Dead Man

by Joe Gores

  Without even looking back, Vangie dove into the water. The boat started to swing free. Maxton tried to scramble down the bank, fell, slid and rolled right down to the water’s edge. Nicky and Trask, on the bank above, started firing wildly over his head at the drifting scow, even though Vangie was nowhere to be seen in the concealing river mist.

  * * *

  Her sleek head broke water on the far side of the scow so it was between her and the shore. She reached up for the gunwale, but it splintered and flew apart. She grabbed a breath, ducked under again so she didn’t see two more slugs hole the side of her outboard motor. Maxton, flat on his back in the mud, was yelling hysterically at his cohorts firing over his head.

  “Quit firing, quit firing, you fucking apes!” He struggled to his feet as they slid down the bank, waved his arms wildly. “Get after her, for Chrissake!”

  Neither man moved. They weren’t about to dive into that cold fucking water in the dark, there were gators and snakes and turtles, oh my…

  “The boat, you stupid fuckers! Use the boat!”

  They scrambled for Papa’s fishing scow. Nicky grabbed the prow. Trask tried to unwind the mooring chain from around the tree. Nicky shoved. Nothing happened. Trask took out his gun.

  “She locked the fucking chain to the tree.”

  Maxton said, “It doesn’t matter,” in a subdued voice. They turned to look out over the mist-covered slow brown river. There was nothing to be seen but mist. “She got away clean.”

  Actually, the flat-bottom scow had wedged itself up against a cypress knee. Vangie’s forearm and lower leg came up to hook themselves over the gunwale, she rolled up into the boat. It sent out silent wavelets, Vangie herself was silent, listening to their distant voices echoing off the sounding board of fog.

  “Hell, I hit the motor a couple times,” said Nicky’s voice. “She ain’t going anywhere with it.”

  Vangie saw the holes, with cold fingers loosened the clamps holding the motor to the transom. She was shivering in the night air. Maxton’s echoing voice transfixed her.

  “What about her folks?”

  Trask said in bragging tones, “I took ‘em both out.”

  Vangie sat down abruptly on the bottom of the boat, terror and despair washing over her in great waves. She started to sob even as Maxton’s voice came again.

  “Terrific work, Trask! Let’s get out of here before someone finds ‘em.”

  Suddenly all fear was gone. She stood up, knuckling her eyes like a little girl, but her face was a mask of hatred. She jerked lose the gas line, with one wild heave sent the motor into the water with a heavy splash.

  Maxton’s distant, muffled voice demanded, “What was that?”

  “Me, you fuckers!” she screamed into the fog. “I’ve got the bonds! Come and get me, I’ll be waiting for you! Especially you, Trask!”

  24

  When Minus turned into the dirt track to Broussard’s Store, his headlights swept across three fishermen just getting into their big four-door sedan. They spun gravel and came right at him, lights on bright. Minus had to slew over to one side of the dirt track, his horn braying angrily, so their fenders could clear his by scant inches.

  He yelled curses after their retreating taillights until his Cajun good nature prevailed. Then he shrugged and started up the steps to the store. He stopped. The place was dark.

  “Vangie?” No answer. He went further, craned forward cautiously like a cat in a doghouse. “Eh la bas! You, Vangie!”

  Still no answer. With sudden decision, he grabbed the screen door and pulled it open.

  Inverness kept the motor barely chugging as their flatboat went down the broad river. Dain was twisted around so he could shine a flashlight low under the fog ahead of them. He found it quite remarkable that Inverness could navigate at all in the drifting mist. His light picked out Papa’s moored boat.

  Inverness cut the motor entirely. “This is the one.”

  “That’s what you said at the last three landings.”

  “I’m bound to get it right eventually.”

  Together they pulled the boat up, followed their flashlights up the bank to the level ground by the store.

  “What the hell?” said Inverness.

  His light had picked up Minus, slumped against the fender of his pickup with his face in his hands. At the same moment a sheriff’s car came roaring down the dirt track.

  “Whatever happened,” said Dain hurriedly, “you’ll want to talk to that dude before your country cousins bottle him up.”

  The cop car slowed to a stop in front of the store, its revolving roof light casting a pulsing intermittent blue glow over the scene. Dain was already halfway up the front steps.

  “Hold it right there, mister!”

  Inverness whipped out his shield. “New Orleans police. Working a possible homicide case that might connect with this.”

  Dain used a ballpoint pen to pull the screen door open enough to get a shoetip in. If the girl was dead, it would once again be his fault. No wonder she had been replacing Marie in his nightmares!

  The first thing he heard was the triumphant chirping of a thousand crickets. His flashlight showed him the smashed box, the little crickets leaping everywhere, flooded one of them like a spotlight on an entertainer. The cricket began to perform, sawing away. It was sitting on a dead and broken and blood-splattered Cajun face. Vangie’s dad. Had to be. Jesus God.

  The full charge of buckshot swept him back against the table. A widening red pool began to spread beneath his chest…

  He had to handle it. Another new memory, jarred loose from his subconscious. Dain followed the flashlight beam down the store, sweating with the nightmare image of his own death.

  The shotgun had killed Eddie, had left only Dain.

  A woman was sprawled facedown over stacked soft drinks in old-fashioned wooden boxes, head at an unnatural angle. Dain’s light moved down her and up again, and away.

  Eddie saw the shotgun belch yellow flame to smash Marie back and up and out of this life…

  Vangie’s mother. He leaned against the wall, fighting nausea. Another siren—an ambulance this time. Nobody in this slaughterhouse would need an ambulance. His moving eye of flashlight stopped on the half-open door to the living area.

  No sign of the bonds here in the store, and…

  Jesus, no! Let the cops find Vangie.

  He pushed the door open silently, looked down a narrow hallway to a kitchen. His flashlight showed a table, two coffee cups, a plate with a few beignets still on it, two smaller plates sprinkled with powdered sugar. The coffeepot on the stove was warm, as was the cast-iron pot of gumbo. The oven was cold.

  No bodies. Praise God, no bodies.

  Back up the hall. Bedrooms. One was obviously her folks’ room, the dressertop crowded with framed family portraits dimmed by age. A gilt-backed hairbrush with strands of gray-shot black hair in the bristles. An age-slicked cane rocker with a thick missal in French on a small round hardwood table beside it. Hand-hooked antimacassar covering the table.

  No bodies in here, either.

  Last room. He drifted the door open with his flashlight. Tossed across the rough bunk bed were Vangie’s miniskirt, blouse, pantyhose. Her shoes on the floor. No blood on the dress.

  A strange voice said, “Thank God.”

  His voice. He backed out, went back up the hall.

  Vangie was not dead in this place.

  And no bonds were here, either. The place wasn’t torn up enough for someone to have searched. It had to be Maxton and his two goons who had killed her folks. Had to be. So the bonds didn’t really matter any more, did they? Unless Vangie was still alive. Which it suddenly seemed she might be. Which meant she might have escaped with them.

  If so, Maxton would still be after her. And Dain would still have to do something about it. He. Him. Not Inverness, not the other cops. Him. If he could get to her first and talk her into giving the bonds to him, he was pretty sure Maxton would accept them and give up
the search. Maxton wasn’t the sort of guy would enjoy slogging through a Louisiana swamp looking for an exotic dancer he once had slept with.

  In the store, Dain started back up the aisle toward the pale rectangle of screen door. Two black shapes appeared in it.

  The door crashed open back against the wall and a bulky man was silhouetted by moonlight behind him. A sawed-off shotgun was in his hands. A second bulky shadow crowded in behind him.

  “What’d you find?”

  The cop, a second one behind him, was staring at him almost suspiciously. Dain shook his head and went by them out the door.

  Two police cars were angled in, both with their cherry-pickers revolving, a sheriff’s car and an ambulance were pulling up behind them in the yard. Cops and medics crowded their way into the store as Dain jumped down off the galerie.

  As he came up, Inverness was asking, “But these three men you saw definitely didn’t have Vangie with them, is that right?”

  “J’ai dis que non.” Minus had been crying.

  Dain walked Inverness off a few steps.

  “Her folks, dead. No sign of Vangie. I want to find her.”

  He looked back at the store now blazing with light. A uniformed cop was just jumping down from the galerie and starting their way. He turned quickly to Minus.

  “If they didn’t have her in the car, where is she?”

  “Mebbe she already went out to her papa’s ol’ camp on his fishin’ groun’ befo’ dey got here.” He knuckled his eyes again. “When I drive her out here, she say dat where she wan’ go, her.”

  “You know that part of the swamp?”

  “Fo’ sure. Dat on de Bayou Noire.”

  The cop arrived to lay a not-unfriendly hand on Minus’s shoulder. “Captain, he wanta talk with you, cher.”

  Dain yawned involuntarily. For the first time in five years, he was exhausted, dying for sleep. Inverness said, “We’ll go back to Lafayette—to my motel.” He gestured after Minus when the cop was out of earshot. “Tomorrow we’ll hire him to guide us out to Bayou Noire.”

  It was dawn. At the boat marina Maxton was asking the tall, stooped, chicken-necked proprietor about a crawfisherman’s flatboat, very wide of beam, with a slightly tapered prow ending in a blunt nose. Maxton was dressed for the swamp, as were Nicky and Trask, lounging on the dock beside their disorderly heap of gear. The skinny old Cajun gestured as he talked.

  “Sure, dis de kine boat I rent dem, go anywhere dat boat go.” His chuckle turned into a cough that curled him like a shrimp. He straightened up, red-faced. “Dat Minus, he tak dem out in dat swamp first t’ing today, not even light yet.” He opened his mouth and laughed. His teeth were discolored from chaw tobacco. “I t’ink dey after somep’n big, dem!”

  Inverness was at the outboard to the rear, Dain hunched in the center seat. His body ached as though he had a fever. Minus, in front, watched the channel ahead of them. Their gear was neatly stowed. Lashed right on top of their craw-fisherman’s flatboat, on the left side, was a pirogue, a narrow, canoe-like rowboat. Dain wished he could stretch out in it and rest, long enough to think. His mind felt jumbled, confused.

  When Minus pointed, Inverness cut their speed, swung the flatboat off the open waterway into a very narrow, tree-shadowed bayou. He blazed a sapling with a hatchet, then swung into midchannel and speeded up again.

  They were gone quickly, their motor noise died out. Peace and calm descended on the bayou. A turtle started to clamber up on a half-submerged cypress when the departed motor sound grew stronger again. He slid back off the log.

  Another flatboat with three men, but without a pirogue atop it, came from the same direction as the first. It went down this same narrow channel. Its motor died away. Its waves stopped washing the shore. The turtle clambered up on the log again to sprawl luxuriously in the warming sun.

  Inverness was isolated by the motor, and Minus was brooding, depressed, shaking his head from time to time as if talking to himself. Dain knew that game, only too well. If only I had gotten there quicker night before last… if only… if only…

  If only Maxton hadn’t come to New Orleans. If only Vangie had given Dain the bonds so Maxton wouldn’t have killed Jimmy, and probably Vangie’s folks. At least it looked like she had gotten away clean with the bonds. Now he had to find her, and get them back from her, before Maxton did both things.

  But how could Maxton find her? They probably knew where she was, Maxton didn’t. But the swamp had a way of changing all equations. Despite its beauty, it was full of death. A blue and white streak of kingfisher darted through nodding reeds near shore just as a cardinal was struck down in midflight by a swooping sparrow hawk.

  Inverness seemed infected by the same pervading atmosphere of gloom. They stopped to eat the sandwiches they had bought at the marina, and he made another of his hatchet blazes on one of the small trees flanking the narrow waterway.

  “I’m not the swamper that Minus is,” he almost apologized. “I want to be able to find my way out of here if something goes wrong. Anything can happen to any of us at anytime.”

  As if to prove him right, a Louisiana heron, carefully stepping through long grass onshore, suddenly darted its head down to spear a foot-long red-bellied water snake, shook it to snap the neck. The head flopped uselessly as the heron ate it with greedy gulps, long gullet jerking with each swallow.

  They worked their way up a series of sloughs where the water shoaled until the propeller roiled mud. When Inverness killed the motor their echo lingered a moment before it was abruptly cut off. Minus reacted with a swift turn of the head toward their wake. Inverness tipped the motor up to clear away water lilies and yellow flag twisted around the propeller shaft; Dain and Minus broke out the push poles.

  And there it was again: beauty and death. A mother wood duck and her brood swam away from them past a half-sunken log. The log swirled, the last duckling in line disappeared. The log immediately sank beneath the brown water. The ducks scattered for shore. But a second, then a third, then the final duckling went under one by one as the gator struck from below. The frenzied mother was still beating her wings and squawking loudly for her brood as Inverness found deeper water and started the motor.

  Late in the day and deep in the swamp, the bayou was split by a small island. Minus gestured to the right-hand channel, then pointed to a beach on the island backed by a clearing.

  “We camp there!” he yelled over the motor.

  Inverness swung the flatboat, cut the motor just before they nosed up onto the muddy bank. Again Dain heard that odd echo as if another, distant motor also had been cut. Minus had already leaped out into the sucking ankle-deep ooze. Dain joined him and together they pulled up the boat. Minus seemed to be coming out of his depression.

  “We leave de flatboat here tomorrow, go on by pirogue. Dis here boat, we have to go roun’ on de open water couple mile ahead. Bayou too shallow for it. Dat take a extra day. Wit de pirogue we be at de fishin’ camp demain—dis bayou take us right to it.”

  An hour later night had fallen, their tent was up with the mosquito flies closed, Inverness was at the cookfire making supper in a blackened frypan, and Dain was holding a flashlight steady for Minus. The Cajun was knee-deep in the water tying short lines with hooks baited with bacon squares onto sturdy branches of the overhanging bushes. As he secured each weighted hook and line, he dropped it into the water.

  “Mebbe we get us some catfish fo’ breffus,” he said.

  He and Dain scoured the pots and dishes with wet sand and poured boiling water over them, then waited for the coffee to boil in the big battered blue enamel pot. Inverness was inside the tent, his silhouette moving against the nylon as he pumped up the kerosene mantle lantern. He picked up what looked like a heavy belt in silhouette, put it around his waist, cinched it tight.

  Idly watching his shadow actions, each of them listened to the sounds of the night, the rustle of a small mammal in the bushes, the bass carrunking of bullfrogs, the thin whine of mosquitoes,
the thrum of a nighthawk passing in a rush of wings.

  It all sounded peaceful, but Dain wasn’t fooled any more. Nothing lived unless something else died.

  Inverness came out, hung the hissing lantern on the tent pole. Dain squinted at the sudden white light. One silhouetted action was explained: a .357 Magnum in a tooled leather holster now hung at the lawman’s lean hip. Dain poured steaming coffee into a thick white mug. Minus lumbered to his feet.

  “I go check dem bush lines we set,” he said. At the edge of the lamplight, he turned back. “Tu sais somebody been followin’ us all day? Stoppin’ de motor when we stop ours, startin’ up again when we start ours?”

  Neither man answered him. With a shrug he went off down toward the river, flashlight in hand.

  Inverness, looking after him, slowly sank to a woodsman’s squat with his back almost touching the front tent pole. Dain watched him, his eyes sharp and hard. Inverness shook his head in wonder.

  “Who in hell could it be?”

  Dain said, “I have a pretty good idea, but why ask me? You’re the boy’s been blazing a trail for them all day that even I could have followed.”

  25

  Neither man shifted his position, but the gauntlet had been thrown. There was a subtle tension in their poses, yet from a distance they still could have been a couple of old friends discussing the day’s events in the camp. The fire crackled, sending sparks swirling up into the darkness.

  “Why would I do a thing like that?” Inverness asked lazily.

  “For the same reason you ran us all over this swamp day before yesterday when you knew damn well where the Broussards’ store was. So the killers could get there first.”

  “You think I wanted her folks—”

  “No, I think you wanted Vangie caught because you’re on somebody’s pad and were told to want her caught.” Dain sat up, drew up his knees, hooked his arms around them, feeling as if there were cobwebs on his brain. “She wasn’t there and things got out of hand and the old people died.”