“If I knew for sure he was there, I’d take Shauna instead. Keith would know if there’s a doctor anywhere nearby that could see her. That hand needs to be taken care of, or it’ll never be right again. But I can’t risk taking her all that way for nothing, if we don’t find Keith.”
“I agree. She’s better off here on the boat until we know. Besides, Daniel would pitch a fit if she went off like that with you.”
Eric laughed. That was certainly true. Daniel would have a hard time with that idea even if it were the best option for his wife. But Eric didn’t want to have to worry about her, injured and exposed out on the river in the dinghy. If something happened to him, she would really be in a bind. He would take the kid, but he would still worry about leaving his father here in a stranded boat. Would he worry any less if Jonathan stayed behind? Eric thought about it for a minute and decided he wouldn’t, although that wasn’t Jonathan’s fault. The kid lacked training and experience for this kind of thing, but he more than made up for it with his willingness to learn and to pitch in and do his part. Eric had been pleasantly surprised with him so far, especially in light of his initial first impressions. Jonathan had the attitude and adaptability of a survivor, and he had proven his courage under fire, a test that Eric had seen even trained soldiers fail their first time out. If they ran into trouble upriver, Eric knew Jonathan would do his best to help out. With his decision made, Eric wanted to make a plan and complete preparations without delay. If not for the risks, he would leave immediately, but he knew it was far more prudent to wait until dark, even though it would make the navigation part more difficult.
“Let’s get ready Jonathan! Time for more operations training. Tonight you make your second trip upriver behind enemy lines! I want you to strip and clean that AK and make sure all the mags you used the other day are topped off. We could run into most anything up there!”
Along with the AK he had used in the open sea encounter with the two fishing boats, the kid would also carry the .357 Magnum revolver Eric had taken off of one of the two men who tried to steal his kayak in Florida. Jonathan had taken a liking to it ever since Eric gave it to him, and he’d demonstrated that he was a decent shot with it as well. Eric hoped that by waiting until nightfall, they could avoid the need to use their weapons at all, but it would be foolish to travel that far without being well prepared.
Eric also packed a few other things they might need into a couple of his smaller dry bags. He still had several of the MREs he’d brought with him in his kayak and with those and the other stores available on the schooner, it was easy to put together enough supplies to allow for contingencies. He assembled a minimal first-aid kit from the inventory he had in his gear, along with survival essentials for a stay in the woods if necessary. For navigation, he had his hand-bearing compass, binoculars and the night vision monocular that had already come in so handy here. But finding Keith’s place in the maze of waterways upstream was going to be part guesswork and part reliance on Bart’s memory from a visit there years prior. Eric and Jonathan sat with him in the cockpit of the schooner as Bart spread out the only Louisiana map he had, along with some notebook paper and a pencil.
“This is just a road map, but it’ll have to do,” he said. “It doesn’t even show the bayou where the house is, but I’m pretty sure I can draw you a rough sketch.”
Eric had been to Keith’s place once as well, but only briefly, and only from the highway. Bart had stayed there longer when he went, and Keith had taken him fishing and given him a tour of the swamp in his boat, so he had a vague idea of the relationship of the river to the house.
“I wasn’t doing the navigating, but I remember that we came out on the old river channel and went south to the big, main channel that the tow boats use to get to the Mississippi. I think you’ll be able to spot the old river mouth on the west side as you head north in the channel. There are probably channel markers there, but without charts I don’t know that for sure. There’ll be all kinds of bayous, canals and dead lakes that you’ll see leading off the river on both sides, but as long as you follow as close as you can to the levee on the west side of the basin, I think you’ll find the bayou. You’ll recognize his house when you see it. It’s at the end of a sharp bend—at least it was.”
That the house might not be there was another possibility they had considered. Keith’s place was far enough inland to be safe from storm surge damage, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t vulnerable to hurricane winds. There was simply no way to know how bad the damage was that far inland until they went there. After what happened this morning, Eric wondered if it wouldn’t have been wiser for he and Jonathan to make the entire trip in the dinghy before they even attempted to take Dreamtime upriver. If they could have found Keith first, he would have helped them with the navigation and given them intel on the overall situation here. The thought of doing just that had crossed Eric’s mind at landfall, but he’d said nothing at the time because he knew the others wouldn’t like the idea of splitting up the group. Now, they were left with no choice.
After Eric and Jonathan finished preparing their weapons and other gear, they offloaded the inflatable and mounted the 15-horse Yamaha outboard to the transom. The dinghy was a good one and quite capable of making the river trip. The Canadian couple that had owned the schooner had outfitted her well for island cruising, and hadn’t skimped on the dinghy or the motor, knowing that a fast, seaworthy tender was needed in many anchorages in the islands that were situated far from the towns and villages where goods and services could be had. The one they’d chosen was an excellent rigid bottom inflatable paired with a quiet and fuel-efficient Yamaha four-stroke. It was a rig that could run upriver at a good clip without making a lot of noise. While it certainly wasn’t as stealthy as Eric’s Klepper kayak that was also on board and available, Eric hoped that wouldn’t matter so much here. There might be more risk of being heard or spotted in the outboard-powered dinghy, but it was a risk he was willing to take. They simply didn’t have the three or more days it would take to paddle that far when they didn’t even know if they would find Keith at home or not. As far as Eric could tell from his underwater inspection, the schooner wasn’t damaged from the grounding, but it could be if conditions changed. A storm bringing choppy waters to the river or even the wakes from more passing barges could cause the hull to move and grind against the metal of the sunken wreck. It needed to be moved free of that mess as soon as possible, and right now, finding Keith was their best hope of doing so.
The afternoon seemed to drag by, as Eric was impatient to get going. He resisted the urge to leave early though, and tried to get a couple of hours of sleep, insisting that Jonathan do the same. Sleep never came, even though he stretched out in his bunk and tried. Everyone on board was anxious, and Eric knew the rest of the crew would be dealing with an uncomfortable situation while they waited here. With the schooner firmly planted on that awkward angle, life on board was quite inconvenient. But worse than that would be the waiting and the helpless feeling of being stuck and immobile until Eric and Jonathan returned. To give them at least the option of leaving the boat in an emergency, Eric offloaded the kayak and assembled the paddles, tying it alongside the schooner before he left.
“I hope we’ll be back with good news by tomorrow,” Eric said, when the twilight finally faded to night and he and Jonathan were ready to depart. “If Keith isn’t there, I’ll spend at least a day looking for him before I give up. Without him we’re back to negotiating with strangers for help, and we all know how that turned out the last time.”
“We’ll be right here waiting,” Bart said, “unless some good Samaritan with a crane barge comes along.”
Fourteen
KEITH DROVE WEST IN Greg’s truck with his wounded partner, heading to Lafayette, where the only somewhat functioning hospital in the vicinity was running on generators and a greatly reduced staff. He kept south of I-10 on the small roads, still risky at night, but far less so than the interstate. It was up to Keith
to get his wounded partner there, as there was no operational ambulance service to call, even if he could reach someone on the sheriff’s department radio in Greg’s truck. It was only a little over 20 miles, but Keith was still worried that he wouldn’t make it in time. Considering where the bullet had hit and the fact that it apparently didn’t exit, he wasn’t sure what kind of internal organ damage and bleeding Greg might have suffered. All he knew was that it was a serious wound, and getting medical help fast was a matter of life or death.
Greg had made a tactical mistake when he placed himself in front of those glass windows. He’d assumed the two intruders that exited were the only ones in there, and it was a mistake anyone could make but it still shouldn’t have happened. He and Keith didn’t have headset comms like a proper entry team, but even if they had, Keith hadn’t seen anything to tip him off until the woman inside fired.
Keith had put her rifle behind the seat of the truck after clearing the store. It was a bolt-action hunting rifle, chambered for .243, a common caliber used for deer hunting. There was also a Mini-14 .223 leaning against inside of the doorframe of the store, probably left there by the man who had his hands full of boxes when he and the other woman carried their loot outside. The pistol that same man had attempted to draw was a well-worn stainless steel Ruger P-90. Keith had given it and the Mini-14 to A.J. and Terry for safekeeping until he had time to come back and record the serial numbers from them. He would probably let the brothers keep the weapons if they wanted them, as he had been collecting firearms from incidents like this for so long now that he had far more than he had use for or space to store. He only kept the .243 because he figured if Greg pulled through this, he might want the gun that nearly killed him as a souvenir—or at least a reminder not to make that mistake again!
As he approached the hospital in Lafayette and drove towards the emergency room entrance, Keith flipped on the blue lights to identify himself as law enforcement to the armed security guards he knew were posted outside. The few doctors and nurses that were doing their best to help the community in this critical time were working on a voluntary basis and they had to turn many people away. Law enforcement officers were a priority though, and Greg wasn’t the first wounded deputy from St. Martin Parish that had been treated there under those conditions. There were so few of them left at this point however, that Keith wondered if he might not be one of the last.
The guards quickly unlocked the emergency room doors when Keith got out and told them why he was there. One disappeared inside and in a few moments two more men came out rolling a gurney and Keith opened the passenger side door of the truck so they could move Greg inside. He was pale and shivering and obviously in a lot of pain as the men moved him. Keith followed them inside and gave a report of what happened to the nurse that greeted him after Greg was wheeled through a set of swinging double doors. All he could do after that was wait, so he found a chair in a dimly lit room off to the side and tried to make himself comfortable. As he sat there in silence, his thoughts returned to the radio call of that afternoon, and he wondered if perhaps even now, his father was at his house, having found his way off the river and into the correct bayou on his own. If so, Keith hoped he would see the tools and materials and realize repair work was being done, and that he still lived there. Surely he would also see the vehicles and the motorcycles parked there and at least wait a reasonable amount of time for him to return. As the possible scenarios played out in his mind, he had to stop himself from worrying about it. Chances were, Bart wasn’t even close. It had already been mid-afternoon when he called and he was obviously too far away to receive Keith’s reply at the time. They would meet up tomorrow, Keith was sure of it, but right now his friend and fellow officer was undergoing emergency surgery, and Keith wasn’t leaving until he knew the outcome. He’d tried to appear positive about it in front of Greg, but they both knew this was a serious wound, as any rifle round striking the torso would be. The hours dragged by and Keith dozed in and out of sleep slumped in his chair. He was alone in the waiting room the entire time, and when the door opened again at last, snapping him awake, the man who entered was one of the doctors.
“He’s in stable condition for now, but I can’t give you any guarantees. There was a lot of internal bleeding. It was a hollow point bullet. We got it out but it did a lot of tissue damage and it just barely missed his spine. We’re pretty limited on diagnostics right now but we think we’ve got all the leaks stopped inside. He’ll need close observation though until we’re sure, and plenty of time to recover.”
“Thanks Doc. I guess there’s no need for me to hang around for now then. I’ll go see if I can find his daughter and let her know, and I’ll be back to check on him tomorrow.”
It was two hours after midnight when Keith left the hospital. There wasn’t much point in going all the way to Vic’s and then running his boat home in the dark only to have to return first thing in the morning, so he drove down to Greg’s house in St. Martinsville instead. Greg lived alone since he was divorced, and he’d given Keith a key back when they lost so many men in the department and began operating out of their homes rather than the central office. There was a spare room there he’d used before, and Keith crawled into the bed to get a few hours of sleep before facing the busy day he had ahead of him.
Greg’s wife, Brenda, had left him three or four years ago, running off to Dallas with a man she met online. His daughter, Rachel, who was already a senior in high school the year they divorced, refused to leave her friends to move away with her mother. Greg and Rachel had managed okay by themselves for a year until she moved off to college, and she’d since married her high-school boyfriend, Jimmy. The two of them lived out in the country on his parents’ farm north of Lafayette, and had stayed put there when things began to break down. Jimmy’s father had cattle on the land, and they were far enough off the major highways that it was unlikely the violent troublemakers would bother them. Greg had been out to check on them a few times, but Keith never went with him when he did. Without working phones of course, there was no way to get word to Rachel other than driving out there, so Keith resolved to do that first thing. He knew about where it was from hearing Greg describe it, and a search through Greg’s address book on his desk gave him enough info to find it. Keith started that way around 8:30 and pulled into the driveway a little over an hour later. After filling Rachel in on the details concerning her father, and getting her assurance that she would go to the hospital to check on him as soon as possible, Keith drove back to A.J.’s Cafe to deal with the bodies at the store next door.
By the time he arrived, A.J. had notified Mr. Patel’s family and his body had already been removed. Keith would write up a brief report in a notebook he found in Greg’s truck, and check to see if any of the dead looters were carrying I.D. Beyond that, these incidents had become so common there was little else to be done. The bodies would be hauled away and buried without ceremony or formality, because even if they could be identified, contacting family members or anyone who happened to care would be next to impossible. After what they’d done to his partner, Keith simply didn’t care who these criminals were. All that mattered was that they would never break into any more stores or shoot anyone again. He put the three Louisiana driver’s licenses he found inside the notebook to bookmark the report and then went next door to tell A.J. all he knew about Greg before he left. He was anxious to get back to Vic’s house and his boat, so he cut the visit short and hurried on his way. When he arrived at Vic’s, his brother-in-law was aboard his trawler, scraping rust and painting. It was the never-ending ritual of maintenance practiced by every owner of a steel work vessel.
“I tried last night and several times this morning since daybreak, but I never got a response,” Vic said, when Keith asked the obvious question as soon as he stepped on board.
“Well, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Maybe he stopped for the night somewhere close to wherever he called from yesterday. Or, there could be something wrong with his
radio. It may be transmitting but not receiving, who knows? I guess I’ll run back to the house on the chance he’s already there.”
Keith left Greg’s truck parked at Vic’s and headed south in his boat. He didn’t pass any other vessels in the short run along the old river channel down to the bayou cutoff, and when he arrived at his dock, he found it just as he’d left it the day before. Keith tied up and went inside to make himself something for lunch, and ate it while sitting and staring at the gaping hole that still let in daylight through the roof. He hated to miss a day of perfect working weather with so much left to do, but he knew he couldn’t focus on it anyway knowing his father was somewhere nearby. The work could wait. He wanted to make a loop over to the Whiskey Bay Pilot Channel and run it north of the bridge to see if he might spot whatever vessel Bart was on over there. He also planned to go back to the hospital and check on Greg again later that afternoon or evening. Knowing it could be days before he actually got back to work on his roof, Keith secured the big blue tarp he’d been using over the section that was still open to the weather and then collapsed his extension ladder and laid it on the ground next to his saw horses.
When he was back in his boat he tried the radio again, of course, even though by now his expectations of getting through to Bart were quite low. When he reached the river, he made the five-mile run down to the junction with the Whiskey Bay Pilot Channel, stopping for a few minutes when he got there to try the radio again. Not long after he turned north, he overtook a tow pushing several barges but still saw no vessels that his father might have called from. Keith was beginning to wonder if he was losing his mind, and if he had not imagined the calls from the day before. He’d been through a lot lately, losing Lynn and so many of his friends and fellow lawmen, but a call from his father here was so unexpected that it simply had to be real. It was simply so unlikely and unexpected he knew he wouldn’t have dreamed it. No, Bart had really called, but he must have been farther away than Keith originally thought. The VHF band was typically used for relatively close-range communications, but with the right antenna and enough transmitter power, Keith knew it was possible to reach out farther. If Bart had a chance to do so, Keith knew he had the knowledge to set up such a system on any vessel he might have left the boatyard on. It was just surprising there had been no more calls since yesterday, though. Keith would have thought they’d be more frequent the closer he got, if he were indeed on his way.
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