, we never ate gator. Just skinned ‘em and threw away the rest. They say it tastes like chicken. I say chicken tastes like alligator,” he says, chuckling at his own joke.

“How far, Mr. Fish?”

“Just Fish, or Leo if you druther. Mister makes me nervous. Not too far, missy. Around the bend a short ways. We’ll get there, don’t you worry.”

“You think we’ll find her?”

“Gonna do our very best for you, missy. Ain’t that right, Mr. Shane?”

“Just Shane,” says Shane. “For the same reason. And yes, absolutely, we’ll find Kelly.”

Can’t help notice he doesn’t specify on finding her alive.

Around the bend arrives, and Fish puts us ashore on a tidy little island he calls a hardwood hammock. Tall trees, mostly tamarind, acacia, and something called gumbo-limbo, are thick around the outside, like the walls of a fortress, the interior being mostly ferns and low-growing shade plants. Much of this has been cleared because he sometimes used it as a camp. The deep canopy of fronds and leaves makes it feel almost like a roof over our heads.

Fish looks around, smiling with contentment, and says, “Always sleep like a baby in here. I woke up once ‘cause a whitetail fawn was licking my face. Must have been the salt. Which makes me an old salt lick, I guess.”

Setting us at our ease as he unpacks a rifle from his little boat.

“What’s going on?” Shane wants to know.

His plan is to leave us here for a bit while he checks out one of Ricky Lang’s camps. Shane naturally wants to accompany him, but Fish insists on going alone.

“On my lonesome I can do it in twenty minutes,” he says, tying little bits of rope around his trouser cuffs. “With you along it’d be an hour. Plus you’ll be tough to hide on open ground. So rest yourself down on the nice soft ferns. We’re gettin’ where we need to be, even if it don’t seem so at the moment.”

Shane reluctantly agrees to let him go it alone.

“Those ropes around your pant legs, what’s that for?” I want to know.

“Keep out the leeches, missy. Don’t mind a leech or two on my ankles, but up higher they give me the willywaws, if you know what I mean.”

Moments later he’s waist deep in the dark water, holding the rifle clear, and before long I lose sight of his cowboy hat as he blends into the swamp. Leaving me with a lump in my throat and nothing to do but wait.

Shane, sensing my despair, plops himself down next to me, hugging his knees.

“I feel good about Fish,” he says.

“He knows the way,” I say, without much enthusiasm.

“Yes, he does. And in about twenty minutes the sun will come up and the search will resume. Today’s the day, Mrs. Garner.”

“Me Jane,” I respond laconically. “You Shane.”

He actually giggles. Which sounds weird coming from such a big guy. When he realizes I’m not going to join in, he clears his throat and says, “A while ago you asked me why I resigned from the FBI. I said I’d tell you about it later. Now seems like as good a time as any. You still want to hear my story?”

He, like Fish before him, seems intent on distracting me from the more immediate crisis. Obviously he’s trying to help, so I go, “Sure. Why not?” more out of politeness than interest.

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” he adds, not quite kidding about it.

“You go first,” I suggest. “The Randall Shane story. But make it quick, because Fish’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

“Won’t take me five,” he promises. “It starts, like a lot of good stories, with a beautiful wife and a beautiful child. Jean and Amy. Jean was my wife, Amy was our daughter. We had this nice little place in New Rochelle, I think I mentioned that part already, and I worked out of the New York office, mostly testifying in fingerprint cases. We’d had to reorganize the fingerprint division after a scandal—the previous expert never saw a print, any print, that he couldn’t connect to a criminal case—and I’d become the new and improved resident expert, basically reorganizing the way we identify prints. Computer stuff. Boring guy with a boring job, but I loved it.

“Anyhow, I had this long weekend, so Jean and I decide we’ll take Amy to the Smithsonian. She’s got this project for her world-studies class and the Smithsonian will really help. Plus we both like Washington. That’s where we hooked up, when I first got hired by the bureau. So we throw the bags in the car and drive from New Rochelle to D.C., four and a half hours door to door, piece of cake.

“Amy, she loves the museum. She adores it. Everybody says this about their kids, but Amy was truly amazing. Twice as smart as me, and she was only twelve years old. Jean and I had just the best weekend, watching Amy soak up all that knowledge. She was having such a great time, taking notes and collecting pamphlets that we end up staying longer than we intended. Would have made sense to stay over, and we discussed the possibility, but decided we had to get back home that night because Amy has school the next day and I’ve got work and Jean has work—did I mention Jean was a lawyer? No? She worked for the Legal Aid Society in New York. Anyhow, it’s night, heavy traffic. We’re on the New Jersey Turnpike when my eyelids start to get heavy. So I pull into the Walt Whitman rest area and let Jean take over. She’s wide-awake, fully caffeinated and raring to go. Amy’s in the back, sound asleep. Probably dreaming of her eventual Nobel Prize nomination for her sixth-grade world-studies class project.”