“Is that how you brothers usually greet each other?” asked Moni, who figured the gator story could be cover for a brotherly fight that ended badly for Robbie.
Randy looked at her as if she had break-danced straight out of the ghetto and met a white man for the first time. She had seen that self-righteous bullshit more times than she cared to remember.
“No. It was late and I scared him. What’d you think? My people ain’t thugs, lady.” He shook his head. “Anyways, my brother told me to hit the road. I told him I was taking his boat and going after the gator whether he came with or not. I know, I know. I played the little brother needs help from big bro card. Call me a selfish asshole.”
Moni couldn’t argue with that reasoning, especially considering how big brother had paid for it.
“Robbie, God love him, wouldn’t let me go alone. He snuck out. Didn’t even tell his wife and boy goodbye…” Randy paused and pinched the tear ducts at the corners of his eyes until he collected himself. “We suited up in hunting gear. Me being a dumb ass, I told him that life vests were for pussies. He took the shotgun and I took my crossbow. I had punched many a gator through the brain with that baby.
“We rode the pontoon boat out on the lagoon in the middle of the night. We didn’t see another soul on the water, just the lights from shore on either side. We found my skiff waiting for us in the mouth of Palm Bay, which feeds into the canal behind my house. We didn’t see the gator. Robbie thought I was drunk and imagined the whole thing like some little piss-ant. We shoulda known the gator had laid a trap for us.”
Sneed rolled his eyes. “The gator laid a trap? What is he, a Vietcong?”
“This ain’t a normal gator, boss,” Randy said as he eyed the lead detective with a grim stare.
Sneed never believed far-fetched stories. He poked holes through liars until they bled the truth. Moni had seen him turn the coldest of men into mounds of jelly. She doubted he bought half of what she told him. But this time, Sneed appeared convinced that Randy had encountered a gator. After all, Robert Cooper’s body had what resembled a gator bite on his right arm. A hungry gator wouldn’t usually let a meal go so its victim could get decapitated cleanly and then leave the body floating in the water. Even if the man had lost his head first, the gator wouldn’t taste a sample of the leftovers without lapping the whole thing up or storing it underwater for later.
“You’ve hunted plenty of gators before,” Moni said. “How’d this one trap you?”
“Oh, it didn’t do it alone,” Randy said. “We tied my skiff to the pontoon boat and Robbie started ribbing me about how he thought I had fallen off the boat like some dipshit and left it out there. It kinda set me off, so when a red-shouldered hawk landed on the railing of our boat, I took aim at it with my crossbow to let off some steam.”
“Is that what you call letting off some steam-killing defenseless animals?” Moni asked.
Sneed shot her a crossed look. No doubt, he had bagged plenty of birds in his day. In Moni’s eyes, killing animals for sport put them one step away from killing people. She remembered her father kicking her neighbor’s yapping poodle right in the mouth.
“I wish I would have shot that damn hawk, or whatever the devil it was.” Randy’s eyes narrowed angrily. “With my attention on the bird, I didn’t see the gator flop onto our deck. It scaled about four feet, from the water over the railing. Don’t ask me how it did that ‘cause I ain’t got any earthy idea. It must have been the hunger. The son-of-a-bitch sprang at me before I could turn my crossbow on it. Robbie was quick as a hiccup, though. He blasted the gator in the back with his shotgun. Saved my life.”
“That should have slowed the sucker down,” Sneed said. “Why couldn’t you finish it off?”
“That’s the thing. The shotgun blast didn’t slow it down one bit. It hardly bled from the wound.”
Moni remembered the decapitated bodies and how they hadn’t drenched the crime scenes with blood because they hardly had any left. The bacteria had thinned it out.
She hadn’t seen Mariella bleed. She hoped she never would.
“The gator didn’t flinch, man. It wanted one of us,” Randy said. “The gator spun around and snapped at my brother. I grabbed its tail and yanked it back. It missed him by a hair. Next thing I knew, the gator had its tail wrapped around my neck. That’s all what you see here.”
He pointed out the red grooves in his neck. Moni saw that they did resemble an imprint of a scaly gator tail. Of course, that made absolutely zero sense.
“Now I’m no reptile expert, Mr. Cooper,” Moni said. “But I don’t think gators can choke people out with their tails. Anacondas? Yeah. But a gator?”
“I already told you-this ain’t a normal gator.” Randy flung the sweat off his brow with the back of his hand and drew a deep breath. “It didn’t wanna eat me. It was kidnapping me. The gator leapt over the rail and splashed into the water. With its tail around my neck, I had no choice but to follow or get my neck broken. It dragged me to the bottom of the lagoon. My arm sunk into the mud.” He held up his arm and showed the flakes of dried mud stuck in his black hairs. “Thank the Lord it wasn’t that deep over there. I poked my boot out the water and Robbie found me. My brother coulda left me and gone back to his family. I got us into this shit, not him. But Robbie had a big heart, man. He didn’t hesitate for a second before diving into the lagoon after me. It was so dark underwater. The gator could have been an inch from his face and he wouldn’t have known.”
Randy paused and chewed on his fist. His eyes combed through the room as if searching for his brother. They lingered on the door and just waited.
Regardless of his attitude, Moni wished she could open that door and have Robbie Cooper bound through and comfort his little brother. Instead, the other side of the door had a hysterical widow and a father-less child awaiting him.
“So how’d Robbie free you from the gator’s, uh, tail?” Sneed asked.
“Robbie used a hunting knife and sawed into the tail until it loosened and I slipped out. You’d think the gator woulda quit after we cut halfway through its tail. Well, nope. Its snout popped right outta the water and it eyed us… It eyed us with these…”
“These what? I thought you said it was dark? How’d you see it?” Moni asked.
“These purple eyes. They were glowing solid purple.”
The blood rushed into Moni’s skull. Her hands went numb for a second. The purple tumors on the murder victims and the animals. The purple pimples inside Mariella’s lip. Now the ghastly purple glow of a gator’s eyes-the same animal Mariella drew the day before in class. Mr. Mint said that the girl’s gator didn’t look threatening. Moni believed her. She couldn’t let herself not believe.
The dots were laid out on the page for her in little purple bacteria mushrooms. She could connect them, but Moni had no idea where they pointed her. They were links in a much larger picture. There were so many other links on a page that suddenly stretched as far as a desert plain.
Just because they were connected, didn’t mean the dots were in order. Moni had never seen Mariella’s eyes glow. The girl had defended herself, but she would never attack someone. No, she had a small infection and had overcome it. Nothing more than that, Moni thought.
“Did you notice anything else purple on the gator?” Moni asked. “Any bumps or welts?”
“I couldn’t make out much besides the eyes and the snout,” Randy said. “Funny thing was it didn’t chase us when we climbed back into Robbie’s boat. We saw its purple eyes dip below water and sink until they were swallowed up by the bottom of the lagoon. We hadn’t even caught our breath when the air started smelling foul. It reeked of this awful rotten egg stench. And the fumes-they stung my eyes and my nose. It fucking burned. We would have motored away right then, but it knocked us on our asses. We were crawling on our bellies. By the time I could tolerate the pain enough to grab the throttle, it was too late. The motor revved up, but we didn’t move. I heard the bubbling and hissing around the boat, and still I couldn’t believe it. When I pulled the propeller out of the water, I saw it had been melted away.”