The dawn horizon was barely a hint on the edge of night; the stars had only just begun to fade away; and the water had turned a particular shade of colour that could not be described, let alone recaptured. The speedboat’s wake churned through it like an eggbeater, and the complexities of the froth captured a certain primal beauty, purity, and power unmatched by anything Joshua had ever known except for the smile of his daughter and the duffle bag full of cocaine resting at his feet.
It was one of those mornings where you couldn’t stop whistling. The sun was finally arriving in big bold splashes that dyed the clouds and oh, look at the red, and the red, and the purple, and the red, and the red, and the blue!
Oh, the red and the blue were also from the coast guard. Well shucks.
And so, with an unburdened soul and a heart full of complex emotion, Joshua lifted up his duffle bag full of cocaine, jammed a set of lead weights inside it as an anchor, kissed its surface once as gently as a mother’s love, and hurled it overboard so he wouldn’t be sent to jail forever.
It went ‘splash!’
The coast guard was pulling up beside him when he remembered he had a very illegal handgun in his glove compartment and he threw that overboard too.
It went ‘splish!’
“What the shit was that?” demanded the first coast guard to step aboard Joshua’s speedboat, who was clearly much larger, handsomer, and smarter than he was.
“Nothing,” said Joshua. “Maybe a saltie. They like this time of day.”
“And you’re out here tooling around in this little thing? You’re playing with fire, you dumbass. Speaking of which, mind if we take a look around?”
“Of course not,” said Joshua.
The coast guards turned his boat upside down and inside out and even poked around inside the engine, but found nothing because as much as he’d wish otherwise, Joshua had only ever owned a single duffle bag full of cocaine.
“Guess that’s that,” said the second coast guard, who was not as large or handsome as the first but still obviously much smarter than Joshua. “Looks like you’re clean, Josh.”
“Please don’t call me that,” begged Joshua. “My mother called me that.”
“Sure, sure,” said the first coast guard laughingly. She looked over the side of the boat into the lovely water. “Jesus christ, you weren’t lying about the salties though. Check that motherfucker out! He must be the size of the boat.”
It occurred to Joshua that the first coast guard was looking precisely where he’d thrown his duffle bag full of cocaine, and a curious horror began to swim into his knees.
“I don’t know where it came from,” his mouth lied before his brain could catch up.
“I’m sorry?” asked the second coast guard. “I thought you said there were salties about.”
“Yes there are,” agreed Joshua’s mouth, trying to make up for its mistakes. “I don’t know where the duffle bag came from,” it continued, digging in deeper.
“What bag?”
Joshua’s brain finally wheezed its way to the front of his priority queue, examined everything his mouth had said in horror, then put the picture of a saltwater crocodile that had swallowed an entire duffle bag of cocaine into his mind with such vividness that he simply shrieked “FUCK!” and hurled himself at the boat’s edge with such speed that the first coast guard spontaneously judo-slammed him into it out of concern for both of their safety. This also put Joshua’s jaw over the edge of the railing and his panic out of the way of his eyeballs, and for a long, long moment there was nothing for him to do but hurt and see, and this is what he saw:
It was a truly magnificent saltwater crocodile, seventeen foot if he were an inch, with a few scars from boat propellers on his broad, powerful snout to lend him character and a calculated gleam in his eyes to show his intellect. There was no hint of a duffle bag – no shreds of nylon floating on the surface, no plastic buckles amidst his teeth, no sheen of a zipper caught amidst his scales.
Joshua sighed a deep, long sigh as the saltie rose a little higher out of the water into full view, ruining the effect of his majesty by revealing his ridiculous little dangling legs. He was safe.
“What the hell is that stuck on its leg?” asked the first coast guard, ruining everything.
“NOT A DUFFLE BAG!” yelled Joshua.
“Of course it isn’t,” agreed the second coast guard.
The crocodile rolled gently onto one side and the leg in question rose just above the waterline with reptilian calculation.
“Oh,” said Joshua’s mouth. “That’s my gun.”
“What?” said the first coast guard, and then “BANG!” and then ‘splash!’
“Holy—” said the second coast guard, and then “BANG!” and then ‘thud.’
Joshua’s brain was still trying to catch up when it went “BANG!” The rest of Joshua gave up and followed its lead overboard.
He probably went ‘splish!’
***
Morning had taken off its shoes by the time the crocodile walked into town. He moseyed, as demanded by biology and mood: each stride steady and calculated and inevitable, accompanied by a long, thorough sashay from head to hips to the very trim of the tip of the tail. He ignored the sidewalks and the traffic median alike and strode with confidence through the whole of the road, the wind and bob of his body taking him insolently from one lane to the other through the whole of his passage. Oncoming cars slowed, veered, stopped, and reversed. Bicyclists and pedestrians stared and pointed and ducked into shopfronts and exchanged stupid and empty statements. A single, incredibly bold or tired trucker was all that remained, rumbling through the half-kilometer that separated them from a half-ton of reptilian majesty until at the very last minute they slammed on their brakes and their horn and their outrage all at once.
The crocodile halted in the road.
“GET A MOVE OUT YOU BIG FUCKING LIZARD,” yelled the trucker, arm and head and fury emerging from their cab like a big angry set of red tomatoes.
The crocodile turned. He was a biomechanical operation, sinews and muscles red and white moving and tugging and pulling a powerful cylinder of a critter until he had half-circled over himself and half—raised his front free of the ground. His lovely reflective eyes glittered in the faint light from the truck’s headlights, almost free of the nighttime and turning invisible in the coming day.
“G’WAN, MOVE IT!” said the trucker. And honked.
“BANG!” said the crocodile.
There was a sudden, sharp silence, broken very rudely by the slumping of the trucker’s corpse atop their steering wheel and comfortably settling their belly button into their horn. The sound became unbearable to human hearing after about twenty seconds, heralding the crocodile’s walk. It also obscured it heavily, which was why the proprietor of the pub he turned towards had no inkling he was there until he slammed down the door with a single forceful tackle.
The woman sleeping behind the bar lurched to her feet, one hand groping under the counter. “Fuck off we’re cloh goddamn what the HELL-“
The crocodile had raised his left foreleg. The pistol glittered in it, still damp from the bay. Rust would probably set in quickly at this rate.
“Oh. Oh god.”
The gun, held with rock-solid grip in a leg designed to stomp, stub, and occasionally paddle, gently bobbed up and down.
“Is it…. is it the cash? I’ll have to open the safe but I can give you the-”
The head, multiple feet long, armoured with a single great cracked carapace-like mask of scale, shook gently from side to side, moved by muscles that could disintegrate bone and turn fat and muscle to bloody water.
“But what fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck did Ethan send you?”
Sideways motions were simple, natural. To nod took more effort: the legs pushed up, then lowered again; the neck craned to the sky and put the snout to the sky before lowering it again. Then repeat. Then repeat.
The bartender’s shirt looked like it had been dipped in sweat, filling the air with two different kinds of swamp. “Please, you’ve got to tell him, you’ve got to tell him: I didn’t MEAN to miss payment, it’s a leap year right, it’s a leap year, and I was only a little short because I had to pay my mother’s hospital bills and and and there’s a new beat cop and I had to grease ‘im and and and and oh please oh please oh please oh PLEASE”
The crocodile didn’t watch. He looked at the bartender, but he didn’t watch. He registered her as a collection of three-dimensional objects housing something he needed.
“OH”
“BANG!”
***
The crocodile’s departure was less ostentatious. There were a lot of police holding everyone else’s attention and THEIR attention was all on the endlessly honking truck some asshole had left a dead trucker in and figuring out who had to move the body so a seventeen-foot Crocodylus porosus was small potatoes respectively. Anyone else who saw him noticed he was walking away from the water and probably figured he’d be caught sooner or later, and if they’d seen him shoot the trucker they were pretty sure they’d imagined it so why not stop paying attention quickly so they don’t remember imaginary things like children or idiots.
The crocodile’s second walk ended five blocks away at a perfectly ordinary office building, where he took the service elevator to minimize the number of locked doors between him and his meeting, which was a short, angry asshole with an expensive haircut lurking behind a very expensive and large desk that cost sixteen hundred times more than the room it was in.
“Did you do the job?” he demanded.
The crocodile nodded. This was shorter, curter, brought less of the spine and the tail into play. Nobody was here to show off: this was business.
“Good. Good. The bosses doubted me, y’know? They thought you were too stupid to pull it off, they thought reptiles were basically big fat bug-brained frogs. Me? I’m not just a washed-up hitman that doesn’t know anything but guns and ammo – I paid fucking attention in biology. I knew you were hungry for it, I knew you had a killer’s instinct, I knew you had the experience to do it, and now I’ve been proven right again. Now for your bonus.” The asshole smiled humourlessly as he pulled out a high-powered game rifle. “Hold still and this won’t hurt; you’ll get to be the most expensive pair of boots ever made.”
The crocodile raised his left foreleg.
The short, angry asshole glared at the gun as if it were a dead bartender who’d owed him money, lip curling like a sun-dried strip of meat on a riverbank.
“Don’t bluff me, you damned skink. I have every moment of your performance out there recorded and I know for a fact that half-a-brain numbnuts Josh Fink never kept that thing more than half-loaded: you’re out of bullets.”
The crocodile coughed. Then hacked. Then, with a thick slosh of mucus and bile and loose saltwater in its jaws, he spoke. “Stashed a spare clip of magazines.” A moment more of careful gargling and rearrangement of fluids: “In my cloaca.”
“A spare WHAT?!” exclaimed the asshole.
“In my-”
“Excuse me, you stashed a CLIP of MAGAZINES? Excuse me, you MOTHERFUCKING IGUANA?? What next, you going to call a bullet a CARTRIDGE?! You stupid, stupid, STUPID MOTHERF”
The crocodile’s jaws closed around his upper torso without ceremony before spinning violently, thrashing him around the room until his limbs came off.
***
The gun was found in a public garbage can three days later. No fingerprints.
He’d been tempted to keep it for sentimental value, but he was a professional. No attachments.