Cold Vengeance

CHAPTER 39

Black Brake swamp, Louisiana

NED BETTERTON TOOK THE HANDKERCHIEF from his pocket and wiped his forehead for what seemed the hundredth time. He was wearing a loose T-shirt and Bermuda shorts, but he hadn’t expected the swamp air to be this suffocating so late in the year. And the tight gauze bandage around his bruised knuckles felt as hot as a damn rotisserie chicken.

Hiram — the old, almost toothless man he’d spoken to on the front stoop of Tiny’s — was at the wheel of the battered airboat, a shapeless cap pulled down around his ears. He leaned over the gunwale, spat a brown rope of tobacco-laced saliva into the water, then straightened again and returned his gaze to the narrow logging channel that led ahead into a green fastness.

An hour of research in the records office at the county seat was all it had taken for Betterton to discover that Spanish Island was a former fishing and hunting camp deep in Black Brake swamp — owned by June Brodie’s family. Upon learning this, he immediately turned his attention to tracking down Hiram. It had taken a great deal of wheedling and cajoling to convince the old geezer to take him out to Spanish Island. Ultimately a hundred-dollar bill and the brandishing of a quart bottle of Old Grand-Dad had done the trick — but even then, Hiram insisted on their meeting up at the far northwestern corner of Lake End, away from the prying eyes of Tiny and the rest of the crowd.

When they first started out, Hiram had been morose, nervous, and uncommunicative. The journalist had known better than to force the man to speak. Instead he’d left the Old Grand-Dad within easy reach, and now — two hours and many pulls later — Hiram’s tongue had begun to loosen.

“How much farther?” Betterton asked, once again plying the handkerchief.

“Fifteen minutes,” Hiram said, sending another thoughtful jet of saliva over the side. “Maybe twenty. We’re getting into the thick stuff now.”

He’s not kidding, Betterton thought. The cypress trees were closing in on either side, and overhead the braided green and brown of jungle-like vegetation blotted out the sun. The air was so thick and humid, it felt as if they were underwater. Birds and insects chattered and droned, and now and then there was a heavy splash as a gator slid into the water.

“You think that FBI man actually made it as far as Spanish Island?” Betterton asked.

“Don’t know,” Hiram replied. “He didn’t say.”

Betterton had spent a most entertaining couple of days looking into Pendergast’s background. It hadn’t been easy, and he could just as well have spent a whole week at it. Maybe even a month. The man was in fact one of the New Orleans Pendergasts, a strange old family of French and English ancestry. The word eccentric didn’t even begin to describe them — they were scientists, explorers, medical quacks, hucksters, magicians, con men… and killers. Yes, killers. A great-aunt had poisoned her entire family and been shut up in an insane asylum. An uncle several times great had been a famous magician and Houdini’s teacher. Pendergast himself had a brother, who had apparently vanished in Italy, about whom there were many strange rumors but few answers.

But it was the fire that intrigued Betterton most of all. When Pendergast was a child, a mob in New Orleans had burned down the family mansion on Dauphine Street. The ensuing investigation had not been able to clarify exactly why. Although nobody admitted to being part of the mob, various people questioned by police gave different and conflicting reasons as to why the mansion was torched: that the family was practicing voodoo; that the son had been killing local pets; that the family was plotting to poison the water supply. But when Betterton had sorted through all the conflicting information, he sensed something else behind the mob action: a carefully crafted and highly subtle disinformation campaign by a person or persons unknown, aimed at destroying the Pendergast family.

It appeared the family had a powerful, hidden enemy…

The airboat bumped over a particularly shallow mud bank, and Hiram gunned the engine. Ahead, the vegetation-choked channel forked. Hiram slowed to a virtual standstill. To Betterton, the two channels looked identical: dark and gloomy, with vines and cypress branches hanging down like smokehouse sausages. Hiram rubbed his chin quizzically, then glanced upward as if to get a celestial fix from the braided ceiling overhead.

“We’re not lost, are we?” Betterton asked. He realized that trusting himself to this aged rummy might not have been a prudent move. If anything happened way out here, he’d be dead meat. There was not a chance in hell of his finding his way out of this swampy labyrinth.

“Naw,” Hiram said. He took another pull at the bottle and abruptly gunned the airboat into the left-hand passage.

The channel narrowed still further, choked with duckweed and water hyacinth. The hooting and chattering of invisible creatures grew louder. They maneuvered around an ancient cypress stump, sticking up out of the muck like a broken statue. Hiram slowed again to negotiate a sharp bend in the channel, peering through a thick curtain of hanging moss that blocked the view ahead.

“Should be right up yonder,” he said.

Goosing the engine gently, he carefully nosed the airboat through the dark, slime-choked passage. Betterton ducked as they pushed through the curtain of moss, then rose again, peering intently ahead. The ferns and tall grasses appeared to be giving way to a gloomy clearing. Betterton stared — then abruptly drew in his breath.

The swamp opened into a small, roughly circular stand of muddy ground, ringed by ancient cypresses. The entire open region was scorched, as if it had been bombed with napalm. The remains of dozens of fat creosote pilings rose, burnt and blackened, thrusting toward the sky like teeth. Charred pieces of wood lay strewn everywhere, along with twisted bits of metal and debris. A damp, acrid, burnt odor hung over the place like a fog.

“This is Spanish Island?” Betterton asked in disbelief.

“What’s left of it, I reckon,” Hiram replied.

The airboat moved forward into a slackwater bayou, sliding up onto a muddy shore, and Betterton stepped out. He walked forward gingerly over the rise of land, pushing debris around with his foot. The rubble was spread out over at least an acre, and it contained a riot of things: metal desktops, bedsprings, cutlery, the burned-out remains of sofas, antlers, melted glass, the spines of books, and — to his vast surprise — the blackened remains of machines of unknown function, smashed and twisted. He knelt before one, picked it up. Despite the intense heat it had been subjected to, he could tell it was a metering device of some kind: brushed metal, with a needle gauge measuring something in milliliters. In one corner was a small, stamped logo: PRECISION MEDICAL EQUIPMENT, FALL RIVER, MASS.

What the hell had happened here?

He heard Hiram’s voice from over his shoulder, high-pitched, tense. “Mebbe we should be getting back.”

Suddenly Betterton became aware of the silence. Unlike the rest of the bayou, here the birds and insects had fallen still. There was something awful about the listening quiet. He stared down again at the confusion of debris, at the strange burnt pieces of metal, at the twisted equipment of unknown function. This place felt dead.

Worse than that — it felt haunted.

All at once Betterton realized that he wanted nothing more than to get away from this creepy place. He turned and began picking his way back to the boat. Hiram, apparently possessed by the same thought, was already halfway there. They gunned out of the slack-water bayou, heading back through the narrow, twisting channels that led to Lake End.

Once — just once — Betterton glanced over his shoulder into the dense green fastness behind him, shadow-woven, mysterious, braided around and above by tree limbs and kudzu vines. What secrets it held — what dreadful event had transpired at Spanish Island — he couldn’t say. But he was sure of one thing. One way or another, this shady bastard Pendergast was at the center of everything.