The road would have been farther if he’d taken the trail they’d hacked through the palmettos and myrtle. Three miles or more. So this was better, cutting cross-country over wet ground. The killers wouldn’t follow him because they didn’t know their way around a swamp, and they would probably be afraid to get out of the truck, anyway.
Candy-livered city boys.
That’s what they were. Snot-nosed punks who believed that carrying a gun made them men. He had heard Perry and King whining about the big gator that had been crashing around, hissing in the distance. True, the animal had made noises Arlis had never heard a gator make before, but what else could it be? The damn thing had been several hundred yards away, way back in the woods, but it had scared the two killers so bad they’d about pissed their jeans hurrying to climb up on the truck—as if a few feet might save them if a full grown she-male gator came sniffing around.
Yankee spawn.
In the western sky, the same planets that Arlis had used many times to guide himself while fishing far offshore—Venus, Jupiter and Saturn—formed a curving line toward the horizon as white and bright as channel markers. He was headed in the right direction, there was no doubt about that. Question was, would the damaged blood vessels in his brain handle more strain?
Arlis coughed and touched fingertips to the side of his neck. His jugular vein was throbbing like a snare drum and the resonant pressure inside his skull was beginning to produce the first warning signs of a killer headache. He had suffered headaches often enough in recent weeks to recognize the signs. His head had been hurting, anyway, because of the beating that scum killer Perry had given him, but the pain coming into his head now was different. It was a sharp, accelerating pain, as if glass splinters were circulating through his bloodstream.
One more stroke, the doctor had told Arlis, and he’d spend the rest of his life in a bed with tubes stuck up him front and rear so that he wouldn’t mess himself. Like a vegetable, in other words, or some wounded animal, unable to speak or fend for himself.
A box in a cemetery was a better option, as far as he was concerned.
But not now, not yet. Not before he had found help and returned to rescue Ford. It didn’t matter if Ford was dead or alive, Arlis felt honor-bound to come back for the man. Just as he was honor bound to do his best later to help recover the bodies of the other two, Tomlinson and the boy.
It was his trip. The least he could do was return and help clean up the mess he had caused.
Arlis touched two fingers to his neck again, checking his pulse, and he thought, I’ll rest here for a while. Not long. It’s better than my brain exploding before I find help. I can’t screw this up. Not again.
In his lifetime, Arlis had failed one hell of a lot more often than he had succeeded. Maybe it was that way with most men, he didn’t know—but he doubted that was true. He had owned too many businesses that had gone bust. He had led too many fishing or hunting or salvage expeditions that had gone south for one reason or another. Never in his life, though, had he experienced so much tragedy in the short space of a day—and it was nobody’s fault but his own.
I’m a Jonah, he thought. I’ve always been bad luck. And things ain’t gonna change now that I’m near the end.
The truth of that thought flooded Arlis with weariness. A lifetime of failure was bad enough—but to take the lives of two, maybe three, trusting men with him, as he himself approached his last days, was almost too much to handle.
Quit flogging yourself, take a breather, Arlis told himself. Dying now, with no one around, would only make this nightmare of a day even worse.
As his breathing slowed, yet another hallucination moved through the saw grass, into his ears, because he heard a sudden shrill whistle and then a man’s voice calling again, the jumbled words telling him, “Hey, we’re over . . . Lost our . . . Hello? We need lights . . . Bones . . . something big. Shovel and a rope . . . !”
Arlis replied before he could catch himself. “Who’s there? Where are you?” He spoke softly and then turned his head to listen.
There was no answer.
Arlis felt like a fool. He had suspected it, but now he knew for certain. He was imagining the voices. It had happened to him before, and he felt a descending helplessness, like a prisoner in his own damaged skull.
The first time a blood vessel had burst in Arlis’s brain, something similar had happened. He’d been out fishing for trout in his little green Beck boat, dragging lures on bamboo poles, when he’d felt a searing electric pain inside his head.
Next thing Arlis remembered, he was belly down on the deck of the boat—the boat running free, idling in a tight circle—as a woman’s voice spoke to him, calling, “Arlis Futch, you old fool. Wake up! Wake up before you kill your boat and yourself on some damn oyster bar!”
That had been a hallucination, no question, because the voice he had heard was the voice of a woman who had been dead for several years. A pretty woman Arlis had once loved named Hannah Smith.
Hannah had fished for a living, as good as any man and better than most, and she’d had fine, heavy breasts and a good laugh. That woman had loved him, too, at least a little, even though she was young enough and pretty enough to have just about any man she wanted. But Hannah Smith had too much heart and body hunger to settle for just one man.
Hannah had loved men. She didn’t bother pretending it wasn’t true when she was alive, so Arlis didn’t bother to pretend after she was dead.
There was nothing wrong with that, Arlis had told himself when he and Hannah were alone together. He had forgiven her long ago—not that Hannah had asked for forgiveness—and he had forgiven most of the men, too, which included Marion Ford, who, Hannah didn’t mind saying, was maybe the man she had loved best of all.
Well . . . Arlis had almost forgiven Ford. Sharing Hannah’s bed was one thing, but for a man to win her love was another. Arlis still sometimes felt the narrowing constriction of fear and focus that was jealousy, if he let his mind linger on the subject. But that wasn’t often—and it would be far less now if Ford actually was dead.
Maybe he was. The gunshots Arlis had heard sounded solitary and irrevocable, like an execution.
Chances were, King and Perry had killed the man.
It would come as no surprise, if true. Ford was a good enough man by most ways of measuring, but he had always struck Arlis as being too bookish to be a dependable partner in a down-and-dirty fight. Ford had been okay in a tussle or two around the docks—Arlis had witnessed it—but Doc was an educated man, better with words and numbers than his fists. A smart-talking biologist would be no match for two low-life murderers who were desperate and on the run.
Marion Ford is dead. Arlis whispered the words to see how it felt to say them. If it was true, he would soon have to get used to saying it because almost everyone on the islands knew Doc Ford and liked him.
The words felt worse than he could have imagined because the next thought that came into Arlis’s mind was Doc’s dead, and I ran away and left him there to die alone!
Arlis could admit that he had failed many times over the years, but he had never before abandoned a friend in a tight spot. True, Ford had insisted that he escape if he had the chance—no mistaking the signals the man had given him, nor the words Doc had spoken.
Even so, to run away and allow a partner to be shot to death was a sorry damn thing to do, and Arlis felt the weariness in him begin to change to anger. Running away like a coward wasn’t how he wanted to be remembered, if anyone remembered him at all—which was unlikely—but he himself knew it. And God, of course, knew it, too.
The more he thought about it, the madder he got.
By God, I’ll make it out of here, and nothing’s going to stop me, Arlis thought. I’ll bring the law back to nail those Yankee punks and maybe get in a few shots of my own.
That was exactly what he would do.
Arlis began to feel a little better now that he was angry instead of sad and tired. He wasn’t running a
way. He was creating some distance so he could come back and take his revenge. This time, though, he would be carrying a revolver, not his old Winchester. If the cops got sloppy, if they didn’t search him, he would pull the thing and shoot down King and Perry both—maybe put a round in Perry’s belly first before finishing him off.
Arlis Futch knew he didn’t have long to live, anyway. A year at most, the doctors had told him.
If he got lucky and shot the two killers, the cops would lock him in jail and probably charge him with murder.
As Arlis leaned against the tree, his heart calming, he thought, So what?
Arlis picked up the tire iron. He saw that the truck was returning to the lake—the bastards had given up their search pretty damn fast, which was fine with him.
His mind lingered on the fantasy of Perry crawling around on the ground, possibly crying for mercy after being gut-shot, but then he told himself, Focus on what you’re doing before you screw this up, too.
Arlis decided that it was best to pace himself now. He would get to the asphalt road as quick as he could, but he wouldn’t push so hard that his head would explode. Maybe it was true that he’d lived a life of failure, but he by God wasn’t going to die a failure!
He pushed away from the cypress tree. After checking the whereabouts of the truck, he pulled the little light from his pocket and surveyed the route ahead. He found the moat at the edge of the cypress head where lilies floated thick and was surprised that he didn’t see the red reflection of at least one pair of gator eyes.
Very damn strange, he thought. There should be at least a few small gators around.
He had never visited a Florida lake at night in his life where he hadn’t seen at least a couple of gators—not this close to the Everglades, anyway.
Next, he painted the flashlight beyond a clump of saw grass to a high area where there were myrtle trees growing, Spanish bayonet plants and cactus and white stopper trees, too. He knew there were stoppers because he could smell their skunky odor, which was a good smell to him, a boyhood smell from his years camping.
Arlis explored with the flashlight, trying to pick out the best path to take. The high area was peaked with a hill. The hill was oddly shaped, like one of the old shell mounds that were common back on the Gulf Coast. The mounds had been built a couple thousand years ago, he had read, and had once been sided with horse conchs and whelks like foursided pyramids.
The hill couldn’t be an Indian mound, though. It was rock, not shell. Big chunks of limestone poked out of the brush where bayonet plants bristled with their needle spikes, the hillside too thick and rocky for a common man to bother climbing. It wasn’t high by Colorado standards—a state Arlis had once visited—but the hill was tall and sharp against the black sky, a chunk of high elevation for Florida.
From the looks of what lay ahead, the best way to bypass the hill was by angling to the south. Arlis didn’t like the idea at first. The route would take him uncomfortably close to the lake, but at least he would be able to keep the cypress head in view, which appeared to adjoin the limestone rise at the foot of the hill.
Arlis switched off the light, gave his eyes time to adjust and then began hiking southwest as his brain considered the hill’s unusual contour.
I wonder if that’s part of the property I bought. A chunk of high land like that would be a good place for a cabin someday.
Prior to buying the land, Arlis hadn’t walked the entire ten acres. The owner—a young weekend rancher who had inherited the property—said it wasn’t necessary, so why not leave the bushwhacking to the surveyors?
The owner was afraid of going near the lake, that was the problem. The man never came right out and said it plain, but he was.
That fact had struck Arlis as rather humorous. There wasn’t an animal in Florida dangerous enough to spook him off his own land and that included a couple of fourteen-foot gators that he had killed personally. He had used the Winchester to shoot one of the monsters behind the eye and he’d caught the other by using a whole chicken on a hook that he’d made himself out of a tarpon gaff.
Up until today, Arlis had believed that buying the acreage—mostly sight unseen—had been maybe the smartest thing he had ever done. He had believed it from the start. Because of the owner’s spineless attitude about the lake, Arlis didn’t feel bad at all about not telling the man he had found the two gold coins and a busted propeller that he was now convinced had come from Batista’s plane.
Doc had returned from the lake with yet another golden peso, hadn’t he? That was proof enough.
At least I was right about the plane, Arlis reminded himself. For fifty-some years, men looked for the thing, but it took me to find it.
Mixed with his fresh anger, thinking about Batista’s plane brought back some of his confidence. It caused him to feel stronger, too, and he decided to pick up the pace a little, not bothering to move quietly through the brush. What did it matter? He could no longer see the lights of his truck, which told him the murderers were busy doing something else.
Perry and King had given up and he was free. It was a mistake the bastards would pay for. Perry, especially.
Because Arlis was feeling more like his old self as he plowed through the brush, he was surprised when he began to hear voices again. He knew it was another damn hallucination, but it sure did sound like Tomlinson calling to him.
“Hey! Don’t you . . . we’re down here! Follow my . . . Hey! Go get help!”
The same jumbled words, but the voice was fainter now that Arlis was abreast of the limestone mound. Hearing the voice stopped him, though, he couldn’t help himself. He stood there listening to the buzz of cicadas and mosquitoes whining near his ear and then he heard a noise that wasn’t a man’s voice and probably wasn’t a hallucination.
Arlis turned and looked in the direction of the lake. It wasn’t a comfortable thing to do because one of his eyes was almost swollen shut. After a few seconds, though, he understood the source of the noise.
Something was following him.
It was an animal, not a man—Arlis had spent enough time in the woods to know the difference. The noise came from behind him, a steady, plodding sound of bushes being crushed by the weight of something dragging its body along the ground on four paws. It was the sound a bull gator would make pushing through saw grass.
Seconds after Arlis stopped, the animal stopped.
It’s gotta be a gator, he thought. What else could it be?
The man took several experimental steps and he heard the animal begin to move again. He stopped. A moment later, the animal stopped.
Arlis stood there thinking about that, then decided, Nope, that’s no gator. Can’t be a croc, either, not this far inland.
It was because of the way the animal was behaving. In all his years of hunting the swamps, Arlis had never come across a gator that was smart enough to match its own movements to the movement of its prey. When a gator got on the scent, it kept right on coming, even if you had a rifle handy and fired off a few rounds. A gator was about as sensitive as a bulldozer when it was on a feed.
Arlis took another few steps and he heard the animal begin to move again. Arlis stopped and again the animal stopped.
No, it wasn’t a gator. This thing was behaving more like a big cat. A panther, maybe.
Arlis felt a chilly, liquid sensation radiate through his lower spine. He’d never been afraid of panthers in his life. He’d had no reason to be. Back in the days when the Everglades was mostly free-range, wide open and wild, it was a fine place to hunt. People weren’t scared of animals. Animals were scared of people—and for good reason.
But Florida had changed in recent years and the Everglades had changed, too—along with the creatures that lived in the swamps.
Gators weren’t afraid of people anymore. They didn’t need to be, not since the state decided to put them under legal protection. Arlis had heard the same was true of panthers. Less than a year ago, he had talked to some hunters who’d had to sho
ot a panther that had been shadowing them near their camp off Fortymile Bend. It was hard for Arlis to believe, but the men weren’t drunks or braggarts and swore it was true. They’d had no choice, they said, because the damn thing just wouldn’t leave them alone. It was a big hungry male.
Behind Arlis, the field of saw grass and scattered trees darkened as a cloud sailed beneath the stars. He gripped the tire iron in his right hand and found the flashlight with his left. With the light, he probed the bushes. Thirty yards behind him, he spotted a thicket of wax myrtle trees that were leaning at an odd angle.
The animal was hunkered down there, he realized. It was something heavy, built low to the ground.
The worst thing he could do was attempt to run away. It was better to take the offensive in these situations—be the attacker man or beast—so Arlis began walking toward the thicket, walking faster and faster, as he waved the light ahead of him like a torch.
He yelled, “Hey! Get out of here!,” as he might to an aggressive dog, and it worked. The myrtle trees began to thrash as the animal retreated.
“I’ll be damned,” Arlis whispered as he stopped to watch. It wasn’t one animal, it was three—three lizard-looking creatures, maybe forty pounds each.
Man, they were fast.
Iguanas, Arlis thought. They were pet-store animals that had escaped—the port of Boca Grande was loaded with the things. Arlis wasn’t related to the famous Lee County Futches, but he knew the story. The iguanas had come over on boats from Central America, the pets of bored cargo captains.
As Arlis watched, the lizards disappeared into the shadows, but then they reappeared a minute later in the far distance. He could see three pairs of orange eyes watching him and he sensed that the lizards were no longer afraid. He felt that radiating chill in his lower spine again.
They’re pack hunters, he thought. They’re stalking me.
But these lizards were too small to attack a man . . . weren’t they?
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