To his left, he heard something else moving and he spun around to look. It was a familiar sound: the subtle slosh of mud and waves as something big entered the water.
He swung the flashlight toward the cypress head, with its natural moat, and Arlis saw another set of glowing eyes. The eyes were the same bright color—orange. This animal was huge, though. Its eyes were spaced more than a foot apart, which told Arlis that the animal was at least thirteen feet long—the formula used by alligator hunters was a simple one.
The eyes stared back into the light, fixated, for an instant, then vanished in a swirl of silver froth before Arlis could get a good look.
Was it another iguana?
No, he thought. It couldn’t have been an iguana. The ugly little bastards didn’t grow that big. A croc had orange eyes, but this was too far inland, Arlis reminded himself, for it to be a saltwater croc. And this animal seemed to be spooked by bright light, which was unlike most crocs or gators in his experience.
Because of what Ford had told him—and other hunters, too—Arlis knew that many strange and exotic animals had escaped into the Glades—particularly after hurricanes. He himself had seen photos of a python that had busted open and died after killing and swallowing a six-foot gator. That damn snake had to have weighed three hundred pounds!
Did the orange eyes belong to a python? Arlis couldn’t remember ever seeing a snake’s eyes glow at night, but maybe some did. Or it could be an anaconda—those things lived in the water, he had read, and they grew to be thirty feet long.
Arlis tried to picture an anaconda with a head so big that its eyes were a foot apart, and the image settled it in his brain.
My God, he thought. It’s a big-ass damn snake!
Stunned, Arlis began walking fast toward the limestone mound, seeking higher ground, without even thinking about it. As he hurried, he barked, “Get away, stay away from me!,” hoping the tactic would work again.
From a black opening in the rocks, a voice too clear to be a hallucination shouted a faint reply. “Arlis? Arlis, are you up there?”
The old man felt dizzy—so many strange things were happening all at once. He stuttered, “Yeah, sure! I’m here!”
The voice came from beneath rocks and brush, Arlis realized, at the base of the mound. The voice said, “It’s us—me and Will-Joseph. Come closer, keep walking. I thought you’d gone off and left us!”
Arlis, beginning to recover, said in a loud voice, “Leaving a partner ain’t something I would do!,” which was now true. He would never again go off and leave a friend.
He hadn’t been hallucinating, which was a relief, and now Arlis felt better about himself than he had in a long time.
It was Tomlinson’s voice. There was no doubt about that now.
Tomlinson was alive—maybe the boy, too.
TWENTY-THREE
THE NIGHT WAS COOL, NOT COLD, BUT PERRY HAD used a towel to wick gasoline out of the generator and built a deadwood fire at the edge of the lake while he bickered with King about who was going into the water to help me with the jet dredge.
They were both afraid, although King was better at hiding it. And he had the fake leg injury to use as an excuse.
“Don’t blame me, blame yourself for trusting Jock-a-mo,” he had told Perry more than once. “I’d handle the hose if I could—hell, I’ve done it! But I can’t, so it’s up to you.”
They had left me facedown at the edge of the lake, hands and ankles tie-wrapped again, while they collected wood. It didn’t take long because they were in a hurry now that there was a chance that Arlis would hike to the dirt road and flag down help. They decided it would take the old man at least two hours to make it to the road, then another half hour to get to the highway, which left them with some time to help with the salvage work before they had to get in the truck and try to intercept him.
“We can give it an hour, but not a minute more,” Perry had finally agreed—one of the few things that he and King hadn’t argued about since Arlis had escaped.
I wasn’t so sure. Arlis was too smart to follow the trail we had cut. There was too much risk of King and Perry catching him, plus it would be shorter to hike cross-country, through swamp that was too soft for the truck.
Arlis Futch and I had had our differences over the years—the most serious having to do with a woman the old guy had had a crush on—but I didn’t doubt his courage or his skills as an Everglades hunter.
When the fire was going, the cons finally cut me loose, then tossed me the remains of an open MRE. I hadn’t eaten anything but the crackers they’d given me, so I ripped open a foil pouch and had vegetarian chili as the men continued bickering. I would need the energy before the night was done.
King and Perry were a painful pair to watch. If some scientist had melded prison genetics with random bad luck, the two could have served as a template. Backdropped by flames and sparks that soared starward, the men resembled absurd rodents, their silhouettes becoming more animated and their voices louder as they squabbled, until Perry finally said, “Okay, okay! I’ll get in the goddamn inner tube. But I known damn well you’re faking!”
“I wish that was true,” King replied, sounding suddenly pleased. “I can barely walk ’cause of that son of a bitch, which is all your fault and you know it.”
“Oh . . . bullshit,” Perry yelled. “But don’t think the cut’s gonna still be fifty-fifty because it’s not. The cut has to be sixty-forty if I’m doin’ extra work. What do you think about that, smart-ass?”
Unperturbed, King said, “Perry, you drive one hell of a hard bargain! I guess I got no choice, now, do I?” He didn’t bother to hide the sarcasm, and there was a smile in his tone when he turned toward me and lied, “We’re discussing our part of the take—not yours, of course.”
I didn’t bother answering. I was watching Perry, who had begun pacing. With the rifle angled over his shoulder, he resembled a toy soldier now. Maybe the man had run out of amphetamines or possibly he had recently swallowed a few more, because his voice was quivering when he spun toward King and screamed, “You always get your way, don’t you, you son of a bitch? Well, at least I won’t screw up the job like you did. But you’ve got to agree to one more thing before I do it. And you’re not gonna weasel out of this one.”
“I’d do anything I could to help you, you know that,” King replied. “Just name it.”
“If I go in that goddamn water, I get sixty percent, which we already agreed on, plus you’re going stand right there by the generator ready to haul me back to shore if I say the word. You promise?” He was talking about using the power cord as a towline.
King said, “Afraid something’s gonna swim up and bite you on the ass, Perry?”
“I mean it! Unless you promise, I ain’t going in that goddamn lake. If I say the word, you’d better by God haul me in quick.”
King had been limping unconvincingly—it was his way of teasing Perry with the truth—but now that he’d won the argument he stood on two straight legs and said, “You know you can trust me, old buddy. When have I ever let you down?”
I crumpled the aluminum pack and tossed it next to my gear. “Let’s go,” I said. “You two have wasted enough time.”
All I cared about was getting back to the tunnel and finding Will Chaser and Tomlinson. I no longer had Arlis to worry about, which was freeing. When I was out of bottom time, whether I had found Tomlinson and the kid or not, I would surface quietly and then drown the man on the inner tube—Perry, apparently. If King tried to shoot me, I would submerge and crawl out on the other side of the lake. After that, I would play it by instinct.
I buckled on my BC, checked my regulator, then picked up the night vision mask. I noticed that Perry was unbuckling his trousers. He wasn’t in a hurry, but he was going through with it, which surprised me.
“Leave your clothes on,” I told him. “The water will seem cold at first, but your clothes will add some insulation. You’ll warm up faster. Hey—there’s a jacket in the tru
ck. You should wear it.”
“A jacket?” Perry asked.
I said, “It’s mine. You’re welcome to use it.”
“You’re serious.”
I was tempted to say, Dead serious, but instead I told him, “You’ll need the insulation.”
“Like dressing for cold weather, huh?” Perry said. “I never heard of that working in water.” As I looked at him, I was struck by his expression. Illuminated by the fire, the man’s face was pale, his eyes wide. He resembled a frightened child. Maybe the children he had murdered had exhibited similar reactions.
I said, “We’re in this together, right?,” as I carried my fins and the extra gear into the water.
Nearby, King was starting the generator.
King had the rifle now, I noticed. The man had been right about Perry.
Perry wasn’t very smart.
Fifteen feet was only three strong strokes with my fins, but the world beneath the surface was so different that I might have traveled the distance between the earth and the moon. My vision narrowed, and isolation stripped away the filters from my senses. Hearing became a survival tool.
Because of that, I froze momentarily when I heard what by now was a familiar sound: the distant thump and slap of something big breaching the water’s surface. I had been arranging my gear next to the lake bottom’s most recognizable feature—the prehistoric tusk, near where the buoy was tied. My head swiveled as I searched for the source.
It was King again, I decided. He had probably found something else to push into the lake. Another one of his adolescent jokes, and I thought, It will be his last.
But what had he used? There weren’t any more handy truck wheels, so maybe he’d rolled a chunk of limestone into the lake. If the rock was big enough and if it hit me, it could mean the end of my search—possibly the end of me.
I spun toward shore. Through the green lens of the monocular, I focused on the jagged incline where the wheel had appeared but saw nothing. Next, I checked the surface fifteen feet above. I could see the silhouette of the inner tube, Perry’s legs dangling over the side, the contour of his fins gray against the emerald, star-speckled sky. I could picture the man shivering with fear and cold as he waited to play out the hose when I signaled him by giving a tug.
Perry wasn’t much of a swimmer, so he had seated himself in the big rubber doughnut like a kid at a water park and paddled out using the spare fins. For the last several minutes, he had been floating above me motionless, too scared to move.
Perry hadn’t caused the noise I’d heard, that was for sure. It was something else.
I considered using the underwater spotlight to check the area. The monocular was effective for a radius of about fifteen feet, but it would take the light’s thousand lumens of white LED to pierce the darkness of the lake basin.
Using the spotlight, though, was a bad idea, I decided. I could see nothing tumbling down the incline toward me, and a flashlight would only screw up my night vision—yet I still felt uneasy.
I told myself to ignore the lingering paranoia I’d experienced earlier. Even so, my nagging inner voice repeated the same ancient questions: Was something out there, watching? Maybe a predator had sensed my vibrations, my body heat. Was something swimming my way?
I remembered the fear in King’s voice when he’d said, I just saw something go in the water. It was fucking huge, man!
His fear was real. He had seen something—but it was also true that King and Perry were easily frightened by the sounds of a Florida swamp at night. To King, a five-foot alligator would appear huge—or a monitor lizard.
I clipped the light to my BC and turned my attention to the jury-rigged jet dredge. The brass nozzle was gone, as well as the trigger, so I could no longer control the flow of water.
That was Perry’s job.
After taking a last look around, I signaled the man by tugging three times on the hose. Above me, I watched the inner tube rock as Perry stirred—and then I saw something that convinced me that King was still taunting us with his absurd tricks. I saw a spinning bright light appear in the sky—a meteorite, I thought at first. But the light tumbled downward, then slapped the water next to the inner tube, creating a shower of sparks.
King had pulled a chunk of burning wood from the fire, I realized, and thrown it at Perry.
Idiot.
The man reminded me of a spoiled child who got nastier and nastier if he wasn’t the center of attention. I imagined the two cons shouting at each other, exchanging threats—wasting time again—so I repeated my signal to Perry by jerking on the hose.
A moment later, Perry recovered enough to provide me a descending coil of slack. Soon, he opened the flow valve, and the hose jolted in my hand, writhing like a snake. I waited until I had the thing under control, then swam to the mound of sand that now covered the mouth of the karst vent.
King. I had never met anyone I had disliked so intensely, so quickly. For now, the best way to deal with the man was to ignore him.
I focused on my work.
The dredge had lost a lot of its pressure, but the jet was still powerful enough to peel away layers of soft bottom as I searched for the tunnel. Around me, as I probed with the hose, sand and silt exploded, forming a cloud as dense as smoke. Visibility dropped from excellent to zero. Soon, I had to work by feel.
With my left hand, I found what I hoped was the upper lip of the tunnel. I used my weight to burrow downward, the hiss of water meshing with the bell-sound exhaust of my own regulator as I excavated.
Because I was operating blindly, my fingers became adept at identifying chunks of limestone or fossilized shell. I removed the debris mechanically, tossing it aside. Five times, though, my fingers also found the slick, dense weight of coins. They were unexpected, but finding them provided me no pleasure. I slipped them one by one into the pocket of my BC. Before I surfaced, I would hide them with the others that were still in the mesh pocket inside my wet suit.
I kept an eye on the time—not an easy thing to do, but I could see the orange numerals if I held my watch against the faceplate of my mask. I had clicked the trigger of the Chronofighter just before submerging, so I knew exactly how many minutes had passed.
It took me five minutes of digging to confirm that I had indeed found the karst opening. Ten minutes later, the opening was only slightly wider than my shoulders, but that was good enough. I tugged on the hose again, a series of two sharp pulls, which was Perry’s signal to close the valve.
He didn’t respond immediately, and I thought, Now what?
After several more attempts, though, I felt a couple of tentative tugs in reply. Moments later, the hose went limp. I pushed the coils aside. Because visibility was so bad, I kept my left arm anchored to the tunnel’s entrance and waited for the siphoning current to clear the water.
It was strange to kneel there, underwater, anchored to a rock, my visual world reduced to a random swirl of sand granules that banged against my faceplate. Above me, below me and on every side, there was a void of sensory data that caused a dizzying interchange between my eyes and brain as they struggled to extract form from the murk.
I had switched off the monocular soon after starting the jet dredge—there was nothing to see, so why waste the battery? Now, though, I clicked the switch downward, which powered the monocular but not the built-in infrared light. The darkness that encircled me was transformed into a boiling green cauldron of silt.
My arm still anchored in the tunnel, I did a slow three-sixty. Soon, I could see my watch if I held it a foot from my face, which told me visibility was improving. A minute later, I could see the vague outline of my own fins.
I looked toward the surface and told myself to relax until the water had cleared. As it did, I expected to see the familiar silhouette of the inner tube and Perry’s dangling fins. Instead, I saw something that startled me. It was an animated darkness, the size of a small plane, off to my right. The thing was fast moving—and its shape and its behavior impossible to
assess.
I pulled my body close to the tunnel opening and watched as the thing drew nearer. It was an animal, I realized, an elongated crocodilian shadow snaking toward me and gaining speed. I decided it was an alligator—maybe the gator that King had seen entering the water earlier. It could be nothing else.
I was fumbling for the oversized spotlight to use as a shield when suddenly the animal slowed and turned. I couldn’t make out details. I could see only its massive silhouette. The shape was visible for a few seconds, but then it melted into the gloom.
I was so surprised that I had stopped breathing. I drew three fast breaths as my brain replayed what had just happened. The animal had been descending, moving from my right to my left like a shark banking downward for an attack. Then it had disappeared. Why—and where?
I stood, with my fins on the bottom, and gave it a few seconds, then I leaned over the tunnel’s opening, straining to see.
Nothing.
I did another careful three-sixty, silt swirling before my eyes, and I soon began to wonder if I had imagined the damn thing. I’ve seen monster alligators in my life, but none the size of the thing that had just buzzed me. And the shape didn’t seem quite right, either.
So . . . perhaps I had been wrong. Maybe a plane had swooped in low, throwing a shadow, as it checked on the lakeside fire. Or possibly I’d seen a school of baitfish, moving past me in a dense cloud. In zero visibility, the human brain will scan randomly like a frozen computer, attempting to impose form on chaos.
I comforted myself with similar reassuring explanations, but I didn’t believe any of them. I had seen something. It was an animal. A reptile of some type or possibly an oversized alligator gar—a freshwater fish that grows to three hundred pounds. The thing had been descending toward me, swimming fast, but then it had veered away.
Why?
Once again, I recalled the fear in King’s voice when he’d said that he’d just seen something huge slide into the water. That suggested that it was a gator, not a fish. A big gator was a threat I had to take seriously.
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