Aaron took a couple of steps toward the door. Then he doubled back and glanced at Mariella, who cowered behind the couch where Darren couldn’t see her. One week before, the girl had seen her parents beheaded and gorged by a freakish killer. Today, she would see the only person left in the world who cared for her shot dead, Aaron thought. Who would love and protect her then?
As Aaron stared at Mariella’s remarkably serene brown eyes, he remembered the brown eyes and black skin of his childhood friend, Crystal Marshall. Only one of six black kids in his elementary school on the beachside, she had lived a few houses down from him since they were toddlers. They always played together, often pitting toy soldier against purse-wielding dolls. Yet, as they got into middle school, most of the kids weren’t so friendly with Crystal. They made fun of her “mini afro” and said she smelled like a monkey. When the girls shoved her, Crystal hit back. The teachers always saw the second blow and suspended her.
Aaron got picked on too, but not nearly as bad. Hanging out with Crystal would give them a whole new arsenal of names they could call him. Some of the boys said they’d beat the crap out of any white kid who dated one of the black students. The only guy who broke this rule was a football player, and he could fend for himself better than puny Aaron could.
So he blew Crystal off. They didn’t talk for the whole spring of eighth grade—not even at the bus stop they stood at every morning. That summer, a moving van rolled onto Crystal’s driveway and loaded up her house. Aaron went over and asked her mother whether he could see Crystal. Even at fourteen, he recognized the look of betrayal on a grown woman’s face. Crystal didn’t want any part of him.
A few days later, her family left. Aaron heard they moved to Atlanta, where Crystal might fit in better and find some friends—something Aaron had failed at being for her when she most needed him.
Now, Moni had a gun on her. He barely knew this woman, but she needed him. So did Mariella.
“I’m staying right here,” Aaron said. Darren pointed the gun between his eyes. He resisted the urge to flinch. “I’m not leaving them alone with you.”
“What do you mean them?” Darren asked. Moni gawked at Aaron. That wasn’t the reaction he had been hoping for. “So you were looking at someone back there. Whoever it is better get out here, and I mean now!”
Mariella didn’t move.
“You wanna see some blood? If not, you get your ass out here.” Darren turned his gun on Moni again. Her face went pale. Aaron knew she’d take a bullet for the girl, but that would only buy her a minute. He had a split second to stop Darren.
Too late. Mariella stepped out from behind the couch. The man had a fresh target. Seeing the look on Moni’s face, Aaron saw that this terrified her more than staring down a bullet herself.
“No. Don’t!” Moni pleaded.
Darren faced the child with the gun at waist level. He aimed it in her general direction, but not straight at her. Mariella wobbled on those meek little feet. Her lips shuddered as she eyed his instrument of death. Without a single word or even a scream, the girl’s angelic face contorted into a portrait of absolute dread, as if a million bodies had roasted in ovens before her eyes.
“Oh… I’m sorry,” Darren said as he tucked the gun into the waistband of his jeans. Moni’s mouth opened so wide that she nearly kneed herself in the jaw. “I didn’t mean to frighten you, kid.”
Mariella backed against the screen door in the rear of the house. Darren shuffled backwards toward the front door.
“I didn’t realize the girl was home,” he said. “I’m not like your daddy. I don’t hurt children.” Moni furrowed her brow and took a step toward her downed gun. “Yeah, I’m not done with you neither. I’ll see you again, Moni—real soon. And I better not see this punk making a play for your cooch or I’ll smash his little prick in my car door and drive ‘round town with him. Ya feel me?”
Aaron would have returned fire with a witty comeback, but concentrated on crossing his legs just in case. His chicken-legged stance didn’t exactly make him look macho for Moni, but at least he didn’t bail out of there crying.
When Darren slammed the door shut and headed for his car, Moni hustled over, scooped up her gun and pointed it at him through the window until he drove away. Aaron couldn’t understand why she didn’t do that in the first place if she thought he came there for a fight—as the broken mirror on Aaron’s car surely attested.
“Holy shit,” Aaron remarked.
“If you want to leave now, I’ll understand,” Moni said as she kept watch out the window. Aaron read the shameful expression on her face in the reflection off the glass as a sign that she couldn’t bear facing him.
“Naw, it’s cool. Everybody’s got some skeletons in their closet. It’s just that those skeletons don’t usually come packing heat.”
“And he might do it again. He doesn’t let things go. The safest place for you to be is as far away from me as possible.”
“What about Mariella? If it’s so dangerous around you, between him and all the craziness in the lagoon, then why is she here? I can help you both out.”
“Mariella…” Moni turned and looked for the girl. “Oh my God! Get away from that!”
Aaron whirled around and saw the night black water moccasin coiled on the other side of the screen door. Mariella was only a foot away on the other side of the flimsy netting. Snakes shouldn’t attack people unprovoked. They eat rats and frogs and stuff. But Aaron knew at once that wasn’t a normal snake. It sprung through the screen with such force that it tore it out of the door frame. The netting fell on top of it, but it wouldn’t keep it down for long. The snake started slithering out with its pointy, venom-filled head aiming for Mariella’s back.
Chapter 16
The snake poked its head out from underneath the downed screen and opened its jaws. Moni saw its white mouth and hooked fangs. One bite from the water moccasin, also known as the Florida cottonmouth because of the color of its most deadly weapon, could kill a grown person. The same amount of poison in Mariella’s small body would stop her heart quicker than a light switch getting flicked off.
Moni dashed across her living room. She couldn’t make it in time. She heard her cat Tropic hissing and yowling from her bedroom. Moni screamed at the snake as if the shockwaves of anger in her voice could stop it. The water moccasin coiled up and readied to pounce on Mariella’s back. The girl didn’t see it. She didn’t move, or even seem disturbed in the least by the sight of Moni freaking out.
The snake sprang toward the girl. Aaron dove from the other side. Mariella ducked out of Aaron’s way. The snake’s white mouth snapped at him as he fell on his shoulder. Moni couldn’t tell whether it had struck him or not, but he spit enough curses to make a truck driver faint. Mariella scampered into her room and slammed the door.
When Aaron sat up, he faced one peeved reptile. It didn’t hiss, but it recoiled into attack mode.
“Roll!” Moni yelled at him as she trained her gun on it.
Aaron reacted with more of a flop than a roll. It worked well enough. The water moccasin hesitated in its attack and Moni shot its head off. Its body fell limp as a rubber band as its blood trickled, not poured, onto her carpet.
“Oh damn…” Aaron gasped as he scrambled to the couch. If the snake had bit him, he couldn’t have gotten back on his feet. He gawked at Moni’s smoking gun. “Thank you.”
“I should thank you,” she said as she holstered the weapon. “You got Mariella out of the way.”
“I didn’t lay a finger on her. I tried to shove her away from it, but she took off so fast. The girl’s got survival instincts.”
“That’s for sure. But we got lucky this time. Thank God you were standing close enough…”
“To serve as bait.” He rubbed the forearm the snake had nearly sunk its fangs into.
“You’re pretty brave for a surfer dude.” Moni trotted up and kissed him on the cheek. She felt a spark there, like a rock striking a piece of flint. A couple more t
imes and it might start burning.
Maybe Darren had it wrong about this guy, she thought. Aaron proved that he’d protect her and Mariella. It took her long enough, but she realized that a good heart—even without the guns to back it up—counted more than all muscle and selfish intentions.
“How about I take you up on that horseback riding trip?”
“Sweet,” he said with a beaming grin. “Let’s tell Mariella.”
As he turned toward the girl’s room, she gently grabbed his arm and halted him.
“Not such a good idea. My baby got spooked. Let her calm down. I’ll tell her before bed.”
“All right. I feel ya.” Aaron sounded as gangster with that phrase as a cat sounds tough barking. Moni giggled. “But I think we should hold off on the pizza for tonight. I better clean up this mess and deliver the remains to the AMRI lab before they spoil.”
Moni dropped her smile as she eyed the dead snake. It resembled a black garden hose that had exploded at one end.
“What’s gonna spoil? I mean, besides my appetite.” Moni pressed her hand against her stomach and stuck out her tongue.
“I bet it’s loaded with bacteria,” Aaron said. “The snake should have bounced off your screen and maybe ripped it along the edge a bit, not tore through it. And then there’s that.”
In the pool of blood underneath the snake’s mangled head festered a smidgen of purple ooze.
Gators, birds, manatees and now snakes infected with the bacteria had attacked people, Moni thought. Most of their targets had died. If Aaron hadn’t gone all out on that desperate dive, Mariella would have wound up like the others.
Moni’s heart numbed over with a chill. The words her father had stuffed into her ear only hours ago rang through her head.
“The lagoon man has a hunger and I smelled it out there today. That girl belongs to his lagoon and he’s coming to take her back. You can’t stop it, so you best get outta the way.”
Chapter 17
Moni couldn’t settle down to sleep. As she lay beneath the sweaty sheets, she replayed the incidents with Darren and the snake over and over in her head. She couldn’t understand the timing of both attacks happening in such close succession. Did someone make the animal strike at her most vulnerable moment? It had caught her utterly unprepared. Aaron had saved the girl, not her.
Detective Sneed interrupted those lingering thoughts with a phone call at around five-thirty in the morning. Moni feigned a weary answer, as if he had woke her from a deep slumber.
“I heard you fired off a round in your house yesterday. You know, we got a firing range so you don’t shoot up your neighborhood like a damn hoodlum.”
“I shot a snake. I reported it and, as I wrote, Aaron took the carcass to the lab.”
“You and Aaron. Uh huh.” He huffed in disapproval. Officers shouldn’t date sources in an investigation, but Moni knew he got offended by something else—a black woman and a white man.
“I hope you have a better reason than that to drag me outta bed. I’ll be taking Mariella to school in a couple hours.”
“I got a plenty good reason,” Sneed said. “Remember Randy Cooper—the guy who escaped being a gator’s midnight snack? We haven’t heard from him since we dropped him back at his house. He hasn’t answered his phone. After you drop off the young witness, go head on over there with Skillings and Harrison. Let Cooper know that he can’t duck us. I got a search warrant that says he better open up.”
Moni rubbed her forehead, which had been basting in her sweat all night. He could have waited an hour before giving her that assignment. Not that he had really awoken her, but he had tried. Maybe Sneed spent all night working his cases like a general plotting war inside his tent. The master of paranoia had once again pointed his hairy finger at the victim instead of focusing on a killer that had him outwitted.
“I’ll knock on his door, but I’d prefer not to draw the search warrant,” Moni said. “The poor guy has been through hell in the past 24 hours.”
Moni got an early start on the day by packing Mariella’s bag and cooking her breakfast. The girl treaded through her morning motions somberly coming on the heels of two attacks, but Moni put a smile on her face by promising horseback riding that afternoon. She decided against mentioning Aaron. She didn’t know whether Mariella had fled from the snake or the man jumping at her.
After she dropped the girl off, Moni met up with Nina Skillings and Clyde Harrison in the parking lot of a Palm Bay shopping center a few miles from Cooper’s house. For sure, Skillings’ toughness and Harrison’s colossal strength could have done the job fine without Moni. She figured that Sneed had signed her up as a tag along so she’d learn how “real officers” handled themselves.
“So, you saw Sneed interview this crackpot,” Skillings said, hanging her head out the window of the patrol car parked beside Moni’s undercover Taurus. “Why do you think he’s gone quiet on us?”
“Telling us about his brother’s murder took a lot out of him,” Moni said. “We really should have sent him for a psychiatric evaluation before releasing him.”
Harrison leaned over from the driver’s side, and formed a scowl with his square jaw and bushy eyebrows. “If this runt doesn’t talk, I’ll give him an evaluation with my boot.”
Moni sighed and shook he head. “I’d say Randy has had enough big, dumb animals attack him for one week.”
He chuckled without a sign of taking offense. At least Harrison knew his role.
They found Randy Cooper’s old Ford pickup outside his house. He must have stopped by the home of his brother’s newly widowed wife on the beachside and picked it up. Moni couldn’t imagine how painful that meeting must have been for him. How could he look that woman and her son in the eyes and tell them that the man of their household is gone? How could he tell them he was snatched from his boat and killed during his reckless caper in the middle of the night? Moni understood why he didn’t feel like answering his phone, or his door.
“Randy!” Skillings shouted for the fifth time. They didn’t hear anything stirring inside. The curtains were tightly drawn, but the odor of stale bread, moldy cheese and spoiled beer wafted through the cracks in the window panes. “I can smell that slob’s mess from out here. That’s a reason enough for a search even without this warrant.”
“Okay. I got it.” Harrison pointed Skillings to the side so he could kick in the door.
“Hold the beef, cowboy. This one’s mine,” Skillings said. She grabbed the battering ram and pounded through the door in two blows. “No need to ruin a fine pair of boots.”
Moni rolled her eyes. At least this time, Skillings showboated on a defenseless door and not on Moni’s ribs in kickboxing class.
Even Skillings’ tough girl armor didn’t prevent her from clutching her nose and groaning when she entered Randy Cooper’s house. Pizza boxes with their rotting, half-eaten leftovers littered the floor. Some of them were atop piles of clothes. A familiar mud-stained shirt covered one of the boxes. He had left beer bottles all over the place—on the couch, on the floor, on the window sill, on the TV, and all over the kitchen counter where they also found a pile of toxic dishes overloading the sink. He had nearly run out of surface space for the bottles and dirty dishes.
“I guess he wasn’t a stickler for recycling, or cleaning,” Moni said as she trudged through the pizza boxes and foam takeout containers. “At least he didn’t make his garbage man work hard.”
“This isn’t by choice,” Skillings said as she drew her gun and checked the bathroom. She wretched, but didn’t fire, and quickly shut off the light. “Bleh. Something’s wrong. No one would live in conditions like this.”
“What are you talking about? When I got out of high school, I got an apartment with a couple of buddies and our shithole put this shithole to shame,” Harrison said. “When the pizza boxes get so high you can sit on them, that’s when you’ve got it made.”
Skillings, who kept her desk so neat that paper clips were sorted by their di
fferent sizes, shuddered.
“Our resident cave man has a point,” Moni said. “Let’s settle this. I bet our witness is sleeping off one wicked hangover.”
They crept toward the master bedroom. The door had been left open a crack. Through it, she caught a whiff of the most horrible stench yet. Maybe he never washed his sheets, she thought. But anyone who had visited a crime scene or a trauma ward would instantly recognize the meaning of that smell.
Moni paused and took a deep breath. With each beat, her heart pounded harder in dread of what waited on the other side of the bedroom door. She slipped into Randy Cooper’s room. Moni saw his body splayed out across the blood-soaked carpet alongside his bed. His flesh had been gnawed up. His skin hung off his face in ribbons of meat around his bare, round eyeballs. Randy’s lips had been whittled down, exposing a skeletal smile that was missing one tooth and sporting puffy gums. His clothes were in tatters, mostly from bite marks, but there were also patches of black ashes where the fabric had been burned through. The acid had singed his bed, which had the bloody tread marks of tiny rodent feet with needle-like claws: rats.
Moni tasted the half-digested eggs and ham from breakfast as they catapulted up her throat. She scampered for the bathroom, but the smell wafting from there turned her reeling back. She let it heave all over the tile in the hallway.
The wretched aftertaste of stomach acid only reminded her of the foul acid that the infected rats had burned Randy with as they ate him alive. On the same night Moni had barely avoided a snake attack, the only other person who had witnessed the lagoon killer’s work had been torn apart by rats in his bed. The monster wanted them. It wouldn’t stop.
Moni started back toward the room, but Harrison placed his palm on her shoulder in the hallway. Instead of its usual mauling, his hand lingered there warmly.
“If it’s too much for you, I’ll understand,” he said. “Hell, I wish I hadn’t downed that protein shake ‘cause it’s sitting extra heavy now.”
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