With the flashlight, I tracked the animals into the brush before I switched it off. “I think they’re Nile monitor lizards,” I told him. “They’re all about the same size, four or five feet long—so they’re probably from the same hatch.”
“Hatch?”
I said, “Monitors lay eggs.”
King said, “You think they’re monitor lizards? What the hell’s that mean?”
I stared at him without answering as Perry said, “Monitor lizards? I never even heard of ’em.”
I replied, “Pet-store people started importing monitors from Africa fifteen or twenty years ago and they sold a lot of them cheap. Some escaped, they bred, now they’re all over Florida. In some counties, there’s a bounty on them.”
“No shit! So they’re dangerous? If they pay a bounty, they’ve gotta be dangerous. Maybe there’s a bigger one around. Do they hiss?”
No doubt about it, Perry was speeding his brains out and his tongue had to work fast to keep up. I told him, “They kill small dogs, they eat bird’s eggs. They eat rodents, too—so you better stay on your toes.”
Perry said, “Rodents, huh?” Then he said, “Hey! What’s that supposed to mean?”
King was laughing. I didn’t reply.
“Fucking pet stores,” Perry muttered, sounding nervous. “You gotta be shitting me. Are they poisonous? Like snakes? They remind me of snakes, the way they move.”
I wasn’t in the mood to engage in conversation with Perry. I was still staring at King. “Turn off the monocular and give me my dive mask. I’m not going to ask again.”
King said, “Or you’ll do what?” He was still laughing as he pretended to use the monocular to focus on me. “You got a gun or knife hidden somewhere? You’re all talk, Jock-a-mo. If I don’t give you the mask, you’ll do what?”
“Quit screwing around!” Perry yelled. “I’m tired of your shit! Give him his goddamn mask!”
I had taken two steps toward King when he held out a palm, stopping me, then said, “Sure, Jock-o, you can have your mask. Here.” He lobbed it high over my head.
I could hear him laughing as I hurried to retrieve the mask from the lake before it sank.
For more than an hour, Arlis Futch had not spoken a word, but now he called from the shadows, “Ford! You watch yourself when you go into that lake. You hear me?”
I was in knee-deep water, wearing my BC, bottle strapped on, my night vision mask tilted up on my forehead and my hands full of spare gear. There was something unusual about the old man’s voice, a quality that was menacing, serious and real. It caused even Perry, who had been jabbering nonstop, to go silent.
I called back, “How’re you feeling, Arlis?”
He coughed—returning to his role as a sick old man, maybe—and said, “Those scum ought to at least let you carry a knife. You got your knife?”
No, Perry had my knife. It was still stuck in his belt. I couldn’t tell if Arlis was actually warning me about something dangerous in the water or if it was a ploy designed to rearm me.
King hollered at him, “Shut up and mind your own business, Gramps. What you’d better be worried about is your boyfriend coming back with more of those Cuban pesos.”
I called to Arlis, “I’ll be fine, don’t worry,” before saying to Perry, “We have a deal, right?” Intentionally, I said it loud enough for King to hear.
King said, “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
What it meant was that he had left Perry and me alone long enough to discuss the jet dredge. I had asked Perry what it would take to convince him that they stood to profit by helping me. More coins is what Perry wanted. Give him proof, he had told me, and he would force King back into the water to handle the hose.
Playing it off, Perry said to me, “Sure, sure, whatever you say. Just do your part.”
As I backed into the water, my fins feeling for balance on the slick rocks, I heard King asking, “What’s he talking about? What deal? Did you two cook up something behind my back?”
I rinsed my mask, fitted it onto my face and flipped the switch on the night vision monocular, the lens of which was hinged tightly against the faceplate.
“Give me ten minutes,” I said, looking at Perry. “I’ll keep my part of the bargain.”
That really galled King. He was still interrogating Perry as I lay back, allowing the buoyancy of water to float me, and began to kick toward the middle of the lake.
I was carrying one oversized LED spotlight and two smaller lights clipped to my BC, but I didn’t need them to see now. My right eye is dominant, but I preferred to wear the night vision monocular over my left. When I closed my right, it was like looking through a magic green tube. The night bloomed bright with details. I could see Arlis sitting up, watching me from the distance. The cypress trees above him were isolated and set apart from the starry skyline, their leaves iridescent and waxy.
When I turned my head, the swamp gloom was illuminated, and I could see that two of the monitor lizards had returned. The animals were perched on the high bank among cattails, tongues flicking, probing air molecules for a scent of prey or the warning scent of predators. Their eyes no longer glowed. Through the monocular, their reptilian eyes appeared as opaque as the eyes of a snake that was shedding its skin.
In reality, I was not looking through the monocular. I was seeing an amplified electronic image on a phosphor screen. The device collected a broad spectrum of light, intensified it, then reassembled real-time images that produced the illusion that it was high noon as if viewed through a Heineken bottle, not a windy, starry February night.
Underwater, the monocular would be even more effective once I activated the built-in infrared light. The infrared was invisible to anyone or anything not equipped with night vision, and the unit was waterproof to a hundred feet.
As I swam toward the marker buoy, I gave some thought to the Nile monitor lizards that were still watching me from shore. The monitor is a foul-tempered pet and a prolific breeder that has, over the years, caused too many impulse buyers to dump their purchases along the sides of the road rather than risk their cats or dogs being killed and eaten. Monitors are superb swimmers, they can scramble up trees, they nest in unseen burrows and they will eat just about anything that moves—or doesn’t move fast enough.
The Nile monitor is a relentless diurnal predator that hunts in packs when necessary—and there is no shortage of prey in the suburbs of the Sunshine State. On its native continent, monitors are hunted for food by crocs and by humans. In Florida, though, where filet of lizard tail isn’t on the menu, the animal has been allowed to ascend to the position of an alpha predator. That’s why it has multiplied so rapidly throughout the state.
The lizards didn’t cause me any uneasiness, though. They were the size of bulldogs, although twice as heavy. Even if there had been a dozen of them, I doubted if they would have risked attacking a full-grown man. Had I been in Indonesia, though, not the pasturelands of Florida, my reaction would have been much different.
I had spent time in Indonesia and so I knew from experience.
On the islands surrounding Pulau Komodo, there lives a close relative of the animals that were now watching me. There, as in Florida, the monitors have no natural predators, so they have evolved to a massive size—“island gigantism,” the phenomenon is called. They grow to eleven feet long, three hundred pounds, and their attacks on man are well documented. The animal’s tail is as lethal as its bite.
Their hunting technique is also well documented. Indonesian monitors use their tails to knock their prey to the ground, then inflict one or more tearing bites. Then they wait patiently. When the wounded victim is immobile—it doesn’t have to be dead—the monitor begins to feed.