Highfire

by Eoin Colfer

  Sayonara, Ivory, thought Hooke, sucking down the sweet oxygen. You served your purpose, paisano. You kept me alive.

  And in return, when Vern had sent the lightning, Hooke had shut the boss out of the safe room.

  Ivory Conti must have been one paranoid little Italian mobster because that room was a mini fortress built to withstand the very worst that nature or the New Orleans underworld could throw its way. Turned out, the room itself was a modified bank vault that could shrug off a hit from a hurricane or an RPG with barely a buckle in its plates. Hooke had seen similar setups in Iraq, but nothing with air-conditioning and deep-pile carpets.

  Ten million, this place cost, he estimated. Easy. And that wasn’t even counting the private elevator.

  Little Ivory must have been expecting a siege-type situation.

  Besides the impressive wall of guns, Ivory had kept his stockpiles of cash in the safe room, along with his records, all burned onto labeled CDs, which was a little archaic but very handy. The surveillance feeds from all over the building were either completely dead or glitching, but the item which interested Hooke the most was a simple Moleskine notebook with the words “Pet Pigs” written on the cover in correction fluid.

  “Hello, future,” said Hooke, pocketing the book. He also stuffed two duffels with cash, a selection of car keys, a couple of gold ingots, and a lot of automatic weapons, because a dirty cop can never have too much of the pimp life. The final item to be requisitioned was a man-portable air-defense missile system, which Hooke almost missed because it was semi-disguised among a pile of cardboard poster tubes.

  “Ah, my Russian friend,” said Hooke, stroking it, “together we shall wreak such beautiful destruction.” The logic being that if a .50-cal could put a hole in Vern, then a Russian MANPAD would shut the lizard down but good. He slung it over his shoulder, summoned the elevator, and three minutes later was nudging his brand-new Humvee out through the underground parking garage’s security gates.

  The Marcello was beginning its slow collapse to the ground, shrieking and groaning like a dying behemoth, and Hooke knew he had underestimated Vern.

  Barely seven feet tall and with a paunch—I thought maybe a little flamethrower-type action, nothing like this. Goddamn, that boy can party.

  But so could Regence Hooke.

  We are as the great adversaries of history, thought Hooke, feeling a little grandiose. Ahab and the white whale.

  Vern was probably Moby-Dick in that scenario.

  Hooke patted the duffel of ordnance strapped into the passenger seat. “Well, boys,” he said to the guns, “I guess we’ll have to write ourselves a new ending to that story.”

  And since Hooke was Captain Ahab in this scenario, he would need to find himself a crew.

  VERN OFTEN THOUGHT that somewhere along the line one of his ancestors must’ve been a pigeon, because he had one hell of an internal compass and could generally find wherever he was looking for with his eyes closed, though this was more a figure of speech than a boast since his inner eyelids were transparent.

  Tonight, though, his compass was all over the place, and Vern found himself out over the Gulf with his mind a thousand miles away instead of concentrating on getting Squib home ASAP.This kind of disorientation often clouded his senses after a battle. One time he’d had a run-in with these Spanish Inquisition assholes outside Seville. There were harsh words on both sides, but it might have blown over had not this one martyr-looking motherfucker in a sackcloth cassock called Vern an “abomination.” Next thing Vern knew, he had six bloody crucifixes strung around his neck and he was touching down in Iceland. Frickin’ Iceland! That was no climate for a dragon. Still, he’d hung out in the Blue Lagoon for a spell until his presence started interfering with the local ecosystem and actually increased the water temperature and mineral composition.

  Tonight, he’d felt it again: the battle rage. Combine that with fat loss, and it was no wonder he was a bit out of his head.

  I need to get some fat into me, Vern realized, before I drop right out of the sky.

  And so he turned his senses back on and allowed the Pearl’s signature scent, a blend of skillet grease, watered beer, and latrine bleach, to guide him in from twenty miles out.

  “Pit stop, kid,” mumbled Vern, hugging Squib close to his belly so he could benefit from some dragon dynamo heat. Dipping his flaps, he added, “Time to refuel.”

  The Pearl Bar and Grill sat back from the Slidell road on the southern border of Petit Bateau. The parking lot was lit up like a baseball diamond on account of the swamp hillbillies who insisted on using any dark corner to go slapping the tar out of each other. There were a couple of dozen flatbeds out front and the buzzy sound of amplified power chords pulsing through the screen door.

  In his woozy state, Vern found himself missing company. For a fleeting moment he thought maybe he’d drop in for a rack of pool, seeing as he was already no doubt plastered all over the Internet. Could be that the Swamp Rangers were already on their way over here to throw some kind of weighted-net doodad over him.

  Then he came to his senses and straight-A resisted the temptation to join the drunken ranks of humanity, instead swooping in round back, skimming a jagged mass of briar and cypress, and scaring the crap out of a sleeping crane.

  “Fucking crane,” said Vern, and as he decelerated, the blood which had, unbeknownst to him, been blowing over his back suddenly reversed direction and flowed down over his face, and he realized that he was bleeding again. A lot.

  Hooke, he thought. The gift that keeps on giving.

  There was more than battle disorientation going on here. I am actually seriously wounded, thought the dragon, and as soon as he thought it, he felt it.

  He twisted in midair, misjudged the height of the fence, and clipped it with his tail, which would have been no big deal except that the proprietor had recently had it electrified and the resultant boost of his heart rate sent the blood gushing in Tarantino-esque gouts from his brow and skewed his coordination entirely. His claws spasmed, releasing Squib, who tumbled into the Pearl’s yard, landing awkwardly but fortuitously on a pile of oat sacks, while the dragon himself crashed headfirst into a pyramid of oil barrels, scattering them like pins.

  Bull’s-eye, he thought. All in all, a successful mission, Lord Highfire.

  And then he joined Squib in the land of shadows.

  SQUIB EMERGED FROM the shadows first, mainly because of the lick of lightning bolt in a can that jolted his system before Vern jettisoned his cargo. The de facto defibrillator set his heart pumping and evaporated the mist from his mind. Fortunately, it did not burn off the anesthetic effect, so the boy lay on his belly for a spell, smelling the oats and thinking breakfast must be on a skillet nearby, while the world and all its travails gradually leaked in from the edges of his eyeballs.

  Squib remembered the constable and his gut hook. He remembered those shining blue eyes that weren’t a mirror to anything, because Regence Hooke didn’t have no soul. He remembered the Marcello walk-in freezer, and how he’d imagined himself strung up with all those sides of beef. This was a troubling thought, and it might have upset the young buck even more had not his dragon friend rescued him.

  Did he have a dragon friend in the actual real world, or was Vern simply a boy’s fancy?

  Squib took a few breaths to ponder this and arrived at the conclusion that he had a dragon boss with friendship potential. And Vern had delivered him from further harm in the Quarter, where further harm had most definitely been on the agenda.

  This memory of harm reminded Squib again of his little piggies, as Momma used to call them on bath days in the blue plastic tub, some twelve years gone by now.

  Three of my little piggies have done gone to market, and they ain’t ever coming back, thought the boy. And he raised himself up from his inverted position on the sacks, for nothing moves a boy like the notion of taking a peek at his own scars.

  I must be a sight, he thought. Downright mutilated.

 
; Their arrival had activated a spotlight in the yard, and Squib knew at once where he was, for he’d been busting his hump in here for years.

  So he was aware right off where he’d landed, but even so, he took a moment to study his left foot in the light of the halogen lamp. “Holy shit,” he breathed. “Like goddamn taffy.”

  It was true. Vern’s surgery hadn’t exactly been cosmetic, and Squib’s foot looked like a monkey had operated on it with a blowtorch.

  “Cool,” said Squib. “I can’t feel a thing.”

  “Well now, son. That’s about to change.”

  Squib looked up from his scrutinizing to see Bodi Irwin pointing a pump-action in his direction. The boss of the Pearl Bar and Grill was scowling through a prodigious gray beard and sporting a 2004 tour T-shirt emblazoned with the legend “American Idiot.”

  Which just about covered how Squib felt.

  “DOWN YOU GET from that pile, Squib,” said Bodi, jerking the barrel of his shotgun, which Squib dearly wished he wouldn’t. Waxman used to say that where “jerking” was concerned, weapons were like a fella’s pecker and would respond in the same fashion. Squib had laughed along with that joke for years without getting it.

  He got it now, though.

  Yeah, I see, he thought. That barrel is likely to shoot off with Bodi manhandling it how he is.

  “This ain’t what it seems, Mister Irwin,” he said, pointing to his foot. “You know me. I wouldn’t thieve from you. Look, I been injured.”

  Bodi glanced at the brutalized foot, but his expression softened not one whit. “Yep. You got a habit of misplacing digits, ain’t you, Squib?”

  “Come on, Bodi,” said Squib. “This ain’t a normal situation. Look at me, way up here.”

  “Seems normal to me,” noted Bodi. “Some kid interfering with my electrified fence. Looks like you’re planning to step up to major larceny.”

  “That ain’t it,” objected Squib. “We crashed, is what it is, I think.”

  Bodi frowned, which crinkled the beard covering most of his face. “‘We’ crashed? Who the hell is ‘we’?”

  It was Squib’s turn to frown. “We” was difficult to explain without someone getting shot or fried, but he could see Vern’s tail sticking out of a mess of oil drums, and the tail wasn’t moving.

  “Okay, Mister Irwin. I’m gonna tell you the truth, but you gotta stop waving that shotgun around. If it goes off and you hit Vern, he ain’t gonna ’ppreciate it.”

  Bodi seemed to sense that something out of the ordinary was going on, and so he lowered his weapon maybe thirty degrees.

  “You got ten seconds, Squib, more or less. Ten seconds to tell me who the hell Vern is, and to convince me why I shouldn’t call the constable.”

  Squib took six of those seconds to plot out his various options and their possible outcomes. Most of them ended up with Bodi being dead. One of them ended up with Bodi accidentally shooting him with his final finger spasm, so before the ten-second deadline he piped up, “If you do call Hooke, I can guarantee that constable ain’t gonna answer that call.”

  The idea that Regence Hooke might be incapacitated in some way cheered Bodi Irwin immensely. “I’m listening,” he said.

  VERN SLOWLY WOKE and his first thought was, Oh, shit, something is Balls Out.

  He was right. Something was Balls Out—and in this instance, there was nothing metaphorical about the phrase.

  He opened his eyes to find himself lying on what he initially thought might be a cloud, so soft and comfy was it. And in that state of utter relaxation that came with being electrified into unconsciousness, he had naturally enough relaxed his scrotal clench and allowed his junk out for an airing. Which would be fine at home on the bayou with nobody watching except maybe a gutsy squirrel, but whatever he was lying on now did not belong in his shack.

  “Balls out,” muttered Vern. “Balls way out.”

  He opened both sets of eyelids, let his pupils settle down, and saw the familiar roof beams of his own shack, which was a relief. But he also noted that he was being hovered over by two humans, neither of them Squib, which was the opposite of a relief.

  Play it casual, Highfire, he told himself. “What the hell am I lying on?” he asked. “Because this shit sure is comfortable.”

  One of the humans squealed: a bearded man wearing a Green Day T-shirt.

  But the woman held it together and said, “That’s memory foam, Mister Vern. And perhaps we might drape a towel over you, for modesty’s sake.”

  Vern glanced downwards. “No need, Miss. I can take care of that double quick.” And he did the thing, withdrawing his tackle into its protective pouch.

  The man, who, Vern had noticed, had a shotgun tucked under his arm, recovered enough to whistle. “Sorry about the hollering. Squib said you could talk, but I guess I weren’t expecting a local accent.”

  “I’m a sponge that way,” said Vern. “I tend to talk like where I hang my hat.”

  “Uh-huh,” said the man, then, “That there is a neat trick with the crown jewels, son. Be handy in a bar fight.”

  “You said it,” said Vern. “Ain’t none of us relishes a Bud Light bottle in the nuts, am I right, fella?”

  The fella agreed with a nod and another “Uh-huh.” If there was one thing the species could come together on, it was balls ache, and the desire to avoid same.

  “Memory foam,” said Vern, testing the bed’s surface with a knuckle. “I’ll be goddamned. I seen the infomercial, but I never imagined. It’s like cotton candy.”

  “It is pretty sweet,” said the Green Day man. “The babes dig it. I got one just like it that’s seen more action than Richard Gere in his heyday, I kid thee not.”

  “‘Babes’?” said the woman, and Vern saw now that she had a look of Squib in her eyes and they both had pretty much the same haircut: a homemade job, by the looks of it, but it suited her, as much as hair could suit anything. “You ain’t had a babe since Clinton left 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

  “Zing,” said Vern. “You got burned, Green Day.”

  Which was all by way of avoiding the elephant in the shack, who was in fact a dragon or a couple of humans, depending on your perspective.

  Squib’s mom took the initiative. “Mister Vern, first off, can I say thank you on account of what you did for my Everett. Saving his life and so forth. And giving him a job, I might add.”

  It took Vern a beat to remember that Everett was Squib’s real name.

  “He’s a good boy,” he said, finding manners somewhere. “Worth saving.”

  “Maybe he told you already that I’m Elodie Moreau? I’m the one who patched your wound. In truth, you should really get yourself a transfusion, although I wouldn’t know where to begin finding you a donor.”

  Vern touched his forehead and felt a bandage cushioning the wound. “Thank you, Miss Elodie. I’d say that makes us square. And don’t be too hard on the boy for keeping me a secret. That was a condition of his employment.”

  “I understand that, Mister Vern. Of course I do, you being how you are, all dragon-ish and such. But Squib had no choice but to come to us, as he was of the opinion that you might be dying. Squib said that he would surely prefer you alive and angry than dead and serene, and you was angry most of the time anyways.”

  This was a fair comment. Vern could certainly allow that he spent a large portion of his conscious life in a state of irritation. Most of his sleeping life, too.

  “This here is Bodi Irwin,” continued Elodie. “He runs the Pearl Bar and Grill where you crash-landed. We come downriver on his boat. He donated the bed and supplies.”

  Vern shifted on the memory foam. “Much appreciated, Mister Irwin. Not a bad way to recuperate.”

  “Call me Bodi, please,” said the Pearl’s proprietor. “Young Squib also assured us that you would refrain from incinerating us.”

  Vern couldn’t say that it hadn’t occurred to him, but what kind of patient would he be, and so forth. “Rest easy, Bodi. You’ll live to see Amer
ican Idiot on Broadway.”

  Irwin laughed bitterly. “We got us plenty of idiots right here, Mister Vern.”

  It occurred to Vern that these people were being reasonably composed under the circumstances. Generally humans who set their peepers on him went plumb hysterical. Old Bodi had let out that single squeak, but that was about it. Elodie seemed positively relaxed.

  “You people are mighty blasé,” he said. “How long have I been out?”

  “Three days,” said Elodie. “We’ve been taking shifts watching over you. I had some leave coming from the hospital.”

  “Three days,” said Vern. “I ain’t ever been out for three days before.”

  “I hung your skin in my bedroom closet,” said Bodi, which as non sequiturs go was a doozy.

  Vern sat up slow. “You hung my what in the where?”

  Elodie passed him a sippy cup of water. “You shed your skin back at the Pearl, Mister Vern, shucked it right off. We didn’t know if you wanted it or not—for a ceremony or something? So we hung it in the closet. It’s on one of them classy wooden hangers so’s it wouldn’t get marked. It’s all in one piece, more or less.”

  Vern drank deeply. He wasn’t due a shed for a couple of years, but trauma did sometimes bring it on. On the plus side, he’d slept right through the shedding, which was usually itchy as hell. In fact, this was the first time a skin had ever survived intact; usually he scratched it to ribbons.

  “No, I ain’t got no ceremony. But I’ll need that skin back, ‘Leave no trace’ being my motto, for obvious reasons.”

  Bodi scratched his beard and whistled. “I dunno, Mister Vern. You left a helluva trace in New Orleans hunting after Regence. Not that anybody around here’s sweet on Constable Hooke. He’s been hitting me up for protection since he got here—he torched Jim Pooter’s barbecue pit when he refused to stump up. There’s rumors he disappeared people.”

  Vern couldn’t refrain from boasting. “Well now, Bodi, I think you can rest easy on the Hooke front.”

  “Not yet I can’t,” said Bodi. “They ain’t identified no body.”

  “I think it’s safe to say he’s gone,” said Vern. “Things did not go easy in the Big Easy, not for our buddy Regence.”