Too Far Gone

82

From the cover of a scrub patch, Leland had watched the trespassers roar into his private inlet. He knew from the pilot’s brown uniform, and the shotguns, the man and woman with the gold words on the backs of their coats, that they were cops. The gal cop had light brown skin, but he could tell she had some nigra blood in her, only not nearly as much as the dead lady warden, who’d been as black as a deer’s eyes. He remembered seeing the gal cop at the house where Doc got shot. He didn’t know if they had come because of what happened at the little house the night before, or because they were looking to find the warden trespassers, but he sure couldn’t imagine how they had found his camp.

He should have gotten rid of Doc’s body like he did the wardens’, let the alligators and varmints crap out the meat and scatter the bones. Maybe they had come to take his new boat. He didn’t have the pink papers because he didn’t know where Doc had put them. He tried to ask him, but Doc wasn’t able to tell Leland anything. He had looked through Doc’s pockets and in the briefcase, but there was no pink paper with a picture of a boat in there.

He’d watched the man and woman jump off the boat as it neared his dock. Leland aimed at them until they went inside. He could swim the bayou and go deeper into the swamp and wait until they left, but he couldn’t allow them to take his boat. He wasn’t of a mind to walk out and leave it behind.

The deputy tied up his police boat. Leland thought that the deputy, a man he was sure he’d seen before, was their pilot, and had guided them to his camp. He was pretty sure the deputy had helped arrest him and send him to the crazy house. If he didn’t do something, he might bring others another time, and Leland couldn’t afford to let that happen.

From forty feet away, Leland aimed the rifle at the pilot’s head, putting the sights on the man’s eye as he raised his radio to talk. When Leland fired, the deputy’s sunglasses fell off and his body froze for a split second, before falling backward to the planks. Now Leland would kill the other two and get rid of their boat, all the bodies, and then everything would be back to normal. Doc had told him a big storm was coming, and people would think they got killed by it. They might think he killed them, but they couldn’t prove it without the bodies to show a judge.

He would take his boat out, and sneak back to finish up. Once they were sure he was gone, they’d be easy targets. He broke cover, ran to his boat, started it, firing at the cabin to keep them inside until he got going.

He crouched down behind the pilot’s backrest so they couldn’t see to shoot him while he started it and gunned the engines. It went just as he planned, until two men on the bank shot his motor dead. He had turned toward the left bank and run off the boat and clambered to shore and to safety, carrying his Remington Nylon 66 carbine, a gun he’d inherited from his father. It was a good thing getting it wet didn’t keep it from working. That gun was one you didn’t ever have to clean but for running a brush through the barrel sometimes and oiling it a tad a couple times a year.

So there were two cops armed with high-powered rifles and two with shotguns. When Leland got on dry land, he looked back at where the shots had come from, and when he saw the men, he fired, hitting one in the leg. Everybody knew that cops wore bulletproof vests, so he had to make head shots on them-from closer range-or shoot them in their legs or arms to immobilize them. Wounded, the cop would be easier to finish off, after Leland dealt with the others.

Four wasn’t so many. Leland had ten rounds in the rifle.

He listened hard to see if he could hear any boats approaching with more cops in it. When he didn’t hear one, he smiled.