Randy White - Night Vision

“Why can’t you just sit there and shut up,” he said to the girl as he screwed the top back on the bottle. “Do you want to see your drunken friend, Carlson, or not? I’m trying to do you a favor! So instead of whining about your wrists and asking God for a bunch of stupid favors, you should be thanking me for going out of my way to help you.”

“But what will the policemen say if they stop us and see what you’ve done to me?” the girl replied, sounding more like an adult than a girl. “Or if we get in a wreck and the ambulance comes? They’ll see that you’ve handcuffed me and take you to jail. How will God be able to help you in jail?”

Squires said it aloud this time-“Shit!”-as he turned hard onto a shell road, then parked behind some trees in a chunk of undeveloped pasture, where he removed the girl’s handcuffs.

It was probably a smart thing to do, because it was midmorning now, he had to pee, and if the girl was going to try to run an empty pasture was better than a 7-Eleven or some other place where strangers could see.

But the girl didn’t run. When Squires returned to the truck, he yanked Tula up onto the seat beside him, and said to her, “There! Happy now? You got no more excuses for whining.”

It didn’t shut her up, though.

“You should wear your seat belt,” the girl reminded him when they were on the road again. “God cares about you. You keep forgetting. And if you got hurt in a crash, what would happen to me? I have no money and no extra clothes.”

“Do you ever think about anyone else but yourself?” Squires snapped.

A few seconds later, he said, “God cares?” and managed to laugh, although it wasn’t easy. The suggestion that anyone cared about him was idiotic. His head ached from too much tequila, last night and already this morning. And Frankie was pissed at him-yet again. Someone must have called her from the RV park last night when the cops arrived because the woman had left five messages on his cell between ten and two a.m. The last message was a rant so profane that Squires had deleted it before getting to the end.

“I ask you to do one simple thing and you completely fucked it up-as usual,” Frankie’s message had begun, and then it got nasty from there.

Well… that was enough of Frankie’s bullying ways, as far as Squires was concerned. He had had it up to here with the woman’s bullshit. That’s why before leaving Red Citrus he had cleaned out all the important stuff from their double-wide just on the chance he could summon the nerve to leave and never see that bitch again.

The important stuff included bags of veterinarian-grade pills and powder that were in the locked toolbox in the bed of his hunting truck. And also about sixty thousand cash from steroid sales, which was in a canvas bag bundled with rubber bands along with the Ruger revolver. The whole business was under the driver’s seat, safely inside a hidden compartment that he had made himself using hinges and a cutting torch.

Frankie was mad now? Christ. The woman would go absolutely apeshit when she realized the money was missing.

Squires was also worried about Laziro Victorino, the badass Mexican with the box cutter and teardrop tattoo under his eye. If cops found a piece of a woman’s body inside an alligator from Red Citrus, the V-man would know instantly it was one of his prostitutes and he was going to be pissed. Someone would have to pay, because that’s the way it worked with the Mexican gangs.

You kill one of them, they killed two of you. That’s why Victorino made snuff films. To remind people.

First person the V-man would suspect was him and Frankie because everyone knew they had a thing for videoing Mexican girls, sometimes as many as three at a time. They were videos that Frankie posted on her porn website but also sold to Victorino’s gangbangers, which was another way she made money when she wasn’t dealing gear. Not that Squires and Frankie ever appeared on camera. No, the videos were for profit but also a way for Frankie to have fun behind the scenes.

Mostly, though, Squires was worried about the dead alligator. What would cops find in her belly when they cut the thing open? That would probably happen this morning, from what he had overheard the Wildlife cops saying. That reminded Squires to switch the radio from AC/DC to a news station.

In Florida, a dead alligator that had eaten a girl would be big news.

Even with the radio loud, it was hard to think his problems through. It was because the weird little Bible freak never shut up. She asked questions about the truck’s air-conditioning. And the CD player, then about his iPhone, which was plugged into its cradle next to the gearshift. It was like the stupid kid had never been out in the world before.

The girl also kept giving him updates from God.

This God talk was getting old.

“Think back to when you were a child,” she was telling Squires now as she sat upright beside him, looking at something near the gearshift-his iPhone, maybe. “Do you remember how safe you felt? Do you remember the love and goodness you felt? That was God’s presence inside you. And He is still there, so why do you fight him so?”

They were on Corkscrew Road, driving east through bluffs of cypress trees, past orange groves and grazing cattle, toward Immokalee, the gate to his hunting camp only half an hour beyond that little tomato-packing town.

Because of what the girl was saying, Squires’s mind slipped back to when he was young-he couldn’t help himself even though he tried-and he was surprised to realize that the noisy little brat was right.

Truth was, he really had felt different as a child. He had felt safe and full of kindness, unless his witch of a mother was screaming at him, calling him a “worthless little bastard” or saying, “You’re even stupider than your faggot father!”

It was strange how things had changed since he was a kid. Maybe because of the tequila, or maybe because of the guilt the girl had caused him to feel, the realization struck Squires as important. He took a swallow from the bottle and let his mind work on it until he thought, I’ll be goddamned. What the brat says is true.

Somehow, the world and his life had become mean and dangerous and dirty.

How? When had it happened?

That was a complicated question that took some time. The man wrestled with the issue as he drove. Had it started when he’d first discovered tequila and weed? Up until then, he’d been kind of a quiet, shy kid.

No… no, that wasn’t the reason he felt as shitty as he did right now. His life had really taken a turn for the worse when he met Frankie. That was almost four years ago, him being twenty-two at the time, Frankie thirty-eight but still with a body on her. And the woman was a regular hellion when it came to games in bed.

Sex-Frankie was addicted to it, and not plain old regular sex, either. The woman liked it rough, sometimes violent enough that Squires’s nose and lips would be bleeding when they were done-once even his dick, which was having problems enough of its own because of the way steroids affected it.

The woman liked hurting her partners, especially if they were female.

Yes, it was when he’d met Frankie that things had really begun to change. That’s when his life had switched from living a hard-assed guy’s life, hanging out with other bodybuilders, to living a life that was small and mean… yes, and dirty, too.

It was strange thinking about stuff like that now while driving to his hunting camp, where, until that instant, Harris Squires had fully intended to punish this noisy little freak by raping her.

But damn it. Now all this talk about God was deflating his enthusiasm, not to mention his dick. Worse, it was adding to his gloom. It threatened to bring back the withering guilt that kept welling up about accidentally murdering that Mexican woman.