Night Vision df-18 Read online

  The handcuffs was something he carried for Frankie. The woman was crazy for bondage.

  Squires turned toward the trailers, seeing kids’ bicycles and rusting trucks, now seeing Tula push open her trailer door, then running toward him, carrying something in her hand. Squires squinted to see a… bottle of liquor?

  What the hell?

  Yep, she was carrying a damn bottle of tequila. Well, no one ever claimed that Mexicans were smart. But then he also saw that she was carrying a flashlight, which was exactly what he needed, so he yelled to her, “Over here! Bring me that damn light so we can see what’s going on!”

  The girl looked in his direction but ignored him. Because of that, Squires was about to yell something else, but that’s when a big white guy came dodging through the crowd, speaking in Spanish, saying something that might have been, “Excuse me, sorry. Let me pass.”

  Definitely being polite, as the guy hurried to the lake’s edge, kicking off shoes, shirt, then tossing his wallet and cell phone onto the ground before he jumped into the water. A second later, another white guy appeared. He was a skinny scarecrow of a hippie who was doing the same thing, stripping to go in the water.

  What the hell were these two white dudes doing at Red Citrus?

  Squires yelled to the hippie, “Hey… you! What the hell you think you’re doing?” but the hippie was busy pulling off his shirt and talking into his cell phone at the same time, before he dropped the phone on the ground, next to his wallet, and then he went into the water, too, but on his belly.

  Using his cell phone? The asshole had probably just called 911.

  Shit! This was all Squires needed. Fifi was in the process of solving a serious problem, but now here were a couple of solid-looking white citizens messing in his business.

  Squires spat, “Goddamn do-gooders!” as he headed after the flashlight Tula was holding, pushing people out of the way.

  A moment later, speaking into the hippie’s cell phone, Squires was telling the 911 operator, “That’s right, cancel the emergency, ma’am. We made a mistake here on our end. I know, I know… it’s not the first time.”

  He’d checked PREVIOUS CALLS. When he’d seen 911, he knew he had to do something to stop the cops from showing up.

  But then Squires had to whisper “Damn it” as he covered the phone so the operator wouldn’t hear Carlson screaming across the water to the big white guy, yelling, “Help me! Take my hand!”

  “Sir?” the operator said, raising her voice, “Who’s yelling in the background?”

  “Ma’am,” Squires told her, being sweet, “I understand what you’re asking. And at first we thought someone was in trouble. But, turns out, it’s just a bunch of Mexican kids playing games. You know how girls squeal when they’re running round, playing games at night?”

  The woman asked, “Did you place the call? Is your name Tomlinson?”

  Squires hesitated, aware that it was sometimes a mistake to lie to the cops before thinking it over. “Yep, that’s my name,” he said finally.

  The operator told him, “We’ve already dispatched units to that address. Dispatched it to… to a Red Citrus RV Park, Guava Street, just off San Carlos Boulevard. That’s near Fort Myers Beach, correct?”

  Squires was getting nervous and impatient. He covered the phone and yanked the flashlight out of the weird little Bible freak’s hand because she kept turning the beam toward the water, where there was now a lot of splashing and swearing going on.

  “Damn it,” he whispered to the girl, “pay attention!” as the operator asked him again, “Did you hear me? Is that the correct address, sir?”

  Squires kept his voice pleasant and easy as he replied, “Well, if you reckon your people need to practice answering ambulance calls, ma’am, there’s nothing I can do to stop ’em. I just wanted you to know this one is a false alarm. Everything’s just fine here. Our folks are having lots of fun-it’s a sort of party going on. So I guess I’m gonna have to apologize to your people again when they show up here for no reason.”

  The operator asked a couple more questions before Squires covered one ear, listening, until he suspected that the woman was convinced and had canceled the 911 call, no matter what she claimed. Then he hung up, as he swung the light toward the water, wanting to confirm the gator still had Carlson.

  Fifi still had the guy, all right. But Squires could see the big white guy was swimming hard to catch up, which caused him to wonder, Who the hell is that crazy son of a bitch?

  Well… there was an easy way to find out.

  From the hippie’s billfold, Squires removed a wad of cash. It looked like a bunch of crisp twenties. He stuffed the money into his jeans, then retrieved the big guy’s billfold. There wasn’t nearly as much cash in it but enough. Yep, these two dudes were solid working citizens-plus, there were some other interesting things to see in this second billfold.

  Squires’s eyes shifted from the pond to what he was holding. He used the flashlight to go through credit cards, business cards and IDs that showed a nerdy-looking guy with a jaw and glasses. Marion D. Ford, Ph. D.

  Sanibel Biological Supply

  Dinkin’s Bay Marina

  Marion. What kind of name was that for a man?

  The guy was a damn scientist or something, apparently. What the hell was a scientist doing at a trailer park full of chilies and wettails? Squires put one of the man’s business cards into his back pocket before he went through the other stuff, paying special attention to a couple of unusual IDs.

  Yeah, the dude was a scientist, but there was some other stuff that worried Squires. Could be the asshole worked for the feds, too, because one of the IDs gave this guy, Marion Ford, unlimited access to something called the Special Operations Center at MacDill Air Base in Tampa.

  What the hell was that about?

  And there was another plastic ID for a military base in Cartagena, Colombia. But that one was mostly in Spanish, so there was no telling what it meant.

  The dude, Ford, Squires guessed, must be some small-time scientist who worked for the feds. But he wasn’t really in the military-not according to what Squires was looking at in the billfold, anyway. Just maybe hired by the military, for some reason or another.

  Could that mean the hippie and the nerd were actually with the Department of Immigration? Squires gave himself a few seconds to think about it. At first, that made some sense to him. Why else would they come snooping around a trailer park ass-deep in chilies and chulas?

  But then Squires got a sinking feeling. What if the two dudes were actually with the DEA instead? What if they had come here trying to set up some kind of drug bust on the small steroid operation Squires was operating?

  Squires whispered “Son of a bitch” as he glanced toward the pond, where he could see the gator rolling in a spray of water, and he thought, Eat that bastard, Fifi! Kill them both!

  Squires was pretty sure he had seen the hippie, Tomlinson, before, cruising around the park in some shitty old Volkswagen that had to be twenty years old. Sometimes a girlish-looking electric bike, too. Which wasn’t that unusual. Dopers often cruised the parks because they knew that the chilies arrived from Mexico carrying baggies of weed or peyote buds in their pants instead of cash.

  Hell, Squires had bought grass from them himself, although, more often, he just took the shit when he wanted it. Sometimes, he’d yank a guy up by the ankles and shake him, like shaking quarters out of an old pair of jeans. What the hell could a Mexican do about it? Call the cops?

  That was one of the good things about managing a place like Red Citrus. No one on the whole goddamn property wanted the cops around, especially Squires and Frankie, so that made it a safe place to be. Which is why, in their newest double-wide trailer, Squires had set up a smaller version of the cookshack they had out there at the hunting camp. It wasn’t the sort of cookshack where he actually cooked food. What he cooked up was home-brewed steroid gear like testosterone enanthate, and equine-which was a horse steroid called EQ-plus win
strol and deca-durabolin.

  “Gear” was bodybuilder slang for steroids, almost always purchased illegally.

  Squires had become good at rendering high-grade veterinarian powders into injectable muscle juice. The kitchen was well supplied with Whatman sterile filters, 20-gauge needles, sesame oil, benzyl benzoate and everything else needed to produce a first-class product.

  Squires had started small, producing just enough gear for himself and Frankie, who had, at one time, been one of the top female bodybuilders in the country. Then he began to sell to a few guys he trusted, and that’s how they got started.

  It was Frankie who noticed how fast the cash was piling up just from selling to friends. So the two of them had expanded the operation, thinking they could make more money dealing gear than they could ever make running his mother’s shitty trailer parks or teaching yoga classes, which Frankie sometimes did. They bought vials by the gross. They bought two vacuum machines and a label maker, too.

  Turned out, they were right about making money.

  Dopers thought a fresh peyote button was expensive? Ask a bodybuilder about the price of a vial of Masteron or high-grade Testosterone-E. Frankie could walk into any gym in South Florida where muscle freaks congregated and make an EQ horsey whinnying noise and that would bring them running.

  Juicers knew exactly what the lady was carrying in her gym bag and they were damn eager to buy. Because of the feds, dependable gear was so goddamn hard to get, Squires and Frankie were now making a small fortune, all in cash, selling their home-brewed goodies in kits, complete with pins and syringes if that’s what the bros wanted.

  Their little organization was becoming so well known, and their products so trusted, that gym rats in South Florida had come up with a nickname for the stuff. They called it Gator Juice. As in, “You tried the Gator Juice Tren? Or the Gator Juice A-bombs? Gator Juice is goddamn grade-A shit. Good to go, man. As in G-two-G.”

  Squires’s eyes kept swinging from Ford’s billfold to the drama taking place out there on the lake. A couple of chilies had come through the crowd carrying a big military-type light called a Golight, so Squires pocketed the scientist’s cash, then handed both billfolds to one of the chilies, saying to him, “Hang on to these, will ya, amigo? Now, give me that goddamn light.”

  With the Golight, Squires could see that it was getting interesting out there on the water where Ford was doing something that would’ve been hard to believe if it wasn’t actually happening. Ford had his left arm slung over the gator’s back while Fifi struggled to swim, still carrying Carlson sideways in her mouth. What Ford was trying to do, Squires realized, was climb onto the gator’s back.

  Un-by-God-believable!

  Into Squires’s mind came the image of the big Australian, the crocodile hunter guy who he used to like to watch on TV, which made what was happening easier to comprehend. But once the scientist got onto the gator’s back, then what?

  Squires placed the big spotlight on his shoulder to steady the thing, then leaned to focus the beam on something the scientist had in his hand.

  What the hell was the dude carrying?

  A hammer, maybe, that’s what it looked like. No… not a hammer. It looked like Ford was trying to steady an itty-bitty pocket pistol behind one of Fifi’s eyes-which was a stupid goddamn thing to try. At least, Squires hoped it was a stupid goddamn thing to try.

  Suddenly, he could feel that sickening feeling in his stomach again, worried the crazy do-gooder was going to find a way to free Carlson and screw up the only good luck Squires had had in a week. But it was pointless, what the guy was trying to do… wasn’t it?

  Squires hoped it was true. There was no pussy pistol in the world with enough stopping power to…

  WHAP-WHAP!

  Squires jumped when he heard the gunshots. Then he stood straight, realizing that the man had managed to get a couple of rounds off.

  Behind him, the crowd made a collective Ooohing noise as they watched the alligator’s tail slam sideways, then tilt upward like a crane. The tail stood there for an instant, before the big animal rolled and then sank from sight.

  Shit! Where was Carlson?

  Squires fanned the light back and forth, searching. Maybe the nosy old turd had gone down with the gator. No… no such luck. Carlson was still out there, floundering to stay on the surface while the hippie swam toward him.

  Sons a bitches!

  Squires felt an acidic surge move from his abdomen toward his head, the signal that he was becoming seriously pissed off. It was a steroid charge that he had experienced many times but seldom as strong as tonight-which would have made sense, if he’d stopped to think about it. Tuesdays and Saturdays were Squires’s pin days-“pinning” being bodybuilder talk for steroid injections.

  That morning, he had flooded two syringes with testosterone, equipoise, trenbolone and decanoate-all oil-based, veterinarian-strength gear-and injected it into his thighs, but only after heating the oil under a hot spigot to make the sticks faster and less painful.

  As a special treat-because it had been such a shitty two days-he had also eaten five tabs of dianabol, a hundred milligrams.

  D-bombs, man-nothing else hit Squires quite as hard as dianabol, although he preferred the injectable version. Juice was easier on the liver than pills. But he was out of D-bomb oil until he made his next trip to the hunting camp.

  Squires lived for that full-on testosterone buzz. He loved the evening of a pin day, when his blood levels were so hormone drunk that he could track the oil moving through his veins like heat. It caused his muscles to twitch and swell beneath his skin, the fibers feeding so furiously on hormone soup that Squires could feel the mass of his body changing.

  “You got your monster face on tonight,” Frankie would sometimes say to him as they elbowed for space before their weight-room mirror, Frankie usually posing naked, but Squires wearing a thong because steroid gear shrunk his nuts so small it was embarrassing.

  “I love it,” the woman would tell him, “when you got your monster face on.”

  Because of the D-bombs, and because of what was happening, Harris Squires had his monster face on now.

  He paused long enough to kick one of the cell phones toward the water, hoping it belonged to the guy named Ford-the damn do-gooder dude who’d just shot his alligator, Fifi. Then Squires batted a couple of chilies out of his way, as he began to pace, still carrying the spotlight, waiting for the bastard to make it to shore-if he ever did.

  As Harris Squires knew from years of hunting the Glades, big alligators died hard.

  FIVE

  When I heard the familiar voice yell, “Doc! Help me get this guy in!” I spun around to see Tomlinson’s silhouette only a few yards away, but that’s all I could see because someone onshore was blinding me with a powerful spotlight.

  I waved my hand and yelled in Spanish, “Get that thing out of my eyes!”

  But nothing happened. So I yelled louder, in English, adding, “You dumbass!” for emphasis.

  For an instant, the light swung skyward, and I could see that Tomlinson had the injured man in a cross-chest carry, trying to swim him to shore. He was having trouble, though, because the guy was fighting him, swinging his fists, trying to get a solid elbow into my friend’s face. The man apparently thought the alligator still had him.

  There was no telling how badly the guy was hurt, but he was obviously in shock. I swam closer, my head up, got a hand under the man’s arm and pulled his ear close to my lips, yelling in Spanish, “You’re safe! Stop fighting!”

  I repeated it several times before his head rolled toward me, eyes wide, and he whispered, in English, “Am I dreaming this? Am I dead? This is a terrible dream if I’m not dead.”

  Yes, he was in shock… a small man with a gaunt drunkard’s face that was a saprophytic gray in the glow of security lights. His voice was incongruous-he spoke with the rounded vowels of a Virginia gentleman.

  I asked him, “What’s your name?”

  He con
tinued babbling, telling me, “I don’t know what happened! I walked down to look at something floating in the water. Next thing I know, something was dragging me in… like it was trying to squeeze the guts out of me. I heard something snap… something way inside my body.”

  The man looked at me, eyes blinking, and I heard what he must have sounded like as a child when he asked, “Am I badly hurt? I don’t want to die, I really don’t.”

  I replied, “Lay back. Get some air in your lungs. We’re taking you to shore.” I could see there was an open slash on the man’s forearm, and his legs looked as dead as wood, the way they floated on the surface.

  As Tomlinson positioned himself to support the man’s other arm, he asked me, “Did you kill it?” meaning the alligator, and I could tell he hoped I hadn’t hurt the thing.

  “Let’s get out of here before we catch a damn disease,” I told him. “Start swimming, I’ll keep his head up.”

  Truth was, I still didn’t know if the gator was dead. Judging from the way the animal’s tail had periscoped to the surface, at least one of the bullets had done damage to the neuro system.

  Either way, a wounded gator was the least of my worries. The most dangerous animals in Florida’s backwaters aren’t reptiles. They aren’t amphibians or fish. I was more concerned about microscopic animals that, as I knew too well, thrived in stagnant lakes like the one we were in.

  The injured man might survive the wounds the gator had inflicted only to die from bacteria that lived in the animal’s mouth. Or from a single-celled protozoan that all the commotion had kicked free from the muck below.

  The injured man wasn’t the only one at risk-Tomlinson and I were in danger, too. There are varieties of single-celled animals that don’t need an open wound to slip through a primate’s skin armor. The amoeba Naegleria can travel through a man’s nostrils, into the brain and cause an encephalitis that is deadly. It’s rare, but I knew from my professional journals that this same microscopic animal had killed at least four healthy young men in the last few years.