Shadow Men Read Online Free

long forgotten the ranger’s name.
    “Griggs,” he said. “Dan Griggs.”
    “Thanks, Griggs.”
    The eastern sky was lightening, though the sun was still too low to break through the tree canopy. In time we both sat up, leaning our backs into opposite posts at the end of the dock. I finally took a solid look at the guy. He was a good ten years younger than me, lean with sandy blond hair and skin too fair for his job in the Florida sun. His ranger uniform was soaked up to a dark line across his chest. His leather boots were oozing mud. He was still wearing his belt with a knife scabbard and a flashlight holder.
    “You swim out here at dawn often?”
    He grinned and shook his head without looking up.
    “I’m usually on dawn patrol out on the main river,” he said. “I’ve seen white smoke rising from your stovepipe before, but when I saw it was black, I knew something was wrong and motored up here.”
    “Couldn’t get the Whaler in,” I stated.
    “Had to tie her up and wade in. But I could see the flames even from deep water.”
    “Guess I picked a bad morning to sleep in.”
    Griggs still hadn’t looked up into my face.
    “I figured you were here ’cause I could see that your canoe was gone from the landing.”
    “I appreciate you looking after me,” I said. “The whole place might have gone up if you hadn’t been here.”
    This time Griggs did look over at me. The irony was not lost on him. Several months ago it was Griggs who had to serve papers from the state informing me that the Attorney General’s Office was attempting to break the ninety-nine-year lease that Billy held on the old research shack. Until then I’d been left alone and had even befriended the old, longtime ranger whom Griggs had replaced. But there had been a messy business. Blood had been spilled in these waters through a violence that didn’t belong in this place. Many people blamed me, and it was a point of view I couldn’t argue with. That was when the state began trying to toss me out. Billy had been fighting the eviction at my request, and he had kept them tied up in legal maneuvering ever since.
    “I don’t suppose you noticed any lightning while you were on dawn patrol?” I asked, finally making it to my feet and looking up under the base supports of the shack.
    “Nope. And I’m sure you can rule out faulty wiring.” He too had gotten to his feet. “But unless you reached out and doused the back wall with kerosene and lit the match yourself, I’d say you got an enemy.”
    The ranger was pointing to a small slick of rainbow-colored water that seemed to float independently on the surface of my channel. Some sort of petroleum-based accelerant had spread into the water.
    “Whoever they are, they don’t know much about Dade County pine,” he said. “It’d take a whole lot more heat than that to do anything more than just scorch that tough old wood.”
    While Griggs used my canoe to retrieve a camera from his Whaler, I went back inside. There had been no interior damage, and the smoke had mostly cleared, rising up through the ceiling cupola as the design had intended. Still, the place reeked of burnt oil and wood. I closed the screen frames and changed my clothes. I found my cell phone and started to call Billy, but put it off. I would need to stay at his place until the shack aired out, but the conversation I anticipated was better off held out of earshot of anyone else. I grabbed my still unpacked travel bag and rejoined Griggs below.
    In the canoe we took a circle around the base of the shack. The back wall and northeast support pillar were blackened, but there was no apparent structural damage. We pushed up next to the pillar, where I used a knife to dig out a scarred piece of wood and put it into a plastic bag. Griggs had been right about the arsonist’s ignorance of the pine’s resistance, unless his intent was to be more psychologically than physically destructive. Maybe someone was more interested in scaring