Highfire

by Eoin Colfer

  Probably not, he admitted. Even before Daddy lost his mind to God, I wasn’t big on conscience and the like.

  “Yep,” he said to the unconscious boy, “first I’ll take the gut hook to you, then old Vern is gonna do my bidding, and when I’m good and satisfied, I’ll put that monster down.”

  What happened next surprised Hooke, and truth be told, he didn’t really understand what was happening until it was over. And even then, he would spend long hours mulling it over, wondering if it could have gone any other way—like, could he have wrung some advantage from the situation.

  Squib was facedown in the vegetable patch with the stink of manure cut with the sharp odor of coffee grinds rising up out of the earth, which was all well and good, but then the earth took to humping and rippling like something was coming up out of there, which couldn’t be right unless a cypress root was shifting, which Hooke had seen happen before, or maybe like a bubble of swamp brook was winding to the surface.

  Hooke was more interested than alarmed, as there wasn’t much to fear from roots or swamp water. But the shifting increased in amplitude, and goddamn if a pale arm didn’t come shooting out of the clay, followed by more limbs and the approximation of a head.

  “Shit,” said Hooke. “Lotta teeth.”

  Which was his first impression. And the constable was not wrong: Whatever that thing was, it did have a whole lot of teeth, which were buzzing in a very disconcerting fashion, and it did not take a whole lot of imagination to realize what those teeth might do to a body.

  Hooke decided to negotiate. “Hey!” he said, “Hold your horses there, fella.”

  But when the creature, whatever it was, obstinately persisted in emerging from the swamp mud, Hooke decided enough with the diplomacy and brought his shotgun to bear.

  “Vern!” said the swamp thing, but that was all it managed as Hooke’s first shot took its face off below the jaw and set it seesawing on its breastbone.

  “Shit,” said Hooke. “Is that you, Waxman? You ain’t human, son—all this time?”

  And right there in front of his eyes, Waxman’s jaw swung upwards, strands of flesh reaching for the upper jaw, questing to be realigned.

  “Vern,” said Waxman again, and he was most of the way out of the mud now, and his hand was reaching for Hooke, and not in a friendly fist bump kind of a way.

  Everything was happening too fast for Hooke to be spooked, or even to consider his options, one of which might be to leverage Waxman to get to Vern somehow. But now Waxman—or whatever it was—was out of the hole, the dirt falling off its torso in clumps, leaving the creature naked apart from a triangular jockstrap of some kind.

  “Shit, son,” said Hooke. “Is that pizza?”

  Waxman, still trying to shake off his grave funk, didn’t respond.

  I guess getting shot in the face didn’t help none, thought Hooke. It was a pity he had had to plug the old guy, because this was fascinating stuff and most days life on the bayou was so goddamn dull.

  My eyes have been opened, Poppa, he told the ghost of his father. This swamp is surely a land of wonders.

  Waxman’s face kept right on repairing itself. The old geezer shambled from side to side.

  Like a zombie, thought Hooke, but then corrected himself. No. Not like no zombie. Zombies were human at some point. Old Waxman sure ain’t human.

  “On your knees, son,” he ordered whatever it was that had emerged from the earth. “Hands behind your head.”

  But that was just reflexive talking; there wasn’t no police work going on here tonight.

  We’re all of us in the swamp now, Hooke realized.

  Waxman either did not hear or chose to ignore Hooke’s commands regarding his knees and hands and kept right on coming, spilling some kind of black bile from his shredded throat.

  Hooke pumped another shell into the barrel and took a breath to issue a warning, but instead changed his mind and used the drawn breath to say, “Fuck it.”

  And he shot Waxman’s left leg from under him, sending the creature down in the dirt beside Squib.

  Waxman oughta been driven near to insane with agony, but the pain seemed to sharpen his wits somewhat. “You asshole, Hooke,” he said, wriggling onto his back. “You done shot the wrong mogwai this time.”

  “A mogwai,” said Hooke. “Is that what I’m talking to?”

  Waxman pawed the earth till he found his leg, then held it close to the stump, which immediately began to spin a web of new sinew, stitching the leg back on.

  “Well, balls,” said Hooke. “It seems like I’m wasting my cartridges here. You don’t die like normal people, huh?”

  Waxman concentrated on his leg, like he was healing it with mind power. “You ain’t got the stuff to kill me, Hooke,” he said.

  Regence drew out his gut hook knife. “Oh, I got the stuff all right, Waxman.”

  Waxman glared at Hooke with golden eyes. “You ain’t killing anybody, Constable. Soon as my leg grabs hold, I’m gonna eat you like a goddamn crawfish, suck the brains right outta your head. You’ll never see a nugget of that Reb gold.”

  Reb gold? thought Hooke. This gets better and better.

  The constable squatted down. “Shit, Waxman. You’re awful perky for a gunshot victim.”

  Waxman nodded at his leg. “This ain’t nothing. You ain’t got the first clue how to end me. Better men than you have tried.”

  “Maybe a better man ain’t what’s needed in this situation,” noted Hooke. “Maybe what you need is a worse man, and I surely am one of those.”

  And Hooke couldn’t be sure, but it seemed that old Waxman blanched a little at that. But just a little.

  “I been in worse situations, Hooke,” declared the mogwai. “I dealt with worse people than you. You think you’re bad, son? I seen bad and you ain’t it. I ate bad and shit it out all over this bayou.”

  “Yep,” said Hooke, “you surely do talk tough, lying there hanging onto your magic leg, but all you’re doing is trying to buy time, hoping for a miracle. It ain’t coming, old man. Ain’t nothing coming for you but the void.”

  This hit home. It was evocative rhetoric: Nothing coming for you but the void. Hooke could see Waxman’s confidence meter was falling.

  Let me just hurry that process along, thought Hooke, grabbing Waxman’s leg and twisting it clear of the mogwai’s body, tearing the fresh-grown tendrils. Waxman flinched some but refused to cry out.

  “Interesting trick,” observed Hooke as fresh tendrils reached out for Waxman’s person. “I wonder what your range is.” The constable tossed Waxman’s leg to the riverbank, then watched the new tendrils wriggle and die. “I guess less than six feet,” he said dispassionately. “I should make a note or something.”

  “I’m gonna make a note on your forehead with my fingernail. ‘DOA,’” said Waxman, but it was clear he didn’t believe it himself.

  “Of course you are, son,” said Hooke. “Now here’s what’s actually going to happen. I’m gonna finish you off, Waxman. Sure as day follows night, you’re going to meet your maker. And after I do you, your pal Vern is next. And after him, the boy. And that’s just God’s honest truth. None of us think it’s coming, and maybe you got more of a right to believe that than most, but time’s up for you, old man. Time’s up, and that’s the way it is. Now, you look in my eyes and tell me it ain’t so.”

  Hooke watched as Waxman did as he was told. The creature looked into his eyes, and Regence knew he saw nothing in there but sense of purpose.

  Yep, he thought. It’s sinking in.

  Waxman changed his tack and tried to appeal to Hooke’s better nature. “You know what you’re doing here, Hooke? This is more than murder. Ain’t you got no heart?”

  Hooke ran his thumb along the curved blade of his gut hook. “Reckon I don’t, but I aim to find out exactly where yours is at.”

  IT TOOK HOOKE a good half hour, but he finally located Waxman’s heart, in his left ass cheek, of all places, and the mogwai talked all the way through,
spouting threats and bile like there was still a chance he was coming out the other end of this encounter.

  “God sure does have himself a sense of humor,” muttered Hooke as he severed Waxman’s arteries and lifted the dripping heart out of its cradle of bone. And just to be sure of the job, he hacked the mogwai’s head from his shoulders with the blade of Squib’s shovel and laid the lot out in a gruesome tableau around the boy.

  “Say cheese, fellas,” he said, snapping off a bunch of photos with Squib’s cell phone. He would send the best shot to Vern with a nicely phrased provocative message, see if he couldn’t entice the dragon out of his shack.

  It occurred to Hooke as he dumped Waxman’s remains into the swamp that he was likely unleashing all manner of hullaballoo on the parish.

  And I’m gonna be the guy holding his nerve while all around are losing their shit.

  Which was another version of the old poem.

  Hooke remembered that old Waxman had a nice shower in his back room. He was covered in mogwai slime, among other things, and he had a lot to achieve.

  You ain’t looking your sharpest, Regence, son. Best you smarten up for a trip into the city.

  So, first a good long shower, then let loose the dragon.

  Sounded like a plan.

  Chapter 15

  HOOKE WAS NOT EXPECTING TO BE WELCOMED WITH OPEN ARMS when he presented himself at the Marcello elevator, and he was right to have low expectations. In fact, the only open arms were the constable’s own, as Rossano Roque frisked him with a thoroughness that would not have been out of place in Gitmo.

  Of course Hooke had not simply strolled in the revolving door with the kid slung over his shoulder in a duffel bag. He considered it, but there was blood blossoming through the canvas, and that would have been too brazen, even for him. So instead, the constable parked out back and lugged Squib in through the deliveries entrance, stashing him in the meat freezer behind the kitchen. One of Conti’s lower-tier goons with spirals shaved into the side of his head was dumb enough to challenge him, so Hooke had cuffed him hard enough to knock the grille right out of his mouth and set him guarding the freezer until he could persuade Ivory to station someone there who was a little lower on the dumbass scale.

  Ivory Conti was waiting for him when Rossano Roque pushed open the heavy double doors. The capo was standing behind one of those adjustable desks which rose up on a motor so he wouldn’t develop curvature of the spine from too much chair-time writing figures into a leather-bound ledger. That was the world he came out of: Wall Street and hedge funds, one of maybe a dozen of the real high rollers who cashed out in 2007, which was optimum cash-out time. You can believe he laughed his waxed balls off when the crash came the following year. If cash was king, then Ivory Conti had graduated to emperor.

  Ivory had decided that the only guaranteed market for his money was contraband, or, more specifically, drugs, and so he invested a large part of his fortune in resuscitating the mobbed-up gang model of the 1950s, when his grandpa had been consigliere for Carlos Marcello, the Tunisian godfather of the Italian Mafia in the French Quarter: a truly international enterprise.

  Ivory had heard all the tales from dear old Grandpa—about how the movie stars flocked to New Orleans and Vegas to fawn over the made men, how there was no finer job for a real man than running his own numbers syndicate—and little Ivory had bought it hook, line, and sinker, even though Poppa had worked himself to death to keep Ivory out of the life. And yet here he was, balls-deep in wise guys looking to be like him, a force in the New Orleans drug scene. And he was a force: medium-sized as yet, but getting bigger, all thanks to the army of crooked but excellent lawyers who’d kept him out of prison on Wall Street, and the legion of police from various institutions across the US, Mexico, and Canada who were very well compensated for having his back.

  Soon those guys will have my back, Hooke thought now.

  Ivory had been known to say, “Don’t expect to make money in the first five years. That’s when you sow the seeds.”

  This was a revolutionary business model for drug dealers, who usually expected to see hefty returns right from the off, but Ivory had money and what he wanted was the Life, which was not to say he was one for giving cash away. Ivory applied the same acumen to his drug deals as he had to his funding of hedges, or vice versa.

  “I’m building bridges now,” he had told Hooke as part of his recruitment patter. “But in five years’ time this town will be mine. It’s all about infrastructure, cop.”

  Hooke had been impressed at the time, that time being a long time ago.

  Ivory Conti looked the part, it had to be admitted—if the part in question was a classic-era mafioso with a pin-striped gray suit, slicked-back hair the color of copper wire, and an almost luminous blue tie fatter than a cottonmouth.

  “Ivory” was Conti’s mob handle. He’d arrived from New York with the pseudonym in place. “Anthony” was the actual name on his birth certificate, but that was too on the nose for a guy who was actually mobbed-up: “Tony the Mafioso.” No, “Ivory” sounded good, and it suited him too. Ivory Conti: the little white count, on account of his super-pale skin. He had de-fanged any ribbing that might come his way over the complexion by sticking it into his name. Clever.

  Hooke thought that this self-applied nickname told a person a lot about Ivory Conti, about how he could control a situation. But shit, he thought with some contempt, a goddamn hurricane couldn’t control Regence Hooke.

  Now he ignored Ivory Conti, deciding to take himself a look at a large painting in an ornate gold frame. Some guy buck naked, more or less, tied to a tree and porcupined with droopy arrows. Guy still looked all holy and shit, like the arrows didn’t bother him none ’cause he was off down the yellow brick road or whatever to see his Lord.

  Hooke knew that look from his own father: the holier-than-thou look. He sniggered. This guy is certainly holier than me, he thought. In every sense.

  “Saint Sebastian,” said Ivory behind him. “By Botticelli. A fine example of chiaroscuro. You familiar with chiaroscuro, cop?”

  “Something to do with how light falls on the subject,” said Hooke, dragging up that nugget from somewhere. “That’s it, right?”

  “That is it, Constable Hooke,” said Ivory. “Look at this, Rossano: The cop knows his art.”

  Hooke turned from the print. “I know enough to know that’s a fake, boss man. Ain’t no Botticelli in the French Quarter.”

  Ivory winced, pained. “It’s a print, Hooke. Not a fake. And someday I might get the real one up there. Maybe I already have it.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the titanium walk-in wall safe, which, rumor had it, doubled as a safe room.

  I surely would love to get me a peek in there, thought Hooke. An Aladdin’s cave of wonders, I bet.

  “It’s important to have goals,” he said.

  Ivory went back to what he’d been doing, which was counting money right out on his standing desk.

  “Constable Hooke,” said the self-styled kingpin. “A cop in my den.”

  Cold shoulder, thought Hooke, so he thought he might push the boundaries a little, shake this little mafioso out of his Capone fantasy. “Gauche,” he said, nodding at the towers of cash.

  This term was unusual enough for Ivory to spare him a glance. “What’s that, Constable? You trying to educate me?”

  “What you’re doing there, son. Gauche. Unpolished.”

  Well, that was enough impudence to stop Ivory in midstack. “You know I’m Italian, right? Sicilian, as a matter of fact. And you’re coming in here calling me unpolished in front of my boy?”

  Now Hooke had his full attention, which was the point. “No, Mister Ivory, I’m just trying to help you along the road to the big time. The boss don’t count money. The soldiers count money. You didn’t know, son—how could you know, being as you’re starting out? Grunt work like that gets delegated.”

  Ivory stopped counting the money. “What are we talking about here, Constable?”
he asked, and Hooke thought that maybe he was smarter than he looked in his Armani suit.

  Hooke eyeballed Roque until the big bodyguard shifted himself out of the way, and then the constable sat uninvited on the chaise longue. “What we’re talking about is how far up the ladder you’re aiming to climb, Ivory.”

  Roque piped up, “I’d say Mister Ivory’s on the top of the ladder, cop. Look around you.”

  Thank you, dumbass, thought Hooke, but he did indeed look around him, taking his sweet time. “Yup,” he said, “this is a fine building you got. Pillars and the whole works. I guess you’re pretty much in control of all the corners you can see from up here. Every single one.”

  Ivory was no fool. He knew blatant sarcasm when he heard it. “I know what I got, cop. I know who I am.”

  Hooke lit a cigar. “Maybe—but do you know where you’re going?”

  Ivory came around the desk. “I’m trying to figure your agenda here, Hooke. A fucking constable on my payroll who runs minor shit occasionally through a swamp coming in here with all this talk about where I’m going? You gotta know this don’t end well for you. Maybe you’re just insane. Is that your deal, Hooke?”

  Hooke took a deep drag. “Psychotic I would say. Yeah, that’s fair. Insane? That’s a little too much for me to take from you.”

  At this point, Ivory had no choice but to stop wondering about Hooke’s agenda and take action. “Okay, that’s it. I got no more time for you, Hooke. This one single building I have is a busy place. I gotta oversee all these corners. Gets real busy here in the city.”

  Hooke interrupted before Ivory could get to the part about making Sicily great again. “Okay, Mister Ivory, maybe I approached this all wrong. No disrespect intended and so forth. I just need to know what kinda balls you got in your silk shorts. I’ve worked with big players in Iraq, on both sides. On all sides, actually. I’m talking mountains of cocaine, shipping crates full of weapons. I’m talking billions in profits. You got that same look in your eyes those guys had. Ambition. But I need to move you on a few squares because there ain’t time to develop naturally.”