“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.”
