He drew a cramped breath, hacked at the meaty weight that was hugging him. Hacked it again and once more after that. Hitting it finally, making good contact, a goddamn satisfying thunk. Getting his aim. A couple more blows bounced off its tough hide. Then a couple more.
He was breathing hard, but he also knew the snake was hurt. Saw a pale, oily liquid coiling to the surface like wisps of cigarette smoke, and bits and strands of membrane swirling up through the tannic-stained water.
Again he struck at the meat and this time nailed it good. Aiming at the section that was compressing his diaphragm, knowing that an errant blow could skid into his own flesh and might seriously wound him. But he was out of choices. He gouged at the greenish hide, gouged again, until finally the python reached its threshold.
It happened fast. In seconds the water in front of Thorn wrinkled, several small whirlpools gathered and disappeared, and the creature unleashed him and was gone.
Thorn staggered backward. He took a breath and another and the light rose around him. He hadn’t realized how deeply he’d drifted into shadowland, how close to the end he’d come. He sank one foot into the muck, then sank the other foot and tore loose the back foot and moved it into the lead.
He waded ahead through the gummy sludge, peering up at the dense mangroves and viney tangle of woods but seeing no sign of any living thing, or any movement or sound. Just the glop and slop of each step, the sucking bottom that was urging him to stay put and rest.
At last he stumbled up the slope of the beach, stood for a moment surveying the basin, then turned halfway round, collapsed, and lay back panting. He stared up at the empty sky, feeling his heart sprinting for some distant finish line. He set the pry bar aside and after a moment more of rest forced himself to sit up and held that position for several minutes, his shirt dripping, his legs weak, shoes full of mire, and he looked out at the basin and tried to recall why he’d come to this forsaken place, why he’d been in such a goddamn hurry and so distracted that he’d run afoul of someone’s primitive booby trap, ruined his engine in his reckless haste.
For a moment he had no clear memory of his mission. No memory of anything. Mind blank, drowsing in the shivery afterglow of adrenaline.
As he drifted through layers of fog toward the bright surface of wakefulness, struggling to breathe the summertime air, his skin sticky and fitting too tight to his bones, Thorn looked out at the cove, at this secret beach at the terminus of a labyrinth of twisty canals and creeks and backwaters that had no names and did not appear on any sane person’s nautical charts.
EIGHT
“HIS NAME WAS BENDELL, MARCUS Bendell.”
With one hand on the wheel of the black government-issue Taurus, Nicole McIvey cut through the traffic on Florida’s Turnpike, heading south. She held out her phone and Frank Sheffield looked at the image on her screen.
A scrawny young man, midtwenties with a prison pallor and dull eyes and stringy hair, stood before a police department’s height chart. Five-eleven.
“That’s before.” She withdrew the phone, thumbed through screens, and held it out again. “And this is after.”
Frank stared for a few seconds, then looked out his window, a sphincter tensing in his bowels. For over thirty years he’d been with the FBI, the last dozen as special agent in charge of the Miami field office, so he’d seen a shitload of postmortem photos, but nothing this grisly.
“Jesus, he walk into a flamethrower?”
The naked body lay on a stainless-steel table. Chunks of the torso were missing. There was a blackened cavity in his right rib cage as if he’d been blowtorched open; the face was a charred mess, unidentifiable.
“Electrocution,” Nicole said. “Happened early this morning. Bendell’s girlfriend discovered the body. Came to his house, found him out back. Metro PD sent me the JPEG a few hours ago. They knew I had an interest in him.”
She set the phone in a cup holder, gripped the wheel, and sliced in front of a slow-moving landscape truck. The lady was a serious lane-warrior.
“What kind of interest?”
“Marcus Bendell was my snitch.”
“Say that again?”
“A valuable asset.”
“You people were running a covert operation?”
“I was running it. Me alone.”
“Did I miss something? Your mission change when I wasn’t looking?”
“It’s not outside our parameters,” Nicole said.
“You let Metro PD know but forget to inform the Bureau?”
“The terms of his parole required me to inform local law enforcement.”
“It would have been collegial of you to notify us.”
“My agency’s mandate is to collect intelligence. Once it goes up the chain, my superiors decide who’s in the loop. If the FBI wasn’t included, Frank, it wasn’t my decision.”