There was a loud splash from the water’s edge. In the moonlight, I could see a large alligator swimming fast toward the dying man. The gator attacked Santana in the midsection, its jaws and teeth popping ribs, bone, and cartilage like twigs. The animal lifted Santana out of the water, tossed its massive head back, and rolled.
I wobbled back to the dock. I could feel vomit rising. My legs felt like they weren’t part of my body. My eyes couldn’t focus. I stumbled, dropped the bow, and fell next to Max. She was crouched in the grass, and I couldn’t tell if she was hurt. I crawled to her and held her trembling body in my arms. “You’re okay now…hold on Max…”
I coughed blood. The murkiness swirled in my brain. The sound of crickets faded. Lying on my back, I clutched Max to my chest as a meteor shower burst across the dark purple sky, the afterglow locked in my retinas, the silence of heaven’s fireworks falling on my ears. I watched a gray cloud slowly consume the moon, the light fading like a dying flame at the end of a match.
It was now very dark and a cool wind blew across the river sending a chill through every nerve in my spine. I felt my body shivering. The ink silhouettes from the river were rising all around me. I was soaring with no horizon. No control. Tumbling from an abyss and freefalling through a black hole where no one kept records. I was the product of my being, falling or soaring on the sum of who I was. There were no limbs to break my fall. There was only the sense of absolute nakedness. Nothing could be concealed or cancelled. Nor did I care to try. Planet Earth had been here five billion years. My life, as it ended, was less than one second of Earth’s existence. In this scope of things, did my moment, my comma in time, mean anything? My mind was no longer attached to my body. Maybe it never was.
Sherri stood on the bowsprit of our sailboat, her hand reaching out toward me, the wind blowing through her hair. God, she was beautiful. I tried to call her name, to tell her I loved her, but I had lost my ability to speak. There was the sound of a woman’s voice. Someone far away singing. Then a dark fog came off the sea from nowhere, and I could no longer see Sherri.
There was a cool sensation deep inside my gut, like a drug was being released inside the skin. I opened my eyes and saw Joe Billie kneeling next to me. In a slow motion voice, a strange voice, I heard myself say. “You’re not real…you’re a dream…none of this is real…”
He watched me without speaking, and he looked at the wound in my stomach. The sensation in my bowels went from cold to fire and back to coolness.
The darkness rose again. I was below the surface of the ocean at night trying to swim to the lights of my boat. I held my breath and kicked. I was rushing toward the light at the top. In a second I would breathe! I broke through the translucence and gulped in air.
The lights from an ambulance and police vehicles raked across the limbs of the live oaks. I could hear a helicopter circling, and my thoughts dissolved to the dark valley of Afghanistan at sunset, the choppers like black locusts against a purple sky.
Lifting me onto the stretcher, a paramedic said, “You’re gonna make it! Hang in there. Your dog will be okay, too.”
EIGHTY-TWO
Nick’s voice sounded like a dream. “He’s awaking up!” I heard him say. “Sean, about time you stopped sleeping.”
I opened my eyes, blinked a few times, looked at the tubes running into my arms, the digital graphics monitoring my heart, and I glanced at the foot of the bed. Nick stood next to Dave, and both had big grins on their faces.
I said, “So, where’s the tin man?” My voice sounded like it came from Oz.
“If that’s Dan Grant, the detective,” Dave said, “he’ll be back.”
“How you feelin’ Sean?” Nick asked.
“Better than the last time I looked. How long have I been in here?”
Dave crossed his arms. “Three days. You were in IC for the first day. Lots of blood loss. When the EMTs got there, they said you looked like your body had gone into some kind of hibernation, sort of like those wood frogs we were talking about. Looks like your system had shut down, somehow, before it could bleed out. Santana did a number on your lower extremities.”
“Don’t tell me…”
“You’re okay there, old friend, but he tried to rearrange your intestinal tract.”
“How bad?”
“It’s all stuffed back in there. Surgeons sewed you up in a lot of places internally. Flooded you with a few liters of bacteria-killing agents. You ought to have one hell of an aftertaste in your mouth until that bleach gets out of your system. The docs checked for polyps while they were in there. Clean as a whistle.” He laughed.
“Where’s Max? Is she okay?”
“Fine,” Dave said. “Vet put some stitches in her. She’s waiting for you.”
Nick grinned. “I take her swimmin’ when you get all well. I know she’s a hot dog but she think’s like a lab.” He laughed and then his face became creased with concern. “What happened, Sean? Where’s the bad guy, Santana? Did he get away?”
Dan entered the room. I could tell he was worried. “Sean, it’s good to see you awake. How’re you feeling?”
“Considering the circumstances, I’d say okay.”
He smiled. “Must have been one hell of a fight. Lauren Miles called us when she heard Santana was heading for you. We found the rental car near your house. A patrol unit picked up a kid who said some ‘crazy white dude’ pulled a gun on him and made him walk away from the car.”
“That wouldn’t have been you, would it, Sean?”
“My memory is a little hazy.”
“Don’t see how Santana got near your place if he didn’t come by car.”
“Came by boat.”
“That how he got away? Using a damn boat?”
“He didn’t get away.”
“He didn’t? There wasn’t a body, but we did find drops of his blood on your dock. It was within six feet of the blood from you and your dog. So what the hell happened to Santana?”
“Best I can remember, he seemed to have lost his balance on the dock, fell in and couldn’t swim very well. Then he got in the mouth of a big gator.”
“Sean,” Dan sighed. “We found blood all over your porch, a big damn spearhead covered in blood. On the dock, we found a bow lying next to you and your dog. Looks like you had some kind of Custer’s Last Stand going on, a one-man war against Santana. Did you shoot him with an arrow?”
“I was shot in the gut. How could I pull back a sixty pound bow?”
“So, for the record, since we may never recover a body, Santana shot you, you hit him with your spearhead, he lost his balance, fell in the river, and was eaten by a gator.”
“It’s all kind of a blur after I was shot.”
Dan closed his note pad. “I’ll just get a statement on tape. You took out the most prolific serial killer since the Green River Killer.”
We talked about all the multiple investigations into the murders. A half dozen agencies, including the FBI, INS, Border Patrol, FDLE, the sheriff’s departments from three separate counties in Florida, two in Texas, and one in Los Angeles, were sharing notes, files and extradition proceedings. In addition to the arrests of Silas Davis and Hector Ortega, others that worked for them were arrested and charged with dozens of counts, including trafficking in human beings, slavery, prostitution, and murder.
Nick was late for a date with a schoolteacher whom he’d been eyeing since she moved into the new condos across the street from the marina.