Acts of Nature

night I read to her aloud from Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses and we made love on the mattress I’d pulled from the bunk bed down onto the floor.
    But by the third morning, I detected a twitch in Sherry’s ankle or a couple of extra sighs while we were lounging on the dock.
    “How you doin’?” I asked.
    “I’m fine,” she said. But I knew the difference in tone between “I’m fine” with half a glass of beer and “I’m fine” and getting bored by the minute.
    “Hey, I’ve got a friend, Jeff Snow, who has a place out farther west in the Glades and down south a bit,” I said early in the day. “It’ll take a three- or four-hour paddle in the canoe, but it’s out in the wide-open marsh field and very different than here.”
    She cut her eyes at me, a look of interest, maybe in a change of scenery, maybe the challenge of a good physical workout.
    “I mean, it’s October, a perfect time out there because the temperature, even in the full sun, is pretty tolerable. In the summer I won’t even go out there.”
    “Oh, not even you, eh? Mr. tough-guy Gladesman.” She was smiling when she said it, but I had been right about the challenge. Sherry did not thrive long without a challenge.
    “And the stars are amazing,” I added, just for incentive. “Horizon to horizon without any of the city lights to muck it up.”
    She took another sip of late morning coffee and acted like she was pondering the possibilities.
    “Sold,” she finally said, stretching out her long legs, flexing and showing the hard cut in the muscles of her thighs. “Let’s go.”
    We packed up a cooler of food and plenty of water. The plan was to stay a couple of nights, maybe three, at the Snows’ fishing camp and then make it back for a final day at the shack before returning to civilization. I was digging around in my duffle bag for the small GPS unit on which I had recorded the coordinates of the Snows’ place. I wasn’t that good of a Gladesman to be wandering around in that open acreage without some help. While I sorted through some old rain gear and special books that I kept in the duffle, I pulled out the leather bag that held my oilcloth-wrapped Glock 9mm service weapon from my days on the Philadelphia Police Department. I hefted it in one hand, feeling the weight of it, but as soon as the memories of its use started leaking into my conscience, I pushed it back into the duffle, deep to the bottom. Don’t go there, Max, I said to myself. I finally found the GPS, left the gun inside the duffle and shoved it back under the bed. New time. New memories.
    In a waterproof backpack I stored the GPS and extra batteries along with some camping tools including a razor-sharp fillet knife I kept in a leather sheath for the fish I hoped we’d catch and the small steel first aid kit I always took with me on trips. I thought of myself as a careful man. I knew enough about alligators and water snakes and poison vegetation, and after four years out here, how one never underestimates that shit can happen, even without the source of its usual progenitor: people. We were ready within an hour’s time and though I thought about it twice, given the pristine vision of where we were heading, I decided to take my cell phone. Sherry said she’d left hers at home because she didn’t want to talk to a soul or get called into work on some damned so-called emergency. I didn’t want to spoil the sense of just she and I, the way I’d planned it, so I tucked it deep into the bag out of sight.
    Just after noon, with Sherry settled in the front seat of my canoe and me in the stern, we pushed off.

TWO
    Edward Christopher Harmon looked into the muzzle of the man’s blue-steel Python handgun and took a step forward. Adrenaline was swirling into his bloodstream as it had so many times before and with a pure force of mind he stopped it before it reached his eyes.
    You don’t show fear in such instances. You don’t show panic, or emit even the scent of wildness. You bring your heart rate down with deep, measured breaths. You consciously keep the irises of your eyes from growing wide. Harmon’s wife once described him as having “safe” eyes. He tried to achieve that look now. When they think they have you, when they think they’re going to make you beg, you must present yourself as being the one in control. And at the moment, they definitely had him.
    “Colonel, you and your men are presently on private property. I am a representative