Max gator, p.1
Max Gator, page 1
Max Gator: A Thriller
A Thriller
Vincent Zandri
Published by Vincent Zandri, 2024.
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
MAX GATOR: A THRILLER
First edition. June 24, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 Vincent Zandri.
ISBN: 979-8224103799
Written by Vincent Zandri.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Also By Vincent Zandri
Begin your Moonlight journey today with a FREE copy of MOONLIGHT FALLS, the first novel in the Thriller and Shamus Award-winning series. | Or visit WWW.VINZANDRI.COM to nab all of Vin’s thrillers and mysteries. | PRAISE FOR VINCENT ZANDRI
“I was completely chomped down on...I had an unbelievable amount of faith in myself that I wasn’t going to die. I was going to be OK, but I needed to act...” | —JC Defeats, alligator attack survivor
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Also By Vincent Zandri
Begin your Moonlight journey today with a FREE copy of MOONLIGHT FALLS, the first novel in the Thriller and Shamus Award-winning series.
Or visit WWW.VINZANDRI.COM to nab all of Vin’s thrillers and mysteries.
PRAISE FOR VINCENT ZANDRI
“SENSATIONAL . . . MASTERFUL . . . brilliant.”
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“(A) CHILLING TALE OF obsessive love from Thriller Award–winner Zandri (Moonlight Weeps) . . . Riveting.”
—Publishers Weekly
“. . . OH, WHAT A STORY it is . . . Riveting . . . A terrific old school thriller.”
—Booklist “Starred Review”
“ZANDRI DOES A FANTASTIC job with this story. Not only does he scare the reader, but the horror
Show he presents also scares the man who is the definition of the word “tough.”
—Suspense Magazine
“I VERY HIGHLY RECOMMEND this book . . . It’s a great crime drama that is full of action and intense suspense, along with some great twists . . . Vincent Zandri has become a huge name and just keeps pouring out one best seller after another.”
—Life in Review
“(THE INNOCENT) IS A thriller that has depth and substance, wickedness and compassion.”
—The Times-Union (Albany)
“THE ACTION NEVER WANES.”
—Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
“GRITTY, FAST-PACED, lyrical and haunting.”
—Harlan Coben, New York Times bestselling author of Six Years
“TOUGH, STYLISH, HEARTBREAKING.”
—Don Winslow, New York Times bestselling author of Savages and Cartel.
“A TIGHTLY CRAFTED, smart, disturbing, elegantly crafted complex thriller . . . I dare you to start it and not keep reading.”
—MJ Rose, New York Times bestselling author of Halo Effect and Closure
“A CLASSIC SLICE OF raw pulp noi r...”
—William Landay, New York Times bestselling author of Defending Jacob
“ZANDRI (IS) A VETERAN wordsmith who executes quality and quantity at superlative levels.”
—Book Reporter
Max Gator
A Thriller
Vincent Zandri
“I was completely chomped down on...I had an unbelievable amount of faith in myself that I wasn’t going to die. I was going to be OK, but I needed to act...”
—JC Defeats, alligator attack survivor
1
South, Florida
Overlook “The Oven” Maximum Security Prison
Present Day
The gator slowly crawls out of the swamp, its razor-sharp fangs covered in the blood of a man and his wife who were careless enough to ride their paddleboards on the adjoining lake’s surface. Didn’t they realize the gator is a lethal monster—a leftover from a prehistoric time when gators of its size and girth were as common as saber tooth tigers?
Didn’t they realize that he is a direct link back to an ancient time when woolly mammoths roamed the frozen earth? When Neanderthals, who hid in caves, painted the walls with drawings of their hunts and were lucky if they lived to be twenty years old before their bodies became the dinner to a predator much larger and more sinister than they could possibly comprehend?
Didn’t they realize that the prehistoric-like gator possesses acute senses of smell, sight, touch, hearing, and taste? Didn’t they realize that it doesn’t fear human beings? That it sees them as easy prey and therefore, an easy meal opportunity?
By the time they understood their horrific fate, it was far too late. The prey was already on their way to being dead, already torn to shreds like meat through a grinder, already food in the gator’s belly, already the stuff of legend.
But you might assume that after consuming two fully grown adult human beings, the beast might rest for a spell. It might take some time to relax while it digested its food and listened to the crickets chirp, the bass jump, and the horns from the recently constructed ultra-maximum prison located less than a mile away, sound the signal alerting the inmates to head to the central yard for thirty minutes of the fresh, post-chow, evening air.
Instead, the beast can already smell the body odor of the serial killers, the rapists, the cartel gangbangers, the Aryans, the radical Muslims, and the just plain evil men. He can smell their sweat and their filth. He can smell their blackened souls.
Slowly he walks on all four short legs through the thinning swamp, until the swamp goes from freshwater to something more foul smelling and tasting. This is the very place where the freshwater is tainted with the filth that comes from a big, thirty-six-inch sewage drainpipe that (illegally) dumps its refuse into the swamp. While the pipe is something that causes the animal happiness, since the pipe is presenting it with an opportunity to feed endlessly, it also makes the gator angry. After all, it and its ancestors have enjoyed the unsoiled and unspoiled South Florida territory for generations where they have lived, fed, thrived, and survived.
Now, the humans responsible for the construction of this private ultra-maximum-security prison are not only lining their pockets with the cash they saved from skipping out on the building of a proper sewage system, but they are also breaking the law at the expense of Florida wildlife.
But the gator knows they will pay the price, not by taking their lives necessarily (the gator can’t exactly be expected to climb the walls of the ivory towers where the wealthy private prison owners do their bidding and their business), but it can do the next best thing. It can unleash utter horror on the prison population, including its corrections officers, and at the same time, satisfy its insatiable craving for human flesh.
Max Gator does its best to squeeze its thick girth into the iron pipe and begin its trek into the bowels of the super max prison—“The Oven.” Max Gator’s mission to feed has only just begun.
2
Serendipity.
You know what that shit means, right? Or maybe I should do a little explaining before you go running off in search of something better to do. The word means being in the right place at the right time. But then, logically speaking, it would also suggest the converse. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
This explains why I’ve been sent up (or in this case, down), to this ultra-max prison for doing what, in my mind anyway, was the right thing when I not only beat the living snot out of a man who sucker punched me in a bar, but I also cut his eyes out with a switchblade. While I was at it, I also cut every one of his fingers off, and severed both his Achilles tendons so that he could never enjoy the ability to sucker punch another man (or woman) in his pathetic life or what was left of it anyway.
So, there you go, serendipity—being in the right place at the right time. Only, in my case, it means being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or just pure dumb luck combined with my, let’s call it, rather incendiary temper. So, sue me, why don’t you. Everyone else has.
But the law, being what it is these days, decided I was far more of a dangerous liability than a frustrated, misunderstood, young sucker-puncher who felt the need to take out his anger of society on a white privileged, middle-aged writer who’d hit the New York Times bestseller list a few times with his murder mysteries. A writer who also enjoyed a nice life of travel and the occasional big paycheck from New York City and even Hollywood, most of which my three ex-wives gobbled up thanks to their hotshot lawyers who got them sweetheart deals. In my business, it’s not making a million bucks that makes you a success. It’s fucking keeping it that makes all the difference. But I digress.
The short of it is this: Just to make an example of me and my lack of social justice morals, they sent me down to a brand new, supposedly impenetrable ultra-maximum security prison where for five to seven years I’m expected to learn my, um, lesson, part of which I’m learning right now on the yard in the form of a bare-knuckle brawl with another new inmate called Blood.
That’s right, Blood. Just Blood, like Sting, or Bono, only without the mega fame or the cash. It’s for the latter reason that Blood and I agreed to engage in this little hastily assembled brawl for the entertainment of just about the entire prison population (aside from the ones presently doing time in one of the two dozen holes). Also, to satisfy their gambling urges.
You can’t drink or do drugs in a supermax like you can in state prisons, but you can gamble, and these killers take full advantage of the opportunity. So do the black-uniformed COs or guards.
Blood and I give them a real show. We dance around the ring. He’s about six-four, his body so muscular and toned he appears to be carved from out of the purest obsidian. He’s wearing nothing but black stretch athletic shorts. No shirt, no sneakers, or socks.
I too am barefoot and sans T-shit. I’m not too badly built for a writer who’s used to sitting on his ass most of the working day. But I’ve always made a commitment to two-hour cross-training workouts that would cause most of the twenty-five-year-old snowflake soy boys I know to undergo a sudden and severe cardiac event. I can bench two-forty-five ten times and do one-armed pull-ups, just like Sly, and my once-upon-a-time home in upstate New York contained not only a full gym but heavy and light bags.
I also had a sort of boxing ring set up where I could spar with anyone who was willing. It’s why I shave my head. Hair gets in the way when you box. It really gets in the way when boxing turns into hand-to-hand combat, and your opponent decides to grab a fistful of it and attempts to yank it out of your skull.
But again, I digress.
What Blood and I are doing right now isn’t boxing. It’s more like kickboxing meets mortal combat. But here’s the thing. I don’t hate Blood. Fuck, I’m not even pissed off at him. I like him! We’re standing in the middle of the yard surrounded by the entire, let’s call them, student body, because we’re about to make some serious cash. Inside the “The Oven” cash sings, and as for Blood and me? We love the sound of money.
