Thorn throttled back and rode the wash forward into the small basin enclosed by red mangroves. For a moment he was that boy again, the curious kid determined to chart every creek and canal and secret bay within his reach, the boy with big plans to someday push outward, to explore beyond the horizon, the unimaginably enormous world of bays and creeks and sounds.
To travel the earth year after year until he’d mapped every continent, hiked every mountain listed in his boyhood atlas, slayed every fire-breathing dragon along the way, pushed aside the beaded curtains of each hideaway bar from Madagascar to Borneo, and seduced the exotic ladies with his tall tales. A kid who’d grown older and traveled inward instead, abandoning those aspirations, dream by dream by dream and year by year as he was drawn into different, darker quests, defending friends, avenging wrongs, entangling himself in exploits as reckless as any of the swashbuckling silliness on the far side of the globe he’d once imagined.
Something scratched his hull. Thorn peered over the side and saw a braided net concealed a few inches below the waterline, and he yanked the throttle back, throwing the gears into reverse to keep from tangling his prop in the mesh, but he was several seconds late.
Strands of the net wrapped around the blades and shaft, almost instantly binding tight, and the Evinrude strained, belched, and the engine seized.
The cove went still.
Thorn drifted forward a few inches before the netting tugged the skiff to a halt. On two sides of the cove the mesh had been stretched to the banks, where dozens of aluminum stakes were hammered into the muck and sand to hold the main lines taut. A snare, a boat killer. Though it would have been easy enough to avoid if he’d been paying attention.
He tried to tilt the engine up, but could only raise it a few inches, the props still trapped firmly below the waterline. On his knees he bent over the transom to inspect the situation. The strands of braided nylon were thin and would be easy to slice with one of the knives he’d brought. Except the mesh had circled the shaft so many times, the metal was buried several inches deep, which meant that sawing through the tangle could take a while.
Rising, he went back to the console and slipped the gears into neutral and turned the ignition key. The engine fired up, belched, and died. He tried a second time and the engine made an even uglier belch.
So that was it. Once he managed to cut away the mesh, he’d have to tear open the engine and track down the issue. But it sounded serious, a blown piston ring or head gasket. Neither of which he was equipped to repair.
Which left nothing to do but swim to shore.
He stepped around the console and surveyed the cove.
At the edge of the sandy beach, a two-tiered wooden storage rack held a half dozen kayaks painted dull primer black.
As he was turning away, Thorn saw an odd shape slung out on the sand. He stopped, came forward, stepped up on the casting platform, and squinted to be sure.
Yes, basking in the sun on the beach was an enormous serpent, a healthy Burmese python. Its head and a couple of feet of its body were exposed, but its hindquarters were hidden in the shadows of the foliage. It was as thick as a goal post, sleek and shiny with blotches on its dark skin outlined in a shade of gold like drizzles of butterscotch. Ghastly and gorgeous.
For the last few years since pythons first appeared in the Everglades, they’d been devastating the ranks of foxes, raccoons, possums, and marsh rabbits, and multiplying so fast they’d begun to push east into the western suburbs of Miami, while others headed west into the outskirts of Naples and Fort Myers. Though these days they were being relentlessly hunted by airboat sportsmen and park rangers and herpetologists, their population was still exploding into the thousands.
Folks in the Upper Keys had thought they were safe from the invasion because the big snakes didn’t tolerate salt water for sustained periods. And a lot of salt water buffered the Keys from the freshwater Everglades. But recently biologists discovered the pythons had found a clever way to cross those barriers. By moving from one brackish estuary to the next, they’d managed to hopscotch south to the Keys, where now they’d taken up residence and were snacking on local egrets, possums, and feral pigs. Even a few deer had been found under digestion in the bellies of some larger specimens.
Thorn’s arrival in the cove had stirred the water, and ripples were sloshing against the sandy shoreline. That small disturbance roused the snake from its sun-dazed slumber. It lifted its head, swiveled it side to side, absorbing the situation. Then the python began a slow glide out into the sunlight, coming and coming till its length was fully revealed.
Fifteen feet, maybe longer, well over a hundred pounds. And it continued to slide forward to the shoreline, where it nosed into the water and disappeared into the basin to investigate.
SEVEN
THORN KEPT WATCH TO SEE where the big snake was headed, but lost it in the dark water. Maybe he’d spooked it, sent it off to a more secluded spot. He peered into the water for a few minutes more but saw no sign of it.
From the bow of his skiff, the shore was a good forty feet away, an easy stone’s throw. A half minute’s swim.
But to be sure the snake was busy elsewhere, he opened his tackle box and gathered a handful of split shot, then tucked the pry bar in the waistband of his shorts.
He stepped up onto the bow deck and edged forward until the toes of his boat shoes jutted beyond the rub rail. He looked across at the closest spit of sandy beach, chose the shortest angle.
He slung a few of the lead weights to the far corner of the basin, then waited a few seconds and plunked two more into the widening riffles of the first splashes, then sailed the last handful into the same splatter. Enough of a distraction to give him a decent head start.
Though he didn’t believe he had anything to fear. Surely the snake had been dining well enough on the shorebirds and small game living on Prince Key and would have no interest in anything as large and unfriendly as Thorn.
He saw its sinuous length gliding just below the surface, heading to the ripples, which put the big snake about as far from Thorn as Thorn was from shore.
He took hold of the pry bar.
Leaning forward, he drew a quick breath and dove. He swam as smoothly as his body allowed. Slicing and pulling himself forward with his arms, but not kicking. Even though he knew this attempt at stealth was silly, for surely the python had registered his entry into the basin, knew instantly that this alien chunk of protein was out of its element.
He was well aware of the creature’s method of attack. He’d encountered one earlier that summer warming its cold blood on his dock. Because it was an invading species, decimating native wildlife, Thorn had no qualms about murdering the thing. A single machete blow had decapitated the six-footer, and he’d stored its chunky head on ice until Sugar’s daughters came down for their next scheduled visit.
That weekend he presented the trophy to fourteen-year-old Janey Sugarman, a devoted naturalist. And just as he’d thought, Janey was thrilled at the chance to dissect the python’s head and study its structure. They’d spent the afternoon at Thorn’s fish-cleaning bench, using one of his fillet knives to dismember the creature’s skull and examine its strange, hingeless jaw that allowed the python to swallow prey five times the diameter of its head. Its incisor teeth were about a half inch long and curved inward, not meant for chewing, but only to lock on to the flesh of its prey, hold it in place while the supple trunk wrapped around its quarry and crushed the life from it.
Halfway across the basin, swimming smoothly, he felt a brush against his ankle. He accelerated, began to flutter-kick in earnest, and lifted his head to check his progress. He was a few seconds offshore when he crashed against the submerged branch. It thumped so hard into his ribs it felt like a short left hook from a pissed-off welterweight. A serious, breathtaking hurt.
Gasping for a breath, he halted his stroke, let his legs drop.
A mistake.
As his feet sank into the mucky sediment, he saw a sh
adow sneaking toward his right hip and jabbed at it with the pry bar, making glancing contact with its slippery flesh, then he staggered backward toward the bank. Twenty feet of squashy muck to cross through waist-high water.
Up to his thighs in the quicksand, he was struggling toward the soggy bank when he saw the shadow making another approach.
He waited till it was at arm’s length, then waited a moment more before he slashed, missed, and slashed again. Water splattered, but he struck nothing solid. He felt the silky mass slide against his thigh, heavy and thick and undulating, its slippery flesh coiling around his hips in a loose embrace.
Gripping the pry bar two-handed, he aimed its sharp end at the golden-brown shine, searching for the head, the vulnerable eyes. But seeing only the endless tail. As far as he could tell, this monster was all tail, all heavy, dark meat, a being whose length had not yet fully arrived.
He picked a spot and hacked at the trunk looping his waist, the massive, rubbery bulk with its butterscotch markings, its slow, encircling clinch. Still not seeing the eyes, the head, the face, the mouth. Its small brain controlling the instinctive swirl of its body. This creature only knew how to do one thing. A simpleton with a single strategy. To squash the breath from what it desired. And right now it hankered for Thorn.
Before he knew it was happening, he was locked firmly. Until that moment he’d thought he was still moving freely. He’d believed he was working his way backward up the last eight or ten feet of the slushy bank, but when he looked back at the land, it had moved away. He was not just immobilized, he was being towed out to deeper water, coaxed without knowing it.
This idiot creature hadn’t even bothered to bite and take hold, but just enveloped him slowly without a fight. Seducing with its slow embrace.
Then he spotted the wedged head moving past and slashed the crowbar’s talon with enough force to splinter its skull and liquefy its brains. But his aim was off by an inch and all he got was another splatter of water.
His mind seemed to be clouding. He was now chest high in water and firmly in the grasp of the python, a pressuring hug that was relentless, yet so languorous that he was feeling a dreamy calm, a sense that there was nothing to worry about, a drifting away from the consequences of drifting away.
But some dim, bullheaded region of Thorn’s brain was still active enough to absorb his predicament. If he didn’t strike a decisive blow soon, his ribs would begin to crack one by one.
He drew a cramped breath, hacked at the meaty weight that was hugging him. Hacked it again and once more after that. Hitting it finally, making good contact, a goddamn satisfying thunk. Getting his aim. A couple more blows bounced off its tough hide. Then a couple more.
He was breathing hard, but he also knew the snake was hurt. Saw a pale, oily liquid coiling to the surface like wisps of cigarette smoke, and bits and strands of membrane swirling up through the tannic-stained water.
Again he struck at the meat and this time nailed it good. Aiming at the section that was compressing his diaphragm, knowing that an errant blow could skid into his own flesh and might seriously wound him. But he was out of choices. He gouged at the greenish hide, gouged again, until finally the python reached its threshold.
It happened fast. In seconds the water in front of Thorn wrinkled, several small whirlpools gathered and disappeared, and the creature unleashed him and was gone.
Thorn staggered backward. He took a breath and another and the light rose around him. He hadn’t realized how deeply he’d drifted into shadowland, how close to the end he’d come. He sank one foot into the muck, then sank the other foot and tore loose the back foot and moved it into the lead.
He waded ahead through the gummy sludge, peering up at the dense mangroves and viney tangle of woods but seeing no sign of any living thing, or any movement or sound. Just the glop and slop of each step, the sucking bottom that was urging him to stay put and rest.
At last he stumbled up the slope of the beach, stood for a moment surveying the basin, then turned halfway round, collapsed, and lay back panting. He stared up at the empty sky, feeling his heart sprinting for some distant finish line. He set the pry bar aside and after a moment more of rest forced himself to sit up and held that position for several minutes, his shirt dripping, his legs weak, shoes full of mire, and he looked out at the basin and tried to recall why he’d come to this forsaken place, why he’d been in such a goddamn hurry and so distracted that he’d run afoul of someone’s primitive booby trap, ruined his engine in his reckless haste.
For a moment he had no clear memory of his mission. No memory of anything. Mind blank, drowsing in the shivery afterglow of adrenaline.
As he drifted through layers of fog toward the bright surface of wakefulness, struggling to breathe the summertime air, his skin sticky and fitting too tight to his bones, Thorn looked out at the cove, at this secret beach at the terminus of a labyrinth of twisty canals and creeks and backwaters that had no names and did not appear on any sane person’s nautical charts.
EIGHT
“HIS NAME WAS BENDELL, MARCUS Bendell.”
With one hand on the wheel of the black government-issue Taurus, Nicole McIvey cut through the traffic on Florida’s Turnpike, heading south. She held out her phone and Frank Sheffield looked at the image on her screen.
A scrawny young man, midtwenties with a prison pallor and dull eyes and stringy hair, stood before a police department’s height chart. Five-eleven.
“That’s before.” She withdrew the phone, thumbed through screens, and held it out again. “And this is after.”
Frank stared for a few seconds, then looked out his window, a sphincter tensing in his bowels. For over thirty years he’d been with the FBI, the last dozen as special agent in charge of the Miami field office, so he’d seen a shitload of postmortem photos, but nothing this grisly.
“Jesus, he walk into a flamethrower?”
The naked body lay on a stainless-steel table. Chunks of the torso were missing. There was a blackened cavity in his right rib cage as if he’d been blowtorched open; the face was a charred mess, unidentifiable.
“Electrocution,” Nicole said. “Happened early this morning. Bendell’s girlfriend discovered the body. Came to his house, found him out back. Metro PD sent me the JPEG a few hours ago. They knew I had an interest in him.”
She set the phone in a cup holder, gripped the wheel, and sliced in front of a slow-moving landscape truck. The lady was a serious lane-warrior.
“What kind of interest?”
“Marcus Bendell was my snitch.”
“Say that again?”
“A valuable asset.”
“You people were running a covert operation?”
“I was running it. Me alone.”
“Did I miss something? Your mission change when I wasn’t looking?”
“It’s not outside our parameters,” Nicole said.
“You let Metro PD know but forget to inform the Bureau?”
“The terms of his parole required me to inform local law enforcement.”
“It would have been collegial of you to notify us.”
“My agency’s mandate is to collect intelligence. Once it goes up the chain, my superiors decide who’s in the loop. If the FBI wasn’t included, Frank, it wasn’t my decision.”
“And here I thought we were all partners, trying to gel into one happy federal family.”
“That’s why I called you. I’m ready to gel.”
Sheffield managed a smile. His bureaucratic side was irritated, but these days that was a small slice of his emotional pie.
“So here’s the story. It started thirteen months ago. I heard about Bendell when he went up for a ten-year stretch at Raiford. An animal rights activist, he and six others burned down a product-testing plant outside Orlando that was using cats for experiments—mascara, eyeliner. He was caught in the act.”
“Mascara,” Sheffield said. “That’s what we’re doing now. Wasting our time on idiots like that.”
“Part of my job, I follow up on these guys, find out who’s visiting them in prison, monitor their correspondence, see what dots we can connect. So I get word Bendell isn’t handling his incarceration well. He fits a profile we look for. With save-the-planet softies like these, it happens a lot, prison life freaks them out. A month or two they’re ready to give up their mamas.
“I went to Raiford, sat down with Bendell. He seemed pliable. So I spent a couple of weeks working on him till he flipped. Homeland Security put together a package, got Justice to sign off, and Bendell took it. We put him in a house in Miami; next few months he goes to political rallies, land-use meetings, anything with an environmental edge. He holds up signs, taunts the cops, lets the local activist groups get to know him, see who tries to buddy up. Just trolling for whoever might be out there. It doesn’t usually work. This time it did.”
“Why didn’t you just pick up the phone, let me know?”
“Didn’t want to bother you. One foot in retirement, you’re preoccupied phasing into civilian life.”
Frank watched her weave through the heavy traffic. Behind the wheel this laid-back woman was a cutthroat. Something to factor in.
“Bendell was doing good work,” she said, shooting Frank a solemn look. “He could talk the talk, had the right cred, knew people who knew people. So one day he gets a call from Cameron Prince. And, bingo, he’s invited inside.”
“So now Marcus is a carcass, you’re in mourning.”
“Jesus, Frank.”
“Sorry. It sounded funnier in my head.”
She was silent for a moment, trapped at the speed limit behind a plumbing truck.
“I’m not saying Bendell was an angel, but he was a decent guy. So, yeah. I’m not happy about this. We were getting close to something.”
“You going to tell me what?”
“I’m working up to it.”
“Okay, let me tell you what I’m hearing. You were fine sitting on this until your guy is offed, but because a federal informant is killed in suspicious circumstances, you need us. So this isn’t courtesy.”
Going Dark (Thorn Mysteries) Page 5