“That’s for sure. But we got lucky this time. Thank God you were standing close enough…”
“To serve as bait.” He rubbed the forearm the snake had nearly sunk its fangs into.
“You’re pretty brave for a surfer dude.” Moni trotted up and kissed him on the cheek. She felt a spark there, like a rock striking a piece of flint. A couple more times and it might start burning.
Maybe Darren had it wrong about this guy, she thought. Aaron proved that he’d protect her and Mariella. It took her long enough, but she realized that a good heart-even without the guns to back it up-counted more than all muscle and selfish intentions.
“How about I take you up on that horseback riding trip?”
“Sweet,” he said with a beaming grin. “Let’s tell Mariella.”
As he turned toward the girl’s room, she gently grabbed his arm and halted him.
“Not such a good idea. My baby got spooked. Let her calm down. I’ll tell her before bed.”
“All right. I feel ya.” Aaron sounded as gangster with that phrase as a cat sounds tough barking. Moni giggled. “But I think we should hold off on the pizza for tonight. I better clean up this mess and deliver the remains to the AMRI lab before they spoil.”
Moni dropped her smile as she eyed the dead snake. It resembled a black garden hose that had exploded at one end.
“What’s gonna spoil? I mean, besides my appetite.” Moni pressed her hand against her stomach and stuck out her tongue.
“I bet it’s loaded with bacteria,” Aaron said. “The snake should have bounced off your screen and maybe ripped it along the edge a bit, not tore through it. And then there’s that.”
In the pool of blood underneath the snake’s mangled head festered a smidgen of purple ooze.
Gators, birds, manatees and now snakes infected with the bacteria had attacked people, Moni thought. Most of their targets had died. If Aaron hadn’t gone all out on that desperate dive, Mariella would have wound up like the others.
Moni’s heart numbed over with a chill. The words her father had stuffed into her ear only hours ago rang through her head.
“The lagoon man has a hunger and I smelled it out there today. That girl belongs to his lagoon and he’s coming to take her back. You can’t stop it, so you best get outta the way.”
Chapter 17
Moni couldn’t settle down to sleep. As she lay beneath the sweaty sheets, she replayed the incidents with Darren and the snake over and over in her head. She couldn’t understand the timing of both attacks happening in such close succession. Did someone make the animal strike at her most vulnerable moment? It had caught her utterly unprepared. Aaron had saved the girl, not her.
Detective Sneed interrupted those lingering thoughts with a phone call at around five-thirty in the morning. Moni feigned a weary answer, as if he had woke her from a deep slumber.
“I heard you fired off a round in your house yesterday. You know, we got a firing range so you don’t shoot up your neighborhood like a damn hoodlum.”
“I shot a snake. I reported it and, as I wrote, Aaron took the carcass to the lab.”
“You and Aaron. Uh huh.” He huffed in disapproval. Officers shouldn’t date sources in an investigation, but Moni knew he got offended by something else-a black woman and a white man.
“I hope you have a better reason than that to drag me outta bed. I’ll be taking Mariella to school in a couple hours.”
“I got a plenty good reason,” Sneed said. “Remember Randy Cooper-the guy who escaped being a gator’s midnight snack? We haven’t heard from him since we dropped him back at his house. He hasn’t answered his phone. After you drop off the young witness, go head on over there with Skillings and Harrison. Let Cooper know that he can’t duck us. I got a search warrant that says he better open up.”
Moni rubbed her forehead, which had been basting in her sweat all night. He could have waited an hour before giving her that assignment. Not that he had really awoken her, but he had tried. Maybe Sneed spent all night working his cases like a general plotting war inside his tent. The master of paranoia had once again pointed his hairy finger at the victim instead of focusing on a killer that had him outwitted.
“I’ll knock on his door, but I’d prefer not to draw the search warrant,” Moni said. “The poor guy has been through hell in the past 24 hours.”
Moni got an early start on the day by packing Mariella’s bag and cooking her breakfast. The girl treaded through her morning motions somberly coming on the heels of two attacks, but Moni put a smile on her face by promising horseback riding that afternoon. She decided against mentioning Aaron. She didn’t know whether Mariella had fled from the snake or the man jumping at her.
After she dropped the girl off, Moni met up with Nina Skillings and Clyde Harrison in the parking lot of a Palm Bay shopping center a few miles from Cooper’s house. For sure, Skillings’ toughness and Harrison’s colossal strength could have done the job fine without Moni. She figured that Sneed had signed her up as a tag along so she’d learn how “real officers” handled themselves.
“So, you saw Sneed interview this crackpot,” Skillings said, hanging her head out the window of the patrol car parked beside Moni’s undercover Taurus. “Why do you think he’s gone quiet on us?”
“Telling us about his brother’s murder took a lot out of him,” Moni said. “We really should have sent him for a psychiatric evaluation before releasing him.”
Harrison leaned over from the driver’s side, and formed a scowl with his square jaw and bushy eyebrows. “If this runt doesn’t talk, I’ll give him an evaluation with my boot.”
Moni sighed and shook he head. “I’d say Randy has had enough big, dumb animals attack him for one week.”
He chuckled without a sign of taking offense. At least Harrison knew his role.
They found Randy Cooper’s old Ford pickup outside his house. He must have stopped by the home of his brother’s newly widowed wife on the beachside and picked it up. Moni couldn’t imagine how painful that meeting must have been for him. How could he look that woman and her son in the eyes and tell them that the man of their household is gone? How could he tell them he was snatched from his boat and killed during his reckless caper in the middle of the night? Moni understood why he didn’t feel like answering his phone, or his door.
“Randy!” Skillings shouted for the fifth time. They didn’t hear anything stirring inside. The curtains were tightly drawn, but the odor of stale bread, moldy cheese and spoiled beer wafted through the cracks in the window panes. “I can smell that slob’s mess from out here. That’s a reason enough for a search even without this warrant.”
“Okay. I got it.” Harrison pointed Skillings to the side so he could kick in the door.
“Hold the beef, cowboy. This one’s mine,” Skillings said. She grabbed the battering ram and pounded through the door in two blows. “No need to ruin a fine pair of boots.”
Moni rolled her eyes. At least this time, Skillings showboated on a defenseless door and not on Moni’s ribs in kickboxing class.
Even Skillings’ tough girl armor didn’t prevent her from clutching her nose and groaning when she entered Randy Cooper’s house. Pizza boxes with their rotting, half-eaten leftovers littered the floor. Some of them were atop piles of clothes. A familiar mud-stained shirt covered one of the boxes. He had left beer bottles all over the place-on the couch, on the floor, on the window sill, on the TV, and all over the kitchen counter where they also found a pile of toxic dishes overloading the sink. He had nearly run out of surface space for the bottles and dirty dishes.
“I guess he wasn’t a stickler for recycling, or cleaning,” Moni said as she trudged through the pizza boxes and foam takeout containers. “At least he didn’t make his garbage man work hard.”
“This isn’t by choice,” Skillings said as she drew her gun and checked the bathroom. She wretched, but didn’t fire, and quickly shut off the light. “Bleh. Something’s wrong. No one would live in conditions like this.”