Down, down, down. The water stretched ever deeper into a canvas of endless black. No hint of life or light. Impossible to track the pace of his progress. He no longer trusted the count, but kept hearing the numbers in his mind’s ear as if they possessed a life outside his thoughts. Stretching his legs to their furthest, praying to feel the contact of muddy ground beneath.
A hundred and two.
A hundred and three.
He was going to die down here. Drowned like a rat, with his corpse serving as a buffet for an unimaginable range of finned and gilled bottom-feeders. He might float back to the surface in time, if the fish chewed through the binds as Abellard had suggested may happen. Abellard might not even get away with it. The anchor might be discovered. The St. James Sheriff may take an interest in the owner of the abandoned rental car. Maybe even Dan Hubbard would be brought into the investigation when the car was traced back to the Hertz office and Rusty’s name showed up on the computer. Hubbard might actually embrace the possibility then that something bad had befallen Marceline Lavalle. He might initiate a real investigation focusing on Abellard and the Carnival.
Yes, all that could happen. There could even be enough left of Rusty’s body for a proper burial once they’d dragged the bay. But he would have accomplished nothing. Marceline would still be missing. Prosper would never see her, or his grandchild.
Even as this bleak panorama of possible outcomes painted itself across Rusty’s thoughts, a disciplined corner of his brain kept counting.
One twenty-five.
One twenty-six.
His boots sank into soft mud at a hundred and seventy.
He curled his body into a tight ball, bringing his feet within reach of his hands. The sudden movement may have cost him a few seconds of oxygen but he couldn’t worry about it. Even bound at the wrists, his fingers had enough freedom of movement to work on the weighted ties at his ankles. Doing a quick tactile scan of the knots, he determined it was a standard anchor hitch, tied with marginal proficiency. The long end of the rope wrapped itself around the metal anchor that had already disappeared into the powdery sediment bed.
Fortunately the rope was only 3/8” thick, a good diameter for getting a quick handle on the loops of the knot. Rusty kept counting as his fingers acted on pure muscle memory.
Two hundred and one.
Two hundred and two.
If any fish swam by closely enough to leave a wake or give him a curious nibble, he had no awareness of it. He pulled on a freshly loosened end of the knot and the weighted rope fell away.
It happened with such unexpected ease, Rusty almost thought he imagined it. Maybe he hadn’t freed himself at all. Maybe his oxygen-starved brain was starting to hallucinate, creating a false vision of freedom before a surge of rancid water filled his lungs.
But no, he was still awake and free. Both legs shook loose like uncaged animals. He could feel a buoyancy lifting him from the muddy surface. Eyes open but sightless, he could only tell which direction was up by an instinctive guess.
Rusty had no way of knowing he deep he was. Or how many seconds it would take him to kick back to the surface. Or if his body still had enough strength to perform the task.
He started kicking. Pushing both legs in tight measured strokes, creating maximum wake. And he kept counting.
Two twenty-two.
Two twenty-three.
After a dozen strokes, he realized with dismay just how drained he was. Each kick seemed to push him forward by mere centimeters. It was so dark that he had no way of monitoring his progress. He didn’t know if he was swimming directly toward the surface or in a lateral direction that brought him no closer to escape.
When his internal count reached two-fifty, he knew he wasn’t going to make it. His lungs reached that decision before his brain did. The message didn’t rely on logic or factual evidence, but a leaden stasis of tendon and muscle that said he simply could not keep moving. His very cells were telling him to quit. That it wasn’t so bad. That it would all be over quickly.
With a jolt, he realized he’d abandoned the count. He’d lost track. The numbers had grown too discouraging, then terrifying, and then ultimately meaningless. He could only count to one, over and over. Just a single abandoned digit. A mantra that wouldn’t save him but which he kept repeating in time with the movement of his near-useless legs.
One more kick.
One more kick.
Why hadn’t he lost consciousness yet, or swallowed half the damn bay? It hardly seemed possible. He’d certainly passed the three hundred mark. Despite the sensory evidence of being in motion, Rusty felt quite sure his lungs had opened by now. No other scenario seemed plausible. He must have expended his limit for constricting his breath long ago. Oxygen supply down to zero, and beyond.
One more kick.
One more kick.
Wait.
Above him—or was it off to the side?—a faint glimmer in the water. A shimmery oval of light, barely the size of a coin. He tried to focus on it, to steer himself toward it. No good. It dissolved as quickly as it appeared, then came back slightly stronger but for an even briefer glimpse.
Rusty didn’t let himself believe he’d seen the sun rippling across the bay’s surface. It was eminently possibly he wasn’t even swimming in the right direction. Hell, he couldn’t be sure if his eyes were open or shut. The blackness was the same, lids up or down.
One more kick.
That distant glimmer, there it was again. No doubt this time. But the mere act of seeing it hardly guaranteed its reality. Could very well be the result of an exploded capillary somewhere behind his optic nerve. A tiny vein bursting with the inexorable pressure on his lungs. Fool’s gold for an overtaxed body not quite ready to quit out of evolutionary stubbornness.
He no longer felt pain, or even panic. A sense of detaching from his own corpse came over him, and it was a relief. The only thing that bothered him was Marceline. Knowing he’d failed her. But even that started to feel like more of an abstraction than a reality. Maybe she was fine, just taking a little break someplace nice, awaiting her admission to the world of motherhood.
No! I heard Abellard on the phone, asking for her…
Rusty clung to that unclear memory as the glimmer appeared once again. A little brighter this time, its layered golden dimples imprinted themselves on his retinas for a fraction of a second longer.
Rusty allowed that it might belong to the sun, or just as easily his own dying brain. Some kind of synaptic misfire. What did it matter, really? He felt fairly certain he was already dead, and it wasn’t so bad.
It was freedom. Release. He knew it, and felt as calmly submissive to that fate as he did when waiting for the plane to crash with Erin’s arms wrapped around his neck.
His mind gave in, but his legs had other ideas. Beyond anything resembling simple exhaustion, they kept the pace.
One more kick.
• • •
Captain Dave Thibodeaux—founder, owner, and chief skipper of the Barataria Tour Company—leaned against the helm of his fifty-foot flatboat, The Swamp Thing. The wheel turned easily in his hand, moving away from a mossy embankment and into deeper waters. Today’s afternoon tour was rounding third and heading for home.
Dave watched an orange sunsplash dance across the bay’s placid surface. A pelican skimmed low in search of an easy catch. The Captain never tired of such sights.
It had been a good day, as profitable as could be hoped for at the tail end of the high season. Dave was ready to wind up this tour and get back home to deposit the lockerful of cash he’d collected in a safe place. Not a fan of the banking system, Dave kept his life savings stashed in a dozen different cubby holes around the half-acre plot of land he owned in the bayside town of Crown Point.
The Swamp Thing carried a capacity crowd, more than twenty passengers in all. Some were locals on a Sunday excursion. Most fell into the category of out-of-town guests who were so vital to keeping the economic health of Louisiana on l
ife support.
Captain Dave had been talking steadily into his hand-held mic for the last hour, pointing out various highlights of the natural beauty found within Barataria Bay. Now he was content to shut up and steer for a while. Just listening to the dull rumble of The Swamp Thing’s motor, accentuated by a rhythmic slapping of waves against the hull, comprised an indelible part of the tour experience he offered.
In addition to a lecture on some of the more recognizable types of flora indigenous to the bay—lush mangroves, waving clusters of Spanish moss, robust live oaks—the Captain had also given his passengers an eyeful of the local fauna. Smartphones pointed every which way; the group had photographed a veritable menagerie of foraging armadillos, frolicking otters, sunbathing turtles, frogs with impossibly bright green skin, and four different species of ducks.
All good fun, but Dave’s patrons had forked over $18-per-head to see Barataria’s most iconic resident: the American alligator. After finding some usually reliable spots empty, Dave steered The Swamp Thing into less traveled waters. His gambit paid off. Pulling close to the shallows near the bay’s southwestern lip, he switched off the motor and treated his guests to an intimate look at no less than fourteen adults of the species.
Customary gasps arose as he leaned over the boat’s stern rail, reaching an arm out to tempt the nearest gator with some marshmallows. Dave knew precisely how long to keep the bait in his grip, watching the massive reptile advance across the water’s cloudy surface with elegant sweeps of its tail. At the last possible moment, his fingers splayed and the marshmallow fell. The creature’s toothy maw snapped shut, loud as a firecracker. Oohs and ahhs filled the boat, right on cue.
The passengers loved seeing the big gators, but Dave had one more surprise in store for them. Before docking back at Crown Point, they’d have the chance to hold a baby in their bare hands. Eight weeks old and twice as many inches long, it was now squirming in a wooden box at Captain Dave’s feet.
“This here on the starboard’s worth looking at,” he mumbled into his mic, speaking in a Cajun dialect that sounded like a linguistic collision between the South of France and Flatbush.
The passengers all scrambled to the boat’s rail, necks craning and phones held aloft to capture whatever marvelous sight the Captain had just alerted them to. There wasn’t much see—just another small island covered with bushy mangroves.
“That’s where I saw the strangest sight ever to greet my eyes in forty-odd years on this bay. I come out early of a morning with my oyster pots, and right there on that muddy spit, I seen a full-grown male gator squaring off against three snapping turtles. Them turtles put up a hell of a fight, too.”
Turning off the mic, Dave chortled into his beard. The story was true, but he had no way of knowing whether it had taken place on the small island they’d just passed or one of a thousand other virtually identical outcroppings in these waters.
“What’s that?” a woman shouted from the stern. “Oh my God!”
A quick shuffle of hurried feet followed her startled cry. Many passengers were rushing aftward to see what had caused the stir.
“Slow down, folks,” Captain Dave growled with irritation at the carelessness of these landlubbing fools. “Ain’t no running on The Swamp Thing.”
He was half-way to the stern when he heard a stout male voice shout, “Man overboard!”
Dave’s blood went cold. In all his days with the Barataria Tour Company, he’d never had a passenger fall out of the boat. All safety measures were up to code, but that didn’t prevent some bullshit liability suit from landing on his head.
He grabbed a life preserver and pushed aside two stoned-looking teenagers who’d spent most of the tour buried in their iPhones.
“Captain, we have a man overboard,” repeated a silver-haired passenger from New England decked out in preppy nautical garb.
“Where?” Dave asked furiously, his head turning on a swivel.
“Two o’clock off the port side,” the man replied, pointing off toward a cluster of sawgrass marshes in the distance.
Sweet Jesus and Mary, Dave thought. How’d we get so far away? How long ago did the jackass tumble out?
“Not one of ours,” the New Englander commented. “I suppose we ought to haul him in just the same, don’t you?”
“Give me room,” Dave said, pushing the man aside to peer over the rail. Off to his right, some thirty yards away, a figure was thrashing wildly in the shallows.
Seeing a tangle of long black hair, Captain Dave initially thought it was a woman. A second glance told him it was a man struggling to pull himself out of the muck and onto a patch of sawgrass.
With a profound swell of relief, Dave confirmed the New Englander’s claim that it wasn’t one of his passengers.
“Everyone take a seat,” he ordered, and there was no need to repeat it. The whole group assumed a rapt seriousness of manner. They were clearly excited about this unscripted addition to the tour, but weren’t sure how to behave.
“Y’all are getting a bonus today, and it ain’t even gonna cost you extra.”
Dave strode back to the wheelhouse and fired up the motor. He swung the boat around in a wide arc and hit the emergency horn. Throttle held at full tilt, The Swamp Thing turned into the westward sun and held a straight line toward the clump of sawgrass onto which the distant figure still fought to climb.
Sounding the horn again, Captain Dave had to shake his shaggy head in wonder. Life on Barataria Bay was something a man simply could not take for granted, even if he knew these vast depths as well as his own backyard. Just when he thought he’d done all there was to do as a tour guide, he was about to make his very first rescue.
18.
Dr. Philip Roque impatiently swiped his card key through the digital reader. The magnetic strip didn’t register on his first attempt, or the second. Roque swore under his breath, cursing the reader’s faulty design. He tried again at a more measured pace and heard a motorized lock slide open.
Roque admonished himself not to be too impatient—or at least not to let it show—and stepped into the medical office plaza’s foyer.
Heeding that inner advice was a challenge. He had been on edge for the past several hours. Ever since his iPhone started ringing a few minutes before seven o’clock, waking him from the first decent dream he’d enjoyed in weeks.
He’d ignored it at first, figuring no one of any importance would bother him so early on a Sunday morning. The call went to voicemail. But no digital chirp followed to indicate a new message. Ten seconds later, it started ringing again.
Sprawled across a king-sized mattress in the master bedroom of his expansive Uptown home (soon to be his sole residence once the divorce papers went through) Roque felt no inclination to answer the phone. It kept ringing, but he lay there stubbornly, fleshy limbs entangled in satin sheets.
His mistress Yvonne was snoring next to him, with considerable volume. Some women snored in a gentle way that was more endearing than annoying, Roque had found over the course of a busy philandering career. Yvonne was of a different breed, sawing logs with the intensity of a lumberjack on meth. This had just recently come to his attention, despite the fact that they’d been sleeping together for well over a year.
It struck him as ominous that her apnea-induced barrage revealed itself only now that she was within weeks of becoming the next Mrs. Philip Roque. As he let the phone ring unanswered for a third time, Roque pondered the matter uneasily.
They hadn’t made love last night, nor the past three nights. She’d claimed a persistent case of cramps, also an unprecedented phenomenon. Taken together, the snoring and sudden lack of carnal interest raised troubling questions. What other traits was she waiting to unveil once that marquis diamond was safely on her finger?
An unsettling proposition, but the goddamned ringing didn’t allow Roque to stew over it for long. He climbed out of bed with an annoyed grumble and retrieved the iPhone. His grumble turned into a groan when he saw Claude Sherman�
��s number on the screen. Christ, of all the people to bother him now!
Roque couldn’t fathom why Abellard had given Sherman his cell number, after being explicitly told not to do so. It was a moot point, and he’d never quite found the nerve to complain about it. Carrying the phone out of the bedroom, he answered with as much pique as he could muster. It didn’t hold up for long.
Sherman was flat-out raving on the other end of the line, insisting the doctor meet him at the clinic within an hour. When Roque pointed out it was a Sunday, most of which he planned to spend on the greens of Riverside, Sherman exploded with such fury it seemed wise not to provoke the man further. For all he knew, Abellard had given him this address along with the cell number.
Philip Roque wasn’t willing to risk the possibility of Claude Sherman showing up here in such an unhinged state. Even meeting at the clinic provided not nearly as much distance as he wished to keep from the man.
So he consented to drive over to Magazine by nine o’clock. No sooner. After a few more minutes of arguing, Claude agreed to meet him at that time.
Now, riding the elevator to the medical plaza’s third floor, Roque considered a mystery he’d ignored until this moment. Why was it so urgent to meet right away? What business refused to wait until tomorrow afternoon, when Claude could make an appearance under his flimsy but useful veneer as the overnight custodian?
Roque stepped off the elevator and flinched at the sight of a dark shape lurking by the clinic’s front door. It could only be Claude Sherman. The uncombed mane and strangely tilted posture was impossible to mistake.
For a surreal moment it appeared he’d grown a hunch. Claude clutched a shiny black garbage bag in his hands, slung over one shoulder. The image of a dozen drowned cats crept into Roque’s head. He brushed it away and approached with measured steps.
“I certainly hope this is important.”
“You’re late. We said nine.”
Roque entered the office without reply. He flicked on the overhead lamp, bringing a dull white glow to the reception room. He’d never been here on a Sunday before, and something about the emptiness of this familiar space unnerved him.
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