Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery

by Jimmy Fox

  He lit another cigarette, upbraiding himself for all this self-pity, which was getting him nowhere and changing nothing. Regardless of his emotional dilemma, the dope had to move tonight. That’s one of the things he hated most: they called all the tunes, and he had to dance to them. He just hoped they held up their end of the bargain, and let him and Holly go their own way.

  In the old days, when Wooty was just a boy, his father had used this camp every fall, for weeks at a time, entertaining politicos and moguls from all over the country in a blood-sport marathon. That’s how he first met Representative Rufus Girn. The men shot anything that moved, occasionally even a hapless guide; Tchekalaya Forest became a battle zone. Lots of drinking, great open-air eating, and a good bit of whoring. The adult Katogoula of the time—most were gone now—worked the annual event as guides, cooks, and bartenders. He remembered a half dozen Katogoula round palmetto huts, constructed amid the trees every year to house the reveling men who didn’t rate a bunk in the cabin.

  The place looked pretty good back then, and invitations were treasured things.

  Wooty shook his head and laughed as he recalled one unfortunate guest—some Yankee lobbyist—who fell off the porch while taking a piss, right into the campfire. No major harm done, just minor burns. The Yankee said he’d had worse damage to his pecker, and less fun, with a few congressmen’s wives.

  Thinking back to those heady times over twenty-five years before, Wooty recalled a different Mr. Tadbull: a dynamic, good-looking, irresistible man, who could spin a tale for hours in a duck blind on a slow day or laugh at your joke until he cried.

  No, he didn’t really hate his old Pop. How could he hate a part of himself ? But there was another part of his soul that he’d inherited from someone else in the family, he didn’t know who. He’d seen heredity at work in horses, cows, and dogs; why not in humans, why not in feelings and personality and character? Sometimes he thought he was almost a new species. Unlike Mr. Tadbull, Wooty had a vision of larger horizons, a hunger to escape the anonymity of ordinary life, a hatred of the chains of somebody else’s rules.

  He wondered if his yearning blood came from his great-grandfather Bascove Tadbull, the artist, or from his mother, who was supposed to have gone crazy and been sent back to her family in New Orleans in a straight jacket? Maybe she had hot French or Spanish blood in her. He could conjure up only the vaguest images of his mother, based mainly on old photos he’d since lost track of and on one or two very early visits to New Orleans. But he knew his father well enough to suspect he’d unfavorably embellished her real nature and ultimate fate.

  The faint sound of movement snapped Wooty back from his ruminations. He felt a difference in the forest. Someone was there, in the pitch blackness. He snuffed out his cigarette on a floorboard and took up his pistol, clicking the safety off.

  Whoever it was out there knew the forest, knew how to move at night like a stalking animal. Definitely not his clumsy contacts, who were supposed to be tough city guys from New Orleans, but surely complete idiots in this environment. He would have heard their vehicle bouncing along the primitive road to the camp long before they arrived.

  Wooty remembered the night several weeks before, when his buddy Travis Corbett had fallen to his death, the same night he had later seen the apparition of the deer and the cougar in the moonlight. Was this the same person, or entity, who’d led Travis on his fatal pursuit?

  He aimed both his pistol and shining flashlight in the direction of the subtle rustling of pine straw fifteen feet in front of him.

  “Identify yourself! Now!” he said, louder than he’d intended.

  “No need to shout.” It was a woman’s voice. A familiar voice. “I can hear you, Wooty. If I was two miles away, I could hear you.”

  The beam of light locked onto Luevenia Silsby, emerging from the scaly pine trunks toward an astonished Wooty. As if cradling an infant, she carried her shotgun propped over her left arm.

  “What the . . . Miss Luevie, listen, you can’t stay out here. I’ve got . . . business. Visitors, uh, friends coming. It’s very confidential.”

  “Turn that light out of my eyes, if you please.”

  “Oh, sorry.” Realizing he was still pointing his pistol at her, he hastily uncocked it and put it in his hip holster. He then laid the light on the porch behind him and covered it with his camouflage jacket. The two looked at each other in the soft green glow.

  Miss Luevie had always been so nice to him, growing up. Boy, the stuff she’d treated him to at her store in his youthful years! He had never had to pay a cent for anything at Three Sisters Pantry; he would just take whatever he wanted to the counter, and Miss Luevie would smile and nod. Surely she wouldn’t have just given him all that merchandise; she must have charged it all to his father’s account. And he couldn’t even remember where he’d put that old Bible she’d brought the other day. It must have been very important to her. . . . He felt rotten about his thoughtless ingratitude toward Miss Luevie now and in the past, but he had to get rid of her, pronto.

  “You have to leave,” he said, trying to keep it plain and polite, but firm. “Right now, you understand? Any other time, Miss Luevie, and I’d be . . . what are you doing in these woods at night, anyway?”

  “Well, I told Royce I had a taste for fried coon.”

  Oh God, here we go. He shouldn’t have asked.

  “Thought I’d go out and find one.” Smiling, she held up her little double barrel. “That explains this; but I don’t reckon you ought to be walking in the woods alone at night without something a little better than coon shot. My second shell is a slug. There’s all kinds of strange things that go on out here. Might even bag me a cougar.” She gave an enigmatic snicker, as if over a private joke. Her steel-frame glasses twinkled in the moonlight. “I see you got your gun, too. A man needs to watch out for hisself. You never ate my coon stew, have you, Wooty?”

  “No, I haven’t had the pleasure.”

  “I brown it in a skillet first, with some bell peppers, onions, celery, and red pepper. Then I—”

  “Miss Luevie, please, I don’t have time to visit at the moment. Like I said, I have some—”

  But she had other things on her mind and paid no attention to his protestations. “You’re supposed to use dogs and a .22 at night for coon, you know.”

  The simple old gal must be afraid I’ll turn her in. “You can trust me. I won’t tell,” he said. “Now, you better get on back or Royce’ll be worried.”

  She glanced off into the darkness, and then her eyes found Wooty’s again. “I really didn’t come out for coon. I come looking for you.”

  “Me? Well, why? And how’d you know where I was?”

  “Even this forest can’t keep secrets forever. I learned that the hard way. That’s why I’m here. To let you in on a secret of mine. And yours.”

  CHAPTER 36

  Nick ran at full sprint through the tangled gauntlet of woods. It was worse than any nightmare. At least in dreams, the mind’s stage lights illuminated even the most surreal horrors.

  Unseen tentacles battered, garroted, and lacerated him. Like an addict going through withdrawals, he imagined giant spiders looping silken ropes around him, turning and turning him until his helpless immobility made him an easy living meal. Then he was a human pinball, bouncing off tree trunks, to the accompaniment of flashes and bells in his stunned brain.

  A solid snarl of vegetation stopped him cold. He changed course to bypass the wall. He tripped and rolled, endlessly it seemed to him, down a steep slope that in the utter darkness felt worthier of the Himalayas than the modest hills of Tchekalaya Forest.

  At last he came to a stop. He rested, trying to catch his breath in the sudden silence, using his shaky good left arm to prop himself up on his knees.

  He tried to swallow, but his throat stuck together like flypaper. He’d inhaled too many bugs and leaves and pine-straw bits and dirt in his flight from whatever it was, whoever it was, chasing him. Was it Nugent Chenerie,
after all?

  His attacker had grunted and snarled but hadn’t spoken in an identifiable voice. Could he be wrong? Suppose Nooj didn’t know about the three incriminating bundles in the stove. Suppose someone was attempting to set up the wildlife agent, just as someone had attempted to frame Tommy Shawe for his twin’s murder.

  His mind cleared a little. No time now to play detective. He had to get himself out of this maddening labyrinth.

  Looking up, he could see gleaming knifepoints of stars above him, in a narrow indigo river between pine trees. Had he fallen onto the Golden Trace? Yes, this had to be it! Which way should he go? The Shawe property was somewhere on the trace. So were the lake and the burial mounds and the cemeteries and the burned museum and Tadbull Hall. Anyplace would be better than here. He stood up, turned around and around in an attempt to get his bearings until he forgot where he began, and started running again.

  Above and behind him, he heard his pursuer crashing through the woods, making even more noise than he had. No point in stealth now. The thing behind him was wounded and just as desperate as he was. Nick could hear labored breathing and groans as it fought pain and the forest to catch him. The shotgun blast must have been merely a glancing hit. What damage had the fairly puny lock-pick blade done?

  But this was still far from an equal contest: his pursuer had a gun. Nick had convinced himself that it was a gun he’d kicked during the scuffle with the bizarre man-like cougar.

  Every joint and bone and muscle of Nick’s body, every inch of exposed, bleeding skin, screamed in agony and begged for just one moment of rest; but he commanded himself to run, run, faster, faster, faster!

  Before the sun came up, he would unmask this killer, or be the next victim.

  CHAPTER 37

  A black van, parking lights on, bounced slowly along an old logging trail. The three men inside hadn’t spoken for ten minutes. Limbs and bushes screeched against the windows and doors. The driver fought the steering wheel through ruts and stomped the brakes when the van dove unexpectedly into water-filled craters. Four times already, two of them had pushed the vehicle out of thigh-deep, cold mud holes. No one looked forward to another one. Green light from the dashboard splashed across the grim faces of the two big men in the front.

  “You sure this is the right way?” said the man strapped in the passenger seat.

  “Yeah, don’t worry,” the driver replied. “Could get to that camp with my eyes closed.”

  From the back of the van the third man, who sat on a stack of tarpaulins, said, “Our eyes are closed.” He was getting the worst of the rough ride, with nothing to hold on to except the metal ribs of the large van’s cargo area. “This ain’t just dark, boys. This is D-A-R-K.”

  The men spoke with the languorous, droll, exotic accent of native New Orleanians.

  “Turn on the lights,” the front-seat man said to the driver. “Ain’t nobody around for miles.”

  They’d taken the precaution of disabling their brake lights.

  “Yeah, yeah, okay, you wimps. What, you afraid of the dark, dawlin’?” said the driver, laughing.

  He switched on the headlights. The Golden Trace was visible a few yards to their right.

  “There’s the road, you dumb fuck,” said the third man.

  “Who you callin’ ‘dumb fuck’?” The driver slammed on the brakes and twisted in his seat belt. “Thas not the way we supposed be goin’, asshole. Thas the scenic route, a hiking trail for yuppoes and other upstandin’ junkies.”

  “Don’t talk bad about our customers,” said the second man. “You two should shutup arguin’, so we can pick up the shit and get out of here. . . . Whazat?!”

  “Whaz what?” The third man in the back lifted a compact submachine gun to his chest. “I didn’t see nothin’. Kill the lights! All of ’em. Quick!”

  The van idled as the three men inside watched the dark figure of a man coming nearer on the Golden Trace.

  “Help!” The man stumbled off the trace, into the thickening brush, toward the vehicle. “Someone’s trying to kill me! Help! Can you hear me? My name is Nick Herald. Help me!”

  “What do we do?” asked the driver.

  “I’m gonna tell the weirdo to beat it, okay?” said the second man from the passenger seat.

  But before he could, the three couriers saw another figure enter their slice of view, roughly thirty yards down the Golden Trace from the first man.

  Gunshots popped and echoed. Three shots, spaced for careful aim. The muzzle flashes strobed the pursuer in three instants of white light.

  After the first shot, Nick resumed his flight, and after the third, his pursuer went after him.

  All was quiet again.

  “Whathefuck! . . . you see that?” the third man asked. He had muscled the front passenger aside and had stuck his head and upper torso out the window. He held his stubby automatic weapon at his shoulder, ready, his elbows propped on the door.

  The second man said, “Am I nuts, or was that some kinda lion walking on two feet? Shooting at that guy in front of him?”

  “Get back in,” the driver said. “This ain’t our fight. We’re gettin’ outa here.” He gunned the van.

  “No shit,” said the second man. “The rest of this parade I don’t want to see.”

  The three couriers were nervous when they arrived. And so was Wooty when they explained what they’d witnessed.

  “Said his name was Dick,” said the driver.

  “No, fuckwad, it was Gerald,” the second courier insisted.

  “You’re both nuts,” the third man insisted. “He wasn’t even speaking English. It was Russian . . . or something.”

  “Oh, right,” the second man said, “like you know Russian!”

  Wooty and Luevenia had been startled by the gunshots; now Wooty realized that the couriers had seen Nick Herald, running for his life. But who was chasing him?

  The three couriers were still arguing about what they’d seen. Wooty grabbed his gear. “Something’s come up,” he said rapidly to the driver. “You know where the stuff is. Been nice working with you guys.”

  “Hey, we could use some help here,” the third man protested.

  But Wooty had already disappeared into the dark embrace of the pines.

  Luevenia waited out of sight in the woods a few yards away. Wooty called softly to her.

  “Did you hear what they said?” he asked her.

  Luevenia materialized in front of him. “Yes. Sounds like Nick.”

  “Got to be. That guy gets into more trouble. What about the . . . thing following him? If I believed in the Katogoula ways”—he corrected himself—“in our ways, I’d say that was the Sacred Cougar hot on his trail.”

  “It’s a man, Wooty, not a spirit. Nick thinks it’s Nooj behind all the killing, behind that cougar mask.”

  “I just can’t get my mind around that,” he said, shaking his head. “Holly told me about Nick’s theory. He had you down as the murderer, too, I hear.”

  “I have a lot more to tell you, when this is all past us.”

  “There’s a lot I want to ask you. I’m glad you told me what you did. But right now we have to help Nick.”

  “Please, my son, be careful.”

  He kissed the top of her head. “Try to get to a phone, call Sheriff Higbee. My cell phone won’t work out here; the whole forest is a”—Wooty paused—“a dead zone. Tell the sheriff to take some deputies out to where the Golden Trace hugs the lakeshore.”

  “Just about where Carl got killed?”

  “Yeah, I guess it is,” Wooty said, picking up her unspoken fear. “Anyway, I’ll meet him there and we can start searching. If they’re on the trace still, maybe I can cut through the woods and gain on them before the sheriff gets there. If it’s Nooj, Nick won’t last long against him. And don’t worry too much about me . . . Mother. Feels funny to say that.”

  “Feels good to hear it.”

  Wooty cleared his throat and after a moment said, “I know these woods a
s good as Nooj does. Must be the Katogoula in me.”

  His pistol drawn, he sprinted off like a quarterback rushing for the goal line.

  Luevenia Silsby walked fast along the Golden Trace to reach the Shawe place and a phone.

  She stopped, looked down at her old hunting companion, the .410, and reversed course.

  CHAPTER 38

  Lake Katogoula yawned before Nick, a ravenous mouth of death. The black surface of the water glimmered with white shards of reflected celestial light.

  Limp with exhaustion and slightly delirious, Nick believed he saw in that light every mythos in history, broken into final, fatal, jagged beauty, a tragic testament to mankind’s hopeless quest to touch the infinite. It called to him, this light, and then he saw transcendent dancers in a magic ceremony moving to a magnificent, frightening requiem of all the prayers ever sent into the starry blackness to all gods. How he wanted to join these dancers in their celebration! He was so tired and the light and the dance and the sound were unbearably alluring.

  No! You can’t dance with them and live!

  Duck blinds floating on the water seemed to Nick to shoot holes in the scintillating skin covering the lake. On the far shore, in the orange glow of a lone sodium-vapor security light, Nick could just discern oil tanks, pipes, and pumps siphoning liquid prehistory to the surface, from wells drilled into the lakebed. This lot across the lake was where the duck hunters parked, and where Holly had shot some of the evocative background footage for her documentary. The rest of the shoreline that he could make out offered merely the suggestion of darker trees at the dark water’s edge. Mourners at his funeral?

  Nick lurched over to a mammoth old cypress tree, a few feet from the softly lapping water, and leaned back on it. He was dizzy and shivering. He wasn’t thinking right; maybe one of those drugged darts had actually hit him.