TOURIST SEASON by Carl Hiaasen

Somehow the dike sealed the Glades from the clamor of suburban Broward County; though Keyes was only a solid four-iron away from civilization, he could neither see it nor hear it. He felt himself distant, and growing tranquil.

After more than an hour he located the cabin. Keyes paddled faster, the bow of the canoe swishing through the ragged grass and pickerel weed. At fifty yards he slowed and let the canoe glide while he raised the binoculars one last time.

The western boots still lay beneath the outhouse, and the cabin still looked empty.

Brian Keyes didn’t notice that the snowy egrets had flown away.

As he tied up to a rotted piling, a green chameleon scampered off the porch to munch a palmetto bug in the shadows. Keyes climbed lightly from the canoe, but the planks still shuddered under his weight. He took each step as if walking on ice, thinking: There’s no way Skip Wiley could be hiding here, not the way he bangs around.

Keyes tested the padlock with a hard yank, and the rusty hasp gave way with a snap. He opened the cabin door with the toe of his sneaker and peered inside.

It looked like a dungeon for Boy Scouts.

Spiderwebs streeled from the ceiling, and a crisp snakeskin fluttered from the pine beam where it had long ago been shed. A shaky card table, once used for dining, buckled under unopened tins of Spam and sausage, the labels faded and curled. In the rear of the cabin was a bunk bed with two plastic air mattresses, each flattened and stained by mildew. In a corner two sleeping bags were rolled up tight, flecked with papery dead moths. A stack of heat-puckered magazines lay nearby; the most recent was a Playboy from December 1978.

In the kitchen area he found a sixty-gallon Igloo cooler; inside was a six-pack of flat Budweisers and three plastic jugs of drinking water. Keyes was about to open one of the jugs when he noticed a sediment of dubious origin suspended near the bottom. The water, he decided without tasting, had also been there a very long time.

The cabin was no larger than fifteen by thirty feet, but Keyes found plenty of crannies to explore. He was actually enjoying himself, poking through drawers and dusty cupboards, looking for signs of Wiley. He felt a little like an archaeologist over a new dig.

What finally persuaded him to retreat was the killer leaf.

Keyes had been using a whippy length of cane to clear out the spider nests, and he flicked it casually at a wrinkled gray-veined leaf beneath the card table. Suddenly the leaf sprang off the floor and, teeth bared, whistled past Keyes’s ear. He stumbled out the door, shouting and brandishing the cane stick impotently. The angry bat followed him, diving in tight arcs, breaking off the attack only when hit by sunlight.

Keyes was not sure where the creature went, but he warily scanned the stratosphere from a protective crouch. He decided the bat was welcome to the solitude of the cabin; he’d wait outside for Skip Wiley or whoever owned those cowboy boots.

The afternoon passed slowly through the binoculars. Keyes didn’t lay eyes on another human being, and he found himself living up to his lie, watching the birds of the Everglades: cormorants, ospreys, grackles, red-shouldered hawks, even a pair of roseate spoonbills. Finding the birds was an amusing challenge but, once spotted, they did not exactly put on a breathtaking show. The fact was, most of the birds seemed to be watching him.

Keyes finally was forced to avail himself of the outhouse—an act of sheer courage—and he stopped on the way out to study the mysterious cowboy boots. They were Tony Lamas, size eleven, with no name inside. Keyes was careful not to move them.

As the sun dropped and a lemon twilight settled on the shack, Keyes knew it was decision time. Once darkness came, there was no getting out of the Glades without a beacon. He’d have to spend the night with no food, no water and, most critically, no bug repellent. December wasn’t a prime mosquito season, but a horsefly already had extracted a chunk of Keyes’s ankle to remind him that billions of other starving insects were waiting their turns.

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