Maximum Bob

One time Lea

Big jumped on that, asking why she didn’t go outside to meditate then. Was she afraid of the dark? She told him, “No, I’m not afraid of the dark. I don’t get up in the middle of the night ‘cause I don’t have to. I can raise my cosmic consciousness anytime I want.” She could, too.

He’d act i

He’d become crude in his anger saying, bullshit, it was because she was afraid of the dark, not letting go of that idea, until she would turn it around and remind him of what he actually was afraid of.

“You’re scared to death of dying.”

She knew he didn’t like her saying that, but it was true. He could send people to death in the electric chair without giving it a second thought. But mention his own passing, like saying to him, “Big, you’re go

He hated knowing he had an aura she could see and he couldn’t. Sometimes she’d catch him standing in front of the full-length mirror on the bedroom closet door, looking at himself naked.

This morning he was looking out the kitchen window by the sink.

“Nice day, huh?”

Almost pleasant for a change.

He usually didn’t get up till seven. By eight-fifteen he’d be in his pickup truck with a mug of coffee heading for the courthouse.

“We could use a cleanup, that blow we had. I’ll call the Stockade for a crew. Those monkeys, if I could find one guy knew what he was doing… Get me a Japanese gardener brought up on some charge, killed his wife, I’d have the son of a bitch confined out here. Lock him up in the pump house at night.”

What Lea

“Pokey? Where are you? Here, Pokey! Come on, sweetheart.” She stooped down as Pokey came skidding across the vinyl floor to hop up into her arms. “Her wants to play with Wanda’s Pokey, don’t her? Big, she hears that other Pokey bark and just about goes crazy, runs around in circles.”

She heard Big, standing at the sink, mutter, “Jesus Christ.” If she could ever get him to say that with reverence it would change his life. The old poop.

“You want, I’ll fix your breakfast.”

“No, you go on.”

“There’s oat bran, bananas…”

“Fine. Listen, you be careful.”

Walking through the dining area and the living room with Pokey and her bag of crystals, Lea

She slid open the glass door and stepped out on the porch, a concrete slab painted a pale gray that ran the length of the living room, across the front of the house. About to slide the door closed behind her, Lea

He got to the glass door in time to see Pokey, for a moment, in the alligator’s jaws before the alligator raised its head as if to look up at the tile ceiling and Pokey was gone, swallowed whole. In those moments all Bob Gibbs could do was stare, not believing an alligator was on his porch. It wasn’t supposed to be there but it was. The next moment he was ru

When the first green-and-white arrived Lea

By the time they had gone around to the yard by the porch and could see the alligator inside, another green-and-white arrived and two more deputies in dark green joined the group. Bob Gibbs told them he had put six hollow-points into the son of a bitch and it was in there eating his sofa. Lea

The four deputies stood in the middle of the porch, about fifteen feet from the alligator in the living room. They fired their magnum revolvers through the shattered door frame with patience and deliberation until the alligator raised up, started to come at them and the deputies got out of there, hurrying out to the yard.

Now the alligator was once again on the porch. Lea

Gary Hammond came in an unmarked Dodge Aries, light gray. He was in the driveway on the other side of the house, out of the car putting on his suit coat when he heard the scream. So Gary arrived on the alligator scene in his dark-navy tropical suit, dressed to go to work.

He had been told what to find here, but was still surprised to see the judge and a woman who must be his wife, in a pink warm-up suit, and four deputies with drawn guns, all looking at a full-grown alligator on the porch, the gator not paying much attention to them. It twisted sideways as if to bite its own tail, jerked itself straight and that tail lashed out to send a metal table and chairs flying. Now it crawled around to see what all the noise was about and rested there with its back to them.