Night Vision

by Randy Wayne White

  Soon they were on the road again, but in an older truck with huge tires that smelled of dogs and beer and the tequila the man was nipping at. His hunting buggy, Squires called the vehicle, which had an even louder engine than the truck they had left behind hidden in his mother’s garage.

  Tula knew that Squires was lying about taking her to the hospital to see Carlson. But what she had told the giant was true. Even though the man had forced her into the truck—leaving her few possessions behind at the trailer park—she wasn’t going to attempt to escape. Not unless the Maiden ordered her to.

  The handcuffs were heavy on her wrists, though. And Tula felt vulnerable, sitting on the floor with her hands bound, unable to see out the window. The man was a fast driver, weaving through morning traffic, braking hard for red lights. Or maybe it just felt as if they were going fast because she was on the floor and Squires had the windows open, the roar of the truck’s mufflers loud in Tula’s ears.

  This was even more frightening than climbing onto the top of a freight train, riding exposed to wind and rain through the mountains of Mexico. On the train, at least, Tula had been able to watch for dangers ahead.

  But not here, riding on the floor. She was unaccustomed to this kind of speed and she feared a collision. Tula imagined impact, then being trapped, unable to use her hands, especially if there was fire.

  Fire terrified the girl. She had watched her father die in flames, smelled his clothes burning, heard his screams, and the vision still haunted her.

  Even the Maiden had feared fire. In the little book Tula had left back in the trailer were Jehanne’s own words:

  Sooner would I have my head cut off seven times than to suffer the woeful death of fire . . .

  Tula bowed her head and began to pray, speaking in English loudly enough to be sure that the giant landlord heard her, hoping to irritate the man into action.

  “Dear Lord my God, I ask in Jesus’ name all blessings on this man who is driving too fast and drinking liquor at the same time. I ask that he look into his heart and understand that he’s scaring me, the way he’s got my hands locked. Even though the police might stop us at any time and arrest him and take him to jail! Make him know I am not going to run away because I am his friend. And a friend does not leave a friend . . .”

  The girl went on and on like that.

  The louder the girl prayed, the bigger the gulps Squires took from the tequila bottle. After a while, even liquor didn’t help, and Squires couldn’t stand it anymore. He glanced down at Tula, then turned on the radio, wanting to drown out her voice. It was AC/ DC doing “Black Ice,” but it only caused the girl to pray louder.

  Shit. The little brat was maddening.

  Squires found all her talk about God disturbing, an upset he felt in his belly. Truth was, he didn’t want the girl to talk at all. Even if he didn’t make his fantasy come true by raping her, he still had to kill her when they got to the hunting camp—what choice did he have? And the more she talked, the more girlish and human she seemed, which Squires didn’t like.

  It irked him that she had brought up the gator attack to make him feel guilty. She was just making it harder for him, using guilt like a weapon, which is the same thing that Frankie and his mother did on a daily basis.

  The realization that this little girl was no different provided Squires with a sudden, sweet burst of anger that immediately made him feel better about driving her to the hunting camp, where he was going to get her drunk, get her clothes off and have some fun.

  “Why can’t you just sit there and shut up,” he said to the girl as he screwed the top back on the bottle. “Do you want to see your drunken friend, Carlson, or not? I’m trying to do you a favor! So instead of whining about your wrists and asking God for a bunch of stupid favors, you should be thanking me for going out of my way to help you.”

  “But what will the policemen say if they stop us and see what you’ve done to me?” the girl replied, sounding more like an adult than a girl. “Or if we get in a wreck and the ambulance comes? They’ll see that you’ve handcuffed me and take you to jail. How will God be able to help you in jail?”

  Squires said it aloud this time—“Shit!”—as he turned hard onto a shell road, then parked behind some trees in a chunk of undeveloped pasture, where he removed the girl’s handcuffs.

  It was probably a smart thing to do, because it was midmorning now, he had to pee, and if the girl was going to try to run an empty pasture was better than a 7-Eleven or some other place where strangers could see.

  But the girl didn’t run. When Squires returned to the truck, he yanked Tula up onto the seat beside him, and said to her, “There! Happy now? You got no more excuses for whining.”

  It didn’t shut her up, though.

  “You should wear your seat belt,” the girl reminded him when they were on the road again. “God cares about you. You keep forgetting. And if you got hurt in a crash, what would happen to me? I have no money and no extra clothes.”

  “Do you ever think about anyone else but yourself?” Squires snapped.

  A few seconds later, he said, “God cares?” and managed to laugh, although it wasn’t easy. The suggestion that anyone cared about him was idiotic. His head ached from too much tequila, last night and already this morning. And Frankie was pissed at him—yet again. Someone must have called her from the RV park last night when the cops arrived because the woman had left five messages on his cell between ten and two a.m. The last message was a rant so profane that Squires had deleted it before getting to the end.

  “I ask you to do one simple thing and you completely fucked it up—as usual,” Frankie’s message had begun, and then it got nasty from there.

  Well ... that was enough of Frankie’s bullying ways, as far as Squires was concerned. He had had it up to here with the woman’s bullshit. That’s why before leaving Red Citrus he had cleaned out all the important stuff from their double-wide just on the chance he could summon the nerve to leave and never see that bitch again.

  The important stuff included bags of veterinarian-grade pills and powder that were in the locked toolbox in the bed of his hunting truck. And also about sixty thousand cash from steroid sales, which was in a canvas bag bundled with rubber bands along with the Ruger revolver. The whole business was under the driver’s seat, safely inside a hidden compartment that he had made himself using hinges and a cutting torch.

  Frankie was mad now? Christ. The woman would go absolutely apeshit when she realized the money was missing.

  Squires was also worried about Laziro Victorino, the badass Mexican with the box cutter and teardrop tattoo under his eye. If cops found a piece of a woman’s body inside an alligator from Red Citrus, the V-man would know instantly it was one of his prostitutes and he was going to be pissed. Someone would have to pay, because that’s the way it worked with the Mexican gangs.

  You kill one of them, they killed two of you. That’s why Victorino made snuff films. To remind people.

  First person the V-man would suspect was him and Frankie because everyone knew they had a thing for videoing Mexican girls, sometimes as many as three at a time. They were videos that Frankie posted on her porn website but also sold to Victorino’s gangbangers, which was another way she made money when she wasn’t dealing gear. Not that Squires and Frankie ever appeared on camera. No, the videos were for profit but also a way for Frankie to have fun behind the scenes.

  Mostly, though, Squires was worried about the dead alligator. What would cops find in her belly when they cut the thing open? That would probably happen this morning, from what he had overheard the Wildlife cops saying. That reminded Squires to switch the radio from AC/DC to a news station.

  In Florida, a dead alligator that had eaten a girl would be big news.

  Even with the radio loud, it was hard to think his problems through. It was because the weird little Bible freak never shut up. She asked questions about the truck’s air-conditioning. And the CD player, then about his iPhone, which was plugged
into its cradle next to the gearshift. It was like the stupid kid had never been out in the world before.

  The girl also kept giving him updates from God.

  This God talk was getting old.

  “Think back to when you were a child,” she was telling Squires now as she sat upright beside him, looking at something near the gearshift—his iPhone, maybe. “Do you remember how safe you felt? Do you remember the love and goodness you felt? That was God’s presence inside you. And He is still there, so why do you fight him so?”

  They were on Corkscrew Road, driving east through bluffs of cypress trees, past orange groves and grazing cattle, toward Immokalee, the gate to his hunting camp only half an hour beyond that little tomato-packing town.

  Because of what the girl was saying, Squires’s mind slipped back to when he was young—he couldn’t help himself even though he tried—and he was surprised to realize that the noisy little brat was right.

  Truth was, he really had felt different as a child. He had felt safe and full of kindness, unless his witch of a mother was screaming at him, calling him a “worthless little bastard” or saying, “You’re even stupider than your faggot father!”

  It was strange how things had changed since he was a kid. Maybe because of the tequila, or maybe because of the guilt the girl had caused him to feel, the realization struck Squires as important. He took a swallow from the bottle and let his mind work on it until he thought, I’ll be goddamned. What the brat says is true.

  Somehow, the world and his life had become mean and dangerous and dirty.

  How? When had it happened?

  That was a complicated question that took some time. The man wrestled with the issue as he drove. Had it started when he’d first discovered tequila and weed? Up until then, he’d been kind of a quiet, shy kid.

  No ... no, that wasn’t the reason he felt as shitty as he did right now. His life had really taken a turn for the worse when he met Frankie. That was almost four years ago, him being twenty-two at the time, Frankie thirty-eight but still with a body on her. And the woman was a regular hellion when it came to games in bed.

  Sex—Frankie was addicted to it, and not plain old regular sex, either. The woman liked it rough, sometimes violent enough that Squires’s nose and lips would be bleeding when they were done—once even his dick, which was having problems enough of its own because of the way steroids affected it.

  The woman liked hurting her partners, especially if they were female.

  Yes, it was when he’d met Frankie that things had really begun to change. That’s when his life had switched from living a hard-assed guy’s life, hanging out with other bodybuilders, to living a life that was small and mean . . . yes, and dirty, too.

  It was strange thinking about stuff like that now while driving to his hunting camp, where, until that instant, Harris Squires had fully intended to punish this noisy little freak by raping her.

  But damn it. Now all this talk about God was deflating his enthusiasm, not to mention his dick. Worse, it was adding to his gloom. It threatened to bring back the withering guilt that kept welling up about accidentally murdering that Mexican woman.

  Trouble was, unlike with the Mexican woman, Squires had no choice about the girl. She was an eyewitness. She had to go.

  Because it made him mad thinking about what he had to do, he said to the little brat, “Do you have any idea how crazy you sound? You’re in the United States now, chula. In Florida, they’ll throw you in the loony bin for saying crazy crap like that.”

  Reaching for his iPhone for some reason, the girl replied, “Where are we going? I know you’re not taking me to the hospital. You can trust me, so why not tell me? It’s always better to tell the truth.”

  “Why, because God is watching us?” Squires laughed, pushing the girl’s hand away. The time on his iPhone, he noted, was 10:32 a.m. They still had to get through Immokalee, another hour of driving ahead of them.

  “If God really is watching,” Squires told her, sounding both angry and serious, “the dude had better perform one of his miracles pretty damn quick. Or it’s out of my hands, chula. Hear what I’m telling you?”

  Because of the caring, wounded expression that appeared on the girl’s face, Squires added, “No one can blame me. What happens next, I can’t control. And that is the truth.”

  NINE

  THE NEXT MORNING, I WAS UP BEFORE SUNRISE, 6:30 A.M., because I was supposed to meet the necropsy team at eight a.m. sharp. I wanted to get a quick workout in first, though.

  Lately, I had been nursing a sore rotator cuff, but was still doing PT twice a day, taking only an occasional Monday off. I knew I’d feel like crap if I didn’t get a sweat going and have a swim. When a man gets into his forties, he has two choices—invite the pain required to maintain his body or surrender himself to the indignity and pain of slow physical decomposition that, in my mind, would be worse than death.

  I wanted to make this one fast but tough.

  I punished myself with half an hour on a brutal little exercise machine called a VersaClimber. HIT—high-intensity training. Thirty seconds climbing the machine at sprinter’s speed—about a hundred feet per minute—then thirty seconds at a slower pace. Over and over, nonstop, after a five-minute warm-up.

  I couldn’t use the pull-up bar, so did a hundred sit-ups, a hundred push-ups, then jogged Tarpon Bay Road to the beach. The swim out to the NO WAKE buoys and back was painful, but it didn’t hurt as much as the mile-and-a-half run home.

  When I lumbered, huffing and puffing, down the shell road, Mack, who owns Dinkin’s Bay Marina, was having a meeting with Jeth, Nels and the other fishing guides. So I stuck around long enough to tell them about the dolphins we had seen in the mangroves—I knew they wouldn’t believe Tomlinson—then headed for the shower. Tomlinson himself was already on his way back to Red Citrus.

  An hour later, I was standing over the remains of the alligator I had killed. The thing was stretched out, belly-up, on a tarp beside dissecting trays, a lab scale, and an assembly of knives, jars and a single stainless-bladed saw.

  It was not something I felt good about, looking down at the dead gator. This inanimate mass only hours before had been a tribute to the genius of natural selection and the animal’s own survival skills. The rounds I’d fired had put an end to a life that had probably spanned sixty years.

  Emily Marston’s team consisted of herself, a sullen man who didn’t offer his name and a graduate student from Florida Gulf Coast University who was assigned to document the necropsy on video.

  The sullen man, I soon decided, had been romantically involved with the woman biologist, but the relationship had ended recently and unpleasantly.

  It wasn’t a guess and it wasn’t intuition.

  The situation was easily read in the tension between the two, the curt questions, the man’s surly tone and the woman’s defensive body language.

  Judging from his age, the man might have been one of Marston’s professors a few years back. In the field sciences, it’s not unusual for female students to bond with male teachers—ironic that the romantic habits of scientists often mimic the behavior of the animals they study, but it is true.

  Emily Marston certainly wasn’t icy to me. She was warm and deferential. The way her eyes sought to communicate with mine caused me to wonder if her invitation to the necropsy had been more than professional courtesy. We probably had a few mutual, peripheral friends, but we’d never met. I wondered why.

  “Dr. Ford, I’ve read so many of your papers—some of them a couple of times,” Marston had said, greeting me as I’d stepped from my truck. “I guess you’d call me ... well, a sort of fan. Except now you’ll just think I’m an even bigger nerd than I am.”

  She was a large woman, late twenties, with an angular Midwestern face that suggested the automotive crossroads of Michigan—part German with a touch of Pole and Irish, I guessed. She struck me as the librarian type: a woman who camouflaged her body beneath baggy, masculine clothing that on
ly served to emphasize a busty, long-legged femininity.

  Right away, I was interested in the woman physically. I couldn’t help myself. I prefer the closet beauties, the private, introspective types who share their physical gifts only with a few. But I also reminded myself that, by Dinkin’s Bay standards, I had been abstinent for a long, long time. And seducing women who are on the rebound from a relationship is a repugnant behavior employed only by the lowest form of predatory male.

  Even so, I noticed that incidental physical contact between us was more than occasional. It seemed accidental, though it seldom is. Shoulder bumps shoulder, elbow brushes breast. It is the oldest form of human cipher, the secret language of females and males, a language that no one acknowledges but every man and woman on earth employs and understands.

  Like now as I stood next to Marston, who had changed into rubber boots, gloves, safety goggles, coveralls and a heavy lab apron that she pretended to be having trouble tying.

  “Do you mind,” she asked, touching fingertips to my arm before turning her back to me.

  “Sure, happy to help,” I said, and tied the thing, aware of the nasty look her former lover was giving us.

  When I was done, I managed to make the situation worse by letting my hand linger on the woman’s shoulder as I told the little group, “This my first necropsy. For an alligator, anyway. You know Frank Mazzotti, the saltwater croc expert? I almost had the chance to watch him work, but I had to leave the country for some reason. I really appreciate the invitation.”

  “Well,” the woman replied, sounding a tad breathless, “it’s always nice to be the first at something in a person’s life. Paul”—she looked at the sullen man—“did you read his paper on filtering species in brackish water environments? It was in the Journal of Aquatic Sciences, wasn’t it, Dr. Ford? Really an excellent piece. Your writing style reminds me of the late Archie Carr, the turtle master. Formal, very orderly, but readable. No bullshit academic flourishes when clear, concise sentences will do the job.”

  I told the woman I wasn’t in Carr’s league and meant it. Then added, “Let’s make a deal. Call me Ford. Or just plain Doc—which is a nickname. It has nothing to do with what I do. Having a degree, I mean.”