Adam Weiss pumped the pedals hard, then coasted, lifting up off the seat to slice through the wet air, cutting through every rain puddle just to fuck up the smooth surfaces.

He’d slept a fitful hour, two at the most, expecting the police to come crashing through his door at any second, demanding to know how he’d learned about the bodies. But it was already mid-afternoon, and not a sign of the cops. It made him uneasy—the medical examiner had probably called them as soon as he hung up the phone, so where were they?

Adam took the short cut through the cemetery, slipping through the back gate and out onto the track. It certainly wasn’t what he thought of as a cemetery: just a big, flat, grassy field, ringed along three sides with small trees and a low brick wall, the other side falling off into a drainage ditch. With its circular paved track, it looked like a high school football field, the sidelines dotted with graves, one end-zone reserved for the bodies of children.

He sped past two sleek young Mexican women, one in a teal sweat suit, the other in puce, their hair and makeup perfect, puffing around the track. The town had no parks, so people walked the cemetery for exercise. There were still only a handful of graves—the cemetery had been planned with growth in mind.

What was it, twelve hours since he’d made the call? He figured the Mexicans were finished with him now, that they’d leave him alone. He didn’t know them, couldn’t recognize them. He didn’t remember them from meetings or from farm visits with Ricky. In his heart of hearts, he thought they pretty much all looked the same—small dark men and women with black hair, bundled up against the heat, scattered across the furrowed fields, bent double to scrabble for strawberries or asparagus.

He realized that was probably why they’d picked him—Ricky, the True Friend of the Worker, would have recognized them, would have identified their regional accents or dialects. They’d been smart.

As Adam coasted into the center of Bel Arbre, the shadows lifted and the western sky became bright. The streets were pretty empty; normally, on a Monday, the place had plenty of traffic, particularly for a town that wasn’t much more than a five- or six-block strip of storefront beauty parlors, run-down furniture stores, and check-cashing places with neon signs advertising money transmission service. There were a handful of businesses that reflected the town’s ethnic makeup—a few taco stands, a piñata shop—but the town’s hotspot was the “Four Corners” intersection, where a used car lot faced off with a Burger King, a Taco Bell, and a new Walgreens across the traffic lights.

The main taco stand was open, but there was no line, and there was never no line at that taco stand. The counterman was watching a portable black-and-white TV.

“Dos carnitas, por favor. Y una Coca tambien.”

Wordlessly, the man pressed tortillas onto the grill, then slopped a ladleful of spiced pork next to them. He put a cold Coke on the counter and turned back to the TV.

Adam looked down the empty main drag.

“Señor…Adonde estan la gente?”

The man answered in English. “At the store…to watch the TV. To watch the news on the TV.”

He folded the warm tortillas into tin foil, then scooped up the meat, sprinkled it on the tortillas.

“They find dead men. The police. In the Everglades. Asesinados.” He mimed stabbing with his ladle, then put it down to pick up the hot sauce.

Adam’s throat was dry, and the hair on his arms now prickling.

So, it had happened. And it was already on the news? God, that was quick.

He took his tacos and Coke, and got onto his bike. What had they found? What was going on? Adam needed to know, and he had no TV. Which store did the taco guy mean?

He unfolded the foil and took a bite, then pedaled slowly up the street until he saw a small crowd bulging from the doors of the bodega where everyone bought their lottery tickets; Adam remembered the TV mounted on the cigarette display wall behind the counter.

He chained his bike to the lamppost and approached the store. The dozen or so people jamming the entrance and small floor space were staring at the TV; the proprietor, perched on a plastic stool behind the counter, was haltingly translating the live feed into Spanish.

The onscreen caption read GRISLY EVERGLADES DISCOVERY. A shaky helicopter shot showed a tree-covered hill rising up out of the marsh like an island. There were airboats and a swamp buggy next to the mound.

A man in a blue windbreaker with DOUGLAS COUNTY printed in white block letters on the back appeared at the edge of the wood. He backed out of the undergrowth onto the bank near the airboats; another man was with him, and then a third became visible right next to them, all three struggling to maneuver something bulky and matte black.

The camera jerked wide, then zoomed in; there was a murmured buzz as everyone in the bodega recognized the body bag. The buzz grew louder as a second body was hefted out of the bush.

Adam felt like he was waking up from an eight-week nap. Until that body had been dragged out of the woods, it had all been abstract, some kind of dreamy game he’d been playing by accident. Something that would suddenly end with him back on his couch on West 120th Street, eating Cap’n Crunch and watching Star Wars for the thousandth time, waiting for Tiff to go to the movies later—oh, it was all just a dream!

But all of this was real, that whole insane chain of events—the drugged-out campesino, the Mexicans, him calling the ME. And now the cops were pulling bodies out of the Everglades. Fuck.

And it was because of him that they had found those bodies; Adam Weiss was at the heart of a mystery.

Onscreen, the first body was being lifted onto an airboat, and now they were pulling a third body bag out of the trees. Adam wondered how many there were, wondered what the people inside the body bags looked like. Wondered if he’d ever seen them, if he even maybe knew them.

But, of course, that was unlikely. His Spanish was fucking pathetic, and Adam had avoided fieldwork as much as he could. He’d showed up late at the office, skipped most evening meetings, avoided the farm inspections whenever he could. The fact was, Adam hadn’t even really tried. He’d gone through the motions, done the bare minimum to get the credit. Ricky probably thought he was a prick, just another over-privileged college kid faking commitment to social service to boost his résumé. He’d supposedly been there to help these people, and his only achievement had been parroting the message of where to find the bodies.

Adam turned to a sniffling sound to his left, and saw that two of the women were crying. Then the old man to his right pulled down the brim of his grubby Britney Spears baseball cap and turned away from Adam, but the bobbing of his head was unmistakable, and soon everyone was sobbing. Under the TV, the owner bowed his head and cried into his hand, and then Adam was the only person in the room who was even listening to the news anchor’s enthusiastic commentary about the bodies.

The helicopter dipped closer to nail a tight shot of the fourth body bag being loaded onto an airboat. Gusts from the chopper combed the grass into scudding waves that raced to the island, battering the bushes on the hammock until they threshed wildly. The airboats listed drunkenly back and forth, the water kicking up to spray the cops as they struggled to balance the body. A female park ranger in green and a tall man in a dark blue rain slicker stood on the bank, angrily waving back the chopper.

Adam looked around him at the people he’d pretended to help. He watched them huddle and hold each other as they cried, watched their shaking shoulders and clenched fists, their threadbare, dusty clothes and their leathery skin.

Now he knew why he was here. He could help them. It was Adam’s turn to help, to really help, this time. He’d stop being a pussy, he’d go to the cops, tell them what he knew. And then the investigation would begin.

But would it? Rick said when people got killed in Bel Arbre, the cops did the minimum possible. Dealing with a migrant population was hard: many potential witnesses were in the area for a month or two only, most spoke no English, and no one wanted to speak to the police for fear of reprisals or deportation. In Bel Arbre, when someone died violently, everyone who’d seen or known anything about it disappeared within hours.

Adam shook his head. No, the cops would do their thing, but this time, he would be the person who got things done. He had started it, and he would see it through to the end.

This was on him.