Too Far Gone

80

Alexa thought the swamp both surreal and eerily beautiful. Above them, pelicans, egrets, cranes, and other birds of unknown denominations flew north below the clouds. Deputy Kip Boudreaux explained that the birds felt the drop in pressure and knew that their normal habitat was going to be inhospitable in a few hours, and they were leaving. He commented that it was too bad the people living around here weren’t a tenth as smart as birds.

Alexa sat beside Manseur on the bench in front of the console where Boudreaux, a pleasant young man wearing aviator sunglasses and a baseball cap, stood piloting the boat. Manseur had his windbreaker positioned like a photographer’s hood, shielding the laptop’s screen from the daylight so he could see it. As he pointed to the position of the blinking dot, Boudreaux translated the direction into turns.

It seemed to Alexa they had traveled miles into the maze of narrow waterways. Tall reeds, bushes, small trees, weeds, and grasses lined the banks. Often the channel they were using would open into a large body of water, usually with several possible channel exits to choose from. She saw cranes with their skinny legs in the water, turtles sliding off logs, and alligators slipping from the banks into the water, spooked by the intruding vessel.

Before they’d left the launch, Boudreaux told her that he had heard stories about Leland Ticholet and his moonshiner daddy for years, but he wasn’t sure exactly where the Ticholet fishing camp was located, or even if it was still standing. The swamp, he explained, tended to lay claim to any building left uninhabited for long.

They passed by several small cabins built on poles, on floats, or constructed on barges. The deeper into the swamp they went, the fewer they saw, but more of the ones they did see were abandoned and in some progressive state of ruin.

Alexa wasn’t accustomed to speedboats. The fast turns and tight banks made her feel like the boat would keep sliding sideways and end up on dry land, but she did her best to lean against the turns and tried not to close her eyes when she became alarmed. She had no choice but to trust that Deputy Boudreaux knew the limits of his craft, and would not lose control of it or slam it into a submerged log. Although the confident deputy seemed to know the lanes, Alexa couldn’t imagine how anyone could differentiate one of the waterways from another.

“The Ticholets are barn-burners from way back,” the deputy told them. Alexa knew the expression meant that they got even with people for slights. “Leland’s grandfather was executed for murdering another fisherman in a bar, then Leland’s daddy was killed in a shootout with his common-law wife about ten, twelve years ago. Hell, they shot at each other all the time. That particular fight lasted all morning, and she got hit several times before she put a fatal round into his heart. She lost her left hand and a leg below the knee. I see her some, riding around town in her scooter chair. Her place got burned to the waterline, and she claimed Leland did that. He was fifteen or sixteen at the time.

“I was in on arresting Leland a couple years back. He thinks and acts like a wild animal, in most respects. You sure can’t reason with him. He isn’t exactly stupid, just primitive.”

Alexa, sitting with the Mossberg in her lap, found herself wishing they had brought along more manpower. She looked down, taking in the absurdity of Manseur’s rolled-up suit pants, his exposed ankles sheathed in thin nylon dress socks, and the wingtips on his small feet. This Ticholet was a wanted fugitive fleeing from an assault and abduction, kidnapping, and if Tinsdale had died from Casey’s bullets, a murder. And it sounded like he was a volatile and dangerous man under normal circumstances. She knew Manseur was a good detective, but she wasn’t all that confident that the group in the boat constituted a SWAT team.

Alexa was an adequate handgun shot, but her shooting experience was on a range, punching holes in paper. She didn’t know, but she hoped Kennedy and Bond were more experienced than she was. Sure, they were hunters, but deer didn’t return fire. Boudreaux was an unknown element, because a sheriff’s deputy might not have adequate training, or even could be with the department simply because a cousin was the sheriff. In Alexa’s mind, they were all just investigators.

Leland Ticholet was completely at home in this inhospitable world, and she and the others were just passing through it.

Well, hopefully just passing through.