His mind lingered on the fantasy of Perry crawling around on the ground, possibly crying for mercy after being gut-shot, but then he told himself, Focus on what you’re doing before you screw this up, too.
Arlis decided that it was best to pace himself now. He would get to the asphalt road as quick as he could, but he wouldn’t push so hard that his head would explode. Maybe it was true that he’d lived a life of failure, but he by God wasn’t going to die a failure!
He pushed away from the cypress tree. After checking the whereabouts of the truck, he pulled the little light from his pocket and surveyed the route ahead. He found the moat at the edge of the cypress head where lilies floated thick and was surprised that he didn’t see the red reflection of at least one pair of gator eyes.
Very damn strange, he thought. There should be at least a few small gators around.
He had never visited a Florida lake at night in his life where he hadn’t seen at least a couple of gators—not this close to the Everglades, anyway.
Next, he painted the flashlight beyond a clump of saw grass to a high area where there were myrtle trees growing, Spanish bayonet plants and cactus and white stopper trees, too. He knew there were stoppers because he could smell their skunky odor, which was a good smell to him, a boyhood smell from his years camping.
Arlis explored with the flashlight, trying to pick out the best path to take. The high area was peaked with a hill. The hill was oddly shaped, like one of the old shell mounds that were common back on the Gulf Coast. The mounds had been built a couple thousand years ago, he had read, and had once been sided with horse conchs and whelks like foursided pyramids.
The hill couldn’t be an Indian mound, though. It was rock, not shell. Big chunks of limestone poked out of the brush where bayonet plants bristled with their needle spikes, the hillside too thick and rocky for a common man to bother climbing. It wasn’t high by Colorado standards—a state Arlis had once visited—but the hill was tall and sharp against the black sky, a chunk of high elevation for Florida.
From the looks of what lay ahead, the best way to bypass the hill was by angling to the south. Arlis didn’t like the idea at first. The route would take him uncomfortably close to the lake, but at least he would be able to keep the cypress head in view, which appeared to adjoin the limestone rise at the foot of the hill.
Arlis switched off the light, gave his eyes time to adjust and then began hiking southwest as his brain considered the hill’s unusual contour.
I wonder if that’s part of the property I bought. A chunk of high land like that would be a good place for a cabin someday.
Prior to buying the land, Arlis hadn’t walked the entire ten acres. The owner—a young weekend rancher who had inherited the property—said it wasn’t necessary, so why not leave the bushwhacking to the surveyors?
The owner was afraid of going near the lake, that was the problem. The man never came right out and said it plain, but he was.
That fact had struck Arlis as rather humorous. There wasn’t an animal in Florida dangerous enough to spook him off his own land and that included a couple of fourteen-foot gators that he had killed personally. He had used the Winchester to shoot one of the monsters behind the eye and he’d caught the other by using a whole chicken on a hook that he’d made himself out of a tarpon gaff.
Up until today, Arlis had believed that buying the acreage—mostly sight unseen—had been maybe the smartest thing he had ever done. He had believed it from the start. Because of the owner’s spineless attitude about the lake, Arlis didn’t feel bad at all about not telling the man he had found the two gold coins and a busted propeller that he was now convinced had come from Batista’s plane.
Doc had returned from the lake with yet another golden peso, hadn’t he? That was proof enough.
At least I was right about the plane, Arlis reminded himself. For fifty-some years, men looked for the thing, but it took me to find it.
Mixed with his fresh anger, thinking about Batista’s plane brought back some of his confidence. It caused him to feel stronger, too, and he decided to pick up the pace a little, not bothering to move quietly through the brush. What did it matter? He could no longer see the lights of his truck, which told him the murderers were busy doing something else.
Perry and King had given up and he was free. It was a mistake the bastards would pay for. Perry, especially.
Because Arlis was feeling more like his old self as he plowed through the brush, he was surprised when he began to hear voices again. He knew it was another damn hallucination, but it sure did sound like Tomlinson calling to him.
“Hey! Don’t you . . . we’re down here! Follow my . . . Hey! Go get help!”
The same jumbled words, but the voice was fainter now that Arlis was abreast of the limestone mound. Hearing the voice stopped him, though, he couldn’t help himself. He stood there listening to the buzz of cicadas and mosquitoes whining near his ear and then he heard a noise that wasn’t a man’s voice and probably wasn’t a hallucination.
Arlis turned and looked in the direction of the lake. It wasn’t a comfortable thing to do because one of his eyes was almost swollen shut. After a few seconds, though, he understood the source of the noise.
Something was following him.
It was an animal, not a man—Arlis had spent enough time in the woods to know the difference. The noise came from behind him, a steady, plodding sound of bushes being crushed by the weight of something dragging its body along the ground on four paws. It was the sound a bull gator would make pushing through saw grass.
Seconds after Arlis stopped, the animal stopped.
It’s gotta be a gator, he thought. What else could it be?
The man took several experimental steps and he heard the animal begin to move again. He stopped. A moment later, the animal stopped.
Arlis stood there thinking about that, then decided, Nope, that’s no gator. Can’t be a croc, either, not this far inland.
It was because of the way the animal was behaving. In all his years of hunting the swamps, Arlis had never come across a gator that was smart enough to match its own movements to the movement of its prey. When a gator got on the scent, it kept right on coming, even if you had a rifle handy and fired off a few rounds. A gator was about as sensitive as a bulldozer when it was on a feed.
Arlis took another few steps and he heard the animal begin to move again. Arlis stopped and again the animal stopped.
No, it wasn’t a gator. This thing was behaving more like a big cat. A panther, maybe.
Arlis felt a chilly, liquid sensation radiate through his lower spine. He’d never been afraid of panthers in his life. He’d had no reason to be. Back in the days when the Everglades was mostly free-range, wide open and wild, it was a fine place to hunt. People weren’t scared of animals. Animals were scared of people—and for good reason.
But Florida had changed in recent years and the Everglades had changed, too—along with the creatures that lived in the swamps.
Gators weren’t afraid of people anymore. They didn’t need to be, not since the state decided to put them under legal protection. Arlis had heard the same was true of panthers. Less than a year ago, he had talked to some hunters who’d had to shoot a panther that had been shadowing them near their camp off Fortymile Bend. It was hard for Arlis to believe, but the men weren’t drunks or braggarts and swore it was true. They’d had no choice, they said, because the damn thing just wouldn’t leave them alone. It was a big hungry male.