He thought that killing the man might cause more of a reaction. Wetherby had been his major source of income over the last few years and for most of them they’d been friends. It was a shame that Wetherby had allowed his hatred of Joe Hunter to come between them.

“You should have just hired me to kill him straight off, Ken, kept things simple, instead of allowing a woman to call the shots. Do you see where a scheming bitch has got us now?”

Chapter 43

43

I’d been meaning to take an airboat ride for the last couple of years, ever since I’d taken up residence here in Florida. Riding the airboats with their huge rotating fans on the back has always summed up my idea of seeing the beauty of the Everglades in style, but I hadn’t got around to it yet. In the time I’d been here, other things just seemed to get in the way. Too often those things had meant violent death to too many people. A lot of those people should have still been around, but some of them deserved exactly what they got.

“We get out of this alive,” I had told Rink earlier, “I’m gonna hire an airboat and go and look at the ’gators.”

“Keep your eyes peeled, buddy, or you might see ’em sooner than you think.”

He wasn’t kidding.

Rink then slipped away through tall grass, heading in a circuitous route around the back end of the hospital grounds. We had our mobile phones to communicate by, but that was the last I’d heard from the big guy in the last few hours.

Instead of careening through the swamp on a flat-bottomed boat, the huge propeller whirring behind me, my view of the swamp was from a raised hummock of limestone. I’d built an observation post there, scraping a narrow furrow in the earth to make lying down a little more comfortable. I had my carbine propped in a natural V between two rocks, the DPM sheet spread over me with tufts of grass strewn over it to aid the camouflage.

Oddly enough, I wasn’t hiding from Luke Rickard. My reason for remaining so still and silent was so that the men on the grounds of the hospital were unaware of my presence. The men—Hubbard’s HRT troopers—would see my being there as interference in lawful process worthy of my being arrested and thrown in chains. We were on the same side; it was just a pity they couldn’t see things that way. They wanted to arrest Luke Rickard, hurl the weight of the federal court system at him and lock him away for life, while I just wanted to bury the asshole.