by Joe Gores
Finally cried out, she fell silent. After a time, animal, bird, and insect noises began again, tentatively at first, then soaring in a triumphant discordant chorus to greet the first predawn lightening of the forest.
31
There was the faintest of pale gold horizontal slashes drawn on the utmost horizon. Everything below was a cold gray blanket of ground mist, the big cypresses rising from it here and there like sentinels. In the woods, just the woolly polls of the overstory trees stood above it like tight-packed heads. On the bayou a flatboat drifted in the gray world where air and water were barely separate, as if floating in a dream.
Inverness came abruptly erect on the seat. Looked around in an almost dazed manner. Splashed water in his face. Even the splashes were muted, distant, dreamlike. He began to row.
Vangie appeared at the mouth of the road walking listlessly, shoulders slumped, face innocent as a sleepwalker’s. Trask’s pistol dangled from one hand by the trigger guard. Overlaying the scents of the morning swamp was the sweetish smell of barbecued meat, not entirely pleasant. She shuddered when she realized what it was.
Dain was limping toward her across the open ground past the rectangle of ash and charcoal, still faintly warm, that marked her father’s cabin. He looked pale, drawn, dragged off center by pain, bloodstained from his reopened wound. She knew she couldn’t look much better.
They stopped three feet from each other, not touching. Vangie finally reached out to lay a hand on his good arm. Only then did they come together, clasp each other fiercely with nothing of lovers in it, only the intimacy of warriors who have survived the battle. They finally stepped back. An uncontrollable shudder ran through Vangie, somewhat like the sudden diminishing little gasping intakes of breath after a fit of hysterics.
She said tentatively, “You ought to see the other guys?”
“What other guys?” he said in the same tone.
Wonder was in her voice. “It’s… over? Truly all over?”
“Yes. For you it’s all over.”
A final shudder ran through her. “Inverness?”
“Strategic withdrawal. He’ll be back.”
Vangie made an aborted gesture back toward what she had left hanging from the tight line in the woods. “I… I don’t know if I can… again…”
“If I could get out of it, I wouldn’t either,” he said. “But you can get out. You must get out. I couldn’t stand it if after all of this you…” His voice had harshened; now he said in softer tones, “Go bury your dead, Vangie.”
They started walking slowly down toward the water, Dain limping, his good arm around her shoulders for support.
“Will you be all right?” he asked.
She didn’t answer.
“Please. Take the bonds and run.”
“I’ll have to,” she said finally. “If I’m still here when he comes back, he’ll have to kill me, won’t he?” Right along with you, she seemed to be implying, though she didn’t say it. “But if I’m back in civilization, shocked, explaining that I was camping out in the bayous, I didn’t know my folks had been murdered, I’ve never heard of any of you… Then I’ll be safe.”
“Take the gun.”
“I have the gun.” She gestured with it. “You hid the pirogue with the bonds in it. He can’t follow me in a flatboat, he has to go the long way around. So don’t worry about me.”
Couldn’t you worry about me? he thought. Just a little? He’d wanted her to leave, but hadn’t really expected that she’d do it.
It was dawn but the sun had not yet broken through the haze. At the rear of the island, where the bayou had cut its ancient channel, Inverness’s flatboat drifted soundlessly out of the fog to ground with only a whisper of keel against mud. With an almost incredible swiftness, Inverness was up over the gunwale and into the bushes.
He kept going swiftly but carefully, slipping from cover to cover, stopping often to let the birds tell him what or who might lie ahead. Totally alert, he was the hunter in his element.
As they shambled down toward the water, Vangie was shocked at how much weaker Dain was. How was he going to stand up to Inverness? He might already be dying; he’d sustained a terrible amount of damage.
“What about you? You can’t just stay here and wait for him.”
“He has to end it. End me. To him I’m a nightmare that isn’t over when you wake up.”
“He killed your wife, Dain,” she said cruelly. “He’ll find Trask, I used the knife on him. That ought to slow him down…”
Dain nodded. “That’s his only failure as a hitman. It’s our only edge.”
“What? I don’t understand.”
“His imagination. He’s got a vivid imagination.”
“If that’s your edge, use it. What are you going to do? What’s your plan?”
“Delay him, that’s the plan.” That wasn’t what she had meant. “I’ll get you as much time as I can. I’m not strong enough to fight him, he’s too wary to be tracked down, and I’m not good enough in the woods to ambush him. So—”
“So you have to make him come to you.”
“When he does, how will he do it?”
“Under cover of this fog. He’ll row around to the rear of the island, work up through the woods afoot, probably along Papa’s fishing road…”
Dain gave a short mirthless laugh, started coughing at the end of it. “The man… who won’t… die…”
He was coughing up blood. She didn’t know if he was talking about Inverness or himself. She couldn’t leave him here in this state, she couldn’t stay with him, she couldn’t take him with her.
Inverness stopped with one foot raised and a hand extended to push aside a branch. He had heard, reduced by distance, robbed of words and given mere tones, the raised voices of Vangie and Dain. He began to trot through the woods toward them, turning into the fishing road when he crossed it, because the going was easier and faster.
And stopped dead, a horrified look on his face. Trask’s gutted body, still held by the deadly traps, had dragged the nylon tight line down so he was held up in a sort of grotesque half-curtsy. One arm was held out head-height by its trap, his legs were bent in an awful parody of a ballet dancer’s plié. He had been neatly disemboweled. As for his face, in its trap…
Inverness edged around the body, unable to look away, then was free of it. They’d been thorough. One burned to death, one gutted. Not a squeamish pair. He wondered what they had done to Maxton. Not that he cared too much. There was nothing squeamish about the survivors of this world, and he was a survivor.
Now shunning the open meandering road, he picked his way as quickly as he could through the heavy undergrowth flanking it. He pulled up short a second time: there had been a distant shot.
What the hell? That didn’t make sense unless…
Unless he remembered the butchery on Trask. Whoever did that didn’t have many compunctions. Two million in bonds… Just Dain and she left… He had been just sort of assuming they would face him together, he would kill them both, take the bonds… But maybe only one would be left to take out…
Suddenly he was sprinting ahead, crashing through the forest, careless of noise. Two more shots had sounded far ahead of him.
32
Ten minutes later he was at the edge of the woods, scanning the clearing. Burned-out cabin, just a heap of charred wood now. Beyond that, the blackened thing that once had been Nicky…
He moved around the perimeter, saw the tar baby in the vat. The person inside would have been burned away leaving only a shape of cooled tar, like the ancient Pompeiians caught by flowing lava while fleeing Vesuvius. Had to be Maxton. And Dain had done it with the use of only one arm.
A couple of minutes later, Inverness parted the bushes near the water’s edge to look out cautiously at the landing area and the thinning fogbank beyond. The mud was trampled, marked with footprints and keel marks. After a long reconnoiter, he stepped out. Looked up the bayou, stiffened.
Up about where V
angie had first seen Dain poling down toward the fishing camp in the pirogue, Vangie was now poling away from the camp in the pirogue. Alone. The craft was too shallow for Dain to be hiding in the bottom of it. She reached the bend of the bayou and passed from his sight.
Alone. Which meant that Dain was either waiting for him somewhere in ambush—or the argument he had heard had been genuine, the shots real, and Dain was…
He turned back to the landing area, crouched, reading sign. He chuffed, an almost silent exhalation of air. Splattered across the churned muddy verge was blood. Fresh blood, his touching fingertip confirmed.
Then his eye picked up a glint at the water’s edge, and he gave a small exclamation of surprise. He lifted Trask’s gun from the mud. Sniffed the muzzle. Looked quickly around, like an animal about to take a drink, then broke the gun. Two unfired shells. He closed it very slowly, a puzzled look on his face.
Patiently, he started over the ground again with his eyes, minutely seeking everything he had missed the first time. Gave a little grunt of satisfaction, waded out to midcalf. Tromped down into the mud and water was something, paper, man-made. He reached down, brought it out.
A sheaf of soaked, trampled, mud-smeared bearer bonds. He thumbed them. Half a dozen, twenty-five thousand each: a hundred and fifty thousand bucks. Dropped in the struggle, probably when the shots had been fired.
He started back out with his head moving, scanning the bushes, the trees, the bayou, the open water of the marshland… With a muttered exclamation he threw the bonds aside and went into a firing crouch, his right hand whipping out the .357 Magnum from its holster on his right hip with practiced ease.
The fog had lifted enough so he could see Vangie’s missing flatboat forty yards from shore and slowly being carried further. One of Dain’s shoes rested on the gunwale as if he were lying faceup, partially across the seats. His good arm was hooked over the far side of the boat so his hand was obviously trailing in the water even though Inverness could not see it.
Inverness slowly put his Magnum away again, even more slowly settled into his woodman’s tireless squat, his eyes fixed on the drifting boat.
His posture was patient but his head was spinning. Dain. Dead? Everything said he was—blood, bonds, gun, the departed Vangie. But… this was Dain. The man he couldn’t kill. But Dain had trusted her and she’d shot him with Trask’s gun and had dumped him in the boat and set it adrift so Inverness would see it and be delayed by it.
Or maybe she hadn’t. Time would tell.
Three hours later the fog had burned away and bright sunlight flooded everything. Inverness still was hunkered in the scrub by the shore, staring out at the drifting boat. His arms were now wrapped around his knees. The boat was quite a bit further away, but was slowly turning around and around in a big leisurely eddy. Dain’s good hand was indeed trailing in the water, submerged about halfway down the bared forearm.
He could only really make out Dain’s boot, a little of the hair of his head, and that arm trailing in the water. The arm made it Dain, not a dummy made up with moss and Dain’s clothes to fool him.
During those three hours the body hadn’t moved an inch.
With abrupt decision, he stood, trotted off toward the fishing road through the woods. Half an hour later he arrived back at his flatboat, seized the prow, and shoved off into the bayou as he leaped aboard. Unshipped the oars, swung the prow, and began rowing away with long steady strokes. In action he was as quick, as sure as he’d ever been. Then why couldn’t he…
Goddammit, now he was going to deal with Dain.
It was high noon, so there was no shade. Dain’s flatboat drifted in its eddy of current. From around the tip of the island came Inverness’s flatboat to the beat of his steady rowing. A dozen yards from the boat in which Dain sprawled, faceup to the sun, he rested on his oars so his boat coasted to a stop. He sat, staring. Waiting. Not quite ready to deal with Dain after all.
If Dain was not dead, only dying, the heat and sun would finish him off. Waiting could only benefit Inverness.
He waited.
Waited until the sun had started its climb down the western sky. Just sat there on the middle seat of his boat, legs drawn up and arms clasped around his knees. From this close he could see Dain sprawled, bloody and lax, across the seat.
Enough.
Inverness suddenly jerked out his .357 Magnum, then once again just sat there with it in his hand, resting the hand on his thigh, the gun pointed at nothing. He yelled.
“Dain!”
No reaction. Man—or body? He raised the gun, aimed with his elbow resting on an upraised knee. Hesitated. Dain was dead, he knew that now, and he was about to shoot the body. Blow its foot off. To see if perhaps the man was only faking it. And if he shot the corpse, wasn’t that somehow an admission that Dain had won, even in death? That even his corpse could spook Keith Inverness so badly that…
With sudden resolve he re-aimed. And fired. A chunk of gunwale six inches from Dain’s boot splintered as the heavy slug passed through it. Dain’s boot did not move.
Inverness lowered the heavy gun with a satisfied look on his face. He’d made his test without having to shoot Dain’s dead body. Dain hadn’t won. Keith Inverness had won. Because nobody had the balls to remain motionless when a bullet missed his foot by six inches that way. Not when he would know the next one could blow his foot right off.
There was still a final act to perform. And even that… worried him. He had to dump Dain’s body into the water so the gators would get it. Did some edge of doubt still linger?
“Goddam you, Dain,” he said earnestly to the corpse, “even dead, you fucker, you… you vex me.”
He laid the gun on the seat beside his thigh, grabbed the oars, gave a couple of strong pulls to send his boat bumping clumsily against Dain’s. The impact knocked Dain’s boot off the gunwale. A cloud of green-bellied flies swarmed angrily up off the bloody mess under Dain’s filth-encrusted shirt.
He picked up his gun again, but it was only reflex. This was obviously a corpse. He used his gun hand to brace himself on Dain’s gunwale so he could, kneeling on the seat, stretch across the sprawled body to feel the carotid artery for a pulse.
He was free at last of that five-year-old shadow across his life. Maybe even the bonds might not be lost to him. Vangie would have to bury her folks, go through a public period of mourning. Which meant she’d have to hang around Cajun country long enough so it would not look odd when she left…
Perhaps she would choose suicide… so easily arranged…
He was so deep in his thoughts as his fingers thrust deep into the side of Dain’s throat after the nonexistent pulse, that he didn’t even see Dain’s good left arm, trailing over the side of the boat, begin to rise.
In the iron grip of his hand was the huge cottonmouth, grasped just behind the head. The snake’s mouth, gaping in rage, showed its dazzling cotton-white lining. Its fangs were raised and ready. As the arm rose and crooked, the massive, foot-thick, five-foot body came writhing up out of the water, flowing, flowing, flowing almost endlessly upward.
Inverness, startled by the pulse he had not expected to find, off balance, was trying to get upright enough to get his weight off the gun hand and shoot. But he was out of time. By then Dain was ramming the huge diamond-shaped head up tight against his straining, corded neck.
The gleaming fangs sank into the flesh, the poison sacks pulsed. Inverness leaped back, shrieking, spraddle-legged in the flatboat, jerking away from the snake so wildly that its entire five-foot length flowed and writhed in air, supported only by its fangs sunk deep into the side of his neck.
His gun went flying so both his hands could find the snake, rip it away. The snake hit the water with a long splash, undulated away as Inverness sank down on the seat, blood running down his neck. Dain sat up in the other boat to watch him with cold interested eyes.
“My God,” said Inverness. “Oh my God.”
“It’s a high-protein venom that litera
lly rots out the blood vessels so internal hemorrhaging begins,” said Dain. “You’re bleeding to death inside even as we speak.”
Inverness put his face in his hands and spoke through his spread fingers. “It hurts. Oh Jesus it hurts.”
“It’s meant to. Your lymph glands are swelling up trying to churn out enough antibodies to save you, but there aren’t that many antibodies in the human body. You’ll start getting excited, your pupils will dilate until the light hurts them…”
Inverness raised a haunted face. Sweat was pouring off him. He croaked, “My lips are numb.”
Now that he was here, watching one of the hitmen actually dying, simple survival wasn’t enough for Dain after all. He wanted at least to know. Who. Where. Maybe if…
“Who hired you to kill me and my family, Inverness?”
“Pu… Pucci… Mario… Pucci…”
“No. The middleman. The other shooter.”
Inverness tried to swallow. Put a hand up to his neck, sweating like a man with motion sickness. His face was ghastly. His voice was querulous.
“The… middleman called me, I flew up from New Orleans. The other hitter had… directions… I had… orders…take out everybody in the place… Didn’t know… woman and kid…”
His head slumped, but Dain reached from boat to boat, grabbed his shoulder, shook him.
“Who, Inverness? Where?”
“He called me again last week… after five… fucking years… told me you were coming after me…” His voice started to fade again. “Hoping… I’d… take you out…”
Inverness was twitching, losing motor control.
“Who? Goddam you, give him to me!”
Inverness coughed rackingly. A little blood came from his mouth. But defiance along with death had entered his eyes. His lips twisted into some semblance of a smile.
“Fuck you, Dain… I’m… giving you… to them… The other shooter is… still around… He’ll blow you… all to shit…” He gave a choking laugh. “The laugh’s… on you…”
