Strawman's Hammock Read online

  She stiffened. “What I always wanted to do.”

  Barrett remained silent. He knew that Laura Anne’s abiding passion was to educate kids in the joys of music. She loved nothing better than to be in a room with children and instruments. Laura Anne had never been happier than during the years she taught at the local high school. And Barrett knew that it was his move to Tallahassee that had cost Laura Anne her hard-earned position.

  “I’m going to be teaching the next couple of weeks.” Laura Anne withdrew, tucking her long legs beneath her chair. “Substituting. But that girl they hired from Orlando? She’s quitting. I’m not surprised. This isn’t the big city, and this girl isn’t used to our kind of life.”

  “So the school’s gonna need another teacher?”

  “A teacher and a band director.” She nodded. “But if I’m going to apply I have to do it quick.”

  “Lord, Lord.” He took a sip of iced tea. “Give up the restaurant? Bank our future on NASDAQ and Mr. Dow? That’s a lot to think about.”

  “Don’t worry,” she softened. “At least we’ll both have a steady job.”

  Barrett had just about decided at that moment that this was not the occasion to tell his wife he was thinking of running for sheriff when Rolly Slade came lumbering up to the table, the baseball cap testifying loyalty to FSU firmly in place on his mat of uncombed hair.

  “Bear. Laura Anne.”

  “Why, hello, Rolly.” Laura Anne smiled as if Slade’s interruption were a looked-for benediction.

  “Wanted you to know ’bout my dog.” Rolly plunged straight ahead.

  “Your dog?” Barrett responded politely.

  “My rottweiler.”

  Barrett was familiar with Rolly’s dog. He was also familiar with the manner in which Slade treated his animal.

  “Just got ’im where I wanted ’im,” Rolly complained. “There to guard the shop and awl.”

  The shop where he repaired lawn mowers and chain saws and such. Any number of complaints had been lodged against the beast that charged at customers from his now-chained restraint. Before the chain, Rolly used a rope to restrain his mascot. It broke. One of Rolly’s kin, fortunately for the proprietor, was the subject of the assault that followed. Terry Slade barely made it back to his pickup before his uncle’s rottweiler broke through the window on the shotgun side. Just drove right through, a couple of hundred pounds of head and fangs. Terry stomped the accelerator through the floor. Good thing, too, people said, or Rolly’s dog would have taken off his head.

  “What’s happened now, Rolly?”

  “Stole ’im is what. I come home from Linton’s camp, sunnuvabitch is gone. My chain? Cut slap in two.”

  “You call it in to the sheriff?”

  “What? Lou?” Rolly looked around as though to spit. “Oh, Sheriff Sessions’s too busy for the likes ’o me. Why, he’s out catchin’ the big crooks. The ones cookin’ drugs and sellin’ pot all over the county? He’s got no time for a man’s dog.”

  Neither, Barrett reflected, did the FDLE. But perhaps this was the time to begin behaving as a man running for office.

  “Tell you what, Rolly. Give me a description. I get to work tomorrow I’ll put out a fax to Sheriff Wilson in Suwannee County and copy Lou. See if we can get some folks looking.”

  “’Preciate that, Bear.”

  “Glad to help.”

  “Laura Anne.” Rolly tipped the bib of his cap and left without another word.

  Laura Anne turned her attention back to her husband.

  “You didn’t tell me you were going to Linton’s camp?”

  “At least you know why it wasn’t relaxing.”

  “Don’t softshoe me, Barrett Raines. What’d he want you out there for? Couldn’t have been hunting.”

  “Tell you later,” Bear replied.

  A place this small, he thought, it was impossible to keep a secret.

  That, at least, is what Agent Raines believed to be true at the time.

  Three

  The field office for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Third Judicial Circuit, is housed in the unlikely architecture of a juke joint once owned by Papa Smiley, one of the most endearing and crooked characters in Suwannee County. Papa opened a kind of combination bar, barbecue, and disco on the site that now promised law and order. He was an enormous man, never wore anything but overalls, no shirt, no underwear, his gut distended as with a hernia. He lumbered from side to side like a drunken sailor, in workboots that he wore without socks. Hard to imagine a creature like Papa doin’ the Hustle, but legend had it the man could dance like John Goddamn Travolta.

  The dance hall, however, was only a front for Papa’s riskier and more profitable enterprises. You used to see everything from stolen cars to cocaine bartered outside Papa’s establishment, while inside teenagers and older singles drank beer and whiskey for fifty cents, sucking on baby ribs and dancing all the while beneath the town’s first coordinated light show. Pickup trucks and fast cars used to spread in groves beneath the oak trees that sheltered the one-story disco. It was, for a time, a popular place.

  Then Papa himself went bankrupt, after getting arrested on various counts of trafficking, possession, and larceny. Which left the town richer in piety, but poorer in conversation. The one-story, completely unremarkable structure that survived Papa’s incarceration was put up for auction. No one had much use for a used disco stripped of its liquor license. The FDLE got the place on the cheap. Nothing betrayed the building’s serious purpose. The barbecue pit that remained out back might have signaled that this was the home to some family-based business. A plumber’s office, say, or insurance agency.

  Even the riverbed stones piled thin up the walls like you’d see in some other state—Colorado, say, or Pennsylvania—were not enough to catch the eye of a casual traveler wheeling down Highway 129 on the way to the town’s only Wal-Mart. The town was called Live Oak, appropriately enough. Live Oak trees thrived in Suwannee County, one giant step inland from Lafayette, separated and landlocked by the Suwannee River. Barrett could normally leave home at a quarter to seven and safely get to his office on time, but this morning he had been forced to leave Deacon Beach an hour earlier, because on this particular morning there was an eight o’clock meeting to which Bear could not be tardy.

  The session to come promised some acrimony. Cricket Bonet, Barrett’s one-time partner, had been temporarily assigned to the Live Oak office from the violent crimes squad in Tallahassee. Barrett was glad to have the Crazy Canuck, or any competent agent, for any duration. The third district was responsible for an immense expanse of territory, six large counties stretching from Dixie County in the southmost part of the jurisdiction a hundred miles north to Hamilton County and the Georgia line. Cricket was in charge of a presentation this morning that would outline special areas of concern identified by the FDLE. Each county’s sheriff was to attend the briefing. Some came willingly. Others not.

  Suwannee County’s sheriff, fortunately, got along well with everybody. Buddy Wilson was elected to sheriff while still a lieutenant in Live Oak’s municipal PD. One of the youngest sheriffs in the state, Buddy was also one of the most cooperative with outside agencies. As did most sheriffs, Wilson appreciated the forensic and technical support always offered poorer districts by the FDLE, but he was even more willing than most to recruit field agents in innovative programs designed for rural law enforcement.

  At Buddy’s request Cricket had already visited the local high school to institute a program designed to prevent violence among teens. Everyone knew that the Columbine High School that was the site of a teen slaughter was in an upscale suburb of Denver, but statistically, random killings committed by young people in schools were more likely to occur in rural environs than in New York’s Harlem or the barrios of Los Angeles.

  Cricket Bonet’s goal was straightforward. To curb violent behavior among teenage boys and girls, he wanted to make violence uncool for kids in school. To that end Bonet convinced schools to allow
their teenage students to identify their own problems and flashpoints, and to arbitrate in situations where their peers experienced anger, frustration, or persecution.

  Early identification of conflict was crucial to this process; aggrieved parties or sullen castaways would not always volunteer to bring a problem before a student committee. Student arbitrators were required to take an active role, identifying the boy too terrified to admit that he was being bullied in the locker room, or the overweight girl too ashamed to complain that her obesity had become a target for torment.

  Once identified, the relevant parties were required to come before the student committee where an airing of grievance could safely occur. Sometimes an open exchange between antagonists was enough. But whether the precipitating incident was a fistfight or an unintended slur, the agreed mantra for settling all conflicts between students was simple: Use words!

  Without Sheriff Wilson’s help, Cricket never would have been able to persuade Suwannee County’s School Board to give its teens authority to arbitrate disputes. Buddy threw his weight behind Agent Bonet’s proposal, knowing that any mechanism venting anger and fear inside a high school made its own and the outside community a safer place. He represented about the best you could ask for in a sheriff.

  Lou Sessions offered the other opportunity. Behavior at school, so far as Lou was concerned, was the teachers’ responsibility. What they did at home was up to the parents. Everyone else was an interloper. And he didn’t want interlopers anywhere. If there was a drug operation cooking in the county, he’d handle it. No FDLE. No DEA, thank you. Cars being stolen? Trucks? Just stay where you are, Agent Raines. I don’t need no Tallahassee lassies poking around my county. How about a corrupt cop in your department? Well, Lou had already been through that wringer. But the lesson he learned from the experience was to keep dirty linen well hid.

  Sheriff Sessions would be in attendance this morning, an officer of the court to whom Barrett Raines was, by law, subordinate. This was the man who hated Linton Loyd’s guts, the man Linton wanted to depose from office. Their meeting, Barrett knew, would be fraught with more than the usual number of complications.

  * * *

  You get to the briefing room at Live Oak’s field office by walking in from the pleasant shade of ancient oaks to find a front door naked to a blacktop street and a blistering sun where you push a buzzer to enter a foyer cramped with three folding chairs and the most recent arrivals from FedEx or UPS. You take maybe two steps to reach a formica-topped counter, show your identification and a broad smile to Bonny, take a sharp left to round the counter, the first right down a narrow, plaque-lined hall and then straight back to a room shaped like a cigar box, chilled to freezing, furnished cheap, and paneled with acoustic tile. It was amusing to recall that this had once been a dance floor. There were still dances, of a sort, going on.

  Buddy Wilson and Lou Sessions were seated side by side. It would be hard to imagine a starker contrast. Buddy was clean-shaven with a complexion smooth as a freshman. Crisply pressed tans; polished brass. Lou wore Tony Lima boots, kept his trousers for a week, and had a lunar face pitted as if with meteorites. His arms joined his shoulder at an odd angle, did Lou’s. He was fairly tall, but with a prematurely stooped posture and hair gone gray, pressed at the temple from the weight of his sweatstained Stetson. This was Lafayette County’s sheriff.

  Besides Buddy and Lou there were three other sheriffs in attendance. The sheriff from Dixie County was absent, hospitalized for his second bypass operation. A deputy unfamiliar to Barrett stood in for Sheriff Folsom. They had one distinguished visitor: Barrett’s boss, Captain Henry Altmiller, was down from Tallahassee for the meeting, ramrod straight, as usual, wearing a stiff, white-collared shirt and tie, a pin always on the lapel of his suit, attentive to the proceedings but discreetly seated in the rear. Captain Altmiller was a legend to most FDLE agents, well respected, sometimes feared, but the captain was smart enough to know that his reputation at the department didn’t count for jack with these gathered sheriffs.

  So Captain Altmiller remained in the background and Bear’s former partner, Agent Cricket Bonet, took center stage, his giant frame threatening to bend beneath the room’s depressed ceiling, his preternaturally red hair and pale skin glowing beneath flourescent lights whose ballasts hummed like a nest of hornets.

  You could still hear, in words like “hoose” or “aboot,” the influence of Bonet’s French Canadian origins. You could hear some South Side Chicago, too, were your ear carefully tuned. And Cricket could come up with a great rendition of Houston cops, into which patois he frequently reverted when breaking the ice with southern-raised lawmen.

  “So bein’ raised French and Catholic I was confused when I got down here—” Cricket smiled wryly. “—about lots of things. I thought calaboose, for instance, must be some kinda local vegetable. And the first midshift in Houston I spent all night looking for an ‘armed’ suspect name of ‘Adillo.’…”

  A polite chuckle from the gathered lawmen. Cricket smiled.

  “But I think it was in matters of theology that I really felt out of depth. I mean, you’ve got more churches down here. You’ve got Church of God, Church of Christ, Assembly of God, Assembly of Jesus, Assembly of Registered Holy Rollers. You got Mount Zion, Mount Ephesus, Mount Bethany—and I swear there ain’t a mountain for a thousand miles.

  “And every mainstream church is ‘First.’ You ever notice that? First Baptist, First Methodist, First Presbyterian … damnation, are there any Second Churches down here? Or Thirds?”

  Another chuckle. More spontaneous.

  Hell’s bells, Barrett thought. Cricket’s the man should run for sheriff.

  “One other thing,” Agent Bonet continued brightly, “before we get to our business. Y’all may be able to help me on this one—I still don’t know if I’ve got it straight. Maybe you can tell me: What’s the difference between Northern Baptists and Southern Baptists? Any ideas?”

  No one was biting, of course. But you could see the lawmen wondering what this Crazy Canuck was going to come up with.

  “’Cause the way I understand it—” Cricket smiled. “—the Northern Baptists say there ain’t no hell. But the Southern Baptists say, ‘The hell they ain’t!’”

  With that last icebreaker the lawmen began to relax. And suddenly the affable Cricket Bonet became all business.

  “Gentlemen. Got a couple of problems we need your help with this morning.”

  A Powerpoint display replaced the chalkboards and felt-tip pens that used to be de rigeur for such gatherings. Cricket’s laptop fed the monitor that glowed now in a suddenly darkened room. A few sheriffs pulled out ballpoints and spiral pads. Not Lou Sessions.

  “First item will not require much more on your part than a call to Tallahassee. You may know that we have a division now devoted full-time to computer fraud, hacking, and so on. Well, the Internet is now being used to distribute child pornography in quantities the state deems epidemic. Children are being recruited; in some cases their pictures are taken without permission and scanned in to match up with salacious material. If you see a site yourself or hear of one through a civilian, just call the computer crimes center at 850-410-7000. We’ve got some folks there can trace the cookies to their source.

  “That’s all we need from you on our first problem. Second will require more work. The Immigrant and Natural folks have been receiving reports of civil rights violations among a population relatively new to northwestern Florida. I’m sure you’ve noticed that your white kids and black kids don’t crop the tobacco or haul the watermelons the way they used to.”

  Everyone knew that young people could no longer be persuaded or threatened to do the menial labor that children, even in the recent past, were expected to complete as a matter of course. Most of the gathered lawmen had labored in the grow-crops common in the region. Tobacco was the big one in the past, the big money maker. A common lament among contemporary farmers was the flight of kids from those dwindling fields
. But Barrett had harvested the sandy lugs of tobacco, he had puked his guts after a day in the sun and heat and nicotine. And the day he got an education he never went back. No one with a choice in the matter worked twelve or fourteen or sixteen hours in misery for the five or six or seven dollars a day that were at one time the region’s piecemeal wage.

  “So what we have now,” Cricket went on, “is what we’ve had in California and Texas for a long time: a population of Spanish-speaking itinerants. Migrant workers who speak little or no English and are willing to work for piece wages.

  “Now, the way the law reads, you can’t enforce a minimum wage for piecework. If a man freely contracts to crop a row of tobacco for a dollar, that’s legal. If he agrees to take off a stick of tobacco for two cents a stick, that’s legal.

  “Same thing with straw. You may not know it, gentlemen, but the ordinary pine needles that fall freely from pine trees all over your counties is now the fastest-growing agricultural product in this district. Plain old pine straw. Straw on the ground. A farmer gets maybe seventy or eighty dollars an acre, sometimes more, for every hundred acres of pines that are raked. That’s money free and clear without lifting a hand. The man who buys that straw and bales it then sells it—for road construction, to the state, and especially to nurseries. You can take a twenty-pound bale of straw that costs less than a dollar to buy, bale, and transport, and sell it for two, two and a half dollars.

  “The margin of profit is high because the cost of labor is low. Very low. Now—it’s legal to freely contract for piecework. If a Mexican worker agrees to load a bale for a quarter or fifty cents, that’s his business. But we’re hearing that the owners of these companies are getting kickbacks from Mexican foremen who gyp their workers in return for payoffs and rigged contracts.”

  Lou Sessions cleared his throat. “Let ’em quit. Let ’em work for somebody else.”