Inverness swung the flatboat, cut the motor just before they nosed up onto the muddy bank. Again Dain heard that odd echo as if another, distant motor also had been cut. Minus had already leaped out into the sucking ankle-deep ooze. Dain joined him and together they pulled up the boat. Minus seemed to be coming out of his depression.
“We leave de flatboat here tomorrow, go on by pirogue. Dis here boat, we have to go roun’ on de open water couple mile ahead. Bayou too shallow for it. Dat take a extra day. Wit de pirogue we be at de fishin’ camp demain — dis bayou take us right to it.”
An hour later night had fallen, their tent was up with the mosquito flies closed, Inverness was at the cookfire making supper in a blackened frypan, and Dain was holding a flashlight steady for Minus. The Cajun was knee-deep in the water tying short lines with hooks baited with bacon squares onto sturdy branches of the overhanging bushes. As he secured each weighted hook and line, he dropped it into the water.
“Mebbe we get us some catfish fo’ breffus,” he said.
He and Dain scoured the pots and dishes with wet sand and poured boiling water over them, then waited for the coffee to boil in the big battered blue enamel pot. Inverness was inside the tent, his silhouette moving against the nylon as he pumped up the kerosene mantle lantern. He picked up what looked like a heavy belt in silhouette, put it around his waist, cinched it tight.
Idly watching his shadow actions, each of them listened to the sounds of the night, the rustle of a small mammal in the bushes, the bass carrunking of bullfrogs, the thin whine of mosquitoes, the thrum of a nighthawk passing in a rush of wings.
It all sounded peaceful, but Dain wasn’t fooled any more. Nothing lived unless something else died.
Inverness came out, hung the hissing lantern on the tent pole. Dain squinted at the sudden white light. One silhouetted action was explained: a .357 Magnum in a tooled leather holster now hung at the lawman’s lean hip. Dain poured steaming coffee into a thick white mug. Minus lumbered to his feet.
“I go check dem bush lines we set,” he said. At the edge of the lamplight, he turned back. “Tu sais somebody been followin’ us all day? Stoppin’ de motor when we stop ours, startin’ up again when we start ours?”
Neither man answered him. With a shrug he went off down toward the river, flashlight in hand.
Inverness, looking after him, slowly sank to a woodsman’s squat with his back almost touching the front tent pole. Dain watched him, his eyes sharp and hard. Inverness shook his head in wonder.
“Who in hell could it be?”
Dain said, “I have a pretty good idea, but why ask me? You’re the boy’s been blazing a trail for them all day that even I could have followed.”
25
Neither man shifted his position, but the gauntlet had been thrown. There was a subtle tension in their poses, yet from a distance they still could have been a couple of old friends discussing the day’s events in the camp. The fire crackled, sending sparks swirling up into the darkness.
“Why would I do a thing like that?” Inverness asked lazily.
“For the same reason you ran us all over this swamp day before yesterday when you knew damn well where the Broussards’ store was. So the killers could get there first.”
“You think I wanted her folks—”
“No, I think you wanted Vangie caught because you’re on somebody’s pad and were told to want her caught.” Dain sat up, drew up his knees, hooked his arms around them, feeling as if there were cobwebs on his brain. “She wasn’t there and things got out of hand and the old people died.”
Inverness shifted his position while remaining in his tireless wide-kneed squat. His voice did not match his face, which was tense, watchful, perhaps even a little regretful.
“And whose pad are you suggesting I’m on?”
“Whoever told you I was in New Orleans. I think you’re even more interested in me than in Vangie.”
“You think too much, Dain.”
“Five years ago—”
“I don’t know anything about five years ago.”
Dain got control. “Five years ago a contract was put out on me because I was too good at finding out things. My wife and child died. Five years ago you soured on mankind, took to the swamps. Is there a connection? I get the feeling there is.”
“Don’t be a fool,” said Inverness scornfully. “If you want to find someone to pay for your family, go after the guy who put out the contract.”
“He died. That leaves me with the man who brokered the hit and the men who carried it out. It’s taken me five years of looking, but I think I’ve finally hit a raw nerve.”
Inverness chuckled. “Christ, Dain, you’re really out of your tree. What’s the word they used to use? Overwrought? Having the vapors? Which one am I supposed to be? The guy who brokered it or the guy who carried it out?”
“I didn’t say that. But hitmen aren’t thugs, you know — they’re specialists.”
“Like me.”
“Like you,” he said stubbornly.
He knew Inverness was right, he was reaching, there was a hollow feeling in his gut he’d never had when he’d been playing chess. Paranoia. But he couldn’t stop himself. It was like he was a kid again, that feeling of helplessness from childhood, the unnamed fears that playing chess had conquered. Five years ago he’d quit playing chess, but had kept them at bay by playing other, more dangerous games. Now, all finished.
“Why did you drag me up to view Zimmer’s body?” he heard himself asking like a betrayed kid. “You aren’t even a Homicide cop. And Maxton. Somebody told Maxton where to find Vangie so he could get to her before I did, and I think...”
Inverness stood up in one smooth movement, his head touching the hissing kerosene lamp so it danced on its tent pole hook. It cast moving light and shadow down over his face.
“I’ve had enough of this crap.”
Minus entered the rim of lantern light holding up a massive wriggling catfish. “Lookit dis catfish was on de—”
Inverness, startled, spun toward Minus. His boot grated on a fallen branch, a silver ring glinted on his left hand.
A bulky man, a sawed-off shotgun in his hands, was silhouetted in moving shadow by moonlight through the trees outside the cabin. His heavy boots grated on the bare plank floor. A silver ring glinted on his finger.
Dain wasn’t ready. He gaped in total astonishment even as the .357 Magnum boomed, blowing Minus backward, arms flying, fish flying, blood spilling. Belatedly, he reacted, kicking the coffeepot and already rolling as it hit Inverness in the gut. The gun roared again and dirt jumped where his chest had been.
He was zigzagging out of the firelight as the Magnum roared three more times, chipping wood from a tree in front of him, blowing a branch off a bush just beside him, splattering mud at his heel. He was out of the light when the final shot brought a cry and a loud splash.
Inverness flipped out the cylinder, shaking out the spent brass. By the hissing lamplight he reloaded methodically, his movements casual, unhurried. A minor thrashing in the brush flared his nostrils and sent him into his predator’s crouch; but then he relaxed, got down the lantern and walked to the sprawled body of Minus. He sighed and holstered his gun and grabbed the dead Cajun by an ankle.
He dragged Minus down to the water, heaved him as far in as he could one-handed, then, still keeping the lantern raised high, used his boot to shove him out far enough for the slow surge of current to take him. The body slid downstream into darkness.
Crouching, Inverness checked the edge of the stream for the deep muddy marks where Dain had run down into the water. He edged forward a foot at a time until he was satisfied.