Gator Kill Page 18

  It didn't happen.

  A few minutes passed, five or ten. I didn't count. I managed to push myself to a sitting position.

  Tolliver lay a few feet away. At first I thought he might not be breathing, but then I saw the blood bubble in the area of his mangled nose.

  The sight didn't particularly make me happy. He was a man who had committed murder, or had it done; a man who had raped the environment and possibly poisoned the land for years, or who had allowed it to happen; a man who had betrayed his office and the people who had elected him and who had tried to frame others for his crimes.

  If he had died, I wouldn't have wept for long.

  As it was, he was alive, and I supposed it was my duty to get him to a hospital.

  It took me quite a while to drag him back to the road. I had to rest a time or two. And it was almost impossible to heave him up into the cab of the truck. I finally got it done by propping him in the doorway, grabbing his legs, and heaving him up and in. He was more or less doubled up on the floor, but I didn't care.

  He'd left the keys in the ignition. I started the truck and got out of there.

  ~ * ~

  They kept me in the little hospital for a while, too, taking a few stitches here and there.

  Then I had to take the truck back to the jail, to let Jackson know where his former boss was. Jackson gave me a ride back to the field, but the Subaru was a complete wreck. He told me that he'd have a wrecker sent for it. He thought that the driver might buy it to pay for the hauling fee.

  All in all, it was a long day.

  When I got back to Galveston, it was late afternoon. Dino was at the house, feeding Nameless, or trying to. Nameless was nowhere to be seen. Dino was standing on the porch, looking suspiciously like a man calling "Here, kitty, kitty, kitty," with his hand up to his mouth, but he stopped calling and put his hand down when he saw me coming.

  He relaxed when he recognized me. "Where in hell did you get that thing?" he said. "You look like an extra in an old John Wayne movie."

  "I take it that you're referring to this genuine World War Two Jeep," I said, stopping and getting out.

  "Yeah, the Jeep," he said. "I don't think I've seen one like that lately. The kind they make now, all the kids drive 'em, and they look like yuppie cars."

  "Well, this is the real thing. I guess you might say it was part of my fee."

  He gave me the once over. "Sure looks like you earned it. You crack the case?"

  I was about to answer when Nameless meandered nonchalantly around the corner of the bushes that surrounded the house. He gave me a casual glance, and then walked over to his food bowl.

  "It must be nice to be loved," Dino said.

  "He has difficulty expressing joy," I said.

  "Sure he does. Anyway, how about it? You put the Sherlock Holmes on those mainlanders?"

  "I don't think I'd put it that way, exactly. But I did what I was hired to do."

  "What was that, anyway? You never did say."

  I thought about it for a minute, watching Nameless gobble the Tender Vittles. "I found out who killed the alligator," I said. "Let's go in and have a Big Red."

  Dino simulated gagging. He wasn't fond of Big Red.

  "I gotta go," he said. "I watch Miami Vice every night on cable, the USA channel. Tell me about that alligator sometime, though, huh?"

  I thought about Crockett and Tubbs.

  I thought about Tolliver banging my head against the ground with his hands locked around my throat.

  "Sure," I said. "Sometime."