Deep Shadow (35 page)

King repeated the lie.

“How the hell did that happen?” Perry was jogging toward us, using the flashlight to find King, then me.

King began limping, shaking his head as if in pain, but was still aiming the gun at me as he pretended to test his right leg. “Your girlfriend just tried to body-block me—that son of a bitch is
heavy.
I knocked him down, but he twisted the hell out of my knee. Goddamn it, Perry, thanks to you I can barely walk.”

I said, “He’s faking. Take a look and see if there’s any swelling—” But Perry cut me off, screaming, “Shut your goddamn mouth or I’ll shoot you myself!”

King suddenly became the peacemaker. “Take it easy, Per, not so quick. I don’t think he’ll try it again. And we want that gold, right?”

“Jesus,” Perry said, “I’m getting sick of this whole business. Maybe you were right. Maybe we should just take what we got and get the hell out of here.”

King cut in, “No, man, I was wrong.
You
were right. We make Jock-o here fetch us some more coins, then we leave.” He paused. “Later, if you decide to carve a piece out of Mr. Smart-ass’s hide, I won’t object. For now, though, let’s stick with your plan. But I don’t think it’s smart for me to try and tie up this moose without help. Take my pistol and keep the rifle on him. What do you think?”

A few minutes later, after I was tied, hands and ankles, Perry stormed off alone in the truck to search for Arlis. King waited until the truck lights were pointed away from the lake before he sidled up to me, paused and spit. I felt his spittle hot on my face. As I turned away, he kicked me hard in the ribs.

“Didn’t I tell you he was dumb as a rock?” King said, drawing his foot back to kick me again. “I hate to say I told you so, but—” He stopped in midsentence for some reason and didn’t follow through with his leg.

I couldn’t figure it out. I had twisted myself into a ball, trying to get my knees up into a fetal position, and lay there with muscles tensed until I realized that King was listening to something . . . or maybe looking at something across the lake.

“Do you see that?” he said, his tone serious.

I made a croaking noise when I tried to reply—he’d kicked me so hard that my diaphragm muscle was spasming. It took me a couple of tries to say, “If you kick me again, I’ll kill you.”

King was walking toward the pile of gear where he’d left the night vision mask, then pressed it to his face.

“It’s gone,” he said after several seconds. “It was right there, I saw it, but I don’t see it now.”

I gasped, “What are you talking about?”

His voice low, he replied, “I just saw something crawl out of the bushes and slide down into the water. It swam like a snake, but bigger. I mean
a lot
bigger.” He was silent for several seconds before adding, “The fucking thing was huge, man, the size of a damn canoe. It’s gone now, but I can still see the water moving. How big do alligators get?”

Because I was tied, with my face pressed hard against the ground, I couldn’t see anything but King’s silhouette and a horizon of trees and stars beyond. I said, “Did you hear what I just told you? If you kick me again, you’d better never untie me because I’ll kill you.”

King took another look through the mask, then did a slow circle as if whatever he had seen might sneak up and grab him from behind. He said softly, “If you go into that lake, Jock-a-mo, I don’t think you’ll ever get the chance.” He turned, and then he threw the mask at me again.

I couldn’t move. An edge of the monocular clipped my forehead, drawing blood.

ARLIS FUTCH, WHO HAD SURVIVED TWO MILD STROKES
in recent months but had not told anyone including his closest friends, thought he might be suffering yet another aneurysm—the final nail in the coffin, perhaps—because he could hear voices calling to him and they seemed to be coming from beneath the ground.

He stopped and listened, his hands on his thighs, breathing heavily. His heart was pounding so loud in his ears that he thought he might still be hallucinating, when, once again, a voice called to him. But the words were difficult to decipher. “Doc . . . hey! We are . . . Arlis? Can . . . hear me? Down here!”

The voice was faint, softer than cypress leaves rustling in the wind. The words seemed to float out of the marsh, up through Futch’s feet, then into his head.

That couldn’t be. Tomlinson and the boy were dead. Arlis feared that maybe Ford was dead now, too, after hearing two gunshots just minutes before. The voices couldn’t be real, which meant they were coming from inside his skull, not from the woods around him.

Arlis had brought along the only equipment close enough to grab before escaping into the swamp—the tire iron the two killers had used to fix the truck and a flashlight that Ford had slipped him when he’d left the bottles of water. Arlis dropped the iron on the ground, leaned his weight against a tree and checked the far shadows. He could see the lights of his truck angling through the tree canopy, but it didn’t sound as if the truck was getting any closer.

That was good. The two Yankee killers didn’t have the sense, apparently, to get out of the truck and try to track him on foot. Which meant they didn’t have a chance in hell of finding him—not a man who’d grown up in the Everglades and knew good places to hide, like the shadowed dome of a cypress head ringed by water—a natural moat that would spook most men but not him.

Arlis turned and confirmed that an island of cypress trees lay just beyond. The grove was encircled by water that was thick with lilies, the water so black that starlight floated on the surface like shards of ice. If he needed it, the island was handy.

That gave him a good feeling. The cathedral shape of a cypress head always did. It caused him to picture the cool, open space within, moss hanging from orchid-weighted trees, and usually there was a pond with white lilies, and monster bass sometimes, too. He had felt that way about cypress heads since he was a boy.

Arlis stood, but his legs were shaky, so he used the tree again for support. For the last ten minutes, he had been hiking as fast as he could manage through the backcountry, angling toward the asphalt road that by his calculations was due west on the other side of the swamp, less than two miles away as the crow flies.

The road would have been farther if he’d taken the trail they’d hacked through the palmettos and myrtle. Three miles or more. So this was better, cutting cross-country over wet ground. The killers wouldn’t follow him because they didn’t know their way around a swamp, and they would probably be afraid to get out of the truck, anyway.

That’s what they were. Snot-nosed punks who believed that carrying a gun made them men. He had heard Perry and King whining about the big gator that had been crashing around, hissing in the distance. True, the animal had made noises Arlis had never heard a gator make before, but what else could it be? The damn thing had been several hundred yards away, way back in the woods, but it had scared the two killers so bad they’d about pissed their jeans hurrying to climb up on the truck—as if a few feet might save them if a full grown she-male gator came sniffing around.

In the western sky, the same planets that Arlis had used many times to guide himself while fishing far offshore—Venus, Jupiter and Saturn—formed a curving line toward the horizon as white and bright as channel markers. He was headed in the right direction, there was no doubt about that. Question was, would the damaged blood vessels in his brain handle more strain?

Arlis coughed and touched fingertips to the side of his neck. His jugular vein was throbbing like a snare drum and the resonant pressure inside his skull was beginning to produce the first warning signs of a killer headache. He had suffered headaches often enough in recent weeks to recognize the signs. His head had been hurting, anyway, because of the beating that scum killer Perry had given him, but the pain coming into his head now was different. It was a sharp, accelerating pain, as if glass splinters were circulating through his bloodstream.

One more stroke, the doctor had told Arlis, and he’d spend the rest of his life in a bed with tubes stuck up him front and rear so that he wouldn’t mess himself. Like a vegetable, in other words, or some wounded animal, unable to speak or fend for himself.

A box in a cemetery was a better option, as far as he was concerned.

But not now, not yet. Not before he had found help and returned to rescue Ford. It didn’t matter if Ford was dead or alive, Arlis felt honor-bound to come back for the man. Just as he was honor bound to do his best later to help recover the bodies of the other two, Tomlinson and the boy.

It was his trip. The least he could do was return and help clean up the mess he had caused.

Arlis touched two fingers to his neck again, checking his pulse, and he thought,
I’ll rest here for a while. Not long. It’s better than my brain exploding before I find help. I can’t screw this up. Not again.

In his lifetime, Arlis had failed one hell of a lot more often than he had succeeded. Maybe it was that way with most men, he didn’t know—but he doubted that was true. He had owned too many businesses that had gone bust. He had led too many fishing or hunting or salvage expeditions that had gone south for one reason or another. Never in his life, though, had he experienced so much tragedy in the short space of a day—and it was nobody’s fault but his own.

I’m a Jonah,
he thought.
I’ve always been bad luck. And things ain’t gonna change now that I’m near the end.

The truth of that thought flooded Arlis with weariness. A lifetime of failure was bad enough—but to take the lives of two, maybe three, trusting men with him, as he himself approached his last days, was almost too much to handle.

Quit flogging yourself, take a breather,
Arlis told himself. Dying now, with no one around, would only make this nightmare of a day even worse.

As his breathing slowed, yet another hallucination moved through the saw grass, into his ears, because he heard a sudden shrill whistle and then a man’s voice calling again, the jumbled words telling him, “Hey, we’re over . . . Lost our . . .
Hello?
We need lights . . . Bones . . . something
big.
Shovel and a rope . . . !”

Arlis replied before he could catch himself. “Who’s there? Where are you?” He spoke softly and then turned his head to listen.

There was no answer.

Arlis felt like a fool. He had suspected it, but now he knew for certain. He was imagining the voices. It had happened to him before, and he felt a descending helplessness, like a prisoner in his own damaged skull.

The first time a blood vessel had burst in Arlis’s brain, something similar had happened. He’d been out fishing for trout in his little green Beck boat, dragging lures on bamboo poles, when he’d felt a searing electric pain inside his head.

Next thing Arlis remembered, he was belly down on the deck of the boat—the boat running free, idling in a tight circle—as a woman’s voice spoke to him, calling, “Arlis Futch, you old fool. Wake up! Wake up before you kill your boat and yourself on some damn oyster bar!”

That had been a hallucination, no question, because the voice he had heard was the voice of a woman who had been dead for several years. A pretty woman Arlis had once loved named Hannah Smith.

Hannah had fished for a living, as good as any man and better than most, and she’d had fine, heavy breasts and a good laugh. That woman had loved him, too, at least a little, even though she was young enough and pretty enough to have just about any man she wanted. But Hannah Smith had too much heart and body hunger to settle for just one man.

Hannah had loved men. She didn’t bother pretending it wasn’t true when she was alive, so Arlis didn’t bother to pretend after she was dead.

There was nothing wrong with that, Arlis had told himself when he and Hannah were alone together. He had forgiven her long ago—not that Hannah had asked for forgiveness—and he had forgiven most of the men, too, which included Marion Ford, who, Hannah didn’t mind saying, was maybe the man she had loved best of all.

Well . . . Arlis had
almost
forgiven Ford. Sharing Hannah’s bed was one thing, but for a man to win her love was another. Arlis still sometimes felt the narrowing constriction of fear and focus that was jealousy, if he let his mind linger on the subject. But that wasn’t often—and it would be far less now if Ford actually was dead.

Maybe he was. The gunshots Arlis had heard sounded solitary and irrevocable, like an execution.

Chances were, King and Perry had killed the man.

It would come as no surprise, if true. Ford was a good enough man by most ways of measuring, but he had always struck Arlis as being too bookish to be a dependable partner in a down-and-dirty fight. Ford had been okay in a tussle or two around the docks—Arlis had witnessed it—but Doc was an educated man, better with words and numbers than his fists. A smart-talking biologist would be no match for two low-life murderers who were desperate and on the run.

Marion Ford is dead
. Arlis whispered the words to see how it felt to say them. If it was true, he would soon have to get used to saying it because almost everyone on the islands knew Doc Ford and liked him.

The words felt worse than he could have imagined because the next thought that came into Arlis’s mind was
Doc’s dead, and I ran away and left him there to die alone!

Arlis could admit that he had failed many times over the years, but he had never before abandoned a friend in a tight spot. True, Ford had insisted that he escape if he had the chance—no mistaking the signals the man had given him, nor the words Doc had spoken.

Even so, to run away and allow a partner to be shot to death was a sorry damn thing to do, and Arlis felt the weariness in him begin to change to anger. Running away like a coward wasn’t how he wanted to be remembered, if anyone remembered him at all—which was unlikely—but he himself knew it. And God, of course, knew it, too.