Free A Hard Death by Jonathan Hayes Page A

darkness. The moon slipped from behind its wreath of cloud, and light poured across the flooded plain. The Glades had never seemed so vast, the thousands of acres of saw grass stretching out like an unfurled blanket, bare-trunked cypress and royal palms, thickets of live oak and bustic scattered across it like abandoned toys.
    A few years back, Jenner, visiting from New York, had gone out with Marty on an airboat to recover three victims from a single-engine plane crash. The park ranger who led them to the crash site had explained to Jenner that what looked like a grassy prairie was not solid at all, but a cloak of pale yellow sedge covering a huge, slow-flowing river; under the grass, the water was always moving, sliding down the infinitely gentle slope to the sea. And Jenner had learned that, while the blades of the saw grass seemed lush and thick, they were literally blades, their sawtoothed edges capable of cutting clothing and flesh.
    As he looked into the marsh, Jenner remembered something else about the crash: while he and Marty had waded over to the crumpled Cessna, one of the deputies had stayed on the airboat, sitting in the high driver’s chair, binoculars hung around his neck, cradling a carbine. With a grin, Marty told Jenner he was looking out for alligators, which, with their thick skin, thrived in the dense mesh of razor-sharp grass.
    As he stared out toward the horizon, Jenner tried to remember what the park ranger had said about how to spot an alligator nest.
    There was movement out over the water. No, not movement, but a white light in the distance.
    It was gone.
    Jenner stared, squinting.
    And then it blinked again. Jenner stood, concentrating, until his eye found the light. It was a flashing signal, almost invisible in the undergrowth of a large hammock maybe a quarter-mile out into the marsh.
    So, no hoax, then. Weiss wasn’t lying about the bodies.
    Christ. Why hadn’t he woken Rudge?
    He checked his cell phone. No signal.
    Jenner went back to the car, pulled out the big white Wal-Mart bag, and dumped his purchases onto the backseat. He sprayed himself with insecticide until his clothes were sodden. He wasn’t sure if the waders went over clothes, or if he was supposed to get rid of his pants to get in the waders.
    He decided to keep his pants on, even if that wasn’t right. Earlier that week, he’d listened to state troopers swapping snake stories. Rattlers,they said, didn’t take you by surprise—the sound let you know you were dealing with a rattler. It was the cottonmouths that scared the hell out of them. Cottonmouths would charge you, would come slithering right at you once they got your scent. And they were incredibly fast, and they just kept on coming. And once you got bitten by a cottonmouth, you died slow, the flesh of the bitten limb blistering and oozing, your blood rotting in your veins before the coma took you away.
    Jenner looked back out to the hammock. It looked like a long walk.

C HAPTER 19
    A t first, he made pretty good time. The sedge was compact and springy; he’d heard it had been a pretty dry season, and he wondered if the irrigation pumps dropped the water level near the fields. But as he continued, it got wetter, and Jenner found himself slowing, each footstep sinking deeper into the thick mat of grass and mud.
    Soon, he had to lean into his step, the marsh sucking at his feet and ankles as he clambered forward, struggling to keep his scene bag up out of the damp. The Miccosukee and Seminole had lived in the Glades for centuries, but they had to know their way, had to have had trails through. And they did it during daylight, without twenty pounds of camera equipment and swabs and tape lifts.
    Most of all, he thought glumly, the Miccosukee could tell a clump of bushes from an alligator nest.
    Jenner stopped, the sweat pouring down his face, his shirt soaked, the rubber waders keeping in as much moisture as they kept out. Now the insects caught