Snake Eater (22 page)

“You son of a bitch,” she whispered.

“Listen,” he said. “Both of you. Let me tell you a story. Our team was in the jungle, and some of the snake eaters were scouting a village, and the rest of us were hiding by an old cart path, and along came a couple of dogs, and behind them was this old grandmother and two little boys. The dogs sniffed us out where we were hiding, and they started yapping and the grandmother and the kids saw us, so Daniel says we’ve gotta kill them all or they’ll go back and there’ll be VC all over the place. So—”

“I don’t want to hear this,” said Cammie quickly.

Sweeney held up the hand that wasn’t holding the shotgun. “Listen to the story, darlin’,” he said. “You’ll learn something. So I killed them. Daniel ordered me to do it. I told him I couldn’t do it, and he took out his forty-five and pressed it against my ear and ordered me to do it. So I did. I was nineteen years old. I got up and went to those people and gave them candy bars and cut their throats. Then I killed the dogs, too.” Sweeney shrugged. “Something like that changes a man.”

“So you hated him for that,” she said.

“Huh?” he said.

“You hated Daniel. Enough to kill him.”

He shrugged and smiled at both of us, and when he did he reminded me of Daniel, the way he used to shrug, with a quick roll of his eyes and a twitch of his shoulders. “He made me see a part of myself I didn’t like,” he said. “I couldn’t forgive him for that. But hate?” He frowned, weighing the accuracy of the word. Then he shook his head. “No. I loved him. I owe him my life. We all do. He was our leader. Our father. He made us do things that we didn’t want to do. But we understood. We had to do them to survive. He made us grow up. He showed us things in ourselves that we didn’t know were there, that we didn’t want to know were there. Oh, some of the men hated him, I know. But they were too afraid of him to admit it. And even they loved him, too. Like you love a father you also fear and think you hate.”

“But you killed him,” I said.

He shrugged. “Daniel taught me how. He taught me that I could.”

“Tell me about Al Coleman,” I said.

“Nothing to tell. Something that had to be done.”

“Because he had the book.”

“He had the book. And he knew.”

“About you?”

“No,” said Sweeney. “About Daniel.”

S
WEENEY PICKED UP MY
briefcase and set it on the coffee table. “What other goodies you got in here?”

I reached for it. “I’ll show you.”

“That’s okay.” He grinned. “You just relax.”

He opened the briefcase and reached in. He removed the computer printouts that Charlie had given me, and the photocopied pages from Al’s notebook. He spread them out on the coffee table and glanced at them without entirely taking his attention from me and Cammie sitting across from him.

“You’ve been busy,” he said.

I shrugged.

He reached into the briefcase again. His hand came out with my .38 in it. “My, my,” he said. He held it up and peered at it. “All loaded and everything.” He squinted at me. “You knew what was going to happen tonight, huh?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t know what was going to happen. I just figured something would. I didn’t know whether it would be you or Roscoe or Vinnie or even Cammie. Or maybe none of you. Maybe I was way off base.” I shrugged. “Somebody broke into my apartment yesterday. I kind of figured whoever it was would make it a point to be here tonight. Whoever it was really wanted these photographs.”

Sweeney held the shotgun steady with his right hand. It was pointing at my chest. With his left hand he put the photos and papers and my .38 back into the briefcase. He snapped it shut and dropped it onto the floor beside him. “It’s getting stuffy in here,” he said. “Let’s go outside, get some fresh air.”

Cammie frowned, then said, “I can open a window.”

“He’s not really making a suggestion,” I said.

She looked at me and nodded. She started to stand up.

“Wait,” said Sweeney. “Put your hands behind your necks. Both of you.”

“Jesus,” said Cammie.

I laced my fingers behind my neck. “Do it,” I said to her.

She did. Then we both stood up. Sweeney stood, too. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go get some air.”

We went out onto the deck. Sweeney stayed about five paces behind us with his ugly sawed-off autoloading shotgun leveled on us at his waist. When we descended the steps onto the lawn, he said, “Okay. Why don’t you put your arms around each other? Like you were lovers out for a stroll.”

“Brian,” began Cammie. But she stopped. I put my arm across her back and rested my hand on her hip. I felt her shiver against the chill November air. Her arm went around my waist. That way, it would be impossible for either of us to make a sudden move at Sweeney.

He directed us along a path through the woods. The sky was clear and bright with the moon, and we had no problem following the path. Through the trees off to our left I could see moonlight glimmer on the river, and I recognized the place where Daniel and I had fished. But we didn’t angle toward the river there. We kept moving, and the path narrowed so that Cammie and I had to fend off branches as we walked hip to hip.

Suddenly Sweeney whispered, “Stop!”

We stopped, and Cammie said, “What—?”

“Shut up!” he hissed.

We stood there, not moving. I moved my hand up and down Cammie’s side, hoping to comfort her, and I could feel the tenseness in her muscles. She pressed her arm against my hand and held it tight against her.

I tried to hear what Sweeney had heard. A soft breeze hissed through the trees and made crinkly noises among the brittle oak leaves that still clung stubbornly to their branches. A dog barked far across the river.

Otherwise I heard nothing.

After a minute or two, Sweeney said, “Okay. Let’s go.”

We continued to push through the forest. Cammie and I walked arm-in-arm. We used our free outside forearms to deflect the brush that grew close to the path. Sweeney remained five or six steps behind us, far enough back so that the saplings would not whip against him after we passed, but close enough to hear us if Cammie and I tried to whisper and certainly close enough to spray both of us easily with buckshot if we tried a sudden move.

Sweeney, I realized, had done this before. He’d crept along narrow jungle paths at night with all his senses raw and alert. He’d probably moved prisoners who he knew would kill him if they could. And none of them ever had. He’d been trained to kill, and he had killed. He’d learned how to survive, and he’d done it. He’d killed and survived as a profession. Even after he left the jungles of Indochina.

He’d killed Daniel. And I had cried when the bagpipes played “Going Home” and Daniel’s ashes sifted through Brian Sweeney’s fingers, and partly, at least, I had cried because I could see how he had loved the man he called the Snake Eater.

He would kill me and Cammie, too. It was easy for him. After he’d killed a Vietnamese grandmother and two little peasant boys and their dogs, he had learned he could kill anybody.

After we’d been walking for about fifteen minutes, Sweeney said, “Go left here.”

We pushed through the undergrowth where there was no path, descended a long slope, and found ourselves on the banks of the Connecticut. The river was broad and slow-moving there. Far across the way I could see a few orange pinpricks of light, and I imagined people in their homes watching television, brushing their teeth, making love in their bedrooms.

Cammie and I stood there on the half-frozen mud beside the water, still holding each other by the waist. The slow eddying currents lapped softly against the rocks. Sweeney stood behind us.

“Okay,” I said. “Now what?”

“Wade in.”

“Are you—?”

“Do it,” he said quietly.

“Can I ask a question first?” I said.

“No.”

“But there’s a couple things—”

“No,” he said. “Wade in.”

“This is pretty good,” I said. “You kill us in the water, and we float downstream for a while, and the police will never be able to figure out where we were shot, and after our bodies have been in the cold water for a while they’ll have a helluva time trying to determine the time of our death, and by the time they find our bodies you’ll be back in Vermont, and if anyone thinks to question you, you’ll swear that’s where you’ve been right along, and nobody will be able to say different.”

“Just walk into the water,” said Sweeney. “Slowly.”

“Come on,” I said to Cammie, urging her with my hand against the side of her waist.

We stepped in. For just an instant I felt nothing. Then the frigid water penetrated my shoes and my feet instantly went numb. I could feel the slow currents tug at my pantlegs. With my arm around her waist I helped Cammie keep beside me. I patted her hip, trying to comfort her, to tell her that it was okay, that I had a plan. When we had waded in up to our waists I would signal her with my fingers, alerting her, then I’d yell, “Now!” and I’d push her away from me and dive quickly to the side in the opposite direction from her, and maybe Sweeney would choose to shoot at me instead of her, and maybe he’d even panic and hesitate too long and miss both of us, and we could swim a long way under water, out toward the middle of the river beyond the short range of Sweeney’s sawed-off shotgun. We could swim and float far downriver. It was a chance. We could get away. One of us might, anyway. Cammie, probably. It would be me he’d go for first. If I could dive deep enough quickly enough, the pellets would not penetrate the water with enough force to kill me.

When we were in up to our knees, Sweeney said, “Okay. Stop there.”

Too shallow, I thought. He knew what I’d been thinking. If we tried to dive in knee-deep water, he’d get one of us at least.

“Turn around.”

Cammie and I had to release each other to turn to face him.

He stood about ten feet from us, only a few feet from the brushy banks of the river. The water came to his ankles. He was holding that wicked weapon in his right hand. The stubby barrel was braced across his left forearm. It didn’t waver. The black hole of the bore stared at my chest. He’d go for me first. Cammie might still have a chance.

I put my arm around Cammie’s back. She let her arms dangle at her sides.

“I got nothing against you,” Sweeney said. “Either of you.”

“Why don’t you just do me,” I said. “No purpose in killing her. She didn’t do anything. She doesn’t know anything.”

Sweeney laughed softly. “Neither do you,” he said.

Keep him talking, I thought. As long as he’s talking to us, he won’t shoot us.

“You’re right,” I said. “I don’t understand any of it. So Daniel killed those guys. So what? What’s it to you? You killed Daniel? Why? It makes no sense.”

“It doesn’t have to make sense to you.”

“Let her go, Brian.”

“I wish I could. But—”

The gunshot exploded suddenly, and I reacted to it like a sprinter to the starter’s gun. I shoved Cammie away from me and dived sideways, and I didn’t feel anything except the frigid water, a quick paralysis in my chest, and I pushed under water as hard and as deep as I could. I heard another explosion, muffled down there with my ears in the water, and at first I was exhilarated that he had missed me, and then I realized that he must have gone for her first, and part of my mind tried to tell me to turn back, to try to help her, to go for Sweeney. But I kept swimming toward the middle of the river, as deep under water as I could go. There was nothing I could do for Cammie. If he’d missed her somehow, she’d make it. If he got her, there was no reason to go back to Sweeney except to let him kill me, too.

I stayed under until I grew faint and my lungs burned. I forced myself to surface slowly. I rolled over so that my face pointed up, and I allowed just my nose and mouth to break through the skin of the water. I gasped deeply for air, and my breath sounded harsh in my ears. I found that my toes reached bottom. Cautiously I stood with just the top half of my head out of water and turned toward the shore.

A flashlight was playing across the water’s surface, moving toward me. Quickly I ducked under. I could see it pass over my head. After it swung by, I lifted up again.

I heard Sweeney call this time. “It’s all right,” he was calling, in a voice that wasn’t his own. “He’s dead. You can come in.”

I’m not dead, I thought. Don’t go to him, Cammie. It’s not all right.

“Come on in here,” he yelled. “You’re gonna freeze.”

Then I recognized the voice. It wasn’t Sweeney.

It was Oakley.

I
STOOD THERE UP
to my ears in the Connecticut River, and I found that the adrenaline that had flooded through me was gone. I began to shake uncontrollably against the frigid water, and maybe in a delayed reaction against the fear, too.

Oakley was talking conversationally from the bank of the river, and his voice carried clearly across the river’s surface. “He’s dead, Miss Russell. Mr. Coyne, it’s okay. You can come back. I’m not going to hurt you. Come on. You’ll freeze out there.”

His flashlight continued to move across the water, and when it approached me I instinctively ducked under until it had passed. Then I bobbed up again.

Oakley said, “I’m a policeman. You folks are safe now. Come in. You’ve got to get warm.”

From somewhere off to my left came Cammie’s voice. “Brady? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Let’s go in.”

The flashlight swung to me, went past, stopped, came back. It held me in its glare, and for a moment I thought Oakley intended to shoot me after all. “Move the light,” I said.

It swung away, and I watched it find Cammie. She was wading to shore thirty or forty yards downriver from me.

When I got to shore Cammie was huddled inside a bulky black-and-red checked wool jacket that I assumed was Oakley’s, and Oakley was standing there, holding the flashlight pointed down so that its beam reflected off the water and lit up the area. He was wearing a shoulder holster over his sweater. The handle of a revolver protruded from it.

Brian Sweeney lay facedown in six inches of water a few feet from the muddy bank of the river.