The Best American Mystery Stories 1998

John Lutz Night Crawlers from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

There’s plant life in parts of the Everglades that’s to be found nowhere else in the country, spores carried by hurricane winds from the West Indies that take root and flourish in the steamy tropical climate and are exotic and primitive and sometimes dangerous. Some say that in Mangrove City there’s animal life to be found nowhere else.

Mangrove City isn’t really a city unless you use the term generously. It’s a stretch of ramshackle, moss-marred clapboard buildings where the road runs through the swamp along relatively dry land. The “city” is a few small shops, a restaurant, a service station with a sign warning you to fill your gas tank because the swamp’s full of alligators, a barber shop with a red and white barber pole that’s also green with mold. There’s a police station in the same rundown frame building as the city hall, and a blackened ruin that was Muggy’s Lounge until it burned down five years ago. Next to the ruin is the new and improved Muggy’s, constructed of cinder block and with a corrugated steel roof. Not a city, really. Barely a town. More like something unfortunate that happened on the side of the road.

A mile before you get to Mangrove City, that is before if you’re driving west the way Carver had, is the Glades Inn, a sixteen-unit motel. It’s a low brick structure, built in a U to embrace a swimming pool. Carver couldn’t imagine anyone ever actually swimming in the thing. The algae on its surface was green and thick. A diving board sagged toward the water and was draped with Spanish moss. From the far corner of the pool came a dull plop and a stirring of sluggish water as a bullfrog, tired of Carver’s scrutiny, hopped for green cover. Carver set the tip of his cane on the hot gravel surface of the parking lot and limped toward the office.

As he pushed open the door, a bell tinkled. That didn’t seem to mean much. The knotty-pine-paneled office was deserted. Behind the long counter, whose front was paneled to match the walls, was a half-eaten sandwich on a desk, next to an old black IBM Selectric typewriter. The only furniture on Carver’s side of the desk was a red vinyl chair with a rip in its seat that revealed white cotton batting struggling to get out. On the wall near the chair was a framed color photograph of a buxom woman in a bikini and cowboy boots, riding on the back of a large alligator. She was grinning with her mouth open wide and had an arm raised as if she were waving the ten-gallon hat in her hand. Carver leaned close and studied the photograph. The woman was stuffed into the bikini. The alligator was just stuffed.

“Some sexy ’gator, don’tcha think?” a voice said.

Carver turned and saw a stooped old man with a grizzled gray beard that refused to grow over a long, curved scar on his right cheek. The right eye, near the scar, was a slightly different shade of blue from that of the left and might have been glass. The man had a wiry build beneath a ragged plaid shirt and dirty jeans. He was behind the desk, and Carver couldn’t see much of the lower half of his body, but what he could see, and the way the man moved, gave the impression he was bowlegged. His complexion was like raw meat, almost as if he’d been badly burned long ago.

“I didn’t see you there,” Carver said, noticing now a paneled door that matched the wall paneling behind the desk.

“I was in back, heard the bell, knowed there was somebody out heah.” He had an oddly clipped southern accent yet drew out the last words of his sentences: heeah. He leaned scrawny elbows on the desk and grinned with incredibly bad teeth, shooting a look at Carver’s cane. “What can I do ya, friend?”

Carver saw now that he had a plastic nametag pinned to his shirt, but it was blank. He immediately named the man “Crusty” in his mind. It fit better than the baggy shirt and pants the man wore. And it certainly went with his faint but acrid odor of stale urine. “You can give me a room.”

Crusty looked surprised. Even shocked. “You sure ’bout that?”

“Sure am. This is a motel, right?”

“Well, ’course it is. ’S’cuse my bein’ put back on my heels, but this heah’s the off-season.”

Carver wondered when the “on” season was. And why.

Crusty got a registration card out of a desk drawer and laid it on the counter along with a plastic ballpoint pen that was lettered Irv’s Baits. “You want smokin’ or nonsmokin’?”

Carver thought he had to be kidding, but said, “Smoking. Every once in a while I enjoy a cigar.”

“Be eighty-five dollars a night with tax,” Crusty said.

“That’s steep,” Carver commented as he signed the register. Crusty shrugged. “We’re a val’able commodity, bein’ the only motel for miles.”

“You might be the only anything for miles that doesn’t swim or fly.”

“Then how come you’re heah” — Crusty looked at the registration card — “Mr. Carver from Del Moray?”

“The fishing,” Carver said.

Crusty’s genuine-looking eye widened. “Not many folks come here for the fishin’.”

“No doubt they just come to frolic in the pool,” Carver said. “You take Visa?”

“Nope. Gotta be good ol’ U.S. cash money.”

Carver got his wallet from his pocket, held it low so Crusty couldn’t see its contents, and counted out 850 dollars. The cost of doing business, he thought, and laid the bills on the desk.

Now both of Crusty’s eyes bulged. The glass one — if it was glass — threatened to pop out.

“Ten nights in advance,” Carver explained. “I always give myself enough time to fish until I catch something.”

Crusty took the money and handed him a key with a large red plastic tag with the numeral 10 on it. “End unit, south side,” he said. Carver thanked him and moved toward the door.

“You got one of the rooms with a TV, no extra charge,” Crusty said. “Ice machine’s down t’other end of the buildin’. Just keep pressin’ the button till the ice quits comin’ out brown.”

“I’ll make myself at home,” Carver told him and limped out into the sultry afternoon, astounded to realize it was cooler outside than in the office.

Number 10 was a small room with a dresser, a tiny corner desk, and a wall-mounted TV facing a sagging bed. The carpet was threadbare red. The drapes were sun-faded red. The bedspread matched the drapes. An old air conditioner was set in the wall beneath the single window that looked out on the unhealthy hole that was the pool, then across the road to the shadowed and menacing swamp.

Carver tossed his single scuffed-leather suitcase onto the bed, then went over and opened a door, flipped a wall switch that turned on a light, and examined the bathroom. The swimming pool should have prepared him. There was no bathtub, only a shower stall with a pebbled-glass door. The commode and sink were chipped, yellowed porcelain and so similar in design that they looked interchangeable. A fat palmetto bug, unable to bear the light, or maybe its surroundings, scurried along the base of the shower stall and disappeared in a crack in the wall behind the toilet.

I guess I’ve stayed in worse places, Carver thought, but in truth he couldn’t remember when.

As he was unpacking and hanging his clothes in the alcove that passed for a closet, he laid his spare moccasins up on the wooden shelf and felt them hit something, scraping it over the rough wood. He reached back on the shelf and felt something hard that at first he thought was a coin, but it was a brass Aztec calendar, about two inches in diameter and with a hole drilled in it off-center, as if to make it wearable on a chain.

Carver stood for a moment wondering what to do with the brass trinket, then tossed it back up on the shelf. People might have been doing that with it for years.

He sat down on the bed and picked up the old black rotary-dial phone. Then he thought better of talking on a line that would undoubtedly be shared by Crusty the innkeeper and replaced the receiver. He decided to drive into town and make his call.

Outside Muggy’s Lounge was a public phone, the kind you can park next to and use in your car, if you can park close enough and your arm is long enough. There was a dusty white van parked next to the phone, with no one in it. So Carver parked his ancient Olds convertible on the edge of the graveled lot, climbed out, and limped through the heat to the phone. If the humidity climbed another few degrees, he might be able to swim.

He used his credit card to call Ollie Frist in Del Moray. Frist was a disabled railroad worker who’d retired to Florida ten years ago with his wife and teenage son. The wife had died. The son, Terry, had grown up and become a cop in the Del Moray police department. Terry had come to Mangrove City six months ago, telling anyone who’d asked that he was going on a fishing trip. Ollie Frist had gotten the impression his son was working on something on his own and wanted to learn more before he brought the matter to the attention of his superiors. Two days later Ollie Frist was notified that Terry had been found dead in the swamp outside Mangrove City. At first they’d thought the death was due to natural causes and an alligator had mauled and consumed part of the body afterward. Then the autopsy revealed that the alligator had been the natural cause.

The Del Moray authorities had gotten in touch with the Mangrove City authorities. Accidental death, they decided. The grieving father, Ollie Frist, didn’t buy it. What he had bought were Carver’s services.

“Mr. Frist?” Carver asked when the phone on the other end of the line was picked up.

“It is. That you, Carver?” Frist was hard of hearing and roared rather than spoke.

“Me,” Carver said. He knew he could keep his voice at a normal volume; Frist had shown him the special amplifier on the phone in his tiny Del Moray cottage. “I’m checked into the motel where Terry stayed.”

“It’s a dump, right? Terry said when he phoned to let me know where he was staying that the place wasn’t four-star.”

“Astronomically speaking, it’s more of a black hole. Did Terry actually tell you he was coming to this place to fish?”

“That’s what he said. I didn’t believe it then. Should I believe it now?”

“No. There’s some fishing here, I’m sure. But there’s probably more poaching. It’s the kind of backwater place where most of the population gets by doing this or that, this side of the law or the other.”

“You think that’s what Terry was onto, some kinda alligator poaching operation?”

“I doubt it. He wouldn’t see it as that big a deal, or that unusual. He probably would have just phoned the Mangrove City law if that were the case.” A bulky, bearded man wearing jeans and a sleeveless black T-shirt had walked around the dusty white van and was standing and staring at Carver. Maybe waiting to use the phone. “I’ll hang around town for a while,” Carver said, “see if I can pick up on anything revealing. There’s something creepy and very wrong about this place. As of now it’s just a sensation I have on the back of my neck, but I’ve had it before and it’s seldom been wrong.” The big man next to the van crossed his beefy arms and glared at Carver.

“Keep me posted,” Frist shouted into the phone. “Let me know if you need anything at this end.”

Carver said he’d do both those things, then hung up the phone.

He set the tip of his cane in the loose gravel and walked past the big man, who didn’t move. His muscular arms were covered with the kind of crude, faded blue tattoos a lot of ex-cons sport from their time in prison, and on his right cheek was tattooed a large black spider that appeared to be crawling toward the corner of his eye. He puffed up his chest as Carver limped past him. He probably thought he was tough. Carver knew the type. He probably was tough.

The striking thing about Mangrove City’s main street, which was called Cypress Avenue as it ran between the rows of struggling business establishments, was how near the swamp was. Walls of lush green seemed to loom close behind the buildings on each side of the road. Towering cypress and mangrove trees leaned toward each other over the road as if they yearned someday to embrace high above the cracked pavement. The relentless and ratchety hum of insects was background music, and the fetid, rotting, life-and-death stench of the swamp was thick in the air and lay on the tongue like a primal taste.

The humid air felt like warm velvet on his exposed skin as Carver crossed the parking lot and entered Muggy’s Lounge.

Ah! In Muggy’s, it was cool.

There were early customers scattered among the booths and tables, and a few slumped at the long bar. Carver sat on a stool near the end of the bar and asked the bartender for a Budweiser.

The bartender brought him a can and let Carver open it. He didn’t offer a glass. He was a tall, skinny man with a pockmarked face, intent dark eyes set too close together, and a handlebar moustache that was red despite the fact that his hair was brown.

“So whaddya think of our little town?” he asked.

It’s conducive to insanity, Carver thought, but he said, “How do you know I’m not from around here?”

The bartender laughed. “There ain’t that many folks from around here, and we tend to know each other even if we ain’t sleeping together.” Someone at the other end of the bar motioned to him and he moved away, wiping his hands on a gray towel tucked in the belt of his cut-off jeans.

Carver sipped his beer and looked around. Muggy’s was a surprisingly long building with booths lining the walls beyond where the bar ended. On a shelf high above the bar was a stuffed alligator about five feet long, watching whatever went on with glass eyes that nonetheless seemed bright with evil cunning. There were box speakers mounted every ten feet or so around the edges of the ceiling, tilted downward and aimed at the customers as if they might fire bullets or dispense noxious gas. Right now they were silent. The only sound was the ticking of one of the half-dozen slowly revolving ceiling fans, stirring the air-conditioned atmosphere and moving tobacco smoke around. It occurred to Carver that the clientele in Muggy’s might have stopped talking to each other when he walked inside.

The bulky man who’d been watching Carver outside entered the lounge and swaggered toward him. He was about average height but very wide, with muscle rippling under his fat like energy trapped beneath his skin and trying to escape. He smiled thinly at Carver, then sat down on the stool next to him as if using the phone in succession had formed some sort of bond between them. When he smiled, the spider tattoo near his eye crinkled. Carver had seen real spiders do that after being sprayed with insecticide.

“You Mr. Fred Carver?” the man asked in a drawl that moved about as fast as the alligator above the bar.

“How did you guess?” Carver asked, continuing to stare straight ahead at the rows of bottles near the beer taps.

“Didn’t guess. I was told you checked in at the Glades Inn. I went and talked to the desk clerk, found out who you was.”

“Why?”

“Curious. Stranger here’s always news. Ain’t much happens to amuse us ’round these parts. We take our pleasure when we can.”

“You think I’m going to amuse you?”

“You got possibilities fer sure.”

Carver decided to meet this cretin head-on. “Ever hear of a man named Terry Frist?”

“Sure. Got his fool self killed and damn near et up by a ’gator a while back. Terrible thing.”

“Alligators usually kill their prey, then drag it back to their den at water’s edge where they hide it and let it rot until they can tear it apart easier with their teeth. The way I understand it, Terry Frist’s body was found on land.”

“Yeah. What was left of it. He was a cop, we found out later. From over in Del Moray. Say now, ain’t that where you’re from?”

Maybe not such a cretin. “It is,” Carver said, “but Frist and I didn’t know each other. I read in the newspaper about what happened to him here.”

“What is it you do for a livin’ there in Del Moray?”

“I’m in research. Decided to come here for the fishing.”

“Really? We ain’t known for the fishin’.”

“Didn’t I see a bait shop when I drove into town?”

“Oh yeah. Irv’s. Well, there’s some fishin’. More likely you’ll catch yourself a ’gator like that Frist fella did. Fishin’ suddenly becomes huntin’ when that happens, and you ain’t the hunter.”

The pockmarked bartender came over and asked what the big man was drinking.

“Nothin’.” He slid off his stool and looked hard at Carver. “Fishin’s no good this time of year at all. Not much reason for you to stay around town.”

“I like a challenge.”

“You’re more’n likely to get one if you go fishin’ in them swamp waters.”

“Can I rent an airboat anywhere around here?”

“Nope. Nowheres close, neither. Fella name of Ray Orb rents ’em some miles east, but the swamp’s too thick around these parts for airboats to get around in it. I think you best try someplace in an easterly direction.” He winked, then turned to leave.

“You didn’t mention your name,” Carver said.

“I.C. is what I’m called. Last name’s Unit. The I.C. stands for Intensive Care.” The spider crinkled again as if dying, and I.C. threw back his head and roared out a laugh. Carver watched him swagger out through the door, noticing that all the other customers averted their gazes.

“That his real name?” Carver asked the bartender when I.C. had left.

“He says it is. Nobody much wants to differ with him.”

“He as tough as he acts?”

“Oh yeah. Him and his buddies from over at Raiford.”

“Raiford? The state penitentiary?”

“That’s right. The three of ’em, I.C., Jake Magruder, and Luther Peevy, was in there together after they come down from Georgia and committed some heinous type crime. Some say it was murder. Luther Peevy, his folks died and left him a place nearby, so I guess that’s why they all settled in here ’bout a year ago.”

“I’ll bet the town was happy about that,” Carver said.

“This town was never happy,” the bartender said and moved away and began wiping down the bar with his gray towel.

Carver finished his beer, then walked around the town for a while before going into its only restaurant, Vanilla’s, for lunch, even though it was just eleven o’clock. He was hungry and he was here, and he didn’t know if the Glades Inn had a restaurant and didn’t want to find out. Crusty was probably the cook.

Though Vanilla’s was a weathered clapboard building that leaned on its foundation, it was surprisingly neat and clean inside. Small but heavy wooden tables were grouped evenly beneath a battery of ceiling fans rotating only slightly faster than the ones in Muggy’s. There was a small counter and double doors into the kitchen. Carver saw an old green Hamilton-Beach blender behind the counter and wondered if Vanilla’s sold milk shakes.

There were two men in white T-shirts and bib overalls at the counter, drinking coffee and eating pie. One of them, a redheaded man wearing a ponytail, turned on his stool, glanced at Carver, then went back to work on his apple pie. They seemed to be the only other warm bodies in Vanilla’s.

“’Nilla!” the redheaded man yelled. “You got yourself a customer.”

The double doors opened and a heavyset, perspiring woman in her fifties emerged from the kitchen. She had a florid complexion, weary blue eyes, and wispy gray hair that stuck out above one ear as if she’d slept too long on that side. She was wearing maroon slacks and a white blouse and apron and had a faint moustache. “Sit anywhere you want,” she told Carver in a hoarse voice as deep as a man’s.

He was aware of her looking at his cane as he limped to a table near the wall, well away from the counter. Fly-specked menus were propped between the salt and pepper shakers. He opened one and saw that the selection was limited.

Vanilla came over with an order pad and Carver asked for a club sandwich. Then he asked her if she served milk shakes and she said she did. He said chocolate.

“Why do people call you Vanilla?” he asked when she returned with his food and a thick milk shake, half in a glass, half remaining in the cold metal container that had fit onto the mixer.

“I used to be a blonde,” she said simply, then put his lunch on the table and went back into the kitchen.

Carver had eaten a few bites of the sandwich when he heard the door open and close. He looked in that direction and saw that a uniformed cop had come in, a short, obese, sixtyish man in a neatly pressed blue uniform with a gold badge on his chest.

He waddled directly to Carver’s table. “I’m Mangrove City Police Chief Jerry Gordon,” the cop said. He was one of those very fat men who breathe hard all the time, even when they speak.

Carver shook hands with Gordon and invited him to sit down.

“You’re Fred Carver from Del Moray,” Gordon said, settling his soft and wheezing bulk into the chair across the table from Carver.

“Your job to know,” Carver said, unsurprised. Everyone in town apparently knew his name and where he lived.

“It is that.” Gordon smiled. “You’re the only guest out at the Glades Inn. Only outsider in town, matter of fact. So you’re bound to be noticed. We ain’t exactly Miami here, Mr. Carver.”

“I guess you were told I’m here for the fishing,” Carver said.

“Oh, sure. I got a yuk out of that. Most folks’d rather drop a line in water where there’s more likely to be fish than something that’s gonna eat their bait then have them for dessert.”

“There must be some good fishing. Terry Frist came here a while back. He usually knew where they were biting.” A different lie for Gordon. He’d told I.C. Unit he hadn’t known Frist in Del Moray. Which had been the truth. Or part of the truth. The useful thing about lies was that they were so adaptable.

Chief Gordon gave Carver a dead-eyed, level look, the kind cops were so good at. “Way I recall it, Terry Frist didn’t catch nothin’ but a big ol’ ’gator. I’d be careful walkin’ in his footsteps.”

“Are you warning me to be careful in and out of the swamp, Chief?”

“Cautionin’ you, is the way I think of it.” He put his elbows on the table and leaned toward Carver. “I gotta tell you, there’s some angry people out there, in and around the swamp, all through these parts.”

“Angry at what?”

“Ever’thin’ from violence on TV an’ in the movies to supermarket bar codes. You don’t wanna do no verbal joustin’ with ’em. We got folks around here, Mr. Carver, would shoot you dead over violence on TV.”

“You think that’s what happened to Terry Frist? An argument over politics or the price of something in produce?”

“I think somebody shoulda warned Terry Frist. I read he was a cop. Maybe he was workin’ undercover, an’ this was no place for him to be.”

“Maybe he found out about something. Say, a drug-smuggling operation.”

Chief Gordon grinned. “Why, you’re fishin’ already, Mr. Carver.”

“Maybe. But Mangrove City’s near enough to the coast that drug shipments from the sea could be brought here by airboat through the swamp, and the law would never be able to figure out the routes or the timing. A cop — as you say, maybe working undercover — was killed here recently. And I met I. C. Unit this morning in Muggy’s and was told he’s part of a set and recently of the Union Correctional Institution over in Raiford. And now here you are…”

“The local cop on the take?” Gordon didn’t seem angry at the suggestion, which made Carver curious. “That’s so preposterous I ain’t even gonna respond to it, Mr. Carver, except to say we got creatures in the swamp more deadly than any ’gator. Maybe one of ’em killed Terry Frist.”

“And you don’t want to be next, is that it?”

“Nor do I want you to be, Mr. Carver. I.C. and that Peevy and Magruder, those are bad men. A ’gator grab one of ’em an’ it’d spit him right out. I did feel compelled to warn you, an’ now I have.” Chief Gordon shoved back his chair and stood up, tucking in his blue shirt around his bulging stomach.

Carver felt sorry for him. He was past his prime and dealing with local toughs who had him and the rest of Mangrove City under their collective greasy thumb.

“Do you think Terry Frist was murdered?” Carver asked.

Again Chief Gordon was impassive. “What all I think publicly, it’s all in my report, Mr. Carver. If you’re really serious about doin’ any fishin’ while you’re here, you oughta see Irv down at his bait shop. He’ll tell you where they’re bitin’ an’ you might not get bit back.” He raised a pudgy forefinger and wagged it at Carver. “You remember I said might.” He turned and waddled out, swinging his elbows wide to clear his holstered revolver and the clutter of gear attached to his belt.

Carver poked his straw into the thick milk shake and took a long sip. It was the best thing he’d encountered since arriving in Mangrove City.

That afternoon, Carver set out from the Glades Inn wearing loose-fitting green rubber boots, old jeans, a black pullover shirt, and half a tube of mosquito repellent. He carried a casting rod and wore a slouch cap with an array of colorful feathered lures hooked into it. He hadn’t been fishing for years and didn’t really know much about it, but he figured if his cover story was fishing, he’d better fish. Maybe he’d even catch something.

Irv of Irv’s Baits seemed to know a lot about fishing and had recommended his night crawlers, explaining to Carver that it took the fattest, juiciest worms to catch the biggest fish. Carver thought that made an elemental kind of sense and bought two dozen of the wriggling monsters squirming around in an old takeout fried chicken bucket half full of rich black loam.

He loaded all of this into the cavernous trunk of the Olds, then drove along the road toward town until he came to a turnoff he’d noticed on his previous trip.

The narrow gravel road soon became even narrower, and the gravel became mud that threatened to bog down the big car’s rear wheels. Carver braked the Olds to a stop and turned off the engine. Silence somehow made deeper by the ceaseless drone of insects closed in. Off to his right, through dense foliage shadowed by overhead tree limbs and draped Spanish moss, he saw the dull green sheen of water.

He climbed out of the Olds, got his rod and reel and bucket of worms from the trunk, then muddied the tip of his cane as he limped from what was left of the road and trudged in his boots toward the water. His motion made sensory waves in the swamp. The humming insect tone varied slightly at his passing. He heard soft and abrupt watery sounds and the quick and startled beat of wings.

When he reached a likely spot, he stopped, placed the bucket on a tree stump, and stood in the shade. He disengaged the barbed hook from the cork handle of his casting rod, used it to impale one of Irv’s ill-fated night crawlers, and moved slightly to the side. Careful not to snag his line on nearby branches, he used the weight of the bait, a small lead sinker, and a red and white plastic float to cast toward a clear circle of water in the shade of an ancient cypress tree. Line whirred out, there was a faint plop! and Carver was ready to reel in a fish.

Irv’s worm must have loafed underwater. Nothing happened for about fifteen minutes. Then the red and white float bobbed, went completely underwater, and Carver reeled in an empty hook.

So what did it matter? He was really here to establish himself as a genuine fisherman, in case anyone might be watching him. He reached into the bucket for another worm.

The fishing got better at the spot Carver had chosen. It took him only about an hour to feed the fish the rest of Irv’s worms. He removed the fishing cork, cut the leader line above the hook and sinker, then selected the feathered and multiple-barbed ‘Oh Buggie!’ lure and unhooked it from his cap. He attached it to the line, cast it to where he’d lost all his worms, and almost immediately a fish took it.

Carver reeled in a tiny carp. Since he didn’t like to clean fish, and this one was too small to keep anyway, he worked the hook from its mouth and tossed it back. Catch and release, he thought, hoping that wouldn’t happen with whoever killed Terry Frist.

He thought nothing the rest of the afternoon. That evening he drove into town and had the family meatloaf special at Vanilla’s, then stopped in at Muggy’s for a beer before driving back to the motel. He saw no sign of I. C. Unit or his two confederates and was pretty much ignored by the townspeople. They saw him yet they didn’t, as if someone had planted in them the posthypnotic suggestion that he didn’t exist, and there was a short-circuit between their eyes and their brains that made him invisible to them.

That night Carver awoke in his bed in the Glades Inn to an odd, snarling sound outside in the dark. He lay on his back in total blackness, his fingers laced behind his head, and realized he was listening to the sound of an airboat deep in the swamp. Maybe one of Ray Orb’s boats. But according to I. G. Unit, Orb didn’t operate in this part of the swamp because it was too dense and dangerous. And how could you not believe I.C.?

Carver fell back asleep listening to the faraway sound of the airboat and dreamed that it was a gigantic insect droning in the swamp. In the dawn and the halfway country between waking and sleep, he thought maybe his dream was possible.

It was more possible, he decided when fully awake, that the late-night droning from the swamp was indeed an airboat’s engine, and the cargo was illegal narcotics.

Carver established a routine over the next five days, not doing much other than fishing with rod and reel and ‘Oh Buggie!’, going to secluded fishing spots in the evenings and staying late, tossing his infrequent catches back into the water. Carrying his fishing gear, he explored the swamp around Mangrove City. Though he came across tracks in the mud once, he never saw an alligator. And he didn’t again hear the snarl of an airboat engine in the night.

Until the sixth night, when he was standing ankle-deep in water near the gnarled roots of a mangrove and heard the sudden roar of an engine, as if a boat that had been drifting nearby had abruptly started up. A light flashed, the swinging beam of a searchlight illuminating the swamp, and for an instant through the trees he saw the shimmering whir of an airboat’s rear-mounted propeller spinning in its protective cage as it powered the flat-bottomed boat over the water. Judging by the size of the prop and cage, it was a large boat. Carver heard voices, then a single shouted word: “Cuidado. A man yelling in Spanish to whoever was steering the boat to be careful, probably of some looming obstacle the light had revealed.

Carver stood motionless until the snarling engine had faded to silence. He could still hear water lapping in the boat’s wake, even see ripples that had found their way to the moonlit patch of algae and floating debris where he was pretending to fish.

He reeled in ‘Oh Buggie!’ and a tangle of weed, then returned to where the Olds was parked and drove back to the motel.

Maybe tonight he’d finally caught something.

After showering away mosquito repellent and swamp mud, he put on a fresh pair of boxer shorts, made sure the room’s air conditioner was on high, then went to the alcove closet. He reached up on the shelf and found the half-dollar-size bronze Aztec calendar again and stood staring at it. No one knew for sure that the ancient circular Aztec design actually was a calendar. It was only a theory.

Carver stared at the trinket, then placed it back on the shelf. Now he had a theory, and one he believed in. Tomorrow he’d do something about it.

He sat on the edge of the sagging mattress, flicked the wall switch off with his cane, and dropped back on the bed in the warm darkness. With so much resolved, and with a clear course of action before him, he dozed off immediately and slept deeply.

He sensed it was toward morning when he dreamed again of the giant insect droning in the swamp. Only this time he was surprised to hear it buzz his name.

Abruptly he realized someone was in the room speaking to him. Without moving any other part of his body, he opened his eyes.

I. C. Unit was standing at the foot of the bed. He was holding a shotgun casually so that it was pointed at Carver.

“Carver. Carver. You best wake up. You’re gonna go fishin’ early this mornin’. Gonna get yourself an early start well afore sunrise. Ain’t no need for you to worry about bringin’ any bait.”

Carver knew why. He was going to fobait. And not for fish.

At I.C.’s direction, he climbed out of bed and dressed in jeans and a pullover shirt, then put on his green rubber boots. His fishing outfit.

“Don’t forget your rod and reel,” I.C. said. “Gotta make this look realistic. Hell, maybe we’ll even let you catch a fish.”

When they went outside, Carver met Peevy and Magruder. There were no introductions and none were necessary. Peevy was a short man with a beer gut and a pug face. He was tattooed, like I.C., with the crude blue ink imagery of the amateur prison artist without adequate equipment. Magruder was tall and thin, with a droopy moustache and tragic dark eyes. Each man was armed with a semiautomatic twelve-gauge shotgun like I.C.’s. Their shells were probably loaded with heavy lead slugs rather than pellets, the rounds used by poachers to kill large and dangerous alligators. Awesome weapons at close range.

“He don’t look like much,” Magruder said in a southern drawl that sounded more like Tennessee than Georgia.

“Gonna look like less soon,” Peevy said in the same flat drawl. He dug the barrel of his shotgun into the small of Carver’s back, prodding him toward the parked Olds.

I.C. laughed. “Shucks, that’s ’cause there’s gonna foless of him.”

Peevy drove the Olds, and I.C. sat in back with his shotgun aimed at Carver, who sat in front and wondered if he could incapacitate Peevy with a jab of his cane, then deal with I.C. and the shotgun. But he knew the answer to that one and didn’t like it. Magruder followed, driving a dented black pickup truck with a camper shell mounted on its bed. As they pulled out of the Glades Inn parking lot, Carver was sure he saw a light in the office go out.

“You weren’t smuggling drugs,” Carver said, as they bumped over the rutted road. “You were bringing in illegal aliens from Mexico.”

“From there and all over Central America,” I.C. said. Now that Carver knew, he was bragging. Nothing to lose. “Boat from Mexico transfers ’em to airboats on the coast, and we know the swamp well enough to boat ’em in here. The Glades Inn is the next stop, where they pay the rest of what they owe and then are moved by car and truck on north.”

“And if they can’t pay?”

I.C. laughed hard and Carver felt spittle and warm breath on the back of his neck. “That’s the same question that poor Terry Frist asked. Answer is, if they can’t pay, they don’t go no farther north.”

“Nor any other direction,” Peevy added, wrestling with the steering wheel as they negotiated a series of ruts.

“And Terry Frist?” Carver asked.

“’Gator got him, all right,” was all I.C. said.

Peevy smiled as he drove.

They wound through the night along roads so narrow that foliage brushed the Olds’s sides. Finally they reached the most desolate of Carver’s fishing spots, a pool of still water glistening black in the moonlight, its edges overgrown with tall reeds and sawgrass.

As soon as they’d stopped, I.C. prodded the back of Carver’s neck as an instruction to get out of the car. Carver climbed out slowly, feeling the hot, humid night envelop him, listening to the desperate screams of nocturnal insects. Magruder parked the pickup behind the Olds, then climbed out and walked forward to join them. The only illumination was from the parking lights on the Olds.

While I.C. held his shotgun to Carver’s head, Magruder looped a steel chain around the ankle of Carver’s right boot and fastened it in place with a padlock. Then he shoved him toward the center of the shallow pool of water. Carver noticed a thick cedar post protruding from the water.

When they reached the knee-deep center of the pool, Magruder strung the chain through a hole in the post, wrapped it tight around the thick wood, then used another padlock to secure it. He clipped his key ring back onto one of his belt loops, then stepped back. Peevy was standing nearby, his shotgun aimed at Carter.

I.C. handed Carver the casting rod. “You hold onto your prop here,” he said, then snatched Carver’s cane away and effortlessly snapped the hard walnut over his knee. He let both ends of the splintered cane drop into the water.

“The desk clerk at the Glades Inn knows you left with me,” Carver said. “He’s probably already called Chief Gordon.”

“He knows ever’thin’,” I.C. said. “So’s Chief Gordon know, though he don’t like to let on, even to his own self.”

Both men backed away from Carver, leaving him standing alone and unable to move more than a foot or so in any direction.

“You wanna pass the time fishin’,” I.C. said, “you go right ahead. Now us, we gotta drive back into town and do some minor mischief, establish an alibi. Magruder’ll stay here an’ keep you company till you don’t need no company. He ain’t afraid of the dark, and he likes to watch.”

“Watch what?”

“This here’s a special part of the swamp, Carver. It ain’t at all far from where that Terry Frist fella got hisself tore all to hell by a ’gator. This here area is crawlin’ with ’gators. They figured out some way in their mean little brains that there’s plenty to eat here from time to time.”

I.C. and Peevy sloshed through the dark water and onto damp but solid ground. “We gonna be back to pick up Magruder later,”

I.C. said without bothering to look at Carver. He and Peevy climbed into the cab of the battered black pickup and the engine kicked over.

When the old truck had rattled its way out of sight, Magruder sat himself down on a stump about fifty feet away from Carver and settled his shotgun across his knees.

“Now then,” he said, “you go ahead and fish if you want. You an’ me’s jus’ gonna wait a while an’ see who catches who.”

Carver stood leaning against the post driven into the earth beneath the water. He knew it was firm, driven deep or maybe even set in concrete, and the locks and chain were unbreakable. He stared into the dark swamp around him, listening to the drone of insects, the gentle deadly sounds of things stirring in the night. Though he told himself to be calm, his heart was hammering. He glanced over at Magruder, who had a lighted cigarette stuck in his mouth now, and smiled at him.

When Magruder was on his third cigarette, there was a low, guttural grunt from the dark, and off to the side water sloshed as something ponderous moved. Carver looked down and saw the water around his knees rippling. He tried swallowing his terror, tried desperately to think, but fear was like sand in the machinery of his mind.

The tall black grass stirred, and something low and long emerged. Carver knew immediately what it was.

The huge ’gator slithered out into plain view in the moonlight, sloshed around until it was at a slight angle to him, and regarded him with a bright, primitive eye.

“Sure is a big ’un!” Magruder said, obviously amused.

The ’gator switched its tail, churning the water. Carver’s heart went cold. He wielded the casting rod like a weapon, as if that might help him.

And it might.

He made himself stop trembling, turned his body, and leaned hard against the post, setting his good leg tight to it.

The ’gator gave its fearsome, guttural grunt again.

“Hungry!” Magruder commented, looking from Carver to the ’gator with a sadist’s keen anticipation.

Carver raised the casting rod, whipping it backward then forward. The line whirred out and fell across Magruder’s shoulder. Carver reeled fast as Magruder reached for the thin but strong line.

It simply played through his fingers, cutting them. He yanked his hand away and Carver gave the rod a sharp backward tug, feeling the ‘Oh Buggie!’ with its many barbed hooks set deep in the side of Magruder’s neck.

Magruder yelped and jumped up in surprise, the shotgun dropping to the ground. He reached down for the shotgun but Carver yanked hard on the rod, pulling him off balance and making him yelp again in pain. He’d stumbled a few steps toward Carver, and now he couldn’t get back to the gun.

Carver began reeling him in.

Magruder didn’t want to come. He tried to work the lure loose from where it clung like a large insect to the side of his neck, but each time Carver would yank the rod and pain would jolt through him. The alligator was still and watching with what seemed mild interest.

Carver had Magruder stumbling steadily toward him now, led by excruciating pain. Magruder raised his right hand and tried frantically to loosen the barbed hooks, but found he couldn’t withdraw the hand. It was hooked now too, held fast to the side of his neck. Blood ran in a black trickle down his wrist. With his free hand he removed the cigarette stuck to his lower lip and tried to hold the ember to the fishing line to burn through it. Carver yanked harder on the rod, and the cigarette dropped to the water. Magruder was splashing around now, falling, struggling to his feet, fighting to pull away.

And something else was splashing.

Carver looked over and saw the massive low form of the alligator gliding toward him.

Magruder was still fifty feet away.

The alligator was about the same distance away but closing fast, cutting a wake with its ugly blunt snout, its impassive gaze trained on Carver.

Carver began screaming as he worked frantically with the reel. In the back of his mind was the idea that noise might discourage the alligator. And Magruder was screaming now, thrashing panic-stricken in the shallow water.

The alligator hissed and slapped the water with its tail, sending spray high enough to drum down for a few seconds like rain.

Carver and Magruder screamed louder.

The dented black pickup truck approached slowly and parked in the moonlight beside the still water.

I.C. and Peevy climbed down from the cab and slammed the doors shut behind them almost in unison. They stood carrying their shotguns slung beneath their right arms.

“Been paid a visit here,” Peevy said, motioning with his head toward the two lower legs and boots jutting up from the bloody water. It was obvious from the shallow depth of the water and the angle of the legs that they were attached to nothing. Other than the right leg, with the padlock and chain around its booted ankle.

“Magruder!” Peevy called.

“Will you look at that!” I.C. said. He pointed with his shotgun toward the huge alligator near the water’s edge, its jaws gaping.

Neither man said anything for at least a minute, standing and staring at the alligator, their shotguns trained on it.

“Ain’t movin’,” Peevy said after a while.

I.C. dragged the back of his forearm across his mouth. “C’mon.”

“Don’t like it,” Peevy said, advancing a few steps behind I.C. toward the motionless alligator.

“Nothin’ here to like,” I.C. said.

When they were ten feet away from the alligator they saw the black glistening holes in the side of its head, from the lead slugs Magruder used in his shotgun rounds.

Then they saw something else. The alligator’s jaws were gaping because they were propped open with something — a stick or branch?

No, a cane! A broken half of a cane!

I.C. whirled and looked again at the booted legs jutting from the bloody surface of the barely stirred water.

“Them boots got laces!” he said. “Crippled man didn’t have no laces in his boots! He musta somehow got Magruder’s keys off’n him, then his gun!”

He and Peevy turned in the direction of a slight metallic click in the blackness near the edge of the pond, a sound not natural to the swamp. Together they raised their shotguns toward their shoulders to aim them at the source of the sound.

But Carver already had them in his sights. He squeezed the trigger over and over until the shotgun’s magazine was empty.

In the vibrating silence after the explosion of gunshots, he heard only the beating of wings as startled, nested birds took flight into the black sky. They might have been the departing souls of I.C. and Peevy, only they were going in the wrong direction.

Using the empty shotgun for a cane, Carver limped out of the swamp.