Shadow Men Read Online Free Page B

call.
    “You have reached the desk of Detective Sherry Richards of the Metropolitan Investigations Unit. I am either on the phone or…” I waited for the damned beep.
    “Detective. I am presently on dry land and if at all possible would like to meet with you on that matter we discussed last Tuesday,” I said. One never knew these days about who had access to office phone mail, especially at a cop shop.
    “I am occupied on another case this afternoon, but could meet you at our usual drop off point at 1930 hours. Call my cell if this is acceptable. Aloha.”
    I punched off the cell and wrinkled my forehead. “Aloha”? Where the hell did I get that? I pulled out onto the interstate, and any thoughts of misplaced levity quickly disappeared. In the few years I’d lived in South Florida I had never experienced I-95 when part of it was not under construction. And despite the constant presence of orange cones, disappearing lanes, ramp signs with burlap slung over them and the inevitable group of yellow-vested construction workers, I also have never experienced traffic doing less than sixty-five in a fifty-five-mile-per-hour zone. I eased into a spot in the middle lane and tried simply to keep pace.
    An hour or so later I was in Miami; got off on Eighth Street heading west. The Spanish signage for everything from food markets to computer stores, dry cleaners to haircutters, restaurants to movie theaters, had lost its novelty for me. Miami-Dade County is now 54 percent Hispanic. Those who have danced to the luscious and lively beat of Afro-Cuban music in the street concerts or tasted a homemade salteña outside the American Airlines Arena, have no argument with multiculturalism. To think that Cuban- or South American-influenced politics is any more corrupt or two-faced than many homegrown administrations is to forget the good old boy history of Miami. I grew up in the days of Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia. To borrow from the NRA slogan, the linguistics and the melanin content of the skin don’t devalue people; people devalue people.
    I kept driving west through the typical Florida one-story commercial district, through the miles of three- and four-story apartment complexes, and finally through the construction zone of yet another expanding development of “town homes for luxurious country living starting in the low $90s to $120s.” Then, in the span of a quarter mile, the road narrowed to a two-way macadam, and I rolled over the first of several water-control dams, through which man now decided how much flow was let loose into the lower Glades and on to Florida Bay. Eighth Street had turned into the Tamiami Trail. The vegetation crawled onto the side of the road and I could see the canal water on the north side, the ditch that the Moneghan dredge had originally dug. Beyond the ditch were acres and acres of land, some open and filled only with low sedge grasses and the occasional outcrop of cabbage palms, some grown thick with strangler fig and pond apple trees. The sun was directly overhead, and even though the temperature had climbed into the eighties, I rolled down the window and stuck my elbow out. Out of the city the air again felt worthy of letting in. Another thirty miles and I began looking for the turn to Loop Road.
    Back in the early 1900s, an optimistic developer had laid out Loop Road as a hub of the future that would equal Coral Gables to the east. When the Trail project faltered during WWI, the long loop into the deeper Glades fell to whomever might use it. For the next few decades it became a jump-off point for illegal whiskey runners, gator poachers, small-time criminals or just societal dropouts looking to hide. The city to the east was where governments and laws were made. Out here in the wide-open Glades, those conventions were ignored.
    Partway down the loop, I turned into the white-shelled parking lot of the Frontier Hotel. There were two old, mud-spattered four- by-four trucks pulled up near the entrance