Truth was, he really had felt different as a child. He had felt safe and full of kindness, unless his witch of a mother was screaming at him, calling him a “worthless little bastard” or saying, “You’re even stupider than your faggot father!”
It was strange how things had changed since he was a kid. Maybe because of the tequila, or maybe because of the guilt the girl had caused him to feel, the realization struck Squires as important. He took a swallow from the bottle and let his mind work on it until he thought, I’ll be goddamned. What the brat says is true.
Somehow, the world and his life had become mean and dangerous and dirty.
How? When had it happened?
That was a complicated question that took some time. The man wrestled with the issue as he drove. Had it started when he’d first discovered tequila and weed? Up until then, he’d been kind of a quiet, shy kid.
No… no, that wasn’t the reason he felt as shitty as he did right now. His life had really taken a turn for the worse when he met Frankie. That was almost four years ago, him being twenty-two at the time, Frankie thirty-eight but still with a body on her. And the woman was a regular hellion when it came to games in bed.
Sex-Frankie was addicted to it, and not plain old regular sex, either. The woman liked it rough, sometimes violent enough that Squires’s nose and lips would be bleeding when they were done-once even his dick, which was having problems enough of its own because of the way steroids affected it.
The woman liked hurting her partners, especially if they were female.
Yes, it was when he’d met Frankie that things had really begun to change. That’s when his life had switched from living a hard-assed guy’s life, hanging out with other bodybuilders, to living a life that was small and mean… yes, and dirty, too.
It was strange thinking about stuff like that now while driving to his hunting camp, where, until that instant, Harris Squires had fully intended to punish this noisy little freak by raping her.
But damn it. Now all this talk about God was deflating his enthusiasm, not to mention his dick. Worse, it was adding to his gloom. It threatened to bring back the withering guilt that kept welling up about accidentally murdering that Mexican woman.
Trouble was, unlike with the Mexican woman, Squires had no choice about the girl. She was an eyewitness. She had to go.
Because it made him mad thinking about what he had to do, he said to the little brat, “Do you have any idea how crazy you sound? You’re in the United States now, chula. In Florida, they’ll throw you in the loony bin for saying crazy crap like that.”
Reaching for his iPhone for some reason, the girl replied, “Where are we going? I know you’re not taking me to the hospital. You can trust me, so why not tell me? It’s always better to tell the truth.”
“Why, because God is watching us?” Squires laughed, pushing the girl’s hand away. The time on his iPhone, he noted, was 10:32 a.m. They still had to get through Immokalee, another hour of driving ahead of them.
“If God really is watching,” Squires told her, sounding both angry and serious, “the dude had better perform one of his miracles pretty damn quick. Or it’s out of my hands, chula. Hear what I’m telling you?”
Because of the caring, wounded expression that appeared on the girl’s face, Squires added, “No one can blame me. What happens next, I can’t control. And that is the truth.”
NINE
The next morning, I was up before sunrise, 6:30 A.M., because I was supposed to meet the necropsy team at eight a.m. sharp. I wanted to get a quick workout in first, though.
Lately, I had been nursing a sore rotator cuff, but was still doing PT twice a day, taking only an occasional Monday off. I knew I’d feel like crap if I didn’t get a sweat going and have a swim. When a man gets into his forties, he has two choices-invite the pain required to maintain his body or surrender himself to the indignity and pain of slow physical decomposition that, in my mind, would be worse than death.
I wanted to make this one fast but tough.
I punished myself with half an hour on a brutal little exercise machine called a VersaClimber. HIT-high-intensity training. Thirty seconds climbing the machine at sprinter’s speed-about a hundred feet per minute-then thirty seconds at a slower pace. Over and over, nonstop, after a five-minute warm-up.
I couldn’t use the pull-up bar, so did a hundred sit-ups, a hundred push-ups, then jogged Tarpon Bay Road to the beach. The swim out to the NO WAKE buoys and back was painful, but it didn’t hurt as much as the mile-and-a-half run home.
When I lumbered, huffing and puffing, down the shell road, Mack, who owns Dinkin’s Bay Marina, was having a meeting with Jeth, Nels and the other fishing guides. So I stuck around long enough to tell them about the dolphins we had seen in the mangroves-I knew they wouldn’t believe Tomlinson-then headed for the shower. Tomlinson himself was already on his way back to Red Citrus.
An hour later, I was standing over the remains of the alligator I had killed. The thing was stretched out, belly-up, on a tarp beside dissecting trays, a lab scale, and an assembly of knives, jars and a single stainless-bladed saw.
It was not something I felt good about, looking down at the dead gator. This inanimate mass only hours before had been a tribute to the genius of natural selection and the animal’s own survival skills. The rounds I’d fired had put an end to a life that had probably spanned sixty years.
Emily Marston’s team consisted of herself, a sullen man who didn’t offer his name and a graduate student from Florida Gulf Coast University who was assigned to document the necropsy on video.
The sullen man, I soon decided, had been romantically involved with the woman biologist, but the relationship had ended recently and unpleasantly.
It wasn’t a guess and it wasn’t intuition.
The situation was easily read in the tension between the two, the curt questions, the man’s surly tone and the woman’s defensive body language.
Judging from his age, the man might have been one of Marston’s professors a few years back. In the field sciences, it’s not unusual for female students to bond with male teachers-ironic that the romantic habits of scientists often mimic the behavior of the animals they study, but it is true.
Emily Marston certainly wasn’t icy to me. She was warm and deferential. The way her eyes sought to communicate with mine caused me to wonder if her invitation to the necropsy had been more than professional courtesy. We probably had a few mutual, peripheral friends, but we’d never met. I wondered why.
“Dr. Ford, I’ve read so many of your papers-some of them a couple of times,” Marston had said, greeting me as I’d stepped from my truck. “I guess you’d call me… well, a sort of fan. Except now you’ll just think I’m an even bigger nerd than I am.”
She was a large woman, late twenties, with an angular Midwestern face that suggested the automotive crossroads of Michigan-part German with a touch of Pole and Irish, I guessed. She struck me as the librarian type: a woman who camouflaged her body beneath baggy, masculine clothing that only served to emphasize a busty, long-legged femininity.
Right away, I was interested in the woman physically. I couldn’t help myself. I prefer the closet beauties, the private, introspective types who share their physical gifts only with a few. But I also reminded myself that, by Dinkin’s Bay standards, I had been abstinent for a long, long time. And seducing women who are on the rebound from a relationship is a repugnant behavior employed only by the lowest form of predatory male.
Even so, I noticed that incidental physical contact between us was more than occasional. It seemed accidental, though it seldom is. Shoulder bumps shoulder, elbow brushes breast. It is the oldest form of human cipher, the secret language of females and males, a language that no one acknowledges but every man and woman on earth employs and understands.