Chapter 4
Chapter Four
The road to Mallor's Landing curved through the Everglades like a scar.
On either side, sawgrass stretched toward the horizon, silver-tipped under a moon that hung fat and low over the wetlands. The sky was enormous here, unpolluted by town lights, thick with stars that most people never saw anymore.
Trent let the night air wash over him. It smelled like water and mud and rotting vegetation—the perfume of the swamp, his mother had called it. She'd loved that smell. Said it reminded her she was alive. His throat tightened like it always did when he thought about these things.
The river appeared on his left, black as oil, its surface broken by the occasional ripple of something moving beneath. Gators. Fish. Snakes. The usual residents.
His headlights cut tunnels through the darkness, illuminating the road ten feet at a time as he moved further away from civilization and deeper into the swamp. Trees closed in, cypress and mangrove crowding the edges, their branches reaching over the pavement like fingers.
The gate to Mallor's Landing appeared out of the dark.
Trent slowed, his headlights washing over the chain-link fence, the rusted padlock, the hand-painted sign that had been there since his father put it up thirty years ago.
Mallor's Landing. Private Property. Trespassers Will Be Eaten.
His father's sense of humor. The gators didn't actually eat trespassers.
Usually.
He pulled up to the gate, shifted into park, and stepped out to deal with the lock. The metal was still warm from the day's heat. He worked the combination by feel, the way he'd done a thousand times before, and pulled the chain free.
The gate swung open with a creak that echoed across the water.
And something answered.
Trent froze, one hand on the gate.
The sound had come from inside the property. A low, guttural rumble that he felt more than heard—the kind of sound that vibrated in your chest and made ancient parts of your brain sit up and pay attention.
Gator hissing.
He stood motionless, straining to hear over the thrum of insects and the distant slap of water.
The moat that surrounded the main house was a hundred yards ahead, invisible in the darkness but present in his mind like a map drawn from memory.
A few adult alligators had made that moat their home, and a few others visited frequently.
He knew each of them by name, by size, by temperament.
They weren't supposed to be hissing like this.
Trent got back in the truck and pulled slowly through the gate.
Dawson Ridge, the local police chief, was constantly on him to replace the old fence with a new, modern, motorized one.
Not only did Trent not have the funds, but he also didn't see the point.
The gators and a well-placed, cheap security system were enough.
The gravel drive crunched under his tires, impossibly loud in the silence. His headlights swept across the palmetto scrub, catching the glint of something small that darted into the underbrush. Possum. Maybe a raccoon.
A light. Thin and sharp, cutting through the darkness near the water's edge. Then another, sweeping in a slow arc across the far side of the moat.
Flashlights.
Trent killed his headlights.
The darkness crashed back in, absolute and immediate, and for a moment, he couldn't see anything at all. He sat motionless, letting his eyes adjust, letting the shapes of the world resolve out of the black.
The house emerged first, a darker bulk against the night sky. Then the outbuildings—the equipment shed, the feeding station, the observation platform he'd built three summers ago when he'd started taking tourists out for educational programs.
And there, near the water, two figures. Moving carefully along the bank, flashlight beams swinging low, avoiding the house.
Trent eased his truck off the gravel and onto the grass that bordered the drive. He shifted into park and cut the engine.
Retrieving his pistol from the glovebox without taking his eyes off the distant figures, he checked the magazine by feel. Full. He chambered a round and stepped out of the truck, easing the door closed until the latch caught with a soft click.
The night pressed in around him, thick with moisture and the electric hum of insects. Somewhere in the moat, a gator slid into the water with a sound like a whispered curse.
Trent pulled his phone from his pocket, shielding the screen's glow with his body, and dialed Dawson's number.
"I've got company, and they weren’t invited,” he said without preamble when the line connected.
"How many?" Dawson's voice was sharp, and he didn't ask questions about why Trent was calling.
"Two that I can see. Maybe more.”
"Location?"
"East side of the moat. Near the old dock."
"On my way. Eighteen minutes."
The line went dead.
A lot could happen in eighteen minutes.
Trent hesitated, thumb hovering over the screen. Then he pulled up another number and hit dial.
Dove answered on the second ring. "Trent? What—"
“How far away are you?” he asked, cutting her off.
“Truthfully, not far.”
“ETA?”
"Six minutes from the gate. Why?”
"Someone's on my property." He kept his voice low, barely above a whisper. “Turn your lights off when you come down the road to my house."
“Pedal to the metal.”
He almost smiled. "Gate's open. I'm on foot, east side, near the cypress stand. Find me before you do anything stupid."
"That's my line."
He hung up.
Six minutes. Better than eighteen. But still too long to just wait. And then there was the question of why she was so close with the only answer being that she was on her way to see him. That meant she was breaking their agreement of keeping things in the friend zone.
Again.
He’d deal with that later.
Trent shifted. He'd been walking this property since he could walk at all.
Every tree, every dip, every patch of soft ground that would suck at your boots—he knew them all.
He circled wide, staying in the shadow of the cypress stand that bordered the eastern edge of the moat, keeping the figures in sight.
They'd stopped near the old dock, the one his father had built for fishing and his mother had used for watching sunsets. The one that Trent couldn't take down or replace, even though he'd built a new one last year.
One of the intruders crouched at the water's edge while the other stood watch, flashlight beam scanning in regular sweeps.
If it was fucking Karl, Trent might toss him in the moat and let him fend off the gators one by one.
Trent found a position behind a thick cypress trunk and settled in to watch.
The figures were talking, voices too low to make out words.
The one crouching had something in his hands—a bag, but Trent couldn’t be sure.
It looked like he was reaching his hand into the bag every so often and bending over, but again, Trent couldn’t tell.
Maybe they were leaving gator food to keep them occupied, which was the most logical explanation—but they were going about it all wrong.
Four minutes passed. Maybe five.
Then he heard it—the soft squish of footsteps in the wet ground approaching from behind. Moving carefully, but not carefully enough.
Trent didn't turn. "You walk like a city girl, not a combat sniper."
"Yeah, well, when I don't want to get shot by a trigger-happy snake wrangler, I announce myself." Dove materialized out of the darkness beside him, dropping to one knee. Her weapon already drawn. "Jesus, why is the air always so thick out here? Smells like a monkey's ass."
"It's called nature. You've spent too many nights in the jungle not to know the difference."
"Not sure what's worse. That or dry fucking desert." She peered around the trunk, assessing. "Two of them?"
"That I've seen."
"Armed?"
"Unknown. They haven't drawn on the gators yet, so either they're stupid or they're packing something that makes them confident. One of them is carrying something. It could be gator food, which is really dumb because that could get them killed if they don't know what they're doing.”
"I'm surprised you haven't lost a limb," Dove said softly. "Plan?"
"Dawson's maybe twelve minutes out. We wait, let him come in from the road, box them against the water."
"And if they run or do something stupid before he gets here?"
"Then we confront and have a conversation about trespassing."
She cut him a look. "Not a great plan."
"Best I've got on short notice."
In the moat, the water rippled and gently lapped against the grass.
Trent knew the sound before he saw her—the distinctive movement of Dolly cutting through the water, twelve feet of prehistoric murder gliding toward the disturbance at the bank.
She'd been living on his land for thirty years after being injured.
But she knew the difference between food and not-food, between threat and nuisance.
Tonight, she seemed undecided.
One of the figures noticed the ripple and swung his flashlight toward the water. The beam caught Dolly's eyes, two orange-red embers floating just above the surface, fixed on the strangers with the patient hunger of fifty million years of evolution.
"Jesus Christ," one of them said loudly.
The other figure grabbed his arm. “I wasn’t told there would be so many alligators.”
“It’s the Everglades. Did you think there’d be bunnies back here?” the other man said.
"That thing's looking at me."
"Then stop looking back. Move."
They continued on the far side of the property, where the tree line thickened and the darkness deepened. Their flashlights danced in the dark. Trent squinted, trying to get a better look at what they were doing with that damn bag, but the night swallowed them.
“I’m losing sight of them. We need to shift position,” Trent said.
“Alright.” She crawled from behind the tree—breaking from cover, cutting a sharp angle toward the water. Trent quickly followed.
He and Dove moved fast through the underbrush. Her years of training were evident in how she placed her feet and kept low.