Acts of Nature

EPILOGUE

We are through the hurricane season. It is January in South Florida and the tourists and winter residents are leaking back down from up north to seek out the sun now that it is safe and the chill of winter is pushing them out of their own homes. It is nice to avoid the inconveniences of nature if you can afford to.
I am avoiding them myself by spending most of my time at Sherry’s home in Fort Lauderdale. After she was released from the hospital, I built a ramp from her driveway up onto her back deck, which overlooks the pool. I installed a new set of stainless steel handles that let her ease herself down into the water, and although that was their immediate purpose, she has taken to using them for doing “dips.” It is an excruciatingly difficult exercise she learned in rehab that is like an inverted pull-up and works the hell out of one’s shoulder and triceps muscles. I’ve tried to match her repetitions and failed. She calls me a wimp but concedes that she is only pressing the weight of her body minus one leg. I kept telling myself I was there to help her but I have not yet returned to my river shack. I think perhaps I’m there to help myself. Being alone in the wilderness has lost some appeal. Being with someone you need and needs you is, well, natural.
When Billy’s privately arranged medevac helicopter arrived at the Everglades shack, a rescue jumper and an emergency medical physician winched down and immediately took control of Sherry, inserting IVs, stabilizing her leg, administering who knows what antishock drugs. They strapped her into the basket and pulled her up into the chopper and I followed. While they worked on her, a flight nurse was trying to open another vein in Sherry’s right arm but had to pry her hand open to loosen a muscle, and in her palm she found a necklace with two stones, an opal and a diamond. Sherry had not let loose of it since ripping it off Wayne’s neck. The nurse handed it to me and I put it in my pocket. The flight back to West Boca Medical Center took such little time it caught me off guard. We had been so close the whole time, barely twenty miles away.
I was kept in another room of the emergency center, treated for cuts and abrasions to my face and hands, and proved to be an uncooperative patient until Sherry’s doctor checked back with me to update me on her condition. She would recover, he said, after the amputation of her infected leg. Later, when she was lucid, I stood by her hospital bed and then laid my head on her chest, listening to her heart and promising that we would do together whatever it took to make her whole again.
Billy, the stoic and always-in-control attorney, left the room and I suspect he used one of those silk handkerchiefs he always carried in his suit pockets to dry his tears. When he’d arrived in the helicopter he had deferred to the others and stayed up in the aircraft. Later he told me that he had taken several digital photographs of the area, including shots of the four bodies and their positions on the outside deck. The Broward sheriff’s office homicide unit would take over the investigation with interagency help from the Department of Natural Resources and the Palm Beach and Collier County sheriffs. The illegal drilling exploration station would of course be exposed.
Billy made sure his photographs got to the right reporters at the right newspapers. The environmental folks took the fuel and ran with it, demanding that the state’s attorney general get involved in an investigation of other possible operations. In time the equipment and computer files at the station were confiscated and tracked directly to GULFLO.
The oil company of course would be publicly stunned that, due to the misreading of a survey map, they had made a mistake in operating the research station in an area off limits to such work. They would also disavow any knowledge of a “so-called” security team. They paid a fine. They were sorry But Billy had kept his feelers out, investigating on his own the identities of Harmon and Squires and although Squires’s portfolio remained thin and scattered, Billy would eventually flag an obscure civil suit brought by a woman in Coral Springs who claimed to be Harmon’s wife, which she had filed against GULFLO. The suit was asking for five million in compensatory damages for wrongful death. Billy was watching to see how long it would stay on the docket before being settled out of court.
Billy had often schooled me on the past and present way things work in Florida; two centuries of people flowing to the sunshine had brought with it the spoiling of big business, corruption, money, and crime.
“Nature knocks it back every once in a while, Max,” Billy said. “But the nature of men, I’m afraid, will always prevail.”
I did not believe I’d gained much insight into the ways of nature or the nature of man. The bodies of the boys would be returned to their mothers, and Buck Morris would be buried alone in a pauper’s grave.
Sherry and I would recount to the homicide detectives our days since the hurricane struck in as much detail as possible, as many names as we could, estimated times, conversations as close as we could recall, number of shots fired. The days we spent at the Snows’ fishing camp leading up to that night, we kept to ourselves.
After she was home, when it seemed right, I tried to return her necklace. I held it out in my hand, the chain still broken. She stared at it for a time then asked me for a tiny wooden box from her dresser top. She placed the necklace inside and then tucked it deep into a bottom drawer she used only for keepsakes and memories.
For now she swims. She is researching prostheses and has already subscribed to a Web site detailing the training involved in wheelchair marathons. The park ranger checks my cabin regularly and said its traditional Dade County pine construction weathered the hurricane with nary a damaged stairstep or busted window. When he asked when I planned to return, I had no answer.
How about, I said, we let it take its course.



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As always the author would like to acknowledge the excellent work of the folks at Dutton, especially Mitch Hoffman and Erika Imranyi, who succinctly debunk the statement that editors don’t edit anymore.
I also wish to thank Philip Spitzer without whom there would be no Max; my early reader, Lillian Ros Martin, for her insight and Spanish lessons; and Joanne Sinchuk, who spreads our work and without whom so many Florida mystery writers would simply be broke.