Night Vision df-18

by Randy Wayne White

  Giving me a look of approval, Emily said to Tomlinson, “Sounds like your pal has made up his mind. Any objections to me coming here tomorrow after work? This is an interesting little marina you have. I bet you two have some stories.”

  I said, “I’m counting on it,” as Tomlinson took a square of paper from his breast pocket, unfolded it to reveal a pencil-thin joint.

  He said, “You’ve gotta love this guy, don’t you? The freaking earth could be wobbling off its axis, anarchy loosed upon the world. But good ol’ Doc will still be trying to do the right thing, in the most rational possible way, wanting the best for all concerned.”

  He held the joint so Emily could see it. “In the meantime, us human humans have time for a couple of hits. Care to join me outside for the pause that refreshes?”

  I was a little surprised that Emily nodded her head. Tomlinson was baiting me, that was apparent, so I ignored them both.

  As I went out the screen door, down the steps toward my shark pen, I was already busy deciding what equipment to take just in case I got lucky and got a lead on the missing girl. The odds were slim, but that was okay. The fact was, it would be a relief to be on the road alone. No more talking, no more debates.

  That feeling stayed with me, even after I had kissed Emily good-bye and I was bouncing down Tarpon Bay Road in my old pickup truck, a canvas backpack sitting square and heavy beside me, traffic sparse.

  In the bag was a Sig Sauer 9mm semiauto pistol, plus the pocketsized Kahr that is fast becoming my favorite handgun. There was an odd assortment of other gear that I usually carry only when outside the country: gloves, a black watch cap, a handheld GPS, a Randall attack/survival knife and a MUM night vision monocular mounted on a headband.

  Just for the hell of it, I had also included the tactical laser light, the Dazer. I hadn’t done enough testing to have confidence it would work on feeding sharks. But the company that made the thing, Laser Energetics, had invested years, and a lot of money, to prove that a small, blinding laser beam could disable a human attacker.

  Had Emily been along and gotten a peek into that bag, she might have been shocked.

  Or would she?

  It was something to think about as I drove across the causeway bridge, the Sanibel Lighthouse strobing to my right, a black fusion of water and stars to my left.

  Maybe not, I decided, judging from who her father was… or had once been. The man couldn’t have confided even in his daughter, but it was possible that Emily had been inquisitive as a girl and had done some snooping.

  As I passed beneath the tollboth onto a fast four-lane, I checked my watch. It was 10:05 p.m. on this Wednesday night. Tula had been under the steroid freak’s control for at least twelve hours.

  It was an unsettling fact.

  Unless somehow related, grown men kidnap young girls for only one reason. Once their sexual fantasy is satiated, they usually panic and choose murder as a way to obliterate their lesser crime. The only variable is how many hours before the kidnapper has had enough?

  One thing was certain: In twelve hours, the girl had already been victimized.

  But was she still alive?

  TWELVE

  Just beyond a sign that read Immokalee 22 miles, Harris Squires locked the gate to his hunting camp behind him, then banged the truck into four-wheel drive, telling himself, Shoot the girl in the back of the head. Stop thinking. Get it over with.

  After what he’d just heard on the radio, about cops finding human bones in the dead alligator’s belly, he had no choice but to do it.

  And he would.

  It was almost noon on Wednesday. The craziness of the previous night-the alligator, the flashing police lights-seemed like a month ago, which might have had something to do with the pint of Cuervo Gold Squires had killed on the ride. Mixed with Red Bull and a Snickers bar, he should have had a good buzz going. But instead his brain felt raw and skittish.

  Beneath his seat, in the hidden compartment, Squires had the. 357 Ruger Blackhawk revolver in a canvas bag that was also packed full of cash money.

  The gun was the long-barreled model, chrome with black grips. The cartridges were as thick as his pinkie finger. They were hollow points that would blow the back side out of a watermelon after neatly piercing its rind.

  An unsettling image of the girl’s head came into Squires’s mind of how her face would look after the bullet exited. Skin without a shell and lots of blood. But this wasn’t pretend, there was no going back. Fifi may have missed her chance to kill him, but that fat toad had found a way to totally screw up his life.

  Squires had felt dizzy as the radio announcer’s voice drilled the details through his skull. Then he’d felt physically sick, a nauseating panic deep in his chest that made him want to jump out of the truck and run screaming into the cypress shadows that lay ahead.

  The bones had to belong to the chula Frankie had killed. The one he had bundled into a garbage bag, weighting the body with wire and cement before dragging it to the lake. Squires kept telling himself that, even though he knew there was a chance that the gator had eaten a different dead girl months earlier. The Mexican girl from his sex dream-if the sex dream was real. Which could prove to cops that he was the murderer, not Frankie.

  If it had really happened.

  It was a dream, Squires told himself now, because that’s what he wanted to believe. I didn’t do anything wrong. Or I would remember dragging a body to Fifi’s pen. The Mexican girl probably ran off while I was asleep.

  That made Squires feel a little better. That goddamn Frankie was entirely to blame for this mess. Her with her love for kinky sex, the way she got off on using and abusing Mexican girls. It was some kind of sick power trip… or maybe Frankie’s way of punishing younger, prettier women for the saggy way her own body was aging.

  Squires realized that he had never allowed himself to acknowledge just how dangerous the woman was. If he did, then he’d have to admit to himself that the dead chula he had sunk at Red Citrus probably wasn’t the first girl Frankie had killed. There might be at least two others, maybe more.

  It was just a guess, Squires couldn’t prove it because, until they had trucked Fifi out of the hunting camp, Frankie had handled all her personal chula problems on her own.

  Frankie might be getting up there in years, but that woman was still big and strong as hell. She could have stuck a dead chula under each arm and carried the bodies down to Fifi’s pen, no problem.

  That’s why Harris Squires had stayed out of the woman’s way and didn’t ask questions. In his mind, if he ignored the shit Frankie did, it was like it never happened. Plus, on the rare night when a girl disappeared, he was always so screwed up on tequila, grass and crank that it all seemed blurry and unreal, anyway. Sort of like his sex fantasy dream…

  Until now. Everything in Squires’s life had changed as of last night, and this morning. Now he’d probably go to jail-even the electric chair-because of all the sick and nasty shit Frankie had done.

  Tula had been listening to the radio, too, and paid close attention to how the giant man beside her reacted. She saw Squires’s face mottle, then go pale. It was a rancid color, like the faces of sunbaked corpses she had seen on village streets as a child. That caused her to think of her father, the way he had been murdered, and Tula had placed her hand on the giant’s hand, her first instinct a desire to comfort Squires rather than abandon him to the misery of his own fear.

  Tula had felt real fear before. Not the common everyday sort that everyone feels but the variety of fear that sweeps people over the abyss, then sucks them downward. It was while sitting in a tree near the convent, reliving her father’s death, that she had experienced a wave of panic so dark that Tula felt as if her heart might explode. Immersed in the memory of what she had witnessed, of what she had lost, it was then, her brain numb with fear, that Tula heard the Maiden’s voice for the first time.

  That moment had changed everything.

  No matter what happened to Tula in the fut
ure, the girl felt a serene confidence that fear of that magnitude could never overwhelm her again. The scars from that night were like armor. Thanks to the Maiden, Tula believed she was now immune.

  “You should breathe into your belly,” she had told Squires as he switched off the radio. “It sometimes helps.”

  After studying the man’s face for a moment, she had added, “God is with you if you need Him. Ask and He’ll come into your heart. The goodness that was in you as a child is still alive inside you. Just ask God and He’ll help you.”

  When the girl touched him, Squires had yanked his hand away, drawing it back to slap Tula, but something stopped him.

  “Just shut your damn mouth-” he said, biting off the sentence. “Don’t you say another word to me. Understand? Not another damn word or you’ll be sorry!”

  Squires found the girl’s calm demeanor infuriating, and he almost did slap her when she replied, “There is no sin so terrible that God won’t forgive you. Two nights ago, when I watched you at the lake, I knew what was in the bag that you put into the water. I knew it was the body of a dead person. But, even so, I prayed for you.”

  Squires could barely speak, he was so incredulous, but managed to ask, “You admit that you saw me?”

  “Of course,” Tula replied, and then repeated a familiar phrase: “I would rather die than to do something I know to be a sin. I will never lie to you. It’s an oath I have made to… to someone important. On the radio, the man said the bones they found were probably from a woman’s hand. Because of the ring she wore. Why would you murder a young woman?”

  Squires couldn’t believe what he was hearing. She would rather die than tell a lie? Jesus Christ, the girl was begging for it.

  “I didn’t kill her!” Squires yelled, leaning toward Tula. “You hear me? I didn’t goddamn kill her! All I did was get rid of the body! So why did you have to be there, snooping around?”

  Tula said to him calmly, “Why do you use such terrible words-taking God’s name in vain? That’s a sin. I won’t listen to you anymore if you use profanity.”

  Squires pushed his face toward the girl, his eyes glassy as he bellowed, “Kiss my goddamn ass! Do you realize what this means, you idiot? Why’d you have to be there watching? Now I got no goddamn choice! Do you even understand what I’m telling you?”

  As Tula began to answer, the man drew his hand back again to slap her and roared, “I’m warning you for the last time! Shut your mouth!”

  Tula could see that Squires was crazy with anger, and she sensed that he was on the brink of an emotional explosion. The man appeared near tears.

  When she tried to comfort Squires, though, by patting his knee, it only caused him to moan in frustration, then swear at her, using a word Tula had never heard before but she assumed was profane.

  By then, they were at the gate.

  Now Squires was wrestling the truck over a rutted trail that tracked for a half mile through pine flats, cypress and myrtle to where an RV and his steroid cookshack were anchored with hurricane stakes, the building hidden beneath trees near a cypress pond that looked cool and inviting to Tula.

  Focusing on the cypress trees helped keep Tula from weeping- that’s how badly she felt for the man. She was also beginning to feel frightened for herself. During the hours since they had left the trailer park, the Maiden had not come into Tula’s head to speak with her or to calm her.

  Tula knew that the Maiden would not abandon her. There was no possibility of that. But where was the Girl of Lorraine now when Tula sensed so much danger?

  I must find a tree, Tula thought. If I can sit peacefully in a tree and breathe into my belly, the Maiden will return and tell me what I should do.

  Tula could think of only one reason why the Maiden would order her to travel with this giant, angry man who might also be a murderer. It was the Maiden’s way of providing Tula with a vehicle and a driver to go in search of her mother. Tula had became convinced of this when she saw the sign that read IMMOKALEE 22 MILES. But how could she make Squires understand that the Maiden wanted him to help with the search?

  Yes, Tula needed guidance. It seemed unlikely that the man would react kindly if she asked to be left alone in a tree. Not until he calmed down a little-then, perhaps, Tula could reason with him, and possibly even win him over as a friend.

  So instead of asking to be allowed to walk into the cypress grove, Tula said, “Why have we come here? You should eat some food, it’s no wonder your body is trembling. We haven’t eaten all morning. And I have to use the bathroom.”

  Squires had pulled into the shade of a tree near a medium-sized trailer, white with green trim, its paint fading. Unlike the trailers at Red Citrus, this trailer was also a motor vehicle, with tires jacked off the ground on blocks and a windshield covered with shiny aluminum material. There were also a couple of wooden structures that looked homemade, one of them with locked shutters and a heavy door.

  Squires switched off the engine and said to Tula, “Get out of the truck and shut up. I don’t want to hear nothing else out of you. Just do what I tell you to do. We’re going for a walk.”

  There was something strange about the man’s voice now. It was a flat monotone, all of the emotion gone out of it. Tula could smell the alcohol on his breath, but his eyes looked dead, not drunken.

  “Walk where?” she asked, trying to be conversational. “It’s very pretty here. There are trees down by the water that look good for climbing. And lots of birds-egrets with white feathers, I think. Do you see them up there?”

  The man’s face colored, but he got himself under control before saying, “I’m going to tell you one more time and I want you to listen. No more talking. You’ve got nothing to say that I want to hear, so shut up and follow me. That’s exactly where we’re going, to look at all the pretty birds.”

  “But I need a bathroom,” Tula insisted as she watched Squires lift the driver’s seat and then open what appeared to be a hatch in the floor. He removed a canvas bag that was heavy, judging from the way he handled it.

  Squires turned and began walking toward the cypress pond where Tula could see white birds suspended like flowers among the gray limbs, some on nests in the high branches.

  “Get moving,” he said without looking at the girl. “And I’m warning you-I don’t want to hear another goddamn word out of you.”

  Tula got out of the truck and realized that her legs were shaking. Staying calm when the man was angry had not been easy, but this different voice, so flat and dead, was scaring her. She walked around the back of the truck, wondering if she should risk telling the man that her bladder was so full that she feared wetting herself. But Tula stopped after only a few words when her voice broke, afraid that she would start crying.

  The Maiden had never cried, even when tortured by her tormentors. Even as flames had consumed her, the brave saint had not wept, but, instead, had called out the name of her Savior.

  “Jesus,” Tula whispered now, her right hand clutching her amulets, as she followed Squires toward the trees. “Please protect and keep me, Jesus,” she said in Mayan, and continued repeating the phrase as they walked along the edge of a pond that was cooled by cypress shadows and moss. The giant kept walking, far into the tree shadows, so far that Tula’s abdomen began to cramp because of the pressure in her bladder.

  Finally, Squires stopped beside a tree at the edge of the pond, where water black as oil was flecked with leaves, white-feather down and long-legged insects that skated on the surface beneath cooing birds. For a time, the man stood with his back to her, and Tula realized that he was taking something from the canvas bag.

  “Turn around and look at the water,” Squires said to her in the same flat dead voice. “Do it now.”

  “Can I please go to the bathroom first?” Tula asked the man, frightened but also angry at herself because tears had begun streaming down her face.

  Squires was looking over his shoulder at her. “No. Just do what I tell you to do. This won’t take long. T
urn your back to me and look at the water. Hurry up.”

  Tula could see that Squires had something in his hand. She got a look at it when she pivoted toward the pond.

  It was a large gun, silver with chrome.

  Tula had seen many guns during the fighting in the mountains, but she had never seen a gun so shiny before. The metal was hypnotic, it was so bright, which scared her.

  Tula’s chest shuddered, and she couldn’t help herself. Urine dribbled down her leg as she began crying, but silently, keeping her weakness to herself as she sensed the giant walk up behind her, the gun in his hand that was soon a silver reflection on the black water, the man on the surface huge, the size of a tree.

  “Get down on your knees, child,” said a voice in Tula’s head, and Tula obeyed instantly, overwhelmed with relief, because it wasn’t a man’s voice. It was the Maiden. The Maiden had returned to her in her moment of need, and Tula knew everything would be okay now.

  Get down on your knees, the Maiden counseled, and pray.

  Behind Tula, as she whispered a prayer, the giant stood in silence. A minute passed. Then two minutes, then three.

  In the water’s reflection, Tula could see that Squires was pointing the pistol only inches from the back of her head. Occasionally, he would lower it, but then he would raise the pistol again. But Tula was no longer frightened.

  Once again, she felt a serene immunity from fear. The amulets she clutched in her hand provided strength. What happened would happen. She was with God and she was content. The Maiden would not allow her to suffer pain, and, ultimately, Tula would be reunited with her mother, her father and family again, which was something the girl wanted more than anything she had ever wanted in her life.

  Be at peace, child. I am with you always, the Maiden said, speaking as softly as the muted light inside the girl’s head.

  For another minute, Tula waited, her head bowed. She felt so confident and content that she decided to help the man along by saying, “If this is what you must do, then I forgive you. If it is God’s will, then you are doing the right thing. Don’t be afraid.”