Accustomed to the Dark (27 page)

I turned around. “What?”

Far off, a bird made a whooping sound that wavered up and down the scale, then died off.

“We're almost there,” Carpenter said. He lay his paddle inboard, leaned forward, lifted the shotgun and the box of deer slugs. He set the box on the top of his pack, reached into his pocket, pulled out a shot shell. He slipped the shell into the action of the gun, then opened the box, removed a slug, and slipped that in. He kept loading the weapon, alternating shotshells and slugs.

“How are you with a shotgun?” he asked me.

“Not great.”

“You mind if I carry it?”

“No.”

He nodded. “Get that pistol ready.”

I pulled out the Beretta, worked the slide, pushed the safety.

He lay the shotgun across his pack and he picked up the paddle. “No talking.”

Fifteen minutes later, we were peering through a veil of grass, across a stretch of water, at another cypress island. It was no more than twenty-five yards long. At its east end, beneath the trees, stood a ramshackle shanty of weathered planking. The tar paper of the roof lay in uneven strips down along the walls, and the walls themselves had warped, leaving gaps through which the fading light was visible.

We watched the small building for a few minutes, silently, but it was obvious the place was empty.

Carpenter paddled the canoe toward shore. We got out and took a look at the shack. Its south side was open, facing the water. No one had used it for years.

“What is it?” I asked Carpenter.

“Poacher's shack.” He glanced around. “Let's make camp.”

“What were they poaching?”

“Alligators.”

“And we're going to camp here?”

He waved his hand around the clearing. “You see any alligators?”

“Not yet.”

“Don't worry. They feel the same way about you that you feel about them.”

I doubted that.

The graphite poles for the tent were shock-corded, and it took Carpenter only five minutes to have the thing up and ready. It was a dome tent, big enough for three people. He unlaced his boots, took them off, and climbed inside it. I passed in the air mattresses and the sleeping bags. When he came back outside, he put his boots back on and from his pack he took a roll of toilet paper and a black entrenching tool—a small shovel. I hadn't seen the roll of paper or the tool before—he must've slipped them in there while I was asleep.

About twenty feet from the tent, he dug a small hole in the damp earth and stuck the entrenching tool into the pile of dirt, left it there with the roll of paper. “Toilet,” he said to me as he returned to the tent. “You know how to use it?”

“I can probably figure it out.”

He nodded.

He lit the small Optimus stove, scooped water from the swamp, boiled it. He clipped the tops off two of the freeze-dried meals—macaroni and cheese for him, beef Stroganoff for me—then poured boiling water into the pouches and let them sit for a while.

We ate out of the pouches, using aluminum spoons. The Stroganoff was edible. Barely.

Afterward, Carpenter cleaned up, shoving the empty pouches into a grocery store plastic bag.

We sat again with our backs to a pair of cedars. The mosquitos had gotten hungrier, but the repellent was still holding them off.

“Any other possibilities?” I asked him. “Places they could be hiding?”

“One or two,” he said. “A couple more, if they'd been portaging.”

“They haven't been?”

“No signs of it. From what Eugene says, that inflatable's a fair-sized boat. Three men and all their gear. If they'd carried it out, I'd have seen something.”

“Maybe they've got another boat.”

“No way they could arrange that. Not unless they brought it in.”

“Maybe they did. Another inflatable.”

He looked at me.

“Couldn't weigh all that much,” I said. “One guy could probably carry it.”

He took off his cap, lowered his head, ran his hands forward along his hair. He looked up. “I'm an idiot,” he said.

“They could've done that?” I asked him.

“They could've done that,” he said. He nodded. “And if they did, I think I know where. We'll go back in the morning.”

I turned in first, leaving Carpenter at his cedar trunk, staring off into the night, or off into his own memories.

I didn't expect to sleep well, but I was tired, my muscles sore, my hands sunburned, and I was out even before Carpenter came into the tent.

I awoke at dawn. Carpenter was still asleep. I climbed out of the tent, used the toilet, walked down to the shore. Looked out along the sea of grass, silent and still in the gray of morning. Looked down at the murky pool of water before me. And I saw, lying out there as though it had been waiting for me all night, twenty feet away in the flat unmoving water, the alligator.

I had been imagining alligators so often that for a moment I thought I imagined this one. But it was real. I could make out, clearly, only the snout and the round dark eyes. I couldn't determine exactly how large the animal was, but the snout looked big and so did the eyes. Maybe seven feet long, maybe eight, maybe longer.

Neither of us moved.

And then I jumped, as Carpenter said, beside me, “That one's a baby.”

Maybe the animal heard him, and took offense. The snout and the eyes dipped beneath the surface, and then the water behind them seemed to bulge slightly upward and thicken for a moment, as though it were about to solidify, and then it smoothed out again and there was nothing.

“You ready for breakfast?” Carpenter asked me.

Breakfast was instant coffee and gorp. Carpenter broke down the tent, folded it, rolled it, tied it to his pack. He emptied the shotgun again, slipped the shells into his pockets. I slapped on my insect repellent. He slapped on his. We climbed back into the canoe.

He had said we were going back, but, once again, I had to take his word for it. For hours we drifted through a landscape identical to the landscape we'd drifted through yesterday. Water and grass, grass and water, islands, channels, more islands, more channels.

At around ten o'clock we were approaching still another island, the ghostly cypress looming over us. Carpenter slowed the canoe, swung it around, brought it up against the bank. He stepped from the boat, then helped me out. “Wait here,” he told me.

He moved off slowly through the trees, stalking roughly parallel to the bank, his head bent forward as he studied the ground.

I sat down against another cypress, felt the moisture seep almost immediately into the seat of my pants.

Fifteen minutes later, he was back. For the first time since I'd met him, he smiled a full smile. “Esteban is good,” he said. “But one of the others screwed up.” He nodded toward the canoe. “Let's go.”

We sailed for maybe a hundred yards along the bank of the island, then Carpenter brought the canoe back to the shore. We left the boat and he bent forward, snared my pack, turned, and handed it to me. “We'll carry all the gear first. Then the canoe.”

He grabbed his pack, swung it on. I wrestled my arms into the straps of mine. He squatted, raised the shotgun. Carrying the gun at port arms, he set off. I followed. We trudged over the spongy ground, around the gnarled trunks, under the faraway canopy of branches, for maybe a hundred yards, until we came to another patch of still black water. More grass out there, more channels. Carpenter unsnapped the straps of his pack, shrugged himself free, set the pack up against a tree. “Now the boat.”

Half an hour later, we had the canoe back in the water and the gear back aboard. Standing beside it, Carpenter began to load the shotgun, once again alternating shot with slugs. “We're about half an hour away,” he said.

I loosened the Beretta in its holster.

Carpenter moved into a squat, supporting himself with the barrel of the shotgun, the butt against the ground, and signaled for me to come down to his level. I did. “Okay,” he said. He took a ballpoint pen from his pocket, used the rear end of it to draw in the damp ground. “We're here. If I'm right, they're over here, on this island. It's another shack. Set back from the front of the island, in the trees. What we do is circle around the island and come in from the rear. There's a steep bank back there, five or six feet, good cover for the canoe. We've only got about twenty yards of open ground to worry about. But there're no windows at the back of the shack. We'll get to them before they know we're there.”

I nodded.

He looked over to me. “You ready for this?”

“Not really.”

He smiled that quick smile. “Then let's do it before we change our minds.”

It took longer than half an hour, but within forty-five minutes we were slipping across a fifteen-foot swath of open water, toward the bank Carpenter had mentioned. Its top was above the level of our heads, and I couldn't see much of the island, only that it stretched off, left and right, for a hundred yards or so.

Carpenter brought the boat against the shore and we stepped out into the mud, both our boots sinking up to the ankles. We kept low.

Holding the shotgun, Carpenter nodded his head toward my Beretta. “Up over the bank, and then across the clearing, to the right. Got it?”

I nodded. I pulled out the Beretta, released the safety.

“Go,” he said.

We scrabbled up the bank, out in the open. The shack was maybe thirty yards away.

The first bullet took Carpenter. He went backward, into the water. The second and the third bullets took me, a punch in the arm that lost me the Beretta, then a punch in the chest, and then I was down.

28

J
OSH-YOU-AH
,” said Ernie Martinez. “It's good to see you again, bro.” Standing over me on my right, holding my Beretta loosely in his right hand, he grinned down at me. “Long time, hey?”

He was wearing blue jeans and a denim shirt, the tails hanging loose. He was in better shape than he'd been when I'd seen him last, in civil court, six years ago. His heavy stomach was gone, his chest was full. Prison had apparently agreed with him.

He was also in better shape than I was. I was lying on the ground and the upper part of my right arm was on fire. I reached over with my left. The sleeve was wet and sticky. Hole in the front, hole in the back. The bullet had gone through.

I felt at my chest. Leroy's telephone was smashed. A hole through the shirt pocket, a long ragged tear, but no bullets in there.

“Hey,” said Martinez. He kicked me. In the right arm, where the bullet had hit. “What you got there?” He came down to me and rammed the barrel of the pistol against my temple. “Don't move, asshole.”

Using his left hand, he opened the pocket of the shirt, jerked out the telephone. I felt bits of it fall to my chest. “What's this, bro?”

“What's it look like?” I said.

He stood up and kicked me again. I hissed.

He turned to his left. “Hey, he's got a telephone,” he said. “Maybe he called someone.”

“Let me see it,” said another voice. I lifted my head.

Two men were approaching across the clearing, one of them Luiz Lucero. The other had to be Esteban. He had returned here sometime this morning, before Carpenter and I arrived.

He was a short man, very dark, wearing camouflage field pants and an open field jacket, also camouflaged, unbuttoned. Beneath the jacket he wore a blue undershirt. He was carrying an Uzi.

It was Lucero who had demanded the telephone. Tall and slender, he held a Colt Python revolver in his left hand, probably the same Python that Sylvia Miller had bought in Las Vegas, weeks ago. He wore a tan guayabera shirt, dark twill slacks, and a pair of ornate leather sandals over a pair of white silk socks. It wasn't an outfit I would've worn in the swamp. But it wasn't an outfit I would've worn anywhere else, either.

His right hand was bandaged, cotton gauze wrapped around the palm. His pinkie was missing. Even so, he used this hand to take the phone from Martinez. He examined it for a moment. “A cell phone,” he said. “Not worth shit out here.” He put the shattered phone to his ear and made his face go goofy. “
Hello, Mom? This is E.T
.”

Martinez laughed. Esteban smiled.

Lucero turned to me and shook his head. He tossed away the phone. “
Lucy, Lucy, Lucy. How many times I got to tell ju to stay away from de clob when de band is rehearsin'?
” He kicked at my feet. “Get up.”

I rolled over onto my left side, pushed myself up, slowly, awkwardly. I stood, wavering a bit, forward and back. I felt blood trickling warmly down my right forearm, down along the palm of my hand. I looked toward my feet. Bright red droplets were pattering against the brown earth.

Trickling was okay. Pattering was okay. The bullet hadn't hit an artery. Not that it mattered, in the long run.

With my left hand I reached again for the wound.

Martinez slapped the barrel of the Beretta against my left knuckles. “
Bleed
,” he said. “It's
good
for you, bro.”

“You know this one?” Lucero asked him.

“Sure,” said Martinez, and grinned. “This is my old friend
Josh-you-ah. Josh-you-ah
Croft. This is the one I told you about.” Still grinning, he slammed the gun barrel against the wound.

Lucero stepped up to me and smiled sweetly. He was a handsome man, a strong chin, feline cheekbones. But his dark eyes were bright, the pupils contracted, and I wondered whether he had been sampling the goods he once marketed. He shook his head again, with elaborate regret. “
Holy moley, Lucy
,” he said. “
Ju and Ethel have been makin' a terrible mess again
.” He raised his pistol, put it almost gently against my forehead. “
So now ju tell me, Lucy, who was Ethel, eh?
”

Spooky, Jimmy McBride had called him, back in Santa Fe. Spooky was right.