Mute (13 page)

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.”

“Melted?” questioned Sneed.

“Melted,” Randy nodded with a frustrated huff.
“Like with acid.”

Sulfuric acid—Aaron’s professor said the bacteria
produced this as a byproduct. Moni remembered the stuff from high school
science lab. It could corrode metal, but only a real high concentration of the
stuff could devour it so fast.

“The lagoon turned to acid,” Moni said. “Sounds
like a perverse version of the plagues in the Bible.”

“If it was a plague, it came straight outta hell,”
Randy said.

“I promise you, I will throw somebody’s ass behind
bars for this,” Sneed said. “And it won’t be the devil. I’ve seen people commit
atrocities that Satan himself wouldn’t touch.”

Randy nodded. His hands clamped down on the sides
of the table. With a nod, Moni gave the lead detective his due for coaxing the
witness on.

“How bad did the acid damage the boat?” she asked.

“It breached the hull. We heard water sloshing
around inside,” Randy replied. “My skiff’s hull across the way was looking bad
too, but the engine was up and the propeller hadn’t touched the acid. Robbie
told me I should jump first while he flagged down the Coast Guard on the radio
and I went. I swear, I didn’t know what would happen.”

Randy wedged his fingers into his eyes until his
cheeks flushed red. He couldn’t plug the tears back any longer. They seeped out
from underneath his fingers and streamed down the sides of his nose and the
corners of his lips. Gasping, Randy tasted the salty elixir that Moni knew all
too well. He frantically wiped his mouth and his face as if the tears were acid
from the lagoon.

“It’s okay.” Moni placed a firm hand on his
shoulder. His trembling gradually eased. “No one could have known what would
happen.”

Randy grasped her hand as if it were a life
preserver. His breathing steadily calmed. She felt his heart rate through his
palm normalizing as well.

“I’m sorry,” Randy said. “I know you’ve got work to
do. This is pathetic.”

“No, it’s not,” Moni said. “You’re going to relive
this moment in your brain a million times, and it’ll always be hard. Just take
your time and we’ll get through it.”

Sneed rolled his eyes. He didn’t fix on giving him
any more time. Randy saw his gesture and got going.

“So I was in the skiff and Robbie radioed the Coast
Guard. He told me they were on the way. And I told him… I told him to hurry up
onto my boat. Robbie leapt across the water between our boats and up it came.”
He held his bandaged hand sideways and had his hand with the snake tattoo rise
from underneath. Randy grabbed his hand so hard Moni feared he might have
broken a finger. “The gator came outta the water and snapped onto his arm. I
heard Robbie scream. I saw the horror on his face the moment he realized he’d
never see his wife and son again. I reached for him, but I couldn’t make it. In
the blink of an eye, they were gone into the lagoon. I didn’t even think. I
just plunged my hand into the water.” He placed his bandaged hand on the table.
“They said these are second degree burns. I’ll tell you one thing, I’ve been
stabbed before and this hurt a hell of a lot worse. I would have dove into the
water after him. I should have… You don’t know how bad I… It’s just the pain…”

“You did all you could.” Moni reached across the
table. He yanked his bandaged hand away before she could touch it. “Something
about that gator made it immune to the acid, but it would have fried you.
There’s nothing you could have done at that point.”

Sneed looked down his nose at Randy as if the
grizzly detective would have jumped into the acid bath and snapped the gator’s
neck if that would have saved his brother. Luckily, Randy didn’t notice
anything besides the back of his own hand as he shielded his face.

“My hand was burning, so I ran. I slammed the
throttle and bolted out of there so freaked out I didn’t even look back. The
skiff’s motor lasted about a minute and then it died. No gas. Those fuckers
drained the tank.”

“What fuckers?” Sneed asked. “I thought you were
fighting a gator?”

“Like I said, it wasn’t a normal gator. This beast
wasn’t a creation of God, I tell ya. It left me out there on my skiff stranded
in the middle of the lagoon. The smell of the rotten acid in the water and the
fish getting fried alive with their hot guts bursting—it made me heave over the
side. When I saw that my puke didn’t boil in the water, I knew I had escaped
from the acid. The gator was still out there, though. If it wasn’t for the
Lagoon Watcher, it woulda got me for sure.”

Sneed grilled him on the timing of his rescue.
Harry Trainer, known in boating circles as the pesky Lagoon Watcher, fished
Randy Cooper out of his skiff around a quarter to three in the morning.
Somehow, he had heard the distress call before the Coast Guard and found
himself in better position for a response—less than fifteen minutes after the
call. He came wearing a black wetsuit rather than the trademark tropical shirt
and shorts everybody knows him for in daylight hours. Randy said the Watcher
didn’t seem all that surprised by his story, but he circled the boat around the
lagoon while Randy called out his brother’s name—all while skillfully avoiding
the acid slick near Palm Bay. Randy had screamed until his lungs ached. For the
longest time he heard nothing besides the water lapping up against the
Watcher’s boat.

“Out of the blue, I heard a bird flapping its
wings,” Randy said. “When I looked in that direction, I saw a pair of purple
eyes. At that point, I was ready for the damn gator—shotgun or no shotgun—if it
meant finding Robbie. I told the Watcher, ‘Take me there.’ He must have seen it
too, but he didn’t ask questions. Then I saw it—the red-shouldered hawk. It
was…” He wiped the perspiration off his face and clenched his fist over his
chin until he could spit out the words. “It was perched on Robbie’s life vest.
Just the life vest and shoulders—that’s all I saw. His head was… It was gone.”