Too Far Gone

by John Ramsey Miller

  Running, Leland leapt from the boat.

  Mumbling curses, Alexa fed fresh rounds into the shotgun. Manseur fired in haste, missing the fast-moving target—who, armed with a .22 rifle, scrambled with remarkable speed and disappeared into the shadowy tree line.

  As Alexa watched over the bead sight of her shotgun, there were four quick cracks from the .22, and she turned in time to see Kennedy collapse into the foliage. Ticholet was firing at the two detectives from cover. Bond returned fire.

  She and Manseur moved to the deputy. Kip Boudreaux was dead. Blood pooled in his right eye socket—his aviator glasses, lenses shattered, lay six feet away, by his boot.

  “If Ticholet gets away, we’ll never find him out here,” Alexa said.

  Manseur keyed his radio. “Bond?”

  “Kennedy’s hit in the lower leg. Looks like it broke the shinbone. It’s not bleeding too badly, but he isn’t going to be walking anywhere.”

  “Deputy Boudreaux’s dead. I’ll radio it in.”

  “Ticholet may double back on you. Give me a couple of minutes to tie off Kennedy’s leg. I’ll swing around your flank and cover you.”

  Manseur lifted Boudreaux’s radio from his belt and keyed it. “Dispatch, this is Detective Michael Manseur. Patch me to Sheriff Tolliver.”

  Manseur spent the next few seconds with the radio against his forehead like an ice pack.

  Alexa loaded their shotguns, then watched the tree line over her barrel.

  “You got Leland in shackles yet?” Tolliver’s voice asked.

  Manseur lowered the radio and keyed it. “He killed Deputy Boudreaux and wounded one of my detectives. He’s still active and armed. We need medical, ASAP, and some backup.”

  “We’re coming, Manseur,” Tolliver said, excitedly. “Just hold what you got.”

  Alexa caught something—a flash of movement where Leland had vanished into the dense foliage. “Michael,” she said. “He’s coming this way. I saw him.”

  Straightening, Alexa sprinted down the dock, hoping to cut Leland off before he moved inland from the point. Manseur was right behind her. Seconds later, they were kneeling side by side in the soft dirt, ten feet apart, watching the foliage from behind trees. Leland Ticholet would have to come by them. Alexa knelt beside a tree, her shotgun aimed toward the point. She glanced to her left at Manseur. He was aiming in the same direction.

  Now they had him. He could still surrender and be taken into custody. If he chose to resist, Alexa was confident that one .22 was easily divisible by two twelves.

  82

  From the cover of a scrub patch, Leland had watched the trespassers roar into his private inlet. He knew from the pilot’s brown uniform, and the shotguns, the man and woman with the gold words on the backs of their coats, that they were cops. The gal cop had light brown skin, but he could tell she had some nigra blood in her, only not nearly as much as the dead lady warden, who’d been as black as a deer’s eyes. He remembered seeing the gal cop at the house where Doc got shot. He didn’t know if they had come because of what happened at the little house the night before, or because they were looking to find the warden trespassers, but he sure couldn’t imagine how they had found his camp.

  He should have gotten rid of Doc’s body like he did the wardens’, let the alligators and varmints crap out the meat and scatter the bones. Maybe they had come to take his new boat. He didn’t have the pink papers because he didn’t know where Doc had put them. He tried to ask him, but Doc wasn’t able to tell Leland anything. He had looked through Doc’s pockets and in the briefcase, but there was no pink paper with a picture of a boat in there.

  He’d watched the man and woman jump off the boat as it neared his dock. Leland aimed at them until they went inside. He could swim the bayou and go deeper into the swamp and wait until they left, but he couldn’t allow them to take his boat. He wasn’t of a mind to walk out and leave it behind.

  The deputy tied up his police boat. Leland thought that the deputy, a man he was sure he’d seen before, was their pilot, and had guided them to his camp. He was pretty sure the deputy had helped arrest him and send him to the crazy house. If he didn’t do something, he might bring others another time, and Leland couldn’t afford to let that happen.

  From forty feet away, Leland aimed the rifle at the pilot’s head, putting the sights on the man’s eye as he raised his radio to talk. When Leland fired, the deputy’s sunglasses fell off and his body froze for a split second, before falling backward to the planks. Now Leland would kill the other two and get rid of their boat, all the bodies, and then everything would be back to normal. Doc had told him a big storm was coming, and people would think they got killed by it. They might think he killed them, but they couldn’t prove it without the bodies to show a judge.

  He would take his boat out, and sneak back to finish up. Once they were sure he was gone, they’d be easy targets. He broke cover, ran to his boat, started it, firing at the cabin to keep them inside until he got going.

  He crouched down behind the pilot’s backrest so they couldn’t see to shoot him while he started it and gunned the engines. It went just as he planned, until two men on the bank shot his motor dead. He had turned toward the left bank and run off the boat and clambered to shore and to safety, carrying his Remington Nylon 66 carbine, a gun he’d inherited from his father. It was a good thing getting it wet didn’t keep it from working. That gun was one you didn’t ever have to clean but for running a brush through the barrel sometimes and oiling it a tad a couple times a year.

  So there were two cops armed with high-powered rifles and two with shotguns. When Leland got on dry land, he looked back at where the shots had come from, and when he saw the men, he fired, hitting one in the leg. Everybody knew that cops wore bulletproof vests, so he had to make head shots on them—from closer range—or shoot them in their legs or arms to immobilize them. Wounded, the cop would be easier to finish off, after Leland dealt with the others.

  Four wasn’t so many. Leland had ten rounds in the rifle.

  He listened hard to see if he could hear any boats approaching with more cops in it. When he didn’t hear one, he smiled.

  83

  Waiting for Leland to break through the brush, Alexa was perspiring heavily beneath the vest, and her hands were clammy where they gripped the shotgun. She and the other detectives had firepower on their side, and even though they were unfamiliar with the place, she didn’t see how Leland’s knowledge of the immediate area was adequate to tip the balance to his advantage in the present situation.

  Alexa could feel the positive weight of the Glock in its high-rise holster on her right side. To her left, she could see the wind-rough dark scummy water through the brush behind Manseur.

  As far as she could tell, Leland had stopped coming toward them. Likely he was waiting for them to go to him. She was still looking at Manseur when some reeds in the water swayed suddenly. The surface of the water parted as Leland’s head and shoulders broke above the waterline and, to her horror, she saw he was aiming the gun.

  Leland fired twice as Manseur was turning his shotgun toward him, and the detective fell sideways. The instant Manseur was down, Leland shifted his gaze, saw her, and swung the gun toward Alexa. She had reflexively put the tree beside her between them, and heard the twenty-two rounds smack the bark. She swung the shotgun up, jerked the trigger, and the gun roared, the recoil jarring her. The pellets had churned the water, but Leland had vanished below the surface. She thought she must have hit him, but there was no evidence of it.

  Maintaining her aim, she scrambled over to Manseur, who looked up at her with dazed and frightened eyes. Alexa saw immediately that he had been hit twice in the head. There was a small hole in his cheek and another just above his lip, under his nose. When he opened his mouth to speak, blood poured out. He coughed and spit. Along with the blood, Alexa saw that he had expelled broken teeth and what appeared to be bone chips.

  Alexa helped him sit up against the tree, his back to the
water. “Stay still,” she told him. “Let me take a look at you. Can you open your mouth for me?”

  Alexa was trained to evaluate gunshot wounds. While keeping the water in sight, Alexa laid the shotgun aside on the soft ground where she could grab it up quickly. She took a few seconds to hold Manseur’s head still while she inspected the bullet wounds. She quickly decided that, despite the amount of blood in his mouth, neither wound should be fatal. He seemed alert, and, for the moment, not going into shock.

  “Michael, the round through your cheek exited your jaw. You’ve got some broken teeth, maybe some damage to the gums, and some tissue damage where the jawbone is hinged. The second went through your lip, hit your upper gum, and is probably lodged in your upper pallet. You understand what I said?”

  Manseur nodded, and pointed behind him.

  “I fired at him, but I don’t know if I hit him. I think I closed my eyes when I fired.” Admitting that she had flinched when she fired would have been embarrassing normally, because she had fired pistols and shotguns more times than she could count, and she had been trained and drilled, and drilled again, to teach her not to close her eyes when she fired a weapon. Watch the bullet hit your target. Don’t fire wildly and empty the magazine. Two-one-two-one. The firing range wasn’t real life, and more or less a stress-free environment, which this certainly wasn’t.

  Manseur had been lucky. If Leland had used a larger caliber weapon, and had fired with the same degree of accuracy, the round placed under his nose would have penetrated his brain. He wouldn’t die from the wounds, but she had to get him to a hospital for treatment. Then she noticed the blood on his upper arm. He had also been shot in his left shoulder.

  She heard footsteps behind her, grabbed up the shotgun, and aimed. Carrying his rifle at the ready, Larry Bond moved beside her, knelt, and looked gravely at Manseur.

  “You okay, Michael?”

  Manseur nodded mutely. Alexa told Bond what had happened, pointed to where Leland had surfaced, and told him she may or may not have hit him.

  “I don’t see him floating,” Bond said.

  “The sheriff’s people are on the way out,” Alexa told him. “It’s going to be a long wait, based on how long it took us to get here. They’ll have to launch boats.”

  “We can’t just sit and wait. If Ticholet isn’t hurt really badly, he’ll pick us off before we get out of the channel,” Bond said grimly. “We have to kill him.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Alexa said. She had no problem with killing Leland Ticholet.

  84

  Leland had shown himself moving so the cops would think he was heading toward the cabin. He knew they would move to ambush him as he came in from the point. After moving back into the shadows, he had dropped to the ground and slipped into the water on the far side of the finger of land. He knew they wouldn’t expect him to flank them underwater. Swimming submerged without disturbing the surface was never hard, but with the wind rippling the surface, it was downright easy. Animals in the swamp survived by knowing how things that mattered worked, doing whatever it took to live another day. Leland had not watched and hunted critters without learning how they worked things.

  Lying in the shallows like a gator, he had watched the cops take up positions, marked the closest landmark to them—the cattails, which were roughly at a ninety-degree angle from where the cops had set up. Shouldering the 66 underwater, he broke the surface, knowing the pair would be aiming in the wrong place, and Leland gave the barrel only enough time to clear itself of water to fire at the closest cop’s head.

  The woman had seen Leland come up, and he’d have had her nailed, too, but the man didn’t fall out of the way fast enough. He’d hit the little bald cop in his stupid head. Leland had seen the red marks blossom as the bullets hit home. The gal cop’s gun went off, but missed Leland by a mile. The woman had scrambled behind a tree and turned her shotgun on him, but she wasn’t quick enough, so he was almost completely underwater before she shot.

  He slipped out of the water well away from where he’d gone under, felt a sharp burn in his side, and realized she’d been luckier than he’d imagined. She’d got him. He was bleeding, but the pellets had done little more than cut a couple of shallow channels in him, maybe broken a rib or two. As he lay there, he saw one of the other cops, this one wearing camouflage like a hunter and carrying a rifle, pass within ten feet of where he lay. Leland wished he had a rifle like the one the cop had. Shooting through a motor like it had, it would be even better at shooting through those vests.

  He felt a bulge under the skin lodged between his ribs and pushed it this way and that until the dislodged object just plopped out of the hole where another one had gone through. He looked at the little round piece of lead, which was warped out of round. He inhaled; it felt like somebody was jabbing a sharp stick into his side.

  He took a scoop of mud and pressed it into a piece of Spanish moss and stuck that to the wounds. He moved silently, going around his cabin, toting the 66. The more he thought about it, the more Leland really wanted one of those big rifles. He smiled, because he knew where to get one.

  He could go deep into the swamps and evade any cops or searchers that showed up. But this was his place, and he wasn’t going to allow these strangers to defile his place. When you have something worth having, you do what you have to in order to keep it.

  85

  Detective Kennedy’s wounded leg throbbed to the rhythm of his heartbeats. It hurt like hell, but, he knew, not nearly as badly as it was going to. Bond had cut into his pant leg so he could see the tiny hole below his right knee that, thanks to the tourniquet, was merely oozing a trail of bright blood. Bond had raised Kyler’s leg using two Y-shaped limbs, with their Y’s acting as supports, their lengths forming a bipod. Kyler had set his Glock in his lap and laid the Winchester .270 by his side.

  Shortly after Bond had left to circle around to where Agent Keen and Manseur had gone, hoping to head off Leland Ticholet’s escape, several twenty-two rounds had sounded. They’d been instantly answered by two shotgun blasts.

  Kyler had wanted to be a Homicide detective since joining the force, having moved up from patrol due to hard work and making the right connections.

  The detective closed his eyes to better concentrate on sounds coming across the channel from the other bank. He didn’t dare use his radio, because he could give away Bond’s or Manseur’s position to Leland Ticholet. He had faith that between Bond and Manseur, things would end for Leland shortly. He knew Alexa Keen’s reputation for closing cases, but, as far as he knew, none of it involved dealing with this kind of violence.

  Kyler felt a sting on his cheek and slapped the mosquito that was feeding there. He wondered why the little bloodsucker didn’t land on his leg and drink without piercing the skin. He was probably lying in poison ivy or in chigger-infested brush, and if he were being attacked by the mite-sized parasites, he’d pay a terrible price later on.

  He closed his eyes and felt the cool wind on his face, and the sweat gathering underneath his clothes.

  He shifted and reached for the Winchester .270, but felt only the ground. He looked down and saw, to his horror, that his rifle had vanished. He smelled Leland Ticholet, and had the Glock in his hand a split second before the butt plate of his Winchester crashed into the side of his head, ending his panic.

  86

  Manseur was in excruciating pain. Kennedy was on the other point, separated from them by the inlet. Leland, who might or might not be wounded, could be anywhere. Bond and Alexa had to figure out some way to take Leland out of the picture. Bond tried to reach Kennedy by radio.

  “He isn’t answering,” Bond reported. “Might have his unit turned off.”

  “I hope so, but I doubt it. Leland isn’t someone to underestimate. He killed two game wardens and Deputy Boudreaux.”

  “He killed those wardens?” Bond asked.

  “I found a Wildlife and Fisheries badge inside the cabin. They were on Leland’s trail for sellin
g alligators or something. They got this far, but I doubt they got out alive. We have to assume Leland flanked us and has Kennedy’s weapons,” Alexa said. “If he does, what are we facing?”

  “Two-seventy rifle, shoots on the money to four hundred yards. The rounds will totally ignore these vests,” Bond answered. “He had maybe forty rounds with him, minus what he used up. Plus his Glock .40 and three magazines.”

  Alexa said, “He can pick us off as he sees us. And we can also assume he’s taken Kennedy’s vest.”

  “Possible,” Bond agreed. “We’ll just shoot him in the head, or blow off one of his limbs.”

  “We have to see him first,” Alexa reminded Bond.

  “Any ideas?”

  “He’s wired tightly, primitive emotionally. I’m going to really piss him off and see if he overreacts.”

  “How?” Bond wondered.

  “Boys and their toys,” Alexa replied, smiling grimly.

  87

  Leland put on the cop’s vest. It was a tight fit even after he loosened the straps to let it out. Once he cinched it, the vest did an admirable job holding the compress in place. Leland rubbed mud on his face, head and neck, shoulders and legs. The breeze would dry it quickly. Putting aside the 66, he lifted the pistol and the Winchester and filled his mouth with rifle bullets. Leland watched the shore across the channel from cover, looking through the rifle’s scope for movement that would give away the cops’ positions.