Ben was suddenly alone in the darkness. He stared for a moment at the sudden stillness of the water around him, then began swimming for shore. He could sense the presence of the creature somewhere close by in the murk, but he knew that it wouldn’t need to hunt again tonight. Now it would carry its catch back to some hidden swamp lair and leave the masticated meat to tenderise a while before it enjoyed its feast.
Ben reached the reeds of the bank and hauled himself up onto dry land. He stood and watched as the burning boat’s remains finally slipped away beneath the surface and the orange glow of the flames was snuffed out. Bits of wreckage floated and gently bobbed on the bayou. Smoke drifted over the water and was dispersed by the rain. There was no more trace of Jayce Garrett, and there never would be.
Ben turned away. He retrieved his borrowed weapons and began the trek back across the island.
Chapter 67
Ben got back to the compound as the pilot of a State Police Bell 460 was skilfully bringing his helicopter down between the trees to land in the Garrett compound. There was a flight paramedic on board, who checked the released hostages and then attended to the sheriff. A fleet of ambulances was already en route. Ben didn’t say it, but he hoped they’d packed a large supply of body bags.
He flew back with Keisha, the kids and Officer Hogan. The chopper took them directly to the Clovis Parish Medical Center near Villeneuve, where doctors and trauma nurses were waiting to examine the Heberts for physical injury and shock. The place was buzzing with grim energy as the staff prepared for the return of the first ambulances and Coroner’s Office vehicles ferrying in the wounded and, mostly, the dead. Ben did his usual thing of trying to resist the attentions of the nurses, but to little avail as they herded him into an X-ray room and from there to a cubicle where they set about cleaning up his battered face. He had to admit, he looked a bit better after they were finished.
A horrified nurse failed to see the funny side when he asked for whisky in lieu of painkillers. No sensayuma. Then they let him go. He wandered the corridors, looking for Jessie Hogan. He didn’t find her, but found someone else instead.
The medical personnel weren’t the only ones waiting at the hospital to greet Keisha and the children. The moment word had reached the Sheriff’s Office an obliging cop had driven Tyler Hebert over to be reunited with his family. Ben met him in a lounge area, where Tyler had spent the last anxious hour pacing the floor and chewing his fingernails to the quick. When Tyler saw Ben walk into the waiting room he ran over and squeezed him in a suffocating and painful bear hug.
‘Careful,’ Ben said, wincing. The X-ray had confirmed that he’d cracked a rib, and he was feeling a little tender.
‘They’re okay, ain’t they?’ Tyler asked in a fluster. He hadn’t been allowed to see them yet. He was almost weeping from a mixture of relief and frustration.
‘They’re fine. A bit shaken up, and Caleb took a couple of knocks, but that’s all.’
‘You told me you’d get ’em out. And you did. How can I thank you, Ben?’
‘One good turn deserves another,’ Ben said. ‘You did as much for me. More, even.’
‘No way, buddy. You’re a goddamned hero, is what you are.’
‘Buy me a beer sometime.’
‘You betcha I will.’
Minutes later, a male nurse appeared to say that they’d finished with Mrs Hebert and the children, and that Mr Hebert could see them now. Tyler couldn’t get there fast enough.
Ben didn’t hang around to see the moving reunion. The family needed their privacy. But he could imagine the scene well enough, and it made him smile.
One by one, the ambulances and coroner’s vehicles came screeching into the hospital. Ben collared a doctor who, in a tearing rush, told him that Sheriff Roque was in the ER but would do okay.
Soon after he’d spoken with the doctor, Ben was approached by a pair of state troopers who’d come looking for him and said they were to drive him back over to the Sheriff’s Office. Ben walked out with them to their patrol car, and twenty minutes later found himself seated across a desk from a very serious-looking, bald-headed, overweight plain-clothes man with a crooked tie, who introduced himself as Agent Donald F. Kassmeyer from the FBI office in Baton Rouge.
Kassmeyer appeared tired and harassed as he hunched over a pile of papers. One of them was the affidavit signed by Judge Claybrook authorising the arrest of Jayce and Seth Garrett. Another was Sheriff Roque’s official statement, also rubber-stamped by the judge, dropping all prior charges against the original suspect in the case, one Benedict Hope. Another again was the sheriff’s pre-operational report on the raid on Garrett Island.
Kassmeyer had a lot of questions for Ben about the dramatic and terrible events of that evening. Ben was calm and polite, but intended to say as little as possible.
‘I don’t know how much assistance I can be to you, Agent Kassmeyer. So much happened, so fast. In any case, as you know, my involvement was strictly in an advisory, observational capacity. I was very much on the edge of things. You’d really have to talk to the surviving officers themselves.’
‘Which doesn’t leave a lot of folks to talk to, does it?’
‘Sadly not.’
Kassmeyer gave a weary sigh and spent a moment pinching the bridge of his nose with his eyes shut, as if he had a migraine coming on. ‘It’s a nightmare. Anyway, so happens we already spoke with Officer Hogan. She says that the Garrett brothers each confessed to the murder of Charlotte Landreneau before Seth Garrett was then shot to death by one of his own men, who also shot Officer Fruge before she shot him. While Jayce Garrett apparently managed to escape. Can you confirm that’s what occurred?’
‘If that’s what Officer Hogan says happened, that’s what happened,’ Ben said. ‘She was right in the thick of the action. As I told you, I was barely involved.’
‘We have teams combing the area for Jayce Garrett. I don’t suppose you’d have any idea, strictly in an advisory capacity that is, where the sonofabitch might’ve run off to?’
‘None,’ Ben said. ‘I didn’t see him.’
‘Just one more matter I wanted to get straight, Mr Hope. I’m told you were formally sworn in as a deputy for this operation. Is that so? Strikes me as bein’ a mite unconventional, under the circumstances.’
‘I’m not fully conversant with your rules,’ Ben said with a smile, ‘being a foreigner and all. I think the sheriff was just indulging me. I’d told him I always had a thing about the wild west, growing up. You know, The Tin Star, with Henry Fonda? That was a favourite of mine.’
Kassmeyer grunted. Not a fan of old westerns, clearly. Then again, neither was Ben, particularly. Kassmeyer asked, ‘You still got the badge? It’s government property.’
It was in Ben’s jacket pocket. ‘Sorry to say, I lost it when I fell.’
‘Fell?’
Ben pointed to his face. ‘How do you think I picked up these bruises? Took a bit of a tumble in the dark. Must’ve tripped. Clumsy.’
‘I thought you were supposed to be some kind of SAS hotshot superhero.’
‘Oh, that was a long time ago, Agent Kassmeyer. ’Fraid I’ve gone off the boil a bit. Comes to us all, I suppose.’
Kassmeyer shuffled some more papers, looking a little bemused. His line of questioning now run out of steam, he heaved another deep sigh and got to his feet.
‘Well, this whole affair seems pretty bizarre, but as far as we’re concerned we have no reason to detain you any longer. I guess you’re free to go, Mr Hope. Plannin’ on remaining for any length of time in the US?’
‘I’ll be flying home to France just as soon as I can,’ Ben replied.
Kassmeyer seemed pleased about that. He stuck out a square, blunt hand and said, ‘You have a pleasant trip, now.’
Ben left the Sheriff’s Office and walked out into the cool night. The air was sweet with the scent of tree blossoms and the constellations were sharp and clear in the night sky. As he lit a cigarette, a Clovis Parish police
car came roaring up and squealed to a halt beside him. The driver’s window whirred down and a familiar face smiled out at him. She’d changed into a crisp, clean uniform, washed her hair and didn’t look remotely like someone who’d been engaged in deadly close-quarters combat just a few hours earlier.
‘How are you feeling, Officer Hogan?’
‘You can drop the officer shit. I’m okay. Takes more’n a forty-four magnum round to the chest to slow me down.’
‘That’s my girl.’
‘Shucks. You’re makin’ me blush. Wanna come for a ride? Actually, I was sent to get you.’
Ben flicked away his cigarette and climbed into the car.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Back to the hospital. He wants to see you.’
Chapter 68
The sheriff was sitting up in bed in a private room, surrounded by monitors and tubes and things that bleeped. A drip on a stand was attached to one arm. The other was encased in plaster all the way to his shoulder and raised up on an elevated rest. The old implacable face was as sour as ever, but there was a twinkle in his eye as Ben and Hogan were shown inside the room.
‘How’re you doing, Sheriff?’
‘I’m as pert as a ruttin’ buck. Takes more’n a—’
‘More than a twenty-millimetre cannon round that almost blew off your arm to slow you down. You Louisianans.’
‘Bred tough,’ Roque said. ‘Not like you soft-ass Limeys. No wonder we kicked your butts back into the sea in 1781.’
‘Did you summon me here just to insult my countrymen?’
‘Matter of fact, no, I wanted to thank you for what you done. Hadn’t been for you, this parish might never have gotten shot of the curse of the Garrett boys.’
‘That’s awfully sweet of you to say, Sheriff. But you didn’t do too badly yourself.’
Roque shook his head wistfully. ‘We sure paid a heavy price for it. Lost a lot of good people out there today.’
Ben nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Guess you’ll be fixin’ to head home soon?’
Ben nodded again. ‘First thing.’
‘You oughtta stick around at least another day. They’re buryin’ the Landreneau woman tomorrow mornin’. Thought mebbe you’d want to attend. There’s the other thing, too.’
Ben said, ‘What other thing?’
‘I guess you hadn’t heard,’ Roque said. ‘I mean, what with all that’s been happenin’. You had other matters on your mind.’
Ben said, ‘Heard what?’
‘If memory serves me right, I recollect you tellin’ me you came here to Louisiana for a jazz concert?’
‘Don’t rub it in.’
‘You’re in luck, son. If you’d been followin’ the news, you’d’ve known that ol’ Woody McCoy called off the show at the last minute. Postponed for a couple of days, for health reasons. Which means you ain’t missed nothin’.’
‘You’re kidding me.’
‘I never kid,’ Roque said. ‘Turns out that the greedy sonofagun filled his face with so much of his hometown smoky Creole gumbo with hot sauce that he got a bad attack of dyspepsia and had to spend two days in bed. Show’s been rescheduled for tomorrow night.’
‘Then I suppose that puts paid to my travel plans,’ Ben said. ‘Looks like I’ll be around a little longer.’
‘So you’re a jazz fan, huh?’ Hogan said, smiling at him.
Ben smiled back. ‘You?’
She shrugged. Non-committal. ‘Even if I was, I’m on duty tomorrow night.’
‘Not any more you’re not,’ Roque said. ‘You’re takin’ the week off, effective immediately. That’s an order, Officer Hogan.’
She beamed at the sheriff, then at Ben. ‘Hear that? Looks like you got yourself a hot date, honey pie.’
‘Got somewhere to stay the night?’ Roque asked him.
Hogan shot Ben a sideways look and her cheeks turned pink.
Roque said, ‘Easy there, Jessie.’
‘Seems I’m homeless,’ Ben admitted.
‘Philomena and I have a vacation cabin over by Bourbeaux Lake,’ the sheriff said. ‘Got a spare set of keys in my desk drawer at the office. Jessie’d run by and get ’em for you, wouldn’t you, Jessie?’
And so it was that Ben spent that night in the tranquil setting of Bourbeaux Lake, Clovis Parish, which he was unable to appreciate as he slept for nine straight hours and had to rush off early in order to attend Lottie Landreneau’s funeral at the First Baptist Church on the edge of Villeneuve.
It was a sad, sombre occasion. A large crowd was in attendance, out of which Ben was one of the few white faces. He kept to the rear of the gathering, faintly worried that some uninformed folks might still think he was the murderer. Nobody tried to lynch him. The ceremony ended. The crowd began to disperse. Feeling a gentle tap on his shoulder, he turned suddenly.
‘Sallie!’
The old lady had turned up with several of her entourage, including Carl, who at least hadn’t brought a rifle along for the occasion. He wasn’t driving the hearse, either.
‘You done good, child,’ Sallie said.
‘All thanks to you, Mama.’ He showed her the mojo bag, still hanging around his neck. ‘Kept me safe from the demons, just like you said it would.’
She squeezed his hand and a tear rolled from her eye. ‘Don’t you never take it off.’
‘I won’t,’ he promised her. He bent and kissed her softly on the cheek.
‘Goodbye, Sallie. Look after yourself.’
‘Be seein’ you in Heaven, child.’ The old lady turned and shuffled away towards a waiting car, accompanied by her people.
Evening came. Ben met Jessie Hogan at the Cajun Steakhouse for an early dinner of T-bone and fries washed down by a few Dixie beers that she drank from the bottle like a real Southern gal. Her hair was loose, her jeans were tight and she wore a red check shirt tied at the waist. She looked quite different with mascara and lipstick.
‘So you’re goin’ home in the morning, huh,’ she said.
‘Unless something dramatic and unexpected happens in the meantime,’ he replied.
‘You got a wife waitin’ for you there?’
‘Probably not exactly waiting for me,’ Ben said. ‘And we’re not married.’
She took another pensive swig of Dixie and said, ‘But you got a girl, right?’
‘I wouldn’t call her a girl, either.’
‘A female, then.’
‘Definitely a female,’ he said.
‘Just my luck.’
‘Have another beer,’ Ben said.
Soon afterwards, it was time. They left the grillhouse and joined the throng of people heading for the Civic Center. Jessie Hogan took his hand. Not the tough cop any more. He didn’t stop her.
The place was packed. Ben threaded his way to the front row. Jessie pressed herself to his side, even more excited than he was.
Then to a roar that almost lifted the roof off the building, Woody McCoy and his Quintet came out on stage.
Woody yelled, ‘How are y’all doing?’ The audience went wild.
Then the venerable jazzman raised his saxophone to his lips, and the music began.
Read on for an exclusive extract of the new Ben Hope thriller by Scott Mariani
Valley of Death
Coming May 2019
Chapter 1
Haryana, India
Kabir removed his pilot’s headset and began flipping switches on the Bell Ranger’s instrument panels to shut down the rotors. He turned to grin broadly at Sai in the co-pilot seat, then at Manish sitting behind.
‘Ready to make history, guys?’ he said over the falling pitch of the turbine.
Kabir’s two associates beamed back at him. Manish said, ‘Let’s rock and roll.’
As the helicopter’s rotors slowed to a whistling whip-whip-whip, the three companions clambered out and jumped down to the rocky ground. It had taken less than an hour from the urban hubbub of their base in New Delhi to reach the remotenes
s of Hisar District, Haryana, out in the middle of nowhere several miles north-west of a once barely-heard-of village called Rakhigarhi.
Kabir stood for a moment and gazed around him at the arid, semi-desert terrain that stretched as far as the eye could see in all directions. Far away beyond the barren escarpment of rocky hills behind him to the north-east lay Punjab, the Land of the Five Rivers; in front of him lay the wide-open semi-desertified plains, arid and rocky with just a few desiccated shrubs and wizened trees scattered here and there and offering no shade. It was mid-September and the merciless heat of summer was past its worst, but the sun still beat fiercely down, baking the landscape.
Kabir was hardened to the heat, because of the outdoor demands of a job that often took him to difficult and inhospitable places all across the ancient Near East; unlike his elder brothers, one of whom spent all his time in air-conditioned big-city boardrooms, and the other who, for reasons best known to him, had chosen to live in chilly, rain-sodden Britain. Very strange. Though if it was the life he shared with his beautiful new wife that kept him tied to London, Kabir couldn’t entirely blame the guy. She was something, all right. Maybe one day he too might be lucky enough to find a woman like her. For now, though, Kabir’s sole devotion was to his work.
Kabir stepped back to the chopper, reached into a cool box behind the passenger seat and pulled out three cans of Coke; one for him and one each for Manish and Sai. His two bright, trusty graduate students were both in their early twenties, only a few years younger than Kabir who happened to be the youngest professor ever to teach at the Institute of Archaeology in New Delhi. With his warm personality and winning smile, he was widely held to be the most popular, too – though he was far too modest to admit it.
Sai rolled the cold can over his brow, then cracked the ring and look a long drink. ‘That hit the spot. Thanks, boss.’ Sai never called him ‘Professor’.
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