Chapter One
The scream echoed in the glade, its sound waves trembling in the humid Everglades air like sonar in water. The location of the scream proved difficult to pinpoint. The magnifying effect of a dense overgrowth of palms and cypress and the reflecting surface of the canal in front of him bounced the sound, playing tricks with his ears.
Logan Rivers grimaced and threw his half-eaten sandwich overboard. So much for a quiet lunch of solitary reflection and tuna on wheat. He tried to get a fix on direction as he poled his airboat back off its cypress knees perch. His best guess told him left and he pushed forward up the canal. The giant propeller in its roll cage of aluminum bars sat cocked and ready, but silent.
The scream shrilled again, loud enough to scare an egret from a shadowed shallow in the crook of the canal bank across the way. Urgency in the voice spurred his efforts and Logan’s last shove scooted him past a point of land on his right marked by another cluster of cypress knees sticking out of water like wooden stalagmites.
A thrashing at the water’s edge behind the cypress stumps revealed the source of the screams.
A small brown otter hopped and twisted, one hind leg anchored to the muddy shore by an invisible force. The reason for the scream became apparent to Logan with a lazy swish of brown canal water about ten feet from the trapped otter.
The telltale ripples behind an alligator’s black snout and eye ridges showed the reptile’s slow and steady forward progress. From the distance between the two, Logan estimated this bad boy at about eight or nine feet. The modern day dinosaur had its sights set on an early lunch and for some unseen reason the otter remained in its sights, powerless to keep itself off the menu....