any physical confrontation in my life where I didn’t feel confident I was in control of the outcome. That doesn’t mean I have always won. I certainly have not. But I’ve always felt as if I could win if I picked my shots and made the right moves.
Like now, as I came up behind Squires, saying into his ear, “You’ve got a big mouth, fat boy,” because now his anger could be used to my advantage. I wanted him so mad that he lost control. When the big man tried to pivot, I laddered my hands up his ribs to control his body position and leaned my head close to his shoulder blades so he couldn’t knock me cold with a wild elbow.
When Squires realized he couldn’t maneuver free, he stuttered, “Hey . . . get your hands off me, asshole!” and tried, once again, to face me.
I was ready because that’s exactly what I wanted him to do. I let Squires make half a turn and then stopped his momentum by ramming my head into his back as I grapevined my left ankle around his left shin. An instant later, I locked my hands around his waist and moved with him as he tried to wrestle free.
Our backs were to the mangrove pond. With a quick glance, I confirmed that Tomlinson and the injured man weren’t directly behind us—it was a dangerous place to be if things went the way I planned. Then I used my legs to drive Squires away from the water. Instinctively, the man’s feet dug in, then his legs pumped as he tried to drive us both backward. Squires was taller, heavier and stronger than I. His energized mass soon overpowered my own.
The timing was important. I waited a microsecond ... waited until I felt the subtle transition of momentum.
When it felt right, I dropped my grip a few inches lower on the big man’s waist. I relocked my hands, bent my knees and then maximized Squires’s own momentum by lifting as I arched my back.
I waited another microsecond ... and then I heaved with all my strength as we tumbled backward.
In wrestling jargon, the move I’d executed was a suplex . As I arched backward, I used a two-handed throwing technique, not unlike a Scottish gamesman throwing a fifty-pound rock over a bar. In this case, though, the weight was closer to three hundred pounds. Squires had amassed considerable momentum, and it was his own momentum—not my strength—that sent him flying.
I guessed he would land near the pond’s edge, which is why I had checked behind me before setting up the suplex . I couldn’t have guessed, however, that a man Squires’s size would sail beyond the bank and land on his shoulders in a massive explosion of water.
I got to my feet, cleaning my hands on my jeans. I found the spotlight and aimed it at Squires’s face when he surfaced. He was disoriented and floundering. I watched him splash to vertical, as he spit water and swore. Mostly, he swore at me, ordering that I get that goddamn light out of his eyes.
I told him, “Come up here and say that, fat boy,” and watched the man jam his feet toward the bottom, which is precisely what I hoped he would do.
It was his second mistake of the night.
For a few seconds, Squires stood tall in waist-deep water, as he struggled to find footing. Then he began to sink. The more he struggled, the more suction he created and the deeper he went into the muck.
Squires wasn’t a wrestler, and he wasn’t much of a swimmer, either. He couldn’t manage the delicate hand strokes necessary to sustain positive buoyancy. Soon the man was so deeply mired in mud that he couldn’t move his legs. Water was rising toward his shoulders, and it scared him.
“Goddamn it!” he shouted to the migrants watching. “Help me. Get a rope! Somebody go get a rope and pull me out of here.”
Drowning was terrifying enough, but then another thought came into Squires’s mind. I could tell because of the wild look in his eyes as he glanced over his shoulder, yelling, “Hurry up, before that gator comes back! Does anybody have a gun? Someone break the window of my
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