Dead Man

20

The darkness was beginning to lighten, dawn would soon be staining the sky to the east. In deserted Chartres Street, Dain tossed his bag into his rental car, drove to Canal and Interstate 10 that would take him west toward the vast Atchafalaya Swamp that was Cajun country.

On the system of raised interchanges by which traffic avoided Baton Rouge, Dain stayed on the I-10 freeway west. The sun, rising behind the car, made incredible colors and shapes of the massed horizon clouds. Industrial smoke rising from the plants lining the Mississippi had taken on dawn tints also.

Why was he here? What did he think he was doing? He should be on his way to San Francisco; it was not his fault Maxton had showed up to vitiate his bargain with Vangie. Vangie, who had taken Marie’s place in his recurring nightmare — and from what bizarre corner of his subconscious had that image come?

Who had told Maxton where Dain was? Or, perhaps, where Vangie was? Or Zimmer? Whose bug had been on Farnsworth’s phone? Who had put Inverness on Dain’s trail?

Dain kept telling himself he was looking for strands that somehow stretched back to the Point Reyes cabin five years earlier, but he knew in his secret heart that the idea was nonsense. This morning he had faced the fact that he had to come here because he otherwise would feel guilty about Vangie’s very real danger: because whoever had led Maxton to Vangie in New Orleans might now lead him to Vangie in Cajun country.

The phone rang. Maxton was sitting on the edge of his bed in robe and slippers, yawning, but he made no move to pick it up. When it kept on ringing, a cheap busty blonde wearing a very sheer expensive lace negligee came out of the bathroom. The fresh bruises on her full, soft breasts and rounded belly looked a soft gray through the sheer material. She picked up the phone. There was another bruise on her cheek, ugly and dark.

“This is Mr. Maxton’s room,” she said in a soft southern voice with a secretarial inflection. She listened, handed the phone to him.

“Yes, this is Maxton...” He suddenly leaned forward tensely on the bed. His face, voice, eyes were very hard, his jaw set. “What the fuck do you mean, Dain and the girl together? That isn’t possible. He’s right in the next...” He broke off, said, “Hang on a second...”

Maxton dropped the receiver on the floor and erupted through the balcony door to the terrace. He threw the door to the next room wide. It was empty, Dain’s suitcase was gone. Maxton whirled away, stormed back to his own room and the phone.

“You’re right. He’s gone. Do you know where...” He listened. “Vangie’s parents, huh? Yeah. Give me a second.”

He snapped his fingers, the blonde opened the drawer of the bedside table, gave him ballpoint pen and paper. He sat down on the bed to write the directions.

“Lafayette... Breaux Bridge... Henderson... Follow the levee to...” The blonde was on her knees in front of him, busy fingers undoing the sash of his robe. “Right turn or... I see. Over the pontoon bridge. Gravel road... mmm-hmm... All right... crossroads store. Road ends. Yes, I’ve got all that.”

He broke the connection, dialed three digits. The blonde’s hands were inside his pajama pants, stroking him erect. He said to the phone, “Trask? We’re going after that bitch, you and Nicky be ready to roll in ten minutes...” Trask must have said something, because he listened for a moment, then snapped, “No, I want to be there to watch her die. Before she does, I’m going to...” He caught his breath and his threats against Vangie died as the blonde took him in her mouth. He told the phone, “Make that twenty minutes,” and tossed it aside.

The Lafayette bus ran west along the I-10 causeway on trestles high in the air. The causeway had been built about twenty years before on a Southern Pacific Railroad bed laid in 1908. Even now it was the only road that cut across the vast Atchafalaya Swamp. On the empty seat beside Vangie was the attaché case; her arm lay protectively over it like the arm of a mother cradling her infant. Her face, reflected in the window, seemed superimposed on the wetlands below the causeway.

She wanted to cry. Poor scared Jimmy, she’d talked him into stealing the bonds to get back at Maxton for what he’d made her do, and they’d grabbed the money and run. And now Jimmy was dead. She was alone with the bonds and she would be too afraid to ever do anything with them.

Because of Dain. Treacherous, betraying Dain had made her believe he was giving her time to work on Jimmy, then... She’d be more afraid of Dain than of Maxton, because Dain could find her again, except by now he’d be flying off with his blood money in hand...

Dain had pulled off to the side of that same causeway and was out of his car to lean on the steel railing and stare. The Atchafalaya had struck him like a blow, as if somehow here was his destiny, as if here he would find all his answers. He found it fitting that the eye of devastating Hurricane Andrew had come ashore in this area in 1992.

Now he faced his own devastation here in this breathtaking 2,500 square miles of bayous and lakes and waterways and swamps. Forests of cypress and tupelo and ash and willow and live oak — some flooded, some not. Every kind of game from bear to wild pig. Crabs and crawfish and bass and catfish. Cottonmouths and gators and snapping turtles to take off your fingers while the mosquitoes flayed you alive.

How Marie would have loved to be standing here with him right now on the edge of this unknown, hot, wet, tropical world! Probably Vangie, who’d been born here, was feeling that same lift of delight right now...

Dain straightened up abruptly. For the first time in five years he had thought of Marie as Marie, not as icon. In his last nightmare, it had been Vangie blown away by the hitman’s shotgun. What the hell was happening to him?

Dain shivered in the warm dawn air, turned back to his car. He had a lot of miles to go and had no real idea of what he would do when he got there. Wherever there was going to be.

The bus stopped at the Lafayette depot with a hiss of air brakes. Vangie was first off, minus her blonde wig and slanty eyeglass frames. A few steps away from the bus she spun around in a series of uninhibited circles, attaché case in hand, long raven hair flying out from her head. She was suddenly ravenous.

The Ragin’ Cajun was a workingman’s sort of café, big and boxy, the walls mostly bare except for beer ads. She chose a table near the back facing the door to see anybody coming at her. At the next table were two Cajun men in work clothes, with seamed outdoor faces and callused hands cut and scarred from trotlines. How many Sunday mornings as a little girl had she eaten in this very café with her papa and maman?

When a pudgy teenage waitress brought her the mandatory cup of fragrant chicory-rich coffee, Vangie didn’t even have to look at the menu. Ten minutes later she was tearing into eggs and sausage patties and grits and hot biscuits smothered in country gravy, washing it all down with her third cup of coffee.

A man about her own age, very husky, very Cajun, dressed in work clothes, put coins in the jukebox, punched buttons with the speed of long familiarity. He was thick and square, with laughing eyes and black curly hair and a wide shiny nose on which the pores were visible. Just as he started past Vangie’s table she leaned back from her cleaned plate and drew a big breath of contentment.

He glanced at her appreciatively, then did a double take as his eyes slid up across her face.

“Vangie?” he exclaimed. “Vangie Broussard?”

She looked up at him, tears sprang to her eyes. She said in a voice full of wonder, “You, Minus?”

“Dat’s me,” he admitted.

“How long has it been?”

“Dat mus’ be ten year. How your maman and papa?”

“I just got off the bus.”

“You ain’t seen ‘em yet?” He grabbed her arm, dragged her to her feet. “Den me, I tak off de morning work, drive you home to see dem...”

The beat-up old ‘75 Ford 250 pickup with the 4 x 4 option went along the dirt track on top of the high levee. There was pasture to the right, a narrow twisting bayou, well below flood stage now, to the left. When it reached an intersecting T-road of gravel, the pickup went down across the bayou on a one-way pontoon bridge, very narrow, its tires thumping, drumming on the bed of the bridge. On the far side it plunged into thick forest on a narrow road shaded by the hardwoods. Vangie was looking about in unalloyed delight, her face very open and innocent.

“I’d forgotten how much I love this old swamp!” She half turned toward Minus on the wide vinyl seat patched with long strips of silvery duct tape. “I’m goin’ back to the old camp on my papa’s fishing ground off Bayou Noire, and just fish and hunt and trap crabs...”

Half an hour later, the truck broke out of the forest. It went along the gravel road to a narrower dirt track coming up from the low slow brown reach of the Atchafalaya River to form a “T.” There was a little country store with a faded BROUSSARD’S sign on the front and a converted houseboat tacked to the rear as living quarters. Toward the road were rough dearhound kennels.

They bounced down the dirt track; it dead-ended at the riverbank, below which a couple of boats were pulled up on a narrow earth landing area. Minus stopped on the gravel apron in front of the store with a squeal of worn brake shoes.

Vangie got out with her attaché case, stood looking up at Minus through the still-open doorway. “You come in, see Maman?”

Minus shook his head, tapped the watch on his wrist.

“Gotta work. Ce soir I be back, we all drink some beer.”

Vangie gave him a big grin. “Tu dis.”

She slammed the door of the pickup, stood waving as it made a U-turn and went back the way it had come. She hesitated a moment, then trudged across the gravel turnaround toward the store with an almost frightened look on her face.

21

Vangie climbed the rough unpainted wooden steps worn smooth by countless hunters’ boots, crossed the narrow plank galerie to press her nose against the screen door. No one was visible. She pulled it open, entered, it slammed three diminishing times behind her, tinkling the attached bell. She set down her attaché case carelessly beside the cash register on the front counter as a woman called from somewhere in the rear of the store.

“You wait one little minute, non?”

Vangie started at the remembered voice. “Sure.”

Just as it had been during a thousand daydreams in a hundred strip joints over the past decade. Shotguns and rifles upright in a cabinet behind a front counter that held fishing lures, hooks, nets, line, rifle and shotgun shells. From the ceiling hung rows of muskrat and nutria traps. Below a small black-and-white TV blurrily showing a lively Creole talk show, a large screened box stood on four legs. It contained thousands of live crickets for sale as bait; a light inside kept them actively chirping and jumping against the screen sides.

“Not a single thing different,” muttered Vangie to herself.

She bent over the cricket box to wrinkle her nose at the remembered acrid smell. She straightened, belatedly went back for her attaché case, wandered down the aisle toward the rear where the voice had come from. There was a showcase with hard candies and tinned fancy cakes and a giant glass jar of pickled eggs on top. She sucked a piece of candy as she moved past another case filled with buckets, tubs, tinware, white-ash hoops for hoop nets, netting for gill nets and trammel nets, wire poultry netting for crawfish traps.

Through an open doorway in the right wall were three rough wooden steps down to a small damp room where a row of live-bait boxes took up the space except for a plank walkway around them.

Maman, in her mid-forties and blessed with remnants of Vangie’s same beauty, was bent over one of the bait boxes with a small scoop net in her hand. She was a warm, vital woman with a lined, bright, open face, wearing a cotton dress of no particular style. She glanced up at Vangie in the door frame at the head of the steps, then back at her work with a small wry welcoming smile.

“Too much tracas for little-little money, to dis?”

“Yeah, I know,” said Vangie softly. “Jesus, do I know.”

With a twirl almost like Vangie’s when she was dancing, Maman spun around at the sound of Vangie’s voice. A slow radiant smile illuminated her features. She dropped her little scoop net, darted toward her daughter with open arms.

“Vangie! So beautiful you have become!”

They met at the foot of the steps; Maman enfolded Vangie in her arms. Vangie felt a flush mantling her features, embarrassed and ashamed to be bringing her big-city trouble to this place.

“Ten years you gone,” exclaimed Maman, stepping back from their embrace. Her eyes twinkled. “You bring me some pretty little grandchildren, non?”

Vangie gave an uneasy laugh. “Um... not quite yet, Maman.”

Maman held her at arm’s length, impressed and pride-filled. She looked over Vangie’s shoulder, saw the attaché case.

“A secretary to an important man, my Vangie?”

“Ah... non, Maman. A... singer. And a... a dancer...”

“Singer? Dancer? Maybe I see you on the TV?”

“Uh... not quite yet, Maman.” She added uncomfortably, “I’d... like to stay for a while...”

“Stay? Of course you stay!” Maman gestured toward the front of the store. “Ten year ago you walk out dat door, you. Now you back, Maman gonna keep you, not let you go!”

She nodded happily to herself and bent again over the live-bait tank. She deftly scooped the dead shad from the surface with her little net and tossed them aside, casting sideways glances at Vangie and speaking with her eyes on her work.

“You think Maman not know how hard it is to make your way in dat outside world, dere? You got some trouble, Vangie, you tell your maman, we fix it up real quick, non?”

“Yeah, I got trouble, Maman...” She paused, added, “No trouble with the law, trouble with some men who want...” She paused again. “They don’t know where I am, so I just need a... place nobody outside the parish knows about, okay?”

Maman winked at her gaily. “Okay, you,” she said.

They both laughed. Vangie spoke in a new tone.

“Et Papa? Where’s he?”

Maman laid aside her scoop and straightened up. She looked at Vangie with great love and pride in her face. She took her daughter’s arm. “Out checkin’ de set lines, where else? Dat catfish, he been runnin’ real good, him.”

“Where?” demanded Vangie eagerly.

“Bayou Tremblant, by dat boscoyo knee of cypress where Dede catch de ten-poun’ bass on dat little-little perch hook.” They mounted the steps together. “We got time for one demitasse of café, non? Den you go surprise him, you.”

Vangie only nodded silently, her eyes blurred with tears of relief and love and release and safety. She was moved beyond anything she could have imagined. Arms around one another, they went toward the living quarters at the back of the store.

Dain stopped the car nose-up next to a couple of others on the steep grassy side of the levee above the Breaux Bridge boat landing. As he got out and locked it he could see, downslope beyond him, a concrete boat launching ramp and a U-shaped dock with a dozen outboard motorboats moored. On the galerie of the store a couple of loungers paused in their checker game to look at him and make comment with appropriate gestures.

He went down the bank on his slippery leather-soled oxfords to the edge of the water, moving warily, obviously out of his element. Stepping onto the dock, he stopped dead. Inverness was sitting in a flat-bottom scow moored to the dock, grinning at him like Brer Rabbit from the briar patch. Dain walked out with deliberation, seeking his stance.

Inverness was going to be a complicating factor, for sure. He was a cop, with a cop’s ways. On the other hand, maybe without him Dain would discover nothing at all in this unfamiliar world — he would be as competent in this environment as he was in any other. Dain stopped on the dock above him.

“Back to San Francisco, huh?” said Inverness ironically.

“Change of plans, but how about you? I thought you’d accepted Zimmer as a suicide, pure and simple.”

“We still need Broussard’s statement. Since she’s Cajun, I figured she’d hightailed it for home. Most of ‘em do when they think they’re in trouble. Course I’m not telling you anything new, since you’re here too.”

“A manhunter’s intuition,” said Dain, ironic in turn, then he had to chuckle. “It was her name. Broussard. Cajun. Originally, the Acadians. Run out of Nova Scotia by the British in the seventeen hundreds. French descent. Still speak a patois. Evangeline.”

“Yeah,” said Inverness. “Settled in the bayou country to farm, but they got flooded out every spring so they embraced the swamp — fishing and hunting and moss-gathering and fur-trapping. Very in-turned, family very big with them. For a city boy, you know a lot about Cajuns.”

“For a New Orleans cop, you know a lot about swamp folk.”

“I’m not married, got no family, so I fish and hunt. That means the bayou country. For damn near five years, every weekend and holiday and vacation I can wangle, I’m right out here.”

“Couldn’t the Lafayette parish police get her statement?”

Inverness grinned. “This gives me an excuse to get out into the swamp. That explains me, but what about you?”

“She’s worth money to me,” said Dain easily.

“Ah, yes. Money money money. The older I get...” He didn’t finish the thought. “Anyway, I think Broussard’s folks run a little general store somewhere out of Henderson. But since Broussard is one of the four most common Cajun names, don’t make book on it.”

“I don’t make book on anything,” said Dain, “not any more.”

“If I’m right, the easiest way to their store is by boat — almost all their trade is with swamp people working the bayous.” He jerked his head. “Get in. May as well look for her together — it’s a hell of a lot of backwoods out there.”

Dain started to unfasten the painter from the stanchion on the dock. “If we don’t find her?”

“I’ve got a motel room at Lafayette for the night.”

Dain jumped down lightly into the boat, shoved it away from the dock. A slow eddy caught the prow, swung it out into the river. Inverness was priming the motor.

“What if she takes off into the swamp instead of talking?”

“Then we’ll get to go in after her,” he grinned happily.

Maman’s old-fashioned iron cookstove and oven, once wood- burning, had been converted to butane gas. There was a chipped white enamel sink, and an ancient white enamel fridge with the cooling coils bare on top instead of being fitted in underneath.

Vangie and Maman sat at the minuscule table, finishing their coffee and fresh beignet. A gumbo already simmering on the stove filled the room with rich dark smells. Vangie leaned back, replete, licked the last of the powdered sugar off her fingers and half stifled a satisfied little belch.

“Oh, Maman, how many years since I’ve had your beignets!”

Maman drew a deep breath, sniffing. “Tonight, gumbo!”

“Guess I’d better go meet Papa before he starts back, him.” Vangie stood up. “But I have to see the dogs first!”

“And you gotta change your pretty city clothes, you,” said Maman. “Your old clothes still fit you, I bet!”

The stately blue and white bird stood motionless knee-deep on the fringe of the bayou. A far mosquito whine got steadily louder, but he ignored it to dart his head suddenly down into the water. He came up with a small wriggling silver fish speared on his bill just as the flat-bottom scow bearing Inverness and Dain appeared around a bend in the stream. He crouched, alarmed.

Dain was in the prow of the skiff, craning down the bayou at the spindly-legged bird bursting off the water on huge flapping wings, a doomed minnow wriggling in its bill. A heron? A crane? Inverness would know — Inverness probably knew as much about this swamp as any outsider ever would.

Which made him turn and start to yell a question, but his words were lost in the staccato beat of the motor. Inverness, in the stern, just pointed at the outboard motor and shrugged. Dain pantomimed turning it off. Inverness frowned, turned it down to trolling speed.

“For Chrissake, it’s a Louisiana heron,” he snapped.

But Dain said, “Why didn’t you ask the guy you rented the boat from just where the Broussard store was?”

“You had me stop for that? Cajuns are very big on minding their own business and everybody is first cousins. Unless you speak their patois, better just look, not ask.”

He speeded up the motor again. Every sunken log had its colony of turtles to either slide into the water with barely a ripple or do a sudden scrabbling noisy belly flop. One had a snow-white egret standing on its back; bird and turtle fled at their approach, one up into the air, the other down under the water. Bright-feathered ducks unknown to Dain zipped by on whistling wings. Fish swirled in the shallows when the boat’s waves touched their exposed backs. He glimpsed a lumbering black bear in the brush along the bayou, several small swamp white-tailed deer, and a little shambling ring-tailed fellow with a pointy nose he thought was a raccoon but actually was a coatimundi.

A thick-bodied snake Dain took for a water moccasin swam past with whipping sinuous motions. Beauty was edged with death here, which he realized was what he had come to seek in his own life. As if feeling his thoughts, Inverness suddenly flipped the motor into neutral. It popped and spluttered as they watched the life going on around them. There was a strange, almost luminous look on Inverness’s face.

“I tell you, Dain, come retirement, I’m right out here for good — living off the land. This is just about the last place a man can do it — be entirely on his own, trade what he catches or shoots or traps for whatever store-bought stuff he needs like hooks and lines and shells and flour...”

“You don’t like people very much, do you?” asked Dain.

“Show me a cop who does.”

Dain could think of one, Randy Solomon; but even with Randy, it was sort of despite himself.

Vangie had her fingers through the chicken wire at the deerhounds’ enclosure, scratching the long floppy ear of a sad-faced, dewlapped liver and white hound. She was dressed for the bayou, tight jeans and a cotton long-sleeved shirt with her hair tucked up under a billed gimme cap.

“This bluetick looks good,” she said as the floppy-eared hound crowded the wire for more hands.

“Your papa say he de bes’ deerhound we ever have.”

Vangie came erect. There was disbelief in her voice.

“Better than old Applehead?”

By mutual consent, they turned away toward the river. Maman almost giggled. “You know your papa. Every hound de bes’ one he ever had, him.”

The dogs pressed against the wire behind them, clamoring, tails wagging, heads alert, as they left to descend the switchback dirt path from the top of the riverbank. Near the boats was a big sunken live-box where the fish taken on the setlines were kept until they were sold.

“I look for you two soon after sunset,” said Maman.

Vangie hugged her, unwound the chain painter of the flat-bottom scow from around a tree, pushed it out, then with a final push jumped lightly into the prow. The ten-year lapse might never have been; she walked expertly back to the rear as the current moved the boat downstream and away from the bank. She sat down on the rear seat, primed the outboard, started it. Her mother stood watching on the shore. Vangie put the motor in gear, started off with mutual waves between the two women.

Maman trudged up the path to level ground. Vangie’s boat was just disappearing around a bend in the river downstream. The diminishing whine of the motor faded away as she went back into the store, picked up the attaché case and carelessly stuffed it under the front counter before going back to tend her gumbo.

At Henderson’s Crossroads, a big four-door sedan came along the blacktop road and stopped just short of the steel bridge. To the left a seafood restaurant was built over the water, with the inevitable checker-playing geezers on the galerie. To the right another road went off on the levee parallel to the bayou.

Trask, behind the wheel, said, “You wanna ask which—”

“We ask no one anything,” snapped Maxton. “I’ll drive from here on. I have directions. First, over the bridge, then take a right along the top of the levee...”

22

Inverness got back into their boat, went to the rear seat. Dain cast them off, jumped in as the old Cajun who wasn’t named Broussard turned away with a wave of his hand.

“Third time unlucky,” Dain said.

Long afternoon shadows were reaching across the swamp. Inverness was setting the start lever on the motor. He shrugged.

“If we don’t find ‘em tonight, we’ll come back in the morning by car, get Vangie’s statement, be on our way...”

The boat had started to drift downstream. Inverness was about to start the motor, but Dain held up a hand to stop him.

“Unless somebody gets her first. Zimmer wasn’t a suicide.”

“What the hell are you—”

“Some hard boys from Chicago were all over the Vieux Carré looking for them yesterday. Last night, Zimmer ended up dead. Maybe Vangie couldn’t have done it, but a couple of strongarms could have stuffed him in that bathtub easy enough.”

“Without marking him up? A man fighting for his life?” Inverness shook his head doggedly. “No way.”

He turned back to the motor, but Dain spoke again.

“You shove him in the tub, grab him by the hair, hold his head under.” Inverness was watching him, so he added appropriate gestures. “He grabs your arm, fighting you, but this gives your backup man a chance to slash his wrist. Clean, one stroke. Now he’s bleeding to death, even while he’s fighting for air.” Another gesture. “Zip! The other wrist. Then you let go of the head so he bleeds to death instead of drowns. Instant suicide.”

“You seem to have given this a lot of thought,” said Inverness slowly, as if ideas and questions were moving ponderously about in his mind.

Dain said, “Their room had been searched.”

“Dammit, that I don’t believe! My men would have noticed if there had been anything—”

“Your men weren’t looking.”

Inverness turned back to the motor, seemed to address it.

“You have anything else?”

Dain gave a low chuckle. “My hunter’s intuition.”

Inverness looked back at him, started to chuckle with him, then suddenly got serious, with an odd expression on his face.

“You trust that really?”

The door crashed open against the wall, the two attackers were framed in it. One of them, sunglasses, curly hair. The other, ski-masked so no hair showed.

Details of only shadowy recall previously. Was memory coming back, after five long years?

“With my life,” Dain said fervently.

The big sedan came to a stop on the gravel at the dirt turnoff to Broussard’s Store, about a hundred yards shy of the deerhound pen. No one was visible, nothing was moving.

“So, whadda we do?” asked Trask.

“Wait,” said Maxton.

“For what?” asked Nicky from the backseat.

“Dark.”

The shadows were getting long across the brown reach of Bayou Tremblant. Vangie’s boat had been pulled into shore a bit downstream from the bend where Papa had run out his trotline. The water was slow enough here for the line, known locally as a float line because it was supported at intervals by cork floats, to run out at a right angle to the current.

Papa was in the blunt prow of his flat-bottom scow, Vangie on the stern seat. Papa, a short fierce bristling man, very French, was pulling them along the line, checking the hooks hung from the main line at three-foot intervals on shorter, lighter lines called stagings.

Almost every hook had a catfish on it. Papa removed them, tossed them into a big wash bucket full of water. Vangie was rebaiting each hook, using the heads of large shad as her cut-bait. Both were quick and expert at the work. Vangie’s face was intent but serene, Papa was grinning with delight as he pulled them along the line.

“De bes’ day I have all spring, Vangie.”

“I’ve brought you luck, Papa,” she said gaily.

“Havin’ you home make Papa so happy he wanna bust, him.”

Vangie was silent, thoughtful. “It’s good to be home, Papa, but I hate to see you work so hard.”

Papa laughed. “Not hard, do what you love. It doan make much money, but what you wan’ Papa to do?” His laughter had turned to indignation. “Go drive a truck? Pump ‘pane in New Orleans? Work on a oil rig with les Texiens, him?” He shook his grizzled narrow head. “Time all you got b’longs to you, just you alone. So you gotta use that time lak you wan’.”

In a sudden terrifying moment, Vangie realized that she had never really planned out what she would do with the bonds. She’d stolen them more to get back at Maxton than for the money... Oh, some fuzzy thoughts about tropic isles, the great cities of Europe, the pyramids along the Nile, Japan, Hong Kong, freedom — but mainly it had been, at first, just taking them, and then just getting away with them. Not much beyond that.

Maybe poor Jimmy had been right. Maybe they should have cashed them in and just started running and living and loving with the money, until Maxton eventually, inevitably caught up...

But no, she’d thought only of escape. Now Jimmy was dead. He would never escape. She had the bonds but was afraid to cash them.

No. Not afraid. She knew now, without hesitation or question, what she would do with them. She would cash them somewhere far away, then send her parents the money. If Maxton did ever catch up with her, he would never be led back here to the bayous and to them.

“What if someone gave you money, Papa? A lot of money?”

“Doan want a lotta money,” he said with fierce pride. “I do my life damn good, me! Got all I need. Your maman, good hounds, good fishin’, food huntin’, dis bayou...”

They had worked their way across the channel to the far shore. He let the cleaned and rebaited line drop back into the water. Vangie watched him hungrily, as if trying to figure out the secret of life that he had and that she had lost.

“Dat de las’ hook,” he said happily. “We go home now.”

It was dusk. The three men watched Maman as she removed the last of the dried laundry from the line. She picked up the big wash basket and, leaning sideways to counterbalance its weight, went to the back door of the living area and disappeared. Two minutes later she emerged with a brimming bucket of scraps for the hounds. They flowed around her in an excited river of silky tan and white backs, yelping and barking and whining, ravenous as only dogs can be.

“That old broad don’t never stop working,” said Nicky. “Probably outlive us all.”

“Wanta give odds on that?” asked Trask, and laughed.

She returned to the house and the lights went on. Maxton got out of the car, followed by the other two. They walked down the road to the store, climbed the creaky wooden steps to the equally creaky galerie. Maxton stopped, Nicky and Trask went through the screen door, it slammed its three diminishing times behind them, tinkling the bell.

Maman trudged up from the rear, beaming. Her expression changed when she saw the two men and Maxton outside.

“Cold beer,” said Trask.

Maman jerked her head. There was suspicion in her manner. “In de back. In de cooler ‘gainst de back wall.”

Trask went down the aisle out of sight. Nicky took out some folding money, offered her a $50 bill, thereby keeping her at the front of the store.

“Got nuthin’ smaller, you?” she asked.

Nicky dug around in his billfold, came up with a twenty.

“For three of them,” he said.

Maman made change. Trask came up the store holding all three icy bottles of beer in his left hand, the necks between his curled fingers.

“We’ll drink ‘em here.” said Nicky.

“Mebbe you leave dem empties in de crate on de porch, non?”

On the galerie they gave Maxton his beer, and all three men moved to the front edge of the porch beside the steps. They could not readily be heard from inside. They stood in a row in their town clothes, facing out, drinking their cold beers.

“I went through the place,” Trask said. “She’s alone in there now, but the clothes I saw on a fucking blonde snatch at the New Orleans bus depot was lying on the bed.”

“Blonde, huh? A wig and she gets past you,” said Maxton in a low snarly voice. He stopped and spread his hands. “No matter. She’s been here, we’re here now, we’ll ask where...”

A car came down the dirt track from the gravel to stop in front of the store. Two Cajun fishermen got out and crossed toward the trio on the galerie. Sunset was flushing the sky over the trees to the west with delicate violet and rose pink.

“Nice sunset,” said Maxton to the fishermen as they started up to the steps.

“Tu dis,” said one.

They went by, into the store. Maxton said, “Get us another round of beers, Nicky. It looks like we’ll be here a while.”

Papa’s scow, silhouetted against the gold and crimson sky, was towing Vangie’s empty boat across an open area of marsh. Vangie, in the prow of Papa’s boat, was twisted around forward so the wind was in her face. The motor was a thin steady throb; a big heron flapped by over them in spindly dignity. Vangie looked up at a trio of wood ducks whistling by overhead, then looked back at her father. She laughed. He laughed. There was sheer shared delight in both of their faces.

Beertown was a tavern in Henderson where students from the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette came to drink beer during the school year. There were fishing nets with cork floats strung on the walls, a couple of open muskrat traps on display, a warmouth bass mounted behind the bar, a juke and a shuffleboard and a lot of undistinguished country music, which is why the college kids liked it.

School was out for the summer, so it was once more Cajun country. At the bar a group of young bucks, Minus among them, was drinking beer. The bartender, Ta-Tese, was their age and obviously one of them.

“Eh la bas, Minus,” he said. “Your roun’.”

Minus checked his watch, nodded. “Tu dis.”

Ta-Tese got fresh beers all around from the cooler, plunked them down on the bar. He winked at the other Cajuns.

“Why you honor us comin’ roun’ here to do your drinkin’?”

Minus drank from the bottle neck like they all did.

“Dat Vangie, she back from de big city.”

Cojo exclaimed “Pensez-donc!” in wonder. “Dat was one pretty girl, her. What she lak after all dese years, man?”

Minus couldn’t resist making a whistling mouth and waving one hand as if he had just slammed it in the door.

“Poo-ya-yi! Dat some woman!” Then he laughed and punched Cojo on the shoulder. “An’ she invite me to come out to de store tonight, drink beer wit her and her folks.” He set his empty bottle on the counter, slapped some money down beside it for the round of beers. “Henderson is closer to Broussard’s Store an’ Vangie den Lafayette is. And dat’s why Minus honors you by comin’ round here tonight fo’ a beer.”

He started for the door laughing at their envious faces. Until she had dropped out at the age of sixteen, Vangie had been just about the hottest number their high school had ever seen.

23

The Cajuns emerged from Broussard’s Store in the deepening dusk, one carrying a six-pack, the other a paper bag. Maxton, Nicky, and Trask were over by the edge of the porch, putting their empties in the wooden crate left there for that purpose.

They covertly watched the others depart.

“Nicky, stay out here in case anyone else comes.”

Maxton and Trask went in, their entry jingling the little bell merrily. Maman hurried from the living quarters, went behind the front counter. Her face was flushed from cooking.

“You want a couple more beers, you?” she asked brightly.

“We want your daughter,” said Maxton.

Maman leaned on her elbows and locked her eyes on the network sitcom feed now coming in on the blurry little TV, thus further concealing the attaché case with her body should any of them come around behind the counter.

“Go off ten year ago, her,” she said.

“Come back today, her,” said Maxton harshly.

“We want your daughter Vangie, goddammit!” yelled Trask. He loved this stuff. It excited him.

“No see her, ten year.”

Maxton slapped her explosively across the face. Maman cowered back against the wall, her hands up to protect herself from a beating. Maxton made a disgusted gesture and went back toward the living area. Trask took over, carelessly.

“Tell us now, you old sow, or I’ll hurt you bad.”

He reached for her, and clawed hands flashed out to rip down his cheeks. Trask reeled back, yelling, his face pouring blood as Maman ducked under his arm and was gone. He crashed after her, toppling merchandise to right and left. Maxton emerged from the living area.

“What the hell’s going on?”

“Fucking old bitch clawed my face.”

“Well, at least you were right about the clothes, Trask — I remember that outfit from Chicago. Now go find the old lady. She can’t get by Nicky on the front and I’ll cover here.”

Crouching behind a rack of hunting clothes, Maman jerked down the circuit breaker. Instant darkness.

Maxton’s voice wobbled with earnestness. “Goddam her!”

Red and green running lights glowed out to the side of Papa’s flatboat as it approached the landing. The wake curled palely in the near darkness. He turned the throttle, the motor dropped in pitch, the boat slowed. He reached back to keep Vangie’s towed flatboat from running over them as he cut the motor and the keel grated on the bank. Vangie jumped ashore.

“We put the fish in the live-box, Papa?”

“Tu dis,” he grinned.

He heard the mooring chain clink as Vangie wrapped it around the tree, could dimly see the open padlock in her hand.

He shook his head. “No, de chain hol’ her, good-good.” He had a big rich laugh for such a small, feisty man. “Bet Maman got one great big gumbo waitin’!”

Maman was in the bait room using both hands to hold a large scoop net submerged in one of the live-bait tanks. A sudden flashlight beam hit her square in the face. She crouched, tensed like a trapped bobcat, did everything but hiss.

In a satisfied voice, Trask called, “I got the old bitch.”

And the scoop net full of live wriggling shad slammed into his face. He crashed down on his back, flashlight flying, as Maman ran right over him up the stairs.

The dim battery-powered light in the cricket box at the front of the store had not gone out with the other lights. Maxton saw Maman scuttling from the bait room, a dark figure moving between him and that dim light. She ducked around behind the front counter, grabbed the attaché case, jerked open the screen door — and ran right into Nicky.

Trask stumbled up to grab her with savage pleasure.

“She’s fucking mine!” he exclaimed.

Nicky hissed, “Someone’s coming.”

Trask slapped a hand over Maman’s mouth, dragged her to the back of the store. Her eyes gleamed over his hand like those of a ferret in a trap. Maxton put the attaché case on the counter.

“Just keep quiet,” he said to Nicky in a low voice. “With the lights out, they’ll probably go away.”

Papa’s approaching voice said, “... an’ catfish gettin’ more a pound than they ever got.”

“That’s wonderful, Papa,” said Vangie’s voice.

Maxton hissed at Nicky, “That’s her! Quiet...”

Vangie stopped abruptly. “The lights are out, Papa.”

“Fous pas mal. Dat Maman, she in back makin’ supper, her.”

Without hesitation he went up the steps and across the porch. Maxton could see Papa’s silhouette appear in the paleoblong of the screen door. Papa came in, tinkling the bell. Vangie was coming warily a few steps behind him.

Maman twisted so her mouth was momentarily uncovered.

“Prenez garde!” she yelled.

Trask’s hand jerked her head savagely the other way, there was a loud snap and it remained over at the grotesque angle. Her eyes were wide and staring. Nicky jumped Papa, but her cry had alerted him, he was no easy prey for the strongarm. They went over sideways into the cricket box, smashing it to pieces.

Papa found breath to yell, “Vangie! Run!”

She grabbed the case as Maxton grabbed her. Kicking and clawing fiercely, she twisted free, slammed the screen door wide and was off the edge of the galerie with the attaché case. Maxton tried to do the same, his left foot came down in thin air, and he did a tremendous front flip off the edge of the porch.

Papa had a grim two-handed bulldog grip on Nicky’s ankle, but Trask slammed him beside the head with his gun butt, followed him down, smashing again and again until Nicky dragged him away.

“C’mon, for Chrissake, the old guy’s finished.”

Vangie slid down the bank in pale moonlight like an otter down a mud slide. There was mist over the water. She jumped into her father’s boat, snapped shut the padlock on the chain around the tree, ran down to the stern. Hand-over-handed up her scow on the towrope. She threw in the attaché case, jerked open the slipknot on the towrope.

“Here! She’s here!” yelled a badly limping Maxton when he saw her below just about to jump into the flatboat.

Without even looking back, Vangie dove into the water. The boat started to swing free. Maxton tried to scramble down the bank, fell, slid and rolled right down to the water’s edge. Nicky and Trask, on the bank above, started firing wildly over his head at the drifting scow, even though Vangie was nowhere to be seen in the concealing river mist.

Her sleek head broke water on the far side of the scow so it was between her and the shore. She reached up for the gunwale, but it splintered and flew apart. She grabbed a breath, ducked under again so she didn’t see two more slugs hole the side of her outboard motor. Maxton, flat on his back in the mud, was yelling hysterically at his cohorts firing over his head.

“Quit firing, quit firing, you fucking apes!” He struggled to his feet as they slid down the bank, waved his arms wildly. “Get after her, for Chrissake!”

Neither man moved. They weren’t about to dive into that cold fucking water in the dark, there were gators and snakes and turtles, oh my...

“The boat, you stupid fuckers! Use the boat!”

They scrambled for Papa’s fishing scow. Nicky grabbed the prow. Trask tried to unwind the mooring chain from around the tree. Nicky shoved. Nothing happened. Trask took out his gun.

“She locked the fucking chain to the tree.”

Maxton said, “It doesn’t matter,” in a subdued voice. They turned to look out over the mist-covered slow brown river. There was nothing to be seen but mist. “She got away clean.”

Actually, the flat-bottom scow had wedged itself up against a cypress knee. Vangie’s forearm and lower leg came up to hook themselves over the gunwale, she rolled up into the boat. It sent out silent wavelets, Vangie herself was silent, listening to their distant voices echoing off the sounding board of fog.

“Hell, I hit the motor a couple times,” said Nicky’s voice. “She ain’t going anywhere with it.”

Vangie saw the holes, with cold fingers loosened the clamps holding the motor to the transom. She was shivering in the night air. Maxton’s echoing voice transfixed her.

“What about her folks?”

Trask said in bragging tones, “I took ‘em both out.”

Vangie sat down abruptly on the bottom of the boat, terror and despair washing over her in great waves. She started to sob even as Maxton’s voice came again.

“Terrific work, Trask! Let’s get out of here before someone finds ‘em.”

Suddenly all fear was gone. She stood up, knuckling her eyes like a little girl, but her face was a mask of hatred. She jerked lose the gas line, with one wild heave sent the motor into the water with a heavy splash.

Maxton’s distant, muffled voice demanded, “What was that?”

“Me, you fuckers!” she screamed into the fog. “I’ve got the bonds! Come and get me, I’ll be waiting for you! Especially you, Trask!”

24

When Minus turned into the dirt track to Broussard’s Store, his headlights swept across three fishermen just getting into their big four-door sedan. They spun gravel and came right at him, lights on bright. Minus had to slew over to one side of the dirt track, his horn braying angrily, so their fenders could clear his by scant inches.

He yelled curses after their retreating taillights until his Cajun good nature prevailed. Then he shrugged and started up the steps to the store. He stopped. The place was dark.

“Vangie?” No answer. He went further, craned forward cautiously like a cat in a doghouse. “Eh la bas! You, Vangie!”

Still no answer. With sudden decision, he grabbed the screen door and pulled it open.

Inverness kept the motor barely chugging as their flatboat went down the broad river. Dain was twisted around so he could shine a flashlight low under the fog ahead of them. He found it quite remarkable that Inverness could navigate at all in the drifting mist. His light picked out Papa’s moored boat.

Inverness cut the motor entirely. “This is the one.”

“That’s what you said at the last three landings.”

“I’m bound to get it right eventually.”

Together they pulled the boat up, followed their flashlights up the bank to the level ground by the store.

“What the hell?” said Inverness.

His light had picked up Minus, slumped against the fender of his pickup with his face in his hands. At the same moment a sheriff’s car came roaring down the dirt track.

“Whatever happened,” said Dain hurriedly, “you’ll want to talk to that dude before your country cousins bottle him up.”

The cop car slowed to a stop in front of the store, its revolving roof light casting a pulsing intermittent blue glow over the scene. Dain was already halfway up the front steps.

“Hold it right there, mister!”

Inverness whipped out his shield. “New Orleans police. Working a possible homicide case that might connect with this.”

Dain used a ballpoint pen to pull the screen door open enough to get a shoetip in. If the girl was dead, it would once again be his fault. No wonder she had been replacing Marie in his nightmares!

The first thing he heard was the triumphant chirping of a thousand crickets. His flashlight showed him the smashed box, the little crickets leaping everywhere, flooded one of them like a spotlight on an entertainer. The cricket began to perform, sawing away. It was sitting on a dead and broken and blood-splattered Cajun face. Vangie’s dad. Had to be. Jesus God.

The full charge of buckshot swept him back against the table. A widening red pool began to spread beneath his chest...

He had to handle it. Another new memory, jarred loose from his subconscious. Dain followed the flashlight beam down the store, sweating with the nightmare image of his own death.

The shotgun had killed Eddie, had left only Dain.

A woman was sprawled facedown over stacked soft drinks in old-fashioned wooden boxes, head at an unnatural angle. Dain’s light moved down her and up again, and away.

Eddie saw the shotgun belch yellow flame to smash Marie back and up and out of this life...

Vangie’s mother. He leaned against the wall, fighting nausea. Another siren — an ambulance this time. Nobody in this slaughterhouse would need an ambulance. His moving eye of flashlight stopped on the half-open door to the living area.

No sign of the bonds here in the store, and...

Jesus, no! Let the cops find Vangie.

He pushed the door open silently, looked down a narrow hallway to a kitchen. His flashlight showed a table, two coffee cups, a plate with a few beignets still on it, two smaller plates sprinkled with powdered sugar. The coffeepot on the stove was warm, as was the cast-iron pot of gumbo. The oven was cold.

No bodies. Praise God, no bodies.

Back up the hall. Bedrooms. One was obviously her folks’ room, the dressertop crowded with framed family portraits dimmed by age. A gilt-backed hairbrush with strands of gray-shot black hair in the bristles. An age-slicked cane rocker with a thick missal in French on a small round hardwood table beside it. Hand-hooked antimacassar covering the table.

No bodies in here, either.

Last room. He drifted the door open with his flashlight. Tossed across the rough bunk bed were Vangie’s miniskirt, blouse, pantyhose. Her shoes on the floor. No blood on the dress.

A strange voice said, “Thank God.”

His voice. He backed out, went back up the hall.

Vangie was not dead in this place.

And no bonds were here, either. The place wasn’t torn up enough for someone to have searched. It had to be Maxton and his two goons who had killed her folks. Had to be. So the bonds didn’t really matter any more, did they? Unless Vangie was still alive. Which it suddenly seemed she might be. Which meant she might have escaped with them.

If so, Maxton would still be after her. And Dain would still have to do something about it. He. Him. Not Inverness, not the other cops. Him. If he could get to her first and talk her into giving the bonds to him, he was pretty sure Maxton would accept them and give up the search. Maxton wasn’t the sort of guy would enjoy slogging through a Louisiana swamp looking for an exotic dancer he once had slept with.

In the store, Dain started back up the aisle toward the pale rectangle of screen door. Two black shapes appeared in it.

The door crashed open back against the wall and a bulky man was silhouetted by moonlight behind him. A sawed-off shotgun was in his hands. A second bulky shadow crowded in behind him.

“What’d you find?”

The cop, a second one behind him, was staring at him almost suspiciously. Dain shook his head and went by them out the door.

Two police cars were angled in, both with their cherry-pickers revolving, a sheriff’s car and an ambulance were pulling up behind them in the yard. Cops and medics crowded their way into the store as Dain jumped down off the galerie.

As he came up, Inverness was asking, “But these three men you saw definitely didn’t have Vangie with them, is that right?”

“J’ai dis que non.” Minus had been crying.

Dain walked Inverness off a few steps.

“Her folks, dead. No sign of Vangie. I want to find her.”

He looked back at the store now blazing with light. A uniformed cop was just jumping down from the galerie and starting their way. He turned quickly to Minus.

“If they didn’t have her in the car, where is she?”

“Mebbe she already went out to her papa’s ol’ camp on his fishin’ groun’ befo’ dey got here.” He knuckled his eyes again. “When I drive her out here, she say dat where she wan’ go, her.”

“You know that part of the swamp?”

“Fo’ sure. Dat on de Bayou Noire.”

The cop arrived to lay a not-unfriendly hand on Minus’s shoulder. “Captain, he wanta talk with you, cher.”

Dain yawned involuntarily. For the first time in five years, he was exhausted, dying for sleep. Inverness said, “We’ll go back to Lafayette — to my motel.” He gestured after Minus when the cop was out of earshot. “Tomorrow we’ll hire him to guide us out to Bayou Noire.”

It was dawn. At the boat marina Maxton was asking the tall, stooped, chicken-necked proprietor about a crawfisherman’s flatboat, very wide of beam, with a slightly tapered prow ending in a blunt nose. Maxton was dressed for the swamp, as were Nicky and Trask, lounging on the dock beside their disorderly heap of gear. The skinny old Cajun gestured as he talked.

“Sure, dis de kine boat I rent dem, go anywhere dat boat go.” His chuckle turned into a cough that curled him like a shrimp. He straightened up, red-faced. “Dat Minus, he tak dem out in dat swamp first t’ing today, not even light yet.” He opened his mouth and laughed. His teeth were discolored from chaw tobacco. “I t’ink dey after somep’n big, dem!”

Inverness was at the outboard to the rear, Dain hunched in the center seat. His body ached as though he had a fever. Minus, in front, watched the channel ahead of them. Their gear was neatly stowed. Lashed right on top of their craw-fisherman’s flatboat, on the left side, was a pirogue, a narrow, canoe-like rowboat. Dain wished he could stretch out in it and rest, long enough to think. His mind felt jumbled, confused.

When Minus pointed, Inverness cut their speed, swung the flatboat off the open waterway into a very narrow, tree-shadowed bayou. He blazed a sapling with a hatchet, then swung into midchannel and speeded up again.

They were gone quickly, their motor noise died out. Peace and calm descended on the bayou. A turtle started to clamber up on a half-submerged cypress when the departed motor sound grew stronger again. He slid back off the log.

Another flatboat with three men, but without a pirogue atop it, came from the same direction as the first. It went down this same narrow channel. Its motor died away. Its waves stopped washing the shore. The turtle clambered up on the log again to sprawl luxuriously in the warming sun.

Inverness was isolated by the motor, and Minus was brooding, depressed, shaking his head from time to time as if talking to himself. Dain knew that game, only too well. If only I had gotten there quicker night before last... if only... if only...

If only Maxton hadn’t come to New Orleans. If only Vangie had given Dain the bonds so Maxton wouldn’t have killed Jimmy, and probably Vangie’s folks. At least it looked like she had gotten away clean with the bonds. Now he had to find her, and get them back from her, before Maxton did both things.

But how could Maxton find her? They probably knew where she was, Maxton didn’t. But the swamp had a way of changing all equations. Despite its beauty, it was full of death. A blue and white streak of kingfisher darted through nodding reeds near shore just as a cardinal was struck down in midflight by a swooping sparrow hawk.

Inverness seemed infected by the same pervading atmosphere of gloom. They stopped to eat the sandwiches they had bought at the marina, and he made another of his hatchet blazes on one of the small trees flanking the narrow waterway.

“I’m not the swamper that Minus is,” he almost apologized. “I want to be able to find my way out of here if something goes wrong. Anything can happen to any of us at anytime.”

As if to prove him right, a Louisiana heron, carefully stepping through long grass onshore, suddenly darted its head down to spear a foot-long red-bellied water snake, shook it to snap the neck. The head flopped uselessly as the heron ate it with greedy gulps, long gullet jerking with each swallow.

They worked their way up a series of sloughs where the water shoaled until the propeller roiled mud. When Inverness killed the motor their echo lingered a moment before it was abruptly cut off. Minus reacted with a swift turn of the head toward their wake. Inverness tipped the motor up to clear away water lilies and yellow flag twisted around the propeller shaft; Dain and Minus broke out the push poles.

And there it was again: beauty and death. A mother wood duck and her brood swam away from them past a half-sunken log. The log swirled, the last duckling in line disappeared. The log immediately sank beneath the brown water. The ducks scattered for shore. But a second, then a third, then the final duckling went under one by one as the gator struck from below. The frenzied mother was still beating her wings and squawking loudly for her brood as Inverness found deeper water and started the motor.

Late in the day and deep in the swamp, the bayou was split by a small island. Minus gestured to the right-hand channel, then pointed to a beach on the island backed by a clearing.

“We camp there!” he yelled over the motor.

Inverness swung the flatboat, cut the motor just before they nosed up onto the muddy bank. Again Dain heard that odd echo as if another, distant motor also had been cut. Minus had already leaped out into the sucking ankle-deep ooze. Dain joined him and together they pulled up the boat. Minus seemed to be coming out of his depression.

“We leave de flatboat here tomorrow, go on by pirogue. Dis here boat, we have to go roun’ on de open water couple mile ahead. Bayou too shallow for it. Dat take a extra day. Wit de pirogue we be at de fishin’ camp demain — dis bayou take us right to it.”

An hour later night had fallen, their tent was up with the mosquito flies closed, Inverness was at the cookfire making supper in a blackened frypan, and Dain was holding a flashlight steady for Minus. The Cajun was knee-deep in the water tying short lines with hooks baited with bacon squares onto sturdy branches of the overhanging bushes. As he secured each weighted hook and line, he dropped it into the water.

“Mebbe we get us some catfish fo’ breffus,” he said.

He and Dain scoured the pots and dishes with wet sand and poured boiling water over them, then waited for the coffee to boil in the big battered blue enamel pot. Inverness was inside the tent, his silhouette moving against the nylon as he pumped up the kerosene mantle lantern. He picked up what looked like a heavy belt in silhouette, put it around his waist, cinched it tight.

Idly watching his shadow actions, each of them listened to the sounds of the night, the rustle of a small mammal in the bushes, the bass carrunking of bullfrogs, the thin whine of mosquitoes, the thrum of a nighthawk passing in a rush of wings.

It all sounded peaceful, but Dain wasn’t fooled any more. Nothing lived unless something else died.

Inverness came out, hung the hissing lantern on the tent pole. Dain squinted at the sudden white light. One silhouetted action was explained: a .357 Magnum in a tooled leather holster now hung at the lawman’s lean hip. Dain poured steaming coffee into a thick white mug. Minus lumbered to his feet.

“I go check dem bush lines we set,” he said. At the edge of the lamplight, he turned back. “Tu sais somebody been followin’ us all day? Stoppin’ de motor when we stop ours, startin’ up again when we start ours?”

Neither man answered him. With a shrug he went off down toward the river, flashlight in hand.

Inverness, looking after him, slowly sank to a woodsman’s squat with his back almost touching the front tent pole. Dain watched him, his eyes sharp and hard. Inverness shook his head in wonder.

“Who in hell could it be?”

Dain said, “I have a pretty good idea, but why ask me? You’re the boy’s been blazing a trail for them all day that even I could have followed.”

25

Neither man shifted his position, but the gauntlet had been thrown. There was a subtle tension in their poses, yet from a distance they still could have been a couple of old friends discussing the day’s events in the camp. The fire crackled, sending sparks swirling up into the darkness.

“Why would I do a thing like that?” Inverness asked lazily.

“For the same reason you ran us all over this swamp day before yesterday when you knew damn well where the Broussards’ store was. So the killers could get there first.”

“You think I wanted her folks—”

“No, I think you wanted Vangie caught because you’re on somebody’s pad and were told to want her caught.” Dain sat up, drew up his knees, hooked his arms around them, feeling as if there were cobwebs on his brain. “She wasn’t there and things got out of hand and the old people died.”

Inverness shifted his position while remaining in his tireless wide-kneed squat. His voice did not match his face, which was tense, watchful, perhaps even a little regretful.

“And whose pad are you suggesting I’m on?”

“Whoever told you I was in New Orleans. I think you’re even more interested in me than in Vangie.”

“You think too much, Dain.”

“Five years ago—”

“I don’t know anything about five years ago.”

Dain got control. “Five years ago a contract was put out on me because I was too good at finding out things. My wife and child died. Five years ago you soured on mankind, took to the swamps. Is there a connection? I get the feeling there is.”

“Don’t be a fool,” said Inverness scornfully. “If you want to find someone to pay for your family, go after the guy who put out the contract.”

“He died. That leaves me with the man who brokered the hit and the men who carried it out. It’s taken me five years of looking, but I think I’ve finally hit a raw nerve.”

Inverness chuckled. “Christ, Dain, you’re really out of your tree. What’s the word they used to use? Overwrought? Having the vapors? Which one am I supposed to be? The guy who brokered it or the guy who carried it out?”

“I didn’t say that. But hitmen aren’t thugs, you know — they’re specialists.”

“Like me.”

“Like you,” he said stubbornly.

He knew Inverness was right, he was reaching, there was a hollow feeling in his gut he’d never had when he’d been playing chess. Paranoia. But he couldn’t stop himself. It was like he was a kid again, that feeling of helplessness from childhood, the unnamed fears that playing chess had conquered. Five years ago he’d quit playing chess, but had kept them at bay by playing other, more dangerous games. Now, all finished.

“Why did you drag me up to view Zimmer’s body?” he heard himself asking like a betrayed kid. “You aren’t even a Homicide cop. And Maxton. Somebody told Maxton where to find Vangie so he could get to her before I did, and I think...”

Inverness stood up in one smooth movement, his head touching the hissing kerosene lamp so it danced on its tent pole hook. It cast moving light and shadow down over his face.

“I’ve had enough of this crap.”

Minus entered the rim of lantern light holding up a massive wriggling catfish. “Lookit dis catfish was on de—”

Inverness, startled, spun toward Minus. His boot grated on a fallen branch, a silver ring glinted on his left hand.

A bulky man, a sawed-off shotgun in his hands, was silhouetted in moving shadow by moonlight through the trees outside the cabin. His heavy boots grated on the bare plank floor. A silver ring glinted on his finger.

Dain wasn’t ready. He gaped in total astonishment even as the .357 Magnum boomed, blowing Minus backward, arms flying, fish flying, blood spilling. Belatedly, he reacted, kicking the coffeepot and already rolling as it hit Inverness in the gut. The gun roared again and dirt jumped where his chest had been.

He was zigzagging out of the firelight as the Magnum roared three more times, chipping wood from a tree in front of him, blowing a branch off a bush just beside him, splattering mud at his heel. He was out of the light when the final shot brought a cry and a loud splash.

Inverness flipped out the cylinder, shaking out the spent brass. By the hissing lamplight he reloaded methodically, his movements casual, unhurried. A minor thrashing in the brush flared his nostrils and sent him into his predator’s crouch; but then he relaxed, got down the lantern and walked to the sprawled body of Minus. He sighed and holstered his gun and grabbed the dead Cajun by an ankle.

He dragged Minus down to the water, heaved him as far in as he could one-handed, then, still keeping the lantern raised high, used his boot to shove him out far enough for the slow surge of current to take him. The body slid downstream into darkness.

Crouching, Inverness checked the edge of the stream for the deep muddy marks where Dain had run down into the water. He edged forward a foot at a time until he was satisfied.

“No blood,” he said aloud.

He came erect, still holding the lantern up high, staring out into the darkness of swamp and swirling muddy water.

“Dain!” he shouted. He lowered his voice slightly. “You don’t have a boat or a gun or a knife. No food, no drinkable water. All you’ve got is a choice. Me or the swamp.”

Across the narrow arm of waterway, below the far bank of the bayou, Dain stood submerged in thick swamp water up to his neck. His intent face was touched by the light, but he had smeared mud across it so it reflected nothing.

He was motionless, unblinking, watching the enemy whose voice was coming across the water.

“Your wife was part of the contract, Dain, but for what it’s worth, I’m sorry about your kid. You called that one about right. I’ve been a straight cop since then.”

Dain stood in the thick brown water in stunned silence, not believing what he had heard. Was it this easy? Or this hard? Did the enemy at last have a face, a name?

He’d sought this confrontation, prayed for it, had trained for five years for this moment. He’d thought he’d created a killer to face this professional killer — and here he stood neck-deep in the muck and the other guy had the gun.

So who was he now? A computer nerd, a chess groupie, a games freak who’d gotten his wife and child killed. Trying to undo that unspeakable evil, he’d gone right on to a new game even worse. A game that was relentlessly killing, one by one, every poor bastard who crossed his path. Except Inverness, who, lantern high overhead to create a white core in the darkness, would have made a beautiful target for a man with a gun. Dain, of course, was empty-handed. He could have howled like a wolf with the agony and the irony of it.

Inverness was declaiming to the swamp as if it wore Dain’s face. Fucking Demosthenes yelling at the ocean. He sickened Dain, revived his hatred. If he could hold on to that...

“When I was told you were on your way to New Orleans, I thought you were after me...”

Who told you, bastard? Who who who?

“It was my idea, not Maxton’s, to try and scare you off. When that didn’t work, I thought you’d made me — so I wanted to get you out here in the swamp where killing you wouldn’t make any more stir than swatting a skeeter. I figured showing you Zimmer would make you come running out here to save the girl.”

What about poor Minus, you fucker?

As if he heard the thought, Inverness said, “I needed Minus to guide us so you wouldn’t get suspicious. I figured he’d go after you, but he startled me and so I took him first. Just as good. We gotta talk, don’t we? Just you and me.”

Dain almost answered. He wanted to — wanted to explain himself, wanted to know why this killer was diabolically yoked to him, wanted answers to the questions tormenting him more than he wanted revenge. He started to clear his throat to yell across the narrow channel, then grabbed hold of his mind, let the other man’s spate of words stay him.

“It’s just you and me and the swamp, Dain. The girl, Maxton — they don’t matter. It’s you and me who share the nightmares. You and me who gotta talk. Or maybe we gotta fight.” He gave a short laugh. “Maybe I’ll fuck up again...”

He paused, holding the lantern aloft to make a white-hot halo around him, peering earnestly into the darkness where Dain, shivering in the thick water, almost answered that almost seductive voice. It was that short laugh that stopped him.

That and the loathing that had swept through him at mention of the nightmares. His nightmares. They were all he had, and the killer even wanted to take those away from him.

“What do you say, Dain? I can’t bring back your wife and child, but... can’t we let the past die, go on from here?”

Was Inverness asking forgiveness? Maybe, after all...

What the hell was he thinking of? This was a hitman asking forgiveness, asking Dain to speak, to show himself, standing there with a lantern in one hand — and a gun in the other. A gun he had methodically reloaded after killing Minus.

Forever the amateur, Dain, his thinking screwed up by what he’d learned tonight. An amateur with a patchwork body that ached to give in to the swamp, and maybe fever, a body that wanted to just slip under the water and...

Inverness would be counting on that. But goddammit, Inverness wasn’t the only killer in this swamp. All day Dain had watched things die, none of them willingly. Hatred and weakness rose like bile in his throat — and he was silent.

Right now, silence was the only weapon he had.

It worked. Inverness had talked too much, and realized it.

“You’ll be dead by nightfall tomorrow, Dain!” he yelled, as if suddenly enraged that he wasn’t able to end it right now. “If the fucking swamp doesn’t get you, I will!”

He turned away from the bayou, just a pale aureole moving away into the night, dropping Dain back into total darkness. The mud on his face had dried. He could feel it cracking as the tenseness left his features. He patted water on it noiselessly with his hands. He waited.

With Inverness gone, the swamp that was waiting with him gradually came alive again. The dark air again was filling with its humming, croaking, cackling song. Dain almost sang along with it. Inverness was afraid of him! He’d tried to kill Dain twice and had failed both times. He was the professional and Dain was the amateur, but the slaughter was working on him in a way it wasn’t working on Dain.

That gave Dain an edge. He felt he could stand there in the heavy water of the swamp all night if he had to. Which is when he sagged and his head went under. His groping hand caught a branch trailing down into the water from the bank, he pulled himself erect, spluttering, fighting his gag reflex, a tremendous urge to cough and snort. Inverness was still not that far away.

On his way back to the tent, Inverness passed the twenty-pound catfish whose thrashing had startled him earlier. It was still flapping its tail and gasping in the grass. He picked it up and carried it back to the water, threw it in. Almost, he thought with sudden self-anger, as if placating some god of the predators — the only deity he would have acknowledged if any gods had existed at all.

Was Dain after all tough enough to have known Inverness was trying to lure him, and so had kept silent out there in the swamp? How in the fuck had he missed with all six shots? Come to that, how the fuck had he missed killing Dain five years ago after putting three charges of double-0 buckshot into him and burning a cabin down around him?

Or had Dain been hit after all tonight, but hadn’t started bleeding until he was in the water?

Back at camp, moving slowly and thoughtfully, Inverness killed the lantern and went into the tent to wait out the dying of the fire’s dim light.

It was very late and through drifting tatters of mist a gibbous moon showed the tent flaps were closed. The fire was dead except for one or two dully glowing embers. An owl swooped across the clearing on huge silent wings. A fish broke water. A raccoon came hesitantly out of the brush to begin nosing around the front of the tent.

On the side of the flatboat where the pirogue was lashed, the very top of Dain’s head broke water very slowly. He stood, mouth-breathing, water streaming off his flattened hair and down his face, for a full two minutes, waiting, listening. Four baby raccoons trundled out to join their parent in foraging around in front of the tent. All else was silence and darkness. Safety.

He turned to work on the ties holding down the pirogue, unfastening them one by one. Out in the bayou behind him a fish jumped. He had it all planned out. Steal the pirogue, head for Vangie’s fishing camp as quickly as possible. Maybe she would have guns there. If not, get her away immediately, out into the swamp where Maxton and his men couldn’t find her.

Inverness would be coming after him first, but would be blazing that trail for the others to follow. He had no illusions about Inverness being able to find the place. Inverness knew the swamp well enough to have gotten a clear idea from Minus of the camp’s location on Bayou Noire. But Dain doubted the pursuers would have another pirogue. They would have to go the long way around, giving him time to make Vangie safe.

And to prepare for whatever destiny faced him in this swamp. He wasn’t going to be a rabbit cowering in its burrow when they came. More a tough and wily badger they’d have to dig out. A badger with teeth and claws and a will to live.

All the ties were loosened. He reached for the pirogue and began moving it off the flatboat with infinite care.

Torchlight hit his back and Inverness fired down the beam of light from the brush where he had been waiting for five cramped and silent hours. The slug hit Dain in the back by the top of his shoulder blade, just below his trapezius muscle. He was driven forward by the blow, splashing and stumbling, his clutching nerveless hand flipping the pirogue over the top of him as the fading thought went through his mind, Rabbit, not badger after all...

As he went under, two more shots in rapid succession hit the water just where his head had disappeared and Inverness went crashing through the brush to the water’s edge, charging out after the pirogue. But it was drifting more rapidly now, just too far for him to reach. He kept the beam of his flashlight on the overturned craft, seeking any sign of Dain’s head breaking water, trotting and ducking and slogging along the narrow muddy overgrown shore to keep even with it.

At the tail end of the island he stopped, gun in hand, staring after the drifting pirogue. Finally he turned away. He knew he’d gotten Dain this time, and the pirogue wasn’t going anywhere. He could go down and pick it up in the morning while waiting for Maxton to show up.

Maxton. Maybe he ought to grab Maxton and the two goons and take them back and turn them in for killing Vangie’s folks and Minus... It would square him with his superiors for rushing off into the swamp without leave... maybe save his pension...

Fuck. What was he thinking of? There were still the bonds. Maxton wanted them and he wanted the girl — probably to kill her, if what happened to her folks was any indication. If Inverness brought them in, sure, he’d have his pension. But if he just killed them and sank them in the swamp, he’d have the bonds. Just him. Nobody else knew about them except Maxton.

Of course if Dain were still alive, Maxton and his men would also be useful, no, essential, until Dain was

“Goddam you!” he said aloud to himself, then realized he was really addressing Dain. He was starting to get superstitious about the fucking man, as if he had supernatural powers of survival or something...

He started resolutely away back up the islet toward camp.

He had shot Dain in the back. With a .357 Magnum. Dain was dead, dead dead dead as fucking Jesus. He wasn’t going anywhere except the mud at the bottom of the channel, thrust there by some patient gator to ripen until he could be torn into proper bite-size pieces and eaten.

Fucking Dain was dead.

26

A delicate palette knife of dawn slid through the flooded sentinel trees, laying watercolor washes of gray over the gradations of black. Here and there a bird called, something in the water splashed. Far off a Louisiana panther made a dark sawing sound, then screamed like a woman in labor.

Two flooded hardwoods leaned their heads together over the bayou, their leaves in whispered conversation, their feet in the water. One of them forked some distance above the ground. The fork held a nest containing three greenish white eggs. What looked like a large water snake swam rapidly to the base of the tree, started to slither up the trunk.

Suddenly it was a bird, a sinuous-necked sleek-bodied bird called a snakebird. Its webbed feet had strong climbing claws. When it reached the fork, it perched on one of the branches and preened its wet feathers to redistribute the oil that made its feathers waterproof. Then it sidestepped awkwardly over to settle on top of the eggs.

A dingy patch of mustard yellow showed far below, in the tangle of brush and driftwood caught between the bases of the trees. Minus had been deposited there sometime in the night by the gentle but persistent currents. His dead eyes stared up the trunk at the snakebird far above. When dawn broke, his shirt became a bright eye-catching gold.

The upside-down pirogue drifted up, carried by the gentle current against the same tangle of driftwood and brush as Minus. It clung there. It rocked, sending out ripples. The snakebird started up in alarm, then settled back again.

Inverness, untroubled by bad dreams, had slept until well after sunup. In finally killing Dain, he had killed his doubts. By the light of day, last night’s secret and half-formed fears seemed silly. Dain had been shot in the back with a .357 Magnum, his lungs had filled with blood, and he had died. End of story.

Inverness breakfasted leisurely on a small catfish from one of Minus’s brush lines, then set out to fetch the pirogue before Maxton showed up; it would save them a day. A mile below the island he abandoned outboard for push pole: the water was shoaling rapidly. He rounded a curve in the bayou, and a snakebird flapped down from one of a brace of flooded-out hardwoods with a loud miffed squawk, swept over the water away from the flatboat.

In a tangle of driftwood and brush at the base of the tree was Minus, lying faceup and bare-torsoed; the crabs had been feeding around the bullet hole in his chest. Inverness stood in the flatboat looking down at him. The logical place for the current to have deposited him. All fine so far.

But this was the logical place, also, for the current to have deposited the pirogue and Dain. Inverness had fully expected both to be wherever Minus fetched up, or at least the pirogue if Dain with his perforated lungs had sunk.

He raised his head, looked around the swamp, contentment oozing away. No pirogue in sight, swirled against some other deadhead by a vagrant eddy of current.

Last night Minus had been wearing a bright yellow shirt. Now it was gone. Only Dain could have taken it. But how the fuck could the man have survived being shot with a .357 Magnum? How had he survived being shot thrice with a shotgun and left to die in a burning cabin?

He checked the bole of the tree, the brush pile near Minus for sign just to be sure. Yes. A fresh indentation that could have been made by the pirogue’s prow; and there, the brush was crushed. He could almost picture the scene. The boat, suddenly a human hand would have broken water beside it, groped, found Minus’s face as something to get purchase on, closed about it...

Yes, that was the way it would have gone. Another minute would have gone by, then Dain would have dragged himself partway up out of the brown water. Would have lain there, gasping, facedown, across Minus. One arm hanging uselessly from the bullet that had entered his back and must somehow have exited high enough up in his chest to have missed heart and lung. But still he would have coughed raspingly, startling the snakebird. When he had, fresh red wetness would have spread from the wound.

So he would have taken Minus’s shirt to use as a sling to immobilize the arm, also perhaps as packing to make the wound bleed less. Then he would have righted the pirogue with his one good arm, gotten in, poled away. One-armed.

Jesus, it wasn’t over yet. Inverness knew he would not sleep tonight, no matter how many men Maxton had with him.

The Chinese water lilies produced vivid purple flowers that nodded above pads lying flat on the surface like green plates. On one plate was a small green frog. The frog tensed at an uneven sucking sound and a harsh, rasping exhalation, leaped for his life as a muck-covered push pole was driven down into the lily pads from above. The pole found bottom. Beyond it, the side of the pirogue slid by.

So did an hour. Now Dain poled through a hyacinth-choked neck of bayou that looked like solid earth — what the Cajuns call prairie tremblant. Here in the open, merciless sun beat down on his unprotected head. He poled one-armed, his useless arm tied to his side with a sling made of Minus’s bright yellow shirt. More of the shirt, ripped from the tail, had been stuffed right through the bullet wound from front to back. This crude bandage was soaked with new blood. Sweat stood on his unshaven, sun-reddened face, his eyes glittered feverishly.

He had done all that as soon as he had found Minus, knowing his infected wound would soon make him even more feverish, then had used a trick from his two years of convalescence after the first try on his life: narrowing the focus of his mind to a single thing.

Then it had meant taking this step, resisting the pain of that flexing movement, using them to block out the pain and guilt of his family’s death brought about by his own stupidity. Now it was a single laser of thought: follow the bayou. He might lose why he was following it in the fog of fever; but he was hoping he could hang on to the action: follow the bayou.

He forgot about the bonds, and he had to block out the knowledge that he was now half an invalid, more a liability than an asset to Vangie. He had one overwhelming concern: get to her, warn her they were coming. He had to beat them there. He still had to try and make her safe while preparing for his own final confrontation with Inverness.

If he didn’t die on the way.

Beyond the prairie tremblant was a small lake dotted with stands of cypress. Water hyacinth broken free from the main body drifted in clumps and patches on the otherwise clear water. In the middle of this sudden dazzlingly open expanse, the pirogue was a toy canoe, Dain a toy soldier leaning motionless on his push pole. The toy figure slid down the pole to the bottom of the small tippy craft, almost capsizing it.

Little waves moved out in concentric rings from the pirogue, became mere ripples, ceased. Under the noonday sun the surface of the lake was glassy and still. A shoal of fingerling shad came up to just below the surface, camouflaging their presence from below with the pirogue’s shadow.

Dain stirred, edged his head painfully over the gunwale of the pirogue so he could look down into the water with dazed eyes. He could see minnows swimming there. The water looked cool, inviting. The minnows looked like they were having fun.

But he couldn’t give a fuck about them, whether they lived or died. He had to follow the bayou.

His hand went down, burst the surface of the water to scoop some up, dash it over his head. Another, then another. His wound gave him an almost overwhelming thirst, and he knew he was dehydrating. But to drink unfiltered swamp water was to invite dysentery and disaster. No matter how weak, how disoriented, he had to keep going — by nightfall he would be totally irrational. Already his periods of lucidity were getting shorter.

Follow the bayou.

He splashed more water. Rested. Below him, the little shad returned. Dain grunted getting upright again. The pirogue tipped, almost sending him into the water. Concentric circles of waves became ripples and died, but they had sent a message out to a warmouth bass. It came up from below in a rush, shot right out of the water beside the pirogue as it struck one of the shad, dropped back in with its typical triple tail-splash as it swallowed its victim, dashed after another.

Dain’s pole descended into the water. The pole found bottom. Dain grunted, the clouds scudding across his mind again even as the pirogue slid forward. On the far side the little lake narrowed back into twisting bayou again. At its mouth was a fallen tree with two dozen turtles sunning themselves on one of the limbs that rose out of the water.

Follow the bayou. Why? Don’t know. Do it.

As Dain’s pirogue approached, one of the turtles, then another, then the rest in bunches scrambled and slid and splashed off their perches back into the illusory safety of the water.

When he had passed, still following the bayou, they returned. They had hid from him but his passage had meant nothing to them.

Her flatboat was pulled up in front of the cabin, Vangie was on the bank, checking setlines for fish. Papa had chosen his site well. His fishing camp was on what had once been a peninsula sticking out into vast flat marshlands stretching to the edge of Fausse Point Lake. A mile back from the tip, the bayou once had cut a narrower, separate channel to the marsh, thus forming an island. On one side was the marsh, on the other the narrow bayou which meandered through thick woodland to empty into the marsh.

The camp gave a good view over the open marshland. The rest of the island, behind the raised, cleared area where he had placed his cabin, was deep woods. It was a peaceful scene, but inside Vangie was churning. All she could do was hide here. She could not go to the police: she had stolen $2 million. She had to count on the fact that although Maxton was a ruthless and powerful man who wanted to watch her die, he was from the city. Eventually, even he would give up.

Dain was out of the picture once and for all, thank God, the blood money for giving them to Maxton heavy in his pocket. With him gone, she could survive here until things quieted down. Then she could slip away, with the bonds...

She had arrived trembling with terror, but it was her second day here, and she had finally stopped leaping at every crackle in the brush. She could check her setlines. The very familiarity of the place and the work helped calm her.

Stay alive. It was what she wanted now. Try to forget about Maxton. This place was hard to find even if you were a Cajun. But she couldn’t forget the bonds, and she knew Maxton wouldn’t either. She had fled empty-handed, and Papa never left any guns here at the shack. Which meant that if Maxton ever did find her, it would be three armed men against her bare hands.

But he couldn’t find her. And the police had no reason to be looking for her. They would have accepted Jimmy’s death as a suicide, her parents’ deaths as random — they knew nothing of the bonds.

Her parents. She wanted to cry, but she couldn’t. She wanted to smash things, throw things, grieve — but she couldn’t. How could you grieve when your parents were dead because of you?

Some animal sense made her suddenly raise her head to look up the bayou. She stood up abruptly. Far, far up the narrow waterway, just coming into sight around the last turn, was a pirogue. Even at this distance she could see that the man was poling one-armed and had the other arm in a gaudy yellow sling.

Vangie drew in her breath. Dain! Here! He had set up Zimmer for the kill; she didn’t see how he could have, but maybe he’d had some hand in getting her parents killed, also. And now he was here to set her up for them. The Judas goat. Maxton and the other killers would not be far behind.

Goddam him! Weapon or no weapon, she’d see about that.

She started walking rapidly back toward the cabin.

Dain poled his erratic way toward the distant camp. The wetness soaking through his bandage was no longer red, but pus-yellow. It took all of his willpower to stay focused on that cabin. Follow the bayou. He had made it! He was here!

Where? Why?

No. Hang on. Just a few more shoves with the pole...

The prow of the pirogue sliced into muddy earth, stopped. He poled three more times before realizing he was grounded. He let go of the pole and fell sideways out of the pirogue into the muck and shallow water with a loud splash.

It felt wonderful there. Cool and soothing. Mud bath. Mummy would be mad, his Sunday clothes...

Don’t lose it. He was here. He got to his knees. Crawled ashore, dragged himself erect. Stood swaying on the muddy bank, getting his first look at the fishing camp.

The two rooms formed a stubby ell of unpainted, hand-split cypress boards around a framework of young cypress trees. Stilts held the floor off the ground, even though the cabin stood on a ridge that was itself above flood stage. The roof was peaked, shingled by two tiers of overlapped cypress boards. A two-section stovepipe stuck out of the wall beside it at a crazy angle. The foot-square glassless windows at either end of the cabin were netted against mosquitoes, their exterior wooden shutters laid back against the walls.

The handmade door also stood open, almost invitingly. Very invitingly, in fact. Even as he thought it, the cabin began to distort, to stretch and contract as if made of rubber or Silly Putty. Dain kept his eyes fixed on it as he moved; by the time he had reached the bottom of the three mile-high steps it was yawing mildly as if at sea in the middle of a storm. There was nobody in sight. Who was he expecting?

“He...” He lost it, tried again. “Hello?”

There was no response. Dain went up the steps with agonizing slowness. He paused on the stoop, swaying with the rhythm of his own ragged breathing.

But he had remembered why he was here.

“Vangie?”

He called her name and she came around the door frame from inside the cabin, yelling formlessly, high on rage, already swinging a heavy wooden paddle. It caught him in the stomach, doubling him over, driving out all his breath. She swung again, this time against his useless shoulder, knocking him off the side of the porch like a sack of flour.

White-hot pain shot from his shoulder through his entire body. Even his teeth, his toes hurt. He landed on the grass with a thud that drove his wind out and consciousness away, thinking he was saying aloud, Christ, Doc, that hurts! I don’t know how many more times I can take you cutting me...

She stood looking down at him, face flushed as much from emotion as from exertion.

“Goddam you, you got my parents killed! You got Jimmy killed! Now you come here...”

He was staring up at her, his eyes open, obviously conscious, but with a strange passivity.

“I know why you came here! To lead Maxton to me, you fucking Judas!”

Still no response. It was as if he were defenseless, defeated by her mere words. But she knew he was hearing her, was conscious, was seeing her. A new fear struck her.

“You fucker!” she screamed. “Don’t you dare fucking die on me before I can kill you!”

Then she threw the paddle aside and leaped down off the porch after him.

One of the two rooms was for living, the other for storage of gear. Rough wooden shelves nailed to the walls held canned goods. At one end of the room was a hand pump over a half fifty-gallon oil drum, cut longways with a blowtorch and braced with sawhorses to serve as a sink. Also a potbelly iron stove and a wooden table with four chairs. In the other end were two bunks with sheets, blankets, pillows.

Vangie backed in through the open doorway, dragging the unconscious and filthy Dain, who outweighed her a hundred pounds, by his armpits. She dumped him on the floor beside one of the bunks. Grunting and heaving, she got first his torso up on the bunk, then swung his legs up, leaving him lying twisted and half on his side.

From the table she got a huge glittering Bowie knife, tested the blade on the ball of her thumb as she crossed the narrow room to the recumbent man. Razor-sharp.

In the sixteen years of her life spent in the swamp before she had fled to the bright lights and the big cities, she had killed hundreds of animals, thousands of fish. Gutted them, skun them, filleted them. She was no stranger to death. It didn’t bother her to kill. So easy here. What difference it was a man, not an animal? One slash across the throat, like bleeding a hung deer... Or a single thrust up through the solar plexus under the sternum to the heart...

Dain was already almost dead. A falling-out with the others? Something in the swamp that had gotten him? To know what had happened, she would have to get a look at the wound.

And whatever had happened, Dain alive was an asset. If they were coming after her, maybe he could be a hostage.

Dead, he was just something to bury.

She knelt beside him, slashed the sling, then tore his shirtdown. She stared at the wound with the scrap of yellow pus-caked cloth stuffed through it. She bent over it, sniffed, jerked erect.

“Jesus,” she said aloud, “is that ripe!”

The swamp had not done this to him. It was surely a bullet wound, heavy caliber to have ripped through with such power. Steel-jacketed because a hollow-point or lead-nose bullet would have taken his whole shoulder off. If for some reason Maxton wanted to kill him as much as she did, he might be useful to delay them until she could get away.

She left him there unconscious, his wound uncovered, went back into the kitchen area, pumped a pail of water, set it on top of the stove, and lit the already laid fire. Without a backward glance, she went out through the open doorway. He was going to die anyway. If something came in and got him while she was gone, it would save her a lot of trouble.

Then she thought, I might do it myself when I come back.

But not right this minute. She recovered the paddle she had whacked him with, went down to his pirogue, shoved out into the bayou. She paddled easily and expertly back upstream, in the direction from which he had come.

Fifteen minutes later she swung the pirogue in toward a dead buffalo fish she had remembered was on the bank. As the prow drove into the mud three feet from the dead carp, a swarm of big green-bellied flies rose up, buzzing angrily. The side of the fish was moving in a slow steady seethe, almost as if it were still alive. Vangie crouched beside it, big Bowie knife in hand.

It was dusk when she returned to the cabin. Dain was breathing noisily. She thumped a tin can down on the table. Pumped up the kerosene lamp. A match flared, the mantles flamed, then steadied to pour out white light. She lowered the glass shield of the lantern, left it on the table.

On the stove, the water was boiling ferociously. She wrapped her Bowie knife in a towel and dropped them both into the boiling water, dropped in two more towels as well, took the bucket off the stove. Only then did she turn to look at Dain for the first time since returning from her foray.

His eyes were open, glittering in the lantern light, but his voice was rational.

“What am I doing here?” he asked.

“Dying,” said Vangie.

27

Dain was declaiming, waving his good arm around as he did.

“’By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death.’”

Vangie pumped up the lantern some more, brought it over to set it on a chair near the cot on which she had dumped him.

“That’s Shakespeare,” said Dain.

“Terrific.”

He lapsed into silence as she made her preparations. First she brought a tarp from the storeroom, managed by rolling him first one way and then the other, to get it under him and over the bunk. When she went to work with the knife there would be a lot of blood, water and pus to contend with.

Next she got out the first-aid kit Papa had always made sure was in the camp. Sterile gauze and adhesive tape and, thank God, an unopened bottle of iodine. She’d need plenty of that.

She lugged, over the bucket of cooling boiled water, set it on the floor, fished out the towel with the Bowie knife in it, holding it gingerly in the steaming towel, tossing it from hand to hand so she wouldn’t scald her fingers.

“You’re going to die sane,” she said. “You’re going to feel it coming.” Her eyes narrowed, her face got mean, she burst out, “You son of a bitch!”

She pulled up the second of the two chairs, sat facing him. She opened the hot towel, took out the Bowie knife, poised it above the infected wound.

“Grab onto something besides me or I’ll kill you before I want to.”

Her arm jerked. Pus squirted. Dain gave a single yell and was silent. She worked with the blade, wiping sweat from her face with her sleeve from time to time, rinsing out the wound with the boiled water and sterile towels when she was finished.

“Fun time,” she said to the silent Dain.

And poured about half the bottle of iodine into the opened wound. He screamed again, then was silent again. She felt his pulse; it was racing. Better than not going. She had no way to check his blood pressure, wouldn’t have known what was good and what was bad even if she’d had the proper instrument.

Finally, it was time for the coffee can full of seething maggots from the dead carp. She sat down on the edge of the bunk and very carefully began packing the fat squirming white creatures into Dain’s infected wound. When she had used enough, she wrapped it with gauze and used adhesive tape to bandage it.

Miles away in the swamp, two flatboats were pulled up on the edge of a broad, lakelike waterway. In a small clearing were the hunters’ two tents, their flaps closed. On a little natural raft of vegetation just below the low bank, a bullfrog carrunked away, swelling its throat to drive a ball of air back and forth over its vocal cords and create its thrumming sound.

Without warning a raccoon killed it with one savage crunching bite. The coon began backing off the raft of vegetation with the dead frog in its mouth. As it did, a bobcat on the bank gave a sudden high scream.

Maxton’s voice yelled, “Jesus Christ, what’s that?”

The coon had dropped the dead frog to flee. A powerful flashlight began playing wildly over the inside of one of the tents. The bobcat slunk into the underbrush with the frog.

“Your conscience, maybe?”

The tent flap opened and Inverness looked out. Maxton’s pale face appeared beside his in the narrow V-shaped opening. He was still waving the flashlight around.

“It... it sounded like... a woman’s scream.”

“That isn’t until we get to the camp,” chuckled Trask from the other tent.

Inverness could feel the pressure building inside. He just wanted it finished. He just wanted fucking Dain dead. Maxton and the two creeps could do what they wanted to Vangie. He let the flap drop back again.

“Go to sleep, Maxton. You’ll need it. I smell rain.”

Through the small mosquito-netted window on the east side of the fishing shack, dawn was staining the horizon with a narrow crimson line. But neither of them was awake to see it. Vangie was crowded into the same narrow bunk as Dain, his head resting partially on her breast and partially on her shoulder. His wound was tightly bound with fresh white gauze.

“No,” he said suddenly in a conversational voice. Vangie’s eyes opened. He began throwing his head from side to side. “Run, Albie!” he cried. “Ru...“

He subsided. She put her hand on his forehead. It was cool to the touch. The fever had broken in the night. Just some nightmare... But Dain thrashed again, almost throwing her off the bunk with the violence of his movements. She saved herself only by putting one foot on the rough plank floor.

“Marie! Look out!” He paused for a moment. Then, a loud cry, “Vangie!” Softer voice. “They’re... coming...”

She leaped out of the bunk, ran on bare feet to the table, pumped the dying lantern bright again. She sat down heavily and, hunched forward, regarded Dain intently, an almost frightened look on her face.

She shivered. “Why me... in his nightmares...”

When he had begun bucking like an out-of-control stallion, her old perverse reactions took over as they had so often in the past. She’d started to feel sorry for him. Yesterday, she’d wanted to kill him. This morning, when he had been bucking beneath her, she’d wanted to fuck him. It was as old as mankind, deny death with an act that affirmed life, sometimes created it. But here and now, with this particular man, her body’s reaction seemed a betrayal and made her angry.

“Goddam you,” she exclaimed, “if you’re going to die, I wish you’d do it.”

Dain made no more movements or outcries. Vangie’s head gradually slumped to her forearms, crossed in front of her on the table beside the slowly dying lantern. She slept again.

Midmorning, rain pouring from a leaden sky. Vangie was coming from the marshland in the pirogue through the driving storm, wearing gleaming raingear. Two cylindrical chicken-wire traps in the bottom of the boat were crawling with live crawfish.

Inside, Dain awoke to the sound of rain drumming on the roof, swung his feet to the floor and tried to sit up. On his second try he managed to stay upright. His right arm was immobilized under its gauze wrappings; he gingerly scratched at it. His color was better, he felt totally rational.

“Be a hero,” he said aloud to himself. “Stand up.”

He tried. Fell back on the bunk. Tried again. This time he managed to get to his feet, swaying but upright. He began a very slow progress across the room. Rested, hanging on the back of a straight wooden chair. Panting. He looked at the inviting bunk a continent away. Started back again. Made it.

Sat down. Rested. Stood. Started back toward the table.

Made it. Back to the bunk. Stayed upright.

Again. And again and again and...

The door was jerked open and Vangie was blown into the cabin by hurled sheets of rain. She set down her bait bucket full of live crawfish as the door slammed behind her. Only then did she see Dain on his feet, halfway between bunk and table.

The color left her face and her mouth fell open in astonishment. Perhaps Dr. Frankenstein’s face had worn a similar expression when the monster he had stitched together actually sat up and was alive.

She snatched the Bowie knife off her belt and held it low and in front of her like a knife fighter in a bout.

“You son of a bitch!” she shrieked at him.

Dain stared at her quite mad face. There was a calmness and detachment in him that was almost animal, perhaps the contract of death that naturalists have noted between prey and predator, perhaps the detachment that often comes to people who have suffered pain or been tortured for long periods of time.

“I’m starving to death and this thing is itching like hell,” he complained to her.

Vangie didn’t know what to do. She was ready to kill him and he was acting like a character in a TV drama. She covertly slid the knife back in its scabbard, picked up the bucket of crawfish and set it in the half-drum sink and started pumping fresh water into it as if the knife had never been in her hand.

“That’s, ah, not, ah, not surprising,” she told him. “I packed it full of live maggots last night, and repacked it this morning before I went out. Maggots eat only dead, infected flesh, leave the healthy flesh alone.”

Dain paled and sat down rather abruptly at the table. He stared at her, looked down at his shoulder, back up at her. He made a “whew” mouth and blew out a long breath as she carried the water and crawfish over to the stove.

But then stubbornness entered his face. He said in a bleak voice, “We’ve got four men coming in after us.”

Vangie sat down as suddenly, as heavily as he had, as if all her strength had suddenly drained out.

“Us, you bastard?” Then belatedly, she added, “Four? I thought there were only—”

“Actually, only three of them are after you and the bonds. Maxton and his strongarms. The fourth one is after me. But I’m sure he wants his cut of the loot, too.”

“Maxton,” she said scornfully. “You sold Jimmy out to him, you sold me out to him. Did you sell my folks out, too? What did they ever do to you, you fucker? I wanted to save them—”

“Maybe they didn’t want to be saved.”

Vangie burst out, “Goddam you!” and launched herself across the table at him, eyes flashing, fingers clawed to rip his face. He kicked back his chair as his undamaged arm swept her right off the table. The impact knocked her breath out, so she sat on the floor blinking up at him and gasping.

“Hell, they don’t have to come in after us,” said Dain. “We’ll do each other in.”

Vangie’s panting eased. Dain held out a hand to her. After a hesitation, she took it, allowed him to help her to her feet. She crossed to the kitchen area and got busy preparing the crawfish. He spoke suddenly and harshly to her back.

“I don’t give a fuck whether you believe me or not, but I didn’t sell you out, lady. Five years ago, someone blew away my wife and son—”

“Marie and Albie?” she exclaimed before she could stop herself. She got quickly busy lifting the lid to check the steaming crawfish, so she wouldn’t have to meet his eyes. “I heard a lot about them last night when you were asleep.”

“Nightmares. I have a lot of them ever since... I’ve been trying to find the men killed them. That’s why I do the sort of work I do for the sort of people I do. What’s your excuse?”

She actually started to justify herself to him. “The bonds were going to save me from...” She stopped, added defiantly, “And my folks from working themselves to death...”

Dain said, softly, “Well, maybe we can save each other.”

She shot him a glance but said nothing. Her silence was more palpable than words, an acquiescence she could not yet acknowledge. He spoke to this unspoken acceptance in her.

“Remember down by the river that afternoon I told you I’d stirred someone up by coming to New Orleans to look for you? That was a New Orleans cop named Inverness. He’d braced me the night before, when there was no legitimate way he could have known about me or known I was in town. I figured it had to be connected somehow.”

She said stiffly, “Was it?”

“Yes, but not the way I thought.” He began to prowl the room. His strength was rapidly returning now that the infection was down and the fever gone. “I don’t know if he’s the one tipped Maxton where you were, but he’s one of the men who shotgunned my family. So he has to kill me now.”

“Because you know what he did?”

“Because he knows I’ll kill him if he doesn’t.”

Vangie turned to face him, leaning back against the edge of the steel-drum sink. His implacability was good, she could use it, use him like a missile against her enemies. Maybe. He might even be telling the truth.

“If he’s after you and Maxton is after me, why are they teamed up together?”

“I don’t know how or why, but I know he was blazing trees to lead Maxton here. It only makes sense for him to help Maxton get the bonds and kill you, so Maxton will help him kill me, and so will give him a cut of the bonds.” He paused. “You’d better know it all, Vangie — Inverness killed Minus, too.”

“Oh God,” she said softly, “another one.” Another death on someone’s conscience, whether hers or his he wasn’t sure. She added, “Don’t they think you’re dead?”

“They might — Inverness won’t. He’s a hunter, he’ll be reading sign, he’ll know.”

Vangie got out a couple of thick white plates and some silverware. She avoided his eyes.

“And you, you fucker, you led them right to me.”

“Not me — Minus. He told Inverness where he thought you were, how to get here — thinking Inverness was a straight cop. I did too, until Inverness started leaving a trail for Maxton to follow. I couldn’t lead anyone anywhere, you know that. I’m worthless in this swamp.”

“You got here,” she said.

“Minus said that in a pirogue you just had to follow the bayou. I did. I thought I could save you. Then I just had to get here or die, it was as simple as that.”

“Nothing’s ever that simple,” she said ruefully, as if sorry he had made it and she had saved him.

“Now we have to face them,” he said as if she hadn’t spoken, “or die.”

“We can run.”

He just shook his head. Their eyes locked for a long moment. Then she turned away, took the steaming fragrant bucket of crawfish off the stove.

“Four men,” she said. “By pirogue or flatboat?”

“Far as I know, flatboat. It makes a difference?”

“The storm. Without pirogues, they have to cross the open water — maybe ten miles of it. This wind won’t fall until morning, the waves until afternoon, and even then they can’t hit us in daylight. So we’ve got until tomorrow night.”

“Why not in daylight?”

“They’ll expect guns to be here.”

“Why aren’t there?”

“Swampers wouldn’t steal anything else’d steal guns.”

In the marsh it was very dark, though still only five in the afternoon. The rain was pouring down, the tops of the over-story trees that dominated the rest of the forest were being whipped and tossed by the wind. The two boatloads of hunters were just nosing into shore where the wide waterway they had been following entered the vast open expanse of marshland lake.

They cut the motors, grounded the boats, the four men jumped out to pull them up. Maxton grabbed Inverness’s sleeve.

“Why are we making camp in the middle of the afternoon?”

The big policeman just walked off. Maxton hesitated, then trotted after. They shoved through wet underbrush, broke free. Maxton stopped, appalled at the violence of the open marshland.

The sky was a vicious indigo piled with black clouds. Lightning flashed and flickered constantly. Muddy massive whitecaps piled up out in the open water, sweeping across the surface with relentless precision to finally tip and froth and break into dirty white sweeping crests. The wind howled, rain raised two-inch welts on the surface.

“Understand? The wind probably will die down through the night, but the waves won’t fall off until tomorrow sometime. If we try to cross before they do, we’ve got a damned good chance of capsizing and drowning. That’s why we’re making camp with three hours of nominal daylight left.”

Maxton began in a congested voice, “We’ll try now, god—”

Inverness just turned away. “Give it a rest, Maxton.” He knew goddam Dain was alive, and that belief filled his mind, left him nothing with which to worry about the girl. “You’ll get her. She can’t run and she can’t hide — not from me.”

Vangie leaned back by the light of the hissing pressure lantern, and patted her tummy. If she’d been alone she would have belched. There was just a heap of discarded shells and claws on each of their plates. At their elbows were thick white ceramic mugs of steaming coffee.

“Dain, we can’t stand and fight. We have to run!”

Dain’s face became stubborn, almost mulish.

“We run, we die. We stay and fight, maybe we live.” “Without weapons against four armed men?”

He jammed a finger against his temple, suddenly angry. “We’ve got these.” He swung an arm around the room. “We’ve got everything here.” He pointed at the door. “We’ve got everything out there. I want to—”

“That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? What you want.”

“It’s what you want and need, too, Vangie,” he said.

“Don’t be so goddam sure of that, either.”

As she sloshed off the plates, Dain sighed and started to clumsily take off his pants one-handed, almost immobilized by his own thoughts. Vangie was now at the door, shoving it open a crack as if to assure herself the storm was real. Rain poured through the narrow opening, Dain could hear the howl and rush of the wind. She let it slam again, turned to him abruptly.

“All right, goddam you, I’m in.”

Jesus! He was doing it again! Doing to her what he had done to Marie with his bland, big assurances all would be well...

Don’t be so goddam sure of that, either.

That was the trouble, he was always so goddam sure about what the women he was involved with wanted. They were never real to him as human beings until it was too late, until he had fucked them up. Only then, when dire results from his actions had destroyed them, did they become real. Only when they were icons that he could worship.

Did he have that much hostility toward, fear of, some constant “they” out in the real world? Five years ago, playing games — chess, detecting games on the computer and out in the field — while nurturing his fears and grudges behind a mask of geniality. But it was the women who paid, because he led the “they” right to the place where the women were either trusting... or hiding...

His game had always been practicing his form of worship of those unreal icons. But outside this profane religion of his they had been real enough, his ladies — real enough to die, to be threatened now again with death.

He had done it to Marie, now he held her dead body up like a crucifix between him and Vangie so he could keep Vangie unreal, too, until it was too late.

But she was real. Right here, right now... Getting undressed with the lack of self-awareness about her body that most dancers and athletes end up having. Dain, until that moment as unconcerned as she about stripping off his shorts, stopped dead, caught by her beauty.

She stopped also, feeling the full weight of his intensity. There was a sudden unexpected tension between them. All of a sudden, Dain couldn’t take his eyes off her.

She turned to look at him, then released the pressure in the lantern. As it hissed out, the light began to fade. She crossed to him instead of to the other bunk, cupped his face with her two hands, looking down at him in the dimness.

And he was real to her, too. Whatever, whoever he was.

“Jesus, Dain,” she said softly, “I don’t even like you! But tomorrow we might both be dead.”

In a hoarse voice, he said, “Or they might.”

Because he felt sudden, blinding, total lust, as he had so often and just as suddenly for Marie — and had not felt even once in the five years since her slaughter. He could not make of Vangie an icon as he had of Marie. To do so would be to destroy her also. No! She was real, here and now. Real...

He pulled her hot, naked body against him almost roughly. She gasped as he began licking one already erect nipple. His body jerked as if from a jolt of electricity when her hands cupped his scrotum and closed around his distended member.

As the lantern died, they became lovers in the night.

28

Dawn filtered through the thin mist drifting up off the water. By its light a young marsh rabbit hopped out of its burrow between the roots of a big fallen oak tree near the water’s edge. The woods were wet, but the rain had stopped. As soon as the sun was up, the swamp would be steaming.

The rabbit began scratching its ear with a hind foot, the leg audibly thumping the ground with each movement. The vibrations raised the spade-shaped head of a five-foot cottonmouth that was just sluggishly stirring on the far side of the fallen oak. It was nearly a foot in circumference and was a slate-gray color that blended perfectly with the bark of the tree. It bunched into a tight coil almost experimentally, then slithered slowly forward, tongue darting to get the news.

Dain and Vangie walked down the meandering track her father had cut through the undergrowth and saplings during dry weather so he could put out setlines and crawfish traps from his boat during the spring floods. Dain’s arm was in a sling Vangie had made from an old pillowcase, but his color was good and he moved well. They were walking side by side but not close enough to touch one another.

“I figure twelve hours before they get here,” she said.

“Good. Gives us twelve hours to take inventory, plan, pick the killing ground...”

“You’re so damned... casual about it...”

“Live with death long enough, you get casual about it.”

“Especially someone else’s,” she said in a neutral voice.

As she spoke, the cottonmouth’s arrow-shaped head shot forward between the roots to bury its fangs deep in the rabbit’s shoulder, just for an instant. It drew back, re-coiling, waiting. The rabbit writhed, stiffened, jerked, died.

Why did he kill it, Mommy?

I’m afraid that’s what he does for a living, Albie.

Could he kill me?

There’s nobody around big enough to kill you, Tiger.

If the rattler in the desert three years ago had struck Dain when he danced with it, Vangie’s parents wouldn’t be dead. Jimmy Zimmer wouldn’t be dead. Minus wouldn’t be dead. But Albie and Marie still would be. To avenge their deaths he had trained, planned, shut down every other aspect of his life. Until last night with Vangie.

Vangie was watching, mesmerized, as the snake glided forward, unhinging its jaws to open them amazingly wide. The inside of the snake’s mouth was an absolute, dead white, which had given it the name cottonmouth. It was swallowing the dead rabbit whole, walking its distended jaws up around the body as if the rabbit were entering a tunnel.

For those moments there was nothing else in the world for her. No love last night with him; no dead lover, no dead parents, no men bent on their destruction a few scant hours away across the marsh.

Suddenly it seemed to Dain that for five years he had been willfully evoking certain emotions — pain, the feeling of loss, the need for revenge — mainly for the pleasure of satisfying them. And telling himself he was being true, being steadfast to holy memories. To the icon he had made of Marie.

Would she have wanted that? Did he want that? Last night he had more or less returned to life, in Vangie’s bed and in her body; against that reality, deliberately continuing the motif of the past was something like viewing a snuff film again and again. The pornography of violence.

He realized almost with wonder that if he could walk away from this right now, and never look back, he would. But he couldn’t. Vangie couldn’t. The past was vengeance. The present was survival. The future was...

Vangie said in an almost dreamy voice, “He’ll probably lie up there for three or four days, digesting. Sluggish as an old hog in a wallow.”

Dain returned to the snake, that now looked like just another tree root. The rabbit was gone, a slight bulge in the long curved sinuous body.

“How long would a man live if he was struck by that thing?”

“Depends on the size of the snake and where he gets you. Bigger they are, the more venom they pump. Get hit in a hand or a foot, you’d probably survive — ’specially if there was a doctor only a couple of hours away. But one like this hit you close to the heart, you’d only have a few minutes.”

He nodded thoughtfully, started away up the path. The future was their present now.

“No guns,” said Dain. “One knife that’s worth a damn, that Bowie knife of yours. So we have to—”

“You never quit, do you?” asked Vangie.

“You know how to survive in the bayou, I don’t. When you start picking up signs they’re coming, maybe even when you just feel they’re coming — tell me. I’ll need to know how much time we’ll have. We have to pick the killing grounds, attack them when they think they’re attacking us.”

Vangie said, hesitantly, “How... do you know if you can kill someone or not?”

“I don’t know,” said Dain. “I’ve never done it.”

“But I thought you were...” She stopped. Her face hardened. “They murdered my parents.”

And my wife and son, thought Dain. But suddenly it wasn’t enough. Carry it far enough, you just became them. Better to stick with simple survival, them or you

“Look out!”

Vangie grabbed his arm and jerked him to one side. Head down, watching the trail, he had been just about to walk into a line strung across the road between two trees, eight feet above the ground. At three-foot intervals were loops eighteen inches long, made by gathering and tying off the primary line. Heavy fishhooks had been threaded through the bottom of each loop. Hanging from one of these hooks was a decomposing sparrow hawk.

“Tight line,” explained Vangie. “Left over from fishing.”

“Eight feet up in the air?” demanded Dain.

“You have to remember that during flood stage, the tight line was just about six inches off the water, so the hooks, with bait on them, were about a foot below the surface. Now, of course, with the water back down almost to normal—”

“And the hawk?”

“He didn’t have anyone to grab his arm.”

Dain nodded, a thoughtful look on his face. His body was still full of unexpected jolts and betrayals, sudden weaknesses, but since the fever had broken his mind was clear.

“Let’s get back and start planning our assault,” he said briskly. “We’re going to need those old muskrat traps from the storeroom... and I’m glad you didn’t jettison that gasoline can along with the outboard motor...”

They moved off through now sun-shot woods starting to steam in the muggy heat of morning.

All four of them were sweating with the humidity by the time they had broken camp, striking the tents and packing up all of their gear. Nicky and Trask were starting to lug it all down to the boats, but Inverness stopped them with a wave of his hand.

“Leave all the gear and equipment here, we’ll all go in one boat. It’ll make us less of a target and we’ll move faster.”

Maxton said, with a show of bravado, “Frontal assault, right? Before they can run?”

“And get picked off in the boat, Maxton? Not likely. No frontal assaults, get that through your heads, all of you. We sneak up on ‘em after dark, and if we’re damned lucky—”

“What the fuck, Inverness, first waiting for the goddamned storm to end, and now this! They could be long gone by the time we get there.” Maxton was building up a nice anger at the more cautious hunter. “The girl ran with nothing but the bonds — and you told me yourself that Dain wasn’t armed.”

“You want to take the chance there were no firearms at the shack?” He shook his head. “They’re not going to run from us.”

“What the hell is it with you and Dain, anyway?”

“He wants me dead,” said Inverness. He was suddenly hard as strap steel. He moved in on Maxton, hulked over him. “When I got word he was in New Orleans, I thought he was after me and let you know he was there. Now I’m leading you to the girl so you can get your fucking bonds and your fucking nasty little revenge. In return you’re going to help me get Dain for good. I’ve already killed him twice but he didn’t stay dead, so—”

“You’re scared of him!”

“You’re goddam right I’m scared of him, the same way I’m scared of a cottonmouth coiled under a rock. Five years ago I killed his wife and kid, and he knows it.”

“Why didn’t you just kill him in New Orleans?” asked Maxton. “A mugging. A hit-and-run...”

“Better out here in the swamp where nobody’ll wonder where he’s gone. What are you bitching about? Because of me you’ll get your fucking bonds and the girl.”

“We keep fucking around, she’ll be gone by the time we get there.” He shook his head in disgust. “From what you tell me, you killed Dain again the other night. So I say we—”

“He’s alive and that fishing camp is his goddam rock. He’s going to be coiled and waiting for us. That’s why we go in after dark when he’s cold and sluggish.”

“You’re as fucking crazy as he is,” said Maxton; but he stamped off down to the boat without further argument.

The mist had burned off, the steaming had stopped when the leaves and foliage had dried. On the open cleared knoll, a dozen muskrat and nutria traps were laid out in the bright sunlight. Vangie was on her knees greasing them, making sure the traps didn’t slam shut on her hand as she tested them one by one.

Dain came down off the little verandah of the cabin. Awkwardly, because he had trouble keeping the gunnysacks open, he began stuffing them with the traps she had greased.

“I’ve cut the two-by-fours for the cleats to go up on either side of the door, but you’ll have to nail them up. I can’t do it with only one arm.”

Vangie suddenly stopped working to look up at him, shading her eyes with one hand. “I can’t believe this! We’re actually trying to plan ways to kill four men!”

“No, four men are planning to kill us. We’re trying to survive. There’s a difference.”

“Easy enough for you, with nothing in this world that you care about.”

Dain started to speak, to tell her about his insight that morning: that only simple survival, not revenge, would have a chance of getting them through this. But instead he surprised himself by saying, “I care about you, Vangie. A lot.”

She tried to reply, stopped; she couldn’t handle that one. She didn’t know what it meant, didn’t know what she wanted it to mean, didn’t know if she felt a similar sentiment in return, whatever the hell sentiment it was in the first place. She settled for ignoring it completely.

“You found Inverness easily enough after five years—”

“He found me.”

Surprised, Vangie said, “How?”

“That’s one of the many things I want to ask him when we get together again.”

“Think he’ll answer?”

“If he doesn’t kill me first. I didn’t even recognize him as one of the hitmen. No premonitions, no sudden flashes of evil — I liked the guy. Thought he was just a cop doing his job. If he hadn’t kept pushing himself at me, I never would have known who he was.”

“He wanted you to recognize him? That doesn’t make sense.”

“Not wanted — needed. If I recognized him, then he would be justified in killing me. I think that does make sense.”

“For a hitman?”

“He’s a complicated guy,” said Dain, “and he’s missed me twice. It’s spooking him.” He shoved the last trap into the gunnysack, said roughly, “But even so he’s not going to make any easy mistakes this time. C’mon, let’s get these into the woods and get them set.”

Vangie nodded, grabbing the second sack, then said abruptly, “Listen, Dain, last night was just...”

“Just last night,” said Dain quickly, “I know. But...”

“Yeah,” she said. “But.”

They both looked around, as if fixing this place and this moment in their minds. Then they started down the road dragging the gunnysacks behind them.

It was still daylight when they shoved off into the channel toward the lake, all four men in the one boat, all of their gear except their weapons far behind them in the camp. They had motored this far, then had lain up here until late afternoon. Inverness did not start the outboard right away.

“We can use the motor getting across the main body of open water, but we’ll have to row the last three miles. Surprise and darkness are our best weapons.”

“Jesus, Inverness, you keep acting like this is going to be some sort of war,” said Maxton. “The boys and I think Dain is dead and the girl is unarmed—”

He had to break off because Inverness had started the motor to head for open water, and couldn’t hear him anyway. Maxton settled for cursing Inverness under his breath.

Vangie had just finished nailing up cleats of staggered lengths of two-by-four to the wall on either side of the door. She had used spikes so they couldn’t be torn out of the wall by anything smaller than, say, a fire-crazed stallion. Dain dropped a five-foot length of two-by-six horizontally into the cleats. This made it a bar across the door which would prevent it from being swung open from the inside.

“Perfect!” he exclaimed.

He hugged Vangie momentarily with his good arm, removed the two-by-six and carried it off the porch to stash it under a bush where it couldn’t be seen but would be readily accessible.

“Okay. Now, where’s that vat of tar your dad used for treating the fishing nets?”.

Vangie pointed. “Around that way — at the edge of the woods. But what good will a vat of tar do us?”

They started walking off across the open area toward the woods on the far side of the knoll.

“I don’t know — yet,” said Dain. “Maybe none. But...”

The venerable cast-iron vat, over six feet in diameter and three feet deep, was set under a sycamore tree below a lip of the knoll. It looked full of water.

“There’s a couple of feet of tar under all that water from yesterday’s storm.”

The huge old relic had a hollowed-out place beneath it where a fire could be laid to bring the tar to a boil. Dain was delighted by it.

“We’ll bail it out and fire it up. If we could—”

“Listen!”

Both were instantly still. Only then to Dain’s ears came the very faintest of mosquito whines from out in the marsh. It stopped even as he heard it.

“Outboard?”

“Yes. Your friend Inverness misjudged how far the sound of a motor carries over water.”

“How far away are they?”

“Three miles, probably. They’ll plan to row the rest of the way in well after dark.”

“So we’ll have enough time to get everything ready — if we’re lucky.”

“And if we’re not,” said Vangie unexpectedly, deepening her voice to quote, “’By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death.’ Shakespeare,” she added, then burst out laughing.

He laughed himself. “Did I... when I was delirious...”

“Yes.”

“And you remembered it.”

“I liked it. That part about owing a death—”

“Yeah, well, Maxton and company owe some deaths, too,” said Dain, suddenly darkening and hardening.

Vangie started bailing water with an old coffee can, Dain started gathering kindling for the fire beneath the vat. She suddenly stopped, watching him drag up a large oak branch.

“Dain. I don’t want to die.”

“Neither do I.” He gestured out at the swamp. “Neither do they.”

“Then—”

“Then we have to want to not die harder than they do.”

29

Dusk had come again, and the sky was ruddy with sunset-washed cumulus. The boat grounded behind a very low ridge rising from the marsh, its blunt prow sliding up over the mud without sound. The four men got out, bent over so they could not be seen above the reeds and rushes. Trask had been stuck with the rowing for the last mile. He flexed his hands gingerly.

“Jesus, what blisters!”

“Man jerks off as much as you oughta have calluses half an inch thick,” guffawed Nicky, who’d had gloves.

Maxton followed Inverness as he crawled to the top of the rise. They parted the rushes and peered through. On a spit of land a hundred yards away was the rough-built cabin. Vangie was just walking toward it, alone, careless, unhurried.

“We could wing her from here if we had a rifle,” muttered Maxton regretfully.

“You’re forgetting about Dain.”

“Fuck Dain. He’s lying dead in the swamp somewhere.”

Inverness looked over at him, shook his head. “You’re a fool, Maxton. He’s over there. Waiting.”

“And you’re a fucking paranoid.” Maxton swung around so his back rested on the sloping earth as if were the back of a chair. He took out a cigarette, but Inverness shook his head.

“They might smell the smoke.”

Maxton shrugged, put it away again, his face mean.

“They? You sure are scared of a dead man, Inverness. Why’d you blow away his family in the first place?”

“I was hired. Even now a certain number of big-city cops hire out as hitmen on the weekends. You do one, two a year — good money, easy work...” He gave an easy chuckle. “Usually.”

“You’re a cold-blooded fucker, aren’t you?”

Inverness just stared at him. Maxton looked away first.

Dain was crouched on the floor about three feet from the back wall, working on the end of a floorboard with a small pry bar, when Vangie finally entered the cabin. She left the door open; the windows were both already open. The big red gasoline tank from the flatboat was on the table.

“I can feel them,” said Vangie, “the way I could feel you before you even got to New Orleans. Stay away from the windows in case they have binoculars.”

Dain straightened up, still on his knees. “How long?”

“There’ll be a moon tonight, so the first cloud that covers it after full dark will bring them in.”

“Then let’s finish up here.”

He returned to his floorboard, Vangie began pulling the bedding off the bunks, laying it out like gunpowder trails. With the harsh squawking protest of nails being drawn from wood, Dain raised one end of the plank. Vangie began gutting the mattresses, strewing the dried moss around. He fed the end of one of the blankets down through the slot he had opened.

Vangie suddenly gasped.

“My God, the pirogue! If they see that they’ll know—”

“I moved it up beyond that big cypress and covered it with branches.” He chuckled. “I put the attaché case in it, too.”

Vangie started to whirl toward the place she had hidden it, behind some sacks in the storeroom, then froze, her head coming up, her nostrils flaring like those of a spooked mare.

She said, “It’s time.”

“Okay. You shut the windows and then get into position. Let me know when you’re ready.”

After Vangie had gone around shutting the windows, he stood up and, on an unspoken common urge, they embraced.

Vangie said in a small voice, “Good luck, Dain.”

“Good hunting, Vangie.”

Somehow the phrases seemed inadequate, especially if they turned out to be the only epitaphs either would get; but what else was there to say? He watched her go out the door and around to the back of the cabin in the darkness, and ached to call her back. But it was too late for that.

There was the slightest lingering sunset over on the western horizon, but moonlight was already laying down cold fingers of light as the four manhunters wrapped rags around the tholes of the oars. Nicky and Trask were very clumsy at it, Inverness swift and adept. Nicky stood up in frustration.

“Can’t we use the fucking flashlight? Can’t see a—”

“Quiet!” hissed Inverness. “Voices carry at night.”

He stuck an oar pin in the oarlock, tried it by moving the oar back and forth. It made no sound. He nodded and looked up at the sky. Clouds thickly edged with silver were massing across the face of the moon, fading its light.

“That cloud will give us twenty minutes,” he said in a very low voice. “Let’s move out.”

Now that he could not be seen from outside, Dain had the kerosene pressure lantern on the table, by its light was pouring gasoline over the blankets and ripped mattresses Vangie had strewn about. He especially drenched the blanket trailing down under the floor. At her three measured knocks, he released the pressure of the lantern, by the dying light poured out the rest of the gasoline, dropped the can, and went to the door.

His dark silhouette darted out through the door, closed it as the lantern died. He dropped nimbly to the ground, flitted across the open knoll and without pausing hopped down over the lip of earth where he had hidden the two-by-six.

As he waited, peering through his screen of branches, he gradually became aware of the night life around him. A week ago he would not have been. That was it! Marie had always been so much more intensely alive than he; now, if he died this night, it would be knowing he had returned to life before it happened.

Was it the knowledge of death out there that made life so precious? Blind, urgent, unquenchable life? The night was alive with animal cries, whistles, songs, chitterings. First, flying squirrels emerged from abandoned woodpecker holes to soar through the dimness, chattering shrilly. Then a fox trotted by a yard from the immobile Dain without being aware of him ambushed there. An armadillo waddled across the open ground. A carefully stepping deer made little splashes at the edge of the channel.

Through the forest drifted a great horned owl. It floated across the tops of the trees, swooped down over the bayou, landed in a tree near the point of the island. Dain’s eyes, accustomed to the dark, followed its flight, could pick out its dark bunched shape in the top of the tree. It looked about fiercely and gave its distinctive hoo, hoo-oo, hoo, hoo hunting cry.

It was glaring down at the water, its light-gathering eyes picking up the dark moving shape with its four hunched hunters. A fish broke water right beside the flatboat’s gliding hull. There was a vague squeak of oar, a slight gurgle of water along the strake. The slog of the prow into mud.

Four silent shapes left the boat, melted into tree shadow. Silent was a relative term; their clumsy presence muted the life around them. The owl flew off unnoticed by these other hunters, noted only by Dain as the light began to pick up with the moon’s emergence from the clouds.

Crouching in their cover together, the raiders looked across the now once again moon-drenched open ground to the cabin, dark and peaceful. They spoke in low tones, although Maxton couldn’t keep the elation out of his voice.

“She doesn’t have a fucking clue we’re here!”

“Even so, we wait fifteen minutes,” breathed Inverness. “Watch the animals. They’ll always tell you if somebody’s around. Did you see the owl telegraphing our presence below his tree? If Dain is watching—”

Maxton came out of his crouch and massaged his knees.

“If that bitch was wise to us, she’d be ten miles down the bayou with my bonds. Instead she’s alone in there, asleep. I want to hit her now. You got us here, great, that’s what you’ll get your percentage for. But now I’m taking over the assault.”

“I’ll cover you from here,” said Inverness drily.

“Like hell you will.” He turned to the other two silent killers. “Trask and I will each take a window. Nicky, you bust in through the door. And remember we need her alive long enough to tell us where the bonds are.”

“What if Dain’s in there? What do I do then?”

“Kill him,” said Maxton. “Inverness, you’ll take the back of the—”

“Pass.”

“You’re passing up your cut of the bonds, too, you know.”

“You don’t get it, do you? All I want is Dain — dead. I’d be a fool to risk myself over the bonds if he already is.”

“And if he isn’t?”

“Then maybe you’ll get lucky and kill him for me — or at least maybe cripple him up some more, I know I winged him the other night. If he kills you, I’m no worse off.”

Maxton just chuckled and turned away.

“The yellow streak shows at last,” he sneered, then said to Nicky, “Remember — we need her alive to get the bonds from her.”

“And to have a little fun with after,” added Trask.

The pilings gave just enough headroom for Vangie to lie on her back under the cabin with her head turned so she could see out from beneath it. She stiffened momentarily when, out on the moonlit ground, the moving feet of the three attackers appeared. They took up their positions around the cabin.

Gun in hand, Nicky approached the front steps, tense and crouched and ready. He silently mounted them, crossed the porch. A second small cloud started across the face of the moon, dimming its light again, so the flash in his left hand flickered for one instant to show him the simple iron latch.

Nicky jerked open the door and leaped through the opening, yelling, gun quartering the room.

Everything happened at once, in the five seconds it took for his light to show the room was empty.

Dain was already charging silently at a dead run from his place of ambush under the bushes. His two-by-six slammed the door shut as he smashed it down into the cleats Vangie had made for it. He was already spinning away at a dead run for cover.

“Now!” he yelled.

Vangie touched her already struck match to the blanket-fuse coming down through the cabin floor, rolled away from the searing heat as it went up in a whoosh of igniting gasoline.

Inverness already was drifting back from his tree-shadow cover toward their flatboat pulled up on the mud behind him, even as his quick eyes picked out Dain’s dark moving shape hitting the safety of the bushes on his return.

“That goddam Dain,” he muttered aloud. “Waiting.”

The whole inside of the cabin was already blazing. Nicky was slamming his forearm against the barred door, but it didn’t give. He dropped his gun, ran back a few paces — and the fire running up the gasoline-soaked fuse Vangie had ignited whooshed up around him.

Blazing now, screaming, he hurled himself again and again against the door.

30

The door of the cabin burst outward, the cleats ripping from the wall, and out came a screaming fireball. Air sucked inside made the cabin a sudden massive torch. The fireball rolled in the grass and then quit screaming and quit moving as inside, the shells in its dropped gun began to explode.

Maxton came running around the corner of the cabin from the far side toward their drawn-up boat, gun in hand, yelping in fear, ignoring the burning Nicky. At the water’s edge, in full moonlight, panting, he ran back and forth like a dog left behind by the family car. Their boat was gone. He could just see Inverness on the water, rowing it toward the open marsh.

“Inverness!” he shrieked. “For God’s sake...”

Inverness kept on rowing with long, full, unhurried strokes. Maxton ran up and down the bank in a frenzy.

Vangie rolled out from under the huge torch the cabin had become, jumped to her feet, ran for the safety of Papa’s fishing road through the woods. The burning cabin made everything as bright as day, and at the edge of the undergrowth she ran right into Trask’s arms.

“Got you, bitch!” he panted.

She ripped his face just as her mother had done, he staggered back, letting go of her, so she had room for a high dancer’s kick, the sort where they try to touch their nose with their knee. Only his scrotum was in the way. He emitted a pneumatic “Whoosh!” and Vangie ran into the woods. He got one shot off, aiming low despite his pain, but missed. Bent over, cursing foully, he staggered after her.

Even through his panic, Maxton heard the shot. It helped ease his fear, he began looking around. And shit, ten yards away up the bayou, there was Vangie’s flatboat drawn up nose-to on the bank. He trotted toward it, still wobble-kneed from the shock of that screaming fireball rolling out of the cabin at him.

Dain, grunting, hit him like a blocking lineman. He went sprawling, the gun went flying.

Maxton scrabbled for it in the mud as Dain put a foot against the prow of the flatboat and, with a great heave, sent it shooting backward out into the channel. Maxton came up with his gun, but Dain was already zigzagging away as he fired. Lucky for him, no barrel-clog of mud. Two more shots, but Dain was gone, back into the undergrowth.

Maxton whirled back toward the flatboat. It was being carried away by the current in the same direction Inverness had disappeared — around the front of the island. He looked back to where Dain had disappeared, then back to the boat.

He could dive in, swim after it — he did his dutiful laps at his health club in Chicago three days a week. But what if Dain had the pirogue hidden somewhere, came out after him, smashed in his head with a paddle? He would be too vulnerable in the water, even with the gun...

The underbrush rattled behind him. He spun and fired again. There was instant crashing and thrashing, then sudden silence. Almost reluctantly, Maxton edged across the clearing past the settled angry red remains of the cabin and the black ugly charred remains of Nicky.

His cocked and ready Colt airweight .38 six-shot revolver was outthrust toward a patch of shadow where he feared Dain might be lurking. He was feeling better again. He had a gun, Dain didn’t. Trask obviously had winged the little bitch, would have her waiting for him. He couldn’t remember how many shots he had fired, but he had a fistful of extra bullets in his pocket.

A couple of yards to the right of where he thought Dain was, the top of a bush moved slightly. He shifted his aim without making any noise.

“Dain?” he called.

The next bush moved, surreptitiously, slightly. Maxton edged closer. Hell, he’d hit him with one of those shots, Dain was trying to crawl away. But he had to make sure.

“Maybe we can deal.”

Silence from Dain. A charred timber in the cabin collapsed in a shower of sparks, jerking Maxton’s head around. He turned back quickly. A third bush was moving. Feebly. Yes! He went into his firing crouch.

He called softly, “All I’ve ever wanted is the bonds!”

No answer.

“I don’t want the girl. Not any more.”

Hell no, he didn’t want her. Trask already had her. The top of the next bush moved slightly. He brought up his gun. Sidled closer.

Dain was lying on his back under the bushes, dappled with moonlight. He held a long willow stick in his good hand, angled up against a branch of an overhead bush three yards away. Unlike Maxton, he had kept count of the shots fired.

“Just two more, damn you,” he muttered to himself.

At almost the same time, Maxton’s voice came again.

“What do you say? Not you, not the girl. Just the bonds.”

For answer, Dain jammed the stick hard against the bush, and so close together they were almost one, two slugs ripped through the undergrowth where he should have been. He was already on his feet and bursting out of the thicket.

Maxton was five yards away, digging a handful of shells from his pocket to feed into the gun’s open cylinder. Dain’s charge rocked him back on his heels, sent the bullets flying. But Maxton swung the .38 in a vicious arc — the barrel slammed down on Dain’s injured shoulder.

Dain cried out with the pain, spun away, fell, rolled away from Maxton’s surprisingly quick and viciously kicking feet, was as quickly on his own feet, ready. They circled like fighting dogs seeking advantage. But Dain was backing up as he circled, away from the last embers of the burned-out cabin.

Maxton sprang.

He was a powerful adversary and he had the use of both arms and a pistol as a club. They grappled, fell, rolled over and over, striking, kicking, grabbing. Dain, hampered by his useless arm and the need to protect his wound from Maxton’s blows, was fading fast. His bandages were soaked in new blood.

He managed to break free, get to his feet, back up a low rise with a big sycamore tree in the dip beyond it. He was staggering. Maxton swung the heavy revolver again, Dain ducked, but the gun sight raked across his forehead. Blood ran down into his eyes. Maxton laughed.

“I’ll chop you to pieces, Dain.”

He feinted twice, then leaped in with another terrible swing of the gun. But Dain sprang forward inside the blow, with his last despairing strength got his good hand on Maxton’s windpipe. Squeezing. Maxton’s eyes began to bug out. The gun slammed into Dain’s back, but because they were chest-to-chest there was little force in the blows.

Then Dain fell backward to land at the very lip of the knoll, dragging Maxton down on top of him, with a leg already drawn up to his chest so the raised foot would plant itself firmly in Maxton’s belly. As the big man came down on top of him, the leg pistoned straight up. Maxton’s momentum, guided by the throat grip and given terrific force by the thrust of that catapult leg, sent him right over Dain’s body in a flip.

Under the wide-spreading sycamore the flat black slowly seething depths of the tar vat sent up sluggish bubbles. Dain released his grip on the throat and Maxton went out beyond him and down, screaming horribly when he landed spread-eagle on his back in the bubbling tar, still clutching his useless gun. He tried to rise, pull free, but he was already burning. Several jerky motions, still screaming, but all they did was send waves of tar from the sides of the vat rolling back over him. In a few moments, he subsided to a shapeless smoking mass.

Dain missed that part. He had passed out.

Vangie was leaning against a tree, panting, half a dozen yards off the road through the woods. She could hear the sounds of Trask’s supposedly stealthy pursuit behind her, but she didn’t move. Not too far behind, Trask also stopped, panting, to listen for sounds of his fleeing prey. His face was cut by slashing branches, blackberry thorns.

As he dashed sweat from his forehead with the back of his gun hand, Vangie burst in apparent wild terror from cover a dozen yards away. She was gone even as he fired — still low, still trying to bring her back alive. He was a good soldier, a good button man. He had his quirks, but he knew how to obey orders.

He plunged away after her.

But it was harder now, the moon was lower, its light dimmer. He stopped, listened. He didn’t know that Vangie was sitting on the ground a few yards ahead of him around a bend in the track, also listening. She had been hard-pressed to keep from losing him. She was poised for flight, but there was nothing to flee from. She couldn’t hear him moving around. She took her big Bowie knife from the sheath, nervously, put it back.

It was time. Life or death. She wondered how Dain was. Out of sight of each other, they still were fighting in tandem.

She picked up a rock from the trail, hesitated, then heaved it back the way she had come.

Trask’s head jerked around toward the crashing from the undergrowth. He had been concentrating all of his attention in the wrong direction, but now he had that little bitch!

Gun in hand, he charged around the bend in the track.

Vangie was half-sitting a few yards beyond, one leg drawn up, massaging her ankle with an agonized look on her face. She screamed in apparent surprise and fear.

“I did your folks, now I’m gonna do you!”

And he charged her. There was no way she could escape him. Oh, she tried. She leaped up but cried out, fell, rolled, holding her ankle, trying unsuccessfully to scrabble away from him. Not this time. He was upon her...

But just a yard short of Vangie, in shadow that made it even more invisible, was one of Papa’s tight lines — eight feet above the ground where Trask would never see it unless he was looking up. Instead of the original hooks on the stagings, now at their three-foot intervals were strung the muskrat traps Vangie had been greasing, each one open and set.

Trask, charging, yelling, gloating down at his prey helpless at his feet, ran face-first right into one of the gaping traps. She had led him to it as carefully as a mother bird feigning a broken wing will lead a fox away from her nest.

The trap’s powerful spring snapped jagged steel teeth shut on his face with a vicious metallic snap. He screamed and danced, jumped and jerked — and his wildly swung gun hand smashed into a second trap, which snapped shut around it, crushing the fingers, piercing the wrist. The gun fell.

Vangie came up off the ground in a lithe drive of piston legs, right at him with her huge gleaming Bowie knife in both hands, cutting edge down, held the way a Mayan priest might hold the knife to rip open the chest of a blood sacrifice. He was the one! The one who had killed her folks!

Her face distorted with the killing lust, she slammed the blade down into the center of the screaming man’s belly in a long disemboweling slash like a hunter gutting a hung deer. She cried out formlessly as she did it; a splash of hot blood hit her across the face as her attack carried her right past the flopping, shrieking man.

Vangie dropped her knife and staggered a few steps away into the woods exactly like a drunkard, then collapsed. She slumped there in a huddle, unmoving, sobbing.

For ten years her life had been without consequence, without meaning. Now she had killed two men. She had stolen $2 million. Her folks were dead because of her and she had mourned them with a knife. She could never again be whoever she had been for those ten years.

She cried for who she had been and for who she had become. She cried for Dain, for her folks, for Jimmy.

She didn’t cry for Trask.

Finally cried out, she fell silent. After a time, animal, bird, and insect noises began again, tentatively at first, then soaring in a triumphant discordant chorus to greet the first predawn lightening of the forest.

31

There was the faintest of pale gold horizontal slashes drawn on the utmost horizon. Everything below was a cold gray blanket of ground mist, the big cypresses rising from it here and there like sentinels. In the woods, just the woolly polls of the overstory trees stood above it like tight-packed heads. On the bayou a flatboat drifted in the gray world where air and water were barely separate, as if floating in a dream.

Inverness came abruptly erect on the seat. Looked around in an almost dazed manner. Splashed water in his face. Even the splashes were muted, distant, dreamlike. He began to row.

Vangie appeared at the mouth of the road walking listlessly, shoulders slumped, face innocent as a sleepwalker’s. Trask’s pistol dangled from one hand by the trigger guard. Overlaying the scents of the morning swamp was the sweetish smell of barbecued meat, not entirely pleasant. She shuddered when she realized what it was.

Dain was limping toward her across the open ground past the rectangle of ash and charcoal, still faintly warm, that marked her father’s cabin. He looked pale, drawn, dragged off center by pain, bloodstained from his reopened wound. She knew she couldn’t look much better.

They stopped three feet from each other, not touching. Vangie finally reached out to lay a hand on his good arm. Only then did they come together, clasp each other fiercely with nothing of lovers in it, only the intimacy of warriors who have survived the battle. They finally stepped back. An uncontrollable shudder ran through Vangie, somewhat like the sudden diminishing little gasping intakes of breath after a fit of hysterics.

She said tentatively, “You ought to see the other guys?”

“What other guys?” he said in the same tone.

Wonder was in her voice. “It’s... over? Truly all over?”

“Yes. For you it’s all over.”

A final shudder ran through her. “Inverness?”

“Strategic withdrawal. He’ll be back.”

Vangie made an aborted gesture back toward what she had left hanging from the tight line in the woods. “I... I don’t know if I can... again...”

“If I could get out of it, I wouldn’t either,” he said. “But you can get out. You must get out. I couldn’t stand it if after all of this you...” His voice had harshened; now he said in softer tones, “Go bury your dead, Vangie.”

They started walking slowly down toward the water, Dain limping, his good arm around her shoulders for support.

“Will you be all right?” he asked.

She didn’t answer.

“Please. Take the bonds and run.”

“I’ll have to,” she said finally. “If I’m still here when he comes back, he’ll have to kill me, won’t he?” Right along with you, she seemed to be implying, though she didn’t say it. “But if I’m back in civilization, shocked, explaining that I was camping out in the bayous, I didn’t know my folks had been murdered, I’ve never heard of any of you... Then I’ll be safe.”

“Take the gun.”

“I have the gun.” She gestured with it. “You hid the pirogue with the bonds in it. He can’t follow me in a flatboat, he has to go the long way around. So don’t worry about me.”

Couldn’t you worry about me? he thought. Just a little? He’d wanted her to leave, but hadn’t really expected that she’d do it.

It was dawn but the sun had not yet broken through the haze. At the rear of the island, where the bayou had cut its ancient channel, Inverness’s flatboat drifted soundlessly out of the fog to ground with only a whisper of keel against mud. With an almost incredible swiftness, Inverness was up over the gunwale and into the bushes.

He kept going swiftly but carefully, slipping from cover to cover, stopping often to let the birds tell him what or who might lie ahead. Totally alert, he was the hunter in his element.

As they shambled down toward the water, Vangie was shocked at how much weaker Dain was. How was he going to stand up to Inverness? He might already be dying; he’d sustained a terrible amount of damage.

“What about you? You can’t just stay here and wait for him.”

“He has to end it. End me. To him I’m a nightmare that isn’t over when you wake up.”

“He killed your wife, Dain,” she said cruelly. “He’ll find Trask, I used the knife on him. That ought to slow him down...”

Dain nodded. “That’s his only failure as a hitman. It’s our only edge.”

“What? I don’t understand.”

“His imagination. He’s got a vivid imagination.”

“If that’s your edge, use it. What are you going to do? What’s your plan?”

“Delay him, that’s the plan.” That wasn’t what she had meant. “I’ll get you as much time as I can. I’m not strong enough to fight him, he’s too wary to be tracked down, and I’m not good enough in the woods to ambush him. So—”

“So you have to make him come to you.”

“When he does, how will he do it?”

“Under cover of this fog. He’ll row around to the rear of the island, work up through the woods afoot, probably along Papa’s fishing road...”

Dain gave a short mirthless laugh, started coughing at the end of it. “The man... who won’t... die...”

He was coughing up blood. She didn’t know if he was talking about Inverness or himself. She couldn’t leave him here in this state, she couldn’t stay with him, she couldn’t take him with her.

Inverness stopped with one foot raised and a hand extended to push aside a branch. He had heard, reduced by distance, robbed of words and given mere tones, the raised voices of Vangie and Dain. He began to trot through the woods toward them, turning into the fishing road when he crossed it, because the going was easier and faster.

And stopped dead, a horrified look on his face. Trask’s gutted body, still held by the deadly traps, had dragged the nylon tight line down so he was held up in a sort of grotesque half-curtsy. One arm was held out head-height by its trap, his legs were bent in an awful parody of a ballet dancer’s plié. He had been neatly disemboweled. As for his face, in its trap...

Inverness edged around the body, unable to look away, then was free of it. They’d been thorough. One burned to death, one gutted. Not a squeamish pair. He wondered what they had done to Maxton. Not that he cared too much. There was nothing squeamish about the survivors of this world, and he was a survivor.

Now shunning the open meandering road, he picked his way as quickly as he could through the heavy undergrowth flanking it. He pulled up short a second time: there had been a distant shot.

What the hell? That didn’t make sense unless...

Unless he remembered the butchery on Trask. Whoever did that didn’t have many compunctions. Two million in bonds... Just Dain and she left... He had been just sort of assuming they would face him together, he would kill them both, take the bonds... But maybe only one would be left to take out...

Suddenly he was sprinting ahead, crashing through the forest, careless of noise. Two more shots had sounded far ahead of him.

32

Ten minutes later he was at the edge of the woods, scanning the clearing. Burned-out cabin, just a heap of charred wood now. Beyond that, the blackened thing that once had been Nicky...

He moved around the perimeter, saw the tar baby in the vat. The person inside would have been burned away leaving only a shape of cooled tar, like the ancient Pompeiians caught by flowing lava while fleeing Vesuvius. Had to be Maxton. And Dain had done it with the use of only one arm.

A couple of minutes later, Inverness parted the bushes near the water’s edge to look out cautiously at the landing area and the thinning fogbank beyond. The mud was trampled, marked with footprints and keel marks. After a long reconnoiter, he stepped out. Looked up the bayou, stiffened.

Up about where Vangie had first seen Dain poling down toward the fishing camp in the pirogue, Vangie was now poling away from the camp in the pirogue. Alone. The craft was too shallow for Dain to be hiding in the bottom of it. She reached the bend of the bayou and passed from his sight.

Alone. Which meant that Dain was either waiting for him somewhere in ambush — or the argument he had heard had been genuine, the shots real, and Dain was...

He turned back to the landing area, crouched, reading sign. He chuffed, an almost silent exhalation of air. Splattered across the churned muddy verge was blood. Fresh blood, his touching fingertip confirmed.

Then his eye picked up a glint at the water’s edge, and he gave a small exclamation of surprise. He lifted Trask’s gun from the mud. Sniffed the muzzle. Looked quickly around, like an animal about to take a drink, then broke the gun. Two unfired shells. He closed it very slowly, a puzzled look on his face.

Patiently, he started over the ground again with his eyes, minutely seeking everything he had missed the first time. Gave a little grunt of satisfaction, waded out to midcalf. Tromped down into the mud and water was something, paper, man-made. He reached down, brought it out.

A sheaf of soaked, trampled, mud-smeared bearer bonds. He thumbed them. Half a dozen, twenty-five thousand each: a hundred and fifty thousand bucks. Dropped in the struggle, probably when the shots had been fired.

He started back out with his head moving, scanning the bushes, the trees, the bayou, the open water of the marshland... With a muttered exclamation he threw the bonds aside and went into a firing crouch, his right hand whipping out the .357 Magnum from its holster on his right hip with practiced ease.

The fog had lifted enough so he could see Vangie’s missing flatboat forty yards from shore and slowly being carried further. One of Dain’s shoes rested on the gunwale as if he were lying faceup, partially across the seats. His good arm was hooked over the far side of the boat so his hand was obviously trailing in the water even though Inverness could not see it.

Inverness slowly put his Magnum away again, even more slowly settled into his woodman’s tireless squat, his eyes fixed on the drifting boat.

His posture was patient but his head was spinning. Dain. Dead? Everything said he was — blood, bonds, gun, the departed Vangie. But... this was Dain. The man he couldn’t kill. But Dain had trusted her and she’d shot him with Trask’s gun and had dumped him in the boat and set it adrift so Inverness would see it and be delayed by it.

Or maybe she hadn’t. Time would tell.

Three hours later the fog had burned away and bright sunlight flooded everything. Inverness still was hunkered in the scrub by the shore, staring out at the drifting boat. His arms were now wrapped around his knees. The boat was quite a bit further away, but was slowly turning around and around in a big leisurely eddy. Dain’s good hand was indeed trailing in the water, submerged about halfway down the bared forearm.

He could only really make out Dain’s boot, a little of the hair of his head, and that arm trailing in the water. The arm made it Dain, not a dummy made up with moss and Dain’s clothes to fool him.

During those three hours the body hadn’t moved an inch.

With abrupt decision, he stood, trotted off toward the fishing road through the woods. Half an hour later he arrived back at his flatboat, seized the prow, and shoved off into the bayou as he leaped aboard. Unshipped the oars, swung the prow, and began rowing away with long steady strokes. In action he was as quick, as sure as he’d ever been. Then why couldn’t he...

Goddammit, now he was going to deal with Dain.

It was high noon, so there was no shade. Dain’s flatboat drifted in its eddy of current. From around the tip of the island came Inverness’s flatboat to the beat of his steady rowing. A dozen yards from the boat in which Dain sprawled, faceup to the sun, he rested on his oars so his boat coasted to a stop. He sat, staring. Waiting. Not quite ready to deal with Dain after all.

If Dain was not dead, only dying, the heat and sun would finish him off. Waiting could only benefit Inverness.

He waited.

Waited until the sun had started its climb down the western sky. Just sat there on the middle seat of his boat, legs drawn up and arms clasped around his knees. From this close he could see Dain sprawled, bloody and lax, across the seat.

Enough.

Inverness suddenly jerked out his .357 Magnum, then once again just sat there with it in his hand, resting the hand on his thigh, the gun pointed at nothing. He yelled.

“Dain!”

No reaction. Man — or body? He raised the gun, aimed with his elbow resting on an upraised knee. Hesitated. Dain was dead, he knew that now, and he was about to shoot the body. Blow its foot off. To see if perhaps the man was only faking it. And if he shot the corpse, wasn’t that somehow an admission that Dain had won, even in death? That even his corpse could spook Keith Inverness so badly that...

With sudden resolve he re-aimed. And fired. A chunk of gunwale six inches from Dain’s boot splintered as the heavy slug passed through it. Dain’s boot did not move.

Inverness lowered the heavy gun with a satisfied look on his face. He’d made his test without having to shoot Dain’s dead body. Dain hadn’t won. Keith Inverness had won. Because nobody had the balls to remain motionless when a bullet missed his foot by six inches that way. Not when he would know the next one could blow his foot right off.

There was still a final act to perform. And even that... worried him. He had to dump Dain’s body into the water so the gators would get it. Did some edge of doubt still linger?

“Goddam you, Dain,” he said earnestly to the corpse, “even dead, you fucker, you... you vex me.”

He laid the gun on the seat beside his thigh, grabbed the oars, gave a couple of strong pulls to send his boat bumping clumsily against Dain’s. The impact knocked Dain’s boot off the gunwale. A cloud of green-bellied flies swarmed angrily up off the bloody mess under Dain’s filth-encrusted shirt.

He picked up his gun again, but it was only reflex. This was obviously a corpse. He used his gun hand to brace himself on Dain’s gunwale so he could, kneeling on the seat, stretch across the sprawled body to feel the carotid artery for a pulse.

He was free at last of that five-year-old shadow across his life. Maybe even the bonds might not be lost to him. Vangie would have to bury her folks, go through a public period of mourning. Which meant she’d have to hang around Cajun country long enough so it would not look odd when she left...

Perhaps she would choose suicide... so easily arranged...

He was so deep in his thoughts as his fingers thrust deep into the side of Dain’s throat after the nonexistent pulse, that he didn’t even see Dain’s good left arm, trailing over the side of the boat, begin to rise.

In the iron grip of his hand was the huge cottonmouth, grasped just behind the head. The snake’s mouth, gaping in rage, showed its dazzling cotton-white lining. Its fangs were raised and ready. As the arm rose and crooked, the massive, foot-thick, five-foot body came writhing up out of the water, flowing, flowing, flowing almost endlessly upward.

Inverness, startled by the pulse he had not expected to find, off balance, was trying to get upright enough to get his weight off the gun hand and shoot. But he was out of time. By then Dain was ramming the huge diamond-shaped head up tight against his straining, corded neck.

The gleaming fangs sank into the flesh, the poison sacks pulsed. Inverness leaped back, shrieking, spraddle-legged in the flatboat, jerking away from the snake so wildly that its entire five-foot length flowed and writhed in air, supported only by its fangs sunk deep into the side of his neck.

His gun went flying so both his hands could find the snake, rip it away. The snake hit the water with a long splash, undulated away as Inverness sank down on the seat, blood running down his neck. Dain sat up in the other boat to watch him with cold interested eyes.

“My God,” said Inverness. “Oh my God.”

“It’s a high-protein venom that literally rots out the blood vessels so internal hemorrhaging begins,” said Dain. “You’re bleeding to death inside even as we speak.”

Inverness put his face in his hands and spoke through his spread fingers. “It hurts. Oh Jesus it hurts.”

“It’s meant to. Your lymph glands are swelling up trying to churn out enough antibodies to save you, but there aren’t that many antibodies in the human body. You’ll start getting excited, your pupils will dilate until the light hurts them...”

Inverness raised a haunted face. Sweat was pouring off him. He croaked, “My lips are numb.”

Now that he was here, watching one of the hitmen actually dying, simple survival wasn’t enough for Dain after all. He wanted at least to know. Who. Where. Maybe if...

“Who hired you to kill me and my family, Inverness?”

“Pu... Pucci... Mario... Pucci...”

“No. The middleman. The other shooter.”

Inverness tried to swallow. Put a hand up to his neck, sweating like a man with motion sickness. His face was ghastly. His voice was querulous.

“The... middleman called me, I flew up from New Orleans. The other hitter had... directions... I had... orders... take out everybody in the place... Didn’t know... woman and kid...”

His head slumped, but Dain reached from boat to boat, grabbed his shoulder, shook him.

“Who, Inverness? Where?”

“He called me again last week... after five... fucking years... told me you were coming after me...” His voice started to fade again. “Hoping... I’d... take you out...”

Inverness was twitching, losing motor control.

“Who? Goddam you, give him to me!”

Inverness coughed rackingly. A little blood came from his mouth. But defiance along with death had entered his eyes. His lips twisted into some semblance of a smile.

“Fuck you, Dain... I’m... giving you... to them... The other shooter is... still around... He’ll blow you... all to shit...” He gave a choking laugh. “The laugh’s... on you...”

He fell silent, folded down on himself, went away from there. Dain looked down at him for a long moment, nothing showing in his face. He finally spoke.

“Is it, Inverness? Hell, you’re dead!”

The sky was pale, sulfur-colored. The water was a mirror. Five minutes later Inverness, stripped of keys, wallet, and money to make identification harder should he ever be found, splashed into the marsh.

Most likely a gator would discover him before dark, thrust him deep into the mud, ripen him up...

But hell, old Inverness would like that, wouldn’t he?

Hadn’t he just loved this old swampland?