Dead Man (24 page)

As he went under, two more shots in rapid succession hit the water just where his head had disappeared and Inverness went
crashing through the brush to the water’s edge, charging out after the pirogue. But it was drifting more rapidly now, just
too far for him to reach. He kept the beam of his flashlight on the overturned craft, seeking any sign of Dain’s head breaking
water, trotting and ducking and slogging along the narrow muddy overgrown shore to keep even with it.

At the tail end of the island he stopped, gun in hand, staring after the drifting pirogue. Finally he turned away. He knew
he’d gotten Dain this time, and the pirogue wasn’t going anywhere. He could go down and pick it up in the morning while waiting
for Maxton to show up.

Maxton. Maybe he ought to grab Maxton and the two goons and take them back and turn them in for killing Vangie’s folks and
Minus… It would square him with his superiors for rushing off into the swamp without leave… maybe save his pension…

Fuck. What was he thinking of? There were still the bonds. Maxton wanted them and he wanted the girl—probably to kill her,
if what happened to her folks was any indication. If Inverness brought them in, sure, he’d have his pension. But if he just
killed them and sank them in the swamp, he’d have the bonds. Just him. Nobody else knew about them except Maxton.

Of course if Dain were still alive, Maxton and his men would also be useful, no, essential, until Dain was

“Goddam you!”
he said aloud to himself, then realized he was really addressing Dain. He was starting to get superstitious about the fucking
man, as if he had supernatural powers of survival or something…

He started resolutely away back up the islet toward camp.

He had shot Dain in the back. With a .357 Magnum. Dain was dead, dead dead dead as fucking Jesus. He wasn’t going anywhere
except the mud at the bottom of the channel, thrust there by some patient gator to ripen until he could be torn into proper
bite-size pieces and eaten.

Fucking Dain was dead.

A delicate palette knife of dawn slid through the flooded sentinel trees, laying watercolor washes of gray over the gradations
of black. Here and there a bird called, something in the water splashed. Far off a Louisiana panther made a dark sawing sound,
then screamed like a woman in labor.

Two flooded hardwoods leaned their heads together over the bayou, their leaves in whispered conversation, their feet in the
water. One of them forked some distance above the ground. The fork held a nest containing three greenish white eggs. What
looked like a large water snake swam rapidly to the base of the tree, started to slither up the trunk.

Suddenly it was a bird, a sinuous-necked sleek-bodied bird called a snakebird. Its webbed feet had strong climbing claws.
When it reached the fork, it perched on one of the branches and preened its wet feathers to redistribute the oil that made
its feathers waterproof. Then it sidestepped awkwardly over to settle on top of the eggs.

A dingy patch of mustard yellow showed far below, in the tangle of brush and driftwood caught between the bases of the trees.
Minus had been deposited there sometime in the night by the gentle but persistent currents. His dead eyes stared up the trunk
at the snakebird far above. When dawn broke, his shirt became a bright eye-catching gold.

The upside-down pirogue drifted up, carried by the gentle current against the same tangle of driftwood and brush as Minus.
It clung there. It rocked, sending out ripples. The snakebird started up in alarm, then settled back again.

Inverness, untroubled by bad dreams, had slept until well after sunup. In finally killing Dain, he had killed his doubts.
By the light of day, last night’s secret and half-formed fears seemed silly. Dain had been shot in the back with a .357 Magnum,
his lungs had filled with blood, and he had died. End of story.

Inverness breakfasted leisurely on a small catfish from one of Minus’s brush lines, then set out to fetch the pirogue before
Maxton showed up; it would save them a day. A mile below the island he abandoned outboard for push pole: the water was shoaling
rapidly. He rounded a curve in the bayou, and a snakebird flapped down from one of a brace of flooded-out hardwoods with a
loud miffed squawk, swept over the water away from the flatboat.

In a tangle of driftwood and brush at the base of the tree was Minus, lying faceup and bare-torsoed; the crabs had been feeding
around the bullet hole in his chest. Inverness stood in the flatboat looking down at him. The logical place for the current
to have deposited him. All fine so far.

But this was the logical place, also, for the current to have deposited the pirogue and Dain. Inverness had fully expected
both to be wherever Minus fetched up, or at least the pirogue if Dain with his perforated lungs had sunk.

He raised his head, looked around the swamp, contentment oozing away. No pirogue in sight, swirled against some other deadhead
by a vagrant eddy of current.

Last night Minus had been wearing a bright yellow shirt. Now it was gone. Only Dain could have taken it. But how
the fuck could the man have survived being shot with a .357 Magnum? How had he survived being shot thrice with a shotgun and
left to die in a burning cabin?

He checked the bole of the tree, the brush pile near Minus for sign just to be sure. Yes. A fresh indentation that could have
been made by the pirogue’s prow; and there, the brush was crushed. He could almost picture the scene. The boat, suddenly a
human hand would have broken water beside it, groped, found Minus’s face as something to get purchase on, closed about it…

Yes, that was the way it would have gone. Another minute would have gone by, then Dain would have dragged himself partway
up out of the brown water. Would have lain there, gasping, facedown, across Minus. One arm hanging uselessly from the bullet
that had entered his back and must somehow have exited high enough up in his chest to have missed heart and lung. But still
he would have coughed raspingly, startling the snakebird. When he had, fresh red wetness would have spread from the wound.

So he would have taken Minus’s shirt to use as a sling to immobilize the arm, also perhaps as packing to make the wound bleed
less. Then he would have righted the pirogue with his one good arm, gotten in, poled away. One-armed.

Jesus, it wasn’t over yet. Inverness knew he would not sleep tonight, no matter how many men Maxton had with him.

The Chinese water lilies produced vivid purple flowers that nodded above pads lying flat on the surface like green plates.
On one plate was a small green frog. The frog tensed at an uneven sucking sound and a harsh, rasping exhalation, leaped for
his life as a muck-covered push pole was driven down into the lily pads from above. The pole found bottom. Beyond it, the
side of the pirogue slid by.

So did an hour. Now Dain poled through a hyacinth-choked neck of bayou that looked like solid earth—what the Cajuns call
prairie tremblant.
Here in the open, merciless
sun beat down on his unprotected head. He poled one-armed, his useless arm tied to his side with a sling made of Minus’s bright
yellow shirt. More of the shirt, ripped from the tail, had been stuffed right through the bullet wound from front to back.
This crude bandage was soaked with new blood. Sweat stood on his unshaven, sun-reddened face, his eyes glittered feverishly.

He had done all that as soon as he had found Minus, knowing his infected wound would soon make him even more feverish, then
had used a trick from his two years of convalescence after the first try on his life: narrowing the focus of his mind to a
single thing.

Then it had meant taking this step, resisting the pain of that flexing movement, using them to block out the pain and guilt
of his family’s death brought about by his own stupidity. Now it was a single laser of thought: follow the bayou. He might
lose
why
he was following it in the fog of fever; but he was hoping he could hang on to the action:
follow the bayou.

He forgot about the bonds, and he had to block out the knowledge that he was now half an invalid, more a liability than an
asset to Vangie. He had one overwhelming concern: get to her, warn her they were coming. He had to beat them there. He still
had to try and make her safe while preparing for his own final confrontation with Inverness.

If he didn’t die on the way.

Beyond the
prairie tremblant
was a small lake dotted with stands of cypress. Water hyacinth broken free from the main body drifted in clumps and patches
on the otherwise clear water. In the middle of this sudden dazzlingly open expanse, the pirogue was a toy canoe, Dain a toy
soldier leaning motionless on his push pole. The toy figure slid down the pole to the bottom of the small tippy craft, almost
capsizing it.

Little waves moved out in concentric rings from the pirogue, became mere ripples, ceased. Under the noonday sun the surface
of the lake was glassy and still. A shoal of fingerling shad came up to just below the surface, camouflaging their presence
from below with the pirogue’s shadow.

Dain stirred, edged his head painfully over the gunwale of
the pirogue so he could look down into the water with dazed eyes. He could see minnows swimming there. The water looked cool,
inviting. The minnows looked like they were having fun.

But he couldn’t give a fuck about them, whether they lived or died. He had to follow the bayou.

His hand went down, burst the surface of the water to scoop some up, dash it over his head. Another, then another. His wound
gave him an almost overwhelming thirst, and he knew he was dehydrating. But to drink unfiltered swamp water was to invite
dysentery and disaster. No matter how weak, how disoriented, he had to keep going—by nightfall he would be totally irrational.
Already his periods of lucidity were getting shorter.

Follow the bayou.

He splashed more water. Rested. Below him, the little shad returned. Dain grunted getting upright again. The pirogue tipped,
almost sending him into the water. Concentric circles of waves became ripples and died, but they had sent a message out to
a warmouth bass. It came up from below in a rush, shot right out of the water beside the pirogue as it struck one of the shad,
dropped back in with its typical triple tail-splash as it swallowed its victim, dashed after another.

Dain’s pole descended into the water. The pole found bottom. Dain grunted, the clouds scudding across his mind again even
as the pirogue slid forward. On the far side the little lake narrowed back into twisting bayou again. At its mouth was a fallen
tree with two dozen turtles sunning themselves on one of the limbs that rose out of the water.

Follow the bayou.
Why? Don’t know. Do it.

As Dain’s pirogue approached, one of the turtles, then another, then the rest in bunches scrambled and slid and splashed off
their perches back into the illusory safety of the water.

When he had passed, still following the bayou, they returned. They had hid from him but his passage had meant nothing to them.

* * *

Her flatboat was pulled up in front of the cabin, Vangie was on the bank, checking setlines for fish. Papa had chosen his
site well. His fishing camp was on what had once been a peninsula sticking out into vast flat marshlands stretching to the
edge of Fausse Point Lake. A mile back from the tip, the bayou once had cut a narrower, separate channel to the marsh, thus
forming an island. On one side was the marsh, on the other the narrow bayou which meandered through thick woodland to empty
into the marsh.

The camp gave a good view over the open marshland. The rest of the island, behind the raised, cleared area where he had placed
his cabin, was deep woods. It was a peaceful scene, but inside Vangie was churning. All she could do was hide here. She could
not go to the police: she had stolen $2 million. She had to count on the fact that although Maxton was a ruthless and powerful
man who wanted to watch her die, he was from the city. Eventually, even he would give up.

Dain was out of the picture once and for all, thank God, the blood money for giving them to Maxton heavy in his pocket. With
him gone, she could survive here until things quieted down. Then she could slip away, with the bonds…

She had arrived trembling with terror, but it was her second day here, and she had finally stopped leaping at every crackle
in the brush. She could check her setlines. The very familiarity of the place and the work helped calm her.

Stay alive. It was what she wanted now. Try to forget about Maxton. This place was hard to find even if you were a Cajun.
But she couldn’t forget the bonds, and she knew Maxton wouldn’t either. She had fled empty-handed, and Papa never left any
guns here at the shack. Which meant that if Maxton ever did find her, it would be three armed men against her bare hands.

But he couldn’t find her. And the police had no reason to be looking for her. They would have accepted Jimmy’s death as a
suicide, her parents’ deaths as random—they knew nothing of the bonds.

Her parents. She wanted to cry, but she couldn’t. She wanted to smash things, throw things, grieve—but she couldn’t. How could
you grieve when your parents were dead because of you?

Some animal sense made her suddenly raise her head to look up the bayou. She stood up abruptly. Far, far up the narrow waterway,
just coming into sight around the last turn, was a pirogue. Even at this distance she could see that the man was poling one-armed
and had the other arm in a gaudy yellow sling.

Vangie drew in her breath. Dain! Here! He had set up Zimmer for the kill; she didn’t see how he could have, but maybe he’d
had some hand in getting her parents killed, also. And now he was here to set her up for them. The Judas goat. Maxton and
the other killers would not be far behind.

Goddam him! Weapon or no weapon, she’d see about that.

She started walking rapidly back toward the cabin.

Dain poled his erratic way toward the distant camp. The wetness soaking through his bandage was no longer red, but pus-yellow.
It took all of his willpower to stay focused on that cabin.
Follow the bayou.
He had made it! He was here!