Everglades Read Online Free PDF

my all-too-often slow, slow brain.
    Sally’s stalker was above me, in the buttonwood tree.
    He’d been there the whole time, watching, waiting.
    I stood frozen for a moment, considering how I should react.
    The situation reminded me of something. Years ago, in Indonesia, on a tiny uninhabited island near Komodo and Rintja, a military SAS pal and I decided we wanted to find and photograph one of the rarest reptiles on earth—a giant monitor lizard.
    The island was uninhabited, for the very simple reason that the lizards are predators by day and night, very efficient hunters and their flesh of preference is mammalian.
    To render a man suitably immobile for easy consumption, the lizards lie in wait, use their dinosaur tail to cut his legs out from under him, then bite his belly open with one slashing swing of the head.
    That technique has been well documented, and seldom varies.
    Real estate on the island was very, very cheap.
    My Australian friend and I found the claw and tail prints of a big animal on a beach beneath coconut palms near a waterfall.
    We spent the afternoon tracking it through heavy, Indonesian jungle. A couple of hours before sunset, we were both exhausted and frustrated—outsmarted by a reptile?—and so returned to the beach, and our little ridged hull inflatable boat.
    The monitor lizard was there waiting for us. One of the big females, eleven feet long, probably four hundred pounds, tongue probing the air experimentally, like a snake, getting the flavor of us in advance of attacking. Her eyes were black, yet seemed to glow.
    She’d been shadowing us the whole time, anticipating our moves.
    That’s the way I felt now. Like the hunter who recognizes that he is being hunted.
    Realizing that the man had to be in the tree above me caused the same sensation of adrenaline rush to move up my spine.
    I turned slowly away from the big buttonwood. I wanted to give myself some space before confronting him. In military parlance, he owned the high ground. I pretended to re-examine his tracks, puzzled. Then I began to take slow, small steps toward the path to my home.
    Above me, I heard limbs rustle, then a primal grunting sound. I looked up reflexively to see a dark, refrigerator-sized shape falling through the limbs, dropping toward me.

chapter four
    I lunged away, turning, but I didn’t react quickly enough. The bulk of the man’s weight caught me on the left shoulder, and sent me stumbling into the mangroves. I would have fallen, but I grabbed a mangrove branch as I was going down. Then I used it as a kind of spring to launch me back toward him.
    Normally, I’m not a puncher. Punch a man in the face, and you have just as much chance of breaking your hand as you have of breaking his jaw. But I was so surprised, and the adrenaline dump was so abrupt, that I reacted without thinking. He was getting up from his knees, his shaved head turned away from me—a perfect and unexpected target—so I hit him just as hard as I could with an overhand right that should have dropped him to the ground unconscious.
    It would have knocked me unconscious. It would have dropped almost any man I’ve met.
    Not him. In fact, it didn’t even seem to hurt him much.
    He gave a little shake of his head. Then he turned his eyes toward mine, his expression slowly translating surprise into anger.
    He stared at me for a moment, as if puzzled, before he said, “What the hell’d you do that for, Mac? You got any idea what a stupid thing it was you just did? I hate it when someone sucker punches me.” Talking as if I’d attacked him, stringing the words together in a heavy, urbanized accent.
    Then, before I had a chance to speak, he came charging at me; stuck his shoulder in my stomach like a linebacker, and began to bull me toward the water.
     
     
    I was in trouble. Lots of trouble, and for a couple of reasons.
    For one thing, I hadn’t been working out much lately. I was, in fact, in the worst shape of my life. And he was as big as