That was, if he could walk at all. He could feel himself getting weaker with every passing mile. The blood was pooling under him on the car seat and leaking down to the floor, flooding the rubber matting and making his boot soles slippery on the gas and brake pedals. The pain was keeping him alert. He focused closely on it to keep from flaking out at the wheel.
He found a forestry track leading off-road and headed up it. He was grateful for the fact that when it came to stealing cars in rural Louisiana, virtually every vehicle you were likely to get hold of was a go-anywhere four-wheel-drive with rugged tyres and suspension. He bounced and lurched along for miles, bogging down here and there in deep ruts left by the last rains. Eventually he left the track to carve his way for another quarter of a mile into thick forest.
Unable to go any further, he stopped the truck, killed the lights and engine, clambered down from the blood-smeared seat and stood listening for a whole ten minutes, leaning against the side of the truck for support. Only the sounds of nature could be heard, along with the tick of cooling metal.
Wincing and clutching his wound through his bloody shirt, he hauled himself up onto the pickup flatbed and started rooting around in the dirty old crates loaded aboard. The truck belonged to someone with a handy set of skills and the tools to match. An outdoorsman or a hunter; at any rate the kind of guy who carried around a saw, a small sharp hatchet, a couple of green canvas tarpaulins, and a coil of light but strong rope. Among the assorted trash in the glove box Ben found an autographed photo of Dolly Parton, a roll of gaffer tape and an unlabelled quarter-sized liquor bottle whose clear liquid contents smelled like some kind of illicit home-brewed moonshine. He had no use for Dolly but took the tape and the moonshine.
Ben badly needed to rest but he had work to do first. The truck had been resprayed more than once in its life. In its current paint job it was bright orange, and couldn’t be left as it was without standing out like a beacon to any police helicopter overflying the woods. He couldn’t burn it, for the same reason.
He unfolded the larger of the two tarps and dragged it across the roof of the truck to cover it, then lashed the cover down at the corners with lengths of the rope. Next he spent thirty painful minutes sawing branches from trees and laying them over the tarp, until the shape of the truck was so well camouflaged that a passing deer would be unlikely to notice it, let alone a police chopper. Then he put the hatchet and saw in his bag with the remainder of the rope, strapped the rolled-up smaller tarp on top of it like a soldier’s bedding roll, and set off on foot.
It was a weary march. Nothing he hadn’t done before, but a knife hole in his side didn’t make it any easier. A mile deeper into the woods, ready to drop, he stopped at a great fallen oak tree whose uprooted base had left a large hollow in the ground, an earthy cave deep enough for a man to crawl into and remain hidden. He could lie up and rest here for a while.
Using the small tarp as a groundsheet he wedged himself among the roots, as far from the mouth of his little cave as he could fit. The hollow was damp and smelled of leaf mould and the small animals that had burrowed into it before him. He’d spent time in much worse places.
Risking a little torchlight, he peeled off his jacket and unbuttoned his bloody shirt to inspect his injury. It was still bleeding profusely. Not as deep as he’d first feared, but still pretty damn deep, an ugly gash stretching seven inches diagonally from ribcage to navel.
Open wounds were always an infection risk, especially roughing it outdoors, but Ben had an excellent immune system. With a fastidious doctor for a lady friend he couldn’t avoid being all up to date with his tetanus immunisations, too. Right now, though, what concerned him most was the continuous bleeding. If it had been his arm or leg, he might have been able to stem the flow with a tourniquet. Injuries to the torso were harder to deal with. He’d seen men bleed to death from abdominal traumas, and knew enough about the physiology of such injuries to worry him. Half a litre’s worth of blood loss causes mild faintness, increasing in severity after a litre or so, when the heart rate begins to increase and breathing quickens. That was where Ben was at now. Another half litre drained out of his body, and he would be in danger of losing consciousness. Anything over 2.2 litres or four pints gone, death wasn’t far off.
Setting down the Maglite he took off his shirt and tore a strip of material from the cleanest part of it to use as a swab. Then uncapped the little moonshine bottle, soaked some of the clear alcohol into the cloth, gritted his teeth against the sharp sting and started dabbing the wound. The more he swabbed away the blood, the more kept flowing. It wouldn’t stop. Not good.
There was only one thing for it. He was going to have to cauterise the wound to seal the ends of the severed blood vessels. To do that properly he would need a strong heat source and something smooth and metallic, like a knife. He could hold his hatchet blade over a lighter flame for hours on end, until the fuel burned out or he bled to death, whichever happened first, and it still wouldn’t warm the metal anywhere close to hot enough. Building a proper camp fire with wood was an option, though it was a tactical no-no for the same reason as leaving a bright orange truck sitting parked in the forest to be spotted a mile away.
But there were other ways to generate the kind of heat necessary to sear and seal damaged flesh.
He pulled the revolver from his belt and flipped open the cylinder. One round gone, five remaining. He tipped the muzzle upwards and the unfired cartridges slid out of their chambers and fell into his lap. Big, long magnum brass cases with heavy flatnosed bullets, each containing enough latent chemical force to stop a charging grizzly dead in its tracks.
Ben examined the saw. Its blade was made for cutting wood, not metal. But brass was softer than steel, and as a lifelong abuser of tools Ben felt confident that it was up to the job he had in mind. Next he took out the hatchet and set it down next to him with the flat of its blade level on the ground. Then picked up an unfired cartridge and laid it against the side of his boot to make an improvised cutting bench. He laid the teeth of the saw blade against the shiny cylinder of the brass case, about halfway between the cartridge base and where the bullet was crimped into place.
Cutting was hard at first, as the blade skipped and slid about the smooth surface. But then he started wearing a groove in the metal, and from there it got easier. Tiny bits of brass swarf collected on his boot as he cut deeper. When he’d sawed three-quarters of the way through, he was able to twist the cartridge between his fingers to open up the cut, then gently and carefully tipped out the powder granules to make a little pile on the flat of the hatchet blade.
The propellant in the cartridges was a fine, dark grey nitrocellulose powder. Very unlike old-fashioned gunpowder, which was a crude explosive formula made from sulphur, charcoal and saltpetre. The old stuff would flash up with a sudden and short-lived whoof of flame and a puff of white smoke when ignited, smelling of rotten eggs and leaving a mass of corrosive black fouling guaranteed to gunk up any gun mechanism in short order. Uncontained as loose powder, the sophisticated modern stuff would burn extremely hot, clean and steady for two or three seconds producing very little smoke or residue. There could have been no automatic weapons or machine guns invented without it. Few people were aware of the fact, but the transition from the old gunpowder to the smokeless innovations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been the single most important technological step in facilitating the firepower and carnage of modern warfare.
Progress was a wonderful thing.
After twenty minutes of cutting, bent over his work and straining to see by the flickering lighter flame, Ben had sawed through all five cartridges and built a mound of about five grams of powder on the flat of the hatchet. Now, as he began to worry about the lighter running out of fuel, he had to decide on the best procedure for the next step. If he packed the dry powder into the lips of his still-bleeding wound, it would be ruined by the blood before he could light it, and he’d risk getting all kinds of chemical tox
ins into his veins. The alternative way would hurt like hell, but it would be a lot more effective.
Cruel to be kind.
Here goes, he thought. He took a couple of deep breaths. Then picked up the hatchet, careful not to spill powder everywhere, took out his Zippo and lit it and touched its fire to the little dark grey mound.
The dull orange flame of the Zippo was suddenly eclipsed by the white flash of the igniting powder. It flared up bright and fierce, roaring like a miniature inferno three or four inches high, hot as a furnace. Just as it reached its peak intensity he slapped the searing metal to his wound.
It hurt.
Chapter 17
It hurt so much, there was no word to describe the pain. There was a sharp sizzling like drips of meat fat spattering onto white-hot barbecue coals. The stink of burning flesh filled Ben’s nose. A familiar enough smell to anyone who’d seen the combat horrors he had. But a little different when it was your own flesh cooking. He pressed the hot steel hard against his skin for as long as he could stand it, then dropped the hatchet and fell back onto the damp earth of his cave, stifling the scream of pain that wanted to burst out of his lungs.
It was some time before Ben opened his eyes and realised that he’d passed out. He raised his head off the earth floor and propped himself up on one elbow in the darkness, sick and dizzy and still hurting badly. The hatchet blade was now perfectly cool, one side coated in a blackened and dried crust of cooked blood and skin. The unpleasant battlefield smell of burnt flesh and gunsmoke still lingered in the air.
Ben hardly dared to look at his wound, frightened of what he’d see, and it took a moment to pluck up the resolve. As expected, the whole area was a scorched and ugly mess. But to his relief, the bleeding had finally stopped. He doused himself with more of the moonshine, then swallowed a gulp or two to help take the edge off the pain. The stuff was three times stronger than whisky, but thankfully didn’t taste of much.
Funny, how the mind works. The nasty scar left behind when the wound eventually healed would be an impressive addition to the collection Ben had accumulated over the years. When he looked at them he could remember exactly how and when he’d acquired each one, yet the memory of the pain they’d caused him had faded away to zero. This one would ultimately go the exact same route as its predecessors. It was like people said about the female brain being hardwired to forget the pain of childbirth, as the mind–body connection’s way of preventing women from being put off from repeating the experience. Ben’s only experience of childbirth was his own. Not a subject he knew much about, but if the saying was true, then he could empathise with those women.
To finish the job he could have done with a suture kit to stitch himself up. Lacking needle and thread he tore another clean strip from his shirt, doused it with moonshine and laid it across the wound, then tore off a strip of gaffer tape to hold it in place. It didn’t make a bad field dressing and would help hold things together and keep out dirt until he could seek proper medical attention.
He wrapped his leather jacket around his bare shoulders, turned off his torch and settled back against the wall of the cave, shivering a little, mostly from shock and blood loss. He took a few more sips of moonshine to relax. He craved a cigarette but his training warned him against it. The telltale scent of burning tobacco could carry an amazingly long distance in the wilderness, and was a fine way to betray your presence and position to the enemy. Overcautious, perhaps, but over was better than under.
Now, in the stillness of the pre-dawn, he was finally able to turn his mind to the thoughts and questions that haunted him.
First and most obvious was the fact that he was in a great deal of trouble. The authorities had plenty of evidence to believe Ben was Lottie Landreneau’s killer. Several police officers could confirm his presence at the scene of the crime. His prints were on the hilt of the murder weapon. There might be witnesses who could testify to seeing him entering the guesthouse earlier in the day. At least one neighbour, old Mr Clapp, had seen him go off shopping with Lottie, which would be easily confirmed when the forensic examiners found her DNA in his car. The woman who ran the food market in Pointe Blanche would describe the tall blond-haired white man who’d accompanied the victim shopping, while the gang who hung out at Dumpy’s Rods could confirm he was the same British guy they’d seen on the local news.
Once they had his name, the authorities would seize on Ben’s military past, or as much of it was on open record. Criminal profilers would have a field day creating all kinds of fictions about how a crazed ex-soldier had snapped and gone psychotic with a sword. Where they’d suppose he’d got it from was another matter, but no doubt they’d come up with something.
In short, Ben was in a serious mess. Might he have made things worse for himself by running? The answer was yes, for sure. Guilty men run. Then again, so do men who don’t think they’re going to get fair treatment at the hands of the law. He had done what he needed to do. There was no doubt in his mind that Deputy Sheriff Mason Redbone had fully intended to kill him.
But why? Ben had no answer to that. Only more questions, such as, why hadn’t Mason used his issued weapon to confront him?
Ben examined the revolver again, looking at the scratchy marks on the frame where someone had crudely filed off the serial number. Typically, that someone would be a criminal, who’d later come to some sticky end and had his gun confiscated by the police. Since every bullet discharged from an issue service weapon had to be logged and accounted for, it wasn’t unknown for dirty cops to use such illicit trophy weapons to carry out shootings they didn’t want to be connected to.
What had been Mason’s plan? To make it look as though the revolver had belonged to Lottie’s killer, who had for reasons best known to himself murdered his victim using a sabre but then used a gun against the police? Stranger things happened in the world of crime, and who would have disbelieved the word of a sworn officer?
Once Ben was dead, all Mason would have had to do was blast a couple of rounds into the wall by the front door to make it seem as though he was being fired on as he entered the property. Next, he might have wanted to draw his issue Glock and shoot off a few judicious rounds, providing some 9mm holes to support his side of the story. Then he could have smeared the dead man’s prints all over the grip, frame and trigger of the revolver. Mason’s own prints would have been on it too, but that didn’t matter. His story would have been simple and plausible: on entering the property in response to a 911 call and discovering Ms Landreneau’s body in the hallway, he came under fire from the suspect. Whereupon the valiant lawman had attempted to disarm the assailant, who was shot by his own weapon during the struggle.
That wouldn’t have accounted for the stab wound in the perp’s body, because that hadn’t been part of Mason’s initial plan. In retrospect he’d have had to come up with something to convince his peers, such as ‘sumbitch pulled a knife on me, too, but stabbed himself in the fight. It all happened so fast.’
All of which was pure conjecture on Ben’s part. He might be getting it completely wrong. But nothing else seemed to explain why Mason had turned up at the guesthouse already brandishing the tainted revolver, even as he ran from his patrol car, even before he’d seen Ben in the hallway. Plus, how many cops went about with concealed stiletto daggers in their boots?
Again, pure conjecture. But if Ben was right about this, even halfway right, it all pointed to a premeditated frame-up job, one in which the deputy sheriff was heavily complicit. Mason had tooled up with the illicit gun because he’d known in advance that Ben would be there.
Boy, y’all sure know where to go lookin’ for trouble. Reckon you found more’n you bargained for this time.
Next question: what was a Louisiana deputy sheriff, sworn to uphold the law, doing mixed up in something so dirty? There could be only two reasons for such actions: to protect yourself, because maybe you’re being threatened or blackmailed into helping the bad guys; or to protect the bad guys themselves, because you�
��re one of them. Whichever it was in Mason’s case, one thing was for sure. He was in with some very bad people.
But if there was a frame-up, why was Ben its target? Could it be down to coincidence, a random roll of the dice that just happened to bring up his lucky number? He found that hard to believe. What were the chances that the same guy who just happened to draw the police’s attention by walking in on a liquor store robbery in progress would also just happen to be picked out of the blue as a patsy for another crime the very next day? The odds against it were astronomical.
And so, logic dictated that if it wasn’t just some dreadful coincidence, it had to mean that Ben had been deliberately chosen, in advance, to be set up as the killer. For some reason that he didn’t yet understand, the spotlight was on him.
Then there was the issue of how Mason Redbone had been able to respond so fast to an emergency callout in Chitimacha, forty-five minutes’ drive away from the Sheriff’s Office in Villeneuve. Maybe he lived closer, or just happened to be in the area. Or maybe the speed of his arrival could be explained in other ways. Such as, maybe he hadn’t been responding to the police call at all, but rather to another, earlier, call. Such as one made by Lottie’s real killers to their accomplice as they carried out their attack. Or even beforehand. Which better fitted the timeframe, giving longer for Mason to come racing heroically to the scene in order to apprehend the villain. The last thing they’d have wanted was for their patsy to escape before the cops arrived.
If that were so, then Mason was just as guilty of Lottie’s murder as the man who’d run her through with the sabre.
As Ben reflected on that dark thought, a fresh possibility made his mind swirl and his flesh crawl with horror. Had they killed her simply as a way to get to him? Why? Who were these people? What had he done to them?
The Rebel's Revenge Page 9