1 Chapter 1

“That gator is tore up!” Rudy Swetzek covered his mouth with a beefy hand, his eyes wide. Flies buzzed around the alligator’s corpse, and the leaves and ground beneath the reptile were soaked with blood, baking in the Florida afternoon sun. He lay on his back, his belly still wet, oozing rank entrails. Long, black claws dangled over folded legs, front and back. Gator claws, nothin’ to mess with. One swipe from those and you either lose an arm or get a nasty infection that’ll drop you in your tracks. A warm breeze blew over us and the smell was like to gag a maggot—bloody and full of death.

Most of the gator’s tail was gone, wrenched—not cut—off his rear, the hide torn, the muscle ripped away. Helluva thing.

Trapper Tommy is my name, wrangling wildlife is my game, least that’s what my answering machine says, cute-like. Hogs, possums, armadillos, raccoons, snakes, deer oncet’ in a while, but mostly I earn my living from gators. I yank ‘em out of freshwater ponds when they get too big or too friendly and start eating the neighborhood cats and dogs. Kids sometimes, too.This gator, though, was near useless to me. Dead too long to pull the meat, his belly hide too shredded to skin and sell to the leather goods dealer down to Arcadia. A bust. And he coulda been good money—maybe four hundert dollars worth of tail meat and hide—a twelve-footer, a bull gator, big and fat from his easy life in the swamps north of Tampa.

I bent down to get a closer look. The stink made my eyes water so I pulled my bandana over my nose. I got a soft puff of fabric softener then was overpowered by the gator’s smell. Didn’t matter. I had work to do.

Rudy bent over at the waist, then leaned back, his mouth twisted. “What the hell kill’t this thing?”

“I dunno, but I aim to find out.” The gator’s belly was open from jaw to tail. I counted a dozen trails of torn skin, then stopped counting.

“Lookit here,” I bent closer, my knees creaking. “These ain’t no knife marks, these was claws.” I fingered open one slice. The gator’s fat layer was yellow, then there was the red band of thick muscle. “See here. Long claws, they went all the way into his guts.”

Rudy finally bent over. He wasn’t the sharpest tooth in the trap but he sure was a good helper: didn’t mind getting up at two in the morning to catch animals, didn’t mind the back-breaking work that went with the job. Wrestling a roped gator into the back of the truck, mucking through a crawlspace to net a possum, lassoing a deer in Mrs. Vogt’s backyard last spring. That doe bucked like a bronco, caught Rudy in the jaw with one hoof, popped out two of his teeth. He kept on her though, got her down and tied her legs, all the while Mrs. Vogt oohing and cooing from her porch. “Oh, don’t hurt the little deer! Oh!” We put a shirt over the doe’s head to calm her down, lay her gently in the truck bed while Mrs. Vogt wrote the check.

That doe tasted good. We ate venison for two weeks after.

But this gator wasn’t worth a damn to me now.

Rudy’s voice was small, squealy. “What has claws like this? And balls enough to take on a eight hundert pound bull gator?”

“I’m thinkin’,” I replied.

“It don’t look like bear claws to me,” Rudy said.

“Nope. ‘Sides, nothin’ but black bears around here. They ain’t gonna take on a gator. Let’s roll him over.”

We grunted and pushed the gooshy mass onto its belly, a fleshy log of gore. A fart of gassy air passed from the body. The gator’s back was slimed with green algae, its black hide had old scars, probably from boat propellers or fights with other bulls. Horned ridges of armor and scales covered him, the last of the dinosaurs.

“Nothin’ new,” I said. “These is all old marks. Whatever kill’t him flipped right over, didn’t grab him from the top.”

“Weren’t no bear then.”

I checked the gator’s teeth. When a gator grabs its prey, it’ll twist like an auger, usually yanking off the victim’s part or pulling it off-balance and into the water to drown it. Gators like soft meat; they’ll tuck a deer or dog under a log or rock in the water, let it bloat up and get tender, then go back and feed for a couple o’ days. This gator’s teeth was pretty much intact, ‘cept for one missing way in back.

And something else.

I reached in the gator’s mouth and pulled out a hunk of wet fur. It was grayish-black, coarse, longer than my fingers. I sniffed it. Nothing to get but gator spit, no animal smell left.