Swing (Gun Pedersen Book 2)

by L. L. Enger

  “He lied to Ibbins?”

  “It would appear.”

  “He wanted Ibbins to think he was out of town—”

  “He wanted everyone to think he was out of

  town,” Gun said, “if anyone ever asked. But they never did.” He got to his feet. “He was so effective getting everyone to look at Moses, nobody questioned Rott. He had an escape hatch, and he never had to use it.”

  She stared at him with her cheeks coloring like two maple leaves, and knowing what he knew shook the tiredness from him like water. His eyes were clear and hers were clear and shiny with adrenaline, and it was a good thing because the boat yawed suddenly with footsteps on the deck overhead and the hatch slammed open sounding hollow. Gun shoved Diane into the narrow head and grabbed a paring knife out of the sink. Somebody dropped through the hatch and landed without grace on the teak flooring.

  “Man, you doing!” said Clarence Coldspring. He stood and weaved, smelling of beer and a hundred unfiltered Camels. Diane stepped out from the head and Clarence grinned at Gun.

  “I thought you’d be here, big man,” he said.

  Diane said, “Clarence—”

  “Glad of it, too,” Clarence said. “We could use you. My little brother, he was over at Leavitt’s tonight. Stéalin’ fowl. He heard ’em gettín’ ready, Casper’s boys. Sayin’ it’s time to visit the Coldsprings. This time, hey, we’re gonna be ready.”

  33

  There was a coil of heavy wire in the back of Clarence’s decayed Land Rover that skidded wheelwell-to-wheelwell every time they hit a hole. There were lots of holes. Lots of wire up front, too, holding door handles on, the glove box shut, the rearview in place. Clarence applied alternately too much gas and too much clutch, shouting, “Ho, man! Ho, man!” as the Rover yipped and scratched over pitted blacktop.

  A few miles west of Indiantown they turned north on a lumpy two-tracked field road that showed salt white in the headlights. Clarence stopped his yelling and went grim as he drove, leaning forward over the wheel. Gun could see the remains of rotted fence posts rising out of the land then bumping past on his right. Hanging rags on sprung barbed wire. A gate. Clarence cut the lights and motor and the Land Rover thumped to a halt.

  Engineless they could hear crickets, the distant metronomic bark of a dog, the cicada waltz around them in the swelling dark. The air smelled of oranges, a ways off.

  “No noise,” Clarence said. “We beat ’em here. Or else,” he added, “they been here already.”

  “Where are we?” Gun couldn’t see any houses.

  Clarence went to the Rover and undid the wire that held the back shut. He reached in and withdrew a long high-beam flashlight that looked worth more than the vehicle. He stripped off his black T-shirt and stretched it across the lens and snapped the light on. It still threw a good beam across the field but the small round brilliance of lens and bulb was clouded over. He pointed with the light.

  “We go over the little rise. A dozen shacks in a row. We go in careful so the old man don’t shoot us thinkin’ it’s Casper, and we wait.” Clarence rubbed his narrow chest, quietly murdered a mosquito. “Know what?” he said. “Guns are something we don’t got much of.” He went back to the Rover and got the coil of wire. He got a good grip and yanked it into an oval, then twisted it tight until it made a heavy, flexible two-foot club several inches thick.

  “You smack a guy with that,” he said, handing it

  over, “he’s gonna know it, but not until a whole lot later.”

  They went slowly up the rise with the light trained low ahead of them, readied the top. Kneeling there they could make out a long narrow shed with a slanted roof opposite the small gray humps of Coldspring shacks. The windows were black. A limber gray shadow separated itself from one of the shacks and prowled forward.

  “That’s Early,” Clarence whispered. “Got us on the wind.”

  Early was the mostly blue tick hunting hound that had so proudly reunited the Coldsprings with their departed kin. She glided up the grassy hill toward them, smelling Clarence, hind end wagging. Clarence laughed softly. The earth was cool and sweet under their knees. Reaching them the dog sniffed Gun’s hand, approved, and butted Clarence m the chest with its nose.

  “Playtime you think, hey?” Clarence whispered. Early whined yes. Clarence, holding the light, did the habitual thing. He chuckled, rubbed the dog’s head, and stood up against the sky.

  34

  The small-caliber bullet that finally nestled at the tip of Clarence’s collarbone would’ve gone a lot worse except that it took Early first. The big hound was up on its hind legs embracing Clarence when Gun saw a round hole open on its white hide and a moment later heard the shot. Early was dead almost before the slug was out of her body, the hollow point coming out tired and plocking itself into Clarence, quitting in the son place barely under the skin.

  They landed in the grass with Early on top and Clarence rolled the dog off in a sort of one-shouldered panic. “Pricks, pricks, sonsabitcb.es—” he squealed until Gun stifled him with a palm and held him still. The flashlight was still on, smothered under Early. There’d been just the one shot, nothing more, but now looking at the row of shacks Gun saw gray doors cracking open to black. In at least one of the doors he detected the chill oiled glow of gunmetal, and for the moment it took to register the smells of sweat and cooling dust, Gun thought Clarence had been shot by his own family. Then he saw someone, a small boy from his ducking swiftness, slip out of one of the shacks and start for them, and another shot ruined the quiet and then two more. Slaps of light showed like heat lightning from behind the long shed and the boy disappeared around one of the shacks.

  Clarence was twisting. Gun became aware of pain in his hand and discovered that Clarence was biting

  him, hard, in the thickness below the thumb. He jerked free.

  “Lemme up, man,” Clarence hissed, gasping. “I ain’t no woman. Where are they?”

  “The shed.”

  “Chickenshit.” Clarence was squeezing his right shoulder with his left hand, rotating it. There were tears on his face.

  “Let me see.”

  Clarence shook his head. “Hardly any blood even. I could get the damn thing out with my teeth if I wanted to. What we do is—” but more gunfire wrecked his instructions, the deep bellow of a large-bore shotgun, two shots piling up on each other and making concussions in the earth.

  “Gordon’s double-barrel,” said Clarence. “Oughta knock that shed right down.”

  Gun had a look. Seeing was all but impossible but it seemed that two shapes, large ones bent at the waist, were running from the shed. A third left the shadow of the nearest shack and darted after the boy who’d drawn fire. Gun said, “Stay here,” and went for them fast, his feet uncertain in the dark as if the ground itself were newly made. The movement shook what little vision he had and he lost the men, saw them again as a lamp came on in one of the windows and they ran past it, the light putting yellow stains on their dark hooded windbreakers. Inside someone shouted, Gun almost close enough now to make words of it, his feet getting confidence and hitting easy, and nearing the light he reached back hoping he still had the big lungs and sprinted down the row of shacks. Gaining on the windbreakers he passed the window and there were again shouts behind it and immediately an enormous blast of powder and pane that made the air around him shine with shivered glass like a winter’s worth of frost. There was a feeling like frost, too, at the back of his neck, like ice there and still running he

  felt with his fingers. Slickness. His feet were back to clumsy and sounded muffled and he realized his ears were gone from the explosion. He hoped they’d return and ran on, forgetting who he was chasing. The windbreakers. They’d been up ahead but weren’t now and Gun was out of shacks, out of legs, out of ears. He slowed, stopped, sat down on prairie grass to breathe. Such dark, such quiet, too, except inside the skull where the pounding noises were. Like gravel. He closed his eyes and listened: like a duffel bag of gravel b
umping down a set of metal stairs.

  He waited while his wind came back and then reached to his neck again, blood-shiny with the little glass gnats from the shack window. The blood made him remember Clarence, back there with Early on top of the hill.

  In his head the duffel bumped down a few more stairs, only now it was Clarence in the bag instead of gravel and he was making noises.

  Mmiigg maannn.

  Yup, that’d be him.

  The pounding subsided at last to where Gun could feel the steadiness of the cicada hum moving through him without interruption and he took this as a sign that he would hear again.

  Aaay miig mannn.

  The duffel bag was about gone but Clarence was getting clearer. It came to Gun through a layer of numb that perhaps the noise was now coming from outside his head, and he opened his eyes and turned.

  It wasn’t Clarence, although the voice even distorted carried the same high tension. This boy was crouching a few yards behind him in a stance that displayed both caution and deftness. Gun risked starting the duffel again and spoke.

  “You the little brother? Clarence’s?”

  “Big brother,” said the kid, the Bs resonating like he was talking into a snare drum.

  “Is everyone all right?”

  “We got Clarence.” Gun heard some smile in the voice. “You all right, big man?”

  They had him in the shack next to the one with the blown-out window. The floor was whitewashed pine boards laid loose over bare dirt Electricity came in through a thick black cord hanging down from the ceiling; it hooked up to one bare bulb, sixty watt, a brown Warm Morning space heater in the middle of the room, and a color console television so old the screen had rounded corners. The TV was on, Angie Dickinson as Police Woman looking dated but pretty good, and Clarence was watching on the couch. His shirt was off and the hole was cleaned up already and patched with white paste and cotton.

  “Looka here,” he said, holding up a clear glass jar. It held a bit of mushroomed lead. “Bullet. Gram took it out See,” he said, nodding at the TV, “Angie’s got nothin’ on me.”

  “Wrong, boy,” said a little wrinkled man in a rocker next to the couch. He had gray braids that went to his waist “Angie got everything on you.”

  “Ha, gramp.”

  Gram Coldspring, twice her husband’s size, her hair still black, ramrodded into the room carrying coffee. She poked a mug at Gun, dropping her eyes.

  “Gram, he’s bleedin’,” Clarence said.

  It took Gram five minutes with a hot cloth and tweezers to get the visible chunks of window out of Gun’s neck. The pain set his mind upright again and he started wondering about earlier. Clarence’s brother —big brother?—was sitting cross-legged next to the couch, looking at Clarence with concern and ordering Gram to produce more coffee.

  “How’d they manage to miss you?” Gun asked him. “When you came out and started for us, after they hit Clarence... one of them was right on your backside.”

  The brother stared at him without comprehension.

  “Who came out?” Clarence demanded.

  “No way was it me,” said the brother. “I hear that first shot, I’m stickin’ my head in the pillow.”

  “Christian, musta been,” Clarence said, and to Gun, “my little brother. The one heard Leavitt’s guys, earlier.”

  The old man came with effort out of the rocker and turned off Angie, who was snuggling a dope dealer. “Gram!” he shouted. “You find Christian!”

  And Gram looked, and then with the sweat beginning to move again so did everyone else, but there was no Christian Coldspring.

  35

  What they had to do at last was go outside and spread out like bush-beaters after prey. Dawn was coming with a dusty bloom in the east that seemed to chill what remained of the night. A dozen Cold-springs holding guns and hoes fanned out north and east, away from the highway. Only Gram stayed behind.

  Casper Leavitt’s property ran mostly to pasture and swamp, with a few hundred acres of orange trees on the north end where Casper lived. He was reputed to favor the smell of citrus over that of cows and Coldsprings, and he had enough land to make his

  world essentially what he wanted. Gun figured him for a sort he’d run across before—men whose personalities pushed them uphill until they stood at the top of their unhappy fiefdoms, consuming their women and directing their serfs from afar. It was the Steinbren-ner effect Gun had seen in baseball and sometimes elsewhere. Fifty yards to his right Gramp Cold-spring saluted Gun with his weapon of choice, a splintered axe handle. It was time to march with the serfs.

  The attackers had taken Christian and fled on foot, at least for a distance; no one had heard them arrive, and afterward there’d been no giveaway sounds of ignition. Because of this and because the bodies of Clarence’s great-uncle and cousin had been found in Casper’s boggy bottomland, Gun found himself part of a wide scythe-shaped line sweeping out toward the quiet swamp. He had the improvised wire club from Clarence. It seemed to him a far crusade from what he’d expected when Jack first caught him in the fish house and told him about the message from Moses Gates.

  The pasture had been cow-less long enough to make walking easy and with daybreak near the line moved quickly, heads down scanning the tall grass. Gun began to see that the Coldsprings already half expected Christian to be dead, to find him there bludgeoned on Casper’s ground. He heard a long-ago sound on the morning breeze and it was Gramp singing slowly as if in mourning. The grass as he moved through it had a fresh yellow smell that went sour as they came closer to the swamp. The singing got fainter and Gun realized the line was spreading apart. There was a low rise in the land and then the swamp lay before them, green and woven, and beyond it the uniform rows of trees, branches bent low with fruit. The sun inched up now and with its first ray lit up a rectangle at the crest of the grove. Gun squinted. A window. A high gable on a distant house.

  By the time they reached the swamp they were a hundred yards apart. Gun saw Gramp reach the rushes and step in without faltering. He disappeared as if into a cornfield. Gun did likewise and suddenly there was no sky, only the green scratchiness of bullrush above and around him and underneath an earth that sagged with his weight. He stepped forward and the rushes zipped closed behind him. They filled his stinging ears with whispers. He wondered at their chances of finding Christian here and wished the dog Early was alive and plunging along beside them. He took more steps, trying to keep them straight, remembering the time he’d heard a Catholic talking earnestly about Purgatory and realizing that this was it, cut off from sunlight with dread fear just a thin crust away, and thinking this he heard the low groan of a sinner.

  He stopped his feet and listened.

  The groan again, punctuated by hog grunts. It wasn’t Purgatory anymore. The rushes whispered urgently but anguish and bestial glee came through like a sound burped up from Hell. It was close on Gun’s right and he swung the wire club like a machete, breaking through. The groans faded under his own thrashing until he was right on them in a little matted clearing where the sky showed again. Christian was gagged and on his gut, shirtless. Two guys were with him, a tall one in a windbreaker and a fat football-coach type in rubber boots holding a three-foot piece of steel. Windbreaker had a rifle and that was worse—a club you could dodge. Gun dove for him as the barrel came up and sent everything he could through the twisted wire and into Windbreaker’s right ankle. It brought a scream that sounded all wrong amidst the rushes and the guy dropped next to Christian while the football coach squatted and maneuvered for position. Windbreaker still had the rifle and with one hand tried to point it but Gun on one knee gripped the stock and twisted, catching the man’s finger in the trigger guard and popping it free of the joint. For the length of another scream he had the gun to himself, and then fire rippled through him from behind and his muscles got stupid and he dropped the rifle and fell on his side in the weeds. Grabbing the gun the fat man tossed it gently to the edge of the tiny clearing. He stood o
ver Gun who sat up slowly trying to unmuck his brain.

  “It’s a hell of a surprise, isn’t it?” said the football coach, waving his piece of steel which Gun now saw was a cattle prod. “Volts, amps, I don’t know. Don’t pay no attention. What I know is, ain’t a steer I ever worked with didn’t live in mortal dread of this thing.” With a fleetness that belied his size the fat man thrust the prod at Gun. He parried with a forearm and the roll of electricity sucked his breath from him, peeled back his nerves like a sleeve. He felt the swamp crust shake when his head hit it and lying there he smelled burned skin. Beside him the tall man panted swear words into his ruined hand. Christian Coldspring’s eyes over the gag were narrow and hopeless. Gun flexed the muscles in his arms and they told him no thanks, they’d just done a thousand push-ups.

  “The hell’re you doin’ here anyhow, big fella?” said the football coach. “Got some kinda Indian love-in goin’ on? You look about as Coldspring as—hell, as I do!” His voice was frustrated, as if he’d just noticed for the first time he’d been zapping a white guy.

  The wire club lay to Gun’s left where it had fallen, all but two inches of it hidden in the standing rushes. Five feet distant. Maybe six.

  “Ought to have stayed outa the swamp, anyhow,” Coach went on. “Most of the time it’s safe, ya know, it stays asleep. But every now and again,” he winked at Christian and lowered his voice to a whisper, “it

  wakes up, and eats folks.” He started to reach for the rifle but there was a sudden extra rustle in the weeds and he paused to peer into them. Gun did a roll that felt like the bad slow-motion in scary dreams and caught the wire club just as Coach was thundering down with the prod again. He rolled back and the fat man missed, vanished for a moment in the rushes. Panicked at this Windbreaker made a pathetic swipe at Gun with his good hand but Gun swung the club backhanded, laid the guy cold across Christian Coldspring’s knees. Coach came struggling back before Gun could reach the rifle and feinted desperately with the prod. The rushes grew louder around them. Coach’s eyes were red and nervous and he made the adrenal farmyard grunts Gun had heard over Christian’s groans. At last he pulled the prod back like a switch and aimed a stroke at Gun’s midsection that came in whistling. There was only one way to react and Gun regretted it even as he swung his club to block the big prod. The club was steel wire and in addition to being heavy and effective was the finest conductor of electricity he could’ve chosen. His hands went white and frozen as the blast traveled into them and his mind turned to TV snow, understanding only that try as he might he could not let the damn club loose. It clung to the prod like a magnet, his muscles wearing down while Coach sweated in his rubber boots and kept the pressure on, and it was only after the static in the brain seemed to seep out ana make sparks in the open air that he heard a brief thack and his eyes made sense again and he went panting to his knees.