by Andrew Mayne
“How much scuba diving have you done out here?” I ask.
“Fair point. I forgot you’re the McPherson that doesn’t need to exaggerate. But that was dumb. Real dumb. What would you have done if the alligator came home?”
“What would you have done?” Hughes taunts me.
“Shut up,” I growl under my breath.
Kell raises his hand for us to stop and be quiet. His eyes are searching the ground for something. We remain steady like rocks but scan the area, trying to see what the tracker is seeing.
Hughes glances at me, then to a small trail in the grass less than a foot wide, directly ahead of us. Kell is looking into the distance for where the trail ends. He motions for us to stay put while he unslings his shotgun and takes small steps down the trail.
His lower body is lost in the grass, but we can see him aiming the shotgun toward the ground a few yards ahead of him. Kell moves a little farther, but slowly, so he doesn’t make a sound.
In the distance, thunder rumbles, but the only sound around us comes from frogs and birds.
Suddenly it’s interrupted by the noise of a shotgun blast. BANG!
Hughes and I both have our hands on our own guns, but Kell gestures for us to hold back. He steps forward, shotgun aimed in the grass, then stops and slings it over his back.
He reaches down and picks something up. A shiny, slick pattern of dark green and dark brown reflects the setting sunlight as Kell lifts the tail end of a python from the ground.
I assume it’s the back end of the snake, because it’s missing its head. The python—a Burmese python, specifically—is one of a hundred thousand of the invasive snakes that have been eating other animals and eggs and threatening the balance of the ecosystem out here.
“Grab the other end,” says Kell.
Hughes and I come to him and help pick the larger end up. The thing is huge. We’re each about four feet apart. It’s not super heavy, but it’s massively long.
“Sixteen feet?” asks Hughes.
“Fourteen or fifteen,” replies Kell. “Let’s move it back a little ways near the edge of the pond where we saw the mama alligator.”
“Great,” I reply. “We’re Uber Eats for alligators.”
“Will she eat it?” asks Hughes.
“Gators aren’t that picky. More importantly, I want her babies to get a taste for python,” says Kell.
“Ah, the circle of life,” I say. “I can’t wait to share this experience with my daughter.” One more horror story to tell her. I feel a twinge of guilt.
We place the snake in the grass upwind from the mama alligator. Say what you want about people, but how many other animals leave food out for other creatures to eat? Dead mice your cat won’t eat don’t count.
We leave the snake on the shore and walk back toward the grassy path.
Hughes glances over his shoulder at the giant snake. “You mean we don’t get to stay and watch it eat?”
“You want to stand between it and everything else that’s going to come see what’s for dinner?” asks Kell.
“Fair point.” Hughes catches up with us. “What’s the biggest one you’ve ever seen out here?”
“Officially or unofficially?”
“What’s the difference?”
“They used to be stricter about when and how you could kill pythons. Back then, we knew they were a threat and took matters into our own hands. That’s when some of the biggest ones were caught and killed, but nobody ran to the Sentinel or the Herald to tell them about it. They just had lots of snake meat for months.”
“Oh,” says Hughes. “So, what’s the unofficial record?”
“Some friends of my uncle say they caught a twenty-two-footer without a permit.”
“Twenty-two feet?” I reply. “That’s five feet longer than the record.”
“Do you believe them?” asks Hughes.
“Let me put it this way: Who do you think is the first to find the really big critters out here? Some eggheads from the university or hunters who come here outside of hunting season and go where the hobbyists don’t? They got all the giant ones and left the runts for everyone else.”
“Does that include alligators?” asks Hughes.
“My uncles say a trapper showed them a twenty-one-footer. They measured it themselves. He pulled it from a protected area. It supposedly weighed fifteen hundred pounds. I’ve heard about other big ones poached from state parks.”
“Yikes,” says Hughes.
“And the eight-hundred-pound eleven-footers all around us right now don’t bother you?” asks Kell.
“Another fair point,” replies Hughes.
The sun is beginning to sink below the horizon as we reach the foot of another pond.
Bubbles trickle up at the far end, telling us something is down there.
Kell comes to a stop. He takes a light from his pocket and attaches it to his hat. “What’s next, Boss Lady? We’re in the middle of your hell mouths.”
While there are a few standing trees, I also see several felled logs and withered stumps. I look across the horizon for anything that could serve as a landmark. All I see is swamp.
The sun finally sets, and the stars begin to fill the sky. Birds make their nighttime chirps, and small bats flap their wings overhead.
“Okay, lights out, everyone,” I call out.
Hughes and Kell flip theirs off, leaving us with the distant glow of the sun just beyond the horizon and the moon partially obscured by clouds.
We search the darkness for a sign of something out of the ordinary—a strange silhouette, a glow, anything.
I remember what my father taught me about orienting. Look for a large marker, then a small one. Find the mountain, then look for the valley, then the tree. Or in the treasure-hunting world, the breakers, the reef, then the cove.
We’re all deathly silent, trying to concentrate. The Everglades feels different now. The frogs and insects of the daytime have given way to the nocturnal shift, and their tune sounds different.
The wind whips at our clothes, and large things splash into the water in the distance, yet we all remain still. I keep waiting for Kell and Hughes to speak up and challenge my theory. I almost wish they would. But they don’t. They can feel it too. Something is different here. Sleazy Steve noticed this.
“There,” says Hughes, almost in a whisper. “Can you hear it?”
I turn my ear to the wind. There’s a distant melody. It doesn’t have a pattern, yet it’s pleasing . . .
“Wind chime,” says Kell. He points a finger in the direction that it’s coming from. We start to walk toward the sound; then I stop.
“Hold on. I think it’s a trap.”
“A wind-chime trap?” asks Hughes. “How does that work?”
“A siren song,” says Kell. “Calling you to shore but dashing you on the rocks.”
“Back in the old days, wreckers built fires that looked like false lighthouses to trick ships into crashing so they could salvage the cargo,” I explain.
“Okay,” says Hughes. He glances at the ground around him. “Speaking of traps, we’re surrounded by alligators and other dangerous creatures.”
“Not to mention animal traps that may have been placed to catch men,” adds Kell. “What now?”
I listen more closely to the chimes. Something is off. With the wind, it’s hard to know if that’s exactly the right direction. In fact, it almost sounds like it’s coming from two points.
Ah, that’s it.
“There are multiple wind chimes.”
“So which one is the right one?”
I take out my flashlight, the powerful one that could light up the moon if I had to, and slowly pan it across the area where the sound is coming from.
As it passes between one sound and the other, a brilliant show of sparkles ignites near the middle—my beam reflecting back at me in a dazzling array of colors.
“Holy cow,” says Hughes. “I think that’s the spot.”
“Maybe,
” I reply. “But let’s proceed carefully.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
ABYSS
Kell uses his cap light to illuminate the way toward the distant shimmer. Hughes and I keep our own lights on the ground and in the distance, respectively, making sure that we don’t step into an alligator hole.
Out here, they can just be a few feet across and look like a puddle. They help provide watering holes for other animals during dry spells, but they can also be a hazard if you’re not careful.
Every now and then my light catches a pair of glowing silver eyes in the distance as it strikes an alligator. They have incredible night vision and can see us before we see them. At one point, I spot as many as twelve sets watching us from all around.
Kell stops and points to his ear. There’s a guttural croak sounding in the distance. “That’s a male alligator making a mating call.”
“Do they do that at night?” asks Hughes.
“The deed or the call?”
Hughes shrugs.
“Do you want to tell him to stop?”
“Nah, I’ll let him carry on.”
“Spend much time around alligators?” asks Kell.
“Gators? No. Caimans and crocs, more than a little. But usually it was shoot first and ask questions later.”
“Shooting them?” asks Kell.
“Military related. Sometimes we needed water superiority in a place where crocodiles were used to having it.”
Kell shakes his head. “Saltwater crocodiles. You can have them. Nasty fellas. I prefer my alligators. They stick to the rules. For the most part.”
As we draw closer to the shimmering light, we can see the separation between the reflections and the outline of a withered, leafless tree.
“Looks like fishing lures,” says Kell, his keen eyes probing the dark.
We come to a pond about fifty feet across. The water ripples, sending splashes into the grass that lines the shore. Kell passes his light over the surface and lands on the snout of an alligator at the far end, not too far from the dead tree.
“Easy there, fella, we’re just friends passing through,” he says.
“Does that help?” asks Hughes.
“To be polite? It always helps.” Kell starts to move around the pond, toward the tree, keeping his light trained on the alligator.
“Hey, Kell,” I call out.
“Yeah?” he replies.
“Just one thing. I’m sure you thought of this, but if this pond is what I think it is, and that alligator is a local . . . uh . . .”
“Oh,” Kell says, coming to a stop. “He’s eaten human flesh.”
“Probably has a taste for it,” says Hughes. “But the dead kind.”
“Either he’s going to expect a treat from me or”—he points his light at my feet—“expect me to feed one of you to him.”
I can’t see his face behind the beam of light. Suddenly he begins to cackle.
“What’s so funny, Kell?” asks Hughes.
“What if I was your killer?” he asks, his face still hidden. Hughes’s hand slowly moves toward his gun belt.
“George Solar would drop you from a hundred yards back with his rifle,” I reply. “He’s been following us all the way here . . . just in case.”
Kell laughs again. “That would be a convincing bluff if I didn’t know how much George hated the swamp.” The light flashes back to the alligator, and we get a view of Kell’s profile as he faces away from us, studying the beast.
Hughes whispers to me, “He has no idea how close he came to getting dropped.”
I, too, was a breath away from taking aim, but I play it cool. “Give him some credit,” I whisper back. “If we weren’t all armed, it would be funny.”
“Get out!” yells Kell.
I turn right as he high-steps straight at the alligator and kicks the water near the beast. The gator snaps his head back, opens his massive mouth of nightmare teeth, and hisses at Kell.
Kell stands his ground and stomps again, slapping his stick against the shore. The gator jerks his head to the side and bites at the ground near where the stick hit. Kell taps him on the snout. The alligator slides onto shore and swats his tail in Kell’s direction, just missing him, then stomps his stubby legs and vanishes into the grass.
“Don’t try this at home, kids,” Kell tells us.
“First the snake, then us, and now him. Is there anyone else out here left for you to terrorize?” asks Hughes.
Kell looks up into the sky and catches a bat with his light beam. “I guess I could try to catch one of them.” He looks back at us, catching our faces in his light. “I figured we didn’t want the alligator at our ankles while we looked around.”
“Wise move.” I reach into my bag and pull out a roll of yellow crime-scene tape. “Hughes, grab one end. I want to mark out a path for us so we don’t stomp on anything important.”
Kell stares down at his feet. “I guess I should stand still until you get some photographs of the mud here and by the tree.”
“Good call,” I reply. I take out my camera and start photographing the path and the dirt. When I get to the tree the fishing lures are hanging from, I take photos from different angles, catching what might be a footprint. I put a ruler next to it for comparison.
Hughes uses his camera to do the same, then places yellow flags in the ground next to anything that might be a clue—mostly patches of dry mud where there might be tracks.
“What’s next?” asks Kell. “Do you get the crime-scene unit out here?”
“Not quite,” I reply. “We have to make sure there was a crime here. All we have so far is an art project.” I turn to the pond with my hands on my hips. “The real evidence is going to be in there.”
I set my bag down and pull out my mask and a thin bodysuit. It’s too deep to go in there with my waders. They’ll just fill up with water and weigh me down. I need to explore this pond underwater.
“Detective,” says Kell as he observes me stripping down to my T-shirt and shorts. “I don’t want to tell you your business, or interrupt a show, but may I suggest an easier and safer way to do this?”
“God, I wish you would,” says Hughes.
I give him a cross look. I’d call him lazy or afraid, but he’s neither. He just has more common sense than I do.
“Okay. What you got?” I ask Kell.
He pulls a pouch from his bag, drops it on the ground, and pulls out a rope with a huge, three-pronged hook on the end.
“Are you going to rappel down there?” asks Hughes.
“Alligator hook,” I reply.
“You can catch them on that?”
“You let them wrap themselves up and get tired,” says Kell. “Then you get close and use a bang stick to put them out of their misery.”
“We just used grenades and MP7s,” says Hughes.
“That doesn’t exactly sound humane,” replies Kell.
“Those crocodiles were all members of ISIS. My commander told me so.”
This trip’s drawing Hughes’s real personality to the surface. I can’t tell if he’s funny or a psycho—a term that could probably describe everyone here.
“The worst thing I ever saw was the bone crusher,” says Kell. “In theory it’s great. You have a huge steel pipe on your boat and just drop it on top of an alligator, crushing his skull. Only one time we used one and just hit some spot in front of his eyes, and the thing came to the surface and kept thrashing around in circles, sending waves so powerful the boat rocked. His tail hit two guys and sent them into the water. Shooting him didn’t do anything—he was already brain-dead. We had to back off and wait until he just stopped cold. Fun times.” He picks up his hook by the end and nods to me. “Okay to dredge?”
“It’s got to come up sometime,” I reply.
Kell throws the hook into the pond at one end and starts to pull it back. By the time it reaches his feet, the hook has amassed a clump of vegetation and mud.
“Hold on.” I take a tarp fro
m my bag and walk over to his side. “Let me spread this out, and we can dump that out on it.”
Kell lets the muck fall to the blue plastic. I slip on my gloves and start sorting through the dead grass and wet dirt. I don’t see anything of interest, although Nadine Baltimore might question that assessment.
Kell throws the hook out again and drags it toward us. He dumps the grass, mud, and roots onto the tarp, and I run my fingers through. “Nope.”
Kell lets the hook fall just a few inches from the last spot and pulls it in. I sort through this muck, starting to doubt myself. If this was a body-dumping ground, I’d think we’d find something.
I let the mud fall through my fingers. Hughes’s light falls on the tarp. “What’s that?”
I spread the mud evenly across the plastic like the world’s most disgusting cake frosting. A small metal disk reflects in the beam of his flashlight. I pull the wire attached to it from a clump of dirt and discover a small electronic device.
“It looks like a hearing aid,” says Kell.
More precisely, a cochlear implant, the kind that’s semipermanently attached to the skull.
Kell’s arms drop as I hold the device up in the light. I know they can feel what I’m feeling; this doesn’t belong here. This place feels wrong in the right way.
“Should I go again?” asks Kell in a somber voice.
“Yeah,” I say softly.
We all watch as the hook hits the water and sinks. He starts to pull the rope in. Suddenly it grows taut. Kell pulls, and the rope moves but remains taut.
“I think I caught something.” His voice is even quieter now. This is no longer a joke for him as he realizes what’s on the other end could have been alive once—alive and walking and talking. It could be a person.
He pulls again. “This feels odd.”
“Like bones?” asks Hughes.
“No. Like metal.”
Hughes and I lean in, trying to imagine how deep the pond could be. “Like car metal?” says Hughes.
“No. Not like that. Hold on.” Kell pulls, and again the rope moves while remaining taut.
“Need help?” asks Hughes.
Kell shakes his head. “Not yet. Just keep an eye out.”
We’re so deep in this mystery that we’ve forgotten we’re surrounded by thousands of meat-eating reptiles larger than ourselves. I flash my light around the pond, looking for our original alligator, but see no sign of him.
