The gator’s massive jaws clamped down on his right leg from knee to ankle. Waves of blinding pain raced up his spine. He tried to push himself back toward the bank with his free leg, starting a tug-of-war with the gator. He beat the gator’s snout with the butt of his pistol. The gator responded with powerful rotation into a death roll.
***
Saffi pulled the Viper into the parking lot of Salty’s Shrimp Shack. The wind slammed into the car and tore at Salty’s exterior signs. Saffi parked in the space right next to the front door. Other than the Viper, the parking lot was empty. Someone had used plywood to board up all of Salty’s windows, and the front doors had clear polycarbonate panels bolted to the frames, covering the glass. Saffi saw that the lights were still on inside.
She struggled to push the Viper’s door open against winds that had roared up toward a Category 3 storm. She climbed out of the Viper, letting the door slam closed. The rain crashed into her in waves. She sprinted around the Viper to Salty’s front door and found it locked. She banged on the doorframe. Again and again. Harder. Louder.
She stuck her face to the door and thought she saw someone, or maybe just a shadow of someone. Hard to tell. Some type of security gate sat behind the glass doors and their polycarbonate panels. Saffi tuned away and glanced around the parking lot. No shadows. Nothing more demonic than a hurricane. Thank you, God.
Saffi glanced back at the door. A woman’s face peered out at her. The woman squinted at Saffi, then drew back the accordion security gate. She turned the front door’s dead bolt. The wind grabbed the door, pushed it open, and shoved Saffi inside. The woman gripped the edge of the door and shoved. The wind shoved back. Saffi grasped the door and both women struggled together to get it closed. Finally, inch-by-inch, they forced it back into its frame and the woman flipped the heavy-duty deadbolt. Once they secured the front door, the woman pulled the accordion gate closed and locked it. Saffi turned around and leaned against the gate.
“You look awful, dear. You need to sit down,” the woman said.
She scampered around a counter and came back with a step stool. She guided Saffi to the seat. “I hope you didn’t stop for gas. Pumps are off. Hurricane does that to us. Our emergency generator does keep the lights on, though, and I do have some first aid supplies.”
Saffi looked at the woman. She had a kind but weatherworn face. Around her neck hung a silver chain with a beautiful silver ichthys pendant. In the center of the ichthys — the Christian fish symbol — was a diamond-encrusted cross. Saffi sighed with relief.
CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN
Jim did not want his leg ripped off. He allowed his body to spin with the gator’s death roll. The second time, his head broke the water and he was able to suck in a gulp of air. He felt the bones cracking in his leg. After the fourth time around, the gator stopped and adjusted his bite.
Jim’s face broke the water and he sucked down a deep breath, the longest one he’d been able to manage. The gator rolled him over again, but Jim would be ready the next time he came up. He had a plan, but four more spins had him out of breath and in excruciating pain. He was sure one more time around would take his leg clean off.
Jim’s face came out of the water just as his lungs forced him to inhale. Instead of water, mercifully, he got air. The attack paused for another second. A memory rushed into his mind. A class he had taken, given by State Fish and Wildlife agents, on the proper dispatching techniques for gators. The ones that had developed a proclivity for human flesh and could not be returned to the wild.
He ignored the agonizing pain in his leg and did one more sit up. He was sure it would be his last if his effort failed. God, if I ever needed your help, it’s now.
He reached forward and shoved his left thumb into the gator’s right eye socket, pushing past the eyeball, giving himself a tiny handhold on the side of the gator’s head. The gator flinched, but held on. Jim shoved the barrel of the pistol into the empty socket where the gator’s left eye had once been.
The alligator’s brain sat a couple of inches behind its eyes, directly between the earflaps, behind a hard, thick skull. A shot through the eye socket would be Jim’s only chance. The pistol’s thirty-eight caliber bullet was not much smaller than the alligator’s walnut-sized brain. Jim pulled the trigger.
***
In the microsecond between the gun’s retort and the bullet slamming into the gator’s brain, Baalzaric fled. He tried to enter Demore, because even a seriously injured human would be better than a return to watery isolation, but he could find no open path. Whatever Demore had come to believe about the supernatural, it had not translated into an open door into Demore’s soul. Disembodied in the pool, he could do nothing to Demore.
Again, he found himself lost in his world of liquid loneliness. His only hope was that the bastard cop who put him there would bleed to death from a ruptured artery.
***
When the jaws of the gator went limp, Jim was able to open its mouth and pull his mangled leg free. In the darkness, he couldn’t see the extent of the damage, but he felt it. The pain itself had become a demon-creature possessing his leg.
At the edge of the water, he found Kat’s sundress. He grabbed the material and dragged himself out of the water and up onto the bank. He knew he was in trouble. His right leg was a bloody, twisted mess. Although the bottom half of his leg remained attached, the gator had ripped the knee socket loose. A few long strings of flesh and some badly crushed muscle was all that held his leg together.
He felt cold and light-headed. He needed to stop the bleeding or resign himself to die in this place. He ignored the pain and began ripping Kat’s dress into long strips. He braided three strips of cloth into a strong, single piece and wrapped it around his leg, tying it into place above his knee. He knew he would need a much tighter tourniquet to keep from bleeding out.
He tore three more strips of sundress and prepared another single, braided piece. He picked up the pistol from the grass where it had fallen from his hand and jammed it between the cloth and his leg. He twisted the pistol, tightening the tourniquet as much as possible. He held the pistol in place while he used his free hand and his mouth to tie the ends of the cloth together into a tight, secure knot. It was all he could do.
The wind inside the clearing had picked up, blowing hard now. Rain slammed down from an angry sky. Jim had no protection out in the open, and whatever power that had protected the little oasis from the hurricane-force winds had vanished.
With what was left of his strength, Jim dragged himself toward the edge of the clearing to find shelter. The grassy expanse he crossed was a soft blanket that invited Jim to stay, to rest. Jim fought off the feeling. Rest when you’re dead, Jim.
His Marine drill instructors would have told him the same. Rest when you’re dead.
And he was not dead.
Not yet, anyway.
***
Saffi called 911. The fishmonger’s wife attended to Saffi’s injuries and then they prayed. They prayed aloud. Their voices carried passionate pleas for God’s mercy and for aid for Jim and Carl. They prayed for the safety of the people of Ft. Myers and Southwest Florida, and they prayed that God, in his infinite wisdom and grace, would turn the hearts of the people away from darkness and evil and toward the light of his Son.
CHAPTER NINETY-EIGHT
Trooper Gone Wild says “The devil made me do it.”
The tabloid headline screamed from the magazine racks at every grocery store. Within hours, looky-loos and trespassers swarmed the de la Garza estate. Tearing down fences, tearing up floor boards. Some looking for treasure, some looking for the devil. Two teenagers drowned in the pool the first week after the story broke. Unrestrained curiosity made the pool dangerous. Damage caused by the hurricane, and by the uninhibited greed of amateur treasure hunters, made the mansion unsafe.
After the teenagers drowned, the federal government repaired the fences and brought in two Navy divers to check the pool. They found neither Kat’s bod
y nor the gator’s corpse. During the search, one of the divers claimed that something had attacked him, but the medics that examined him afterward found no physical injuries. The tabloids dubbed the spring “The Demon Pool,” and a news blackout descended on the recovery operation. The Navy transferred the affected diver to a treatment facility for post-traumatic stress. The government condemned the entire property.
***
Jim watched from outside the fence as the huge ball at the end of the crane crashed through the top gable of the de La Garza mansion. A big Cat bulldozer sat close by, its engine idling, and the operator waiting for enough of the structure to come down to begin his task of cleaning up the debris. Before the destruction of the mansion began, the federal government had trucked in tons of native, crushed shell and used it to fill in the pool that sat in the clearing behind the house.
Jim had visited the estate during that particular week. He watched as dump truck after dump truck drove through the gate. The official story was that after the two teenagers drowned, investigators discovered the spring had been contaminated by toxic algae. That explanation led to the decision to fill the pool with native shell. EPA officials claimed that the shell would act as a natural filter for the remaining ground water. Jim knew different.
The official story was crap. Nevertheless, the State and the Feds closed the case and buried the evidence under tons of clean, white fill. Somewhere under the massive load of shell was Kat’s corpse. Jim believed that the hurricane’s winds must have driven Kat’s lean, muscular body toward the center of the pool where it had sunk. After the incident with the Navy Seal, government officials judged it too dangerous to continue the attempt to recover her body from the deep blackness of the pool. Good decision.
The news media also had reported, rather gleefully, it seemed to Jim, that Kat Connors was the only woman ever shot and killed by an on-duty Florida Highway Patrol officer. Of course, Jim had the dubious distinction of being that Trooper. He had officially been back on duty as of midnight that night, thanks to the efforts of Major Kant. Trooper-Gone-Wild, this time with his gun.
Jim watched the ball float through the cooler but still thick air, striking the building again, just below the roof. Cold sweat rolled down the back of Jim’s neck and he shivered. He couldn’t prove it, but he believed that someone in the government believed the tabloids. Otherwise, why fill in the pool and destroy the building?
The wrecking ball made another strike, this time smashing completely through the historic structure. The building, its framework and foundations weakened by the repeated blows, collapsed in and on itself, throwing dust and pieces of roof tile into the air.
He didn’t care much about the official story. He and Saffi had spent hours discussing what had happened while he recovered from the amputation of his right leg at the knee. Jim had even gone to church with Saffi a couple of times, later in his recovery. For Jim, the battle with the forces of hell had left him with a simple understanding. There was Good and there was Evil and, as remarkable as it seemed to him, the substance of life did go beyond physical reality. Science would only take us so far.
The dozer lurched forward toward the demolished building. The big Cat would clean up the mess left behind by the other Kat. Cleaning up debris left by selfish — and occasionally, evil — people took some real work. Of the two, the big Cat’s operator had the easier task.
His leg ached. “Phantom pain” the doctor had called it. Jim would learn to live with it. Just as he was learning to live with the knowledge that things existed that science and raw, materialistic naturalism could never explain. Things like the existence and physical manifestation of evil, questions like where the soul comes from and where it goes after death, and why we only live for a few decades when we are born with seemingly infinite potential.
He and Saffi had talked and talked. She offered answers and most seemed reasonable, given his recent experience. Nonetheless, something inside him was not ready to take the same leap of faith as Saffi. He felt that he needed more time. More time to think, to study. Maybe even to pray. Of course, at the same time that he wanted more time, he realized he couldn’t be sure that he would have even one more second in this life. Pedro didn’t. Uncle Jack didn’t. Scary thought.
His investigation into Briggs’ death became the catalyst that led the State to take a closer look at Advanced Genetic Technologies. What they found there shocked everyone. Even Florida’s most jaded liberals were not ready to accept human fetal farms. The uproar was virtually unanimous. He thought about the headline when they arrested Robert Teal. “Florida’s Dr. Mengele.” Teal would have gone to trial, but his behavior became so bizarre that the State shrinks sent him to Gainesville, to the North Florida Evaluation and Treatment Center. A few weeks later, a major pharmaceutical company bought out AGT and promised to close down the offending research. Did they? Or did they just move it offshore somewhere? A lot of people wanted to live forever. What price would they pay for that privilege?
Jim reached down and rubbed his right leg above the knee. The pain he felt in the missing limb was as real as any other pain in his life. Some days the emotional and physical pains twisted together into tangled feelings that left him wondering why God had even bothered to let him live. Other days, his pain was the tribute that complemented the other trophy from his battle with Kat Connors and the supernatural evil she had poured into his life. His prosthetic leg.
The State of Florida spent a small fortune on his artificial limb. He did not often feel as if anyone owed him anything, even after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the prosthetic leg became the major exception.
The prosthesis was incredibly advanced, and designed to allow him the possibility of returning to active duty with the Highway Patrol. Major Kant had put her own career on the line, defending Jim’s decision to go it alone to save Carl. One problem, though — the “Trooper Gone Wild” story. That media extravaganza had tainted him. Branded him. They may as well have etched “Trooper Gone Wild” into his forehead.
Nope. He was done. Any future, perceived mistake, any false accusation, would always result in the resurrection of Trooper Gone Wild. Jim knew that the media, and maybe even some in law enforcement, would forever question his credibility. Forever doubt his judgment as a cop. Damaged goods. That would be his epitaph.
But being disabled in the line of duty? That would be an honorable end to his law enforcement career. So he did what many others whose careers had come under a cloud had done — he accepted what he was entitled to and moved on. He would move far enough away to provide a chance at a new life.
Jim turned away from the flattened mansion and walked toward a white Mazda MX-5 Miata Club parked on the grass shoulder to the west of the estate’s original gate. Linda waited for him in the car. The top was down to take advantage of an unseasonably warm, winter day.
The Miata suited Linda perfectly. She had told him it was what an environmentally conscious but image-sensitive supermodel should drive. Not that she had quite yet reached supermodel status. But Jim had little doubt that she was on her way.
He had to give her credit. In spite of all of their problems, she had shown herself to be a reasonably thoughtful friend during his recovery. The romance was surely dead, but it had been Linda who had helped him plan his escape from Florida, while Saffi had hoped he would stay. He opened the passenger door and slid into the seat.
“Mario called and said his friend will meet you at the airport when you get to Maui,” she said. “I’m glad you and Mario got along. This might have been a bit awkward.”
The one thing that Linda had, in addition to her looks, was connections. Along with a long line of potential suitors. Making those connections had become part of her greater plan, but, to her credit, she never left anyone feeling used, even if they actually had been.
“I think you’ll like Maui,” Linda continued. “It has almost everything Florida has, except you don’t have to sweat as much.”
“So, did you blow
the whole insurance check on the car? Brent told me you got your share out of our house.”
“Jim, it stopped being ‘our house’ a long time ago,” Linda said.
“Yeah, I guess it did,” Jim said. “Nice car anyway.”
Jim’s phone rang. He looked at the display. Saffi’s number showed. He answered.
“At the airport yet?” she asked.
“On the way.”
“Linda driving you?”
“Yeah, she had some time between jobs. Don’t suppose I’ll see you there?”
“Sorry. Can’t get away today. Kevin Williams kept diary. The work is piling up,” she said. “I wanted to wish you a safe trip.”
A moment of silence.
Saffi was smart, attractive, and she and Jim had a strong common interest in all things forensic. Jim had thought they might have made a good couple, but Saffi was God’s girl, and he was not ready to become God’s guy. Not in the same sense, anyway. Saffi said she would pray for him and he believed her. After what had happened, he had no problem with prayer.
“Call me some time,” he said.
“I can do that. Take care, Jim.”
“Thanks,” he said. The call disconnected.
He would miss Saffi, but more than anything else, he would miss being a cop. He loved the uniform. He loved the sense of serving the people of Florida. He loved taking bad people off the street and putting them where they couldn’t harm his fellow citizens. He loved his job, and he loved the Florida Highway Patrol. He would miss that most of all.
They cruised for a while without talking. It was one of those moments where everything that needed saying had been said. Everything that needed doing had been done.
Jim’s decision not to have the house rebuilt turned out reasonably well. He took a cash settlement on the replacement value, paid off Linda, and sold the vacant lot. He had wrapped up the details, finished the tasks, and tied up the loose ends, and Linda had her share of the money and her new car. Their silence was mutual consent to a new reality. Life was changing, had changed, and, most likely, would change again.
The Demon Pool Page 38