Shadow Men Read Online Free PDF Page A

and a sun-faded Toyota sedan off to the side. Business was slow and it made me optimistic. My last trip here had included an ugly encounter with some young locals. It wasn’t, and had never been, a place for outsiders. I pulled up next to the other trucks, rolled up the window and locked the doors before heading in.
    Inside the entryway I had to stop and let my eyes adjust to the sudden dimness. I remembered the cramped “lobby,” which gave up registering guests many decades ago, and I followed one of those long, rolled-out, industrial-strength carpet runners into the adjacent barroom. It was even darker in here. There was not a single window to the outside, and the electric sidelights glowed a dull yellow. Somewhere in the back a window air conditioner rumbled. A handsome mahogany bar ran the length of one wall, and two elderly men sat on stools at one end studying a cribbage board. I sat at the middle and watched the woman bartender ignore me at first, then cut her eyes my way too many times, like she was trying to remember an old one-night stand. Finally she moved my way, shuffling a wet bar rag from hand to hand.
    “Can I get cha?” she said. She may have been the same woman from my last visit, but her hair color had been changed to a hue of red not known to nature. She was wearing a tight cotton pullover that formfitted her breasts and didn’t make it down to the waistband of her jeans. Her other nod to contemporary fashion was a silver belly button ring, through which was looped a matching chain that circled her waist. The rolled skin of her flabby stomach was too soft and too pale for the look.
    “Nate Brown,” I said in answer to her question.
    She narrowed her eyes and tilted her head just so.
    “Thought I recognized you,” she said. “You was in here just the other day. Gave them Brooker boys a ass-whippin’.”
    While she talked she reached down into the stainless cooler of ice, pulled out a longneck bottle of beer and opened it.
    “Mr. Brown said you was all right.”
    “It was a couple of years ago,” I said.
    “Yeah?” she said, putting the cold bottle in front of me.
    The two men at the end of the bar had turned their attention to us. I met their eyes and they both carefully, almost imperceptibly, nodded their respect, maybe to a man who Mr. Brown had said was all right or maybe to someone who could ass-whip the Brooker boys. They returned to their cards. I took a drink from the bottle.
    “Have you seen Mr. Brown lately?” I asked the bartender. “I’m trying to get a message to him.”
    She straightened her look this time, being careful.
    “Maybe,” she said. “The other day.”
    Nate Brown had some kind of native status in the Glades. His ancestors were some of the first white people to settle here. No one seemed to know how old he was, but a logical guess put him in his mid-eighties. Still, I had personally been pole-ferried by him in a Glades skiff over a dozen miles or more of canals and water routes into the heart of the swamp. I had seen him appear from nowhere and then disappear into the emptiness of four thousand acres of sawgrass without so much as a compass.
    “If I leave you a phone number, could you get it to Mr. Brown along with a message that Max Freeman needs to see him?” I said to the woman.
    “Maybe,” she said, glancing down to the cribbage players.
    I took a bar napkin off a stack, used my own pen to write down my cell number and handed it to her.
    “I appreciate it,” I said, finishing the beer and putting a twenty- dollar bill next to it. As I turned to leave I gave the eleven-foot gator skin mounted on one wall a cursory look, but below it I noticed a pair of framed black-and-white photographs. I bent closer and could make out a group shot of a dozen men, standing stiff and posed before the raised iron neck of an ancient dredge that had the word NOREN painted on one side. The photo paper was dulled with age, but I could make out the thin figures of the men,