I laced my fingers into the knee-high weeds that grew along the bank and pulled myself out of the water, hand over hand, trying to time it right. Friends sometimes chide me about my obsessive attention to detail and my hyperawareness of my surroundings-particularly if the environment is populated with strangers.
Sometimes, I am tempted to reply, “I’m still alive, aren’t I?” but never do.
Fortunately, my hyperwariness paid off. Again.
Just as I was getting to my feet, blue jeans muddy, a slimy mess, Squires appeared. He took a quick jump step, grabbed me by the left arm and stabbed the huge light into my face as I stood. He was screaming, “Can you see any better now, you son of a bitch! Who do you think you are, coming ’round here, giving orders!”
I pushed the light-a military Golight, I realized-out of my eyes and tried to back away, but the man’s hand was like a vise. In an easy voice, I said to him, “Calm down, Squires. We have a guy who needs medical attention.”
It didn’t help. “Screw you!” the man yelled, his breath hot in my face. “Who the hell died and made you boss, you goddamn do-gooder prick? You’re giving me orders?”
I kept my voice even. “When the police arrive, what are they going to think when I tell them you tried to stop us from saving this man’s life?”
Squires was trembling, he was so mad. He roared, “You’re not telling the cops nothin’, asshole! How you gonna talk to anybody after I snap your damn head off and use it to feed my gator?”
His gator? It was an unexpected thing to hear, but it told me something.
I was gauging the man’s size and his balance. He was about sixfive, six-six, probably two-eighty, but weight-room muscle is among the most common cloaks of male insecurity. To test his balance, I rolled my left arm free of his grip. At the same time, I gave him a push with the fingers of my right hand. It wasn’t an obvious push. It was more of a blocking gesture, but he didn’t handle it well.
Clumsy people have a difficult time with simultaneous hand movements, and this guy was clumsy. The little push turned his entire body a few wobbly degrees to the left. It was all the opening I needed, but I didn’t take it.
Now was not the time for a brawl. Besides, Tomlinson and I needed this guy’s cooperation if we were going to save the injured man. The illegals who lived in the park weren’t going to risk helping us-not if their blustering bully of a landlord disapproved. And I couldn’t blame them. They had to live here. I didn’t.
I squared my body to Squires’s, and said, “This is my last try to be reasonable. We’ve got an injured man and we intend to help him. Get out of our way and behave like an adult.”
That’s all it took. Squires screamed at me, “Or you’ll do what?” and he jammed the light toward my face again.
I had no choice, I ducked under the light and then drop-stepped beneath the landlord’s extended right arm. From the sound of surprise he made, the move was the equivalent of a disappearing act. Where had I gone?
I had disappeared behind him, that’s where. Years ago, in an overheated wrestling room, I had practiced hand control and simple duck unders day after day, week after week, year after year. I had practiced the craft of grappling so relentlessly that I had pleased even our relentless perfectionist of a coach, a man named Gary Fries. Fries was a wrestling giant, all five feet seven inches of him, and he would not tolerate mediocrity.
Thanks to that coach, I’ve never been in any physical confrontation in my life where I didn’t feel confident I was in control of the outcome. That doesn’t mean I have always won. I certainly have not. But I’ve always felt as if I could win if I picked my shots and made the right moves.
Like now, as I came up behind Squires, saying into his ear, “You’ve got a big mouth, fat boy,” because now his anger could be used to my advantage. I wanted him so mad that he lost control. When the big man tried to pivot, I laddered my hands up his ribs to control his body position and leaned my head close to his shoulder blades so he couldn’t knock me cold with a wild elbow.
When Squires realized he couldn’t maneuver free, he stuttered, “Hey… get your hands off me, asshole!” and tried, once again, to face me.
I was ready because that’s exactly what I wanted him to do. I let Squires make half a turn and then stopped his momentum by ramming my head into his back as I grapevined my left ankle around his left shin. An instant later, I locked my hands around his waist and moved with him as he tried to wrestle free.
Our backs were to the mangrove pond. With a quick glance, I confirmed that Tomlinson and the injured man weren’t directly behind us-it was a dangerous place to be if things went the way I planned. Then I used my legs to drive Squires away from the water. Instinctively, the man’s feet dug in, then his legs pumped as he tried to drive us both backward. Squires was taller, heavier and stronger than I. His energized mass soon overpowered my own.
The timing was important. I waited a microsecond… waited until I felt the subtle transition of momentum.
When it felt right, I dropped my grip a few inches lower on the big man’s waist. I relocked my hands, bent my knees and then maximized Squires’s own momentum by lifting as I arched my back.
I waited another microsecond… and then I heaved with all my strength as we tumbled backward.
In wrestling jargon, the move I’d executed was a suplex. As I arched backward, I used a two-handed throwing technique, not unlike a Scottish gamesman throwing a fifty-pound rock over a bar. In this case, though, the weight was closer to three hundred pounds. Squires had amassed considerable momentum, and it was his own momentum-not my strength-that sent him flying.
I guessed he would land near the pond’s edge, which is why I had checked behind me before setting up the suplex. I couldn’t have guessed, however, that a man Squires’s size would sail beyond the bank and land on his shoulders in a massive explosion of water.
I got to my feet, cleaning my hands on my jeans. I found the spotlight and aimed it at Squires’s face when he surfaced. He was disoriented and floundering. I watched him splash to vertical, as he spit water and swore. Mostly, he swore at me, ordering that I get that goddamn light out of his eyes.
I told him, “Come up here and say that, fat boy,” and watched the man jam his feet toward the bottom, which is precisely what I hoped he would do.
It was his second mistake of the night.
For a few seconds, Squires stood tall in waist-deep water, as he struggled to find footing. Then he began to sink. The more he struggled, the more suction he created and the deeper he went into the muck.
Squires wasn’t a wrestler, and he wasn’t much of a swimmer, either. He couldn’t manage the delicate hand strokes necessary to sustain positive buoyancy. Soon the man was so deeply mired in mud that he couldn’t move his legs. Water was rising toward his shoulders, and it scared him.
“Goddamn it!” he shouted to the migrants watching. “Help me. Get a rope! Somebody go get a rope and pull me out of here.”
Drowning was terrifying enough, but then another thought came into Squires’s mind. I could tell because of the wild look in his eyes as he glanced over his shoulder, yelling, “Hurry up, before that gator comes back! Does anybody have a gun? Someone break the window of my truck and grab the gun from the glove box. Shit! Hurry up!”
Automatically, my right hand touched my sodden pocket to confirm the Kahr 9mm was still there. It was.
No one moved except for a frail, luminous figure that I recognized. It was the teenage girl Tomlinson had been calling to, Tula. I watched her step free of the crowd, then walk toward me, her eyes indicating Squires as she said in English, “Do you think he might drown?”