Mute (34 page)

As she plodded toward the frightened little girl,
Moni remembered when she had found Mariella among the mangroves on that
blood-soaked day. This time, the girl quivered with fear whereas before she
appeared more nervous and shy. Moni hadn’t recognized pure terror in the girl’s
eyes until that moment. Yet, with every step closer she took, the chains of
dread strewn across Mariella’s face loosened. Finally, her arms reached out.
Moni stepped into them. She embraced the girl with all her heart as they stood
in the place that might have been a grave for both of them. Mariella tied
herself around Moni’s neck like a sweater. She reluctantly untied the girl and
rolled up her sleeves. Despite the blood on her clothes, Mariella didn’t have a
scratch on her. She better keep it that way. They still had the Lagoon Watcher
underneath there with them, but not for long.

Holding the flashlight together with Mariella, she
found her pistol and scooped it up. She focused the beam on the man’s
sun-beaten head as he lay face down. Moni pointed her pistol along the same
line. She wrapped her finger around the trigger.

The bastard deserved it more than anyone, she
thought. He had claimed so many lives with his deranged experiment on the
lagoon. He had taken everything from Mariella, including her innocence and joy.
This man had stalked her and kidnapped her. He had murdered people. The Lagoon
Watcher would get the death penalty anyway, so she might as well expedite the
process and insure that he doesn’t catch a lucky break in court.

She took a step closer and steadied her aim.

He’s
unconscious. This man is no longer a threat. What the hell am I doing?

Moni had never shot a person. She had never felt
comfortable making a split-second judgment of whether someone should live or
die. The Lagoon Watcher could easily be arrested without any more violence. She
would sleep a whole lot better, as would Mariella, if he had a bullet rip
through his spinal column. Moni took a deep breath. Mariella squeezed her hand
as if she were pleading for an ice cream cone.

“Anybody in here?” Sneed hollered from the opening
in the wooden skirt. He nearly toppled over as he squatted down with his hefty
gut dragging past his knees. His eyes went wide. “Holy crap! That’s him!” Sneed
tried arching his back and ducking under the trailer, but his tank-like frame
couldn’t handle anything close to a limbo. “Connors! Get over here and arrest
that man.”

Moni sighed as her chance to end the Lagoon
Watcher’s pathetic existence passed her by. When she traded her pistol for a
pair of handcuffs, she realized that she could at least make the most out of
her first big arrest.

“You can tell Connors to hold off,” Moni told
Sneed. “I’ve got this one.”

She briefly turned the flashlight on Mariella and
herself. Sneed looked like a toddler who couldn’t believe he had just shit his
pants.

* * * *

Moni had never been so relieved at the sight of
blood all over her face when she looked in the mirror. It sure beat purple
bacteria juice.

The blood wasn’t hers. When she wiped it off with a
damp towel, she saw a black welt on her cheek, but no cuts. The Lagoon Watcher
hadn’t infected her. He bled on her from the gash on his forehead. All of a
sudden, Moni felt like bathing in bleach. Mariella would need a bath as well,
because the man had bled all over her arms.

With Mariella safely in the SUV with a clean shirt,
Moni marched up to the patrol car that held the Lagoon Watcher. The man had
come to and immediately started babbling nonsense. The large bandage on his
head didn’t make him look any saner.

 
When he saw
Moni, he pressed both hands on the glass and started shouting. She couldn’t
understand him through the thick window, but his lips formed the word “girl”
several times.

“He said the little girl sliced open his forehead,”
Sneed said as he moseyed up behind Moni. His eyes trained on the suspect. “And
I’m sure
she
beheaded all those people too. What a deranged individual.
You’re damn lucky you found him when you did.”

Calling her lucky didn’t substitute for
congratulating her on formulating and executing a perfectly laid trap, but
she’d take anything she could get.

“What makes you think I was lucky?” Moni asked.
“Maybe I planned everything down to the tiniest detail.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet you did.” Sneed gave a dismissive
huff. “I said you’re lucky, because the Lagoon Watcher had a jacket loaded with
syringes. We haven’t figured out what the hell he had in them yet, but I have a
good idea what he intended to do with them.”

Moni cringed at the thought of the Lagoon Watcher
yanking Mariella’s arm out of its socket and jamming a needle into her artery.
He had brought a pouch full of poison for the girl’s heart.

Seeing that freak incessantly jabbering from inside
the car, Moni smacked her palm on the window square over his face. The Lagoon
Watcher recoiled and went quiet. She wished she had the strength to break that
glass so that its shards shredded his face. Another punch or two might do it,
Moni thought. She turned her back on him and refocused with a deep breath
before she did something she would regret.

“I know how you feel. I wanna kick his ass too,”
said Sneed, who couldn’t possibly hate the Lagoon Watcher as much as Moni did.
Sure, he had killed one of his friends, but he couldn’t love another human
being as much as Moni loved Mariella. “We got something even better than that,
though. We can finally rest easy knowing we’ve got this case under control. All
we have to do is make him tell us where the bombs are. I don’t think you have
to worry about your girl anymore.”

Another thing Sneed didn’t understand is that a
parent never stops worrying. And she had good reason to.

Chapter 34

Mrs. Mint watched the news casts of the officers
marching the Lagoon Watcher into jail over and over. She must have read every
news account too. The teacher gazed at his mug shot with those startled blue
eyes, and that mouth with a primordial blood lust. Those were the eyes that had
her in their sights. Even knowing that he sat behind bars at that very moment
with serious charges coming down the pike, the teacher trembled before she
rounded corners. She wondered whether someone waited for her on the other side
with gloved hands and a jacket full of needles.

She kept shaking her head and snapping herself back
into reality. Mrs. Mint sat in the front seat of the school bus as it took her
kids for their Friday field trip to the Enchanted Forest Sanctuary in
Titusville. Yesterday, she had been prepared to cancel this trip in light of
the threat to Mariella, but with the Lagoon Watcher put away, she went ahead
with it. Besides, she figured, exploring the 393-acre nature preserve would
alleviate some of the anxiety that Mariella and the other kids felt after the
police sting on their school.

The kids were their normal chattering selves in the
bus. Mariella remained quiet and content. Yet, for some reason, Mrs. Mint
couldn’t relax. Maybe it was the glimpses of the Indian River Lagoon she caught
between the trees as they rolled up U.S. 1. It still carried such a revolting
stench that the bus driver made the kids shut all the windows. Arresting the
Lagoon Watcher hadn’t solved every problem, at least not immediately.

No one had explained to her how his killing spree
related to the swimming and fishing bans in the lagoon. She had seen the
massive fish kills. She had seen video of someone shooting a hawk flying over
the lagoon and then it popping back to life a minute later and gliding around
impossibly on a broken wing. She couldn’t fathom how all that connected with
the murder of Mariella’s parents. But if Sheriff Brandt had gotten on TV and
proclaimed the emergency over, and the pollution in the lagoon on the verge of
tapering off, that suited her fine. The teacher would much rather see her life
return to normal—even if life for some of her students would never resemble how
it was before.

Mrs. Mint breathed easier as the bus turned west
away from the lagoon and then headed up a road pinned in by scrub pines and oak
trees so virulent that they had to be pruned so they didn’t overrun the
roadway. A few kids scanned the forest for deer and tortoise, but most of them
kept their eyes inside the bus on more captivating sights, such as video games
and cell phones. After a few minutes, they came across the only building for
seemingly miles: the Enchanted Forest Education and Management Center. Its
large screen porch served as a haven from the mosquitoes when the hordes were
particularly unbearable.

The kids jumped out of their seats. The teacher
figured their enthusiasm came more for finally getting off that cramped bus and
pumping their legs rather than for observing some woodland creatures and exotic
plants. Mrs. Mint held back the entire class with one raised hand. She headed
for the exit first so she could herd them into an orderly line with the help of
her assistant. Mrs. Sara Fogel, a blond education student, had the body of a
preteen and an even less mature understanding of teaching. She better grow up
quick, Mrs. Mint thought, because she could use an extra set of eyes watching
these 29 kids traverse a forest full of creepy crawly things, and not all of
them friendly.

When Mrs. Mint landed on the parking lot, she
thanked goodness that her boots had thick soles. By the looks of the sizzling
pavement, if she had stepped on it barefoot it would have been like tossing a
chicken breast onto a frying pan. In no more than twenty seconds, the sweat had
already started dripping from her hair line down her cheeks and they had
another two hours of roasting there. At least it wouldn’t feel so blistering
hot underneath the canopy of trees.

As the kids started filtering off the bus and into
a line, Mrs. Mint kept watch on Fogel, and made sure that she kept Mariella
away from the Buckley twins. Luckily, the blond troublemakers were among the
first off the bus. Kyle leapt off the top step and did a 180 as if he were
skateboarding. Cole mimicked the jump, but he came down on the side of his foot
and landed on his bottom. His brother led the chorus of laughter.

“This is a nature park, not a skate park,” Mrs.
Mint said as the boy rubbed his sore keister. He got up with the assistance of
his embarrassment rather than his teacher’s hand.

Mariella stepped off the bus gingerly along with
the stragglers who would rather sit in air conditioned living rooms all their
lives. The quiet girl didn’t seem reluctant, though. She gazed at the southern
magnolias, cabbage palms and the live oaks elegantly draped in Spanish moss
like queens in furry coats. Mariella appeared awestruck.

Mrs. Mint felt a wave of relief. The teacher had
worried that this trip would trigger Mariella’s nightmares of the terrifying
evening she had spent in a mangrove forest after her parents died. Instead, it
might have unlocked the magnificent curiosity of a child.

After the park rangers nearly sapped the
imagination out of all of them with their dull lecture, Mrs. Mint led her
students on a hike along the trail with Fogel bringing up the rear. The
teachers made sure the students stayed between the wooden markers of the trail
as they strolled along the walls of slash pines. Live oak trees bent over the top
of the trail, making the kids arch their necks back as they gazed up at the
birds chirping on the branches above. The humming of the insects, and the
singing of the birds, melded into a natural symphony that was rudely
interrupted by little feet stomping on leaves and twigs.

“Whoa, cool,” remarked Cole Buckley from near the
front of the line.

The brothers stopped, along with all the kids
behind them. They stared at the banana spider dangling in its yellowish web
between the spiky leaves of neighboring slash pines. Also known as a golden
silk spider, the arachnid had yellow and red legs with tufts of prickly black
hairs extended almost the width of an adult’s hand. The spider’s head resembled
a polar bear with six black eyes. Of course, those were spots on its back and
not its real eyes.

Having taken this tour dozens of times, Mrs. Mint
knew that the banana spider looked fearsome but it only truly threatened
insects. Its bite was milder than a bee’s sting, but try telling that to a
hysterical child who’d seen too many horror movies. The spider wouldn’t inject
its venom into someone unless they got violent with it. She doubted that the
Buckley twins were that stupid as she patiently watched them from the head of
the halted line.

The teacher quickly realized that she had
underestimated the boys. Cole tossed a twig at the web. It ripped through a few
strands and made the spider’s handiwork sag. The banana spider scrambled away
from the orb at the center of its web and up to a more stable spot. As the arachnid
flicked its front four legs, Mrs. Mint thought of how terrified she would feel
if a giant one-thousand times her size started hurling logs at her.

“Cole and Kyle, cut that out,” Mrs. Mint said
without taking a single step towards them. Those kids only listened when
someone physically stopped them. That usually comes from a lax disciplinary
environment at home. If they didn’t start respecting her voice, they would keep
causing their teachers headaches all through high school, when they would be
too big to manhandle—assuming they didn’t get expelled before then.