“That’s what you do, isn’t it?” Rebecca asked. “Hunt men?”
“When the price is right.”
“A third of what he’s got hidden plus the bounty—that sounds right,” Rebecca said.
Decker pushed his plate away and reached for his mug of cold beer.
“All right,” he said after a healthy swallow. “The other question is for my own curiosity.”
“What?”
“How do you have enough money to come to New Orleans and afford a hotel like this?”
Brian looked at Rebecca again, and she nodded. He shrugged and said sort of sheepishly, “We robbed banks along the way.”
Chapter XXXXI
Decker agreed because he wanted to close the book on this Foxx-twins thing. He still didn’t think that Brian and Rebecca were telling him the whole truth.
He did believe, however, that they had robbed banks in order to get the money they needed to come here. It hadn’t taken Brian Foxx nearly as long to get back to work as he had projected, and Rebecca Foxx just wasn’t the same person she was before she was raped by the comancheros. That incident, once she had recovered from it, seemed to have brought out a new toughness in her—that and the murder of her brother, who had been killed by her brother-in-law, Decker reminded himself.
Something definitely was not right here.
“We know approximately where he is,” Brian said the next morning at Decker’s hotel. “About two to three miles straight in, there’s an island. He’s there.”
“An island?”
“Well, technically it’s an island. The water around it isn’t even knee-deep. You’ll have to leave your horse at one point and walk, though. It gets pretty dense and then opens up again as you approach the island.”
“How do you know he’s there?”
“Well…I did talk to him, Decker. He wouldn’t give me any of the money.”
“And he let you walk out?”
“We’re brothers, Decker.”
“Then why are you afraid to go back in?”
“There’s such a thing as pushing your luck.”
Decker knew all about that.
He decided to leave John Henry behind and rent a horse. He didn’t want to have to leave the gelding alone in the swamp.
Brian and Rebecca saw him off from his hotel, and said they’d meet him back at theirs later that day.
“Shouldn’t take you more than a day,” Brian said.
“You’ve got a lot of confidence in me, Brian.”
“Always,” Brian said, smiling.
Decker headed for the livery to rent a horse.
The island was exactly where they had said it was, and by the time Decker got there his feet were soaked. On the island he removed his boots, dumped the brackish swamp water out of them, and put them back on over his wet socks. He wondered how much money Brent Foxx was sitting on. Enough, he hoped, Tomake this discomfort worth it.
He found the shack about a hundred yards in. The front door was hanging by one hinge and it looked deserted. He circled it first, but he didn’t spot any movement inside. He looked around out-side, but the result was the same. It didn’t look as if anyone had been there for weeks.
He approached the shack cautiously, his hand on his gun, but he needn’t have bothered. No one challenged him as he got to the door, and when he stuck his head inside, the smell hit him and he knew he wouldn’t need his gun.
Brent was inside on the floor. His head was caved in, and the blood had long since caked. Maggots and flies inhabited the body, which meant it had been there quite a long time. Decker bent over and lifted Brent’s shirt gingerly to look underneath. He nodded at what he saw, and then stood up and searched the shack. He found nothing. There was, however, an empty leather satchel on the floor.
He went back outside and looked around again. Behind the house there was a tepid stream running off from the bayou. It wasn’t good for anything, being too filthy to drink or bathe in, yet in one place there was a pair of boot prints indelibly set in the mud, as if Brent had squatted there every day.
Why?
Decker went over, squatted in the footprints, and stuck his hand in the water. The stream was about six inches deep, and at the bottom he felt something smooth and metallic. He reached in with both hands and found that a metal box had been buried at the bottom of the stream. He lifted it out and carried it to the shack.
Inside he forced the box open. Inside, wrapped well in pieces of a rain slicker that had been cut to size, were stacks of money. He opened one and found it dry. He opened them all and laid them on a wooden table.
They were bank notes, held together in packs by paper rings from an assortment of banks. From the looks of it, he judged there to be close to sixty thousand dollars. There was also a little something extra inside the box, also wrapped and kept dry. He put everything inside the leather satchel and started back.
His third would come to twenty thousand, plus the twenty-five hundred on Brent’s head.
Not bad for a day’s work.
“I’d like to see Mr. and Mrs. Foxx,” Decker said to the clerk. It was the same prissy-faced man, and Decker had not taken the time to change after he had left the bayou. He had the satchel with him, and he wanted to get their business over with so he could leave New Orleans.
“Sir,” Prissy Face said. Then he looked at the register and said, “Oh, they checked out, sir.”
“Checked out? When?”
“This morning.”
Either before or after he had left. But why check out? Why call him all this way to find a dead body and sixty thousand dollars, and then check out?
“All right, thank you.”
To the delight of the clerk he left, and once out-side he hailed a cab and told the unhappy driver to take him to the New Orleans House.
If he hadn’t been so damned puzzled—and tired—he might have figured it out.
When he opened the door to his room, the first thing he saw was Rebecca on his bed, naked. When she saw him, she rose to her knees and preened for him, thrusting out her beautiful breasts and sucking in her already flat stomach. She was a vision, and he froze…long enough for Brian to step out from behind the door and put the barrel of his gun in Decker’s ear.
“I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist a pretty…face.”
Across the room Rebecca was already off the bed and dressing, her face crimson.
“The money Decker,” Brian said. He took the satchel from Decker’s hand and tossed it on the bed. Rebecca turned and opened it. Meanwhile, Brian took Decker’s gun from his holster.
“I knew I could count on you, Decker.”
“You killed your own brother, didn’t you, Brent?” Decker asked. “I told him, I warned him that you would.”
“Shut up.”
“He found you on that island, where he went to talk to you, and you killed him.”
“He wanted the money, all of it, he said. He walked in there like he thought he could still control me. Well, I showed him who was in control.”
Rebecca had some of the money on the bed, pawing through it, and now she looked up, puzzled, as if parts of their conversation had gotten through to her, but not all of it.
“What?” she said.
“Your husband is not your husband, Mrs. Foxx,” Decker said “He’s your brother-in-law.”
“No, it can’t be…” she said, letting it trail off.
“Oh, I have a hunch that it is,” Decker replied.
“You’re saying that this is…Brent?” she said. “The man who killed my brother?”
“Brian went into the bayou, Rebecca, but Brent came out. You mean you haven’t noticed anything different about him since then?” Decker didn’t wait for her reply.