The monitor lizard was there waiting for us. One of the big females, eleven feet long, probably four hundred pounds, tongue probing the air experimentally, like a snake, getting the flavor of us in advance of attacking. Her eyes were black, yet seemed to glow.
She’d been shadowing us the whole time, anticipating our moves.
That’s the way I felt now. Like the hunter who recognizes that he is being hunted.
Realizing that the man had to be in the tree above me caused the same sensation of adrenaline rush to move up my spine.
I turned slowly away from the big buttonwood. I wanted to give myself some space before confronting him. In military parlance, he owned the high ground. I pretended to re-examine his tracks, puzzled. Then I began to take slow, small steps toward the path to my home.
Above me, I heard limbs rustle, then a primal grunting sound. I looked up reflexively to see a dark, refrigerator-sized shape falling through the limbs, dropping toward me.
chapter four
I lunged away, turning, but I didn’t react quickly enough. The bulk of the man’s weight caught me on the left shoulder, and sent me stumbling into the mangroves. I would have fallen, but I grabbed a mangrove branch as I was going down. Then I used it as a kind of spring to launch me back toward him.
Normally, I’m not a puncher. Punch a man in the face, and you have just as much chance of breaking your hand as you have of breaking his jaw. But I was so surprised, and the adrenaline dump was so abrupt, that I reacted without thinking. He was getting up from his knees, his shaved head turned away from me-a perfect and unexpected target-so I hit him just as hard as I could with an overhand right that should have dropped him to the ground unconscious.
It would have knocked me unconscious. It would have dropped almost any man I’ve met.
Not him. In fact, it didn’t even seem to hurt him much.
He gave a little shake of his head. Then he turned his eyes toward mine, his expression slowly translating surprise into anger.
He stared at me for a moment, as if puzzled, before he said, “What the hell’d you do that for, Mac? You got any idea what a stupid thing it was you just did? I hate it when someone sucker punches me.” Talking as if I’d attacked him, stringing the words together in a heavy, urbanized accent.
Then, before I had a chance to speak, he came charging at me; stuck his shoulder in my stomach like a linebacker, and began to bull me toward the water.
I was in trouble. Lots of trouble, and for a couple of reasons.
For one thing, I hadn’t been working out much lately. I was, in fact, in the worst shape of my life. And he was as big as his footprints advertised. Bigger. Not tall, but one of the citified, double-wide models. Three or four inches under six feet, but he had to weigh close to two-fifty, two-seventy-five, with freakishly large feet and hands, and a head that could not have been supported by a normal human neck.
Men who are big and quick and hard exude a kind of physical assurance. He had it.
Something else: The guy had been a competitive wrestler-and a good one.
I knew the instant he put his hands on me. It was unmistakable. I knew because, in high school, I’d spent each and every post-football season enduring the brutal practices which that great, great sport demands. Hand control, the variations of classic takedowns and reversals, had all been pounded into my skull by a brilliant wrestling coach named Gary Freis. The moment you hook up with another man in any kind of physical conflict, a wrestler instantly recognizes another wrestler.
This guy had had a pretty good coach himself-unsettling news.
As he pushed me into the water, I used his own momentum to duck under his right armpit, and come up behind him. When I grabbed his throat to take control, he slapped his huge hand on mine. Then, instead of trying to pull away as expected, he pushed his body back into mine, prying my hand loose as he moved.
Suddenly, he was behind me, his left arm levered under mine, using the back of my head as a fulcrum, his right leg trying to grapevine between my legs.
As I grunted in pain, he said into my ear, breathing heavily, “You want to get nasty, asshole? I’ll show you nasty.”
What I’d learned in those few first seconds was disturbing.
The guy was stronger than I-no question-plus he had to be thirty, maybe forty, pounds heavier. He had those raccoon kind of fingers, steel within hard rubber, that move like tiny, independent little animals, and are nearly impossible to escape.
Something deep inside was telling me to stop, give it up, surrender-but not just because he was capable of beating me; even killing me.
No.
My inner voice and its reasoning were all too familiar: I no longer trust myself in a fight. Simple as that. I can no longer rely on the control I once pretended to have over my own cold temper.
Yet I couldn’t quit. Old habit.
Instead, I tried to relax my body, hoping to give him the impression I was quitting. When I felt his grip ease ever so slightly, I swung my hips to the right, then somersaulted forward into the knee-deep water as hard as I could throw my body.
It was enough to break me free. But not for long. He was instantly on me as I tried to get to my feet, pulling me, then turning me with a very effective arm drag.
Then he was behind me again, his left arm wrapped around my throat, the hard edge of his forearm digging into my Adam’s apple, severing the flow of oxygen between mouth and lungs.
It is the most basic-and the most effective-of submission holds, and if I didn’t find a way to break it, he could hold me there until I was unconscious. Or brain-damaged. Or dead.
“You want to keep dancing, asshole? Or you ready to quit?”
I hammered my head backward. Felt it glance off his nose; heard a woof of pain. It loosened his grip enough for me to drive my elbow into his stomach, but he managed to keep his forearm locked on my throat.
That was the end. All I could do. All I could stand without replenishing the oxygen supply, and I knew it. The world was getting fuzzy, and not just because my glasses were now hanging uselessly, tied around my neck with fishing line.
My head was tilted skyward and I watched the April sunset clouds turn gray, then rainbow-streaked as I began to slip into unconsciousness…
Then I heard: “Oh… shit. Oh-h-h-h-h shit-t-t-t! ”
Was I imagining the distress in his voice?
No… because suddenly, I was free. For no reason whatsoever, he released his grip, allowing me to collapse into the shallow water.
I got shakily to my feet, touching fingers to my bruised Adam’s apple, pulse roaring in my ears, as I put on my glasses.
Skinhead had already waded to shore where, inexplicably, he was now on his knees at the base of the buttonwood tree that had once been his hiding place.
He seemed to be coughing, making a weird barking sound. It took me a confusing few seconds to understand what he was doing.
He was vomiting, using the tree to steady himself, heaving violently. We’ve all experienced it: When you’re that nauseated, you are absolutely focused on the intensity of stomach spasms, and therefore helpless.
What had I done to cause him to vomit? There was a touch of blood beneath his nose. Otherwise, he was unmarked. Had I somehow caught him in the solar plexus, or the testicles? It made no sense.
As I walked toward him, he held his hand up like a flag, palm out and waving: a universal signal of surrender. He was done; too sick to fight anymore.
Breathing heavily, feeling sick myself, I turned my back to him and waited. I could see Sally crossing the scrim of kitchen window, still busy doing something, almost frenetic in her body movement.
The way she moved seemed out of character-just as some of the things she’d said, her speech patterns, were different.
More indications that my friend had changed.
Why the hell’d you hit me, Mac? There wasn’t no reason for you to coldcock me like that.”
The man was still on his knees, pale-faced and
leaning against the tree, taking long, slow breaths.
I said, “Are you kidding? You jump on me from a tree and don’t expect me to fight back?”
“Jump you? I didn’t jump, dumbass, I fell. Slipped off that wet limb ’cause I was so surprised to see you down there. Next thing I know, you’re taking a swing at me. Just my luck, too-about a billion acres of swamp in this shit-hole of a state, and I gotta land on a fucking wrestler.”
Was he serious? Yeah, he seemed to be sincere, talking in his big-city accent: New York with a touch of New Jersey. Some kind of hybrid combination; almost a parody, it seemed, of a 1940s tough-guy movie. I didden jump dumm azzz… The mobster talking to Bogart about a Maltese falcon.
He had a big, wide, citified face, too: Mediterranean skin-Italian blood showing-with birdlike, golden eyes set deep beneath a heavy brow, darker with his head shaved bare. I also noted that his fingernails were thick, pitted like opaque oysters, a condition known as onchomycosis, which is a fungal disease, often associated with people who have their hands in water a lot, or who use steroids. The fungus spores attach themselves beneath the nail, and begin to feed on the nail’s cells. Tough to get rid of.
The guy definitely did not fish for a living so, judging from his size, he’d gotten into bodybuilding, juicing himself with shots or pills to get bigger. Maybe.
I listened to him ask, “Where’d you wrestle college, Mac?”
I said, “High school. That was it.”
“No way. You had to go further. Or you were a blue-chipper. Nothing national?” He seemed to be marking time, speaking but focusing inward, testing all the internal sensors, unsure if he was going to be sick again. He punctuated every few words by spitting weakly, then sniffing.
“My junior and senior years, I did the AAU tournament in Iowa.”
He said, “That explains it. I did that tournament three times, which means you had to be a state champ or you wouldn’t’a been invited. You make the finals? Maybe we wrestled before.”
I took a few steps and leaned against a nearby black mangrove, relaxing a little. “Nope. Lost in the quarters. I was way out of my league.”
He made a baritone gurgling sound, his stomach momentarily spasming, but then he slowly smiled. “Most guys, they have excuses. Tore up their knee or popped a shoulder. But you say it right out loud: just not good enough. I’ll tell you something though, Mac. If you made it to the quarterfinals in that tournament, you were good enough. Plenty good enough.”
I waited a few moments, looking at him, before I said. “You didn’t have much trouble beating me.”
“The hell I didn’t. I wrestled two years college, then three years in the military. I thought you’d be one of those bookworm saps, never been in a fight in his life. Jesus Christ, that was a hell of a Granby you threw. Shocked the shit out of me.”
“And you nailed me with one of the best arm drags ever. So it’s a mutual-admiration society, except for one little thing. You’ve been following a friend of mine, and you’re scaring her. That’s why I came out here-to talk, not to fight.” I paused. “You really did fall out of that tree?”
“Uh-huh. What? You think I’m dumb enough to fucking jump fifteen, twenty-feet? I climbed up there to get a better angle on your windows-to use those things.” He nodded toward the rubber-coated binoculars lying in the mud near some kind of complicated, battery-assisted monocular. Both were camo-coated, the sort of instruments sold in hunters’ catalogues. “When I fell, I ’bout busted my nuts on that limb. Climbing a tree in a rainstorm-that’s one I need to cross off the list.”
I said, “Why the monocular?”
I expected him to dodge the question. He didn’t. Like it was no big deal, he told me that the monocular had a passive, infrared motion detector that was triggered by an animal’s-or a man’s-body heat.
I said, “So you knew I was looking for you, coming through the mangroves.”
“Hell, no. You surprised the crap out of me. Once you got in your boat and pulled away, I forgot all about you. Pretty slick move, Mac.”
“But why? Why’re you tailing her?”
He sniffed and spat, thinking about it. “Tailing Mrs. Minster,” he said.
“Yes. Sally Minster.”
“It’s because I’m a private investigator, that’s why. A company hired me to keep an eye on the lady, so it’s a job-of-work. Nothing personal. She’s got nothing to be scared of-not from me, anyway.”
His inflection told me more than his words. I said, “You’re following her because of her husband. Is that right?”
He shrugged, maybe in affirmation.
I said, “Okay, so I’m guessing it’s his life insurance company you’re working for. They hired you because they don’t believe he’s dead. If you follow her long enough, you’re thinking she’s going to lead you to him.”
The man looked up at me briefly. “Just because we both spent time on the mat doesn’t mean we’re pals. I wouldn’t tell you if I could. So stop askin’. Your lady friend isn’t in any danger from me, Mac. That’s all you need to know.”
I told him my name was Ford, not “Mac,” before adding, “Then there’s something you need to know. It might be helpful to your employer, too. My friend Sally doesn’t think her husband’s dead, either. She’s the one who stands to inherit the insurance money-presumably quite a bit of money-but she still doesn’t think he’s dead. She’s not going to take you to him, because she doesn’t know where he is.”
When I saw the mild look of surprise register on his face, I added, “Instead of sneaking around following her, why don’t you just talk to her? You might save yourself some time.”
He started to reply, but then stopped, his eyes widening. Speaking softly and very quickly, he said, “Man oh man, I feel like hell. You ever try chewing tobacco, that goddamn snuff? Copenhagen. First time I ever put that garbage in my mouth was just before you showed up. When you head-butted me, I swallowed the crap. All of it. Mac, I don’t think I’ve… I’ve ever felt so sick… so damn sick in my life. Oh-h-h-h-hhh. ”
I turned away and waited while, once again, the man began to heave.
chapter five
He was private investigator Frank DeAntoni, who’d twice made it to the Olympic trials wrestling for the Air Force before joining the NYPD, making detective, and then, a year ago, opening his own firm in Coral Gables.
“Why not?” he told me. “First my mom passed away, then my dad, and then my girlfriend dumped me. So why am I gonna stick around the city? ’Cause I got a great-aunt who lives in Jersey? I was outta there, Mac.”
He sat on the first step of the wooden boardwalk that leads to my house, fanning himself with one huge hand, his face still a pale and sickly gray. His blue raincoat was draped over the railing. He wore a black Polo shirt tucked into the black slacks, both of them stained with muck and sand.
He’d told me a little about himself during our slow walk out of the mangroves. I’d told him a little about myself. When he showed me his identification-an old NYPD badge and new business card-I looked at the card, saying, “Shouldn’t there be a drawing of an eye on this thing? Like in the old movies?”
To which he replied, smiling painfully, “Fuck you, Mac. I’m puking my guts out, and you play comedian.”
We were of a comparable age. Another similarity was that, as former wrestlers, we’d both worn our headgear religiously. No telltale scarred ears.
“I’ve never been what you’d call pretty anyway,” he explained.
I replied, “There’s another thing we have in common.”
“Wrestling all those years,” he added, “my shoulders, my knees are all so screwed up, I’ve been having to take steroids. But it’s been getting better. I’ve been working out a lot, making the muscles strong enough to help out the bad joints. Even so, I’m going to be sore as shit tomorrow.”
“Me, too,” I told him.
Now he sat, holding a bottle of water he’d retrieved from his car, trying to recover, his stomach movin
g with rapid, shallow breaths.
Why had he chosen this day to try chewing tobacco?
I’d asked him a couple of times.
The only answer I’d received was cryptic: “It’s ’cause of my work. We talk, let’s see how it goes, maybe I’ll tell you. But damned if I’m gonna try snuff again. The crap smells like horse piss and tastes worse.”
Groaning sounds. He was still making lots of weary groaning, gurgling noises.
Once, he looked at me and sniffed. “Jesus Christ, is that you who stinks? I thought it was fuckin’ swamp gas or something.”
I hadn’t changed clothes since returning from Tomlinson’s swamp ape expedition, and the khakis and T-shirt I wore were still coated with mud, burrs, flakes of duck weed and cow dung, plus the oily residue of something else.
“A skunk,” I told him. “I just got back from the Everglades, and I haven’t had a chance to shower yet. I got sprayed by a skunk.”
“You’re shittin’ me. I think I saw one in a zoo once. You see ’em squashed on the roads. What makes ’em stink so bad?”
I answered, “They have two musk glands inside their anus. They produce an oil, a chemical compound called thiol, which is the same thing that makes a rotten egg stink. They lift their tail and shoot the oil out of their butt.”
DeAntoni moaned softly, picturing it. “Their fuckin’ anus,” he said miserably. He sniffed again, then tried to cover his nose, but it was too much for him to handle.
He was sick once more.
I walked to the marina, got a bucket of ice. By the time I got back, DeAntoni seemed to be feeling better. He rubbed the ice on the back of his neck, as I told him again, “If you’re trying to get information on Geoff Minster, it might make sense for you and Sally to sit down and talk. If she’s willing.”
“Hell, yes, I want to talk to her. What do you think the chances are?”
“Give me ten, fifteen minutes and I’ll let you know.”
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