“Jack? I can’t talk to the bushes. We need to talk face-to-face.”
Foote was about fifty yards away, a long shot for a handgun. Jack stood up, immediately dropped back down as the shot rang out.
Foote came crashing toward him through the brush, firing again. Jack ran at a crouch, diagonally away, another shot pursuing him, snipping leaves and twigs off.
“Your daughter’s dead meat!”
Jack continued on as fast as he could, weaving through the narrow gaps, moving in unexpected directions, the sleet and wind covering his tracks. But something happened, something snapped. The fear and paralysis vanished, replaced by anger. Searing, furious rage. The bastard had kidnapped his daughter, bound her, tried to kill him—and would surely kill them both at his first opportunity.
With the rage came a sudden clarity of mind. He could think again. And his thoughts were terrible indeed.
Foote, in his noisy pursuit, had lost track of Jack’s position.
“Ha, ha, Jack. I wasn’t aiming for you. Look, let’s just talk. We can work this out, and you’ll get your daughter back. Make it a hundred grand.”
Jack recalled hearing the slamming of a car door after he’d been shot. It had been close to the house. No doubt that’s where Corrie was being held. But where, exactly, was it?
Orienting himself, Jack began moving swiftly but stealthily through the densest part of the woods, making a loop around Foote, who continued to broadcast his position by alternately cajoling and making threats. Finally he heard the man say: “That’s it! She’s dead!” And then he heard him moving decisively through the forest.
Jack paused and picked up a pebble. With his good arm, he lofted it behind and to the side, where it rattled in some bushes. He could hear Foote stop, move quickly in that direction.
“Jack! I know where you are! One… two… three…!”
Jack used the man’s movement and his loud voice as an opportunity to move quickly himself, once again laterally, but now in a new direction, based on where Foote seemed to be heading. Foote called out a few more times and then began to move as well—very fast—through the forest.
Jack picked up another pebble and tossed it, but it ricocheted off a tree—not as artfully placed as the other.
“Throwing rocks, are we? It ain’t gonna work, asshole!”
Just keep yelling, thought Jack as he used the opportunity to sprint across an open area into another thicket. The sleet was coming down hard now, soaking him to the bone.
As he moved, he realized he was significantly behind Foote. He had to move faster. He threw another rock, which was answered by several shots aimed vaguely in his direction. He could indeed hear Foote continue pushing his way back toward the cabin, repeating his threats and describing in graphic detail what he was going to do to Corrie.
“I’m gonna do her brown, Jack—think about that! And then I’ll strangle her, slowly!”
Jack sprinted at a crouch, scurrying through the laurel. The lashing of the storm allowed him to move almost at a run. He could hear Foote’s yelling getting louder. He had to hurry, hurry.
Ahead, Jack saw an opening in the dark, cold forest—the track. Foote had stopped yelling. He pushed forward through the brush, keeping parallel to the road, as silently as possible, until he saw a dull gleam. There it was, parked pretty much where he thought it would be.
But Foote was closer to the car than he was—too close. The gun was visible in one bleeding hand. Foote was chuckling as he opened the rear door.
“Get ready, bitch,” he said.
All the strength fled from Jack’s limbs and he collapsed to the ground. This was it. He was too late. It was all over.
At that moment, something dark in color—one of Corrie’s boots, followed by a jeans-covered leg—flashed out from the rear seat toward Foote. The boot caught him squarely in the crotch with a savage impact. Foote gasped in pain and staggered backward, dropping the gun.
In an instant, Jack was on his feet. In another, he was atop Foote, ignoring the gun in the grass, instead bringing the penknife down into the man’s face with one smooth, swift motion, the blade going straight into his eye. The knife sank into the orb, the ocular jelly squirting out, the knife scraping against the thin bone in the back. Foote jerked and thrashed with an inarticulate roar, hands flying to his face. Jack fell on the gun, grabbed it, then trained it on Foote while the man lay rolling in agony, blood leaking between the hands gripping his face. Jack raised the gun, pointed it at Foote’s head.
“No!” came the voice from behind him.
Jack turned. It was Corrie, lying in the backseat, hands tied behind her back.
“We need him alive,” she said. “We need him to talk.”
For a moment, Jack said nothing. Then, slowly, he lowered the gun. His eyes fell to her ankles. They were free, a pair of plastic cuffs lying scuffed and severed on the floor of the rear seat.
Corrie followed his glance. “There was a burr in the metal rail behind the driver’s seat,” she said.
And now Jack came forward. Wiping off the bloody penknife, he used it to cut through the plastic handcuffs. In another moment he was wordlessly hugging his daughter like he had never hugged anyone before in his life, the tears streaming down both their faces.
57
IT WAS A COOL MORNING AFTER A NIGHT OF RAIN, THE mists drifting over the surface of the river, as they set off from the last town on the Rio Itajaí do Sul, the southernmost tributary of the Rio Itajaí.
Mendonça, in a foul mood and nursing a hangover, guided the boat upriver. The naturalist, Fawcett, resumed his seat in the bow, no longer reading his book but keeping a lookout for butterflies. Once in a while he would shout for Mendonça to slow down when he spotted a butterfly fluttering along the river’s edge, and once he demanded that they actually chase a butterfly with the boat, with him leaning over the bow, swiping at the thing with his net until he caught it.
The last town on the river had been a sad, dirty, horrible little place called Colonia Marimbondo. While there, Mendonça had made careful inquiries about Nova Godói: where it was, how to recognize the landing place along the river. He had gathered most of his information at the local cervejaria, the central beer hall in the town, where he had been forced to spend his hard-earned money buying endless rounds to encourage the uncommunicative villagers to talk. What he had finally managed to squeeze out of them had unsettled him greatly. Most of it was no doubt superstition and sheer ignorance, but it badly unnerved him nonetheless.
They had set off early, just at dawn, the sound of the engine echoing off the wall of araucaria trees, dripping after a night of rain. Mendonça could feel the wetness gathering in his hair and beard and creeping through his shirt.
God in heaven, he couldn’t wait for this to be over.
Around noon, they came around a broad bend in the river, and there, on the right-hand bank, stood a floating dock with a ramp leading up to a rickety wooden quay. Beyond the high riverbank lay a partially overgrown clearing in the forest, with several rusting Quonset huts and a ramshackle wooden warehouse. It was exactly as the villagers had described it.
“We have arrived,” said Mendonça, eyeing the quay for signs of life. To his great relief, it looked abandoned.
He slowed the engine and angled the boat in, easing up to the dock, hopping out and tying it off. He stood on the dock as the naturalist, awkward as usual, hauled his pack out and transferred it to the dock, then got out himself, standing unsteadily and peering about.
“We have arrived,” Mendonça repeated, mustering a smile. He held out his hand. “The rest of the money, please, o senhor?”