He ran the channel north for 15 miles until he passed under the I-10 overpass and then continued on to the north end of the old river split and headed back south to return to Vic’s place. By the time he was back in Greg’s truck and driving to the hospital again it was already getting dark. One of the security guards at the emergency room doors recognized him from the evening before: “You brought the wounded officer in last night, right? The one you said was your partner?”
Keith froze at the question, fearing the guard was about to give him bad news. “Yeah, that’s right. Do you know his status?”
“His daughter was here all afternoon. You just missed her, in fact. She asked if you had been back. She said her father was asking about you, and that he told her you saved his life.”
Keith felt a flood of relief as he thanked the guard and made his way inside the hospital. A nurse directed him to the room and he found Greg asleep when he got there, no doubt sedated with pain meds, but alive and in recovery. Keith plopped into the chair in the corner of the room, thinking he would just sit there a few minutes while he thought about his plans for tomorrow. But he was a lot more exhausted than he realized after being awake most of the night before and then running back and forth all day. He fell asleep in the chair and if any nurses or doctors came in the room to check on Greg, they didn’t bother him, because when he finally woke up and looked at the clock, it was nearly 4 a.m. It wasn’t what he’d planned to do, but he needed the sleep and it didn’t really matter where. Now he wouldn’t have to wait long for daylight, and then he would drive back to Vic’s and get his boat. If there was still no sign of Bart at his house, Keith thought he would head south on the river towards Morgan City today to have a look down there. He was just about to leave the room when Greg woke up and saw that he had a visitor.
“How are you feeling, man? The doctor said you’d be in some pain, but I guess they’ve been keeping you pretty medicated.”
“Yeah, I’m more groggy than anything else. I guess I got lucky, didn’t I? It could have been worse.”
“A lot worse! A .243 in the torso is no joke. The doctor said it just missed your spine by millimeters.”
“Good thing I had you there for backup so they didn’t shoot me again. Thanks for going out there to tell Rachel, too man. I really appreciate it.”
“Of course. The security guys said she told them she was coming back today. I may not make it back myself until tomorrow. I still haven’t been able to get in touch with my father since I received that radio call, so I’m going to spend the day looking for him. Probably run the river all the way down if I have too. I’ll get back to check on you as soon as I can. Don’t worry about your house or anything. I went by there last night and everything is fine.”
“I wish I could go with you and help you look for him.”
“Yeah, I know. Don’t worry about it though. You’ve got some healing to do, so get after it. I’ll see you soon.”
By the time he drove back to Vic’s house from the hospital, it was less than an hour until daylight, and Keith knew Vic would already be up with coffee brewed. He went inside to have a cup and Vic told him he’d tried radioing his father again to no avail.
“It does seem kind of strange that he was close enough to get through to you the day before yesterday and yet he’s still not here. He’s either not receiving or he somehow made the call from a long way off.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. I’m going to run back up the bayou one more time and make sure he’s not there, and then I’m going to make a run downriver, at least to Morgan City… maybe on to the coast. You wanna ride with me?”
“I’d love to, bro, but I promised my Aunt Francine the other day that I would go over there this weekend and help them with their roof. She’s going to be expecting me.”
“I didn’t even realize it was Saturday already,” Keith said, “there’s so much going on.”
The truth was that the days had all been more or less the same to Keith since Lynn died. Besides that, with no one working a regular schedule anymore and most stores and businesses shut down and communications offline, the days of the week were of little importance to most people. Keith just got up everyday and did what he had to do; never knowing what that would be until it was time to do it, like when he’d gotten Greg’s call for backup. Today his schedule was wide open as of now, and going downriver to look for his father was as good a use of his time as anything else he could think of. The first hint of dawn was beginning to lighten the sky, and he was ready to get going.
“Be careful on the road,” he told Vic, knowing that his brother-in-law was fully aware of the dangers out there and that he wouldn’t go anywhere unprepared and unarmed.
“Oh I will. I’m leaving later this morning and I’ll be coming back well before noon tomorrow. Good luck on the river today, bro.”
Keith carried a cup of Vic’s coffee out to the boat with him and started the twin outboards as soon as he stepped aboard. While they were warming up, he got on the VHF radio again, of course, but after repeating his transmission three times and getting nothing, he hung up the mic and headed to the bayou for home. He had no expectations as he turned the final sharp bend in the winding bayou and came into view of his house. He hadn’t seen another soul since he’d left Vic’s dock, and when he pulled up to the pilings of his own, everything looked just as he’d left it until he stepped out of the boat to finish tying off his lines. That was when he noticed that his sheriff’s department truck was missing. Keith had already slung his M4 over one shoulder when he left the boat. Now he quickly brought it to ready and then shouldered it when a man suddenly walked into view in the gravel drive that led to the road out front. The man was headed towards the house but apparently hadn’t spotted Keith yet in the dim light of dawn. He would give this stranger only one chance to comply before he opened fire. Whatever he was up to, Keith stopped him short with his command: “YOU THERE! FREEZE! KEEP YOUR HANDS UP AND GET DOWN TO YOUR KNEES! NOW!”
Fifteen
ERIC AND JONATHAN QUIETLY motored away from Dreamtime, heading upriver into the night. There was enough ambient light out on the broad river channel to see the way though, surrounded as it was on all sides by open marsh. Eric sat in the stern at the tiller of the outboard, keeping the dinghy in the middle of the river as Jonathan scanned ahead for danger with the night vision monocular. Bart had doubted they would see signs of life on the river at night south of Morgan City, and he was right. The marsh here was mostly uninhabited even before the hurricane, and oil field activity had ceased in the aftermath. Barges like the one that had forced them out of the channel probably weren’t running at night either, since they could no longer use GPS to aid in their navigation.
Eric still couldn’t figure out why that captain had behaved so aggressively towards their schooner. He had plenty of room to pass without coming that close, but he’d used every bit of the channel on their side of the river. Was it just out of spite, or were the barge captains taking the offensive position around all smaller vessels because of the danger of attack? Thinking about it made Eric wonder if he really wanted to get involved with those guys, trading security services for a ride upriver. Of course they probably weren’t all the same, and maybe that particular captain was simply having a bad day. Eric knew he probably made a mistake giving up the channel so readily. The captain may have been simply messing with them and might not have followed through with actually running them down, but watching him bearing down, Eric hadn’t trusted he could turn in time to miss them even if he wanted to. Besides, he’d expected there was a bit of elbowroom outside of the channel anyway, as there often was in most places. The schooner only drew four feet, so there wouldn’t have been an issue if not for that damned wreck they couldn’t see. The grounding was a serious enough problem, but hitting something solid like that at full speed could have ended far worse. If the hull had been breached, they would all be in the dinghy now, towing the kayak and as many of their supplies as the
y could carry away. The Colvin schooner was apparently built as well as Bart said it was though, and from a very strong alloy too. It was the perfect vessel for what Eric had in mind later, after he had Megan, and he intended to do everything in his power to get it free and dock it somewhere reasonably safe while he went to find her. Without Dreamtime and the means to sail someplace far away, they would be little better off than everyone else here. Things were sure to get worse long before they got better, and the survivors left with limited options were going to get a lot more desperate and dangerous. Eric felt far better about taking his chances at sea. He’d had enough of fighting hopeless battles to change things that probably couldn’t be changed.
He was confident that the boat could be saved if they acted quickly. If they couldn’t find Keith, he would find someone else who could help them. He’d come prepared for that as well, as they were traveling a long way up river and he didn’t intend to go back until he’d arranged a solution. The weight of the small pouch of Krugerrands in his pocket reminded him how fortunate he was to have the means to pay for such help if it came to that. Gold would always work to get things done, no matter how bad the economic situation got, and Eric had enough to get a lot done.
He kept the dinghy at just enough speed to plane, a pace that would be fuel efficient and still relatively quiet from far away. When they reached the area of Morgan City, scattered lights powered by generators and open fires here and there shone against the backdrop of damaged buildings and houses. There were barges and various workboats and fishing vessels docked along the waterfront, but even in the dark, Eric could tell that there was barely any activity here despite how busy this place had once been. Morgan City was situated in the center of a junction of waterways, including the route to the Gulf from which they arrived. The Gulf ICW connected the river to Texas as well as to points east, and the Atchafalaya and some of its smaller bayous converged near there from the north. Their route north would be on that main river channel, which flowed down the western side of the basin, but to get there they had to wind through Morgan City’s hurricane-devastated industrial waterfront. As they passed beneath the low bridges Bart had been concerned about here, Eric kept to the middle of the channel to keep some distance from the banks in case someone happened to spot them. Jonathan kept a continuous lookout for movement, switching between night vision and the regular binoculars, but if anyone was watching them motor by, he didn’t see them.
“This is pretty messed-up, dude,” Jonathan said, over the hum of the Yamaha. “It’s worse than anything we saw in Florida. That hurricane must have been a badass storm when it came through here!”
“I’m sure it was. You saw what was between here and the Gulf—not much of anything. They would have gotten the full force of it here. Most of the people that lived here are probably dead or have moved on.”
Regardless of the greatly diminished current population, Eric felt too exposed out there on the river, even in the dark of night. It was a relief when the last of the lights disappeared behind them as they moved north. It was hard to discern much of the landscape in the dark, but Eric could see that the riverbanks here were wooded. Bart had said that north of Morgan City they would be entering the main Atchafalaya Basin. The vast between the levees was said to be the largest swamp in North America and much of it was heavy river bottom forest subject to seasonal flooding. Eric knew such a place would make a good hideout for insurgents. With the country in chaos as it was, and various factions fighting against the government as well as each other, many of them would be claiming territory from which to base their operations. He had no idea if any such groups existed in these parts, and he had no desire to find out. He had no time for that kind of fun and games now, and hoped he never did again.
The main river channel of this part of the river was still wide enough that it was easy to follow in the dark. They passed several junctions with other waterways entering the river from the west, like the one they were looking for, but all of them were too far south based on Eric’s dead reckoning calculations, so he passed them without even slowing. There were floating channel marker buoys in the river too, but other than to confirm they were on the main route, they meant little to Eric without the charts necessary to identify them. His estimate was that they would be in the vicinity of their turn-off when they had traveled for approximately three hours after leaving Morgan City. The Yamaha purred along flawlessly, making it easy to maintain a constant speed, and when they were close, Eric favored the west side of the river so that they wouldn’t miss the junction.
“That’s got to be it,” he said, aiming the bow of the inflatable towards the wide opening of another channel angling in from just west of due north. “It’s in the right place and coming in from the right direction.”
“So we go up that channel a few miles, and then we’ll be looking for a bayou cutting off to the left?” Jonathan asked, when Eric slowed down for the junction.
“Yep. Dad said it’s the first one that we’ll come to and that we can’t miss it.”
“This place is awesome!” Jonathan said, as he stared into the dark and mysterious stands of tall cypress trees that grew right to the edges of the old river. Many of them had been damaged by the storm, but the forest was still impressive. “I’ll bet your dad is right about the fishing here, and there’s nobody around. This is way better than Florida!”
“Don’t speak too soon. We won’t really know what’s going on until we talk to Keith. Let’s just hope he’s still around.”
Eric steered them up the smaller, old river channel at a much slower pace than he’d run the big river. There were logs and big drifts of storm debris caught in the eddies near some of the bends, and he was leery of hitting something in the dinghy after what had already happened to the schooner. The RIB was much tougher than an ordinary inflatable, but it would still be possible to rip open the tubes if they hit a sharp object at speed. In just a few miles, they came to the mouth of a large bayou branching off the river to the southwest, just about where Eric expected it would be.
“This has got to be it. Everything about it looks right.”
“So, we just follow this bayou until we see the house?”
“Yep. Unless someone else has built there since, it’ll be the first one we come to. Keith’s place is the only one this far down.”
Eric had been impressed that one time he’d visited Keith and Lynn at their bayou home. Keith had been lucky to find a piece of property like that—isolated from nearby neighbors, yet still accessible both by water and the small paved road that paralleled part of the bayou. They both seemed to love it there. It was similar to the kind of place where Lynn grew up on the west side of the basin, and ideal for Keith as it was in the jurisdiction of St. Martin Parish and relatively close to the sheriff’s office in St. Martinsville, despite how remote it seemed surrounded by the enclosing woods.
Eric took it even slower on the bayou, steering clear of the protruding branches of downed trees that had fallen in from the banks. Unless Keith was out working tonight, Eric figured he would be at home and likely asleep at this hour. He didn’t want to alarm him, and more importantly, didn’t want to get shot. He and Jonathan had already come close to that when they’d approached his father’s boatyard on the Caloosahatchee in the wee hours of the morning. Keith was every bit as dangerous as their old man, and with what he’d probably been dealing with here as a sheriff’s deputy, he would likely take no chances with intruders. Eric had brought his handheld VHF radio with him, and now that he knew he was close to Keith’s house, he slowed to a stop and tried calling him with the transmitter on the low-power setting. If he had a radio in his patrol boat, it might be on. He probably wouldn’t hear it from inside the house, especially if he was asleep, but Eric thought it was worth a try, even though the result was as he expected.
“We’ll just have to yell when we get within sight of the house. Maybe he won’t start shooting if he hears his name.”
“That’s really rea
ssuring, dude.”
“Yeah, well it’s all I got right now, so we’ll take our chances.”
When they rounded a sharp bend, Eric was surprised to see that they were closer to Keith’s than he’d guessed. The house was there on the west bank dead ahead, elevated fully ten feet above ground level on heavy wooden pilings. New metal roof panels reflected the moonlight from one corner, but part of the roof was covered by what looked to be a tarp, probably because of hurricane damage. There was a low dock along the waterfront adjacent to the house, but no boats were tied up there. Eric knew that didn’t mean anything. Keith could have lost his patrol boat to the hurricane or someone else in the department might be using it. He was certain this was the right house though, because it was just as he remembered it from his one visit. There was no generator noise and no lights shining inside the house or out. Eric eased the dinghy closer and scanned the property with the night vision monocular. The best indication that someone might be at home was the presence of three vehicles parked out front. One was a white SUV with a sheriff’s department emblem on the door. There was also a silver Jeep Cherokee and the old blue Toyota four-wheel-drive pickup that Keith had owned since before he joined the Marines. In the open space under the house, Eric saw two motorcycles chained to one of the pilings and a couple of mountain bikes hanging on a rack. He stood in the dinghy and yelled his brother’s name and waited, watching the windows for signs of movement or a light. But there was nothing. It seemed no one was at home, despite all the vehicles at the house. Eric figured Keith was gone in the boat, probably out working tonight. Maybe Lynn was staying somewhere else, with her family perhaps? It made sense that Keith wouldn’t leave her out here alone considering what was happening everywhere.
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