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fence was a mangrove lake, where a crowd was gathering. The lake was fringed with coconut palms and a row of garbage dumpsters.
    The place had probably been a homey Midwestern retreat back in the seventies, popular with Buckeyes who caravanned south each winter. But now smoldering cooking fires and a sewage stink communicated the demographic change and a modern economic despair.
    Over his shoulder, Tomlinson yelled to me, “There’s someone in the water!” which I could already see. At first I thought we had stumbled onto a brawl, that the fight had tumbled into the pond.
    But the man’s screams didn’t communicate rage. The sounds he made signaled terror, an alarm frequency that registers in the spine, not the brain. His howling pierced the gabble of men and women who were peeking from their trailers, yelling questions and expletives in Spanish, as a dozen or so of the braver residents—several of them children—ventured as a group, not running, toward the water’s edge.
    In his poor Spanish, Tomlinson yelled, “What’s wrong? What’s happening?” as I ran past him, hollering in English, “Call nine-one-one. It’s a gator. A big one,” because I could see details now in the pearl haze of security poles that rimmed the park.
    I could see the alligator’s tail, slashing water, an animated grayness edged with bony scutes that had not evolved since the days of stegosaurus. I could see the flailing arms of a man as he battled to stay above the surface of the water.
    A likely scenario flashed into my mind: The man had stopped on the bank to urinate, or stare at what might have been a floating log—no one in their right mind would go for a swim in that cesspool—and the gator had snatched him.
    It happens—not often in Florida—but it happens, and it had happened to a friend of mine only a few years before on Sanibel Island, where I live and run my small marine-specimen supply company. A good woman named Janie Melsek had been attacked while pruning bushes and she had died even though she had fought to the end, just as the man was fighting now. Even though in shock maybe he sensed that if the gator took him under, he would never surface again.
    I hadn’t been there when a twelve-foot gator took Janie into the water. I hadn’t seen what had happened in the following minutes of terror. And things probably wouldn’t have turned out any differently if I had. But maybe, just maybe, it was the memory of Janie that caused me to push through the slow phalanx of onlookers, as I jettisoned billfold, cell phone, then pulled the Kahr pistol from my pocket and lunged feetfirst into the water, unprepared for the knee-deep sludge beneath.
    Jumping into the lake was like dropping into a vat of glue. My ankles were anchored instantly in muck, so my momentum caused me to slam forward, bent at the waist, face submerged, until I floundered to the surface and fought my way back to vertical.
    The man was near the middle of the lake, only thirty yards away, screaming, “Help me! Grab my hand, I’m dying!” so maybe he’d gotten a look at me as I pried one slow right leg from the mud, losing my shoe, and then struggled to pull my left foot free. To do it, I needed both hands, so I pocketed the pistol and went to work trying to break the suction.
    Behind me, someone had a flashlight, and he painted the pond until he found the alligator. I’d been right. It was a big one: four or five hundred pounds of reptile on a feed, creating a froth of lichens and trash that washed past me in waves. It was a male. Had to be. Female gators seldom grow beyond ten feet and two hundred pounds.
    The animal had its back arched, head high, and I could see that it had a frail-sized man crossways in its jaws, the man’s buttocks and pelvis locked between rows of teeth that angled into a reptilian grin.
    The alligator’s eyes glowed ember orange; the man’s face was a flag of white, and, for an instant, his eyes locked onto mine just before the