Dead Man (26 page)

The color left her face and her mouth fell open in astonishment. Perhaps Dr. Frankenstein’s face had worn a similar expression
when the monster he had stitched together actually sat up and was alive.

She snatched the Bowie knife off her belt and held it low and in front of her like a knife fighter in a bout.

“You son of a bitch!”
she shrieked at him.

Dain stared at her quite mad face. There was a calmness and detachment in him that was almost animal, perhaps the contract
of death that naturalists have noted between prey and predator, perhaps the detachment that often comes to people who have
suffered pain or been tortured for long periods of time.

“I’m starving to death and this thing is itching like hell,” he complained to her.

Vangie didn’t know what to do. She was ready to kill him and he was acting like a character in a TV drama. She covertly slid
the knife back in its scabbard, picked up the bucket of crawfish and set it in the half-drum sink and started pumping fresh
water into it as if the knife had never been in her hand.

“That’s, ah, not, ah, not surprising,” she told him. “I packed it full of live maggots last night, and repacked it this morning
before I went out. Maggots eat only dead, infected flesh, leave the healthy flesh alone.”

Dain paled and sat down rather abruptly at the table. He stared at her, looked down at his shoulder, back up at her. He made
a “whew” mouth and blew out a long breath as she carried the water and crawfish over to the stove.

But then stubbornness entered his face. He said in a bleak voice, “We’ve got four men coming in after us.”

Vangie sat down as suddenly, as heavily as he had, as if all her strength had suddenly drained out.

“Us,
you bastard?” Then belatedly, she added, “Four? I thought there were only—”

“Actually, only three of them are after you and the bonds. Maxton and his strongarms. The fourth one is after me. But I’m
sure he wants his cut of the loot, too.”

“Maxton,” she said scornfully. “You sold Jimmy out to him, you sold me out to him. Did you sell my folks out, too? What did
they ever do to you, you fucker? I wanted to save them—”

“Maybe they didn’t want to be saved.”

Vangie burst out, “Goddam you!” and launched herself across the table at him, eyes flashing, fingers clawed to rip his face.
He kicked back his chair as his undamaged arm swept her right off the table. The impact knocked her breath out, so she sat
on the floor blinking up at him and gasping.

“Hell, they don’t have to come in after us,” said Dain. “We’ll do each other in.”

Vangie’s panting eased. Dain held out a hand to her. After a hesitation, she took it, allowed him to help her to her feet.
She crossed to the kitchen area and got busy preparing the crawfish. He spoke suddenly and harshly to her back.

“I don’t give a fuck whether you believe me or not, but I didn’t sell you out, lady. Five years ago, someone blew away my
wife and son—”

“Marie and Albie?” she exclaimed before she could stop herself. She got quickly busy lifting the lid to check the steaming
crawfish, so she wouldn’t have to meet his eyes. “I heard a lot about them last night when you were asleep.”

“Nightmares. I have a lot of them ever since… I’ve been trying to find the men killed them. That’s why I do the sort of work
I do for the sort of people I do. What’s your excuse?”

She actually started to justify herself to him. “The bonds were going to save me from…” She stopped, added defiantly, “And
my folks from working themselves to death…”

Dain said, softly, “Well, maybe we can save each other.”

She shot him a glance but said nothing. Her silence was more palpable than words, an acquiescence she could not yet acknowledge.
He spoke to this unspoken acceptance in her.

“Remember down by the river that afternoon I told you I’d stirred someone up by coming to New Orleans to look for you? That
was a New Orleans cop named Inverness.
He’d braced me the night before, when there was no legitimate way he could have known about me or known I was in town. I figured
it had to be connected somehow.”

She said stiffly, “Was it?”

“Yes, but not the way I thought.” He began to prowl the room. His strength was rapidly returning now that the infection was
down and the fever gone. “I don’t know if he’s the one tipped Maxton where you were, but he’s one of the men who shotgunned
my family. So he
has
to kill me now.”

“Because you know what he did?”

“Because he knows I’ll kill him if he doesn’t.”

Vangie turned to face him, leaning back against the edge of the steel-drum sink. His implacability was good, she could use
it, use him like a missile against her enemies. Maybe. He might even be telling the truth.

“If he’s after you and Maxton is after me, why are they teamed up together?”

“I don’t know how or why, but I know he was blazing trees to lead Maxton here. It only makes sense for him to help Maxton
get the bonds and kill you, so Maxton will help him kill me, and so will give him a cut of the bonds.” He paused. “You’d better
know it all, Vangie—Inverness killed Minus, too.”

“Oh God,” she said softly, “another one.” Another death on someone’s conscience, whether hers or his he wasn’t sure. She added,
“Don’t they think you’re dead?”

“They
might—Inverness won’t. He’s a hunter, he’ll be reading sign, he’ll know.”

Vangie got out a couple of thick white plates and some silverware. She avoided his eyes.

“And you, you fucker, you led them right to me.”

“Not me—Minus. He told Inverness where he thought you were, how to get here—thinking Inverness was a straight cop. I did too,
until Inverness started leaving a trail for Maxton to follow. I couldn’t lead anyone anywhere, you know that. I’m worthless
in this swamp.”

“You got here,” she said.

“Minus said that in a pirogue you just had to follow the bayou. I did. I thought I could save you. Then I just had to get
here or die, it was as simple as that.”

“Nothing’s ever that simple,” she said ruefully, as if sorry he had made it and she had saved him.

“Now we have to face them,” he said as if she hadn’t spoken, “or die.”

“We can run.”

He just shook his head. Their eyes locked for a long moment. Then she turned away, took the steaming fragrant bucket of crawfish
off the stove.

“Four men,” she said. “By pirogue or flatboat?”

“Far as I know, flatboat. It makes a difference?”

“The storm. Without pirogues, they have to cross the open water—maybe ten miles of it. This wind won’t fall until morning,
the waves until afternoon, and even then they can’t hit us in daylight. So we’ve got until tomorrow night.”

“Why not in daylight?”

“They’ll expect guns to be here.”

“Why aren’t there?”

“Swampers wouldn’t steal anything else’d steal guns.”

In the marsh it was very dark, though still only five in the afternoon. The rain was pouring down, the tops of the over-story
trees that dominated the rest of the forest were being whipped and tossed by the wind. The two boatloads of hunters were just
nosing into shore where the wide waterway they had been following entered the vast open expanse of marshland lake.

They cut the motors, grounded the boats, the four men jumped out to pull them up. Maxton grabbed Inverness’s sleeve.

“Why are we making camp in the middle of the afternoon?”

The big policeman just walked off. Maxton hesitated, then trotted after. They shoved through wet underbrush, broke free. Maxton
stopped, appalled at the violence of the open marshland.

The sky was a vicious indigo piled with black clouds. Lightning flashed and flickered constantly. Muddy massive whitecaps
piled up out in the open water, sweeping across the surface with relentless precision to finally tip and froth
and break into dirty white sweeping crests. The wind howled, rain raised two-inch welts on the surface.

“Understand? The wind probably will die down through the night, but the waves won’t fall off until tomorrow sometime. If we
try to cross before they do, we’ve got a damned good chance of capsizing and drowning. That’s why we’re making camp with three
hours of nominal daylight left.”

Maxton began in a congested voice, “We’ll try now, god—”

Inverness just turned away. “Give it a rest, Maxton.” He
knew
goddam Dain was alive, and that belief filled his mind, left him nothing with which to worry about the girl. “You’ll get
her. She can’t run
and
she can’t hide—not from me.”

Vangie leaned back by the light of the hissing pressure lantern, and patted her tummy. If she’d been alone she would have
belched. There was just a heap of discarded shells and claws on each of their plates. At their elbows were thick white ceramic
mugs of steaming coffee.

“Dain, we can’t stand and fight. We
have
to run!”

Dain’s face became stubborn, almost mulish.

“We run, we die. We stay and fight, maybe we live.” “Without weapons against four armed men?”

He jammed a finger against his temple, suddenly angry. “We’ve got
these.”
He swung an arm around the room. “We’ve got everything here.” He pointed at the door. “We’ve got everything out there. I
want to—”

“That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? What you want.”

“It’s what you want and need, too, Vangie,” he said.

“Don’t be so goddam sure of that, either.”

As she sloshed off the plates, Dain sighed and started to clumsily take off his pants one-handed, almost immobilized by his
own thoughts. Vangie was now at the door, shoving it open a crack as if to assure herself the storm was real. Rain poured
through the narrow opening, Dain could hear the howl and rush of the wind. She let it slam again, turned to him abruptly.

“All right, goddam you, I’m in.”

Jesus! He was doing it again! Doing to her what he had
done to Marie with his bland, big assurances all would be well…

Don’t be so goddam sure of that, either.

That was the trouble, he was always so goddam sure about what the women he was involved with wanted. They were never real
to him
as human beings
until it was too late, until he had fucked them up. Only then, when dire results from his actions had destroyed them, did
they become real. Only when they were icons that he could worship.

Did he have that much hostility toward, fear of, some constant “they” out in the real world? Five years ago, playing games—chess,
detecting games on the computer and out in the field—while nurturing his fears and grudges behind a mask of geniality. But
it was the women who paid, because he led the “they” right to the place where the women were either trusting… or hiding…

His game had always been practicing his form of worship of those unreal icons. But outside this profane religion of his they
had been real enough, his ladies—real enough to die, to be threatened now again with death.

He had done it to Marie, now he held her dead body up like a crucifix between him and Vangie so he could keep Vangie unreal,
too, until it was too late.

But she
was
real. Right here, right now… Getting undressed with the lack of self-awareness about her body that most dancers and athletes
end up having. Dain, until that moment as unconcerned as she about stripping off his shorts, stopped dead, caught by her beauty.

She stopped also, feeling the full weight of his intensity. There was a sudden unexpected tension between them. All of a sudden,
Dain couldn’t take his eyes off her.

She turned to look at him, then released the pressure in the lantern. As it hissed out, the light began to fade. She crossed
to him instead of to the other bunk, cupped his face with her two hands, looking down at him in the dimness.

And he was real to her, too. Whatever, whoever he was.

“Jesus, Dain,” she said softly, “I don’t even like you! But tomorrow we might both be dead.”

In a hoarse voice, he said, “Or they might.”

Because he felt sudden, blinding, total lust, as he had so
often and just as suddenly for Marie—and had not felt even once in the five years since her slaughter. He could not make of
Vangie an icon as he had of Marie. To do so would be to destroy her also. No! She was real, here and now. Real…

He pulled her hot, naked body against him almost roughly. She gasped as he began licking one already erect nipple. His body
jerked as if from a jolt of electricity when her hands cupped his scrotum and closed around his distended member.

As the lantern died, they became lovers in the night.

Dawn filtered through the thin mist drifting up off the water. By its light a young marsh rabbit hopped out of its burrow
between the roots of a big fallen oak tree near the water’s edge. The woods were wet, but the rain had stopped. As soon as
the sun was up, the swamp would be steaming.

The rabbit began scratching its ear with a hind foot, the leg audibly thumping the ground with each movement. The vibrations
raised the spade-shaped head of a five-foot cottonmouth that was just sluggishly stirring on the far side of the fallen oak.
It was nearly a foot in circumference and was a slate-gray color that blended perfectly with the bark of the tree. It bunched
into a tight coil almost experimentally, then slithered slowly forward, tongue darting to get the news.

Dain and Vangie walked down the meandering track her father had cut through the undergrowth and saplings during dry weather
so he could put out setlines and crawfish traps from his boat during the spring floods. Dain’s arm was in a sling Vangie had
made from an old pillowcase, but his color
was good and he moved well. They were walking side by side but not close enough to touch one another.

“I figure twelve hours before they get here,” she said.

“Good. Gives us twelve hours to take inventory, plan, pick the killing ground…”

“You’re so damned…
casual
about it…”

“Live with death long enough, you get casual about it.”