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.