The River

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Jack could see it in his mind’s eye: the rage. Breaking camp in silent fury. Loading the much smaller canoe with the cook box, the barrel of brined fish, the massive tent roll. No whiskey. Plenty of space in the nineteen-footer without the case of Ancient Age. Not a single bottle left. Maybe the most ire-inducing fact of all.

Reloading the rifle. Thumbing the cartridges in the magazine one by one, each with a curse and a prayer for more death. We helped them. We gave aid and succor to those sonsofbitches and look at what they did. Goddamn. Probably keeping the girl drugged or some such, some slave. Well, I plugged one, surely did, hope he’s dead. But why in hell did they go upstream?

The useless sentry, JD. Brent backhanding him maybe, full force across the already bruised jaw. Muttering maybe about how a professional drinker who can’t hold his liquor or holster his hard-on is the saddest thing on earth. Loading the pinewood-colored Kevlar canoe, shoving off, hellbent for Wapahk. Three days hence. Paddling with a will, because a) no bourbon, b) no food but a few salted fish, c) vengeance. The phone there in the village, the urgent call to the Mounties: Send a chopper. One injured or drugged girl, two bad men, one injured or dead. Because Brent was sure that the same laws held on a northern river as they did in Texas: if you caught someone stealing your horse you could shoot him dead, no questions asked.

Jack could imagine the two Texans paddling hard in his and Wynn’s canoe and reaching the rock island in the bend before the infamous Last Chance Falls, heading toward shore. And…

And the man Pierre waiting, loaded, for two men in their Kevlar nineteen-footer. Waiting head down behind his cover, and…there it was, the canoe, correct length and color—the boys! Sitting ducks, no gun in sight! His blurred, uncorrected vision plenty good enough at forty yards to see two male figures steadily paddling. Patience, brother, waiting until they were maybe thirty, twenty-five yards off the shore, rising up, shotgun leveled—fire! Pump, fire, pump, fire…until he had emptied the six shells in the Winchester Marine, the men torn open and flung sidelong, the canoe flipped, a bobbing loglike hull in the main current, tugged toward the horizon line, tipping over the lip of the cataract. Gone.

Smashed and drowned.

Pierre would think that if she was still with them he wouldn’t have to worry about her either. She would have been lying half alive in the bottom of the boat, she would be battered to death and submerged in the terrible falls.

The odds of finding bodies in this big river, in this remote territory, were pretty low. But if they did, if the authorities mounted an ambitious search and there were gunshot wounds, he could say that the boys had attacked their camp, kidnapped her, he ambushed them, it was survival, self-defense, he was trying to rescue her.

Jack replayed how Pierre would shoot the two men from Texas thinking they were he and Wynn, and then Pierre would pack up his camp, relieved that it was finally over, his megafuckup, and he would go straight to the village elders and start spouting lies.

Jack’s plan. Why he had stolen their boat. Why Wynn was dead. Everybody he loved most, he killed. One way or another. Hubris killed them—his own. Always.

Still, he’d have to wait a day to let it play out. Wait upstream with a woman who was clearly dying, and with the body of his best friend.