“What?”
King repeated the lie.
“How the hell did that happen?” Perry was jogging toward us, using the flashlight to find King, then me.
King began limping, shaking his head as if in pain, but was still aiming the gun at me as he pretended to test his right leg. “Your girlfriend just tried to body-block me—that son of a bitch is heavy. I knocked him down, but he twisted the hell out of my knee. Goddamn it, Perry, thanks to you I can barely walk.”
I said, “He’s faking. Take a look and see if there’s any swelling—” But Perry cut me off, screaming, “Shut your goddamn mouth or I’ll shoot you myself!”
King suddenly became the peacemaker. “Take it easy, Per, not so quick. I don’t think he’ll try it again. And we want that gold, right?”
“Jesus,” Perry said, “I’m getting sick of this whole business. Maybe you were right. Maybe we should just take what we got and get the hell out of here.”
King cut in, “No, man, I was wrong. You were right. We make Jock-o here fetch us some more coins, then we leave.” He paused. “Later, if you decide to carve a piece out of Mr. Smart-ass’s hide, I won’t object. For now, though, let’s stick with your plan. But I don’t think it’s smart for me to try and tie up this moose without help. Take my pistol and keep the rifle on him. What do you think?”
A few minutes later, after I was tied, hands and ankles, Perry stormed off alone in the truck to search for Arlis. King waited until the truck lights were pointed away from the lake before he sidled up to me, paused and spit. I felt his spittle hot on my face. As I turned away, he kicked me hard in the ribs.
“Didn’t I tell you he was dumb as a rock?” King said, drawing his foot back to kick me again. “I hate to say I told you so, but—” He stopped in midsentence for some reason and didn’t follow through with his leg.
I couldn’t figure it out. I had twisted myself into a ball, trying to get my knees up into a fetal position, and lay there with muscles tensed until I realized that King was listening to something . . . or maybe looking at something across the lake.
“Do you see that?” he said, his tone serious.
I made a croaking noise when I tried to reply—he’d kicked me so hard that my diaphragm muscle was spasming. It took me a couple of tries to say, “If you kick me again, I’ll kill you.”
King was walking toward the pile of gear where he’d left the night vision mask, then pressed it to his face.
“It’s gone,” he said after several seconds. “It was right there, I saw it, but I don’t see it now.”
I gasped, “What are you talking about?”
His voice low, he replied, “I just saw something crawl out of the bushes and slide down into the water. It swam like a snake, but bigger. I mean a lot bigger.” He was silent for several seconds before adding, “The fucking thing was huge, man, the size of a damn canoe. It’s gone now, but I can still see the water moving. How big do alligators get?”
Because I was tied, with my face pressed hard against the ground, I couldn’t see anything but King’s silhouette and a horizon of trees and stars beyond. I said, “Did you hear what I just told you? If you kick me again, you’d better never untie me because I’ll kill you.”
King took another look through the mask, then did a slow circle as if whatever he had seen might sneak up and grab him from behind. He said softly, “If you go into that lake, Jock-a-mo, I don’t think you’ll ever get the chance.” He turned, and then he threw the mask at me again.
I couldn’t move. An edge of the monocular clipped my forehead, drawing blood.
TWENTY-TWO
ARLIS FUTCH, WHO HAD SURVIVED TWO MILD STROKES in recent months but had not told anyone including his closest friends, thought he might be suffering yet another aneurysm—the final nail in the coffin, perhaps—because he could hear voices calling to him and they seemed to be coming from beneath the ground.
He stopped and listened, his hands on his thighs, breathing heavily. His heart was pounding so loud in his ears that he thought he might still be hallucinating, when, once again, a voice called to him. But the words were difficult to decipher. “Doc . . . hey! We are . . . Arlis? Can . . . hear me? Down here!”
The voice was faint, softer than cypress leaves rustling in the wind. The words seemed to float out of the marsh, up through Futch’s feet, then into his head.
Was it Tomlinson’s voice?
That couldn’t be. Tomlinson and the boy were dead. Arlis feared that maybe Ford was dead now, too, after hearing two gunshots just minutes before. The voices couldn’t be real, which meant they were coming from inside his skull, not from the woods around him.
Arlis had brought along the only equipment close enough to grab before escaping into the swamp—the tire iron the two killers had used to fix the truck and a flashlight that Ford had slipped him when he’d left the bottles of water. Arlis dropped the iron on the ground, leaned his weight against a tree and checked the far shadows. He could see the lights of his truck angling through the tree canopy, but it didn’t sound as if the truck was getting any closer.
That was good. The two Yankee killers didn’t have the sense, apparently, to get out of the truck and try to track him on foot. Which meant they didn’t have a chance in hell of finding him—not a man who’d grown up in the Everglades and knew good places to hide, like the shadowed dome of a cypress head ringed by water—a natural moat that would spook most men but not him.
Arlis turned and confirmed that an island of cypress trees lay just beyond. The grove was encircled by water that was thick with lilies, the water so black that starlight floated on the surface like shards of ice. If he needed it, the island was handy.
That gave him a good feeling. The cathedral shape of a cypress head always did. It caused him to picture the cool, open space within, moss hanging from orchid-weighted trees, and usually there was a pond with white lilies, and monster bass sometimes, too. He had felt that way about cypress heads since he was a boy.
Arlis stood, but his legs were shaky, so he used the tree again for support. For the last ten minutes, he had been hiking as fast as he could manage through the backcountry, angling toward the asphalt road that by his calculations was due west on the other side of the swamp, less than two miles away as the crow flies.
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?