Perilous Skies by Pendleton Don

Author:Pendleton, Don [Pendleton, Don]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Worldwide Library
Published: 2013-01-31T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Glades County, Florida

When tourists vacationed in Florida, very few of them came to Glades County. Even when they came to live in Florida, they didn’t come here. The county had one of the lowest population densities in the state outside of the Everglades National Park and the various state parks, which filled the map starting about twenty miles south of the county line.

The town of Muse was a throwback. An unincorporated little outpost of civilization in the middle of twenty thousand acres of South Florida swamp. It was 150 miles and a world away from Orlando and the other central Florida tourist destinations.

The old man in the metal chair was also a throwback, the kind of old man who had been sitting in a metal chair in front of a bait shop in South Florida for the past century.

Like the bait shop, he was faded and dusty. But his eyes were alert to the strange car coming up March Road when it was still a half mile away. When it was a quarter of a mile away, he could hear the engine, and it didn’t sound like any of the cars he knew. Not that there weren’t strange cars passing through the town of Muse from time to time. It was just that he always knew when they were coming.

The vehicle was new and shiny and painted a deep rich green so dark it was almost black. The scorching sun penetrated the layers of paint and threw up an olive-colored rainbow. But the dust was already starting to settle on the hood, dimming that glorious paint. At this time of year, up here you were a good five or six feet above the water table, and the dirt drained and turned to dust. And when some fool drove in his shiny new Jeep Wrangler, coming too fast, driving like he had no sense, then for sure he was going to kick up a cloud of dust.

The old bait-shop owner had learned to accept the dust that came at this time of year. When the car stopped the clouds engulfed his old metal chair and the old man just blinked a little. Didn’t cough. Did not try to wave the dust away from his face.

A scrawny-looking young man stepped out of the passenger side, nodded at the old man and just sort of stood there for a minute, looking in all directions.

“Got cold Cokes inside,” the old man offered.

“Sounds good.” The skinny man removed and wiped at his wire-rimmed glasses.

The man who got out of the backseat was a Hispanic, and he wasn’t wearing the forehead of sweat his skinny white friend had been wearing. He smiled at the old man and, like his friend, just sort of stood there for a moment, not in any hurry, as if they weren’t on any deadline. Most people who managed to drive their way in such a roundabout route that took them through Muse and who actually stopped their car here, at this old bait shop, were usually in a hurry.

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