Highfire

by Eoin Colfer

  There ain’t one goddamn thing I’m seeing here that I don’t like, thought Hooke. I know there are finer women who don’t need persuading, but Miss Elodie is a peach, no doubt.

  Inside the house, Elodie climbed up along the table leg, then stood in place, swaying slightly.

  That goddamn woman is asleep, Hooke realized, and gave one more knock at the window.

  Barely a minute later Elodie appeared at the screen door. She hadn’t needed a minute to shrug on a dressing gown, being as she was still in her night-shift duds.

  Hooke was disappointed.

  A little slovenly, he thought, a person sleeping in her clothes. That’s something I’ll have to fix.

  Still he kept his professional face on, hiding his eyes behind the Wayfarers, hoping the Polaroids reflected the light both ways so she wouldn’t see the lasers coming out of him. Not yet, leastways.

  Elodie opened the door, eyes down, in the manner of sleepy people. Hooke’s navy uniform trousers with their gold piping were enough to shake half the sleep from her system.

  “Constable Hooke,” she said, taking a barefoot step back, surprised to see him at her door, especially so soon after his snake bite. It was true that he had called on her before, but never out of the blue. “Constable.”

  Hooke approximated a friendly smile. It came out something like a guy sucking on a slice of lemon.

  “That’s two ‘Constables.’ Hell, that near to makes me a captain—Captain Hooke. Get it?”

  Elodie shook her wedge of dark hair.

  Hairdo looks like someone hacked it off the back of her head with an axe, thought Hooke. I believe she does it herself. Squib’s, too. Guess she only knows that one style.

  “Oh, I see,” mumbled Elodie, rubbing one eye. “Captain Hooke. Like in the book.”

  Stupid Cajun, thought Hooke. I like that. “I think you might find it was a movie,” he said kindly. “If you went and looked into it.”

  Elodie blinked maybe half a dozen times, thinking that maybe she was still dreaming.

  “I’ll do that. You know, there’s no need to come around, Constable. You done thanked me already, at the clinic. Maybe you don’t remember. You was all drugged up at the time.”

  Hooke held up a hand to stop the flow. “No, Elodie. Miss Moreau. It ain’t that. It ain’t that at all. I’m here about something else.”

  “About that something else,” said Elodie, placing half her head behind the flimsy protection of the screen door. “I don’t think there is anything else, Constable.”

  Hooke knew what Elodie was saying. She had seen him stripped down to the bones personality-wise and thought now that there was no future for them romantic-wise. This surely was a pity, but Hooke had encountered resistance before and he felt confident he could charm his way over that molehill. But not today. Today was for more pressing issues.

  Hooke casually nudged the toe of his boot into the frame, in case he had to apply pressure to find out what he needed to know.

  Could be I’ll end up here for the day. Six hours shenanigans, two hours cleanup. Then burn the place to the ground.

  Hooke always kept that card in his back pocket, which was probably why that telltale glint never left his eyes. Every time he met someone, Hooke was figuring how to murder them and get away with it, in case the need arose.

  But this time, it was better to turn that burner down real low. There was an endgame here beyond the usual gratifications.

  “I ain’t here about personal stuff,” he said, “though I surely wish that was the case. No, I done had a complaint about your young ’un. Ain’t the first time neither.”

  Elodie came completely awake like a switch had been flicked. “Everett? He ain’t done nothing. The boy promised me.”

  Hooke sighed like it pained him to be delivering bad tidings. “They promise, don’t they? Sun, moon, and stars. But words don’t mean shit to boys in the long term, pardon my language. They is just convenient at the time.”

  Elodie had a bit of fight in her as far as Squib was concerned, her hackles rising even in the face of Hooke. “What’s Everett supposed to have done?”

  “This time,” said Hooke keeping up the gentle tone. “What’s Everett supposed to have done this time. Because this surely ain’t the first time.”

  Elodie squared her shoulders some and her chin cranked over to one side, which the hunter in Hooke knew as a sign that this lioness was prepared to protect her cub. “Well then,” she said, the steel in her voice challenging Hooke, “what’s he supposed to have done this time?”

  “Nothing too serious. Just a spot of dynamiting on the bayou. Stun those catfish to the surface.” Hooke wiggled his pinky finger. “He sure has got previous experience in that particular area, if not expertise.”

  Elodie gripped the screen-door slat tight with one hand and her entire frame stiffened, and Hooke realized that with that one little gesture he’d forever blown his chances. It always amazed him how much some mothers actually loved their offspring. Not his, obviously, which was why he found it hard to relate.

  “It’s been a while since that incident, Constable,” said Elodie. “Everett’s done straightened up. Boy’s working three jobs trying to get us out of the hole his daddy done dug.”

  Hooke was interested. “Three jobs? You don’t say? Mind running those down for me?”

  Elodie counted down on two fingers. “One, the boy has his own graft on the water. Crawfish, catfish. Sells to Bodi direct. Which is his second port, working the bar and grill, being as Bodi cuts us a deal on this place.”

  “Yup,” said Hooke, thinking, Cuts a deal, does he? I wonder, is old Bodi taking his rent in kind?

  “Three,” continued Elodie, on her thumb, “Mister Waxman has taken him on as his assistant. He’s doing all sorts of chores over there. It appears Mister Waxman likes to loaf about mostly, and he has Everett keep up his house. My boy is spending every hour the Lord sends on the water. Won’t even take the Sundays for himself. He’s a good son, Constable. Lord knows he sneaks a beer on occasion, but that’s all he does these days. He swore to me, and I believe him. I ain’t breaking my back to throw it all away on bail money and medical fees.”

  Hooke tipped his cap back on the crown of his head. “That’s a pretty speech, Miss Elodie. You surely do have a way with the words.”

  “Truth makes its own way,” said Elodie, shifting one foot back like she was primed to end this conversation.

  “That’s all as may be,” said Hooke. “Unfortunately, I have this here complaint and I got to check it out. So, if you could present the young fella, we can get this cleared up in a jiffy.”

  “I can’t present him,” said Elodie, sounding hard like she wouldn’t present him if she could. “He’s at the Pearl, filling Waxman’s shopping list. I don’t know when the boy sleeps. Can’t be getting more than two hours in the bunk every evening.”

  Hooke allowed his mirrored gaze to wander all over Elodie’s person, taking his sweet time, moving his head as well as his eyes so that she knew he was looking, because at this point he was pretty sure his chances of getting his hands on that person legitimately were pretty much zero, but he gave it one more try.

  “Maybe I could come by later and catch up with the boy? Maybe bring a bottle of that sparkling wine you like?”

  Elodie rubbed her neck. “I can’t, Constable. I’m on the late shift all summer. We need the money, Lord knows we do.”

  Well now, thought Hooke, there’s the clincher.

  He considered snatching the Wayfarers off his own face then, letting this no-account Cajun see exactly what she was turning down. How her life was hanging by a thread every time they spoke.

  Take off the glasses, then one hand around her throat, and walk her backwards into the house.

  Wasn’t no one around to see. The kid was on the clock.

  But that didn’t solve his problem. There was someone out there, maybe with a video of him slitting Carnahan’s belly, but at the very least an eyewitness.r />
  And even after that problem was solved, he had Ivory Conti’s empire to deal with.

  It had to be done clever.

  He flashed back on a night in Iraq, sitting on a breeze block beside an oil-drum fire, and Colonel Faraiji showing him a stump of cracked wood before he tossed it into the flames.

  “Do you see this piece of wood, Regence, my friend?”

  “I see it, Colonel,” Hooke had said. “And I bet there’s more to it than wood. I bet nature’s teaching me a lesson I ain’t understood yet.”

  Faraiji’s smile was pained but indulgent. He’d never had a son who would listen to the lessons passed down through the generations, so Hooke would have to do.

  “This wood is split and weakened. Good for nothing but the fire. How did this happen?”

  “Fuck knows,” said Hooke.

  “How would you destroy this piece of wood?”

  Hooke’s patience was wearing thin. Faraiji never just came out and said stuff. There was always the big buildup.

  “I guess I would take an axe to it.”

  “And how would the wood feel as the axe came down?”

  Sometimes Hooke felt like he was being trained by Yoda. “I guess the wood would shit its wooden trunks.”

  “Exactly,” said Faraiji. “So we must take our cue from the desert moisture. Seep into the wood, as a friend, then freeze in the night and split the wood.”

  “Fight from the inside is what you’re saying?”

  “Exactly, my friend,” said Faraiji. “And even as the wood lay dying, it would not blame the water.”

  Fight from the inside, thought Hooke now. Be a friend to all, until the time comes to stop being a friend.

  He flashed Elodie a smile that was broader than it was deep. “Hey, you can’t blame a fella for asking, right?” He slid a card from his breast pocket and proffered it to Elodie like he’d pulled it from behind her ear, magician-style. “Ask Squib to give me a call when you see him. It ain’t nothing serious, but I do want to hear from him, okay?”

  Elodie took the card, careful not to make fingertip contact. “I surely will tell him, Constable.”

  Hooke adopted a jokey Southern drawl. “Don’t make me come back here, hear?”

  “I hear ya,” said Elodie, an unconvincing good sport.

  Hooke tapped his brim. “Ma’am,” he said, and returned to the Chevy, leaving Elodie Moreau shivering in the thump of ninety-degree Louisiana heat.

  The Hooke-Moreau hookup was never going to happen now, and they both knew it.

  But, thought Hooke as he climbed into his vehicle, there is surely more than one way to skin a Cajun.

  Chapter 10

  VERN SNUCK INTO HIS CABIN THAT SAME AFTERNOON KNOWING full well that he shouldn’t even be in there during the daytime, in case one of those swamp boys plucked up the courage to set foot on the island. Lord knew he had disappeared a few of them over the years just to send a message to the rest, but there was always some bane-eyed simpleton looking to make a name for himself by tracking down the Honey Island monster.

  “This ain’t even Honey Island, you dumbass,” Vern had shouted at the one guy before he sank him in the bayou.

  But he didn’t do that anymore.

  What he usually did was slink into the water and hide out till the latest baccy-chewing would-be monster-killer went on his way, praying he wouldn’t stumble across Vern’s shack with TV, beer cooler, and satellite line snaking down from the cypress canopy.

  Not today, thought Vern, cracking the seal on his first bottle of vodka of the day. Today I torch any motherfucker who sticks his nose into my hallowed ground. Screw it, I am done hiding.

  Vern was no fool. He knew what was going on.

  The black dog has got me in his jaws.

  These spells were unpredictable and often accompanied by a migraine so severe that Vern felt like the top of his head was gonna peel right off. His core temperature went sky-high, and he could melt his way through a tub of ice in twenty minutes, if he had a tub, or if he had any ice to spare.

  Problem was that the blues used to creep over him slow: a gradual trough, then a slow climb up the other side. But now his mind knew what to expect and ramped things up straightaway, from zero to critical in a matter of minutes. The slightest trigger could set him off. A fish bone in his teeth. A bad bowl of gumbo. Or, in this case, the slightly more serious matter of his only friend going into the earth. The depression had taken hold of him when old Wax had gone down, and had only gotten worse since.

  When these moods came over him, Vern felt like he was trapped in a dark tunnel with nothing ahead but more darkness. Endless night with only momentary flashes of light to distract him.

  Light? he thought now. What fucking light? I can’t even go out in the daytime no more.

  And that was when the thoughts came, like:

  Why bother? Why the hell bother? Ain’t you lived enough?

  The temptation that lurked closest to the surface was to go out in a blaze of glory. Just load up on fats and make a beeline for Belle Chasse. Swoop in there and go full scorched earth. See how much damage he could do before the navy got the tarps off their big guns.

  Shit, I could probably burn that base off the face of the earth.

  It tickled Vern some to imagine the worldwide shit storm that would follow an event like that. The humans would straight-up crap themselves. Washington would be terrified of an impending dragon takeover. No stone would be left unturned, that was for sure.

  And this was where Vern’s gung-ho fantasy ran out of steam. If Vern cut himself a fiery swath through some armed forces, then you could bet your last quarter that the government would scour every remote corner of the earth looking for more possible threats. And if he wasn’t the last, if there were a few of his brothers and sisters hiding out somewhere, then Vern’s actions would condemn them along with himself. Or even worse, they would be taken alive and subjected to a whole raft of intrusive testing.

  Also, Wax’s new pacifist ethos must be rubbing off on him because Vern didn’t enjoy killing humans like he used to. The red mist was lifting a little. He hadn’t gone on an unprovoked rampage for more than a century, though the way Vern figured it, every rampage had been provoked if you followed the river back to its source, so to speak. Vern had only killed in order to survive for quite some time, and even then, he’d kept a clean slate for close to eight years, ever since an asshole monster-hunter had actually found what he’d been looking for.

  I outta get one of those flip signs, Vern thought. “No homicides in: 2923 days.”

  So, no flying into naval bases.

  But Vern still yearned to just not be on occasion. And he would probably have to weather many such occasions before he made it through this spell of gloominess.

  And he’d made several attempts to get that done. Back in the day he realized that his neck was simply too stubborn to be snapped by any kind of rope-drop combination. Deadly nightshade just gave him a knee-trembling case of the shits. A bullet to the brain never made it through his skull, though he did manage to damage his sinuses when he stuffed a flintlock up his nasal passage. Vern took a high jump a time or two, but chickened out before impact. Once he chickened out a hundred feet too late and inflicted a bum shoulder on himself for a couple of decades. It still twinged from time to time.

  Frankly, it was too much pain for too little gain.

  Or it had been. Until now.

  Because Wax had given him his bag to destroy, in case some dumbass found it and mistook the vials for aphrodisiac. The Gladstone bag of murderous playthings, chock-full of death-dealers that had been passed down through the centuries. Usually Waxman didn’t have to dig too deep into his bag for the appropriate murder weapon, but there were a few hidden pouches just in case. Sure, the mogwai could slice and dice a person better than most, but he could also drop a parasite into an ear or smear toxic bacteria on the back of a neck, all kinds of subtle but fatal shenanigans. When it came to creative ways to kill a person
, the mogwai made humans look like koala bears. And it seemed to Vern that mogwai in general had a real taste for that macabre element of the job, but lately Waxman had lost his gusto in the homicide department. He’d held on to the bag, though, because you never knew, and now Vern had the bag, stashed inside his wet sack for the swim back here. And he knew there was something in there that could do him in because Waxman had told him so, maybe fifty years ago, when he started putting the bag together.

  Vern remembered the first day Waxman had plonked the Gladstone bag onto the orange crate which had served him as a table before he went all antique-collectory.

  “You see this, Highfire?” he’d asked, like it wasn’t sitting right there. “This here is my murder kit. ’Cause you know people are going to need killing if we plan to avoid dying.”

  “Amen, brother,” Vern had said, because truer words had never been uttered.

  The bag was in its infancy at that point, but still Waxman laid out a fair collection on the crate. Blades, bottles, pills wrapped in tissue.

  “That’s a lotta shit,” Vern had commented. “That bag is like a goddamn clown car.”

  This had been back when Vern did a lot of circus references just to piss Waxman off, considering how he’d been rescued.

  “Screw you, Highfire,” Waxman had said. “You see, it’s comments like that is why I have this beauty here.”

  The “beauty” in question was a small patty of herbs and mud wrapped up in a boiled nettle leaf. Covered in wax paper, the leaf looked like a hipster vegan snack. Except it wasn’t.

  “Dragon’s Bane,” explained Waxman. “Because some dragons are assholes who get to thinking that maybe they can beat up on their mogwai whenever they feel like it. I’m here to tell you, Highfire, I don’t hold with that kind of abuse, and I won’t stand for it.”

  Which kind of put them on an even footing.

  And now, seventy years later, dragon and mogwai had grown tight, and there was a ball of Dragon’s Bane sitting on the table in front of Vern.

  So easy, thought Vern. I pop this little fella down my gullet, lie down in the swamp, and let Wax’s pill work its magic.