In The Falling Light (23 page)

Cole looked at the Cajun for a long moment.
The other man glanced up to his eyes, then looked away, still
chewing that thumbnail.

“What’s going on, Brick?”

A shrug.

“He in some kind of trouble?”

Brick looked as if he was wrestling with
something, and then his shoulders slumped. “I’m worried about him.
He’s been gone two days now, took the truck and the boat. Ain’t
been back.”

“Where’d he go?”

Brick looked at the enforcement agent. “Out
to Devil’s Hole. Said he was going to find Old Nick.”

Cole whistled. “Gone two days to Devil’s
Hole?”

“Uh-huh. Too far for me to go walking to
find him. He ain’t young no more, Cole.”

The agent looked hard at LaBauve, and saw no
deception in him, only concern. He knew it was difficult for a man
like Brick to ask for help, but that was surely what he was doing,
and a man as old as Pappy had no business in a place like Devil’s
Hole. It was absolutely the meanest part of the bayou.

“I don’t see any violations, don’t see any
reason we can’t get you your permits back.” He jerked his head
towards the Dodge. “What do you say we take a ride out there, see
if we can find him?”

Brick squinted. “You bust me and pull my
tags one day, then wanna help me look for my Pappy the next? What
the hell?”

Cole shrugged. “The law’s my job, Brick, and
I won’t apologize for it. You were in the wrong. But that’s the
past, and this isn’t about that. We know each other, and I know
your Pappy.” He stuck out his hand. “C’mon, let me help.”

Brick eyed the agent’s hand as if it might
bite him, but then gripped it firmly. “I appreciate it. Let me
throw on a shirt and get my rifle.”

Cole shook his head. He didn’t think he had
anything to fear from Brick, didn’t think the man had any cause to
jump him out in the swamp, but he also didn’t need him to be armed.
“I got that covered.” In the rack against the Dodge’s back window
hung a Remington 12 gauge and a Sig .223 assault rifle, something
the department had begun issuing to agents since Katrina. “Let’s go
see what Pappy’s up to.”

It took an hour of traveling back roads,
transitioning from asphalt to gravel to dirt to ruts, and now they
bounced along a narrow track with high grasses and views of blue
water to the left, and sprawling black willows on the right,
growing half in and half out of stagnant pools. A flock of
low-flying cranes swept by in the distance, their white shapes a
startling contrast to the jungle-like background, graceful and
seemingly slow as their big wings beat at the humid air. A few
fishing shacks were nestled among the willows here and there,
decaying, thrown-together places with bowed porches and crooked
docks right on the water. Dogs and chickens could be seen, but no
people. They would all be out on the water, making a living.

Cole braked as a family of nutria scurried
from the grass on the left and crossed the road in front of the
LDWF truck. Both men watched the housecat-sized, oily furred
rodents disappear into the brush, hairless tails following
after.

“You getting any these days?” Cole asked,
gesturing towards where the animals had been and getting the Dodge
moving again.

“Hell yes. Since ya’ll pulled my tags and
licenses, been the only way to make any money. I don’t eat ‘em,
though. Ain’t sunk low enough to eat swamp rat. Pappy has a taste
for ‘em.”

Nutria was a breed which landed somewhere
between rat and otter, an aquatic rodent with webbed feet and long
orange teeth, brought to the U.S. for the fur trade long ago. Like
nearly every other imported species, it had found its way into the
wilds and thrived. When the market for furs died off in the
eighties, the nutria grew unchecked and flourished in the food-rich
environment of the bayou. Breeding as often as common rats, they
fed on roots and vegetation, the very structure which held the
bayou together, and Cole’s agency estimated that as a result,
twenty-five miles of Louisiana wetlands disappeared into the Gulf
of Mexico each year. They were considered the most invasive species
in America.

“Couple weeks ago, got me a hundred of them
little bastards in one day. That was a damn good day.”

Cole agreed that it was a nice payday.
Nutria were such an infestation that the LDWF paid five dollars for
every tail brought in, and was extremely generous in granting
no-bag-limit licenses to locals. Brick’s claim of a hundred in one
day seemed a bit inflated, though, even considering the
out-of-control population.

“I heard the Chinese was interested,” said
Brick.

“Yep. The mayor of Beijing came to Baton
Rouge to look into importing them as a meat source. Nothing ever
came of it, though.”

Brick laughed, a harsh bark. “Goddamn
Chinese’re stupid enough to invite them little bastards into their
country, I say let ‘em take all the swamp rats they want. See how
they like it.”

Cole nodded as he drove, unable to argue
with Brick’s simple logic. And that was the one thing which made
this job difficult sometimes. He had grown up with these people, he
understood the bayou and their way of life, saw how hard they had
it. His training and schooling had well-educated him on the need
for conservation, and his loyalties were firmly in place, but it
was still tough to tell a father trying to feed a family of six
that the state was taking away his boat for thirty days and
suspending his tags because he shot a gator an hour after sundown.
It didn’t help that he knew most of them by their first names. He
had to enforce the law, it was something he wanted to do and for
which he had volunteered, but he couldn’t help quietly believing
that there was more than enough deer, opossum, fish and reptile
meat in the bayou to feed these simple folks and their families,
and still have plenty left over to supply New York City with
alligator skin for their shoes. And he couldn’t really picture
anyone on Park Avenue wanting to dine on opossum.

The open wetlands were increasingly broken
by submerged stumps and bald cypress, thickening into woods once
more, the overhead canopy steadily blotting out the sun. They were
getting closer to Devil’s Hole, or at least one of the few places
that part of the bayou touched land.

“What was Pappy doing out here, Brick?”

The other man shook his head. “Got it in his
head he was gonna find Old Nick.”

“He believes in Old Nick?”

“Damn straight,” said Brick, “that big
bastard’s out there too, I guarantee.”

Cole looked sideways at his old schoolmate
and tried a smile. “C’mon, really?”

“You can think whatever you want,
warden
, (they were back to that now) but he’s real, and he’s
out there. A hundred years old, raised from an egg but escaped to
the bayou when he was a baby after he killed some little girl on a
farm. Been living in Devil’s Hole ever since.”

Cole said nothing. He knew the legend.

“I’m just hoping Pappy nodded off drunk in
the truck, and didn’t try to go out after him. He’s always saying
if anyone could ever find Old Nick, he could.”

The wildlife agent didn’t want to get into a
debate over a mythical swamp monster with a hot-tempered redneck,
and didn’t bother to argue that the local reptiles were dangerous
enough for an eighty-seven-year-old without bringing Old Nick into
the equation. The American alligator averaged eleven or twelve feet
long, and weighed between three and eight hundred pounds. Normally
they steered clear of humans, but they were also opportunistic, and
Devil’s Hole had more than its fair share of the animals. An old
man struggling to put an aluminum boat in the water might prove
tempting for an attack.

“I’m sure he’s fine, Brick. Probably be more
pissed off that you brought a lawman to come look for him.”

Brick grinned. “He would be at that. But
I’ll take the sharp end of his tongue and a slap up-side the head
so long as I know he’s okay.”

They drove deeper into the darkening
bayou.

Old Nick wasn’t an alligator. He was said to
be a “salty,” a saltwater crocodile native to Northern Australia,
India and Southeast Asia. Salties were the largest reptiles on
earth, and Old Nick was said to be a real monster, between
twenty-three and thirty feet long, weighing in at two tons, capable
of pulling boats under and biting the tailgates off pickup trucks,
unaffected by gunfire and able to choke down a full grown man. The
tales of Nick’s size and exploits enlarged in direct proportion to
the amount of beer being consumed, and Cole had once even heard an
enforcement agent quietly say that he had seen Old Nick kill a man
twenty years earlier, but had been unable to get off a shot. Swamp
tales.

Cole didn’t believe in the legend himself,
but there was just enough truth to make it plausible, and that was
why the story lived on. Salties lived as easily in freshwater
swamps as they did in open ocean. They were apex predators and
masters of ambush, aggressive, territorial and physically powerful.
They could swim for short underwater bursts at up to 18 mph,
exploding onto shore even faster, and by using their immense tail
could propel themselves their full length vertically out of the
water. And they were smart, believed to be smarter than lab rats,
and capable of learning. A salty who had survived over a hundred
years would be a crafty predator indeed. If one existed in
Louisiana, Devil’s Hole would be the place for it; infrequently
visited, dark and filled with prey, undisturbed and remote. The
perfect lair for the undisputed King of the Bayou.

But Old Nick was a legend and nothing more.
No matter how stealthy the creature might be, no matter how
impassable the bayou could get, there was simply no way a reptile
the size of a bus could have avoided being spotted and hunted down,
or even photographed after all these years. Hell, something that
big could be seen from the
air!
He was more elusive than
Bigfoot. Of course that didn’t stop the airboat tour guides from
spinning yarns about him for the tourists, that was good for
business. And the nature channels regularly came down to do stories
on him, interviewing locals who had “lived to tell the tale” and
taking pictures of plaster casts of his supposed footprints and
doing extended filming of the creepiest sections of the bayou.
T-shirts and television and tall tales. But no giant crocodile.

The sides of the road grew marshy and
spotted with pools of standing water as the bald cypress trees
closed in, branches heavy with gray-green clumps of Spanish moss
hanging limp in the close air. It was a twilight place, the sun
neatly tucked away above, the low light intensity resulting in
little undergrowth. Between the trees was flat mud which led to the
water. A thick cottonmouth wriggled across the track in front of
the Dodge.

They found the truck a few minutes later,
parked where the road simply stopped in the trees, only a few yards
from the water’s edge. A trailer was hooked up to Brick’s old Ford,
and an aluminum fishing boat was still strapped into its mountings.
Cole stopped and Brick jumped out at once, running up to the cab to
look inside, then turning in a circle and yelling, “Pappy!
Pappy!”

Cole got out and checked the truck as well,
finding the cab empty, crushed beer cans and filthy overalls on the
floorboards. He had so wanted to find the old coot passed out in
the front seat with an empty bottle. The boat still on its trailer
wasn’t a good sign, either. He looked out into Devil’s Hole, a
deep, shadowy expanse of algae-filmed water, rotting stumps and
cypress vanishing into the distance. Nothing moved to disturb the
surface, and though mosquitoes drifted through the air, nothing
else did. There were no birds, no croaking bullfrogs. It was a
silent place.

Brick climbed up into the back of Cole’s
Dodge and stood on the equipment box, cupping his hands to his
mouth and yelling, “Paaaaappy!”

Cole looked at the muddy bank and shivered
despite the heat. Even in the half-light he could see a pair of
bare footprints making their way from the Ford straight to the
water. The old man was a suicide, had finally lost his mind and
walked straight into the swamp. Cole had no delusions about what
would have happened next.

“Brick,” he said quietly, turning to look at
the other man, “I think we…”

His companion was sitting on the Dodge’s
equipment box, swinging his legs comfortably against the side of
the truck, looking at him with a weird grin.

Old Nick erupted out of the water and onto
the bank at just under twenty mph, hitting the back of Cole’s right
leg with open jaws and snaggled teeth. The impact threw him
face-down in the mud and he screamed as the croc whipped its
massive head left and right and tore his leg off at the knee. It
snarled, deep and throaty, advancing on the prone man. Cole flipped
onto his back and used his arms to scramble away, dragging his
stump, slipping into shock as he watched it spurt blood across the
croc’s snout. Thirty feet
at least
, his brain screamed. Two
tons easy. Three feet tall at the shoulder.

It bit down on his kicking leg, crushing the
shin bone and making him scream, and then it started backing
rapidly towards the water. Cole clawed for his sidearm, got it
free, and then lost it in the mud when the croc gave him a sharp
jerk. It shook its head and tore away the remaining leg.

“
Brick help! Shoot it shoot it shoot it
help me heeeelp!”

The salty, mottled black and green, covered
in leathery scale ridges and looking very much like the dinosaur it
was, gulped down the leg, a boot still on the foot. Then it looked
at Cole and croaked, staring with one big blue eye, and one which
was a milky, blind orb.

“Don’t think I can help ya, warden,” Brick
said casually, pulling out a tin of chewing tobacco and fingering
out a large dip, shoving it into his mouth. “You’re on your
own.”