Inverness would be coming after him first, but would be blazing that trail for the others to follow. He had no illusions about Inverness being able to find the place. Inverness knew the swamp well enough to have gotten a clear idea from Minus of the camp’s location on Bayou Noire. But Dain doubted the pursuers would have another pirogue. They would have to go the long way around, giving him time to make Vangie safe.
And to prepare for whatever destiny faced him in this swamp. He wasn’t going to be a rabbit cowering in its burrow when they came. More a tough and wily badger they’d have to dig out. A badger with teeth and claws and a will to live.
All the ties were loosened. He reached for the pirogue and began moving it off the flatboat with infinite care.
Torchlight hit his back and Inverness fired down the beam of light from the brush where he had been waiting for five cramped and silent hours. The slug hit Dain in the back by the top of his shoulder blade, just below his trapezius muscle. He was driven forward by the blow, splashing and stumbling, his clutching nerveless hand flipping the pirogue over the top of him as the fading thought went through his mind, Rabbit, not badger after all...
As he went under, two more shots in rapid succession hit the water just where his head had disappeared and Inverness went crashing through the brush to the water’s edge, charging out after the pirogue. But it was drifting more rapidly now, just too far for him to reach. He kept the beam of his flashlight on the overturned craft, seeking any sign of Dain’s head breaking water, trotting and ducking and slogging along the narrow muddy overgrown shore to keep even with it.
At the tail end of the island he stopped, gun in hand, staring after the drifting pirogue. Finally he turned away. He knew he’d gotten Dain this time, and the pirogue wasn’t going anywhere. He could go down and pick it up in the morning while waiting for Maxton to show up.
Maxton. Maybe he ought to grab Maxton and the two goons and take them back and turn them in for killing Vangie’s folks and Minus... It would square him with his superiors for rushing off into the swamp without leave... maybe save his pension...
Fuck. What was he thinking of? There were still the bonds. Maxton wanted them and he wanted the girl — probably to kill her, if what happened to her folks was any indication. If Inverness brought them in, sure, he’d have his pension. But if he just killed them and sank them in the swamp, he’d have the bonds. Just him. Nobody else knew about them except Maxton.
Of course if Dain were still alive, Maxton and his men would also be useful, no, essential, until Dain was
“Goddam you!” he said aloud to himself, then realized he was really addressing Dain. He was starting to get superstitious about the fucking man, as if he had supernatural powers of survival or something...
He started resolutely away back up the islet toward camp.
He had shot Dain in the back. With a .357 Magnum. Dain was dead, dead dead dead as fucking Jesus. He wasn’t going anywhere except the mud at the bottom of the channel, thrust there by some patient gator to ripen until he could be torn into proper bite-size pieces and eaten.
Fucking Dain was dead.
26
A delicate palette knife of dawn slid through the flooded sentinel trees, laying watercolor washes of gray over the gradations of black. Here and there a bird called, something in the water splashed. Far off a Louisiana panther made a dark sawing sound, then screamed like a woman in labor.
Two flooded hardwoods leaned their heads together over the bayou, their leaves in whispered conversation, their feet in the water. One of them forked some distance above the ground. The fork held a nest containing three greenish white eggs. What looked like a large water snake swam rapidly to the base of the tree, started to slither up the trunk.
Suddenly it was a bird, a sinuous-necked sleek-bodied bird called a snakebird. Its webbed feet had strong climbing claws. When it reached the fork, it perched on one of the branches and preened its wet feathers to redistribute the oil that made its feathers waterproof. Then it sidestepped awkwardly over to settle on top of the eggs.
A dingy patch of mustard yellow showed far below, in the tangle of brush and driftwood caught between the bases of the trees. Minus had been deposited there sometime in the night by the gentle but persistent currents. His dead eyes stared up the trunk at the snakebird far above. When dawn broke, his shirt became a bright eye-catching gold.
The upside-down pirogue drifted up, carried by the gentle current against the same tangle of driftwood and brush as Minus. It clung there. It rocked, sending out ripples. The snakebird started up in alarm, then settled back again.
Inverness, untroubled by bad dreams, had slept until well after sunup. In finally killing Dain, he had killed his doubts. By the light of day, last night’s secret and half-formed fears seemed silly. Dain had been shot in the back with a .357 Magnum, his lungs had filled with blood, and he had died. End of story.
Inverness breakfasted leisurely on a small catfish from one of Minus’s brush lines, then set out to fetch the pirogue before Maxton showed up; it would save them a day. A mile below the island he abandoned outboard for push pole: the water was shoaling rapidly. He rounded a curve in the bayou, and a snakebird flapped down from one of a brace of flooded-out hardwoods with a loud miffed squawk, swept over the water away from the flatboat.
In a tangle of driftwood and brush at the base of the tree was Minus, lying faceup and bare-torsoed; the crabs had been feeding around the bullet hole in his chest. Inverness stood in the flatboat looking down at him. The logical place for the current to have deposited him. All fine so far.
But this was the logical place, also, for the current to have deposited the pirogue and Dain. Inverness had fully expected both to be wherever Minus fetched up, or at least the pirogue if Dain with his perforated lungs had sunk.
He raised his head, looked around the swamp, contentment oozing away. No pirogue in sight, swirled against some other deadhead by a vagrant eddy of current.
Last night Minus had been wearing a bright yellow shirt. Now it was gone. Only Dain could have taken it. But how the fuck could the man have survived being shot with a .357 Magnum? How had he survived being shot thrice with a shotgun and left to die in a burning cabin?
He checked the bole of the tree, the brush pile near Minus for sign just to be sure. Yes. A fresh indentation that could have been made by the pirogue’s prow; and there, the brush was crushed. He could almost picture the scene. The boat, suddenly a human hand would have broken water beside it, groped, found Minus’s face as something to get purchase on, closed about it...
Yes, that was the way it would have gone. Another minute would have gone by, then Dain would have dragged himself partway up out of the brown water. Would have lain there, gasping, facedown, across Minus. One arm hanging uselessly from the bullet that had entered his back and must somehow have exited high enough up in his chest to have missed heart and lung. But still he would have coughed raspingly, startling the snakebird. When he had, fresh red wetness would have spread from the wound.
So he would have taken Minus’s shirt to use as a sling to immobilize the arm, also perhaps as packing to make the wound bleed less. Then he would have righted the pirogue with his one good arm, gotten in, poled away. One-armed.
Jesus, it wasn’t over yet. Inverness knew he would not sleep tonight, no matter how many men Maxton had with him.