Free Shadow Men by Jonathon King

just to forget about swamps and fires and the unmarked graves of tired men for a while. When I saw the van take the same off-ramp, I got more interested. I’d just finished filling Billy in on my conversation with Nate Brown, and that I’d planned to meet up with him in two days.
    “Does Brown think any of this is feasible?” Billy said.
    “He’s hard to read.”
    “Do you think it’s possible?”
    “I think it’s going to take more than old letters and fireside ghost stories,” I said.
    “That’s why I’m record-hunting, Max. We might not even be able to prove the great-grandfather and his sons were even out there.”
    I punched off with Billy and saw the white van speed up to catch a light with me. Maybe I was paranoid, nervous about leaving the shack. Maybe it wasn’t even the same van. God knows how many white vans are on the road—just ask the sniper task force up in D.C. and suburban Virginia. Still I did a figure-eight through the tight blocks of Victoria Park before finally backing into Richards’s driveway. I watched both ways for ten minutes and had just reached for the door handle when a sharp rap sounded on the passenger side window and made me jump. Richards opened the door and pushed her head in. Her eyes glowed blue and her hair was down.
    “Forget the stakeout, Freeman, the neighbors already know,” she said, sliding into the seat.
    “Know what?”
    “Know the nice policeman’s widow next door is seeing some unemployed swamp guy with a pickup truck,” she said.
    We drove through her quaint neighborhood and into what had over many years comfortably become the downtown area of Fort Lauderdale—small one- and two-story condos and side streets of old, motel-style apartments whose days were now numbered by the rising value of the land they sat on. For the last fifty years the population flood into South Florida had surged west off the beach and into the drained swamp to create suburbia. But somehow a barrier—both political and environmental—had been raised, and the new and supposedly final boundary of the Everglades established. Now, like a wave started at one end of a pan of water, the still- growing number of new arrivals was sloshing back toward the sea. The only place left to go was vertical. Turning west on Las Olas Boulevard, the city’s venerable shopping lane, we were soon surrounded by high-rises.
    “Are we being followed, Freeman?” Richards suddenly asked.
    Her question caught me off guard, but shouldn’t have.
    “You’ve been checking the rearview since we left the house,” she said. “Bad form for a cop not to let his partner in on the game.”
    “Sorry,” I said. “I thought I picked up somebody on the way down. White van. But I could be wrong.”
    “The fire starter? Or this other doing you’ve got going with Billy?” she asked, using the remote control on her own rearview side mirror to take a glance behind.
    “Maybe I’m just skittish these days,” I said.
    “So what kind of car does this park ranger drive?”
    “You know, I don’t know why I’m not more suspicious of him,” I said, stopping for yet another red light. “It’s way too easy, him being there, his access to marine fuel, the state trying to roust me. It doesn’t feel right.”
    Richards reached over and put her hand flat on my thigh. “Stop grinding, Max. Let’s go out and have a good time.”
    I leaned over and kissed her, got distracted by the smell of her perfume and the touch of her lips, and the guy behind me popped his horn.
    “Green light,” she murmured.
    We rolled on. But before we got to the old post office parking lot on Second Street, I’d caught her checking her rearview mirror twice. Always a cop. 24/7.
    Richards had great seats at the Broward Center. The jazz was superior and the piano riffs were still in my head afterward as we walked down Second Street, holding hands and debating which of Krall’s talents was better, the interestingly malleable voice, or the