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.