It took an hour to make the full circuit back to where the flood levee abutted Lunker Lake Number Seven. When he reached the designated spot, Eddie Spurling turned off the engine, killed the lights, rolled down his window, and gazed off to the west. The Everglades night was glorious and immense, the sweep of the sky unlike anything he’d seen anywhere in the South; here the galaxy seemed to spill straight into the shimmering swamp.
When Eddie looked east he saw blocked and broken landscape,mthe harsh aura of downtown lights, the pale linear scar of the nascent superhighway and its three interchanges, built especially for Charlie Weeb’s development. There was nothing beautiful about it, and Eddie turned away. He put on his cap, snapped his down vest, and stepped out of the truck into the gentle hum of the marsh.
Water glistened on both sides of the dike. Under a thin fog, Lunker Lake Number Seven lay as flat and dead as a cistern; by contrast, the small pool on the Everglades side was dimpled with darting minnows and waterbugs. The pocket was lushly fringed with cattails and sawgrass and crisp round lily pads as big as pizzas. Something else floated in the pool—a plastic Clorox bottle, tied to a rope.
Eddie Spurling noticed how out of place it looked; obscene, really, like litter. The whole idea of it made him mad—Weeb and his damn Alabama imports. Eddie carefully made his way down the slope of the dike, his boots sliding in the loose dirt. At the edge of the pool he found a long stick, which he used to snag the floating bleach bottle.
He got hold of the rope and pulled it hand over hand. The fish trap was unexpectedly heavy; leaden almost. Must’ve got tangled in the hydrilla weed, Eddie thought.
When the cage finally broke the surface, he dropped the stick and grabbed the mesh with his fingers. Then he pulled it to shore.
Eddie shone his flashlight in the cage and said, “My God!” He couldn’t believe the size of it—a coppery-black bass of grotesque proportions, so huge it could’ve been a deep-sea grouper. It looked thirty pounds. The hawg glared at Eddie and thrashed furiously in its wire prison. Eddie could only stare, awestruck. He thought: This is impossible.
On the other side of the pond something made a noise, and Eddie Spurling went cold. He recognized the naked click of a rifle hammer.
A deep voice said: “Put her back.”
Eddie swallowed dryly. He was almost too terrified to move.
The gun went off and the Clorox bottle exploded at his feet. After the echo faded, the voice said: “Now.”
Rubber-kneed, Eddie lowered the fish cage back into the pool, letting the wet rope pay through his ringers.
Across the pond, the rifleman rose from the cattails. By the size of the silhouette Eddie Spurling saw that the man was quite large. His appearance was made more ominous by military fatigues and some sort of black mask. The man sloshed through the marsh and hiked up the side of the dike. Eddie thought about running but there was no place to go; he thought about swimming but there was a problem with snakes and alligators. So he just stood there, trying not to soil himself.
Soon the rifleman loomed directly above him, on the dike.
“Kill the flashlight,” the man said.
He was close enough for Eddie to make out his features. He had long dark hair and a ratty beard and a flowered plastic cap on his head. The mask turned out to be sunglasses. The rifle was a Remington.
“I’m Fast Eddie Spurling.”
“Who asked?”
“From television?”
“I watch no television,” said the rifleman.
Eddie tried a different approach. “Is it money you want? The Jeep? Go ahead and take it.”
Without blinking, the rifleman turned and blasted the tinted windshield out of Eddie Spurling’s Wagoneer. “I got my own truck, thanks,” he said. Then he shot out the fog lights, too.
Eddie was sweating ice water.
The man said, ‘That’s some fish, huh?”
Eddie nodded energetically. “Biggest I ever saw.”
“Name’s Queenie.”
“Real nice,” Eddie said desperately. He was quite certain the hairy rifleman was going to kill him.