My friend, I could see, had both hands locked on the gator’s tail and was being dragged. The animal was swimming faster now, probably convinced we were competing gators, employing harassment, hoping it would drop its prey. It’s a common gambit in the animal world, so the thing was trying to get into shallow water before dealing with us.
As I started swimming after them, I heard Tomlinson yell a garbled sentence, words that sounded like “You just scared the piss out of me! Do something, Doc!”
I planned to do something, even though I had no plan. I considered risking a shot at the animal’s flank, but there were too many people around, and the slug would skip if it hit the water. No… I had to get closer.
It took longer than expected. Despite the gator carrying a man in its jaws and a second man clinging to its tail, I still had trouble catching the animal because I was palming the pistol in my right hand. A pound of polymer and steel is not an efficient fin.
Finally, though, I was close enough to throw my left arm over the animal’s back, which wasn’t easy because the creature was twice my size. The gator bucked its head at me in warning, its hard belly spasmed, but it kept going. I felt around until I had what I thought was a good grip on the far ridge of scutes, hoping the thing would continue swimming long enough for me to get my right hand up. Next, I would position the pistol flat against the bony ridge behind the gator’s right eye.
Alligators have tiny brains, little more than a bulbous junction of nerve cells. However, their heads and jaws are also covered with thousands of bead-sized nodules that serve as remarkably sensitive pressure detectors. That’s why a gator can sense a lapping dog, or the splash of a child, from a hundred yards away. Even if the bullet missed the brain, the shock might cause the animal to release its prey and dive or swim for safety.
As I pushed the pistol barrel hard against the gator’s head, though, the thing rolled again. I was on the animal’s right side. It slapped its tail and rolled to the left. The movement was as abrupt as the slamming of a steel trap, and I was vaulted over the animal, into the air, and lost my grip as I hit the water.
When I surfaced, I had no idea where Tomlinson was. But I knew the gator still had its prey because I could hear the man coughing water and I could see his dangling legs only a yard away in the flashlight’s beam.
I had come up just behind and to the left of the gator’s snout. Close enough to see the animal’s bulging right eye, its pupil dilated within gelatinous tissue that cast an orange glow.
The gator saw me. No doubt about it, and I wasn’t surprised when the thing slowed and swung toward me, opening its jaws, then slinging its head to release its prey, now fixated on me. It had been harassed enough. In the animal’s mind, I was attempting to steal its meal. It had decided to fight.
I grabbed the man’s leg with my left hand and pulled, trying to help him roll free but also using the resistance to lever myself close enough to throw my right arm over the animal’s back. The gator shook its head again, maybe having difficulty tearing its teeth from the man’s clothing, which provided me with the extra second I needed to get a grip on the reptilian neck with my left hand.
As its tail hammered the water, spinning toward me, I wrestled myself atop the gator long enough to steady the pistol barrel flush behind its right eye. My hold was tenuous, the positioning wasn’t perfect, but I was adrenaline-buzzed and scared. I didn’t hesitate. I fired two quick shots, the report of the pistol heavy and flat, muffled by the animal’s keratin skin.
There was a convulsive, watery explosion that threw me backward. When I surfaced, the gator’s tail was vertical, slashing the air like a wrecking crane, and I had to scull backward to keep from being hit. A moment later, the animal rolled to the surface, still thrashing, and then submerged abruptly in a boil of bubbles and muddy detritus from the bottom.
I wasn’t sure if I’d killed the thing or not. Alligators sink when dead, but they also submerge if they’re wounded or feel threatened. If the bullets had done only minor damage, then the gator could be drifting to the bottom right now, tracking my vibrations as it regrouped. I didn’t relish the possibility. To me, a known quantity, however perilous the situation, is much preferred to a vague unknown.
As I turned to search for Tomlinson, I hollered, “Where is he? Did he go under?” meaning the injured man.
I received an answer in the form of another scream. It was a shredded plea in English, the frail man hollering, “Help me! The animal has me again!”
I pivoted toward the sound and started swimming.
FOUR
When Harris Squirespushed through the crowd of little brown people and realized what was happening, he grinned, thinking, Awesome!
Because of his girlfriend, Frankie, it had been a rotten week. But seeing what he was seeing now made him feel hopeful. Two nights before, while shooting a homemade skin flick, the idiot Mexican girl with them had taken too much Ecstasy and stopped breathing just like that. There was no one around but them, thank God, but it wasn’t until the next morning when Squires finally sobered up that even he had to admit the girl wasn’t going to start breathing again. Meaning she was dead.
That was bad enough, but it got worse. The girl was a prostitute who belonged to a Mexican gangbanger named Laziro Victorino. Victorino was what the illegals called a coyote, meaning that for a price he would lead groups across the border into the States, then find them jobs, too-but for a percentage of their pay, which he collected weekly.
Victorino-V-man, his gangbanger soldiers called him-was a wiry little guy but a serious badass who carried a box cutter on his belt and had a teardrop tattoo beneath his left eye, along with a bunch of other gangbanger tats on his arms and back.
Squires was aware that the V-man had made a few films of his own, him and his boys. Snuff films. Kill a man or woman-or just torture them-and get it all on their iPhone video cameras.
Frankie had chided Squires, saying, “Why you worried about some midget Mexican? You’re twice that greaser’s size. Besides, he’s got some new girl with him every time he comes through here. He probably won’t even notice she’s gone.”
Squires doubted that but didn’t want to piss off Frankie by voicing his opinion. So he told her he’d never played a role in killing anyone before. And he didn’t want to get in the habit of doing it.
That wasn’t exactly true, although Frankie didn’t know it. No one knew, and sometimes even Squires wasn’t convinced it had happened.
Once, only once, alone with a pretty Mexican woman, Squires, naked, had taken the chula from behind, lulling her body into a thrashing silence, his hands around her throat, his body finishing and the chula ’s life ending at a precise, constricting intersection that was euphoric beyond any physical sensation Squires had ever experienced.
He had been too drunk to remember details, though. And by the time he had sobered, the woman’s body was already gone-into the lake near his hunting camp trailer, he guessed later-so it was as if he had imagined the whole damn thing.
But it had happened. The event-that explosive physical rush, a sensation of ultimate power-had rooted itself in Squires’s brain. Occasionally, the memory flooded him with a horrifying guilt, which he mitigated by telling himself that it had only been a dream.
When he was blood-drunk on steroids, though, the roots of that memory propagated in the man’s head. They snaked deeper into his brain, germinating into a fantasy that had become an obsession.
If he ever got the opportunity, if he ever got just the right girl alone, Squires would make that dream happen again.