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Back Jungle Up Save as PDF
Chapters (63)
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  63. Author’s Note

He gave me a few instructions on how I would pay, then said, “Now you need to get your ass to Miami.”

5

5

miami international airport
august 13, 9:37 a.m.
days since abduction: 8

I’d been to Florida once previously when I was contracting with the FBI’s Violent Crime Unit. A serial killer had been working his way eastward from Louisiana, through Mississippi, into Alabama, and down into the Florida Gulf Coast, knocking off white-hairs left and right. We nearly nabbed him in Clearwater, then again in Sarasota. It was the middle of winter at the time, and the weather was a pleasant seventy-five degrees, the beaches white sand, and the fresh grouper so delicious it almost made you forget about the three elderly couples who’d been stabbed to death on their sundecks.

Good times.

But Miami in August was anything but pleasant. In fact, it was disgusting. I wiped the beading sweat from my hairline as I jog-walked the nine blocks from my hotel back to Miami International Airport, where I had landed less than twelve hours earlier.

I could have taken an air-conditioned taxi, but traffic headed to the airport was at a standstill, and I was running late.

After getting off the phone with Garret, I booked the next flight to Miami. My Air France flight departed Nice Côte d’Azur Airport at 12:15 p.m., and after a four-hour layover at JFK in New York, I landed in Miami at 10:45 p.m. local time.

Having not slept since my little nap more than twenty-four hours earlier, I walked directly to the nearby Embassy Suites and sacked out for nine solid hours. I woke just in time to catch the tail end of the continental breakfast, cramming down two boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios and a hard-boiled egg.

I again wiped at the sweat openly dripping down my face and adjusted the straps of my newly acquired Osprey Rook 65 pack.

Lacy and I had spent a frantic hour the morning before tracking down all the gear I would need for the trip. Luckily, there was an outdoor sports store, Alticoop, six shops down from Lacy’s gallery, and I quickly rang up over two-thousand dollars’ worth of gear. The sixty-five-liter teal pack was crammed with everything Lacy and I thought I might need for the “mission”: tent, sleeping bag, multiple cans of DEET, sunblock, headlamp, Garmin inReach Explorer (a GPS and satellite communicator), hammock, whistle, first aid kit, compass, lighter, water purification tablets, seven-inch bowie knife, hat, sunglasses, specialty hiking clothes, and a three-liter hydration bladder. I had also bought a pair of hiking boots, which I was now wearing, trying to break them in.