ONE
"This is as far as I can take ya," the sheriff said, stopping the old squad car where the dirt road ended. "And I only took ya this far on account of you being a friend of his."
Blaine McCracken nodded his thanks and started to climb out of the car. He took it slow, his hip stiff from the ride, focusing on the tangled growth of vegetation and the dark waters ahead.
"Ya need some help there?"
"I can manage."
"Don't forget your bag now," the sheriff reminded, shifting it across the back seat.
He was a dour man with a face marred by pits and furrows. The thickness of his southern accent seemed strange to Blaine, who didn't consider Florida to be part of the Deep South. Then again, this part of the state was new to him.
Blaine had flown into Miami and had a cab take him southwest to Flamingo. There the sheriff had offered to drive him to Condor Key, a swampy peninsula that jutted out into the northern tip of the Everglades. The only road sign he noticed on the way was faded and spotted with rust.
Blaine reached into the back seat and hoisted his duffel bag with his good arm, the bad one dangling limply by his side. He closed the door again and caught a glimpse of his face in the window. It was much thinner than he could ever recall, the cheekbones set high and jaw sunken beneathhis close-cropped beard. His skin looked pale and furrowed, further exaggerating the thick scar that sliced through his left eyebrow where a bullet had left its mark years before. The sheriff made no motion to join him outside the car, pointed straight ahead through the windshield instead. "What ya wanna do now is walk out on that dock, far as you can. There'll be a boat coming to take ya the rest of the way 'fore too much longer."
"Thanks. I appreciate the lift."
The sheriff leaned a little across the seat. "I ask ya a question?"
"Yeah."
"Thing is, see, the man don't get many visitors. Fact is you the first I seen since he moved in, and that includes his family."
"You said you had a question."
"Does he know you're coming?"
"Depends if he reads his mail."
The sheriff nodded, not changing his expression. "I figured as much."
"Then why'd you drive me out here?" Blaine said through the window, dropping his duffel and leaning his hands on the door.
"Saw your ring, son." The sheriff cocked his gaze toward Blaine's ring finger. "He got one just like it, and I know enough 'bout such things to be sure there ain't many. You got that ring, way I see it you're a man he wouldn't mind seeing. He'll have my hide if I'm wrong."
"Yours and mine both."
The sheriff restarted the engine. "Give the ole boy my best. Tell him there's a meal waiting at the house whenever he gets it in his head to come into town."
He had to reverse his car a few times in the narrow roadway to manage the swing back around. With the sheriff gone, Blaine was left alone amidst the mangroves and black swamp waters that lay in every direction. The land was so flat, only a few inches above the water level and tangled with thick vegetation, he could see little beyond the worn dock. Blaine's shirt was already soaked through with sweat by the time he walked to the edge, the world around him alive with noise. Things shifted and plopped in the water. The mangroves rattled in the breeze.
Blaine sat down on the dock to take the pressure off his hip, felt the wood, moist with lapping waters and relentless humidity, soak through the seat of his pants. He slapped at the mosquitoes buzzing around his ears and fingered his ring, glad now he had worn it, tracing the two silver embossed letters amidst the black:
DS
It was a part of his past, dead and gone, but the past was what he needed now.
His mystical Indian friend, Johnny Wareagle, who knew him better than anyone, said men like the two of them walked with the spirits, their movements guided, protected. The last few years, Blaine had really started listening, because Wareagle's explanations made as much sense as any other. A small bullet could kill, just as a big bullet might not; it was all in where it hit you.
Johnny had spent many hours at the hospital over the past six months, strangely unmoved by the severity of McCracken's wounds or of what his prognosis might hold.
"Looks like your spirits deserted me, Indian," Blaine had said one night when the pain in his hip was especially bad.
"They are your spirits too, Blainey," came the seven-foot-tall Wareagle's placid reply. "The road you travel with them has taken a sharp turn, that is all."
"The end of it for me, maybe."
"You've been broken before, Blainey."
"Nothing a little gauze and antiseptic couldn't take care of. Small scars, relatively speaking."
"I was talking about your spirit, where the scars are never small. I was talking about years ago when both of us had withdrawn, accepting the emptiness."
"I came and got you."
"The years between that time and the Hellfire were merely a respite to convince us of the men we really are." Here Johnny had paused, his eyes seeming to light the room. "You still are that man."
"Not exactly."
Wareagle looked unfazed. "There is a legend among my people of a warrior who rode the plains through too many years to count. Entire tribes fell to his hand, if they dared attack his people. One night he slept by a calm stream, where he was attacked by a warrior who was his equal in every way. He had at last met his match, and the battle went on for hours. Others in the tribe found him bloodied and near death, and pointing at his attacker." Johnny's expression had fixed tightly on Blaine. "His own reflection in the stream, Blainey, come to take him in a nightmare."
"There a point to this, Indian?"
"Only one man can defeat you. The warrior of legend had bested every opponent, but he could not overcome himself when at last confronted. This is that confrontation for you, Blainey."
Blaine thought back to those words, fingering his ring again. It had been a gift to him and a select few others after the war in Vietnam. A gift from the man who had shaped him, pounded the folds of his being as if he were a sword and left him razor sharp.
DS ...
Dead Simple, the motto of the elite unit Blaine had been a part of through those years. But the last few months had been anything but simple.
Lying in the hospital, listening to the grim pronouncements of specialists, fighting through the grueling hours of physical therapy--lower body first and then upper body, the dual regimens necessitated by his two equally debilitating wounds. Watching and hearing people marvel at his progress. A medical miracle. A triumph of will.
Yet he couldn't get out of a car without an old sheriff asking if he needed help. Couldn't use his left arm to lift a duffel bag that barely weighed twenty pounds.
So where was the miracle?
The doctors had proudly pronounced him capable of being able to lead a normal life. How could Blaine explain that wasn't good enough? When they said he would eventually get back ninety-five percent of his strength and mobility, how could he tell them it was that last five percent that mattered most, was responsible for the edge that made him what he was, at least had been?
They wouldn't understand, so he had come down here to Condor Key in search of the man who would.
Blaine saw a skiff pushing its way through the still water, slipping past the vegetation that stubbornly clawed at it. The skiff...
