Everglades (4 page)

One of the liveaboards had turned the music up loud, so, through her big fly bridge speakers, I could hear Jimmy Buf fett singing about one particular harbor, and the day that John Wayne died.

I said a few quick hellos, promised everyone who tried to engage me in conversation that I’d be right back, then walked across the shell parking lot toward the gate that Mack, the marina owner, closes and locks each Friday before sunset.

 

 

There were two lone vehicles parked on the other side of the gate, near the trail that leads to my wooden walkway. Sally’s BMW was there, a sporty 5 Series—an expensive choice that seemed out of character for someone I’d thought of as having simple tastes.

Behind it was a black Lincoln Town Car with gold trim, gold-spoked wheels and Florida plates. I found a stick, and noted the license number in sand beside the gate, before shielding my eyes and pressing my nose against the tinted windows.

On the passenger seat was a Florida road map, cans of Copenhagen snuff in a cellophane tube (one can missing) and the sort of rubber gizmo that nervous people squeeze to improve their grip. I also noted that the glove compartment was open.

So what do stalkers or private investigators stash in a glove box? Binoculars? Or maybe a handgun.

I used my T-shirt to rub prints off the window, then I stepped into the mangroves, moving quietly over the monkey-bar roots, feet sinking into the detritus bog, mosquitoes whining in my ears.

The path to my wooden walkway channels through limbs and roots, a dark, green tunnel that is a shady conduit walled by swamp.

I was close enough to the boardwalk path so as not to be seen without some effort, but close enough to be aware of anyone approaching or leaving the boardwalk.

If the stalker attempted to leave, I would see and intercept him.

Which meant he was still there, down there in the mangroves, watching my house from the water. Had to be.

 

 

So why couldn’t I find him?

Mangrove roots are like fibrous, shin-high hoops, half planted in the muck. I stepped over one after another, holding on to limbs for balance, moving steadily toward the approximate area where I’d last seen the man.

I used all the little tricks. Made sure I placed each careful boot-step on a shell or piece of broken branch so I wouldn’t sink into the bog. Waited for small gusts of wind to cover what little sound I did make. Paused every few seconds to listen for noise of movement ahead of me, or behind.

Big golden orb spiders thrive in the shade of mangroves, and there wasn’t enough light to see or avoid their webs, so I bulled through several insect traps, spider-silk sticking to my face like threads of cotton candy. When I felt a spider crawling on me, I stopped, carefully removed it and released it on a limb.

The whole while, I kept my eyes fixed in the direction where mangroves ended and water began.

Soon, I could see patches of silver and blue through the gloom of leaves. Then I could see the sandy area next to the buttonwood trees where the man had been standing.

He wasn’t there now.

Odd. Where’d he gone?

I stopped, waited, ears straining to hear, eyes straining to see.

Nothing.

There was no way he could have left via the trail without my seeing him. The only possibilities were that he had waded down the shoreline, or that he was now better hidden in the mangroves, off to my left or right.

Moving even more slowly, I worked my way to the big buttonwood at the water’s edge. The rain had quit now, though leaves still dripped.

From where I stood, I had an uninterrupted view of my house and the seascape beyond. Could see the top edge of a pumpkin moon, one day before full, a gaseous bubble rising out of the mangrove horizon. Could see Sally through the windows, very busy doing something in the kitchen.

It was the sort of scene that, if I had the talent, I’d want to capture on canvas. I stood in the shadows for another few moments before stepping out onto the sand.

That’s where the man had been standing, no doubt about that. The area was stamped with big shoe prints, pointy-toed, flat-bottomed shoes, Vibram heels sunk deep. He was a big guy. Size fourteen or fifteen shoes that carried a lot of weight.

There was an open Copenhagen can there, too. It was tossed down among the roots, silver lid missing, still nearly full.

A guy that big and sloppy should have been easy to track. Coming from the direction of the path, his bootprints were easy to read. But they ended by the tree where I now stood.

Each and every morning, I check the tide tables, which also give solar and lunar information. It has been a lifelong habit, and I do it automatically. So I knew that, on this day, the eleventh of April, low tide was at 7:47 P.M.—balanced, astronomically, between moonrise at 7:45 P.M. and sunset at 7:51. So the bay had nearly emptied, and would soon be refilling.

I stepped out into the shallow water, looking carefully.

Nope. No tracks out there, either. Which meant he hadn’t waded down the shoreline. Where the hell had he gone? It was as if he’d vaporized, disappeared into the darkening sky.

Then it came to me. Where he’d gone. Where he
had
to be.

 

 

A wise British physician once wrote that, when baffled by a problem, and all probabilities have been eliminated, the remaining possibility—however unlikely—
must
be the solution.

Only one possibility remained, and that probability now entered my all-too-often slow, slow brain.

Sally’s stalker was above me, in the buttonwood tree.

He’d been there the whole time, watching, waiting.

I stood frozen for a moment, considering how I should react.

The situation reminded me of something. Years ago, in Indonesia, on a tiny uninhabited island near Komodo and Rintja, a military SAS pal and I decided we wanted to find and photograph one of the rarest reptiles on earth—a giant monitor lizard.

The island was uninhabited, for the very simple reason that the lizards are predators by day and night, very efficient hunters and their flesh of preference is mammalian.

To render a man suitably immobile for easy consumption, the lizards lie in wait, use their dinosaur tail to cut his legs out from under him, then bite his belly open with one slashing swing of the head.

That technique has been well documented, and seldom varies.

Real estate on the island was very, very cheap.

My Australian friend and I found the claw and tail prints of a big animal on a beach beneath coconut palms near a waterfall.

We spent the afternoon tracking it through heavy, Indonesian jungle. A couple of hours before sunset, we were both exhausted and frustrated—outsmarted by a reptile?—and so returned to the beach, and our little ridged hull inflatable boat.

The monitor lizard was there waiting for us. One of the big females, eleven feet long, probably four hundred pounds, tongue probing the air experimentally, like a snake, getting the flavor of us in advance of attacking. Her eyes were black, yet seemed to glow.

She’d been shadowing us the whole time, anticipating our moves.

That’s the way I felt now. Like the hunter who recognizes that he is being hunted.

Realizing that the man had to be in the tree above me caused the same sensation of adrenaline rush to move up my spine.

I turned slowly away from the big buttonwood. I wanted to give myself some space before confronting him. In military parlance, he owned the high ground. I pretended to re-examine his tracks, puzzled. Then I began to take slow, small steps toward the path to my home.

Above me, I heard limbs rustle, then a primal grunting sound. I looked up reflexively to see a dark, refrigerator-sized shape falling through the limbs, dropping toward me.

chapter four

I
lunged away, turning, but I didn’t react quickly enough. The bulk of the man’s weight caught me on the left shoulder, and sent me stumbling into the mangroves. I would have fallen, but I grabbed a mangrove branch as I was going down. Then I used it as a kind of spring to launch me back toward him.

Normally, I’m not a puncher. Punch a man in the face, and you have just as much chance of breaking your hand as you have of breaking his jaw. But I was so surprised, and the adrenaline dump was so abrupt, that I reacted without thinking. He was getting up from his knees, his shaved head turned away from me—a perfect and unexpected target—so I hit him just as hard as I could with an overhand right that should have dropped him to the ground unconscious.

It would have knocked me unconscious. It would have dropped almost
any
man I’ve met.

Not him. In fact, it didn’t even seem to hurt him much.

He gave a little shake of his head. Then he turned his eyes toward mine, his expression slowly translating surprise into anger.

He stared at me for a moment, as if puzzled, before he said, “What the hell’d you do
that
for, Mac? You got any idea what a stupid thing it was you just did? I
hate
it when someone sucker punches me.” Talking as if
I’d
attacked
him,
stringing the words together in a heavy, urbanized accent.

Then, before I had a chance to speak, he came charging at me; stuck his shoulder in my stomach like a linebacker, and began to bull me toward the water.

 

 

I was in trouble. Lots of trouble, and for a couple of reasons.

For one thing, I hadn’t been working out much lately. I was, in fact, in the worst shape of my life. And he was as big as his footprints advertised.
Bigger.
Not tall, but one of the citified, double-wide models. Three or four inches under six feet, but he had to weigh close to two-fifty, two-seventy-five, with freakishly large feet and hands, and a head that could not have been supported by a normal human neck.

Men who are big and quick and hard exude a kind of physical assurance. He had it.

Something else: The guy had been a competitive wrestler—and a good one.

I knew the instant he put his hands on me. It was unmistakable. I knew because, in high school, I’d spent each and every post-football season enduring the brutal practices which that great, great sport demands. Hand control, the variations of classic takedowns and reversals, had all been pounded into my skull by a brilliant wrestling coach named Gary Freis. The moment you hook up with another man in any kind of physical conflict, a wrestler instantly recognizes another wrestler.

This guy had had a pretty good coach himself—unsettling news.

As he pushed me into the water, I used his own momentum to duck under his right armpit, and come up behind him. When I grabbed his throat to take control, he slapped his huge hand on mine. Then, instead of trying to pull away as expected, he pushed his body back into mine, prying my hand loose as he moved.

Suddenly, he was behind me, his left arm levered under mine, using the back of my head as a fulcrum, his right leg trying to grapevine between my legs.

As I grunted in pain, he said into my ear, breathing heavily, “You want to get nasty, asshole? I’ll
show
you nasty.”

What I’d learned in those few first seconds was disturbing.

The guy was stronger than I—no question—plus he had to be thirty, maybe forty, pounds heavier. He had those raccoon kind of fingers, steel within hard rubber, that move like tiny, independent little animals, and are nearly impossible to escape.

Something deep inside was telling me to stop, give it up, surrender—but not just because he was capable of beating me; even killing me.

No.

My inner voice and its reasoning were all too familiar: I no longer trust myself in a fight. Simple as that. I can no longer rely on the control I once pretended to have over my own cold temper.

Yet I couldn’t quit. Old habit.

Instead, I tried to relax my body, hoping to give him the impression I was quitting. When I felt his grip ease ever so slightly, I swung my hips to the right, then somersaulted forward into the knee-deep water as hard as I could throw my body.

It was enough to break me free. But not for long. He was instantly on me as I tried to get to my feet, pulling me, then turning me with a very effective arm drag.

Then he was behind me again, his left arm wrapped around my throat, the hard edge of his forearm digging into my Adam’s apple, severing the flow of oxygen between mouth and lungs.

It is the most basic—and the most effective—of submission holds, and if I didn’t find a way to break it, he could hold me there until I was unconscious. Or brain-damaged. Or dead.

“You want to keep dancing, asshole? Or you ready to quit?”

I hammered my head backward. Felt it glance off his nose; heard a woof of pain. It loosened his grip enough for me to drive my elbow into his stomach, but he managed to keep his forearm locked on my throat.

That was the end. All I could do. All I could stand without replenishing the oxygen supply, and I knew it. The world was getting fuzzy, and not just because my glasses were now hanging uselessly, tied around my neck with fishing line.

My head was tilted skyward and I watched the April sunset clouds turn gray, then rainbow-streaked as I began to slip into unconsciousness. . . .

Then I heard: “Oh . . . shit. Oh-h-h-h-h
shit-t-t-t!
”

Was I imagining the distress in his voice?

No . . . because suddenly, I was free. For no reason whatsoever, he released his grip, allowing me to collapse into the shallow water.

I got shakily to my feet, touching fingers to my bruised Adam’s apple, pulse roaring in my ears, as I put on my glasses.

Skinhead had already waded to shore where, inexplicably, he was now on his knees at the base of the buttonwood tree that had once been his hiding place.