by Greg Iles
Chapter
29
Panic drives me through the trees without direction. A single thought burns through the flood of endorphins in my brain: get away from the man in the truck. A second gunshot quickly follows the first, and one look over my shoulder tells me that the shooter has followed me into the woods. Now and then he flicks on a flashlight to find his way through the trees. From his careful progress, I know one thing: he’s driving me southward, down an ever-narrowing strip of land. It’s only a matter of time before he corners me on the tip of the island, a bare patch of sand with a mile of rushing water at my back.
I need to find a way to slip around him, but on this ground that’s almost impossible. The island here is like tropical jungle. The willow and cottonwood brakes give good cover, but there’s too much underbrush on the ground to move quietly, even in the rain. There’s only one other chance.
The boat ramp is on the west side of the island, facing the main channel of the river. If the shooter were farther behind me, I might have time to launch the fishing boat before he reached me. But he’s not. I’ve got to slow him down. But how? I have no weapons. As I fight my way through the underbrush, an image comes into my mind—bull nettle. Bull nettle is a twisting green vine about four feet high that bristles with thousands of hypodermic needles. Those needles inject a painful toxin into any animal that rubs against it. Horses will lie down in bull nettle to avoid brushing against more of it. In humans it causes painful itching and hives, and the effect is immediate. The southern tip of DeSalle Island is covered with bull nettle.
I veer south again. Tree branches whip my face, and peppervine claws at the legs of my jeans. Here the ground rises and falls in three-foot undulations, and I pray not to step on a cottonmouth as I splash through the dark slews. I’ve seen fifty moccasins together roiling the water in the drying pools.
The rain falls relentlessly, and the sound of my pursuer crashing through the brush grows nearer. Sweat pours from my skin, and my heart thumps against my breastbone. Free diving keeps me in good physical shape, but terror steals my breath, and alcohol withdrawal probably isn’t helping matters.
As I slow to get my bearings, the rifle cracks again, driving willow splinters into my left arm. I duck down and scramble between two cottonwood trunks, then crab-crawl through the dark until my arms begin to itch like fire. Bull nettle! There’s a thicket of the stuff all around me. I could never have imagined being glad to feel this pain, but at this moment I’m ecstatic.
Thirty yards into the thicket, I bear right, toward the boat ramp. Before I cover twenty yards, the sound of cursing floats through the trees. With a tight smile on my face, I rise and sprint for the west side of the island. A light beam cuts the air close by, but then a scream of male rage echoes through the trees. I can’t make out his words, or even if there were any.
My heart lifts with hope as I hit a level patch of sand, cause for joy until I spy a string stretched across my path at thigh level. It’s an old trotline strung with rusty fishhooks, and though I twist my body torturously in an effort to avoid it, nothing can stop my headlong flight. I swallow a scream as the hooks tear into my flesh. The line rips free from whatever held it as I fall, but the treble hooks are well and truly buried in my right thigh.
The rifle booms again, its echo rolling over sandy berms like cannon fire. My hunter heard my scream and got a new fix on my position. I pray he doesn’t know about the boat ramp, but what are the odds of that? I’m almost certain that it’s Jesse Billups behind me. Who else knew where I was?
At the top of a dune, I catch myself and stop. The main channel of the Mississippi has opened before me, its far shore a mile away, cloaked in rain and darkness. Get down! shouts a voice in my head. You’re silhouetted against the clouds!
Sliding down the dune, I race south along the bank, skirting cypress knees and driftwood snags. There’s the boat ramp, forty yards along the shore. Its concrete slab runs right down into the water at a steep angle. A glitter-coated bass boat sits on a trailer on the sand about five feet above the river. The problem is, it’s totally exposed. To launch that boat quickly, I’ll have to unsecure it from the trailer, lift the hitch end of the trailer, and heave both trailer and boat down the ramp into the water. If I can manage that, the boat should float free while the trailer sinks into the depths. I’ll have to swim freestyle with the fast current to catch the boat and board it, but I can do that. I’d rather swim the damned river with one arm than fight this island on foot anymore.
The boat ramp looks deserted from here, but that means nothing. If I walk into that open space unprotected, a ten-year-old could pick me off with a rifle. I crouch near the river’s edge, my senses primed for the slightest stimulus.
Something’s not right. I don’t hear my pursuer anymore. The wind is louder on the exposed bank, but I should hear something. The rain raking the water sounds like rain hitting a tin roof, only the pitch is higher—almost a hiss. The southerly wind blasting upcurrent is building whitecaps three feet high. Rough going for a bass boat.
I need a weapon. A tree branch? Not much good against a rifle. A rock? Same problem. What do I have with me…?
Cell phone. If I can get close enough to my attacker to identify him before he shoots me, I can give his name to the police—and tell him I’m doing it. Killing me at that point would be the act of an idiot. Or a lunatic, counters the voice in my head.
Taking the Ziploc out of my pocket, I see silver metal but no electric light. Did the sealed bag somehow short it out? I squeeze the phone through the plastic, and the light of the screen clicks on. My joy is short-lived. The screen reads, NO SERVICE.
Shit! I need to move to higher ground. There’s no true high ground on the island, but there are better spots than this.
A blue beam of light sweeps over me, nearly stopping my heart. It’s the push boat again, driving its barges upriver. Any hope there? I could signal the crew by standing in the spotlight and waving my arms, but that would be suicide. I could try swimming out to the boat, but I would probably be sucked under its barges and into its massive propellers.
I’m thinking of sprinting north along the shore, away from the boat ramp, when a flashlight beam shines out of the woods behind me and moves steadily along the bank. In seconds it will pick out my hunched body on the sand.
Without even thinking I shove the Baggie into my front pocket, crawl to the river’s edge, and slip into the current like a rat leaving a sinking ship. The water is cool but not cold, thank God, and it soothes the hives caused by the bull nettle. The waves are another matter. When I swam this river at sixteen, its surface was like glass. Now it batters me like breaking surf, and the rain lashes my face as I try to keep my head above the waves.
The flashlight sweeps over the spot I just left and lingers, but I’m no longer there. The current has me now. I’m moving along the shore at the speed of a jogging man, and a force like the hand of a giant is pulling me out into the river.
I feel no bottom below me because there are no shallows here. This part of the island forms the outside of a river bend, and so takes the full brunt of the current before deflecting it west. The cutting power of all that water is enormous. Wherever it hits a bank like this, the Mississippi gouges out a channel over a hundred feet deep. Compounding this effect, the river also narrows here, creating a sort of sluiceway that would knock down skyscrapers if they were placed in its path.
I’ve got to get my shoes off. My jeans, too. In this river, they’re more lethal than Jesse’s rifle. I’m reaching down to pull off my left shoe when the flashlight pins me to the crest of a wave. I don’t feel or see the impact of the bullet, but the whipcrack by my ear knocks my heart into my throat. Whoever is firing that rifle knows what the hell he’s doing. I’m a good shot, Jesse bragged, when telling me about my father.
I yank off the shoe and dive, exhaling to bleed off buoyancy, extending my limbs like sails to catch the current and drift more swiftly past the island.
When I surface again, the flashlight is gone.
Unsnapping my jeans, I try to peel myself out of them, but they’re tight even when dry. I curse my vanity, sinking like a stone as I fight to get the soaked denim off my legs. My left leg comes loose, but the other won’t. Kicking back to the surface, I see why. The fishhooks from the trotline have fastened the jeans to my thigh. Two prongs of the treble hook are buried deeply in my flesh. I’d like to rip the jeans to get them free, but even if I could manage to tear the wet denim, I can’t afford to do it—not with what I have in mind.
I pull gently on the central stem of the hooks, and a trickle of blood runs toward my groin. Getting fishhooks out of flesh is a tricky business. I’ve seen my grandfather remove dozens. Sometimes he snips off the loop and pushes the barb out through unwounded skin; other times he widens the hole with a scalpel and frees the barb the way it came in. Both methods take tools I don’t have.
It’s really a question of pain.
My fingers can’t grip the free hook firmly enough to rip out the other two, but my Tag Heuer watch has a steel band. Slipping the barb of the free hook into a crevice in the band, I turn my forearm so that I can jerk upward with maximum force. If I can stand the pain, this should rip the buried barbs out of my skin.
Taking a deep breath, I curl into a fetal position, then explode out of it, yanking my right arm up and my right leg down. The flesh of my thigh rises like a pup tent, and a scream bursts from my throat. Consciousness flickers, and my stomach starts to come up. My brain screams for me to stop, but in that moment I yank still harder, and something tears free.
Afraid it was only my watchband, I right myself in the water and look at my thigh. Where the hooks were embedded is now only a ragged hole streaming blood. It looks like a small, vicious animal took a hunk out of me. After retching in the water, I carefully remove the freed jeans leg, making sure I don’t hook myself again. I’m tempted to let the jeans sink into the river, but that would be a fool’s gesture. This pair of Banana Republics is going to save me.
Treading water with only my legs, I tie knots in both legs of the jeans. Then I put the jeans behind my head, take hold of each side of the waist, and whip them back over my head in a wide arc, trapping enough air in the makeshift life vest to keep me afloat for ten minutes. Then I lay my chin in the inverted crotch of the jeans, with the knotted legs sticking up like the arms of those inflatable figures you see at car dealerships. I learned how to do this on the swim team, and it works surprisingly well. Now I can devote some energy to trying to figure out where the hell I am in relation to the man who wants to kill me.
I’m fifty yards from the island now. All I can see is a narrow strip of beach, but then that, too, disappears. Fifty yards. Only fifteen hundred left to swim. Maybe seventeen hundred…
The safest thing to do would be to drift south along this bank for a mile or so, then climb ashore. The problem with that plan is that I’d be getting out of the river at a place called Iowa Point. This isn’t a town or even a crossroads, but only a dot on the map. The nearest telephone lies across five miles of uninhabited swamp. Uninhabited by humans, anyway. There are plenty of alligators and snakes to keep you company. Very little chance of a cellular transmission tower. But if I cross the river, I’ll come ashore less than a mile from Louisiana Highway 1, not far from the Morganza Spillway. There I can flag down a car—which shouldn’t be difficult in my underwear—or easily walk to a place where I’ll have cellular service.
Am I crazy to try it? Most people would say yes. But I swam this river fifteen years ago, and if I did it then, I can do it now. The fact that it almost killed me—under ideal conditions—is something best not dwelled upon. The trick, as I’ve told several people, is not to fight the current, or even to try to swim across the river. The trick is to float with the current and gradually vector out toward the thalweg, or deepest part of the channel. Once you reach that, the river will do its best to deposit you on the opposite shore of the next bend.
Under optimum conditions, that would happen about a half hour from now. But tonight there are complications. Darkness. Rain. Waves trying to beat me to death. A string of barges that I can’t see and that could crush me like a tractor-trailer squashing a mosquito. Any normal person dropped into this situation would drown within ten minutes. But I’m not normal. And at least the madman with the rifle has been removed from the equation.
My makeshift life preserver is steadily losing air. I’ll have to reinflate the jeans soon. Because of the pounding waves, I keep my right hand gripped over the jeans pocket that holds my bagged cell phone. Every time a wave carries me to its crest, I glance around to make sure I’m in no immediate danger. All kinds of debris gets swept into the river when it’s high. The biggest threat is logs. Some float high and dry, but others ride half-submerged, like alligators, tearing the props off pleasure boats and staving in the sides of barges. From the bridge at Natchez, I’ve watched hundred-foot trees bobbing like twigs in the muddy flood below.
Ten minutes of steady kicking move me into the main body of the river, and in that time I probably drift half a mile downstream. Now it’s barges that concern me. Though the last string has passed, others will come, and there’s simply no way to see them with these waves. The front barge in a string carries only two lights: green on the starboard side, red on the port. The push boat itself might be a thousand feet behind those lights, its pilot ignorant of anything happening below the bow of his waterborne freight train. If I’m crushed by barges, no one will ever know, not even the man who killed me.
The sound of an engine penetrates the hissing rain, and it chills my blood. The pitch is too high for a push-boat engine; it’s revving like a chain saw cutting its way across the surface of the river. If it were daylight, I might think it was a chain saw—sound travels amazing distances over water—but nobody’s cutting trees at this hour.
That revving sound is an outboard motor. Probably the Evinrude on the old bass boat I decided to leave on the island.
Jesse has come looking for me.
Chapter
30
Kicking up onto a wave crest, I see a flashlight bobbing up and down about thirty yards away. It’s hard to believe my pursuer could get this close by design, but maybe he heard my scream. If it is Jesse Billups, he probably knows the river well. I try to calm myself with logic: the odds of his sighting me in this maelstrom are low. As long as I keep my head down.
Pulling the deflating legs of my jeans beneath my arms, I lie flat on the surface and stop kicking. The whine of the motor gets louder, then dies, only to return again closer to me. Jesse must be as scared as I am. A submerged log could tear off his propeller, leaving him without power, or smash the side of his fiberglass boat and dump him into the river with me. His rifle wouldn’t do him any good there. I wonder if he can swim. His cousin Henry admitted he couldn’t. But Jesse was in the army. The 101st Airborne. They teach men to parachute in the Airborne. Do they teach them to swim? Maybe. It doesn’t really matter, though. If I can get him into the water with me, I can kill him.
All I have to do is get close enough to tangle him up. Like a squid drowning a sperm whale. Even if he were choking me, I could drag him under and keep him there until his brain winked out like an old lightbulb. It’s a strange thing to contemplate. The only person I’ve ever thought about killing before is myself.
The motor revs suddenly, not twenty yards from my right ear. Sucking in a lungful of air, I duck my head and drop three feet underwater, clinging only to the jeans pocket that holds my cell phone. I hear the prop spinning, a high-pitched whine like a kitchen blender. The boat doesn’t seem to be moving, though, only holding its position in the river. Did Jesse catch sight of me in the waves?
For two minutes I float like the fetus in my womb, listening to the spinning prop. He must have seen me. Why else would he remain in one place? Surfacing slowly, I raise my eyes above the water. This time a white shaft of light slices through the rain like the eye of God. F
or an instant I think it’s a push boat, but the beam is too near the water. No…it’s a Q-Beam spotlight mounted on a pivot on the bass boat’s hull. Whoever is piloting that boat either just remembered that spotlight or just discovered it. Maybe the gunman isn’t Jesse Billups. The foreman of the island would have switched on that spotlight as soon as he launched the boat.
The Q-Beam rakes over the waves like a searchlight in a prison movie. First this way, then that, occasionally returning to one spot or another in the frothing waves. Once, when the light lingers upstream, I see the massive root-ball of a tree moving in the glare. Half the twisted roots are above the water, and by the size of them, the tree itself must be eighty feet long.
The drone of the motor rises, and the searchlight moves closer to the tree. Its white beam probes the tangled root structure, its operator obviously looking for a stowaway on this natural vessel. Without warning, the light whips back around toward me. Submerging again, I feel my jeans adding to my weight.
The air in them is gone.
I need to reinflate them, but whipping them over my head right now would be like waving a flag. Like most of my decisions, my next is made purely by instinct. Carefully removing the Ziploc containing my cell phone from my pocket, I let the jeans sink in the river. Then I kick toward the bass boat, using the spotlight as my guide. My goal isn’t the boat itself—or the man in it—but the tree floating toward it.
After thirty seconds underwater, I surface to check my progress. The boat is fifteen feet in front of me, its pilot invisible behind the spotlight. Taking a gulp of air, I drop back under the waves and swim past the boat.
When I surface ten meters beyond it, the tree arrives like a scheduled bus. With my right hand I reach out and catch a trailing root. It’s like catching hold of a ski rope being towed by a speedboat. The root bloom is the bow of my adopted ship, the branches far behind me its stern. The trunk is easily four feet in diameter, which tells me it’s probably a willow uprooted by high water. As the monster trunk drifts downstream, I climb from its submerged roots to the dry roots above the waterline. Suddenly the waves that were thrashing me around the river are merely scenery. I’m riding atop an eighty-foot willow like Cleopatra on her royal barge. The rifleman in the bass boat is already behind me, and though he could return to search this tree again, the tangle of roots and mud could easily conceal me.
