Mute (18 page)

A few days later, her family left. Aaron heard they
moved to Atlanta, where Crystal might fit in better and find some friends—something
Aaron had failed at being for her when she most needed him.

Now, Moni had a gun on her. He barely knew this
woman, but she needed him. So did Mariella.

“I’m staying right here,” Aaron said. Darren
pointed the gun between his eyes. He resisted the urge to flinch. “I’m not
leaving them alone with you.”

“What do you mean
them
?” Darren asked. Moni
gawked at Aaron. That wasn’t the reaction he had been hoping for. “So you were
looking at someone back there. Whoever it is better get out here, and I mean
now!”

Mariella didn’t move.

“You wanna see some blood? If not, you get your ass
out here.” Darren turned his gun on Moni again. Her face went pale. Aaron knew
she’d take a bullet for the girl, but that would only buy her a minute. He had
a split second to stop Darren.

Too late. Mariella stepped out from behind the
couch. The man had a fresh target. Seeing the look on Moni’s face, Aaron saw
that this terrified her more than staring down a bullet herself.

“No. Don’t!” Moni pleaded.

Darren faced the child with the gun at waist level.
He aimed it in her general direction, but not straight at her. Mariella wobbled
on those meek little feet. Her lips shuddered as she eyed his instrument of
death. Without a single word or even a scream, the girl’s angelic face
contorted into a portrait of absolute dread, as if a million bodies had roasted
in ovens before her eyes.

“Oh… I’m sorry,” Darren said as he tucked the gun
into the waistband of his jeans. Moni’s mouth opened so wide that she nearly
kneed herself in the jaw. “I didn’t mean to frighten you, kid.”

Mariella backed against the screen door in the rear
of the house. Darren shuffled backwards toward the front door.

“I didn’t realize the girl was home,” he said. “I’m
not like your daddy. I don’t hurt children.” Moni furrowed her brow and took a
step toward her downed gun. “Yeah, I’m not done with you neither. I’ll see you
again, Moni—real soon. And I better not see this punk making a play for your
cooch or I’ll smash his little prick in my car door and drive ‘round town with
him. Ya feel me?”

Aaron would have returned fire with a witty
comeback, but concentrated on crossing his legs just in case. His
chicken-legged stance didn’t exactly make him look macho for Moni, but at least
he didn’t bail out of there crying.

When Darren slammed the door shut and headed for
his car, Moni hustled over, scooped up her gun and pointed it at him through
the window until he drove away. Aaron couldn’t understand why she didn’t do
that in the first place if she thought he came there for a fight—as the broken
mirror on Aaron’s car surely attested.

“Holy shit,” Aaron remarked.

“If you want to leave now, I’ll understand,” Moni
said as she kept watch out the window. Aaron read the shameful expression on
her face in the reflection off the glass as a sign that she couldn’t bear
facing him.

“Naw, it’s cool. Everybody’s got some skeletons in
their closet. It’s just that those skeletons don’t usually come packing heat.”

“And he might do it again. He doesn’t let things
go. The safest place for you to be is as far away from me as possible.”

“What about Mariella? If it’s so dangerous around
you, between him and all the craziness in the lagoon, then why is she here? I
can help you both out.”

“Mariella…” Moni turned and looked for the girl.
“Oh my God! Get away from that!”

Aaron whirled around and saw the night black water
moccasin coiled on the other side of the screen door. Mariella was only a foot
away on the other side of the flimsy netting. Snakes shouldn’t attack people
unprovoked. They eat rats and frogs and stuff. But Aaron knew at once that
wasn’t a normal snake. It sprung through the screen with such force that it
tore it out of the door frame. The netting fell on top of it, but it wouldn’t
keep it down for long. The snake started slithering out with its pointy,
venom-filled head aiming for Mariella’s back.

Chapter 16

The snake poked its head out from underneath the
downed screen and opened its jaws. Moni saw its white mouth and hooked fangs.
One bite from the water moccasin, also known as the Florida cottonmouth because
of the color of its most deadly weapon, could kill a grown person. The same
amount of poison in Mariella’s small body would stop her heart quicker than a
light switch getting flicked off.

Moni dashed across her living room. She couldn’t
make it in time. She heard her cat Tropic hissing and yowling from her bedroom.
Moni screamed at the snake as if the shockwaves of anger in her voice could
stop it. The water moccasin coiled up and readied to pounce on Mariella’s back.
The girl didn’t see it. She didn’t move, or even seem disturbed in the least by
the sight of Moni freaking out.

The snake sprang toward the girl. Aaron dove from
the other side. Mariella ducked out of Aaron’s way. The snake’s white mouth
snapped at him as he fell on his shoulder. Moni couldn’t tell whether it had
struck him or not, but he spit enough curses to make a truck driver faint.
Mariella scampered into her room and slammed the door.

When Aaron sat up, he faced one peeved reptile. It
didn’t hiss, but it recoiled into attack mode.

“Roll!” Moni yelled at him as she trained her gun
on it.

Aaron reacted with more of a flop than a roll. It
worked well enough. The water moccasin hesitated in its attack and Moni shot
its head off. Its body fell limp as a rubber band as its blood trickled, not
poured, onto her carpet.

“Oh damn…” Aaron gasped as he scrambled to the
couch. If the snake had bit him, he couldn’t have gotten back on his feet. He
gawked at Moni’s smoking gun. “Thank you.”

“I should thank you,” she said as she holstered the
weapon. “You got Mariella out of the way.”

“I didn’t lay a finger on her. I tried to shove her
away from it, but she took off so fast. The girl’s got survival instincts.”

“That’s for sure. But we got lucky this time. Thank
God you were standing close enough…”

“To serve as bait.” He rubbed the forearm the snake
had nearly sunk its fangs into.

“You’re pretty brave for a surfer dude.” Moni
trotted up and kissed him on the cheek. She felt a spark there, like a rock
striking a piece of flint. A couple more times and it might start burning.

Maybe Darren had it wrong about this guy, she thought.
Aaron proved that he’d protect her and Mariella. It took her long enough, but
she realized that a good heart—even without the guns to back it up—counted more
than all muscle and selfish intentions.

“How about I take you up on that horseback riding trip?”

“Sweet,” he said with a beaming grin. “Let’s tell
Mariella.”

As he turned toward the girl’s room, she gently
grabbed his arm and halted him.

“Not such a good idea. My baby got spooked. Let her
calm down. I’ll tell her before bed.”

“All right. I feel ya.” Aaron sounded as gangster
with that phrase as a cat sounds tough barking. Moni giggled. “But I think we
should hold off on the pizza for tonight. I better clean up this mess and
deliver the remains to the AMRI lab before they spoil.”

Moni dropped her smile as she eyed the dead snake.
It resembled a black garden hose that had exploded at one end.

“What’s gonna spoil? I mean, besides my appetite.”
Moni pressed her hand against her stomach and stuck out her tongue.

“I bet it’s loaded with bacteria,” Aaron said. “The
snake should have bounced off your screen and maybe ripped it along the edge a
bit, not tore through it. And then there’s that.”

In the pool of blood underneath the snake’s mangled
head festered a smidgen of purple ooze.

Gators, birds, manatees and now snakes infected
with the bacteria had attacked people, Moni thought. Most of their targets had
died. If Aaron hadn’t gone all out on that desperate dive, Mariella would have
wound up like the others.

Moni’s heart numbed over with a chill. The words
her father had stuffed into her ear only hours ago rang through her head.

“The
lagoon man has a hunger and I smelled it out there today. That girl belongs to
his lagoon and he’s coming to take her back. You can’t stop it, so you best get
outta the way.”

Chapter 17

Moni couldn’t settle down to sleep. As she lay
beneath the sweaty sheets, she replayed the incidents with Darren and the snake
over and over in her head. She couldn’t understand the timing of both attacks
happening in such close succession. Did someone make the animal strike at her
most vulnerable moment? It had caught her utterly unprepared. Aaron had saved
the girl, not her.

Detective Sneed interrupted those lingering
thoughts with a phone call at around five-thirty in the morning. Moni feigned a
weary answer, as if he had woke her from a deep slumber.

“I heard you fired off a round in your house
yesterday. You know, we got a firing range so you don’t shoot up your
neighborhood like a damn hoodlum.”

“I shot a snake. I reported it and, as I wrote,
Aaron took the carcass to the lab.”

“You and Aaron. Uh huh.” He huffed in disapproval.
Officers shouldn’t date sources in an investigation, but Moni knew he got
offended by something else—a black woman and a white man.

“I hope you have a better reason than that to drag
me outta bed. I’ll be taking Mariella to school in a couple hours.”

“I got a plenty good reason,” Sneed said. “Remember
Randy Cooper—the guy who escaped being a gator’s midnight snack? We haven’t
heard from him since we dropped him back at his house. He hasn’t answered his
phone. After you drop off the young witness, go head on over there with
Skillings and Harrison. Let Cooper know that he can’t duck us. I got a search
warrant that says he better open up.”

Moni rubbed her forehead, which had been basting in
her sweat all night. He could have waited an hour before giving her that
assignment. Not that he had really awoken her, but he had tried. Maybe Sneed
spent all night working his cases like a general plotting war inside his tent.
The master of paranoia had once again pointed his hairy finger at the victim
instead of focusing on a killer that had him outwitted.

“I’ll knock on his door, but I’d prefer not to draw
the search warrant,” Moni said. “The poor guy has been through hell in the past
24 hours.”

Moni got an early start on the day by packing
Mariella’s bag and cooking her breakfast. The girl treaded through her morning
motions somberly coming on the heels of two attacks, but Moni put a smile on
her face by promising horseback riding that afternoon. She decided against
mentioning Aaron. She didn’t know whether Mariella had fled from the snake or
the man jumping at her.

After she dropped the girl off, Moni met up with
Nina Skillings and
Clyde
Harrison in the parking lot of a Palm Bay shopping center a few miles from
Cooper’s house. For sure, Skillings’ toughness and Harrison’s colossal strength
could have done the job fine without Moni. She figured that Sneed had signed
her up as a tag along so she’d learn how “real officers” handled themselves.

“So,
you saw Sneed interview this crackpot,” Skillings said, hanging her head out
the window of the patrol car parked beside Moni’s undercover Taurus. “Why do
you think he’s gone quiet on us?”

“Telling
us about his brother’s murder took a lot out of him,” Moni said. “We really
should have sent him for a psychiatric evaluation before releasing him.”

Harrison
leaned over from the driver’s side, and formed a scowl with his square jaw and
bushy eyebrows. “If this runt doesn’t talk, I’ll give him an evaluation with my
boot.”

Moni sighed and shook he head. “I’d say Randy has
had enough big, dumb animals attack him for one week.”

He chuckled without a sign of taking offense. At
least Harrison knew his role.

They found Randy Cooper’s old Ford pickup outside
his house. He must have stopped by the home of his brother’s newly widowed wife
on the beachside and picked it up. Moni couldn’t imagine how painful that
meeting must have been for him. How could he look that woman and her son in the
eyes and tell them that the man of their household is gone? How could he tell
them he was snatched from his boat and killed during his reckless caper in the
middle of the night? Moni understood why he didn’t feel like answering his
phone, or his door.

“Randy!” Skillings shouted for the fifth time. They
didn’t hear anything stirring inside. The curtains were tightly drawn, but the
odor of stale bread, moldy cheese and spoiled beer wafted through the cracks in
the window panes. “I can smell that slob’s mess from out here. That’s a reason
enough for a search even without this warrant.”

“Okay. I got it.” Harrison pointed Skillings to the
side so he could kick in the door.