Night Vision

FOUR

When Harris Squirespushed through the crowd of little brown people and realized what was happening, he grinned, thinking, Awesome!

Because of his girlfriend, Frankie, it had been a rotten week. But seeing what he was seeing now made him feel hopeful. Two nights before, while shooting a homemade skin flick, the idiot Mexican girl with them had taken too much Ecstasy and stopped breathing just like that. There was no one around but them, thank God, but it wasn’t until the next morning when Squires finally sobered up that even he had to admit the girl wasn’t going to start breathing again. Meaning she was dead.

That was bad enough, but it got worse. The girl was a prostitute who belonged to a Mexican gangbanger named Laziro Victorino. Victorino was what the illegals called a coyote, meaning that for a price he would lead groups across the border into the States, then find them jobs, too-but for a percentage of their pay, which he collected weekly.

Victorino-V-man, his gangbanger soldiers called him-was a wiry little guy but a serious badass who carried a box cutter on his belt and had a teardrop tattoo beneath his left eye, along with a bunch of other gangbanger tats on his arms and back.

Squires was aware that the V-man had made a few films of his own, him and his boys. Snuff films. Kill a man or woman-or just torture them-and get it all on their iPhone video cameras.

Frankie had chided Squires, saying, “Why you worried about some midget Mexican? You’re twice that greaser’s size. Besides, he’s got some new girl with him every time he comes through here. He probably won’t even notice she’s gone.”

Squires doubted that but didn’t want to piss off Frankie by voicing his opinion. So he told her he’d never played a role in killing anyone before. And he didn’t want to get in the habit of doing it.

That wasn’t exactly true, although Frankie didn’t know it. No one knew, and sometimes even Squires wasn’t convinced it had happened.

Once, only once, alone with a pretty Mexican woman, Squires, naked, had taken the chula from behind, lulling her body into a thrashing silence, his hands around her throat, his body finishing and the chula ’s life ending at a precise, constricting intersection that was euphoric beyond any physical sensation Squires had ever experienced.

He had been too drunk to remember details, though. And by the time he had sobered, the woman’s body was already gone-into the lake near his hunting camp trailer, he guessed later-so it was as if he had imagined the whole damn thing.

But it had happened. The event-that explosive physical rush, a sensation of ultimate power-had rooted itself in Squires’s brain. Occasionally, the memory flooded him with a horrifying guilt, which he mitigated by telling himself that it had only been a dream.

When he was blood-drunk on steroids, though, the roots of that memory propagated in the man’s head. They snaked deeper into his brain, germinating into a fantasy that had become an obsession.

If he ever got the opportunity, if he ever got just the right girl alone, Squires would make that dream happen again.

Frankie had laughed when he had balked. “We’ve got nothing to feel guilty about. The stupid little whore did it to herself. It’s one less stupid chula in the world. Good riddance. No one’s gonna miss her and no one’s gonna care. Now, do me a favor, clean up around here ’cause I’ve got that appointment in Orlando tomorrow. Make sure she’s gone by morning-and you’d better never goddamn mention it again.”

Which meant that Frankie was leaving the dirty work to him. That’s just the way the woman was, and Squires had to wonder sometimes if Frankie’s love of crazy, wild-sex kinkiness was really worth all her crazy, wild-bitch meanness.

For the first couple of years, it had been a toss-up. But now Harris was tired of the woman-a little frightened of her, too-and he was looking for a way out.

The reason had to do with something else Squires had been wondering about: How had he gotten himself trapped into a relationship with a woman who reminded him more and more of his abusive, bullying mother?

Like his mother, Frankie had a nasty streak in her, particularly when it came to other women. Because of this, it was sometimes hard to tell if some of the things Frankie did were accidental or intentional. For instance, it wasn’t exactly true that the Mexican girl had overdosed herself. Frankie had done it.

Frankie had dropped extra Ecstasy tablets into the girl’s drink, doubling the dose she usually used when they happened to pick up a Mexican chula who was camera-shy and needed some loosening up.

This particular girl was unusually cute, with a sleek, sensuous body. When Frankie’s hands were on a girl like that, her face flushed. Her body shook. It was a response that was part passion, part jealousy. It was like she never wanted to let the girl go. So maybe Frankie had decided to keep the chula by dropping in those extra tabs.

To Squires, it made what had happened seem less of a crime, the fact that a woman had done it to another woman. But that didn’t stop him from going almost crazy with panic when he finally realized the girl was dead. Maybe he had killed that Mexican girl or maybe it was all a dream, but he’d never had to deal with a dead body before. Not sober, anyway.

They had a corpse on their hands. And they had to get rid of the thing without the Mexican gang leader, or the cops, finding out.

Not they, actually. Him. Frankie, who was sixteen years older than Squires, and a lot more experienced, would have nothing to do with getting rid of a dead body.

It wasn’t the first time that something like this had happened while Squires was around, but it was the first time a girl had ended up dead instead of puking her guts out while Squires tended to her.

That’s what really pissed him off when Squires took time to give the subject some thought. When would he learn not to leave Frankie alone with girls that were younger and prettier than her? And even if the stupid chula had done it to herself, who was going to believe it?

No one, that’s who. Not with at least one eyewitness, maybe two, who had seen him drag the girl’s body into the lake.

Now, though, Squires’s future seemed to be improving, judging from what he could hear and see, out there on the lake, which was that Fifi had snatched one of the eyewitnesses, old man Carlson, into the water.

Fifi. That was the name of the twelve-foot gator that he and some buddies had trucked in from his hunting camp, east of Immokalee, way back off County Road 858.

Squires could see it happening and he liked what he saw.

The gator had that nosy little turd in her jaws and now looked like she was swimming him back to some dark hole where she could drown him. That’s what gators like Fifi did. The ol’ girl would probably leave the mouthy asshole underwater to tenderize a bit before finally chowing down.

No way could the cops blame Squires for something an animal did. It was perfect.

Squires wasn’t sure if Carlson had in fact been an eyewitness, but, if he was, Fifi was now providing the solution. It had been a smart thing to move the gator here, where she could harass the Mexicans instead of the hunting dogs they sometimes used at his camp.

Squires’s hunting camp-well, actually, the property belonged to his mother-was a big place, four hundred acres of cypress trees and saw grass that opened into flats of oaks and pines where feral hogs liked to feed. And where sometimes they’d kill deer and an occasional bear, too.

Once, in that same area, Harris had gotten a clear shot at a panther, but he’d missed.

Harris Squires loved that hunting camp as much as he hated tending his mother’s three crappy little RV parks, this one, Red Citrus, being the only one even slightly fun. Red Citrus, at least, had girl tenants who weren’t redneck hags with silver hair, big asses and little old titties shriveled like raisins on a vine. Brown girls, true, but at least they were young.

In Squires’s mind, the younger the girl, the better-not something he would’ve admitted to Frankie, who was now in her forties-like the weird little chula who’d been pretending to be a boy and called herself Tulo. What was she, twelve, maybe thirteen years old? He’d been pretty down the last couple of days, but surprising “Tulo” in the bathtub had lifted his spirits.

Until that moment, Squires had been confused about how to handle the situation. Seeing the girl’s body, though, all water slick and smooth, had changed that. It caused his secret fantasy to bloom bright in his mind.

He’d drive her to the hunting camp and show her around. Just him, alone. At the hunting camp, there’d be no one around to hear or see what he did. Not on a Tuesday night. It was a comfortable spot, private, with a big RV braced up on cinder blocks, generators, a cookshack, a shower and a wide-screen TV for video games and porn. A perfect place for a guy like him to make his fantasy come true with a little wettail.

Wettails, that’s what Squires called them. He and Frankie had entertained a bunch of them out there at the camp, which was really more a second home than a camp. The place was comfortable enough to be fun but still wild enough for an ol’ boy to get away, spread his wings and do just about any crazy thing he wanted without worrying about some cop or asshole ranger cruising by, asking questions.

Harris Squires hated nosy people. Do-gooders. If he and Frankie wanted to have some fun with a few young wettails, what harm were they doing? But try explaining that to a goddamn do-gooder.

Carlson was a prime example. Now Carlson was getting exactly what the little turd deserved.

Squires nudged a couple of short people out of the way as he edged closer to the lake. He could hear what was happening-Carlson screaming his lungs out, begging for help. It wasn’t easy to make out details, though, because the mangrove pond was on the other side of the fence, in shadows cast by palm trees beyond the haze of security lights.

It made him wish he had his night vision binoculars. Those bad boys would’ve made everything bright as day, but they were behind the seat of his Ford Roush pickup, along with some other gear he usually carried: duct tape, an ax handle, handcuffs, condoms and sometimes a. 357 Ruger Blackhawk when he wasn’t carrying the gun in the glove box.

The handcuffs was something he carried for Frankie. The woman was crazy for bondage.

Squires turned toward the trailers, seeing kids’ bicycles and rusting trucks, now seeing Tula push open her trailer door, then running toward him, carrying something in her hand. Squires squinted to see a… bottle of liquor?

What the hell?

Yep, she was carrying a damn bottle of tequila. Well, no one ever claimed that Mexicans were smart. But then he also saw that she was carrying a flashlight, which was exactly what he needed, so he yelled to her, “Over here! Bring me that damn light so we can see what’s going on!”

The girl looked in his direction but ignored him. Because of that, Squires was about to yell something else, but that’s when a big white guy came dodging through the crowd, speaking in Spanish, saying something that might have been, “Excuse me, sorry. Let me pass.”

Definitely being polite, as the guy hurried to the lake’s edge, kicking off shoes, shirt, then tossing his wallet and cell phone onto the ground before he jumped into the water. A second later, another white guy appeared. He was a skinny scarecrow of a hippie who was doing the same thing, stripping to go in the water.

What the hell were these two white dudes doing at Red Citrus?

Squires yelled to the hippie, “Hey… you! What the hell you think you’re doing?” but the hippie was busy pulling off his shirt and talking into his cell phone at the same time, before he dropped the phone on the ground, next to his wallet, and then he went into the water, too, but on his belly.

Using his cell phone? The asshole had probably just called 911.

Shit! This was all Squires needed. Fifi was in the process of solving a serious problem, but now here were a couple of solid-looking white citizens messing in his business.

Squires spat, “Goddamn do-gooders!” as he headed after the flashlight Tula was holding, pushing people out of the way.

A moment later, speaking into the hippie’s cell phone, Squires was telling the 911 operator, “That’s right, cancel the emergency, ma’am. We made a mistake here on our end. I know, I know… it’s not the first time.”

He’d checked PREVIOUS CALLS. When he’d seen 911, he knew he had to do something to stop the cops from showing up.

But then Squires had to whisper “Damn it” as he covered the phone so the operator wouldn’t hear Carlson screaming across the water to the big white guy, yelling, “Help me! Take my hand!”

“Sir?” the operator said, raising her voice, “Who’s yelling in the background?”

“Ma’am,” Squires told her, being sweet, “I understand what you’re asking. And at first we thought someone was in trouble. But, turns out, it’s just a bunch of Mexican kids playing games. You know how girls squeal when they’re running round, playing games at night?”

The woman asked, “Did you place the call? Is your name Tomlinson?”

Squires hesitated, aware that it was sometimes a mistake to lie to the cops before thinking it over. “Yep, that’s my name,” he said finally.

The operator told him, “We’ve already dispatched units to that address. Dispatched it to… to a Red Citrus RV Park, Guava Street, just off San Carlos Boulevard. That’s near Fort Myers Beach, correct?”

Squires was getting nervous and impatient. He covered the phone and yanked the flashlight out of the weird little Bible freak’s hand because she kept turning the beam toward the water, where there was now a lot of splashing and swearing going on.

“Damn it,” he whispered to the girl, “pay attention!” as the operator asked him again, “Did you hear me? Is that the correct address, sir?”

Squires kept his voice pleasant and easy as he replied, “Well, if you reckon your people need to practice answering ambulance calls, ma’am, there’s nothing I can do to stop ’em. I just wanted you to know this one is a false alarm. Everything’s just fine here. Our folks are having lots of fun-it’s a sort of party going on. So I guess I’m gonna have to apologize to your people again when they show up here for no reason.”

The operator asked a couple more questions before Squires covered one ear, listening, until he suspected that the woman was convinced and had canceled the 911 call, no matter what she claimed. Then he hung up, as he swung the light toward the water, wanting to confirm the gator still had Carlson.

Fifi still had the guy, all right. But Squires could see the big white guy was swimming hard to catch up, which caused him to wonder, Who the hell is that crazy son of a bitch?

Well… there was an easy way to find out.

From the hippie’s billfold, Squires removed a wad of cash. It looked like a bunch of crisp twenties. He stuffed the money into his jeans, then retrieved the big guy’s billfold. There wasn’t nearly as much cash in it but enough. Yep, these two dudes were solid working citizens-plus, there were some other interesting things to see in this second billfold.

Squires’s eyes shifted from the pond to what he was holding. He used the flashlight to go through credit cards, business cards and IDs that showed a nerdy-looking guy with a jaw and glasses. Marion D. Ford, Ph. D.

Sanibel Biological Supply

Dinkin’s Bay Marina

Marion. What kind of name was that for a man?

The guy was a damn scientist or something, apparently. What the hell was a scientist doing at a trailer park full of chilies and wettails? Squires put one of the man’s business cards into his back pocket before he went through the other stuff, paying special attention to a couple of unusual IDs.

Yeah, the dude was a scientist, but there was some other stuff that worried Squires. Could be the asshole worked for the feds, too, because one of the IDs gave this guy, Marion Ford, unlimited access to something called the Special Operations Center at MacDill Air Base in Tampa.

What the hell was that about?

And there was another plastic ID for a military base in Cartagena, Colombia. But that one was mostly in Spanish, so there was no telling what it meant.

The dude, Ford, Squires guessed, must be some small-time scientist who worked for the feds. But he wasn’t really in the military-not according to what Squires was looking at in the billfold, anyway. Just maybe hired by the military, for some reason or another.

Could that mean the hippie and the nerd were actually with the Department of Immigration? Squires gave himself a few seconds to think about it. At first, that made some sense to him. Why else would they come snooping around a trailer park ass-deep in chilies and chulas?

But then Squires got a sinking feeling. What if the two dudes were actually with the DEA instead? What if they had come here trying to set up some kind of drug bust on the small steroid operation Squires was operating?

Squires whispered “Son of a bitch” as he glanced toward the pond, where he could see the gator rolling in a spray of water, and he thought, Eat that bastard, Fifi! Kill them both!

Squires was pretty sure he had seen the hippie, Tomlinson, before, cruising around the park in some shitty old Volkswagen that had to be twenty years old. Sometimes a girlish-looking electric bike, too. Which wasn’t that unusual. Dopers often cruised the parks because they knew that the chilies arrived from Mexico carrying baggies of weed or peyote buds in their pants instead of cash.

Hell, Squires had bought grass from them himself, although, more often, he just took the shit when he wanted it. Sometimes, he’d yank a guy up by the ankles and shake him, like shaking quarters out of an old pair of jeans. What the hell could a Mexican do about it? Call the cops?

That was one of the good things about managing a place like Red Citrus. No one on the whole goddamn property wanted the cops around, especially Squires and Frankie, so that made it a safe place to be. Which is why, in their newest double-wide trailer, Squires had set up a smaller version of the cookshack they had out there at the hunting camp. It wasn’t the sort of cookshack where he actually cooked food. What he cooked up was home-brewed steroid gear like testosterone enanthate, and equine-which was a horse steroid called EQ-plus winstrol and deca-durabolin.

“Gear” was bodybuilder slang for steroids, almost always purchased illegally.

Squires had become good at rendering high-grade veterinarian powders into injectable muscle juice. The kitchen was well supplied with Whatman sterile filters, 20-gauge needles, sesame oil, benzyl benzoate and everything else needed to produce a first-class product.

Squires had started small, producing just enough gear for himself and Frankie, who had, at one time, been one of the top female bodybuilders in the country. Then he began to sell to a few guys he trusted, and that’s how they got started.

It was Frankie who noticed how fast the cash was piling up just from selling to friends. So the two of them had expanded the operation, thinking they could make more money dealing gear than they could ever make running his mother’s shitty trailer parks or teaching yoga classes, which Frankie sometimes did. They bought vials by the gross. They bought two vacuum machines and a label maker, too.

Turned out, they were right about making money.

Dopers thought a fresh peyote button was expensive? Ask a bodybuilder about the price of a vial of Masteron or high-grade Testosterone-E. Frankie could walk into any gym in South Florida where muscle freaks congregated and make an EQ horsey whinnying noise and that would bring them running.

Juicers knew exactly what the lady was carrying in her gym bag and they were damn eager to buy. Because of the feds, dependable gear was so goddamn hard to get, Squires and Frankie were now making a small fortune, all in cash, selling their home-brewed goodies in kits, complete with pins and syringes if that’s what the bros wanted.

Their little organization was becoming so well known, and their products so trusted, that gym rats in South Florida had come up with a nickname for the stuff. They called it Gator Juice. As in, “You tried the Gator Juice Tren? Or the Gator Juice A-bombs? Gator Juice is goddamn grade-A shit. Good to go, man. As in G-two-G.”

Squires’s eyes kept swinging from Ford’s billfold to the drama taking place out there on the lake. A couple of chilies had come through the crowd carrying a big military-type light called a Golight, so Squires pocketed the scientist’s cash, then handed both billfolds to one of the chilies, saying to him, “Hang on to these, will ya, amigo? Now, give me that goddamn light.”

With the Golight, Squires could see that it was getting interesting out there on the water where Ford was doing something that would’ve been hard to believe if it wasn’t actually happening. Ford had his left arm slung over the gator’s back while Fifi struggled to swim, still carrying Carlson sideways in her mouth. What Ford was trying to do, Squires realized, was climb onto the gator’s back.

Un-by-God-believable!

Into Squires’s mind came the image of the big Australian, the crocodile hunter guy who he used to like to watch on TV, which made what was happening easier to comprehend. But once the scientist got onto the gator’s back, then what?

Squires placed the big spotlight on his shoulder to steady the thing, then leaned to focus the beam on something the scientist had in his hand.

What the hell was the dude carrying?

A hammer, maybe, that’s what it looked like. No… not a hammer. It looked like Ford was trying to steady an itty-bitty pocket pistol behind one of Fifi’s eyes-which was a stupid goddamn thing to try. At least, Squires hoped it was a stupid goddamn thing to try.

Suddenly, he could feel that sickening feeling in his stomach again, worried the crazy do-gooder was going to find a way to free Carlson and screw up the only good luck Squires had had in a week. But it was pointless, what the guy was trying to do… wasn’t it?

Squires hoped it was true. There was no pussy pistol in the world with enough stopping power to…

WHAP-WHAP!

Squires jumped when he heard the gunshots. Then he stood straight, realizing that the man had managed to get a couple of rounds off.

Behind him, the crowd made a collective Ooohing noise as they watched the alligator’s tail slam sideways, then tilt upward like a crane. The tail stood there for an instant, before the big animal rolled and then sank from sight.

Shit! Where was Carlson?

Squires fanned the light back and forth, searching. Maybe the nosy old turd had gone down with the gator. No… no such luck. Carlson was still out there, floundering to stay on the surface while the hippie swam toward him.

Sons a bitches!

Squires felt an acidic surge move from his abdomen toward his head, the signal that he was becoming seriously pissed off. It was a steroid charge that he had experienced many times but seldom as strong as tonight-which would have made sense, if he’d stopped to think about it. Tuesdays and Saturdays were Squires’s pin days-“pinning” being bodybuilder talk for steroid injections.

That morning, he had flooded two syringes with testosterone, equipoise, trenbolone and decanoate-all oil-based, veterinarian-strength gear-and injected it into his thighs, but only after heating the oil under a hot spigot to make the sticks faster and less painful.

As a special treat-because it had been such a shitty two days-he had also eaten five tabs of dianabol, a hundred milligrams.

D-bombs, man-nothing else hit Squires quite as hard as dianabol, although he preferred the injectable version. Juice was easier on the liver than pills. But he was out of D-bomb oil until he made his next trip to the hunting camp.

Squires lived for that full-on testosterone buzz. He loved the evening of a pin day, when his blood levels were so hormone drunk that he could track the oil moving through his veins like heat. It caused his muscles to twitch and swell beneath his skin, the fibers feeding so furiously on hormone soup that Squires could feel the mass of his body changing.

“You got your monster face on tonight,” Frankie would sometimes say to him as they elbowed for space before their weight-room mirror, Frankie usually posing naked, but Squires wearing a thong because steroid gear shrunk his nuts so small it was embarrassing.

“I love it,” the woman would tell him, “when you got your monster face on.”

Because of the D-bombs, and because of what was happening, Harris Squires had his monster face on now.

He paused long enough to kick one of the cell phones toward the water, hoping it belonged to the guy named Ford-the damn do-gooder dude who’d just shot his alligator, Fifi. Then Squires batted a couple of chilies out of his way, as he began to pace, still carrying the spotlight, waiting for the bastard to make it to shore-if he ever did.

As Harris Squires knew from years of hunting the Glades, big alligators died hard.