Highfire

by Eoin Colfer

  Hooke’s fingers clamped onto Carnahan’s shoulder. “Shit, boy. You used up the entirety of your credit, and half of mine, too.”

  Squib was barely more than a kid, but he could see what was coming. This was way more leverage than he wanted. This here was the kind of information a guy volunteered to get lobotomized right out of his own head just to be certain he couldn’t testify to it.

  “I’m the pilot, Constable,” said Willard. “There ain’t nobody can navigate the swamp like me. I ain’t lost a single package since we opened the pipeline. Not a goddamn gram.”

  “That is true, son,” acknowledged Hooke, actual pain on his features. “So now you got me discomfited, too, because of how I got to train up a replacement.”

  Willard had one more argument in his bank. “But we got plans, Regence. We’re partners.”

  Regence sighed. “We was, right enough,” he said. “Until you fucked up Ivory’s nephew. I ain’t ready for heat yet. My plans ain’t been stress-tested.”

  A fine mist of reality settled on the situation, and the hope drained out of Carnahan. He slumped in Hooke’s grasp like a punctured balloon man, and it looked like he might collapse on the spot, but the constable propped him up.

  “Now, come on, son,” said Regence. “We all got to pay the piper.” At which point Hooke whistled a few bars of the reveille. “Get it, son? In your particular case, I’m the piper.”

  Flat on his belly in the swamp mud, with crawfish and God knows what else nipping at his shoelaces, Squib had himself a Road to Damascus moment. It wasn’t God-related—Squib had little time for God or his boys. No, Squib’s epiphany was corporeal, vis-à-vis his own mortality. The boy was no fool. He knew in theory that he was gonna die at some distant time in the future. But to Squib, like most kids, that’s all it was: a theory. Also, Squib had half a notion that by the time his number was up, the whole death problem would’ve been solved by scientists.

  But right there on the banks of a sluggish bayou, with the silver-dollar moon throwing shine on a dead man walking and the man about to kill him, Squib felt the yawning vacuum of his own mortality open right above him, and he knew with utter certainty that if he gave himself away, Regence Hooke would end him without even breaking a sweat.

  “Aw, Constable,” said Carnahan, “we’s partners, ain’t we? Must be something can be worked out.”

  “Not a damn thing,” said Regence Hooke, and he tipped his cap like a good old boy. “Now, listen. I got this single mom back in Petit Bateau waiting for me to crank her open, so I need to finish up here. You understand, right?”

  Carnahan sighed, not really on the same page re: his own fate. “Yeah, I guess. Gotta chase that tail, right, Constable?”

  “That’s right, son,” said Hooke, and took his hand out of his windbreaker pocket, two of the knuckles sheathed in the grip of a gut hook. He flicked the blade out with his thumb and sawed it across Carnahan’s midsection below the rib cage. The skinning blade opened the flesh in a W flap.

  Willard jerked a little. “That’s chilly, Constable. Did you just murder me?”

  Hooke wiped the blade on Carnahan’s shirt. “Yep, son. I did. My sincere regrets.”

  And he pitched Carnahan into the Pearl like he was ejecting him from a club.

  Willard Carnahan toppled onto the bayou, and the scrim of its spongy surface supported his 150 pounds with barely a splash. The wound was so devastating that Carnahan’s insides rushed out of him, and almost immediately the bottom-feeders lurking below took hold of this unexpected bounty of tendons and gore, reeling the man in. Willard had barely any strength in him, and all he could accomplish was a sideways leer into the reeds, drawing equal measures of sludge and air through his yawning mouth. For Carnahan, life had slowed to one-third, and nothing he wanted to do was feasible. Watching the world telescope away from him was about all he could manage.

  “Hey, son,” Regence Hooke called after him, “the swamp is taking you to its bosom. That’s fitting, ain’t it?”

  If Regence had only turned away before casting his final barb, then he might not have cottoned on to the movement in the rushes. Even then, no big deal. Lotta things moving in the rushes this deep in the bayou. However, usually none of those lotta things blurted out exclamations along the lines of Jesus goddamn Christ, which Hooke was pretty certain he heard coming out of the flora. And even if he hadn’t just murdered a person, an inquisitive man such as Constable Regence Hooke would be obliged to ascertain who exactly was playing fast and loose with the second commandment.

  What had happened was this: Carnahan had bobbed on past the sagging jetty till he arrived level with young Squib, who’d long since abandoned any notion of blackmail and was wishing he had himself a pair of ruby slippers to click together. Poor Willard had that expression on that was halfway between fucked and dead, and with a pale slickness to the complexion which made it clear he was on the brief trip from one to the other.

  Squib found his eyes glued to the dying man, wondering which embodiment of death would win the race to claim Carnahan, blood loss or drowning? Or perhaps a gator? As it turned out, there was another contender. A monster snapping turtle breached like a mottled, domed submarine, coming a full foot out of the water, its predator’s beak all hysterical, and tore Carnahan’s living face right off his skull, to which Squib exclaimed, “Jesus goddamn Christ!”

  He had never seen a turtle of this girth: shell the size of a small car, and that long neck corded and erect like the dick his good friend Charles Jr. liked to wave about so much, proud as he was.

  Swamp folk often spoke of the bloodthirsty nature of these generally docile creatures, but not many had seen it firsthand.

  That was more than likely all she wrote for Willard Carnahan and his modern-day piratical escapades, but the boy did not see him and his flayed skull go under, for Squib’s own blasphemous mouth had named him a witness and therefore a target, so he upped off his belly and jinked like a jackrabbit into the island proper.

  HOOKE SAW A figure hightail it into the island with the green glow of a phone in his hand and scowled in petulant frustration. “Mary, Mother of Jesus, I cannot believe this day.”

  In Regence Hooke’s mind he had been much put-upon in the past twelve hours.

  First the Elodie Moreau thing was souring his mood, then Ivory forced him to gut his pilot, and now some shadowy figure shoots a movie of the proceedings?

  Leverage, thought Hooke. That goddamn Ivory was reckoning to tighten the leash. It seemed like he was misinterpreting their relationship, forgetting who had the badge here. Who else could be responsible? Ivory insisted on the hit, then planted some city kid up here to play Candid Camera. The drug lord would get even more information than he’d hoped for if he watched that video.

  “Not tonight, Ivory,” said Regence Hooke, patting the service Glock in his holster. Gunfire traveled crystal clear over flat water, but there was no helping that. Shots in a swamp could always be explained. Video could not.

  Regence did not waste bullets firing into the Spanish moss but instead picked his way carefully across the half-rotten jetty to his own swamp cruiser and cast off. He had two reasons for taking the boat: One, the idiot spy had marooned himself on an island, and two, he had a couple of toys in the strongbox.

  I’m gonna bleed you with my pump-action, son, thought Regence, then put you down close quarters with the Glock.

  It occurred to Constable Hooke, as he pushed the flat-bottomed craft back from the jetty, that this would only be the second time in his life he had killed two men in one night.

  Oh, no, hold up, Regence. You’re selling yourself short. You did that Witness Security guy and his handler last year in Florida.

  The WITSEC guy—not an easy hit.

  So three times.

  Definitely three.

  In peacetime.

  SQUIB’S FIRST EXPERIENCE of shotgun pellet sting came upon crashing through the mangroves on the western shore of Honey Island. He’d not been intending to cr
ash through anything, but it came upon him all of a sudden, like the cliff in a Road Runner cartoon: One second he was stumbling along what could at a squint be called a trail, and the next his nose was out in the open and there was Hooke out on the water all pumped and ready to unload. Squib saw Regence Hooke’s jaw in the red glow of cigar ember, and then the cop’s barrel jerked upwards and Squib had himself a gunshot wound on the forearm. It wasn’t anything near fatal, not from a distance of sixty yards plus, mostly didn’t even break the skin, but he’d be feeling it for weeks to come.

  That weren’t no shot to kill, thought Squib. Bastard’s herding me.

  The shot’s recoil scooted the boat backwards across the bayou, forcing Regence Hooke to tend to his throttle, which gave Squib a second to duck out of sight, shuffle into the interior, and catch his breath.

  He lay flat on his back, feeling the buckshot scalding in his arm and the cold swamp mud shrinking his ball sack.

  How the hell do I get off this island? he thought. If Hooke don’t get me, the gators sure as hell will.

  The smell of the oil-slick water gave him his answer.

  As far as he could figure, Squib’s only option was to wait it out. Tours would start motoring through here from Crawford Landing at first light, dozens of out-of-towners eager to catch sight of the legendary swamp bigfoot. Wasn’t no way Regence Hooke could take a shot at him then, not with a multitude of cameras pointed his way, because social media sure did love itself a cop-discharging-his-weapon video.

  I gotta keep my head down and my mouth shut, Squib realized. Simple as that.

  But he knew in his heart that this assessment was pure optimism. Regence Hooke was no rookie to the blood-sport game, and he was hardly about to dissolve into a puddle of sniffles because Squib was taking shelter on an island.

  This was confirmed seconds later when all hell broke loose.

  Squib’s first thought was Volcano, which might seem like the thinking of an idiot, but in fairness to the boy, although he might have considered himself tough as nails, he had never been within a thousand miles of a war zone and had no frame of reference for the explosive chaos erupting all around. Thousands of man-hours on the PlayStation could not begin to do the experience justice.

  The noise was terrific, a thunderous thooom rising from the earth and crashing over him in waves of sonic terror. Bayou mud, shellfish, mangrove root, and slate were liquidized and dragged skywards in drapes of swamp slop which fell in a harsh deluge upon the boy, scouring him to his pores. It felt to Squib like he was being summarily interred, buried by the sheer weight of debris tumbling on his slight frame from above.

  Momma will never know what happened to me, he realized, and the thought terrified him. He tried to call out, but that turned out to be a mistake as his mouth was filled with falling debris. Squib’s eye sockets filled up with mud, and even his T-shirt was shredded by the assault.

  I am surely dead, thought Squib. I can’t figure out nothing.

  But gradually the earth’s revolutions settled down, and the whine in Squib’s ears was intruded upon by laughter from out on the water. Sounded like Regence Hooke was having himself one hell of a time.

  “You like that concussion grenade, fella?” he called. “Was that your cup of iced tea? I bet you opened your stupid mouth, didn’t you? Took a gutful of swamp shit and shellfish.”

  Hooke laughed again, and it might have been shell shock, but Squib could have sworn there was an animal tinge to his mirth.

  “Every night after a firefight we’d have some fool greenhorn running around with his mouth open, getting himself a mouth of shrapnel. We had more busted teeth than limbs.”

  Squib peeped between the rushes. He reckoned himself camouflaged enough. Regence Hooke was seated on the cabin of his boat, a squat weapon across his lap and his boots kicking against the windshield. His grenade launcher sat in his lap like a favored pet. Squib even knew the model from Call of Duty: the MM-1. Funny-looking chunky fucker. The barrel organ of death.

  “Lovely night, ain’t it, boy? I bet you’re wishing you never set foot outside New Orleans, right? I bet you’re wishing old Ivory had sent someone else to do his spying.”

  Ivory, thought Squib. Hooke don’t know who I am.

  This meant that if he could give Constable Hooke the slip, then all he had to do was make it back to his pirogue.

  Hooke hiked the grenade launcher to his shoulder. “Son, I bet you’re thinking that all you gotta do is crawl snakelike back to your boat and paddle out of here. Well, I got bad news for you on that front. Your boat just floated on past me toward the bay. I guess you didn’t secure it none too good.”

  Squib squinted his eyes mostly shut, thinking that the whites might give him away. Was Hooke shitting him? Had he secured his boat?

  Probably not.

  He hadn’t exactly been planning the final step of this mission. So now he was stuck on this goddamn island with the boars and the cougars and maybe a bunch of fire ants forming an orderly line to crawl up his pecker. And if he tried to make a bolt for it, then Hooke would spiral a grenade up his ass like a rocket-powered snow cone.

  What a peach of a night this had turned out to be.

  Everett fucking Moreau: master planner.

  Like that little French guy who used to get with tall ladies to prove a point. Napoleon.

  But not like him at all, except for they both ended up fucked on an island, if he didn’t misremember his history. Or maybe it was Huck Finn who got fucked on an island.

  Either way, he was the idiot getting fucked on a water-locked landmass this fine evening.

  Sorry, Miss Ingram, he broadcast to his social studies teacher, the only teacher he had ever liked in the ten-year history of his education.

  “Hey, son,” called Regence Hooke, his voice boomy across the sound, “I tell you what. Why don’t you toss out that cell phone you got there? It’s probably all sorry-looking and waterlogged anyways. Hell, I’ll even sign off on your police report for a new one. Because we both know you ain’t getting a lick of signal in this stretch of the Pearl.”

  It ain’t sorry-looking, thought Squib. It’s safe and sound in my work pants pocket.

  “You do me that favor,” continued Hooke, “and I’ll see myself off with my box of munitions and call it a night. What do you say to that? There’s a deal you won’t see in Target.”

  Seemed like Hooke was in the mood for chitchat. This was his general mood, in Squib’s experience. Waxman once opined that Hooke’s brand of chitchat was akin to a prison cake: “All purtied up on the outside with sugar frosting, but you know there’s a blade lurking in there somewheres.”

  It was like how Hooke always referred to Squib as “Monsieur Moreau” when Elodie was around, tousled his hair and such, said he was a fine figure of a “jeune homme,” but soon as Momma’s back was turned, the constable would lean in close and growl some off-color remark along the lines of Fine piece of tail, that, Squib. Sooner or later, boy. I’m giving your momma her head for now, then I’ll reel her in when she’s wore out. Spittle rimmed his lips as he leered: Regence Hooke, a prince among men.

  “Otherwise,” said the prince now, “I surely do plan to blanket-bomb the island with half a dozen more of these grenades from this dandy launcher I got here. And just to assure you I mean business, here’s another firecracker to set you thinking.”

  Shit, thought Squib. Shit and goddamn.

  There was no time to figure the correct course of action. And even if he did have the time, he didn’t have the tactical experience. Should he hunker down or make a run for it? Which was best? Both seemed downright fraught with mortal peril.

  While Squib was equivocating, Regence Hooke sat back on the roof of his cabin cruiser and, with a squeeze of his trigger, lobbed a metal cylinder high into the night. Up she flew into the drape of mist, trailing a plume of gray smoke, and Squib judged by what he could make out of the trajectory that he had about ten seconds to live.

  This entire scheme was
a fool’s errand.

  “Bye, Momma,” he whispered, and the regret he would carry with him to his watery grave was that now there was nothing between Hooke and his mother but a screen door.

  “Bless me, Jesus,” said Squib, just in case, and “I’m sorry for all the shit I done.”

  Then he shut his eyes and waited for the end.

  VERN WAS ALL set up in his La-Z-Boy watching Swamp Rangers on Netflix. Goddamn, but he loved that show. Those Everglades boys tooling around in their golf carts, wrangling tiny gators and such, making a big old deal out of it.

  I would fuck those boys up, thought Vern good-naturedly. But in truth he probably wouldn’t. They were amusing guys, all confident and shit. It would be fun to see that braggadocio drain down to their boots.

  Vern took a slug of vodka soda and laughed. Imagine their faces. Those stupid goatees would drop off in shock.

  He did his best Jack Nicholson for the only squirrel on the island with enough nuts to sit on his windowsill. “Wait till they get a load of me.”

  Then he heard the explosion.

  “Well, shit,” he said resignedly, cranking up his chair. If there was one thing he’d learned from centuries hiding out in various remote spots round the globe, it was that certain things heralded discovery.

  Elephants for one.

  Elephants were assholes, and no one could tell Vern any different. Those big gray bastards had a nose for dragons, and that nose was called a trunk. There was this one bull who worked for one of the Mamluk sultans way back. Mean fucker with a cloudy eye and a grudge against fire lizards for some reason. Hunted Vern all over the Delhi province for ten years until Vern paid him a visit one balmy night in his paddock and stuck that trunk where the sun historically did not shine. Old Cloudy kept his dragon-seeking skills to himself after that.

  Another thing that generally spelled trouble was rows of lit torches coming up a hill. Vern had lost count of the times he’d been dozing in one eyrie or another, only to be woken by the sound of a torch-bearing mob. Humans were stupid fuckers back in those days, attacking a dragon with torches, but they were persistent, and generally a guy would have to move on if he didn’t want to spend his days swatting away flaming arrows.