At first, King thought that an alligator, maybe, was trying to crawl up onto the log, but then as he moved the light he realized that he was wrong. It wasn’t a log he was seeing and it wasn’t an alligator. It was a huge reptile of some type, with a snake-shaped head and glowing orange eyes. The thing resembled the monitor lizards he’d seen earlier, only this animal was about twenty times bigger.
King thought, Jesus Christ, that’s the thing I saw crawl into the lake, and he began to back away, still watching, because he couldn’t take his eyes off what was happening now.
He watched the creature’s head lift high above the water as its paws tried to find traction on the inner tube, but the tube squirted away when it tried to lift itself close enough to get to Perry. It swam after the inner tube, its tail stirring a smooth wake, and then the same thing happened. This time, Perry stopped clawing at the water long enough to squint into the beam of the flashlight and holler, “King, shoot the fucking thing, goddamn it! Shoot!”
King had the pistol in his hand, but now he slipped it into his pocket as he watched the creature pursue the inner tube. It reminded him of something he’d seen at a beach on Lake Michigan, a Labrador retriever swimming after a beach ball that was too big to get into its mouth.
King cupped one hand to his lips and yelled, “Get out and swim for it!,” hoping his partner would because that would mean the end of him and the end of one more pain-in-the-ass problem.
As he watched, King began to relax again, and he realized that he was smiling. It was sort of fun, as long as that big slimy bastard didn’t come after him, and it only got better when the animal tried something different, this time swimming so fast that its body skated halfway up onto the inner tube, where King could see Perry crouched low, with his hands up, palms out, eyes white and wide in the beam of the flashlight, as he moaned, “Help me, King . . . please.”
The creature lifted its head high and paused for a moment, as if surprised that Perry’s body was right there beneath its claws, and then the glowing eyes blurred as it struck at Perry’s leg three times, so fast that King began walking backward again, as he whispered, “Jesus Christ Aw’mighty.”
Perry was sobbing now, calling, “It bit me! Pull me in, King! The fuckin’ thing just bit me!”
King thought he should say something—give Perry a taste of his own medicine, maybe, by yelling, What-ever—but he didn’t because he realized that he’d been so focused on Perry, he hadn’t noticed something important happening nearby.
There was a man in the water not far from where the inner tube had been anchored. He was swimming fast in the darkness, using long, clean strokes, headed for the shoreline near the pickup truck.
It was Ford. The ass-wipe wasn’t wearing all his heavy scuba gear, either, which suggested that he was trying to sneak off on his own—probably carrying a bunch more gold coins somewhere on him, too.
King pulled the pistol from his pocket and started running. He didn’t like Ford—hell, he despised the man—but Perry had been right when he’d said there was something quiet and scary about the professor-looking dude. King didn’t want to have to face the man, not just the two of them, alone on dry land.
As King sprinted along the shore, there was something else he realized, judging from the direction Ford was headed. He had to beat Ford to the generator, where his idiot partner, Perry, had left the Winchester unattended.
TWENTY-NINE
WHEN I REACHED SHALLOW WATER, I ROLLED ONTO my back and continued kicking fast over the bottom toward shore, wanting to avoid the slippery limestone and muck beneath me. Through the night vision, I could see what was happening forty yards away.
The Komodo monitor was trying to climb onto the inner tube and get to Perry, who hadn’t stopped screaming for help since I’d surfaced. Underwater, the lizard had appeared big. On the surface, though, with its tail slashing and the breadth of its back visible in the glow of the beach fire, it was massive.
Perry was still alive. I was surprised. But Komodos feed differently than most animals, as I knew, striking and then waiting for their venom to do its work.
I could also see my BC vest, spotlight attached, drifting shoreward in the wake of all that splashing, and I could see King, too, sprinting toward me, the pistol in one hand, my flashlight in the other. The angle wasn’t good, and I knew it was going to be close. I was thinking about changing directions and swimming to the other side of the lake, but I remembered that King had left the Winchester leaning against the generator out in plain sight.
Was it still there? I swung my head to look and there it was, standing lean and western-looking against the Honda generator, with two rounds left in the chamber. And the pickup truck was parked nearby.
I was closer to the rifle than King was, but I was at least thirty yards away. And I was still in the water. I abandoned the idea of changing directions and decided to risk a footrace. Three times, King had fired the little pistol at me. Cheap pocket guns are notoriously inaccurate, and he had only three rounds left—unless the man had been smart enough to reload, which was unlikely.
King was sloppy. If I could get to my feet before he was close enough to open fire or if he started shooting too soon, his sloppiness would get him killed.
When my butt banged bottom, I swung my legs under me and yanked off my fins, hearing King yell, “Get your hands up, Jock-o! Don’t move a goddamn muscle!”
I glanced at him as I stood, feeling moss-coated rocks beneath my feet, and I yelled in reply, “Help your partner. Fire a few rounds, maybe you’ll scare off the lizard.” It was possible King heard me, but maybe he didn’t because Perry was shrieking for help now, his words interrupted only by his own wild sobbing and the depth-charge implosions of the monitor’s tail hitting water. I guessed that the monitor had begun to feed.
“Stay right where you are! I don’t want to shoot you but I will, goddamn it!”
It was the first time King had said he didn’t want to shoot me, which told me the opposite was true—this time, he meant to do it. I pulled my face mask down around my neck before throwing my hands up because now he was blinding me with the flashlight. King mistook the gesture for surrender and he immediately slowed to a walk. When he did, I dropped my hands and took off running toward the Winchester, kicking water, knees high, but it was tough to keep my balance because of the moss.
WHAP!
King fired. The slug threw a geyser up a few feet in front of me, where the water was only ankle-deep, but I kept running, trying to juke a zigzag pattern, which would have been a smart tactical move on land but not in the shallows of a lake, all limestone and marl. Only a couple of yards from shore, my ankle snagged the lip of a rock and I stumbled, almost regained my footing, but then hit a slippery patch, and I crashed, shoulder first, into the water, hitting hard.
When I raised my head, I heard King fire again—WHAP! The slug skipped off the water so close to my face that I wondered for an instant if I’d been hit, and I knew that King was lying again when he yelled,