The Rebel's Revenge

by Scott Mariani

  ‘You’ll get your lawyer,’ Roque snapped, eyeing him with contempt and wishing he could just pistol-whip this clown like in the good old days. ‘And a champagne and steak dinner down at the jailhouse, just as soon as you talk to me. So talk.’

  Randy Prator was willing to spill whatever beans could help to get him off the hook. ‘Damn right this was the Garretts’ operation,’ he blurted. ‘Hell, Jayce Garrett himself was here in person earlier,’ he added, with almost a note of pride, as if he’d rubbed shoulders with royalty. ‘Seems like this Hope guy, he was fixin’ to kill ’em all. Jayce and Seth rode off like two bats outta hell. Logan, I reckon he’s all burnt up in that wreck back there, with Landon and Rufus.’

  ‘That’d be Landon J. Lamarr,’ Officer Guidry said. ‘Ford pickup back there’s registered in his name. OMV came back with nothin’ on the other vehicles we checked out. Cadillac Escalade and a 1970 Mustang, both stolen out of state. Got zilch on this Rufus character either.’

  Sheriff Roque listened, then motioned to his officers to follow him outside where they could confer. Mason Redbone was staying very quiet. ‘What you make of it, Sheriff?’ Daigle asked.

  Roque took off his hat and scratched the grey stubble on his head. ‘I busted Landon Lamarr, must be twelve, fifteen years ago, for assault and possession. Always figured he was in with the Garretts, never could prove it though. But I just don’t get it. What business on God’s earth does Ben Hope have goin’ after these people?’

  ‘It ain’t no secret them boys have been runnin’ illegal firearms for years,’ Daigle said. ‘You think mebbe Hope came up here to get gunned up?’

  ‘Or mebbe he was part of their gang and they had themselves a dispute,’ Guidry suggested.

  Waylon Roque’s craggy, iron-hard face showed no expression as he chewed those hypotheses over. ‘Nah,’ he said at length. ‘I ain’t buyin’ that. My gut tells me somethin’ else is goin’ on here. But I’m damned if I can make head or tail of it. This whole thing has been a burr under my saddle from the beginnin’.’

  It was then that the sheriff’s radio began to fizz and splutter. He grabbed it impatiently. ‘This is Roque. Whassup?’

  ‘Sheriff,’ came the excited voice on the other end. ‘It’s him. It’s Hope! We got’m!’

  Chapter 39

  The cops had set rows of traffic cones across the road and had a marked Ford Explorer Interceptor blocking one lane and a pair of Dodge Charger pursuit vehicles either side. A yellow metal sign warned POLICE CHECKPOINT, for any half-asleep Louisianan motorist who’d failed to notice. Officers armed with pump-action shotguns loitered about the vicinity, smoking cigarettes and looking bored and demoralised after two days of fruitless stop-and-searching for a fugitive who had apparently vanished into thin air.

  All that was about to change.

  The instant Ben saw them he knew he’d have to take evasive measures. He let the Firebird slow to under fifty and then threw it into a violent handbrake turn, spinning the car around 180 degrees. The tyres howled and smoked as he stamped hard on the gas to accelerate away.

  The cops were galvanised into a frenzy of action, tossing away their cigarettes and grabbing their weapons and yelling into radios and all but crashing into one another as they leaped into the two Chargers while the Explorer stayed behind to man the checkpoint. The patrol cars roared into life and skidded off the verge in pursuit of the fleeing Pontiac Firebird. Sirens were activated and lights flashed.

  Ben saw their headlights flaring in his mirror and put his foot down harder. The Firebird was fast, but he’d put enough souped-up specialist vehicles through their paces during his high speed pursuit and defensive driving courses back in the day to know that the police interceptors were good for at least a hundred and fifty miles an hour, with uprated brakes and handling to match. The needles on his dashboard soared and the V8 under the Firebird’s bonnet howled as the road flashed towards him like a flicking black ribbon. The blazing lights in the mirror fell back, but soon started coming on again.

  He was going to have his hands full getting shot of these guys. Not a great way to keep a low profile. The one advantage of getting chased by the police, as opposed to regular bad guys, was that the police couldn’t just open fire on you unless threatened.

  At any rate, that was the theory. On the other hand, regular bad guys weren’t so well organised at doing things like radioing ahead for backup and air support, sealing off the area from other traffic and laying barriers and tyre spikes across the road to bring your wild antics to a very rapid halt indeed. And if you tried to resist arrest, that was when you’d likely get shot to pieces by a couple dozen officers with fully-automatic carbines.

  Ben knew it was just a matter of time before he encountered a whole fleet of police coming the opposite way to block him off. But they weren’t going to stop him, not if he could help it. He’d helped it plenty of times in the past.

  He was a long way from the hills and forests where the Garretts had managed to hide their distilling operation for so long. The landscape rolled out flat and wide either side of him, endless expanses of wetlands and rice fields that looked like lakes in places and attracted huge flocks of geese and ducks and herons and cranes; here and there a flat-bottomed boat dawdling lazily through the open channels. Nice for some folks, living easy-going rural lives, who didn’t have to worry about having two high-powered pursuit vehicles filled with armed men intent on incarcerating you for a crime you didn’t commit and clawing steadily, determinedly closer to your tail as you wrung every last drop of performance from a forty-year-old motor whose fancy paintwork and chromed engine parts couldn’t quite hide its age. At a hundred and twenty miles an hour the Firebird was beginning to run a little hot and bothered. Ben had a nasty feeling that the guys chasing him could keep this up a lot longer than he could.

  Now the rice fields were disappearing behind him and the wetlands were dissolving into open water on both sides of the road as the abutment pillar supports of a long, stretched-out metal bridge loomed up ahead. The blacktop climbed and levelled out, and then the car was speeding high over the broad, mud-brown bayou.

  Ben was halfway across the bridge when the inevitable sight greeted him from the far side. It looked like an ocean of black and white and flashing blue lights waiting for him over there. The exit from the bridge was completely blocked. Cops were spilling from their vehicles and taking up shooting positions from behind the open doors. Subject is armed and extremely dangerous.

  Oh, well, Ben thought. If you want to play it that way.

  Dumpy wasn’t going to like this.

  A hundred and ten miles an hour. Ben reached for the seat belt, pulled it across him and clicked it into place. He felt quite calm, but maybe that was how all stupid people felt when they were just about to do something completely nuts.

  He slammed his foot down all the way to the floor, twisted the wheel sharply to the right and sent the Firebird crashing headlong through the side railing of the bridge.

  The impact slammed him forwards in his seat. If the car had possessed anything as modern as airbags they’d have punched him in the face. Bits of aluminium spar and rail smashed against the windscreen and clattered violently over the roof.

  And then the Firebird took to the air like its mythological phoenix namesake. The muddy waters came hurtling up towards him. Next, there came a second jolting impact as the car knifed into the still surface of the bayou with a huge murky splash and the rest of the world disappeared.

  Chapter 40

  The first rule of being trapped inside a submerged car: don’t try to fight the water pressure, because it’s a lot stronger than you are.

  Ben unclipped his seat belt and then quickly wound the driver’s window all the way down, to allow the murky brown water to flood the cabin. The car would sink faster as a result, which was exactly what he wanted it to do. Because what was coming next needed to happen out of sight of the onlookers gathering on the bridge.

  The weight distribut
ion of the car dragged it downwards nose-first as the cabin quickly filled up. Ben didn’t have much time. He used it to loop his bag straps over his shoulders and make sure his bow was to hand. It was the only weapon he had, and he intended to hang on to it.

  He sat there calmly waiting until the water reached his chin, then took a deep breath. Some free divers could hold their breath for up to ten minutes. After years of practice, Ben was good for about four and a half. That was all the time window he was going to get, and every moment would count.

  When the cabin was completely full of water the car began to sink much faster. Only ripples and a few remaining bubbles would be visible on the surface now. As the water pressure equalised inside and out, Ben opened the driver’s door. Visibility through the brown murk was about two yards. He grabbed his bow, slipped out of the open door and pushed away from the sinking car. Rescuing the bow meant swimming one-handed, but that was little hindrance to someone who’d been through the things he had. His old regiment might have been called the ‘Special Air Service’, but SAS men could perform every bit as well in water as their Navy counterparts in Jeff Dekker’s old SBS could cut the mustard out of it. When the merciless Special Forces training instructors who made you swim kilometre after kilometre in full kit, often grappling two hundred pounds of wounded comrade along with you, said, ‘You’ll thank me for this one day,’ they were speaking from experience.

  Ben swam hard and fast, letting as few bubbles escape his lips as possible so as not to leave a trail on the surface. Far away over the roar of the water that filled his ears he could hear the screeching whoop-whoop of the police sirens on the bridge. He could picture the vehicles all converged in the middle and all the cops hanging over the edge where he’d smashed through, all eyes on the water, guns at the ready lest the dangerous fugitive come bursting from the surface intent on murdering them all.

  Behind him the car touched down against the bayou bottom, disturbing the mud and turning the murky water even more impenetrable. Only the faint glimmer of light from above kept Ben orientated towards the surface. He’d been holding his breath for nearly two minutes now and he could feel the lactic acid building up in his muscles as his body became starved of oxygen. Underwater swimmers who were conditioned to make it past the ‘struggle phase’, when most people panicked, found their heart rate decreasing and their whole metabolism slowing as the body concentrated the flow of oxygenated blood to the brain and vital organs.

  Two minutes and thirty seconds under. The sound of sirens seemed further away now as Ben kept ploughing doggedly ahead. Time seemed to have slowed right down, along with his biorhythms and normal perceptions. The dim shapes of fish flitted away at his approach. As long as he didn’t meet one of those big things bristling with teeth, he’d be fine.

  Three minutes under. Ben was just about reaching his limit. His lungs were on fire, his movements becoming sluggish. As the urge to kick for the surface became almost unbearable, the fingers of his outstretched hand brushed against something reedy, then something solid, and he knew he’d reached the bank. It took immense self-control to keep from bursting head and shoulders out of the water, gasping noisily for air. He paddled gently in the shallows, turned his face upwards and pushed his mouth and nose clear of the surface and sucked in the blessed oxygen until he felt his body start to return to normal.

  He had swum about two hundred yards from the bridge. The bayou shoreline was thick with rotting vegetation and scummy algae that clung to his hair and skin and wet clothes. He made no attempt to brush them off, knowing that they offered excellent camouflage. Not that anyone was looking this way. Just as he’d pictured it, the distant uniformed figures crowded along the bridge railing were all still fixed on the spot where the car had sunk. But they wouldn’t stand there gawping for ever. Pretty soon the police helicopters would be thudding overhead and diver patrols would be deployed to investigate the submerged vehicle in search of one drowned fugitive.

  Ben intended to be far, far away from here by the time they failed to locate his body.

  He paddled through the nasty green scum until he’d rounded the shoreline past a big clump of mossy vegetation that hid him from view as he tossed his bow up onto the bank and pulled himself from the water. Half man, half slime creature, as if wearing a sniper’s ghillie suit, he climbed up the bank trailing stinking strands and filaments of algae behind him, and slipped into the bushes.

  Just as he’d predicted, the cops soon realised that the sunken car was empty and scrambled their air support unit to widen the search. By that time Ben had progressed a good distance downriver, cutting an unseen path through the thick verdant vegetation that overhung its banks. Hearing the first approaching helicopter long before it came into view, he slipped back into the water and hid among the floating green algae and reeds and cattails at its edge. As the chopper appeared over the tree line he sucked in another deep breath and ducked under the surface. Modern-day air cops were equipped with more than just binoculars for hunting their fugitive quarry. The best camouflage in the world couldn’t hide your presence from the all-seeing eye of a thermal imaging camera, but the reflective water surface would bounce the infrared right back at them and cloak his heat signature.

  Ben held his breath for a full minute, until he was certain the chopper had passed over, before he resurfaced.

  His only real fear was that the police might back up their air surveillance with K9 ground search units. No manmade technology yet devised could match the skill of well-trained Belgian Malinois or German shepherds at tracking a fleeing suspect over any kind of terrain. His best chance of escape was the water, avoiding leaving a scent trail on land.

  He remembered seeing boats back there among the wetlands. The Clovis Parish waterways were full of river folks looking for crawfish or catfish or gumbofish or whatever it was that inhabited these waters. If he clung to the shoreline, sooner or later he’d find an unattended boat. Nobody, least of all the cops, would pay much attention to just another hick dawdling downriver, going about his business.

  No dawdling. Keep moving. The dreaded sound of baying dogs never materialised but Ben nonetheless stuck to his plan to keep to the waterways. The tree canopy was so thick in places that the creeks and bayous couldn’t even be seen from the air, especially now that evening was falling. The sunset light filtered red and purple through the leaves and gradually darkened until he had to use his torch, keeping his hand cupped over the beam to give himself just enough light to see by.

  The night creatures were awakening. Things crawled and slithered in the shadows and large fluttery moths were drawn to the dimmed torchlight. The sky was empty of helicopters but more immediate dangers existed on the ground, like the risk of stepping on a hidden snake among the waterside vegetation.

  A long time passed before Ben saw the lights of the cabin through the trees. He killed the torch and stalked closer.

  Chapter 41

  As Ben crept up to within a few yards he saw it was little more than a shanty, built a short distance from the edge of the bayou and almost swallowed up by rampant ivy and weeds. Chinks of lantern-glow peeped through cracks in its shuttered windows.

  Ben sniffed the air, smelling a putrid odour about the place, like rotting meat. He moved silently away from the cabin and followed the smell to a tall wooden A-frame structure erected a few yards from the entrance. It was the kind of thing hunters built to hang, gut and skin deer carcasses. Except the two animal corpses that hung from this one were large alligators, one partially skinned. There was an air line and compressor and all kinds of knives and hatchets and a bucket or two of offal, and other things Ben didn’t hang around to enjoy identifying.

  A short dirt path led from the gator hunter’s home to a wooden jetty at the water’s edge. The planking creaked softly as Ben cautiously picked his way past old lobster creels and barrels and coils of rope. At any second he half-expected to hear the bark of an alerted dog or an angry voice yelling out, ‘Who’s there?’, maybe followed by t
he boom of a shotgun.

  There was enough moonlight shining off the water to make out the shapes of two boats tethered to the end of the jetty, bobbing almost imperceptibly on the gentle swell. Ben knelt down to inspect them. One was a fibreglass-hulled motorboat, the other a traditional wooden canoe. Firing up an outboard motor in the dead of night was just an invitation to get blasted by the gator hunter’s gun. The canoe, by contrast, was ideal. Ben peeled two wet hundred-dollar bills from his dripping wallet and left them wedged in a crack in the jetty’s weathered planking, in the hope that the owner would consider it a fair trade. Then he wedged his things into the canoe, climbed aboard and cast silently off.

  He paddled on deep into the night as a perfect full moon climbed over the bayou, visible here and there through the gaps in the overhanging tree canopy where its light shone over the water. All that could be heard was the gentle rhythmic sloosh of his paddle and the music of crickets and frogs and night birds. He could navigate these waterways for days, maybe weeks, before he’d ever reach the end of this huge wilderness. A person could easily get lost here and never be seen again. No doubt, some did.

  The bayou narrowed, then broadened out, then narrowed again. The air was fetid and jungly and smelled nearly as bad as the gator hunter’s yard. In some places the green slime on the water’s surface was so thick that clumps of spiky swamp plants were growing on it and Ben had to chop with the blade of the paddle to break it up. In other places he had to steer a zigzag line to navigate between the bald cypress trees that jutted from the depths of the bayou: eerie, dark sentinels of the swamp, bearded like strange old men with feathery Spanish moss that brushed Ben’s face and shoulders as he passed through. The bottom of the canoe was constantly bumping and scraping over part-submerged tree roots.