Shadow Men by Jonathon King Page B

and came up with a bottle and half-filled my glass. I thanked him and sipped some of the smoothest whiskey I had ever tasted.
    “I’m trying to find the truth, Mr. Brown,” I finally said.
    My answer seemed to stop him, and an amusement came to his eye.
    “The truth,” he repeated. “The onliest truth is the sun comin’ up and the ocean moving, son. I know y’all are smart enough to know that.”
    I let him watch me drink. I knew he was right, but such philosophy was not on my timetable yet.
    “Do you think Cyrus Mayes and his boys died out here, Nate?” I said instead.
    “More’n possible.”
    “Do you think they were killed?”
    “They’s a lot of scar out here, Mr. Freeman. Some of them deserve to be healed and some don’t.” It was not a question and I knew he did not expect an answer. I waited while he sipped his own drink. “That’s why I asked you how much you want to find out.”
    The skin on his face was nearly as dark as the whiskey and had captured some of the same glow.
    “I consider what you done before with me was an honest collaboration. An’ that might be the onliest way to do this one,” he said. “I believe maybe I owe you. But it ain’t just for you neither, just like before.”
    “So what do you suggest?” I said.
    “Let’s go.”
    As we walked to the door, the bartender called out, “Good afternoon, Mr. Brown,” with more politeness than I would have thought she possessed. He waved and got the same response from the card players. As I passed the bar I looked for the old construction photograph but it was missing from the wall. When I turned and asked the bartender about it she looked past me at the clean, empty rectangle its removal had left on the wall and shrugged her shoulders. “I hadn’t noticed,” she said.
    Outside we got into the truck and Brown directed me south. I had never seen the old Gladesman in anything other than a boat and he looked small and uncomfortable in the passenger seat. He rolled his window the rest of the way down and I half expected him to thrust his head out like a retriever. He was not a man for closed- in places. He soon had me pull off onto a dirt track and we bounced a quarter mile west into a thick stand of rimrock pines. When we ran out of trail I stopped and he simply said, “You might want to slip right there under them boughs. Keep her out of the sun some.” I did as instructed and we got out. I could see no path or obvious opening beyond the trees, and when Brown started to move off I said, “Should I lock it up?”
    “Suit yerself,” he said, and kept walking. I had learned in my last encounter with Nate that in his world, you were best off just to trust him. I locked the truck and followed.
    He slipped into the trees, moving with a slow and steady grace that I could not match. I stepped where he did, ducked under the same limbs and avoided the same ankle-breaking ruts and holes, but with only some success. About fifty yards in, the pines thinned and the ground turned moist. We skirted a patch of cabbage palms and in seconds were calf-deep in standing water. I was about to break my silence when I spotted the white fiberglass of a boat hull. Nate had left his center console runabout floating along a wall of cattails in crotch-deep water. He clambered up over the stern and I followed. I watched as he wordlessly pulled in the anchor line and then used a pole to push the boat backward into some kind of natural channel. When he seemed satisfied with the depth, he stood at the console, cranked the starter, and at idle speed began to guide us along the snaking ribbon of water. Soaked to my waist and now completely lost I finally checked my patience.
    “If you don’t mind my asking, Nate, where the hell are we going?”
    “We’s headin’ over to Everglades City, son,” he said, not taking his eyes off the water, studying, I assumed, its depth and direction. “I got you a man you need to talk with.”
    I could tell from the sun’s