Shadow Men Read Online Free PDF

dressed in dungarees and long-sleeved shirts. Some sported thick, handlebar mustaches; some showed dark hair pasted across their foreheads. There were old ink scratchings at the bottom of the picture, but the letters were indecipherable.
    “Are these the old road builders?” I said.
    “Don’t know,” the bartender said. “Them pictures been up there before that gator probably.”
    “Anybody out here have family in the photos?”
    She looked at me oddly.
    “They’s just a bunch of old-timers,” she said. “Nobody knows ’em.”

CHAPTER
    4
    I kicked up the AC and was on the trail back to the city when my cell phone rang.
    “Freeman,” I said.
    “Aloha? What the hell is Aloha?”
    “Hey, I don’t know, a guy tries to be humorous, sometimes it doesn’t work.”
    “You’re not a funny guy, Max—face it.”
    “You’re right, Detective, I’m not.”
    “So don’t try.”
    “All right then, seriously. Can I see you tonight?”
    “Depends.”
    “On?”
    “On whether I can get this case paperwork done on time and whether seeing means we can go see a movie or you just want to sleep with me.”
    “Oh, your turn to be funny,” I said.
    “I’m not laughing.”
    “In that case, how about I pick you up in the parking lot at seven? It’ll give you more desk time. We’ll eat at Canyons, then walk around to the movies at eight fifteen.”
    “What? No sleeping?”
    “We’ll have to see how the evening goes.”
    “You’re a true man of mystery, Max.”
    “True,” I said, “See you at seven.”
    “OK.”
    Jesus, I thought, and clicked off the cell.
    Richards and I had met during an investigation of a series of child abductions that brought her task force to my river. I’d tried to avoid her. I had once been married to a cop. The romance had been short-lived. Richards had also been in a police marriage. Her husband was killed in the line of duty by a kid who wasn’t old enough to grasp the true difference between pulling a real trigger versus the one in an arcade game. The kid was still in a Florida prison, a real one, doing a man’s life sentence. My ex was still in Philly, and I had not talked with her since before I left.
    Despite some effort to keep our distance, Richards and I had been seeing each other more and more often. The emotional distance was closing, but we were both carrying a lot of baggage. We were working at it, letting it come if it was going to.
    In a few minutes my 7:00 P.M. promise was being broken. The only time traffic on I-95 isn’t running ten miles over the speed limit is when it’s locked up at five miles per hour and the bumper-to- bumper wall of commuters makes it physically impossible. It is a time when South Floridians collectively curse railroad baron Henry Flagler for bringing civilization to the subtropics in the first place and his friend Henry Ford for engineering cars that were cheap enough to let just about anyone pack up and drive on down.
    The only advantage to a South Florida traffic jam during the evening rush hour was the chance to see the sunset. Because the state is as flat as a pool table and the interstate overpasses are often higher than the one-story buildings, you often get treated to a spectacular swirl of purple, orange and soft lavenders in a stubborn cobalt blue sky that hangs on to the late light. I thought of the Tamiami Trail workers eighty years ago who must have seen a similar sight lose its grandeur in their desperate daily labor. By the time I reached the Broward Boulevard exit to downtown Fort Lauderdale, the sun was bloodred, and from the top of the interchange I could see a necklace of bright, starlike lights strung out in its glow. They were the landing lights of airliners stacked up in their approaches to the international airport. More tourists and a returning business class flowing into paradise.
    Three blocks off the interstate, I pulled into the sheriff’s parking lot, fifteen minutes late but lucky enough to arrive during a