A Visible Darkness by Jonathon King Page A

its front edge, and pressed it up and tight against the hinges to avoid any squeaking as he eased it open. He was surprised to see a line of light glowing at the bottom of a door inside. Another bathroom. It was wrong for this neighborhood. She must have had it installed, Eddie thought. He had never seen a second bathroom in these houses. He watched the strip for several seconds, soaking up the light, adjusting his eyes. In the high-mounted bed, he could see the line of Ms. Thompson’s body turned away from him. He could see her white hair in the slight glow. Another pillow lay next to her, punched down and indented. Eddie picked it up, assessed the position of the old woman again, and then pushed the material over her face.
    He was just beginning to close his eyes to her muffled groans when light burst into the room.
    “Abby baby, you purrin’ like a ol’ lioness ain’t too tired…” The man coming out of the lighted bathroom caught a glimpse of the huge thick back bent over the woman he had just recently started calling his girlfriend and yelped “What the hell?…”
    The speed of Eddie’s left hand swapped its hold from the woman to the old man’s throat before another syllable could be uttered. The man’s eyes went big. Eddie’s right palm remained on the pillow and the light from the doorway caught all three of them in an ugly instant of time.
    Just as the old man started kicking Eddie tightened his grip, feeling the soft flesh and then crushing the bony windpipe under his thumb. He spread the fingers of his other hand and kept the pocket of his huge palm over the mouth of the other. And he silently held the pose, watching the man’s face go from red to dusty blue in the light of the new master bathroom. Eddie was a patient man and did not move until he was sure that the lives in both of his hands were gone.

15
    I was upriver on a rare morning paddle when the cell phone chirped from my bag in the bow of the canoe. I’d been up with the sun. Found it impossible to read and was actually pacing the wood floor of the shack when I decided to grind out a trip to the headwaters. The water had been high and the morning light spackled the ferns and pond apple leaves that crowded the edges. The river twisted and folded back in on itself and if you stopped moving, the deep quiet and moist greenness could sweep even an unimaginative mind back several millenniums. In the morning light I’d seen several glowing white moonflowers nestled in a small protected bog, and I knew that back in a thicket at the end of one offshoot stream were a half dozen undisturbed orchids. By luck no one had found them. But like a hundred years ago, when exploiters of the delicate flowers had plucked them from the dark hammocks of the Everglades until tĥey were nearly extinct, there was little optimism that these few would remain hidden.
    I’d spent more than an hour plowing up past Workman’s Dam and on to the culvert where Everglades water from the L131 Canal poured into the river to give it an extra flow. I had pulled the canoe up onto the grass bank and was on top of the levee looking out over acre upon acre of brown-green sawgrass. The view extended to the horizon like unbroken fields of Kansas wheat. The only break was a dark clump far in the distance that looked like bush but was actually a hammock of sixty-foot-tall pine, and mahogany and crepe myrtle rooted in high ground in the river of grass.
    The bleating of the cell phone in my canoe spoiled the quiet. I loped down the bank to answer it and Richards was on the line.
    “Hey. Nice to hear your voice on such a great morning,” I said, sounding too chipper.
    The silence on the other end dampened my enthusiasm.
    “I don’t know how the hell you do it, Freeman,” she said. “But you’ve got one special nose for trouble.”
    I was back in the world, outside another low-slung home on the northwest side. The address Richards gave me wasn’t hard to find. Three patrol cars and