The Way We Die Now (12 page)

"I'll need some money to eat on," Hoke said. "Eight bucks and change won't go far."

"That's plenty," Brownley said. "In fact, it's almost too much. You've got to play the part of Adam Jinks, and he's got to be broke enough to actually hit Tiny Bock up for a job."

"All right, Willie, I'll play it your way this time. But after this you're going to owe me a big one."

Mel shook hands with Hoke. "Good luck, Sergeant. I've got to get moving. I'm due back in Naples before noon." Mel turned and started up the path.

"Just stay here for about twenty minutes," Brownley said, "and then go out and hitch a ride on the Trail." He turned to leave.

"Just a second, Willie. Is this some kind of test or what?"

"In a way maybe, but don't worry about it. Just look at this as another routine investigation." Brownley trotted up the path to catch up with Peoples.

Hoke sat on the bench and lighted another cigarette. With cigarettes selling for a buck and a half a pack, he would have to go easy on them for a while--at least until he got some more money. Why didn't he tell Brownley to go fuck himself? The story about the dirt at Bock's farm matching the dead Haitian's toenails and fingernails was thinner than his hair, for Christ's sake. There must be dozens of farms in the Immokalee area with the same kind of dirt. For some reason they wanted to get something on Tiny Bock. He didn't have to take this weird assignment. He was on his own now--without a badge, gun, or authority--and he didn't know exactly what he was supposed to be looking for--except those little V's nagged at him a bit-- and neither did Peoples and Brownley. Well, he would find out soon enough. Some branches broke up the path, and Hoke got to his feet.

Brownley came back into the clearing. He wiped his sweaty forehead with the back of his hand. "Those dogs, Hoke, the pit bulls. D'you know what to do if one of 'em attacks you?"

"Sure. I run like a striped-ass ape."

"No, that isn't the way. He'll catch you. When one of 'em jumps for your throat, he tucks his front legs up a little, like this, see?" Brownley held up his wrists in front of his chest and let his hands dangle. "What you do then, you grab these forelegs, drop onto your back, and flip the dog over at the same time. Hang on to his legs. This'll break both of his front legs, you see, and then he can't chase after you again. That's all you have to do."

"No shit? That's all I have to do, huh? Just hang on to his legs. Suppose both dogs jump for my throat at the same time?"

"You'll have to dodge one when you get the other one. But I wanted to be sure you knew what to do in case you got attacked, that's all."

"You ever do this, Willie?"

"Not with a real dog, no. But when I was at Fort Gordon, Georgia, during the Korean War, we practiced how to do this with a sack of sand. The sergeant would throw the sack at us, and it had two little legs dangling off it. We practiced grabbing 'em, and it wasn't too hard once you got the hang of it."

"A sand dog and a pit dog aren't the same, Willie."

"Sure they are. The principle's the same. You'll catch on in time. I just wanted to make sure you knew how to do it, that's all. Good luck, Hoke."

Brownley waved and disappeared up the path.

CHAPTER 9

When Hoke emerged from the shady grotto to stand on the north side of the trail, his Pontiac was gone. Perhaps he should have argued with Brownley to keep the car, but it wouldn't have done any good. A toothless migrant like Adam Jinks could hardly explain how he came to own a 1973 Pontiac with a new engine and a police radio. The rusty Toyota was still there. A tourist family had parked beside the pickup and was disembarking for breakfast (a middle-aged man in green canvas shorts, two teenage children, and an obese woman--the wife, no doubt, carrying a sleepy two-year-old on her hip). Hoke wanted to follow them into the restaurant and drink another beer, but Brownley had told him not to go inside. Besides, he had to guard his eight bucks and change until, somehow, he managed to obtain some more money.

It was another twenty miles to the hamlet of Ochopee, and then seven or eight more to Carnestown, the crossroads where he would have to take the state road north to Immokalee. The Tamiami Trail continued southwest into Naples at Carnestown, and south of Carnestown, two or three miles, was Everglades City, the major port for marijuana coming into South Florida.

The traffic was thinly spaced, and no cars slowed to his raised thumb. Why would they? Without his teeth, and with the stubble of gray beard on his long face, he looked like a wilderness wino. The sun toasted his back through his threadbare shirt, and he was grateful now for the new straw farmer's hat with its green plastic brim. It protected his balding dome from the direct rays. Sweat dribbled down his sides, and his shirt was wet. His balls were damp in his Jockey shorts. There were fewer mosquitoes out on the highway than there had been in the dusty clearing, but there were still clouds of gnats nibbling at the moisture about his eyes and lips. Two hundred yards up the road, across from Monroe Station, was a small Seminole village. There were a half dozen chickees behind the peeled pole palisade, and he could see the tops of the thatched roofs of the chickees. At the gate, on the other side of the canal, across the small bridge, there was a small clapboard store selling Indian artifacts. A pipe rack outside the store displayed multicolored Seminole jackets and aprons.

Hoke walked down to the village parking lot and stood under the shade of an Australian pine. There were no tourists as yet, parked in the gravel lot, but he would wait for one and then ask the driver for a ride as far as Carnestown. It would be much more difficult for a man to refuse his direct request than it would be to ignore his thumb from passing cars.

There were buses on the Tamiami Trail, Trailways and Greyhound, but they went straight through to Naples and didn't stop for passengers on the Trail. If a man lived out here in the Glades, he either owned his own vehicle or had to cadge a ride with a friend. The migrant camps had buses and trucks, and if one came by, Hoke might be able to get a ride in one or the other; but his best bet, he thought, was a sympathetic tourist.

Monday morning was not, apparently, a good day for tourists of any kind. An Indian kid, black as tar and with a heavy black braid down his back, came out of the village and crossed the road. Hoke watched the boy go into the Monroe Station restaurant and then come out a couple of minutes later eating a Mounds bar. He nibbled the bar as he walked back and then tossed the candy wrapper into the canal before crossing the little bridge into the village again. Ah, Hoke thought, Indian culture at first hand. The Seminoles and Miccosukees both, in Hoke's opinion, were a surly lot. If you bought gas at their Shark Valley reservation station, near their restaurant, the attendant would merely look at you without expression until you told him what you wanted. After he had filled your car, he would take your credit card without saying anything and walk away. You got no thanks or any other acknowledgment from the pump jockey when he returned with your card or change. It was as if the Indian were doing you a big favor by selling you gas, gas that was ten or fifteen cents more per gallon than you could buy it for in Miami. If you asked the jockey to check under your hood, he didn't hear you. He went back inside his office and waited until you drove away, frustrated and angered by his attitude.

The Indian kid with the Mounds bar had not looked at Hoke either going to or coming from the Monroe Station restaurant when he crossed the highway. It was nice to know that officially the United States and the Seminole Indian nation had not, as yet, signed a peace treaty and that the two nations were still at war. This was a mere technicality to the United States, but perhaps the Indians took it more seriously and therefore refused to fraternize with the enemy--except to take American money.

An hour later the sun was hotter yet, but Hoke discovered that if he walked back and forth on the lot instead of standing still, he could discourage some of the lazier gnats. Smoking also helped keep them away, but he was now down to only six cigarettes in his crumpled pack. No more cigarettes, he promised himself, until he got a ride.

The stillness in the Everglades was appalling. There were six chickees inside the compound, but no noise or talking came from inside. The woman inside the open door to the little shop didn't come out to take a look at him. Indians never offered any help or suggestions and merely grunted the price of something if you asked. There was no dickering either. Except for the striped, multicolored Seminole jackets fluttering on the pipe rack, all the other Indian artifacts they sold were made by other Indian tribes--not by the untalented Seminoles or Miccosukees. The turquoise jewelry came from New Mexico, and the rubber tomahawks were imported from Taiwan. But the Seminoles were getting rich anyway. They sold taxiess cigarettes and ran bingo games on their reservation in Broward County, and the federal government couldn't do anything about it-- so long as they stayed on their reservation. But Hoke wouldn't live out here in the Glades if he made two hundred thousand dollars a year. Hell, it would take more than three hours to get a Domino pizza delivered from West Miami!

What -was- he doing out here anyway? No driver's license, no weapon, no teeth, and no ID except for a handwritten identification card in his beat-up wallet--the kind that comes with a cheap wallet when you buy it. Not even a Social Security card for the unmourned Adam Jinks, stretched out now on a gurney in the Miami morgue with the top of his skull sawed off. He shouldn't have let Brownley take his teeth. Even if Adam Jinks was also toothless, he must have had a set of choppers stashed somewhere. The more Hoke thought about it, the more absurd the mission seemed to be. What was he supposed to do? Exactly. Get hired somehow by Tiny Bock or perhaps by his honcho, Cicatriz, and then poke around on the farm to see if he could discover a few more buried Haitians? Cicatriz. Cicatriz? The name sounded familiar. Of course. -Cicatriz-, in Spanish, means "scar," so that couldn't be the Mexican foreman's real name. He would have a scar, and it would be a lulu of a scar if he used it as his moniker. Jesus, what was he getting into, and why should he do it?

Hoke lighted another cigarette and decided to return to Miami. He could cross the road to Monroe Station, buy a fresh pack of Kools, and then pay someone--sooner or later--five bucks to give him a ride back to Miami. This was not a legitimate assignment for a Miami homicide detective, and there wasn't a damned thing Brownley could do about it.

A huge Mack sixteen-wheeler slowed slightly as Hoke held out his thumb and pulled to a wavering stop some two hundred yards past the Indian Village. Hoke ran toward the truck but slowed after the first hundred yards, panting for breath. He was almost out of wind by the time he reached the cab. He climbed the three steep steps, opened the door, and collapsed on the sheepskin seat in the airconditioned comfort of the monstrous cab.

"Sorry," the young driver said, grinning, "I didn't stop a little sooner, but I was afraid she'd jackknife on me."

Hoke nodded, gasping. "That's okay."

"I don't know how to back her very good neither. To go one way, you see, you gotta turn the wheel the other way, and even then it don't always back straight. I'm still learnin' how to drive her. You may not believe it, but this baby's got seven shifts forward and three shifts in reverse."

"Sure, I believe it. But you'd better move it on out 'cause you're still on the road, and someone might ram into you."

"Right. I'll just take a quick look at this little diagram on the dashboard here. It's got all the shifts on it and stuff. I don't know what all this shit means yet on the dash. What's the tack-o-meter for? When I get her rolling past fifty, that needle spins around like crazy. So I slow her back down to forty-five."

"It just measures the engine's revolutions per minute, that's all. Ignore it. But forty-five's a nice speed for a rig this size. What're you hauling, fish?"

"Smells like it, don't it? But I don't think it's fish. The back's all sealed up, but the guy on the loading dock had him a couple of cartons marked 'lobster tails,' so I think that's what I'm carryin'."

"Didn't he tell you?"

"No, but it don't matter none to me. For two hundred bucks I'd haul a load of dead babies, wouldn't you?"

The driver, with a long chestnut mane, a silver stud in his right earlobe, and smudgy traces of sparse brown hairs on his upper lip, was about nineteen, Hoke thought. He wore tight, faded jeans, running shoes with red racing stripes, and a rose-colored T-shirt with a white sailboat printed on it. A CAT gimme cap rested lightly on the back of his head. He bit his lower lip with concentration as he studied the gear diagram bolted to the dash and then took the lever noisily through five gears as he accelerated. He didn't double-shift, and the truck jerked at each progression.

"I usually skip four and five," he said, sitting back, "and it don't seem to make no difference."

"It probably won't hurt anything on a flat road like the Trail. There's only a one-foot drop in elevation between Miami and Naples."

"That's where I'm goin'. Naples. You got a driver's license?"

"Yeah, but not on me. I left it back in Miami."

"Me neither. That's too bad, pops. The main reason I picked you up was because I thought you might have a license. I don't mean I'd let you drive or nothin', but I wanted to tell a trooper, in case he stopped me, that you were the driver and you was givin' me lessons drivin' across the Trail. See what I mean?"

"Not exactly. Who're you driving for? What company?"

"He didn't say. I was drinkin' a Miami Nice Slurpee and readin' -Auto Trader- outside the Seven-eleven on Bird Road when these two guys drove up in a brown Volvo. Black guys. I guess I must've looked at 'em a little funny, you know. I never seen a black man drive a Volvo before, have you?"

"Never."

"Anyway, the driver got out and asked me if I knew how to drive a truck. I told him I sometimes drove my dad's pickup, and then he asked me if I wanted to make two hundred big ones. 'Sure,' I said, and got into their Volvo. We went to this warehouse over in Hialeah, and this here's the truck they give me to drive. He paid me a hundred in advance, and when I get to Naples, to the warehouse there, I get the second hundred."