Highfire

by Eoin Colfer

  But the number one warning sign that his days in his current hangout were numbered was the sound of an explosion. Goddamn smart-ass Chinese guys with their gunpowder. That shit could get in a guy’s scales and itch like balls. And even if the humans weren’t searching for him specifically, big explosions tended to shine a light on everything underneath.

  “One of these days,” said Vern to the squirrel, meaning that one of these days the humans would nail him with some kind of armor-piercing shell that would slice through his scales like butter.

  “And then that will be all she wrote for every living thing in a mile radius.”

  Of course that was an estimate. If Vern’s core was pierced, the blast radius could be much more than a mile. When they hit old Blue Ben by total freaking accident with an early-model torpedo, couple of centuries back, he took a large chunk of Cornwall to the bottom of the ocean with him.

  “I better check it out,” Vern told the squirrel. “Put a stop to whatever this shit is before it can get started.”

  Vern climbed out of the La-Z-Boy and carefully peeled off his Flashdance T-shirt, folding it neatly with the three-precise-creases method he’d picked up from the chirpy Netflix lady. It was one of his favorite shirts, and he didn’t want it getting ripped to tatters flying around the swamp.

  SQUIB SHUT HIS eyes, cried a bitter tear, and waited for the end.

  Except it didn’t come.

  By some freak of physics Hooke’s grenade reappeared from the mist, going right back the way it had come, that is to say retracing its own flight pattern, landing square between Hooke’s feet, and clanking off down into the cruiser’s gunwales.

  Most men would have cursed in disbelief, and many might have fallen to sobbing or collapsed entirely, but Regence Hooke was made of sterner stuff. He grunted a gruff “fuck,” then stepped lively off the prow of the boat and into the river. The constable had barely a moment to duck below the water before his grenade ignited and blew a ragged disk from the port side of the cruiser, which frisbeed cinematically into the mangroves and buried itself in the bulbous trunk of a tree with a whang like a hillbilly working a saw.

  “Lucky,” said Squib.

  And he wasn’t just talking about his own person. Hooke had God only knew what kind of non-standard-issue explosive hardware in his box of tricks. Half the island could have gone up in swamp lumps. They would’ve smelled the barbecued hog all the way to Slidell.

  Squib dared to raise himself to all fours, praying to Jesus, God, Buddha, Aslan, and whoever else might be listening that Hooke was squashed flat between the keel of his sinking boat and the swamp bottom and would die slowly watching air bubbles leak from his nose. But he didn’t get to find out if his prayer was answered just at that point because something very strong grabbed him by the waistband of his jeans and yanked him high into the Louisiana night sky.

  Two seconds was all it took from earthbound to sky-high.

  What in the name of—?

  But Squib never completed that thought because:

  A: He was too petrified to think rationally.

  And B: His balls had been forced halfway up his stomach with the sudden acceleration of what could be fairly described as a supersonic wedgie.

  And so as Squib Moreau was lifted high above the bayou, the only coherent thought he could manage to string together before the Gs blacked him out was, Hey, I can see our cabin from here.

  Chapter 3

  HOOKE WAS A BENT COP, NO DOUBT ABOUT THAT, BUT THERE WERE degrees of bent. A patrolman taking his coffee on the house every now and then was one thing, but you get a constable systematically subverting his vested power to knock off drug pilots for crime lordlings, and that right there was a whole other level of corrupt.

  What set Regence apart were his intentions. Any cop who ever sat down before a congressional hearing or an IA board eventually mumbled shamefaced into the microphone a declaration along the lines of I became a cop to help people, ma’am. I don’t know when that changed exactly.

  Nothing had changed with Regence Hooke. From day one Regence was out to augment his own prosperity—or before day one, truth be told. It was biblical, actually, how Regence’s ambitions got forged. His daddy was a self-styled preacher out of Homestead, Florida, who never managed to whip up much of a flock on account of his fanatically strict adherence to the letter of the Bible, mostly the early chapters. Jerrold Hooke might have had more of a pickup in Mississippi, but Florida folk preferred the whitewashed version of Jesus, the one who didn’t point the finger at their fur-lined winter coats in church because Leviticus frowned on clothing woven of more than one kind of cloth. And retirees from the Northern states would not countenance a preacher who slapped cheeseburgers out of their hands because Exodus proclaimed that it was forbidden to consume meat and dairy in one meal.

  Young Regence had little choice but to toe his daddy’s Old Testament line, and it put a serious cramp in his adolescence. Everything concerning beer and balls was off the table, and goddamn if those things weren’t the whole world for a teenager. Regence went the traditional route of outright rebellion and got himself spanked for his trouble, actually spanked, in the front yard with his buddies looking on, for flying in the face of Deuteronomy by being a profligate and drunken son. Young Regence, with his face as red as his ass, thought, Screw this shit, I’ll see that Bible-thumper dead and buried.

  It wore Preacher Jerrold Hooke down, how few shits people gave about his churching, and he eventually took to altar wine, and from there it was a short hop to bourbon. And it was only a few hours’ sleep from bourbon to self-loathing. And that same self-loathing was passed on down to his wife and kids, as it generally is. Selma Hooke cracked one night following eight hours of preaching spat right into her face by a drunk man o’ God and took off with her daughter, Martha Mary, never to be heard from again.

  Regence, she neglected to take along.

  He was trouble.

  It was written all over the boy: a linebacker-looking lump of resentment with violence bubbling under the surface. Selma Hooke knew that there would come a day of reckoning, and she didn’t want Martha Mary around to witness it.

  This day of reckoning arrived maybe half a year later. Six months of boy and man living on their lonesomes out back of a timber-slat excuse for a storefront church with flaking paint and a spire that wasn’t much more than a stack of pallets. Worshippers were limited to the ranks of the homeless, drunk, and addled. And even those poor souls reckoned that old Jerry Hooke was losing the run of himself, drunk as he was most days, whipping that boy around for mostly fabricated infractions of his endless rules.

  Seemed like Jerrold was going more Jesus-crazy by the day. He started to invest serious belief in the notion that he’d been chosen by God for something superspecial that would give his life relevance to more than the dozen or so Walking Dead extras who inhabited his pews.

  When Hurricane Andrew swept in from the Bahamas, Jerrold felt that he had finally found his vehicle.

  He told his son, who really could not give a damn, “We shall stand together in the temple though it crumble around us, and then they shall see.”

  Regence started giving a damn sharpish then because if he understood his poppa’s rantings, they were going to stick it out in a church made of rusted nails and plywood while the rest of the city got itself evacuated the hell out of Dodge.

  Fuck that, thought Regence.

  And so he turned on his father.

  Or at least he tried to turn. Regence was big, but Jerrold was bigger. The son got in one good swing before Preacher Dad coldcocked him with his King James.

  Regence woke up on the church altar with Armageddon swirling around his head and his crazy-ass father standing naked above him, calling to the Lord to show him a sign.

  A sign? thought Regence. A goddamn sign? Someone is shitting someone.

  And why the hell was his dad buck-ass naked?

  None of it made a lick of sense to Regence, and he knew that the hurric
ane bearing down on them like the world was turning itself inside out was sure to send the both of them to whatever afterworld there actually was. And while the idea of a heaven would have been of some comfort at that moment as Andrew unwrapped the church from around them, flittering it to toothpicks, Regence half hoped the entire heaven thing was bullshit just so his dad’s final thought might be something along the lines of Oh, hell. I was wrong.

  Some tiny squib of Hurricane Andrew landed on father and son, punching the pair straight through into the basement, where they lay gasping and covered with debris while the fury of nature passed above. Miraculously, both Hookes survived.

  Momentarily, at least.

  Regence was first to gather himself and stood over his father thinking, Maybe my daddy was actually right. Maybe Jesus delivered us.

  Then Jerrold Hooke opened his eyes and said, “Regence. A pity the Lord did not take you so my survival would have been all the more miraculous. Also, I would have cut a tragic figure for my flock.”

  And Regence picked up a jagged plank, staked his father through the heart like a vampire, then lay beside him on the mud floor and waited to be rescued.

  And right then, lying there with the heavens torn apart above him, young Regence learned that the biggest clouds had the biggest silver linings—if a body was prepared to take advantage of chaos.

  I have a gift, Regence had realized. And that gift was that he could keep his shit together while the whole world was freaking the hell out. Years later, a mentor in Iraq would toss out a quote that hit the nail on the head: “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs . . .”

  The rest of that Brit poem didn’t really suit Regence’s purposes, so Hooke took what he wanted and finished it off as follows: If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, then there is serious money to be made.

  BUT ON THIS night in the Pearl River bayou, with his large frame hunched under six feet of water and his own cruiser coming down on his head, Regence Hooke knew that there was more than cash on the line. His own traumatic upbringing had granted him the gift of presence of mind, which he employed to lunge out of harm’s way. That particular harm, at any rate. There were plenty of other options on the harm menu that night, one being the cottonmouth snake which Hooke near to punched in the mouth accidentally while dragging his knuckles to shore, and another being the twelve-foot gator which, shocked awake, was eager to bite something on the ass but too addled to zone in on the constable. And to top it all off, when Regence Hooke dragged himself out of the churned slop, he was met nose-to-nose by a red-eyed boar, which took one look at his murderous expression and decided to break off eye contact and back away.

  Hooke bludgeoned a path through the reeds and stalks, his anger intensifying with each swing of his fists. He was pissed about the boat, yes. So much for bringing Elodie around now with his grand gesture. And he was pissed about the ten grand’s worth of firepower that had drowned with her. But there were always more bullets and more boats, and this neck of the parish had a surfeit of both. In fact, Willard Carnahan’s inflatable was moored around the bend, and Hooke would bet his badge that there were plenty of weapons stashed in the cubbies. And a bottle of Willard’s moonshine to drive out the chill would be most welcome.

  What had really shaken Hooke’s composure was his own confusion. What the hell had just happened? Best he could figure, his grenade had come home like it was on a string. In his long and varied experience of projectiles in general, that class of shit just didn’t happen. That grenade didn’t operate on any sort of independent guidance system. The direction a person aimed it was the direction it went.

  Until today.

  He grabbed hold of two stakes of cypress and hauled himself over the ridge of the levee, plopping onto the bank proper.

  This ain’t dignified, he thought, lying here on my belly like a washed-up corpse. And what’s more, I’m wide-open.

  Though if he was honest, the lack of dignity worried him more.

  I get double-tapped now, and this is how they’ll find me.

  So Regence Hooke rose, sloughing off his jacket and maybe ten pounds of swamp crap along with it.

  “Come and get me, asshole,” he called into the spectral curtains of Spanish moss. “I got plenty in me yet.”

  It was true. Hooke was ready to go toe-to-toe. His drill sergeant back in Polk once remarked, “You’re like the fuckin’ Hulk, ain’t you, Private Hooke? The more shit I pile on you, the more you got that glint in your eye. I like that, Private. You’re a killing machine, ain’t you, boy?”

  And Hooke had said, “Yessir, Sergeant. A killing machine is what I am.”

  But he hadn’t said it loud, like he’d been trained to. He said it real quiet, like the words came from his heart.

  The drill sergeant near to crapped his camos, and he didn’t trouble Hooke too much after that.

  Hooke had that glint in his eyes now, and there was nothing he would have liked more than to go rampaging across the length and breadth of this godforsaken island hunting down Ivory’s boy.

  But . . .

  But there had been a couple of explosions which would draw attention.

  And his sidearm was no doubt clogged with shit.

  And maybe Ivory’s boy was already heading toward Petit Bateau, the closest landing, on whatever craft had taken him up here since Regence had been lying about seeing it drift by earlier.

  The smart move was to take Willard’s boat upriver and maybe get the jump on whoever had been videoing him. That was the smart move.

  “Stay smart, Sergeant Hooke,” he told himself, imitating his Iraqi mentor, Colonel Faraiji. “Remain calm.”

  Hooke closed his eyes and counted to ten, breathing in deeply through his nose, which was a relaxation exercise he’d picked up from a whore in the French Quarter. When he opened his eyes again, the killer was tucked away for the moment.

  For the moment, thought Hooke. But something happened here, and I’ll be back to find out what.

  Chapter 4

  VERN OFTEN THOUGHT OF THE OLD DAYS, WHEN DRAGONS HAD ruled decent patches of the earth from high in their eyries. Dragons kept that shit on track for centuries, lording it over the rest of creation, no predators to threaten their supremacy. And Vern was royalty, too: heir to the Highfire Eyrie, including the castle itself and the entire town, not to mention the caverns of assorted riches stashed in the catacombs. It was an excellent package with top-class benefits. But what the dragons in general hadn’t realized was that, in the absence of physical predators, time itself becomes a predator. Dragons got accustomed to being top dogs. They started to enjoy the whole shock-and-awe thing. They forgot that humans weren’t just dumb sheep with thumbs.

  First the dragons grew complacent; then they got lazy. And the universe cannot suffer laziness because it leads to species-killing mistakes. The dragons’ mistake was when they started keeping familiars, because before you knew it, the humans had moved on up from carrying logs and shoveling dragon shit to bringing home the bacon.

  Next thing, those familiars were doing the books and giving pedicures, making themselves indispensable, making themselves invisible. Dragons allowed those humans to build quarters for themselves inside the walls. Dragons blabbed on about politics and strategy while their familiars were in the room. And goddamn if those familiars weren’t taking notes.

  It didn’t take more than five hundred years and half a dozen failed revolutions before those smart little humans were running the show, and any dragons who had survived the purge were reduced to hiring themselves out as muscle or skulking around in various inhospitable shitholes.

  And still humans ran the show, keeping themselves sharp by becoming their own predators, which was twisted as hell. Sure, dragons used to throw down every now and then, but there was no organized slaughter. The era of man was nothing more than a reign of murder and conquest, so far as Vern could see, which was why enjoying human media was about as far as Vern was prepared to go on
the whole integration front. Sometimes he fantasized about revealing himself to E! News and getting his own show, but it was just a pipe dream. Sooner or later all those reality stars went the way of the Hiltons. He would have to make a sex tape to keep his ratings up, and how the hell would that even work? So Vern kept himself to himself and hid out in the Pearl River and tried not to think about the inevitable day when some eagle-eyed CIA motherfucker would spot him on a satellite pass-over and the next thing he knew he’d be up to his ass in drones.

  And with all the explosions popping off in the environs, that day could be this day, so Vern needed to know what the hell was going on before he dispatched this kid to kingdom come and slid the body into the bayou, to let the gators make short work of him.

  At that precise moment the kid was passed out on the floorboards of Vern’s wilderness shack. Poor little bastard had hardly been expecting a night flight. He felt a little guilty for shaking up the kid, but Vern was quietly proud that he’d managed enough vertical acceleration to knock the human out.

  You still got it, Vern baby, he thought, pulling on his T-shirt and cargo shorts.

  He didn’t get to stretch his wings much these days, not since every human over the age of six months got themselves a camera phone. He’d gotten himself all pumped up on Absolut a couple of years ago and taken a quick swoop over New Orleans. Some janitor shot a video of him doing a loop around Plaza Tower and it made the Tribune’s website. Fortunately, the video was little more than a shadowy blur which might have been a big flying lizard, but could also have been a kite or a crappy Photoshop job, so the piece never went national. Vern had been lucky, simple as that. But his luck couldn’t hold forever.