by Jack Tunney
During the fight with the Adrieux twins, I’d been too preoccupied with pain to hear the yelling of the crowd outside the cage. Now, however, I realized they were in full scale riot.
Flames shot up from the distillery along the end of the prison ground nearest the docks. There were more explosions as the fire ate hungrily into the flammable raw alcohol stored in large vats.
Edmond Adrieux was suddenly beside me. I turned and was shocked to see him smiling. “Come! Come!” He gestured.
Canray still appeared to be disoriented. When Edmond grabbed one of his brother’s arms, I grabbed the other, both of us leading him toward the cage entrance, which Omar swung open as we approached.
“Hurry,” he said.
There was the sound of shooting and men screaming. Canray grunted and staggered, hit by several stray shotgun pellets.
The generator powering the three spotlights suddenly disgorged it’s innards as a stick of dynamite exploded on top of it. The glare of the spots instantly died, rendering me almost completely night blind.
Then the night sky was illuminated by several flares, and I spotted Tombstone on the bow of an airboat. He had tossed the flare gun aside and, using the glowing stub of a cigar secured in his mouth, he lit the fuse leading into strapped bundle of dynamite sticks. He then tossed the bundle under the guard tower closest to him.
I swiveled my head, looking for Trask. I couldn’t see him, but somehow I could feel him ... I could feel his anger ... And I could feel his fear ...
Finally cognizant again, Edmond detached himself from my supporting arm. He reached over and grabbed Canray, who was slowing, and dragged him along in my wake as I headed toward the prison dock.
Another large explosion ripped another gash in the night. This one came from the front of the prison, blowing out the crumbling cement block walls on either side of the main entrance. Without the support of the walls, the heavy steel entrance gates stood for a second then tipped inward, crashing to the ground. Two concussion-shocked prison guards were caught underneath the crushing weight. Dust and debris flew everywhere.
In the light of the now descending flares, I was relieved to see the green uniforms of US Army Rangers flooding through the gaping hole left by fallen gate. Tombstone’s Army connections ran deep, but he must still have had to move mountains to get the Rangers here.
Since the Sauvage Penitentiary was under federal jurisdiction, Banister would have been powerless to stop the Army from moving in. I had no doubt, he didn’t even try. Banister would have reacted in an instant and scrambled to turn things to his advantage – cockroaches always survived. Banister would be claiming credit for destroying Trask’s corrupt organization before the night was through ... Bringing in the Army would turn out to be his idea.
My thoughts had been somewhat disoriented by all the explosions, but with the impact of a striking fist, I was focused again. I could feel something rising up inside me – something powerful, something ready for battle – and my head snapped around searching for Lucas Trask.
Even with the fizzling light from the flares, there was still too much commotion in the prison yard for me to be able to clearly see anything other than jumbled silhouettes and shadows. There were more explosions as other vats within the distillery caught fire. Men battled around me. Shots were still being fired.
I crouched and closed my eyes. I allowed my hearing to be blotted out by the cacophony around me. I took a lungful of air in through my nose and overloaded my olfactory senses with smoke and dust. I stopped feeling and simply let myself find my center as if I was about to step into the ring.
I felt energy flowing from my core, blazing down my legs into the ground beneath me. Energy flowed down my arms, out through my fingers, and into the surrounding night. I felt as if I was on fire, burning from the inside out, my muscles being tempered like steel, my bones seared into an unbreakable skeleton. I felt utterly and totally alive as I never had before ...
And then I felt him ... Felt Lucas Trask ... Felt Kalfu ...
The feeling came from the ground, in through my feet, and straight to my center. I open my eyes, stood tall, and turned toward the dock. I began to run. Ten steps later, I saw Trask raising his Winchester to his shoulder. He was beginning to take aim at Tombstone, who was jumping from the front of his airboat onto the prison’s wooden dock.
Without thinking, I scooped a fist-sized chunk of concrete debris from the ground, hurling it like a fastball pitcher trying to get the last out in the World Series.
It took a split second for the projectile to cover the remaining distance to Trask and smash into his shoulder. The Winchester fired, but the shot flew past Tombstone to strike the man who had been in the driver’s seat of Tombstone’s airboat. The man cried out and fell to the deck.
Trask didn’t hesitate. He bounded toward Tombstone and whipped the Winchester around like a club. Throwing up an arm, Tombstone deflected the brunt of the blow, but was still bludgeoned back.
I was running forward in pursuit, but Trask kicked viciously at Tombstone, knocking him first to one knee and then off the edge of the dock. Trask jumped onto the airboat on which Tombstone had arrived. It was still running, and he grabbed for the controls.
I reached the dock, going down on my belly and reaching over the edge. I flailed blindly with my right arm, rewarded almost immediately as I felt Tombstone’s hand wrap around my wrist. I grasped his wrist in returned and half pulled, half dragged him back onto the dock.
Lying on the rough wood boards, we looked at each other and grinned. “You’re early,” I said.
“You complaining? You’d rather I’d waited a week?”
“Guess you were busy while I was being tried and transferred.”
“Got Banister alone and convinced him to talk straight or the Army would be taking him down along with Trask.”
Trask ... There was a roar and we were showered with swamp water as Trask accelerated away in the airboat.
Tombstone suddenly jumped up and began dancing around shaking himself. Two long, skinny, shapes fell away from him and hit the deck near me. I jumped further and farther than Tombstone. The shapes were cotton mouth snakes thrown up from the swamp in the water shower from the airboat.
Nothing was more important in that moment for Tombstone and me than kicking the snakes off the dock and checking each other over to make sure there weren’t any hidden hangers on.
Two of the prison’s airboats had fired their engines into life and slid in next to us at the dock.
“You done jigging and dancing around?” Edmond asked from the pilot seat of the first boat. Canray was driving the second boat. I scooted off the dock onto the deck of the first boat and Edmond hit the throttle even before I could get settled. I looked back to see Tombstone hitching a ride with Canray.
Behind us, in the light from the still burning distillery, I caught a glimpse of the Rangers beginning to round up both prisoners and guards.
“Ain’t going back behind no walls,” Edmond yelled at me over the roar of the giant engine driven propeller behind him. A grin split the slab of his face in what I thought was amusement, but could just have easily been a grimace.
Clearly, once this night was over, he and Canray would disappear into the swamp – which was fine with me. The Army and the New Orleans political machine would have their hands full with the remaining violent prisoners being rounded up, let alone the guards. Two missing brothers, sent to the Sauvage through the corruption of one crime family battling another, were not going to be a priority.
But the night wasn’t over yet.
I could feel the inevitability of the coming confrontation with Trask throbbing through me.
I hungered for it.
Legba would not be denied.
ROUND EIGHTEEN
There was a battery-powered spotlight on the front of the boat. I scrabbled my way over and fiddled with it until it turned on. Its light did little to penetrate the darkness of the swamp. I looked behind and saw the lig
ht from Tombstone and Canray’s boat twenty yards back.
My heart raced as every couple of seconds tall gum trees or hidden stumps appeared in front of us, seeming too close to miss. Edmund, however, handled the boat with the calm assurance of someone who had grown up in the swamp and knew it’s every nook and cranny.
“We have to catch Trask,” I yelled back toward Edmond.
He looked at me and I though he nodded, but I couldn’t be sure.
“Edmond,” I said. This time my voice was not my own. I hadn’t yelled, but the name came out loud and clear. I saw the expression on Edmond’s face change, the white of his eyes growing huge in the darkness.
He pointed ahead.
There was no way to hear the sound of another boat over the roar of our own. But as I looked where Edmond indicated, I saw several pinpoints of light weaving through the swamp toward us.
Slowing slightly, Edmund spun the airboat around a trio of gum trees. Several more pinpoints of light winked on ahead of us. Two more appeared off to our left, and I realized the lights were from other boats all working in concert. Tombstone hadn’t relied just on the Rangers to save the day – the Adrieux clan were out in force.
As Edmond maneuvered our boat, with Canray and Tombstone’s airboat off our starboard side, the other boats seemed to also move in a herding motion. It was a narrowing and negating of escape routes, a noose tightening around the airboat steered by Lucas Trask.
Edmund feathered the throttle, skipping the airboat’s flat bottom over a barrier of roots, pushing its prow like a spear through a wall of tall sawgrass and into a placid lagoon. Edmond cut the engine and we immediately slowed to a wallowing stop.
The lagoon was a hundred yards wide and formed a moat around a bare hump of land in its center. Tall and twisted gum trees grew out of the wall of tall sawgrass surrounding the lagoon. All around the edge of the sawgrass, swamp boats had settled, pointing the lights from their prows toward the center island. The boats were manned by shadowy men, swamp rats of the first order. Here and there flaming torches were set alight, both illuminating the area and infusing it with flickering shadows.
Fixed in the bobbing beams of the headlamps, herded to this location like a wooly mammoth pursued by cavemen, was the airboat piloted by Lucas Trask. The big man himself stood defiantly, legs spread, on his boat’s deck.
I felt myself standing, then almost physically being pulled forward. The boat beneath my feet began gliding ever so slowly toward the small island in the middle of the lagoon. The flat plateau gradually rose out of the swamp. It was circular in shape, about twenty-feet in diameter.
“Your sons are here,” I said, my voice low, but carrying across the water.
“Your sons are dead men walking.” This came from Trask. He had stepped from his boat onto the island and was holding up two of the leather pouches he’d been wearing around his neck. “I have their souls in my gris-gris bags.”
I didn’t need to look back at Edmond to feel the change in him when Trask held up the voodoo instruments. The airboat I was on gently eased onto the sandy incline of the island.
Other boats floated toward the island. Nobody got out of their boats, but they did reach out and sink the long poles of a dozen flaming torches into the soft ground. Charlotte Adrieux stayed standing proud and firm at the front of a swamp skiff polled by two tall, but rail thin black men.
Spreading her arms wide, she spoke in English. “Adrieuxs were part of this swamp long before Trasks arrived. The swamp flows through the blood in our veins. Your gris-gris cannot contain the soul of the swamp.”
Trask let loose with his high pitched laugh, spinning slowly around and around. This time nobody answered his laughter. When he was facing Charlotte Adrieux again, he feinted toward her, but she did not flinch.
“It is not my gris-gris. It is Kalfu’s and Kalfu cannot be defeated.”
“But you can,” I said, stepping from the airboat onto the wet earth of the tiny island plateau.
Trask whirled to look at me, his face nothing more now than a triumph of madness and evil. “You dare face Kalfu?” Trask gnashed his sharp pointed teeth at me.
I was angry and tired. Not physically tired – physically, I felt incredibly strong and aware – but emotionally. I was tired of the game, tired of the voodoo, tired of bad men thinking they could steamroller over everyone and everything.
I was angry for having been manipulated. I was angry for what had been done to Marcus de Trod. I was angry for every fight I’d ever been forced to fight, and for every battle from the orphanage, through the Navy, and the streets of Los Angeles, in which uncaring wolves ravaged the weak.
I was not weak. With or without the power of Legba, or whatever it was within me, I was Patrick Felony Flynn, The Giant Killer ...
Without warning, I sunk my fist with brutal force straight into the maw of Trask’s mouth. He staggered backward, blood swelling over his lips, anger almost instantly replacing the shock flashing across his features.
Tombstone would later tell me what happened next was either a trick of the light or of the swamp itself, for Trask appeared to swell in size – both height and width. All I knew was I felt myself also swelling with stature and power.
Trask jabbed his huge right fist at me, but I brushed it aside – ready for his follow-up left. I had stripped off the remaining tatters of my shirt while on the airboat, but I was still wearing the work gloves with the sand pouches sewn along the fingers. Trask still had on his black leather gloves, and I was very aware of the rolled lead concealed in the palms of his fists.
The dirt of the swamp mound was as springy as a ring canvas beneath my feet. I shuffled across it easily, making Trask come after me like a bull chasing a matador. He swung at me again and again, heavy clouting blows I fended off with my forearms.
I was forced back to the edge of the plateau. I placed one boot-shod foot into the water, ducked under Trask’s thunderous roundhouse right and drove a hard straight right of my own into his exposed side.
I moved forward, out of the water, and felt something trailing behind me. I looked down and saw a cottonmouth snake had attached itself to my boot heel. Any higher and it would have latched on to my bare ankle. The water surrounding the small island plateau must be infested with the deadly vipers.
Frankly, for the moment, the snake scared me more than Trask, and I jumped around like a scalded cat. I finally swung my foot with enough force to dislodge the snake and send it spinning back into the swamp.
In my dance of craziness, however, I’d lost focus on Trask, giving him the opportunity to blindside me. A crushing blow struck the left side of my head and I spun directly into a left upper-cut that threatened to tear my head from my neck.
My hands dropped and I was barely aware of Trask stepping forward, his forehead snapping in toward my face in a head-butt. Street fighting instinct was all that saved me. I moved my head to the side and, as the force of Trask’s body followed through with the missed head-butt, I brought a knee viciously up into his exposed gut.
He howled and staggered away from me. I wasn’t in any better shape. Trask’s blow to the left side of my head had me still seeing stars. I was happy to stagger away in the opposite direction and regain my bearings.
On this island areana, there were no neutral corners, no referee, nobody to ring the bell to end a round. There was nothing outside the brutal ballet of this fight we both had chosen. Two men, but only one winner.
As my head cleared, I could hear the sounds of a strange chanting. It was coming from the boatmen. Above their constant sound was a higher wailing coming from Charlotte Adrieux. She still stood in the prow of her skiff, her hands now front of her weaving in strange and complex motions.
The water around the edges of the island began to agitate a
s if it were boiling. The roiling of the water surged and a tangle of snake-like coils became visible, tumbling to the calling of Charlotte Adrieux’s voice and the motion of her hands.
Trask loomed up in front of me, impossibly large and solid. I dropped into a crouch and took the brunt of two crashing blows across my shoulders. I then began to piston my arms, moving forward and forward, driving a left jab, then a right, then a left, over and over.
I was impervious to the blows raining down on me from above. I knew only one thing – I had to punch my way through the man mountain in front of me.
Slowly the wall of Trask’s trunk began to crumble under my relentless onslaught. Here in the swamp, as in the ring, a man is only as strong as the core of his body. Chop down the core and the tree of the man, no matter how big, falls.
I punched again and again, my mind lost in the hours and hours Pop Hawks had kept me striking the heavy bag, always pushing me to punch one more time ... two more times ... ten more times ...
Pops had made me into a machine – a machine that could ignore the fierce burning in my shoulders, the electrifying shocks moving through my arms. A machine that drew strength from every muscle in the body – feet, legs, and hips sending their energy forward into the relentlessly punching fists.
Trask gave ground.
His feet shuffled back, not of his own volition, but because his body could take no more. He was still swinging, but the power of his punches was fading away.
I came up out of my crouch and was surprised to see I’d battered Trask across the plateau. The water that had been at my ankles was now at his, the edges of it a churning foam. I threw a hard jab once more to his gullet, but followed it this time with a lightning jab to his exposed throat.
He urked as his Adam’s apple swelled to cut off his breathing. My next blow smashed his nose flat. Trask threw up his hands. He opened his mouth and a harsh wind blew out of him, wrapped around me, twisted away and fled into the dark.
