The Rebel's Revenge

by Scott Mariani

  There were other things in the water, too. Ben could hear all kinds of strange grunts and splashes around him. He shone his light and glimpsed the swirling movement of something black and glistening suddenly disappearing into the water. At first he thought it must have been a snake, or maybe a turtle. He cast his torchlight more broadly around him. Red lights glowed back at him from all over the water, like Chinese lanterns, floating among the algae and lilies. As he watched, one would abruptly vanish, to be replaced by another nearby. There were scores of them. No, hundreds.

  Ben realised what he was seeing. They were eyes, watching him. The eyes of alligators that had emerged from their lairs after their long day’s rest away from the heat of the sun. This was their time to hunt, and feed.

  And it would soon be Ben’s, too. He was hungry, just like they were. The reptiles weren’t the only predators that lurked in the darkness.

  A couple of miles further downriver he pulled into the side and dragged the canoe onto dry land, looking for a place to build his camp for the night. He stowed his things at the foot of a tree, then grabbed his bow and arrows and went looking for something to eat, marking his route so he’d find his way back. It was close on another hour before he came upon the wild hog, a young one, clearly visible in the shafts of moonlight shining through the trees. He stalked up as near to it as he could, keeping himself upwind to lessen the chance of its smelling him. The hog paused among the shadows, munching and rooting and unsuspecting.

  Ben silently drew the bow, took aim, and released his arrow. A thud, a squeal, a brief rustling in the bushes, and the kill was done. He went to claim his quarry.

  By midnight he was sitting in the flickering glow of a wood fire eating hunks of spit-roasted pig. He was stripped almost naked and had his clothes hung over the fire to dry, along with his wallet, money and phones. As he ate, he reflected on his situation. He was safe for now, but for how long, he couldn’t say. And all the while the two remaining Garretts were out there somewhere, far out of his reach.

  Just after 1 a.m., as Ben sat meditatively still, gazing into the flames of the dying fire, his dark, brooding thoughts were suddenly interrupted by the ringtone of his burner phone. He’d never heard it ring until now. Its sound, so incongruous and alien out here in the wilderness, surprised him as much as the fact that it was still working at all after getting so wet.

  Ben picked up, hit reply and said, ‘Who is this?’

  The voice on the other end was deep and male and sounded familiar. ‘Yo, Cracka.’

  Ben said, ‘Hello, Carl. To what do I owe this pleasure?’

  ‘Mama wanna talk wichoo.’

  Ben said, ‘Why?’

  ‘Because she knows shit you don’t.’

  Ben said, ‘Okay. Put her on.’

  ‘Uh-uh. Like I already told you, man, Mama don’t use no phone. She wanna meet wichoo face to face.’

  Ben was silent for a minute. He said, ‘All right, let’s meet. Where do I find you?’

  ‘Listen real carefully.’

  Chapter 42

  People express grief in different ways. Some people internalise their mourning, or become depressed, or cry a lot. Others simply get drunk to cloud the pain.

  Jayce Garrett’s way of coping with the death of his youngest brother was to take it out on a suitable victim. That night, three Garrett accomplices had driven to the home of Louis Biquaisse in the small town of Fortune, Elysium Parish, forcibly abducted him with strict orders not to break too many bones, and brought him to the island to face punishment for his crimes.

  Hooded, bound and gagged, he was dragged from the back of the van to where Jayce and Seth Garrett stood grimly waiting on the floodlit patio outside what they called the clubhouse, adjoining the main house, and dumped on the ground at their feet.

  Seth’s upper arm was bandaged where the bullet had nicked his tricep. Jayce wore a thick cotton dressing taped to his damaged ear. If they couldn’t vent their rage against the man who’d killed Logan, they were happy to make do in the meantime.

  When the hood and gag were removed and Louis Biquaisse’s worst fears as to who had kidnapped him were confirmed, he wet his pants and started screaming even more loudly. The screams were cut short by a vicious kick from one of the Garretts’ men. Biquaisse wept. He pleaded. He grovelled, kneeling before his captors and bowing his head to the ground in the faint and fading hope that they might offer him mercy if he acted pathetic enough. Through his bubbling tears and snot he swore to them that he’d never intended to hold back the ten Gs he owed. That it was all a big mix-up, and that he absolutely promised to get the cash tomorrow, if they’d only let him go. That he’d been just about to call Logan that evening to tell him he had it and—

  ‘Logan’s dead,’ Jayce said, cutting him off. ‘Your deal was with him. Now that’s dead too. You got me to reckon with now, podnuh. And that’s real, real bad news for you.’

  Louis Biquaisse’s jaw dropped. ‘Shit, oh shit, oh shit, I swear I had nothin’ to do with whatever happened to Logan.’

  ‘We know that, asshole,’ Seth said.

  ‘Why, you think you could’ve killed our brother?’ Jayce said.

  ‘No, no!’

  ‘You sayin’ our brother was a pussy?’

  ‘No! I swear! Listen, I’ll get the money tonight! Right now! Just let me go, okay?’

  ‘This guy is really startin’ to annoy me,’ Seth said. He rubbed his sore arm, and winced. ‘Dang, that hurts.’

  ‘Know what, Louis?’ Jayce said. ‘We don’t even care about the money. It’s too late for that now. We’re gonna make an example of you.’ He turned to one of the men. ‘Floyd, that camera locked’n’loaded?’

  Floyd held up the Panasonic camcorder. ‘Good to go, boss. Hyuk hyuk.’

  ‘Louis, your ass is about to go viral,’ Seth said. ‘Wait till your skank bitch momma sees her boy gettin’ famous at last. She’s gonna be so proud.’

  Everyone piled into a pair of all-terrain quad bikes they used for roving about the island, and set off towards the area of its western shore where tonight’s entertainment would take place. Jayce and Seth’s daddy had built a pontoon there in the seventies, overhanging the water right around the far side of the island near the old boathouse, where it couldn’t be seen from the land side. The old man used it for fishing and mooring his boat; mostly he used it for getting comatose on rye whiskey.

  The brothers had adapted the pontoon for other purposes.

  At the end of the track they dismounted from the quad bikes and dragged their screaming, struggling prisoner down the slope to the pontoon, where they already had everything set up. A heavy-duty extendable boom rig of the kind used for marlin fishing overhung the water, with a large steel hook and strong cable attached to a geared crank mechanism. The Garretts were well practised in its use. While Floyd Babbitt rolled the camera and his fellow associate Bubba Beane manned the crank, Jayce kicked and shoved Louis into position beneath the boom arm, and Seth attached the hook to the prisoner’s belt. Once he was securely hooked up, Bubba took up the slack in the cable. A few more turns of the crank and Louis was hauled up into the air, spinning and flailing on the end of the cable like a big worm about to be offered to a waiting fish.

  Except it wasn’t fish that Louis was to be used as bait for.

  The boom arm was extended right out over the water. It was easily able to hold Louis’ weight. Next, Seth grabbed a bucket, from which protruded the handle of a large ladle. Floyd zoomed in for a close-up on the bucket’s contents, which were in fact the remains of a Labrador retriever Logan had killed a few days earlier, now just a mess of blood and guts. Floyd said, ‘Yugh, gross. Hyuk hyuk.’

  Seth tossed a ladleful of gore out over the water, then another. ‘Come and get it, bitches!’ The blood spattered and spread out in an oily slick, glistening in the floodlights.

  ‘Feedin’ time at the zoo, boys,’ Jayce said as he stood watching Louis slowly descend towards the water. Bubba Beane was grinning all over
his scarred face as he worked the crank handle. Scars that had been put there by Jayce himself, a few years back, to keep him in line.

  Right on cue, the alligators appeared, drawn by the scent of blood and the prospect of more. The ring of water that surrounded the Garrett stronghold like some historic castle moat was heavily populated with the creatures. The Garrett clan had been actively encouraging them for decades and always ensured they were well fed. The pets were about to receive another tasty snack.

  Louis was screaming so frantically that his voice was breaking up. Bubba gave another turn of the crank and the prisoner’s thrashing legs splashed down into the dark, bloody water. Instantly, an explosion of foam burst from the surface as a dark shape rocketed up from below, huge jaws distended and snapping.

  ‘That’s gotta be ol’ Cyrus,’ Seth said. Cyrus was reputed to be over sixty years old, and measured nearly fifteen feet from nose to tail. He was often the first to turn up at these events.

  Cyrus’ jaws closed around Louis Biquaisse and dragged him under. Louis’ screams dissolved into a shrill bubbling gurgle. More swirling black shapes closed in and the water churned red. Bubba waited a few seconds, then brought up the cable. The hook was bare. All that remained of Louis were a few tatters of shredded flesh floating on the water. They would soon be gone, too.

  ‘Show’s over, ladies,’ Seth said. ‘You get it all, Floyd?’

  ‘Sure thing. Hyuk.’

  Faces would be blurred and names bleeped out before the video was uploaded to the web. People loved this kind of stuff, but those who knew the Garretts would take it as yet another dire warning not to mess with them.

  Bubba and Floyd jumped back aboard their quad bike to go play billiards in the clubhouse. Jayce stood gazing at the ripples on the water. Seth joined him, and the two brothers shared a quiet moment of remembrance.

  ‘Damn it, Logan,’ Jayce said. ‘Why’d you have to go and fuckin’ die on us?’

  ‘I miss that stupid sumbitch,’ Seth said.

  ‘He was dumber’n a box of rocks. Lettin’ himself be followed like he did.’

  ‘But he was our brother,’ Seth said. ‘Blood’s thicker’n water. We know all about that, right?’

  Jayce nodded. ‘Reckon we do. And Garrett blood’s the thickest.’

  Chapter 43

  The brothers rode back to the house. All three of them had shared the place since they were kids, and it seemed depressingly empty now without Logan.

  It was the only brick building on the island, built in 1868 by Leonidas Garrett with a little help from the few remaining cronies who supported him following his downfall during the Civil War. To this day it remained the clan’s headquarters and command centre, hidden away in their secret enclave where few dared set foot. The remote island itself, some fifteen acres of mostly impenetrable woodland, stood encircled and protected like a fortress by the muddy, gator-infested waters of the Bayou Sanglante – literally ‘the bloody river’ – with a heavily guarded wooden bridge the only way on or off.

  Garrett Island had been home to its namesakes for so long that only the older Cajun folks, who’d heard it from their parents and grandparents, remembered what it used to be called before the Garretts came along: Voodoo Island, a tribute to its even darker history and the practices of the Creole people and Indians who once dwelled there. In some parts of the region there still echoed terrible tales of human blood sacrifice and satanic rituals said to have been practised on the island, long ago, and maybe still today.

  Returning indoors, the brothers went into their small, stone-walled living room. A TV in one corner and a fridge in another, a couple of armchairs and a crowded gun rack, were all the furniture they really needed. Seth yanked a half-finished litre of vodka from the chiller and poured himself a mugful, while Jayce helped himself to a bottle of Swamp Pop. Jayce didn’t touch alcohol, especially not the kind of un-American shit that Seth favoured.

  Seth was complaining about his sore arm. Jayce just sipped his Ponchatoula Pop Rouge and stood gazing at the family pictures over the old stone fireplace. There was a framed blow-up of their daddy, Willard ‘Killer’ Garrett, a violent tyrant who had been the only man Jayce had ever feared and happily drunk himself to death aged sixty-six. Next to that hung the sole surviving portrait of their ancestor, Jayce’s great-great-grandfather, Leonidas Garrett. The oil painting had been among the few items rescued from the ruins of his plantation estate, Athenian Oaks, after the damn Yankees razed it to the ground. The stately mansion was shown in the background, white columns gleaming majestically under the blue sky.

  Jayce Garrett had never been able to look at the painting without the same old bitter feelings boiling up inside him. He’d been brought up listening to stories of the billion-dollar fortune that would have been, should have been, the rightful inheritance of the family, passed down from father to son, all the way down the line. He and his brothers could have been the richest men in the state, had it not been for the actions of one filthy subhuman who’d dashed their prospects for ever with her treachery. It was entirely thanks to the despicable Peggy Iron Bar, may she burn screaming in hell for all eternity, that the brilliant patriotic genius Leonidas, hero of the South, had died a reclusive pauper in exile on his island.

  Likewise, it was thanks to her that successive generations of Garretts had had to bust their nuts making their own way, surviving the Great Depression, Prohibition, two world wars and the determined efforts of a zillion lawmen to stop them from making a dishonest living. As proud as he was of his achievements, seldom had a day of Jayce’s adult existence gone by that he hadn’t reflected with simmering anger over the life of privilege and luxury that had been stolen from him, just as surely as it had been from his ancestor.

  Beneath the picture was the empty space where Leonidas’ cavalry sabre used to hang. The same weapon with which, legend held, he’d personally executed the traitorous slave bitch who had sold him out to the Yankees. The same one with which Jayce, all these years later, had rid the world of the last of Peggy Iron Bar’s line.

  How proud old Leo would have been of him.

  And how poignant it was – or so it seemed to Jayce – that the fulfilment of their ancestor’s oath had been possible thanks only to the dear, departed Logan. For all his soft tendencies and occasional lapses of judgement, he’d been the one to thank for tracking down Lottie Landreneau.

  It had all started when Logan was serving his drug conviction sentence in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola. Angola was a notoriously violent prison that housed all manner of murderers, rapists and psychopaths. Logan could handle himself okay, but there were inmates there who most certainly could not. Such was one Eric Schwegmann, a balding, bespectacled forty-year-old former genealogist serving four years for vehicular homicide after drunkenly mowing down a line of kids queuing for their school bus. When Logan had first begun sharing a cell with Schwegmann he’d neither known nor cared what a genealogist was. But as cellmates with nothing much else to do during those long lockdown hours, their conversation had turned to the subject of their past lives and Logan, who’d grown up hearing those same stories of betrayal and retribution as his brothers, had begun to see an opportunity that would enable him to rise up in the esteem of his elder siblings.

  Eric Schwegmann was hopelessly out of his depth in Angola. In his first year there he’d been brutally beaten and sodomised multiple times, and he knew he could not survive the remainder of his sentence. He was depressed, suicidal, falling apart mentally and physically. And so Logan made him a golden offer: for the next three years, or until one of them was released, whichever came first, he would look out for the weaker man and protect him from bullies, rapists, crooked guards and other habitual hazards of life in Angola. In return, Schwegmann would use his expertise to find out the names of any and all living descendants of the person who had betrayed Logan’s ancestor and robbed the Garrett clan of their rightful inheritance.

  Naturally, Schwegmann leaped at the chance.


  Like any prison, Angola was awash with contraband goods, and it hadn’t been too hard for Logan to bribe a corrupt guard into supplying a laptop computer with illicit web access. Getting down to business, Schwegmann was able to upload a professional genealogy software package that allowed him to tap into a nationwide pool of data from adoption, cemetery, church, census, military, court, prison and land records, to obituaries, newspaper articles, probate and tax filings. It was all Greek to Logan, who watched idly as his new buddy set about honouring his side of the deal.

  It turned out that Eric Schwegmann was one highly talented individual. He actually made it look easy to piece the puzzle together. Within a week, the picture was complete and it went like this:

  In 1873, following the death of her sister, the recently-married Mildred Brossette, née Eyumba, relocated to Arkansas with her husband Samuel, where they purchased a modest property in Pulaski County. Three years later they produced a son, Avery. In 1899 Avery met and married Fannie Jones in Little Rock, and from this union was born a baby boy, Milton Brossette. The adult Milton didn’t marry until 1936, the year after his grandmother’s death, at which point the family line had veered back down south to its Louisianan roots. In 1938, now living in Baton Rouge, Milton and his wife Joyce celebrated the birth of their first daughter Marion, only to lose her to pneumonia at the age of three. The Brossettes’ second daughter, Betty, born 1941, fared better and eventually tied the knot with a certain Elijah Landreneau in 1966, moving to Chitimacha, Clovis Parish, soon afterwards. Eli and Betty Landreneau had both died relatively young but their one child, Charlotte, born in 1971, was still very much extant. She had gone by the married name Dupré for a good many years; the divorce records showed that she’d more recently reverted back to her maiden name.

  The line of Peggy Iron Bar, it thus appeared, was not yet ended. Hence, there was more work to be done in order for Leonidas Garrett’s oath to be fulfilled – and for his descendants to feel a little more vindicated, even if nothing could bring back the money.