Headhunter (28 page)

The drugstore sat between two small cemeteries. Within each graveyard there was the odd wrought-iron mausoleum, but mainly they were filled with whitewashed tombstones. The drugstore building leaned crookedly, the shutters askew at the windows. A light was burning inside beyond the open door.

Leaving Spann. Rick Scarlett walked down the street to an all-night cash-and-carry. A sign over the counter warned:
Because of food stamp regulations, there will be no drinking in front of the store.
He purchased two po'-boy sandwiches, each one made from a French loaf; shrimp with mayonnaise and chowchow for Spann, an oyster loaf for himself. He bought himself a paper cup of coffee which he sipped as he walked back. The coffee tasted of chicory.

Spann was watching the drugstore through a pair of binoculars when he returned to the stakeout. After a while she passed them to him in exchange for the sandwich. He also took a look.

The pharmacy was dirty and broken down, the paint on its counter worn to the wood and grimed with decades of use. Behind the counter was an unglazed cupboard framing several sooty boxes and old hunks of root.

There were several people in the drugstore, most of them female. Two old women dressed in white lolled on the floor in front of the counter. They were smoking cigarettes and scratching their heads while at the same time running small cloth-covered bundles through arthritic fingers. These bundles had been removed from a small altar built into the base of the counter. Within the altar Scarlett could make out oleographs of St. Peter, St. George, and St. Patrick surrounding a statue. Beneath the pictures but above the floor were bottles of rum mid vermouth and whisky alternating with white porcelain pots. Then a weird old woman dressed in white sat down to join the others. She appeared to be holding her head in her hands.

Just then two other figures walked into the light beyond the doorway. One was a wizened old woman of at least seventy-live. She was wearing a faded print housedress and a pair of black laced shoes. Her thinning gray hair was pulled back Into a small bun at the nape of her neck. Her cheekbones tutted out over a toothless mouth. Walking behind the drug-tore counter she pointed up to seven drums, four of them I minted green, that hung by a rope from the ceiling. Then she indicated a bull whip hanging on the wall.

Che second figure, a man, began to take the seven drums down
.

"That's our boy," Scarlett said, for the man was John Lincoln Hardy.

Spann looked at her watch. "You remember the telephone tap said 'The pot boils over at midnight?' Whatever's going to happen, we don't have long to wait."

All tour cars moved out at 11:00 p.m.

Scarlett and Spann counted seventeen people—fifteen blacks and two whites, all but five of them women—come out of the drugstore single file and climb into the vehicles. In a line the automobiles drove off, following the river.

"Let's take both cars," Rick Scarlett said. "If the group splits up we can fork the tail."

Once they were underway, each officer switched on the electric teeth underneath the dashboard. The electronic homing devices were just what Hodge had said—the latest and the best. Each device had a small screen that glowed a soft red color, imprinted upon which was a map of this section of New Orleans. As each vehicle moved, the map changed, following the route.

There were now four small lights blinking in unison on both computer screens. Scarlett and Spann could actually watch the drugstore vehicles as they moved across the electronic grid. A digital display at the side calculated the distance between each police car and the homing devices.

Out to the suburbs, then out of the town, then deep into the countryside. Rick Scarlett and Katherine Spann stalked John Lincoln Hardy.

In Terrebonne, the home of the Cajuns, the demarcation line between what is liquid and what is earth is vague and always changing. The bayou streams weave a sort of lace-work out of the land, curving and twisting and then curling back on their own curves to split and resplit again. Lose your way in such terrain and you could be lost forever. For here, hemmed in by decay and dripping trees, crowded by grass and sedge and palmetto, totally without a foothold on firm ground, terror can come quickly—followed just as quickly by death. Terrebonne sucks its victims into a grave of mud and buries them alive.

Beneath the light of the moon tonight, Scarlett and Spann followed John Lincoln Hardy deep into bayou country.

After the town of Houma and just east of Humphreys, the four cars from the drugstore left the highway and turned south onto a road made out of potholes. The potholes were filled with water, each one like a well.

At first there were several bayou shanties standing three and four deep on either side of the road, the air around them awash with a stench of fish, excrement, sweat, ashes, garbage, dogs and mud. Beside these hovels grew mango trees with their plump and heavy fruit hanging from long green navel cords. But after a distance of several miles the shanties disappeared. Now the moon shone down on the procession of cars and the air hummed gently with distant noise and the sound of crickets and frogs.

Scarlett and Spann dropped back to give their quarry some room. Both Constables switched from head to parking lights. Soon they doused the lights altogether and let the moon show the way, the teeth as their guide. Then twenty minutes later, the four blinking lights on each computer screen ceased moving across the map. Wherever they were, it seemed they had arrived.

It had been at least ten miles since they had last passed a sign of habitation. It was in fact questionable whether or not the road on which they were driving continued to exist.

Scarlett and Spann pulled off to the right and drove in behind some trees and bushes. The place where they finally stopped the cars could not be seen from the road. Spann was just switching off the engine of her vehicle when Scarlett came running up to the open driver's window.

"Come on, let's move, or we're going to lose them," he said. He pointed off to the left. Through the trees she could just make out several flickering torches. Spann climbed out of the car.

By the time they were back to the road again the torchlight had disappeared. Crouched low in case there was a guard they both moved swiftly toward the four cars parked up ahead. They found no sentry and turned off into the woods. By now the torches were gone from sight, swallowed by murky vapor. Within minutes the two cops were splashing through cypress woods where grasping roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them. A few seconds later they were both up to their thighs in smelly water. Then up to their waists. Their chests. Their necks—when Katherine Spann found herself wondering if this part of Louisiana was known for its amphibious snakes.

"What the hell is that?" asked Scarlett, stopping dead in the water.

The woman beside him strained her eyes and was surprised to see a pile of dank stones jutting up out of the murky bayou fifteen feet in front of them. It looked like a fragment of some rotting man-made monument built among these malformed trees, then flooded by the waters of the swamp. Beyond the atones and up on the ground which was bathed in silver moonlight, Spann could see a miserable huddle of huts. In front of them several bones hung from moss-covered gallows.

It was at this moment that the first sound of drums came

throbbing through the trees, the
thump . . . thump . . . thump
of an insistent and malevolent tom-tom beat.

"We found them," Scarlett whispered. "Let's go take a look."

Sunday, November 7th, 12:07 a.m.

Crouched low and then down on their stomachs, Spann and Scarlett closed the gap. First they skirted the uninhabited huts, crawling out of the water and sticking to patches of shadow as they followed the voodoo drumming into the trees. Each time the beating stopped they picked up on a monotonous soul-chilling chant that droned through the muggy air. Several harrowing screams erupted, raising the hackles on each cop's neck. They left the shelter of the trees and came upon a natural glade within the swamp where a grassy island, almost clear of vegetation and washed in splinters of moonlight, humped out of the bayou. At once they could see that the island was a graveyard-—perhaps an ancient cemetery for runaway Southern slaves—for from one end to the other crooked tombstones stuck up from the ground like rotting lower teeth.

For the next twenty minutes neither Spann nor Scarlett would speak a word. They lay submerged in mud on the fringe of the fetid waterway that circled the island and watched.

Near the center of this graveyard, seven naked figures— one of them white—were bellowing and braying and writhing around a raging ring-shaped bonfire. An occasional rift in the high curtain of flame revealed a gnarled cypress tree that stood at the heart of the blaze. Surrounding both the dancers and the fire like a circle of Stonehenge rocks was another concentric ring of several wooden scaffolds. These gibbets were similar to those in front of the uninhabited huts but from each of these hung the still-twitching corpse of a freshly-slaughtered goat. One of the goats was still alive for the air was rife with its screams, while beneath each scaffold the ground was littered with hundreds of skulls. The dancers were moving counterclockwise in between the ring of gibbets and the fire.

The goat stopped screaming and died.

Then suddenly someone with an almost disembodied voice cried out the word "damballah!" and the chorus of dancers in return chanted
" Largent, ce sang!"

A man with a snake curled around his neck burst through

the ring of flame.

Thump . . . thump . . . thump
... the drums began again.

Scarlett tapped Spann on her mud-covered shoulder and nodded off to the left.

Twenty feet from the bonfire stood a squat, square mausoleum. It was the only structure on the island and it was made from stone that shone an eerie irradiant white under the light of the moon. The fire-glow licked one side and turned it red.

Sitting around this charnel house were several knots of people. Four drummers in one group off to the right were thrashing the top of a single drum. Within a second huddle, lour women—each one wearing an ebony mask carved with the face of the Devil—sat on the ground facing the tomb, their hands busily stroking and working red cloth bags as if they were rosaries. Up on top of the white stone mausoleum, with her legs crossed and her eyes closed, with one wrinkled arm and pointing finger outstretched toward the man with the snake, sat the old woman in the faded housedress who Rick Scarlett had seen earlier through binoculars inside the drugstore.

John Lincoln Hardy, a bone in one hand, lurked behind this woman.

Thump . . . thump , . . thump,
the drumming picked up in pace.

It was the sight of the snake, to Rick Scarlett's mind, that really set things off. First the drummers on the
assotor
frantically began setting up a shifting structure of counterpoint beats. But as soon as the writhing figures began to adopt the beat, each drummer abruptly abandoned the
assotor
and reached for a separate drum. Three started thrashing tom-toms, the fourth an iron
ogan.
Fragmented now, the musicians slapped out monologues while the dancers around the fire followed them into frenzy.

thump, thump . . . thump, thump . . . thump, thump . . . slap . . .

The man with the snake—"Damballah!"—approached the tomb—"Damballah!"—and the old hag on top stood up.

'' Dam"—
thump
—
'' Ba''—
thump
—
'' Llah!"

Thump, thump . . .

Reaching down the old woman grabbed the hem of the housedress and pulled it up to her neck. Moonlight rippled across the wrinkles of her belly and her drooping pouches of fat.

The old woman spread her legs.

Thump, thump . . .

Her feet were planted firmly a yard apart on the top of the white stone tomb.

Thump, thump ...

Her head was thrown back, swinging, her arms stretched up to grab the moon.

Thump . . .

She thrust forward her crotch.

Black-gray hair, twisted and tangled, climbed halfway up the old woman's abdomen, spreading out like creeping vines from between her legs.

Jesus!
Rick Scarlett thought as the man with the snake eased the head of the reptile up toward the old hag standing on the tomb.

The masked women went wild.

"Dam-ba-llah! Dam-ba-llah!" they began to chant.

John Lincoln Hardy retrieved a skull from the ground and started to beat on its cranium with the large bone in his hand. The old woman leaned back like a limbo dancer and lowered herself to the tomb. She was now lying with her shoulders two inches off the stone, her skirt still raised, both feet doubled back under her to support the weight of her body, the snout of the snake firmly nestled up into her sex. She began to undulate her hips to the pounding of the drums. And as she rolled and heaved and humped spasmodically, the four masked women on the ground stood up and stripped off their clothes. Then they too began to rock to the rhythm of the drums, naked save for the masks which continued to cover their faces.

Spann closed her eyes when the man let the reptile go.

When she opened them once again, the snake had slithered up over the old woman's abdomen and between her withered breasts. Now Spann could see that the reptile was over six feet long, for its head was wrapped in a coil around the woman's neck while its slippery skin still slid across her groin. The old crone's voice was moaning out:
" Bande, Damballah, bande!"

Then the man who had released the snake began to shake out of control. Though his steps were sedate to begin with, he abruptly gathered himself into a whirl, gyrating about on one foot, then breaking away with a stagger amid flailing arms.

This stagger was more a leap than it was anything else, a violent forward-reaching movement as though he were falling into space and could only avoid calamity by falling yet once more—so at the last moment he recovered himself and whirled about once again.