Another fountain of moonshine came spurting from the arrow hole and pattered to the floor. There was a growing lake of the stuff pooling all over the concrete. The fumes were dizzying.
Ben went to pluck another arrow from the quiver. As he fitted it to the bowstring he realised that Seth’s gun was no longer on the floor, because its owner had retrieved it and was now sneaking between the stills to come up on his left flank. Which could have been a problem for Ben, if Logan had decided to stalk around on his right, catching him in a pincer movement.
But Logan had other things on his mind at that instant. He let out a yowl of alarm as he saw the river of moonshine rapidly spreading across the floor towards Ben’s modified arrow that had fallen there, the steel wool wadding still burning away brightly. Logan bounded over to kick the arrow away before the entire lake of near-pure alcohol went up in flames, but he slipped on the wet floor and went down with a grunt and a splash.
The next thing, Logan Garrett was on fire. The super-strength moonshine blazed with a blueish, almost invisible but intensely hot flame as it engulfed his legs, then set light to his shirt and spread all up his body. Logan screamed and thrashed on the floor, desperately trying to beat out the flames, but his clothes were soaked with moonshine and there was nothing he could do to prevent himself from turning into a human torch.
As he rolled wildly he spread the flames to the second pool that was leaking from the other perforated still. A curtain of shimmering blue fire whooshed up across the floor.
Seth Garrett had been just about to shoot at Ben but now had to leap back to save himself. In his haste he stumbled and fell, and his gun clattered from his hand. Ben saw his chance and pounced to snatch it up, then had to retreat quickly to avoid getting burned himself.
Now the flames were leaping up everywhere, spreading with lethal eagerness through the whole distillery. Once the other stills began to catch alight, the entire place would erupt like a volcano – and that was just seconds away. Logan’s body was now totally consumed by fire and he wasn’t moving any more, just an indistinct black shape curled on the floor at the heart of the roiling blaze.
Ben raced back the way he’d come, heading for the passage, Caleb’s bow in one hand, Seth Garrett’s Beretta in the other. He paused for an instant to glance across the sea of fire and spotted Seth and the wounded Jayce smash through a window at the far side of the blazing building, making their own escape. There was no way he could follow them, but he had an idea where they’d be headed.
As Ben reached the passage another copper still blew, filling the air with an incendiary blast that shook the whole building. He could feel the scorching breath of the fire on his back as he raced down the narrow corridor towards the storeroom and the exit beyond. Any second now, thousands of gallons of moonshine were going to ignite simultaneously and bring the whole place down. He ran faster.
But then the way ahead was suddenly barred as three more Garrett accomplices appeared at the foot of the passage. One clutched a handgun, one a shotgun and the other a rifle, and all three looked utterly terrified. Ben could tell from the looks on their faces that these were not combat-hardened men, but just a bunch of local hicks brought in to work and guard the moonshine distillery and were only putting themselves in harm’s way because they were even more afraid of their bosses. But three hopeless stooges could still get lucky against a single determined opponent. Especially the guy with the shotgun, who wouldn’t even have to aim.
So Ben singled him out and shot him first, firing one-handed on the run. The guy spun and fell. The one with the rifle panicked, dropped his weapon and bolted. The plucky soul with the handgun bent into a combat crouch and got off a rushed shot that punched through the tin wall at Ben’s elbow.
And then the moonshine distillery exploded.
Ben was hurled off his feet by the force of the blast. Perhaps if the other guy had been closer to the epicentre of the explosion, he might have been more fortunate. Because then he wouldn’t have remained standing, and a jagged crescent-shaped fragment of copper shrapnel from one of the shattered stills wouldn’t have taken the top of his head off in the fraction of a second before the roof collapsed on both of them.
Chapter 37
Ben fought his way out from under the wreckage of twisted corrugated-iron sheets and bits of timber. He was bleeding and scorched and bruised. But he was still alive. And he also still had a pretty good idea of where Jayce and Seth Garrett had made off to: straight for their Mustang, only to discover it and all the other possible escape vehicles were out of commission. No getting away so easily this time, boys.
Ben staggered to his feet, looking around him for his weapons. The storeroom and corridor were completely flattened. Behind him, the scorched remains of the moonshine distillery looked as if they’d taken a direct hit from a military air strike. The few structural timbers left intact were furiously ablaze and threatening to give way at any second. Barely visible among the belching smoke, the tall chimney was still standing but would not be for much longer.
There was no sign of the rifleman who’d bolted and run for safety. Ben picked up his discarded weapon, an old lever-action Marlin deer carbine. No wonder the guy had run away in fear. He’d racked the lever in such a hurry that he’d short-stroked the action and jammed it up solid. Marlins were known to do that. It was a gunsmith job to fix.
Ben tossed the useless gun down. That was when he noticed the limp, bloody arm protruding from under the debris. He paused to feel for a pulse. He wouldn’t let a man suffer the fate of being buried alive, even an enemy who had just tried to kill him.
But it was already too late for this one. Ben snatched up the bow and pistol and went in pursuit of Seth and Jayce.
The sky was dark from the smoke and dust that were blocking out the sunlight. As Ben sprinted between what was left of the buildings, heading in the direction of the parked vehicles, the remnants of the distillery structure gave way and crashed into the flames. Then the chimney itself began to topple, slowly at first, with a groaning and buckling and rendering of metal.
Ben looked up and saw that it was on course to come down right on top of him. He could skid to a halt in the dirt as it blocked his path, or he could pick up his step and try to race past and pray he didn’t get crushed to death.
He lengthened his stride. The chimney began to topple faster. He kept his eyes to the front and ran hard. The falling stack came down ten feet behind him, destroying what little remained of the Garretts’ factory and flattening the store sheds adjacent to it.
Now the lean-to containing all the stacked moonshine drums was ablaze, too, threatening to set a thousand more gallons of high-octane alcohol off like a fuel refinery disaster. Ben pressed on through the mayhem, hurdling fallen wreckage and shielding his face from the intense heat of the many smaller fires that had broken out everywhere. A few yards further, the parking area came into view, near the perimeter fence. Ben stopped and scanned the row of vehicles. The Mustang was still there, along with the two pickups and the ancient flatbed truck and Logan’s Cadillac, all sitting low to the ground on their deflated tyres and covered with dust from the explosion.
But there was no sign of the surviving Garretts themselves. Ben’s eyes narrowed and he tightened his grip on the pistol, anticipating their appearance any second. Where were they?
Just then, he heard the roar of a motorcycle engine and spun round to see two dirt bikes come bursting out from another storage shed, just about the only one still intact. Jayce and Seth Garrett were making their escape, riding like wild men through the flaming debris. Jayce’s neck and shoulder and the whole right side of his T-shirt were red with blood from his torn ear. He rode one-handed, clutching a sawn-off shotgun like a huge double-barrelled pistol in his left fist. He saw Ben standing there and levelled the gun over the handlebars to fire at him.
The shotgun boomed and spouted flame as Ben ducked behind part of a wrecked shed and the blast peppered buckshot holes in the corrugated-iron sheet
just inches over his head. The bikes roared by, kicking up dust and dirt in their wake with their knobbly off-road tyres.
Ben stepped out behind them and let off three fast snapping shots with the pistol. A spurt of blood flew from Seth’s upper left arm. His machine wobbled and kept going. Ben sprinted after them, firing as he went, but it was a moving target and hard to nail down in his sights.
The bikes raced straight towards the collapsed chimney stack that blocked their path. For a moment it looked as though both machines were going to smash straight into the obstacle. Then Jayce veered left, aiming for a section of the store shed the chimney had crushed flat. Part of its collapsed roof was jutting up at an angle like a ramp. Jayce’s machine hit it with a thud and the bike engine yowled as he rocketed upwards into the air, clearing the fallen chimney like a stunt rider.
Seth followed right in his wake. The bikes landed on the other side and kept going, with nothing now between them and escape but a locked gate. Ben scrambled up the ramp and jumped down the other side. His pistol was empty. He threw it away and kept running.
Jayce Garrett still had one barrel of his shotgun. He fired straight ahead of him at the padlock and chain that fastened the gates. The buckled lock fell and the chain parted. The gates swung open as the two bikes flashed through the opening without slowing down. Then they were off, accelerating noisily away up the dirt road and shrinking fast into the distance.
Ben chased them on foot as far as the open gates before he was forced to accept that they’d got away from him. He swore, knowing he’d underestimated his enemy. He might have struck the Garretts a serious blow and taken one of them permanently out of the picture, but he’d failed in his main objective.
Where to pick up their trail again, now that his one lead was gone? He had no idea, but he’d have to worry about that later.
For now, he had to focus on getting away from here before the unmissable black smoke skyscraper rising from the wreck of the distillery drew someone’s attention and the police came swarming all over this place like ants.
It was a long run back to the car. Late afternoon was slowly morphing to early evening. As he scrambled up the slope Ben heard the faint thud of a helicopter far away in the distance. He looked up and scanned three hundred degrees of the horizon before he saw a tiny dark dot tracking above the forested hills, some miles off. His well-trained eye identified it as being most likely a Bell 430, a type favoured by a lot of law enforcement and military units. From this range he couldn’t make out the tell-tale blue livery and gold stripes that would have marked it as a state police chopper. Nor would it be able to observe him from so far away. But the smoke rising and drifting from the site of the Garretts’ moonshine distillery was too conspicuous to miss. If the occupants of the aircraft hadn’t spotted it yet, they soon would.
He made it the rest of the way up the slope to the car, then slid in behind the wheel and fired it up and pulled a tight U-turn to go bouncing and lurching back down the track the way he’d come.
Ten miles later, he pulled sharply in at the side of a country road and got out. He walked around to the boot, opened the lid and said, ‘How are you doing in there, still breathing?’
‘It ain’t human, keepin’ me locked up like this for hours on end,’ Dwayne Skinner protested.
‘You’re right, Dwayne. I’ve seen the error of my ways and decided to let you go.’
Dwayne’s face lit up, then grew suspicious. ‘Seriously? Y’all ain’t gonna bust my arms and legs like you said?’
‘Unless you try to rat on me, in which case I’ll know where to find you again and you’ll spend the next six months in plaster from head to toe, sucking baby food through a straw. Now get out.’
Dwayne clambered stiffly out of the boot and looked around him at the expanse of wilderness. ‘Aw, hell, man. This is the goddamned middle of nowhere.’
‘It’s only forty miles or so back to Pointe Blanche. The exercise will do you good. Get moving and don’t ever let me see your ugly face again. Understood?’
Dwayne was left standing by the roadside in a cloud of dust as Ben roared away.
His next move was an unknown quantity. He only knew that he wouldn’t go back to the Heberts. Motels and trailer parks were unsafe refuges. The roads were even more dangerous. If there was an avenue not closed to him, he couldn’t begin to think what it might be.
The more Ben thought about it, the faster he drove. The Firebird roared happily along at eighty, ninety, a hundred miles an hour. Trees and farms and bayous and open fields flashed by him. It was a big country and he needed to lose himself in it and remain a step ahead of his pursuers while he figured out his plan.
That was when he went speeding around a bend and almost piled straight into the police checkpoint.
Chapter 38
It was the co-pilot of the Louisiana State Police Air Support Unit Bell 430, an officer named Claude Daigle, who reported the sighting back to base after a couple of passes of the still-burning wreckage they’d spotted in the remoteness of the Declouette Hills, forty-five miles north-west of Pointe Blanche and close to the Elysium Parish line. His orders to land and investigate were duly carried out by him and his colleague, Officer Jerome Guidry.
The impression the policemen had got from the air was quickly confirmed once they were on site: that whatever incident they were dealing with here was still very fresh indeed. Much of the wreckage of the buildings was still burning fiercely. Elsewhere among the devastation they found discarded weapons that were still warm to the touch, a quantity of spent cartridge cases, and one dead body buried under a ton of debris. If there were more bodies, it would be a while before anyone could get close enough to dig them out.
Officers Daigle and Guidry also discovered a very agitated, smoke-blackened gentleman trying to free his friend who had received a nasty blow to the head and been hogtied with electrical wire inside a hut. The hut further contained items of evidence suggesting that the burning buildings had served as a remote illegal distilling operation that had until now escaped police notice. The officers’ first assessment of the situation was that some rival gang of outlaw moonshiners must have attacked and destroyed it as a way of eliminating the competition.
The two apprehended suspects were immediately cuffed and read their rights. The bearded one with the swelling lump on his head had little to say, apart from give his name which was Willie Deeb. His friend Randy Prator, on the other hand, was so willing to talk that they couldn’t shut him up. And the things that came out in Prator’s babbling stream were enough for Daigle and Guidry to look at each other and agree, ‘Sheriff Roque needs to hear this right away.’
Within minutes, Waylon Roque was hustling aboard a second State Police Bell 430 and being whisked rapidly to view the scene and hear the witness’s statement for himself. The chopper landed next to the other on the approach track to the ruined distillery and Roque, bending low and clamping his campaign hat to prevent it from being blown away by the rotors’ downdraught, hurried through the gates with his deputies Mason Redbone and Eli Fontaine at his heels. The sheriff cast his steely eye across the scene of carnage. Looked like one bunch of morons killing another bunch of morons, in his estimation. Done a pretty damn good job of it, too. There hadn’t been a shoot-em-up war zone like this in Clovis Parish since the days of Bonnie and Clyde.
‘This better be good,’ the sheriff growled at Officers Daigle and Guidry as he stepped inside the hut where the suspects were being held, one hand on the butt of his Colt. ‘I’m busy as a one-legged cat in a sandbox with this damn manhunt and I got better things to do than clear up some gang-related bullshit. So what’ve we got?’
‘This went down just this afternoon, Sheriff,’ Guidry said. ‘Found a bunch of guns an’ shell casings in the dirt. Reckon there’re at least three crispies back there for the coroner to dig out of the wreckage. But it don’t look like a gang thing.’
Roque looked sharply at Officers Guidry and Daigle. ‘Then what the hell is it?’
Daigle nudged Randy Prator, who was sitting glumly cuffed on the hut floor next to his pal Willie. ‘Come on, peckerwood, tell the sheriff what you told us.’
‘Weren’t no gang,’ Randy Prator said. ‘It was just one guy. Same fella who knocked Willie here on the head and damn near cracked his brains out.’
‘One guy?’ the sheriff said, his face tightening hard. ‘Speak, son. Talk to me.’
‘Tore this place apart like a goddamned one-man army,’ Randy Prator babbled on. ‘I saw’m shoot Landon, standin’ right next to me.’
‘Never mind Landon, tell me about the guy,’ the sheriff grated.
‘Some foreigner, English or somethin’. All I know is, Landon told me that he’s the crazy-ass sumbitch broke Billy Bob Lafleur’s neck and cut up that black girl in Chitimacha. Name’s—’
‘Hope,’ Roque finished for him. ‘Ben Hope, goddamnit.’ He shook his head in bewilderment as he tried to make sense of this bizarre turn of events. ‘I should have known that maniac would be behind this. Well, this proves he’s still alive, anyhow. But what the hell’s he doin’?’
‘Beats me, Sheriff,’ Daigle said, rubbing his chin. ‘All I know is, these boys work for the Garrett brothers. This is their operation. Or was. Ain’t much left of it now.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ Deputy Redbone put in. ‘The Garretts? Reckon not. Don’t look that way to me at all.’
Roque looked at him. ‘No? Just how does it look to you, Mason?’
Daigle nudged Prator again. ‘Go on. Tell’m the rest of it.’
Prator bit his lip. ‘I wanna lawyer before I say another goddamn thing. And I’m only talkin’ if I get a deal. Y’all put me on the federal witness protection program or I ain’t playin’.’
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