The alligator’s eyes glowed ember orange; the man’s face was a flag of white, and, for an instant, his eyes locked onto mine just before the animal slung its tail and rolled, taking him under, then bringing him back to the surface, the animal’s eyes not so bright now because the angle had changed but the man still sideways in the thing’s mouth.
Because the gator had him by the hips, the roll-a death roll, gator hunters call it-had not snapped his spine.
“ Please. Take my hand!” The man coughed the words, stretching his arm toward me, his voice pleading as if trying to convince me it would be okay.
I wasn’t convinced. I am neither stupid nor particularly brave. But I also know enough about animal behavior to feel sure that I wasn’t being mindlessly heroic. There are certain predators-alligators, sharks and killer bees among them-that, once their sensory apparatus has locked onto a specific target, ancillary targets cease to exist.
I have swam at night among feeding sharks so fixated on a whale carcass that my dive partners and I had nothing to fear. I once watched an Australian croc wrestle a feral hog into the water while an infant blackbuck antelope-a much easier target-drank peacefully within easy reach.
This alligator might worry that I wanted to steal the meal it had taken. But it wouldn’t abandon a meal in its teeth to waste its time attacking me, additional prey.
I hoped.
I ducked beneath the water, dug at the muck until my left shoe popped free and then I surfaced as someone belly flopped into the pond next to me and began thrashing the water, racing toward the gator.
It was Tomlinson.
I pushed off after him, swimming hard, my head up, focusing on the bright, blurry horror ahead. I passed my friend after only a few strokes, watching as the gator turned and began ruddering toward the far shore.
The man’s screams became whistled sobs, similar in pitch to the trumpeting of nearby peacocks, dark shapes that dropped from bushes and sprinted toward the shadows. Behind me, I heard a woman yell in Spanish, “Call for help, someone call the police!” but then heard a male voice hush the woman, saying, “Are you insane? Not the police!”
The gator appeared to be in no hurry now. The animal knew we were in the water-gators possess acute hearing and the night vision of owls-but it didn’t seem to care. Even so, it traveled deceptively fast over the bottom, and I was halfway across the lake before I was finally close to enough to make a grab for the thing. Before I did, I rolled onto my side long enough to find the pistol.
I took a couple of more strokes to catch up and then lunged to get what I hoped was a solid grip on the animal’s tail. I expected the gator to slash its head toward me, a hardwired crocodilian response. For a few seconds, though, the thing continued swimming, pulling me along-me, an insignificant weight-but then its slow reptilian brain translated the information, and the animal exploded, its tail almost snapping my arm from the socket.
Because I expected the gator to swing its jaws toward me, I ducked beneath the surface, feeling a clawed foot graze my ear. I sculled deeper until my toes touched bottom, took a look toward the surface-it was like being submerged in tar-then swam a couple of yards underwater before angling up, hoping I didn’t guess wrong and reappear within reach of the animal’s teeth.
I didn’t. Instead, I collided with something bony and breathing as I surfaced. The gator’s belly, I thought at first. But then I heard a wailing profanity-the voice familiar-and realized I had banged into Tomlinson, who assumed he was being attacked from beneath.
My friend, I could see, had both hands locked on the gator’s tail and was being dragged. The animal was swimming faster now, probably convinced we were competing gators, employing harassment, hoping it would drop its prey. It’s a common gambit in the animal world, so the thing was trying to get into shallow water before dealing with us.
As I started swimming after them, I heard Tomlinson yell a garbled sentence, words that sounded like “You just scared the piss out of me! Do something, Doc!”
I planned to do something, even though I had no plan. I considered risking a shot at the animal’s flank, but there were too many people around, and the slug would skip if it hit the water. No… I had to get closer.
It took longer than expected. Despite the gator carrying a man in its jaws and a second man clinging to its tail, I still had trouble catching the animal because I was palming the pistol in my right hand. A pound of polymer and steel is not an efficient fin.
Finally, though, I was close enough to throw my left arm over the animal’s back, which wasn’t easy because the creature was twice my size. The gator bucked its head at me in warning, its hard belly spasmed, but it kept going. I felt around until I had what I thought was a good grip on the far ridge of scutes, hoping the thing would continue swimming long enough for me to get my right hand up. Next, I would position the pistol flat against the bony ridge behind the gator’s right eye.
Alligators have tiny brains, little more than a bulbous junction of nerve cells. However, their heads and jaws are also covered with thousands of bead-sized nodules that serve as remarkably sensitive pressure detectors. That’s why a gator can sense a lapping dog, or the splash of a child, from a hundred yards away. Even if the bullet missed the brain, the shock might cause the animal to release its prey and dive or swim for safety.
As I pushed the pistol barrel hard against the gator’s head, though, the thing rolled again. I was on the animal’s right side. It slapped its tail and rolled to the left. The movement was as abrupt as the slamming of a steel trap, and I was vaulted over the animal, into the air, and lost my grip as I hit the water.
When I surfaced, I had no idea where Tomlinson was. But I knew the gator still had its prey because I could hear the man coughing water and I could see his dangling legs only a yard away in the flashlight’s beam.
I had come up just behind and to the left of the gator’s snout. Close enough to see the animal’s bulging right eye, its pupil dilated within gelatinous tissue that cast an orange glow.
The gator saw me. No doubt about it, and I wasn’t surprised when the thing slowed and swung toward me, opening its jaws, then slinging its head to release its prey, now fixated on me. It had been harassed enough. In the animal’s mind, I was attempting to steal its meal. It had decided to fight.
I grabbed the man’s leg with my left hand and pulled, trying to help him roll free but also using the resistance to lever myself close enough to throw my right arm over the animal’s back. The gator shook its head again, maybe having difficulty tearing its teeth from the man’s clothing, which provided me with the extra second I needed to get a grip on the reptilian neck with my left hand.
As its tail hammered the water, spinning toward me, I wrestled myself atop the gator long enough to steady the pistol barrel flush behind its right eye. My hold was tenuous, the positioning wasn’t perfect, but I was adrenaline-buzzed and scared. I didn’t hesitate. I fired two quick shots, the report of the pistol heavy and flat, muffled by the animal’s keratin skin.
There was a convulsive, watery explosion that threw me backward. When I surfaced, the gator’s tail was vertical, slashing the air like a wrecking crane, and I had to scull backward to keep from being hit. A moment later, the animal rolled to the surface, still thrashing, and then submerged abruptly in a boil of bubbles and muddy detritus from the bottom.
I wasn’t sure if I’d killed the thing or not. Alligators sink when dead, but they also submerge if they’re wounded or feel threatened. If the bullets had done only minor damage, then the gator could be drifting to the bottom right now, tracking my vibrations as it regrouped. I didn’t relish the possibility. To me, a known quantity, however perilous the situation, is much preferred to a vague unknown.
As I turned to search for Tomlinson, I hollered, “Where is he? Did he go under?” meaning the injured man.
I received an answer in the form of another scream. It was a shredded plea in English, the frail man hollering, “Help me! The animal has me a
gain!”
I pivoted toward the sound and started swimming.
FOUR
When Harris Squirespushed through the crowd of little brown people and realized what was happening, he grinned, thinking, Awesome!
Because of his girlfriend, Frankie, it had been a rotten week. But seeing what he was seeing now made him feel hopeful. Two nights before, while shooting a homemade skin flick, the idiot Mexican girl with them had taken too much Ecstasy and stopped breathing just like that. There was no one around but them, thank God, but it wasn’t until the next morning when Squires finally sobered up that even he had to admit the girl wasn’t going to start breathing again. Meaning she was dead.
That was bad enough, but it got worse. The girl was a prostitute who belonged to a Mexican gangbanger named Laziro Victorino. Victorino was what the illegals called a coyote, meaning that for a price he would lead groups across the border into the States, then find them jobs, too-but for a percentage of their pay, which he collected weekly.
Victorino-V-man, his gangbanger soldiers called him-was a wiry little guy but a serious badass who carried a box cutter on his belt and had a teardrop tattoo beneath his left eye, along with a bunch of other gangbanger tats on his arms and back.
Squires was aware that the V-man had made a few films of his own, him and his boys. Snuff films. Kill a man or woman-or just torture them-and get it all on their iPhone video cameras.
Frankie had chided Squires, saying, “Why you worried about some midget Mexican? You’re twice that greaser’s size. Besides, he’s got some new girl with him every time he comes through here. He probably won’t even notice she’s gone.”
Squires doubted that but didn’t want to piss off Frankie by voicing his opinion. So he told her he’d never played a role in killing anyone before. And he didn’t want to get in the habit of doing it.
That wasn’t exactly true, although Frankie didn’t know it. No one knew, and sometimes even Squires wasn’t convinced it had happened.
Once, only once, alone with a pretty Mexican woman, Squires, naked, had taken the chula from behind, lulling her body into a thrashing silence, his hands around her throat, his body finishing and the chula ’s life ending at a precise, constricting intersection that was euphoric beyond any physical sensation Squires had ever experienced.
He had been too drunk to remember details, though. And by the time he had sobered, the woman’s body was already gone-into the lake near his hunting camp trailer, he guessed later-so it was as if he had imagined the whole damn thing.
But it had happened. The event-that explosive physical rush, a sensation of ultimate power-had rooted itself in Squires’s brain. Occasionally, the memory flooded him with a horrifying guilt, which he mitigated by telling himself that it had only been a dream.
When he was blood-drunk on steroids, though, the roots of that memory propagated in the man’s head. They snaked deeper into his brain, germinating into a fantasy that had become an obsession.
If he ever got the opportunity, if he ever got just the right girl alone, Squires would make that dream happen again.
Frankie had laughed when he had balked. “We’ve got nothing to feel guilty about. The stupid little whore did it to herself. It’s one less stupid chula in the world. Good riddance. No one’s gonna miss her and no one’s gonna care. Now, do me a favor, clean up around here ’cause I’ve got that appointment in Orlando tomorrow. Make sure she’s gone by morning-and you’d better never goddamn mention it again.”
Which meant that Frankie was leaving the dirty work to him. That’s just the way the woman was, and Squires had to wonder sometimes if Frankie’s love of crazy, wild-sex kinkiness was really worth all her crazy, wild-bitch meanness.
For the first couple of years, it had been a toss-up. But now Harris was tired of the woman-a little frightened of her, too-and he was looking for a way out.
The reason had to do with something else Squires had been wondering about: How had he gotten himself trapped into a relationship with a woman who reminded him more and more of his abusive, bullying mother?
Like his mother, Frankie had a nasty streak in her, particularly when it came to other women. Because of this, it was sometimes hard to tell if some of the things Frankie did were accidental or intentional. For instance, it wasn’t exactly true that the Mexican girl had overdosed herself. Frankie had done it.
Frankie had dropped extra Ecstasy tablets into the girl’s drink, doubling the dose she usually used when they happened to pick up a Mexican chula who was camera-shy and needed some loosening up.
This particular girl was unusually cute, with a sleek, sensuous body. When Frankie’s hands were on a girl like that, her face flushed. Her body shook. It was a response that was part passion, part jealousy. It was like she never wanted to let the girl go. So maybe Frankie had decided to keep the chula by dropping in those extra tabs.
To Squires, it made what had happened seem less of a crime, the fact that a woman had done it to another woman. But that didn’t stop him from going almost crazy with panic when he finally realized the girl was dead. Maybe he had killed that Mexican girl or maybe it was all a dream, but he’d never had to deal with a dead body before. Not sober, anyway.
They had a corpse on their hands. And they had to get rid of the thing without the Mexican gang leader, or the cops, finding out.
Not they, actually. Him. Frankie, who was sixteen years older than Squires, and a lot more experienced, would have nothing to do with getting rid of a dead body.
It wasn’t the first time that something like this had happened while Squires was around, but it was the first time a girl had ended up dead instead of puking her guts out while Squires tended to her.
That’s what really pissed him off when Squires took time to give the subject some thought. When would he learn not to leave Frankie alone with girls that were younger and prettier than her? And even if the stupid chula had done it to herself, who was going to believe it?
No one, that’s who. Not with at least one eyewitness, maybe two, who had seen him drag the girl’s body into the lake.
Now, though, Squires’s future seemed to be improving, judging from what he could hear and see, out there on the lake, which was that Fifi had snatched one of the eyewitnesses, old man Carlson, into the water.
Fifi. That was the name of the twelve-foot gator that he and some buddies had trucked in from his hunting camp, east of Immokalee, way back off County Road 858.
Squires could see it happening and he liked what he saw.
The gator had that nosy little turd in her jaws and now looked like she was swimming him back to some dark hole where she could drown him. That’s what gators like Fifi did. The ol’ girl would probably leave the mouthy asshole underwater to tenderize a bit before finally chowing down.
No way could the cops blame Squires for something an animal did. It was perfect.
Squires wasn’t sure if Carlson had in fact been an eyewitness, but, if he was, Fifi was now providing the solution. It had been a smart thing to move the gator here, where she could harass the Mexicans instead of the hunting dogs they sometimes used at his camp.
Squires’s hunting camp-well, actually, the property belonged to his mother-was a big place, four hundred acres of cypress trees and saw grass that opened into flats of oaks and pines where feral hogs liked to feed. And where sometimes they’d kill deer and an occasional bear, too.
Once, in that same area, Harris had gotten a clear shot at a panther, but he’d missed.
Harris Squires loved that hunting camp as much as he hated tending his mother’s three crappy little RV parks, this one, Red Citrus, being the only one even slightly fun. Red Citrus, at least, had girl tenants who weren’t redneck hags with silver hair, big asses and little old titties shriveled like raisins on a vine. Brown girls, true, but at least they were young.
In Squires’s mind, the younger the girl, the better-not something he would’ve admitted to Frankie, who was now in her forties-like the weird little
chula who’d been pretending to be a boy and called herself Tulo. What was she, twelve, maybe thirteen years old? He’d been pretty down the last couple of days, but surprising “Tulo” in the bathtub had lifted his spirits.
Until that moment, Squires had been confused about how to handle the situation. Seeing the girl’s body, though, all water slick and smooth, had changed that. It caused his secret fantasy to bloom bright in his mind.
He’d drive her to the hunting camp and show her around. Just him, alone. At the hunting camp, there’d be no one around to hear or see what he did. Not on a Tuesday night. It was a comfortable spot, private, with a big RV braced up on cinder blocks, generators, a cookshack, a shower and a wide-screen TV for video games and porn. A perfect place for a guy like him to make his fantasy come true with a little wettail.
Wettails, that’s what Squires called them. He and Frankie had entertained a bunch of them out there at the camp, which was really more a second home than a camp. The place was comfortable enough to be fun but still wild enough for an ol’ boy to get away, spread his wings and do just about any crazy thing he wanted without worrying about some cop or asshole ranger cruising by, asking questions.
Harris Squires hated nosy people. Do-gooders. If he and Frankie wanted to have some fun with a few young wettails, what harm were they doing? But try explaining that to a goddamn do-gooder.
Carlson was a prime example. Now Carlson was getting exactly what the little turd deserved.
Squires nudged a couple of short people out of the way as he edged closer to the lake. He could hear what was happening-Carlson screaming his lungs out, begging for help. It wasn’t easy to make out details, though, because the mangrove pond was on the other side of the fence, in shadows cast by palm trees beyond the haze of security lights.
It made him wish he had his night vision binoculars. Those bad boys would’ve made everything bright as day, but they were behind the seat of his Ford Roush pickup, along with some other gear he usually carried: duct tape, an ax handle, handcuffs, condoms and sometimes a. 357 Ruger Blackhawk when he wasn’t carrying the gun in the glove box.
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