Randy White - Night Vision

Squires whispered “Son of a bitch” as he glanced toward the pond, where he could see the gator rolling in a spray of water, and he thought, Eat that bastard, Fifi! Kill them both!

Squires was pretty sure he had seen the hippie, Tomlinson, before, cruising around the park in some shitty old Volkswagen that had to be twenty years old. Sometimes a girlish-looking electric bike, too. Which wasn’t that unusual. Dopers often cruised the parks because they knew that the chilies arrived from Mexico carrying baggies of weed or peyote buds in their pants instead of cash.

Hell, Squires had bought grass from them himself, although, more often, he just took the shit when he wanted it. Sometimes, he’d yank a guy up by the ankles and shake him, like shaking quarters out of an old pair of jeans. What the hell could a Mexican do about it? Call the cops?

That was one of the good things about managing a place like Red Citrus. No one on the whole goddamn property wanted the cops around, especially Squires and Frankie, so that made it a safe place to be. Which is why, in their newest double-wide trailer, Squires had set up a smaller version of the cookshack they had out there at the hunting camp. It wasn’t the sort of cookshack where he actually cooked food. What he cooked up was home-brewed steroid gear like testosterone enanthate, and equine-which was a horse steroid called EQ-plus winstrol and deca-durabolin.

“Gear” was bodybuilder slang for steroids, almost always purchased illegally.

Squires had become good at rendering high-grade veterinarian powders into injectable muscle juice. The kitchen was well supplied with Whatman sterile filters, 20-gauge needles, sesame oil, benzyl benzoate and everything else needed to produce a first-class product.

Squires had started small, producing just enough gear for himself and Frankie, who had, at one time, been one of the top female bodybuilders in the country. Then he began to sell to a few guys he trusted, and that’s how they got started.

It was Frankie who noticed how fast the cash was piling up just from selling to friends. So the two of them had expanded the operation, thinking they could make more money dealing gear than they could ever make running his mother’s shitty trailer parks or teaching yoga classes, which Frankie sometimes did. They bought vials by the gross. They bought two vacuum machines and a label maker, too.

Turned out, they were right about making money.

Dopers thought a fresh peyote button was expensive? Ask a bodybuilder about the price of a vial of Masteron or high-grade Testosterone-E. Frankie could walk into any gym in South Florida where muscle freaks congregated and make an EQ horsey whinnying noise and that would bring them running.

Juicers knew exactly what the lady was carrying in her gym bag and they were damn eager to buy. Because of the feds, dependable gear was so goddamn hard to get, Squires and Frankie were now making a small fortune, all in cash, selling their home-brewed goodies in kits, complete with pins and syringes if that’s what the bros wanted.

Their little organization was becoming so well known, and their products so trusted, that gym rats in South Florida had come up with a nickname for the stuff. They called it Gator Juice. As in, “You tried the Gator Juice Tren? Or the Gator Juice A-bombs? Gator Juice is goddamn grade-A shit. Good to go, man. As in G-two-G.”

Squires’s eyes kept swinging from Ford’s billfold to the drama taking place out there on the lake. A couple of chilies had come through the crowd carrying a big military-type light called a Golight, so Squires pocketed the scientist’s cash, then handed both billfolds to one of the chilies, saying to him, “Hang on to these, will ya, amigo? Now, give me that goddamn light.”

With the Golight, Squires could see that it was getting interesting out there on the water where Ford was doing something that would’ve been hard to believe if it wasn’t actually happening. Ford had his left arm slung over the gator’s back while Fifi struggled to swim, still carrying Carlson sideways in her mouth. What Ford was trying to do, Squires realized, was climb onto the gator’s back.

Un-by-God-believable!

Into Squires’s mind came the image of the big Australian, the crocodile hunter guy who he used to like to watch on TV, which made what was happening easier to comprehend. But once the scientist got onto the gator’s back, then what?

Squires placed the big spotlight on his shoulder to steady the thing, then leaned to focus the beam on something the scientist had in his hand.

What the hell was the dude carrying?

A hammer, maybe, that’s what it looked like. No… not a hammer. It looked like Ford was trying to steady an itty-bitty pocket pistol behind one of Fifi’s eyes-which was a stupid goddamn thing to try. At least, Squires hoped it was a stupid goddamn thing to try.

Suddenly, he could feel that sickening feeling in his stomach again, worried the crazy do-gooder was going to find a way to free Carlson and screw up the only good luck Squires had had in a week. But it was pointless, what the guy was trying to do… wasn’t it?

Squires hoped it was true. There was no pussy pistol in the world with enough stopping power to…

WHAP-WHAP!

Squires jumped when he heard the gunshots. Then he stood straight, realizing that the man had managed to get a couple of rounds off.

Behind him, the crowd made a collective Ooohing noise as they watched the alligator’s tail slam sideways, then tilt upward like a crane. The tail stood there for an instant, before the big animal rolled and then sank from sight.

Shit! Where was Carlson?

Squires fanned the light back and forth, searching. Maybe the nosy old turd had gone down with the gator. No… no such luck. Carlson was still out there, floundering to stay on the surface while the hippie swam toward him.

Sons a bitches!

Squires felt an acidic surge move from his abdomen toward his head, the signal that he was becoming seriously pissed off. It was a steroid charge that he had experienced many times but seldom as strong as tonight-which would have made sense, if he’d stopped to think about it. Tuesdays and Saturdays were Squires’s pin days-“pinning” being bodybuilder talk for steroid injections.

That morning, he had flooded two syringes with testosterone, equipoise, trenbolone and decanoate-all oil-based, veterinarian-strength gear-and injected it into his thighs, but only after heating the oil under a hot spigot to make the sticks faster and less painful.

As a special treat-because it had been such a shitty two days-he had also eaten five tabs of dianabol, a hundred milligrams.

D-bombs, man-nothing else hit Squires quite as hard as dianabol, although he preferred the injectable version. Juice was easier on the liver than pills. But he was out of D-bomb oil until he made his next trip to the hunting camp.

Squires lived for that full-on testosterone buzz. He loved the evening of a pin day, when his blood levels were so hormone drunk that he could track the oil moving through his veins like heat. It caused his muscles to twitch and swell beneath his skin, the fibers feeding so furiously on hormone soup that Squires could feel the mass of his body changing.

“You got your monster face on tonight,” Frankie would sometimes say to him as they elbowed for space before their weight-room mirror, Frankie usually posing naked, but Squires wearing a thong because steroid gear shrunk his nuts so small it was embarrassing.

“I love it,” the woman would tell him, “when you got your monster face on.”

Because of the D-bombs, and because of what was happening, Harris Squires had his monster face on now.

He paused long enough to kick one of the cell phones toward the water, hoping it belonged to the guy named Ford-the damn do-gooder dude who’d just shot his alligator, Fifi. Then Squires batted a couple of chilies out of his way, as he began to pace, still carrying the spotlight, waiting for the bastard to make it to shore-if he ever did.