“ That bastard boyfriend of yours cut me good,” he said into her ear, feeling feint from the blood loss. “Now let's get to the boathouse. Mr. Kenyon's waiting on us. Don't want him to grow impatient.”
Just as he said this, he heard a new roar in the wind and instantly felt something bite into the back of his skull. He turned to come eye-to-eye with Grant/Phillip Kenyon, realizing as he fell dead that somehow Kenyon had gotten free. His last thought was of not finishing his film.
“ Oh, thank God you've stopped him!” cried out Lara Swantor, whose eyes only now met Kenyon's. She saw a strange lust in the man's pupils, and she saw the still whirring bone saw. Instinctively, she pulled away. “You're Kenyon. You're the Skull-digger!” She turned and ran in the slippery mud, fleeing him.
Kenyon grabbed up Swantor's gun when a shot rang out, and he felt the bullet bite off a piece of his ear. He rushed at Mrs. Swantor as she attempted to get away, still wearing the open yellow raincoat. He caught her, grabbed her by the arm, and dragged her toward a steep drop-off at the rear of the house. Kenyon then shoved her down the gully and watched as the yellow raincoat made an easy visible target.
From below in the gully, Lara Swantor felt a cold desperation infiltrate her mind along with the chill to her body-and, as she rolled down into the depths of the black swampy area in this backwater ravine, she recalled how often Jervis had warned her of alligators on the prowl all along here. How he meant to feed her to them one day. Apparently, he had found a human alligator to do the job for him.
Grant dropped into the ravine as well, a second bullet from an upstairs window whistling directly at him, striking his right forearm and sending him rolling down the gully after Mrs. Swantor.
The second bullet had gone clean through him, leaving pain but little blood.
He picked himself up and rushed after Mrs. Swantor, his bone cutter in hand. “One last meal before they kill we,” Phillip said to Grant. But Mrs. Swantor had had a sudden burst of energy fueled by fear, and she was getting away. He saw the yellow color darting in and out of trees and brush. Behind him, he saw lights approaching and heard the others chasing him.
EIGHTEEN
All evils art equal when they art extreme.
— Pierre Corneille, 1606-1684
Jessica and Sorrento had heard the shouting from above, Konrath's voice; the tone meant he was delivering orders or demands. They had seen him at the front door, and they'd seen O'Hurley break in the glass and tear the door open. Something had happened. But by the time Jessica and Sorrento arrived at the front door, Konrath and O'Hurley had vanished. Jessica announced their arrival, calling for Konrath as they bounded up the porch and into the foyer.
They'd been instantly hit with the sight of the dead man lying in the foyer, obviously having fallen from above. Jessica kneeled for a moment, trying to identify him as Swantor or Kenyon. It was neither man. “Someone in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“ Looks like overkill.”
“ Or Kenyon's work.”
“ Konrath!” shouted Sorrento. “O'Hurley!”
They heard a gunshot coming from the rear of the house. This was followed by two additional gunshots originating from upstairs. They heard O'Hurley shout, “I think I got the bastard! LaPlante's down!”
“ The rear!” shouted Jessica, going for the back of the house. Sorrento slipped on the dead man's blood; not slowing, Jessica raced ahead of him, gun pointed.
When Jessica made it to the back door off the kitchen, she saw the two dead men lying out in the rain. She rushed out to where the two men lay in the blood-soaked grass. Jessica saw the youthful face of the man in the Coast Guard uniform, his nametag proclaiming him LaPlante, dead of a clean gunshot wound through the heart. The other man was tall and hefty, and the back of his skull was grinning with a gaping wound like the one they had seen on Sheriff Potter, but this wound to the back of the skull had been washed clean by the rain.
Sorrento was beside her now, doing his own assessment of the situation. With Mike's help, she turned the body and stared into the face of Jervis Swantor. “One down, one to go,” she said through gritted teeth. “It's Swantor.”
Sorrento and Jessica crouched over the bodies in the storm, their weapons pointed, but they had no target, and they were exposed. The two agents scoured the landscape for any sign of Kenyon and Mrs. Swantor. They saw no one.
Konrath came racing from the house, going to his knees over the young guardsman, LaPlante. “Oh, Christ! No, no!”
O'Hurley followed, saying, “He's got the woman! I got two shots off from the upstairs window. I'm sure I hit him.”
Konrath bellowed, “O'Hurley, which way did the bastard go?”
“ They went straight down, just as if they were swallowed up by the earth,” said O'Hurley. “There's got to be a steep drop-off right out there, maybe sixty yards. She's wearing LaPlante's raincoat. The man's wearing dark clothing.”
“ Let's get this bastard before he feeds again,” said Jessica, her teeth set. She grabbed her flashlight and beamed it toward the area O'Hurley's own light sought out. The men followed suit, and they spread out along the drop off, shining their lights at the dark hole into which Kenyon had crawled, taking his prey with him, like some beast out of the scriptures.
They tentatively made their way in the slippery undergrowth for about ten minutes before Jessica's flash picked up a slight movement and the color yellow in the for distance. “There! There she is. Come on!”
They carefully negotiated the incline, when a shot rang out, a bullet whistling past them. This made O'Hurley fall and tumble, sending up a bevy of frightened quail and shattering his ankle on impact against a tree. “Son of a bitch.” He moaned.
First Mate Konrath ordered everyone to discard their slickers, realizing they presented too much of a target. Konrath then tended to O'Hurley while Jessica and Sorrento went toward the yellow marker, where they hoped to find the woman.
They fought tough, jagged underbrush, palmetto bush and gnarled branches that cut their hands and faces just to win a foothold on the riverbank where the yellow coat winked again and again at them like a lure.
Jessica whispered in Sorrento's ear, “Do you see it, the raincoat?”
“ Could be there to decoy us in, a trap,” he replied.
“ What do you suggest?”
“ I walk into the trap… you cover me,” he told her.
“ No, I walk in, you cover me.”
“ Not in this life.”
“ Then we go in together.”
“ We don't have that option,” he insisted.
“ Look, if he hasn't killed her already, this may be our only chance of flushing him out before he does.”
They then heard a flurry of crashing noises in the water, and the yellow raincoat suddenly went in and out of sight. Jessica instinctively rushed toward the sound, ahead of Sorrento.
“ Wait… wait up! We go in together!” he shouted, rushing in behind her.
The sound of a struggle ahead in the fog-laden bayou beckoned her on. So far, they had been unable to save any of the Skull-digger's victims. Jessica, acutely aware of their utter failure in this regard, meant to change that here and now. Then a deafening silence fell over the place, and Jessica again spotted the yellow cloth. It began to move and thrash about in the black water, and then she heard the sound of the bone cutter's deadly whirr.
“ Jesus, he's killing her right now!” Jessica rushed toward the flagging yellow marker in the dense forest ahead. They had come perhaps a hundred yards from where they'd left Konrath and O'Hurley. Her flashlight shone crazily, hitting the tops of trees now as she brought up her 9-mm semiautomatic to bear on the scene.
As she came into a clearing of caked mud and ooze, she fell and her body was trapped up to her hips in a sucking muck. She'd fallen prey to the swamp. Just ahead of her, from her prone position in the sucking mud, she saw the last of the color yellow go down the gullet of a feeding alligator that was pulling back into the rive
r. Then she realized that Kenyon had leapt onto the monster, that he was actually wrestling with the alligator, using his bone saw now on the creature, cutting wide swaths of tough skin from its head, attempting to kill it. She knew instinctively that this was no act of heroism on Kenyon's part, but rather a rage against the beast and an attempt to regain Mrs. Swantor-or rather her brain-for himself.
Jessica, staring at this sight, froze, curious and amazed.
From behind her, Sorrento shouted as he broke through the brush, almost joining Jessica in the quagmire. Balancing himself, he came to a standstill and stared out at the water where the battle raged. “Shoot… shoot him,” Jessica shouted at Sorrento.
While Mike hesitated, Jessica managed to bring up her gun, readying to fire at Kenyon when she saw that he'd vanished. All had gone silent in the water as if there had never been a disturbance. Nothing left of the battle but ripples on the surface.
Sorrento cursed himself for having hesitated firing. He imagined either the gator had sunk its teeth into Kenyon, or the madman had slipped away. He could be making his way to shore, given that the alligator was busy with Swantor's wife. She pictured Kenyon wading from the water and crawling onto shore somewhere on the island, still holding firm to his bone cutter.
“ Can you get me out of this muck?”
Sorrento worked his way to solid ground as close to her as possible, trying to reach her. He perilously reached a hand out to her, nearly falling in beside her. “Sonofabitch is getting away,” he complained, unable to reach her.
“ No, he slipped off to the left. I saw him,” countered Konrath who'd come up on the clearing from another direction. “He's still out there.”
“ Will you two please get me the hell out of here?” asked Jessica. “We've got to follow the riverbank. Try to keep up with Kenyon.”
Konrath located a strong branch, and with Sorrento's help, they towed Jessica to safety.
“ We have to split up.” Jessica told them. “Kenyon could crawl ashore anywhere on the island, maybe down by the boathouse, make a clean escape. I swear I won't have that, gentlemen.”
Konrath helped her to her feet. “I say we call in for help and wait until daybreak before one of us gets killed.”
“ You do what you think's right, Mr. Konrath,” said Jessica. “I'm going after the bastard.” She stood mud-soaked before them, her eyes determined.
Sorrento suggested, “Why don't you radio for everyone aboard the cutter to form a search party, Mr. Konrath? By time they get here, it will be daybreak.”
“ I'd do that but I lost my radio someplace out here, and the only other one is back with LaPlante's body.”
Sorrento then turned to Jessica, but she was gone, moving swiftly along the bank and out of sight.
“ Damn that impetuous woman,” said Sorrento, before going after her.
Kenyon had felt terror rip through him as the alligator plunged below the surface, turned topsy-turvy, spinning and going for the bottom while holding on to Mrs. Swantor, a little of her coat still extended from its jaws. Kenyon's own ability to hold on became a question of losing either the gun or his bone cutter, something he couldn't allow. So he'd lost the gun in the struggle. In the end, it had been a futile attempt when the alligator dove into the depths, dragging Mrs. Swantor with it.
He imagined her brain deep inside its gullet on its way to the stomach, and awaiting digestion.
He cursed those chasing him; he'd had to give up the fight when they appeared. He had swum away, trying to keep the bone cutter from taking on any more water than it already had.
He tried to catch his breath as he swam, hearing the authorities in the distance. He quietly made for the bank, disorientated and wondering where he was in relation to the house and the boat dock.
Then he saw the gator coming for him, weakened but coming on, its eyes filled with an eternity, its mouth still filled with small parts of Mrs. Swantor's raincoat.
Horrified now, Kenyon hurled the bone cutter ahead of him, hoping it would make shore, and then he swam faster and noisier in the same direction. The creature was right on his heels, snapping and trying to grab hold of Kenyon.
Kenyon had weakened it considerably with the damage he'd done the monster's head, yet it came on like a demonic force. Kenyon now pulled himself to land, and tugging at the exposed roots of trees, he threw himself onshore, tearing at the earth and pulling himself as far from the bank as he could. When he looked back, he saw the thing had somehow climbed ashore as well.
“ Fuck, the damn thing's fixated on you, Phillip,” Grant reasoned. “Something in it has to have Phillip-to feed on Phillip's cosmic mind.”
But Grant didn't want to die, not like this. He clawed his way farther along, mustered his strength and got to his feet. He ran.
Having heard Kenyon's struggle from the water and the thrashing alligator, Jessica positioned herself as close to the battle as possible. She had grabbed a vine in the underbrush where she saw Kenyon attempting to escape the alligator, and she pulled the sturdy vine taut just as Kenyon raced toward her, unaware of her presence. Jessica had waited for the exact moment to rip at the hanging vine that cut across Kenyon's path. The vine stiffened at an angle, cutting him viciously across the face.
This sent him down on his back, a bruise across his forehead like one of the lines he'd so often drawn on his prey.
Seeing Kenyon immobilized, the alligator now took one last, powerful leap, and with its front feet firmly set, its bottom jaw scooped beneath Kenyon's skull and the massive upper jaw awaited its lower counterpart. The consequent crack, snap and pop through bone sounded like small gunfire at a distance, muffled as it was by the monster's closed jaws. The massive teeth met directly at Kenyon's forehead. Again the monster chomped, and Jessica heard the subsequent sound of crackling bone until she imagined the man's brain was spiked. She wondered if he were yet alive in this position.
Grant Kenyon, the man she had chased halfway across the continent now, writhed, his body stiffening and his every fiber feeling the pain, not unlike the pain that he had inflicted on his victims. He was still very much alive. As the gator thrashed, so did Kenyon's body.
Finally, Jessica listened to the horrible sound of bubbles and air escaping Kenyon in a long, painful agony of last rites.
She held out her firearm, preparing to put an end to it, but she questioned such an action. Kenyon had shown not the slightest mercy to his many victims, victims he presumed to rob of their souls while they suffered a live torment.
Her gun pointed at Kenyon, she saw that his body was still now, dead at last.
“ Now, you son of a bitch, you've got a taste of nature's bone cutter,” Jessica shouted, her eyes firmly held by the sight, when a final spasm of the man's body made the alligator chomp-swallow on him once again.
The beast then tried to pull Kenyon's dead weight back toward the water, tugging at its prey, and shaking its tail to move in reverse.
“ Jessica! We can't let that gator get away!” shouted Mike Sorrento from behind her. “We've got to recover both bodies, Kenyon's and Mrs. Swantor if we can.”
Jessica fully agreed. She both wanted to recover Mrs. Swantor's body from the bowels of the beast, and to hold on to Kenyon's body, so that no one could ever question whether the Skull-digger was killed this day or not. She wanted no ambiguity remaining.
Since she didn't want to lose the alligator a second time, Jessica aimed and fired into its brain. A second shot from Sorrento rang out, hitting the beast as well. Right as it made the riverbank, the creature expired like a balloon losing air, dead of wounds earlier inflicted by Kenyon and now their combined gunfire.
She turned to Sorrento, his gun smoking. How long had he been there? How much of her behavior he had witnessed, she did not know.
The rains had softened and the sky along with it, a hint of daybreak showing through in the east.
Mike Sorrento stepped before her, and he stared at the scene: All but Kenyon's head extended from the alligator's
mouth, his brain crushed inside the monstrous jaws. “Makes for a fitting metaphor for the man's life.”
“ Going to make one hell of a forensic photo, too,” she replied, standing over the scene.
“ Yeah… yeah, one hell of a shot. Good of you to put Kenyon out of his misery.”
“ I shot the gator, not Kenyon.”
“ No, I shot the gator,” he disagreed.
“ Then we both shot the thing.”
“ How long did Kenyon suffer?”
“ All of his life, I'd say.”
They stared for a moment at one another, each keeping silent. Jessica again wondered how much Mike Sorrento had seen, and how much his remarks were meant to elicit from her. In the distance, they heard Konrath calling out, trying to locate their position. I don't want anyone thinking we just sat here and let the alligator do our job for us,” she said.
“ I can't imagine anyone thinking that, Dr. Coran.”
“ I stopped him with a vine strung across his path. The moment he fell, the gator grabbed him. There was no pulling him to safety.”
“ I know… and you didn't have time to react. I saw the whole thing,” he concurred. “And if it becomes necessary, Jessica, I'll back you up.”
It wasn't lost on her that this was the first time he'd called her Jessica. Now that they shared a secret, he presumed them closer, she imagined.
Konrath came through the underbrush and stared at the scene. “Jesus,” he said. “Terrible way to go.”
“ No more so than his victims,” Sorrento replied.
Jessica knew that even dead, the gator's digestive juices would only continue to eat away at Lara Swantor's flesh. “Look around for that brain saw. It's got to be around here someplace.”
The two men did so, and Sorrento complained, “It's likely in the water, six feet under.”
“ No, here it is!” shouted Konrath holding it up.
“ Let me have it.” Jessica examined the machine and expertly started it. “Good, it's still functioning.”
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