Going Dark(3)
Maybe this self-assurance made Leslie vulnerable. She dropped her guard, didn’t expect the croc to turn and surge so quickly. Cameron could make out only the dim outlines of the moment of attack. Leslie’s headlong tumble, the big reptile’s swift move. A violent merging of the two.
The audio records violent splashes as though the animal is trying to drag Leslie underwater or tow her as far from land as possible, with Leslie fighting, thrashing. There are garbled words and heaves of breath, while the frozen video continues to show only the still and shadowy image of the grassy bank where the nest is torn open, exposing the white cluster of eggs to a milky wash of moonlight.
More than a minute of quiet is followed by splashing, and a few seconds later, a howl. A human voice that is barely human.
It could be either of them. Cameron doesn’t remember yelling but supposes it’s possible. He doesn’t recognize the scream as his own. To Cameron those moments were a bewildering blur. Shortly after the attack began, he recalls being chest-high in the canal and smacking the water with both hands to lure the big croc away from Leslie. Not heroic, he says, just a blind reaction to the horror unfolding before him. Then he remembers backing away when he thought the croc turned on him.
All that jostling of the water rocks the airboat and somehow triggers the camera’s light to flutter on again.
More silence follows, then the sound of someone slogging through the canal, and a moment later Cameron is in the camera’s frame staggering toward the bank in hip-deep water.
He’s massive, tall and heavily muscled, with short blond hair. He’s cradling something in his arms. His face is stricken and white. He claims to remember none of this. Picking it up, carrying it to the boat.
The video shows him splashing near the bow, then lifting the object and setting it on the deck in front of the camera. This human arm was severed an inch above the elbow. Around the wrist is a rubber bracelet, a camouflage design.
Cameron is huffing as he pulls himself aboard and lifts the video camera from the deck. For a moment the lens captures hundreds of glittering lights that outline the towers and the two enormous containment buildings at Turkey Point only a few hundred yards away. With all those lights sparkling in the night, the nuclear power plant appears almost festive.
Then the video goes dark.
TWO
THORN HAD SET UP HIS fly-tying vise next to the lagoon and was almost done with his latest version of a Crazy Charlie with silver bead-chain eyes, underbody of pearl flashabou, wings of tan calf tail, and a few wispy sprigs of possum fur that he added to the rump. The possum fur was an oddball addition to the standard fly, but last week Thorn had found the creature crushed on the highway near his house, and on a whim he plucked a clump from its pelt to give the possum another shot at a useful purpose. That creature whose major survival skill was pretending to be dead was about to spend a while longer pretending to be alive.
He was making the final snips when a car rolled into his gravel drive. He watched Sugarman park in his usual spot beneath the ancient gumbo-limbo and get out of his dented Honda.
Sugar was his oldest buddy, an accomplice in more messy escapades than either of them would admit. Tall and lean, a striking mix of his pale Norwegian mother and Rastafarian dad, with a finely modeled face and a caramel skin tone a half shade lighter than Thorn’s perpetual tan. Sugar and Thorn had been yinning and yanging since they met in grade school and were still doing the same crazy, out-of-kilter tango decades later.
Impulsive, hair-trigger Thorn and steady, no-nonsense Sugar. Thorn, the hard-core loner, and Sugar with a hundred friends and a sunny view of the darkest days. For years the two had undertaken risky balancing acts along precipices and canyon edges, lurching along the edges of one bottomless disaster after another, but somehow they’d always managed to steady each other and dance away just before the plunge. So far.
Thorn tied the final knot and set the bonefish fly aside and stood waiting on the gray, weathered planks of the dock.
Sugarman didn’t say hello, didn’t say anything as he stepped down onto the dock. He blinked and looked off as if trying to conceal the slow-motion hardening in his jaw and some unpleasant taste rising into his throat.
Sugar was dressed today in blue-and-white-striped seersucker shorts and a canary-yellow polo shirt and his best boat shoes, the jaunty look that usually meant he’d been trying to impress a prospective client.
“What happened?”
Sugar turned and glanced back down the gravel drive, shaking his head faintly, the way he did when he was fetching the right phrase. When he turned back, a grimace had stiffened his face.
Thorn backhanded the sweat from his eyes, looked out at the lagoon, where a cormorant had surfaced, a bulge in his skinny throat. He swam in ever-larger circles as he searched the water for more targets.