Crack, crack! another weapon spoke, and suddenly Gault was gripping his right leg and he stumbled and fell to the planks.
A man neither Flint nor Pelvis had ever seen before had come out from under the pier at the speedboat’s bow, and he was standing in the chest-deep water, holding a rifle with a telescopic sight. He fired a third time, but Gault had already crawled over to the far side of the pier and the bullet penetrated wood but not flesh. Then the man shouted to Flint, “I’m drivin’!” and he threw the rifle in and pulled himself over the boat’s side, his eyes squeezed shut with pain and effort.
Flint didn’t know who the hell he was, but if he could operate this damn boat, he was welcome. He scrambled into the back and picked up the rifle as the man got behind the wheel. “Cover us, you better!” the man yelled; he pulled a chrome lever, hit a toggle switch, and twisted the key. The boat barked oily blue smoke from its exhausts, its engine damaged by the Ingram’s bullets. Flint saw Gault getting up on one knee, lifting his weapon to shoot. There was no time to aim through the scope; he started firing and kept firing, and Gault flattened himself again.
The engine boomed, making the boat shake. The rifle in Flint’s hands was empty. Gault raised his head. The man behind the wheel grabbed a throttle and wrenched it upward, and suddenly the boat’s engine howled and the craft leapt forward with such power Flint was thrown across the stern and almost out of the boat before he could grab hold of a seat back. The man twisted the wheel, a mare’s tail of foamy brown water kicking up in their wake. A burst of Ingram bullets pocked the churning surface behind them. The boat tore away toward the bayou, passing the vacant watchtower, as both Flint and Pelvis held on for dear life. Around a bend ahead, blocking the channel, stood a partly submerged pair of gates made of metal guardrails and topped with vicious coils of concertina wire.
Train chopped the throttle back. “Somebody get on the bow!”
Pelvis went, stepping over the windshield as the boat slowed. “You see a way to get that gate open?” Train asked. “Bolt on this side, oughta be!”
“I see it!” The boat’s engine was muttering and coughing as Train worked the throttle and gear lever, cutting and giving power until the bow bumped the gate. The bolt, protected by a coating of black grease, was almost down at the waterline. Pelvis lay at the prow and leaned way over; he had to struggle with the bolt for a moment, but then it slid from its latch.
Train gave the engine power, and as Pelvis crawled back over the windshield, the bow shoved the gates apart through bottom mud. He smelled leaking gasoline. The oil gauges showed critical overheating, red caution lights flashing on the instrument panel. “Hang you on!” Train shouted, and he kicked the throttle up to its limit.
Dan heard a pistol shot. Water splashed three feet from his right shoulder.
“Put the rifle down! Drop it or you get dropped!” Dan hesitated. The next shot almost kissed his ear. He let the rifle fall into the water. “Hands up and behind your head! Do it! Turn around!”
Dan obeyed. Standing on the walkway that led between the house’s rear entrance and the incinerator were Doc and the girl, both of them aiming their guns at him.
“I saw you on television!” Doc said. His face glistened with sweat, his hair damp with it. His sunglasses had a cracked lens. “Man, how come you want to fuck us up like this? Huh? After I turned you loose?” He was whining. “Is that how you reward a fuckin’ good deed?”
“Get up here!” the girl snapped, motioning with her automatic. “Come on, you sonofabitch!”
Dan eased back through the vines, the pain of his injured ankle making him flinch. From the other side of the house there were more shots and the growl of a speedboat’s engine. “Where’re Murtaugh and Eisley?”
“Get your ass up here, I said!” The girl glanced at Doc. “You turned him loose?”
“Those two bounty hunters had him in handcuffs, back at St. Nasty. Takin’ him to Shreveport. I let him go.”
“You mean … it’s ’cause of you all this happened?”
“Hey, don’t gimme me any shit now, you hear? Come on, Lambert! Climb up!”
Dan tried. He was exhausted, and he couldn’t make it.
“I’m not gonna tell you again,” the girl warned. “You get up here or you’re dead meat.”
“I’m dead meat anyway,” Dan answered.
“This is true,” Doc said, “but you can sure lose a lot of body parts before you pass on from this vale of tears. I’d try to make it easy on myself if I were you.”
Playing for time, Dan grasped the planks and tried once more. With an effort of will over muscle, he got his upper body out of the water and lay there, gasping, on the walkway.
“Shit!” the girl said angrily. “You’re the damnedest fool in this world! How come you didn’t kill him and forget about it? Your mind’s gettin’ senile, ain’t it?”
“You’d better shut your mouth.” Doc’s voice was very quiet.
“Wait till this sinks in on Gault. You wait till he figures out it’s your fault all this happened. Then we’ll see whose ass gets kicked.”
Doc sighed and looked up through the trees at the sun. “I knew this minute would come,” he said. “Ever since you horned in, I did. Kinda glad it’s here, really.” He turned his pistol toward Shondra’s head and with a twitch of his trigger finger put a bullet through the side of her skull. She gave a soft gasp, her golden hair streaked with red, and as her knees buckled she fell off the walkway into the swamp.
“I just took out the garbage,” he told Dan. “Stand up.”
Dan got his knees under him. Then he was able to stand, the sweat streaming off him and his head packed with pain. “Move,” Doc said, motioning with the gun toward the house. “Gault!” he hollered. “I got one of ’em alive!”
They went through the destroyed kitchen, the shot-up dining room, and the bullet-pocked game room. Dan limped at gunpoint through a hallway and then entered a living room where there were a few pieces of wicker furniture, a zebra skin on the floor, and a ceiling fan turning. A sliding glass door opened onto the awning-covered platform, where the screen of a large television on wheels was showing a Pizza Hut commercial.
“Oh, Lord!” Doc said.
Gault was on the platform. He was lying propped up by an elbow on his side, a trail of blood between him and the place on the pier from where he’d crawled. The right leg of his jeans was soaked with gore, his hand pressed to a wound just above the knee. Next to him lay his Ingram gun. Sweat had pooled on the planks around his body, his face strained, his ebony eyes sunken with pain and shock.
“Don’t touch me,” he said when Doc started to reach down for him. “Where’s Shondra?”
“He had a pistol hid! Pulled it out and shot her clean through the head! I knew you wanted him alive, that’s why I didn’t kill him! Gault, lemme help you up!”
“Stay away from me!” Gault shouted. “I don’t need you or anybody!”
“Okay,” Doc said. “Okay, that’s all right. I’m here.”
Gault gritted his teeth and pulled himself closer to Dan. The snakeskin boot on his right foot was smeared with crimson. “Yes,” he said, his eyes aimed up at Dan with scorching hatred. “You’re the man.”
“How was I supposed to know he was gonna come here?” Doc squawked. “He’s supposed to be a killer, killed two fuckin’ men! I thought he’d be grateful!” He ran a trembling hand across his mouth. “We can start over, Gault. You know we can. It’ll be like the old days, just us two against the world. We can build it all again. You know we can.”
Gault was silent, staring at Dan.
Dan had seen the bodies lying on the pier. The one farther away was still twitching, the nearer one looked to be stone-cold. He saw that one of the speedboats was gone. “What happened to Murtaugh and Eisley?”
“You came here” — Gault was speaking slowly, as if trying to understand something that was beyond his comprehension —” to get two men who were taking you to prison?”
“He must be crazy!” Doc said. “They must’ve been takin’ him to a loony prison!”
“You destroyed … no, no.” Gault stopped. His tongue flicked out and wet his lips. “You damaged my business for that reason, and that reason alone?”
“I guess that’s it,” Dan said.
“Ohhhhh, are you going to suffer.” Gault grinned, his eyes dead. “Ohhhhh, there will be trials and tribulations for you. Who brought you here?”
Dan said nothing.
“Doc,” Gault said, and Doc doubled his fist and hit Dan in the stomach, knocking him to his knees.
Dan gasped and coughed, his consciousness fading in and out. The next thing he knew, a bloody hand had gripped his jaw and he was face-to-face with Gault. “Who brought you here?”
Dan said nothing.
“Doc,” Gault said, and Doc slammed his booted foot down across Dan’s back. “I want you to hold him down,” Gault ordered. Doc sat on Dan’s shoulders, pinning him. Gault pressed his thumbs into Dan’s eye sockets, the muscles of his forearms bunching and twisting under the flesh. “I will ask you once more. Then I’ll tear your eyes from your head, and I’ll make you swallow them. Who brought you here?”
Dan was too exhausted and in too much pain to even manufacture a lie. Maybe it was Train who’d gotten away in the speedboat, he hoped. Maybe Train had had time by now to put the fire to the Swift’s furnace and get Arden far away from this hell. He said nothing.
“You poor, blind fool,” Gault said almost gently. And then his thumbs began to push brutally into Dan’s eye sockets, and Dan screamed and thrashed as Doc held him down.
Suddenly the pressure relaxed. Dan still had his eyes. “Listen!” Gault said. “What’s that?”
There came the sound of rolling thunder.
Dan got his eyes open, tears running from them, and tried to blink away some of the haze. Doc stood up. The noise was getting steadily louder. “Engine,” Doc said, his pistol at his side. “Comin’ up the bayou, fast!”
“Get me another clip!” There was desperation in Gault’s voice. “Doc, help me stand up!”
But Doc was backing away toward the television set, his face blanched as he watched the bayou’s entrance. Behind him, the Flying Nun was airborne.
Gault struggled to stand, but his wounded leg — the thighbone broken — would not allow it.
With a full-throated snarl, all pistons pumping, Train’s armor-plated Baby came tearing past the watchtower, veered, and headed directly at the platform.
Doc starting firing. Gault made a strangling, cursing noise. Dan grinned, and heaved himself up to his knees.
The Swift boat did not slow a single knot, even as bullets pinged off the bow’s armor. It hurtled toward the platform, a muddy wake shooting up behind its stern.
Dan saw what was going to happen, and he flung himself as hard and far as he could to one side, out of the Swift’s path.
In the next instant Baby rammed the platform and the planks cracked with the noise of a hundred pistols going off. The pilings trembled and broke loose, the entire house shuddering from the blow. But Train kept his fist to the throttle and Baby kept surging forward, ripping through the platform, shattering the sliding glass doors, through the living room, through the prefab walls of Gault’s dream house, and bursting out through the other side. Train jammed the engine into reverse and backed the Swift out between the two halves of the house, and as he cleared the broken walls the insides began to fall out: a hemorrhage of animal-skin-covered furniture, brass lamps, faux marble tables, pinball machines, exercise equipment, chairs, and even the kitchen sink.
Dan clung to one half of the platform as it groaned and shivered, the walls of the house starting to collapse into the water. On the other half Doc saw the television set rolling away from him, its plug still connected and the screen still showing the images to which he was addicted. He dropped his pistol, his sunglasses gone and his face stricken with crazed terror. He flung both arms around the television in a desperate embrace, but then the planks beneath his feet slanted as the foundation pilings gave way. The set rolled Doc right into the water, and there was a quick snap, crackle and pop and his body stiffened, smoke ringing his head like a dark halo before he went under.
“Dan! Dan! Grab my hand!”
It was Arden’s voice. She was standing at the bow’s railing, reaching for him as the boat began to back away from the splintered wreckage. Dan clenched his teeth, drawing up his last reserves of strength. He jumped off the platform, missing Arden’s hand but grabbing hold of the railing, his legs dangling in the water.
“Pull him up! Pull him up!” Train shouted behind the pilothouse’s bullet-starred glass.
Something seized Dan’s legs and wrenched at him.
The fingers of one hand were pulled from the railing. He was hanging on with five digits, his shoulder about to come out of its socket. He looked back, and there was Gault beneath him, patches of the man’s skin and face scorched in a gray, scaly pattern by the electrical shock, frozen nerves drawing his lips into a death’s-head rictus, one eye rolled back and showing chalky yellow.
Gault made a hissing noise, the muscles twitching in his arms.
Another arm slid down past Dan’s face.
In its hand was a derringer.
The little gun went off.
A hole opened in Gault’s throat. Bright red blood fountained up from a severed artery.
Other arms caught Dan and held him. Gault’s head rose, his mouth open. His hands loosened and slid down Dan’s legs. The muddy, churning water flooded into his mouth and filled up his eyes, then his head disappeared beneath its weight.
Dan was pulled up over the railing. He saw the faces of Murtaugh and Eisley, and then Arden was beside him and there were tears in her beautiful eyes, her birthmark the color of summer twilight. Her arms went around him, and he could feel her heartbeat pounding against his chest.
He put his arms around her, too, and hung on.
Then the darkness swelled up around him. He felt himself falling, but it was all right because he knew someone was there to catch him.
28
Avrietta’s Island
DAN OPENED HIS EYES. He was lying on the deck in the shadow of the pilothouse, the engine vibrating smoothly and powerfully beneath him, the blue sky above, the sound of the hull pushing deep water aside.
A wet rag was pressed to his forehead. Arden looked down at him.
“Where are we?” he whispered, hearing his own voice as if from a great distance.
“Train says we’re in Timbalier Bay. We’re goin’ to a place called Avrietta’s Island. Here.” She’d poured some of the filtered water into the cup of her hand, and she supported his head while he drank.
Someone else — a man without a shirt — knelt beside him. “Hey, ol’ dinosaur you. How you doin?”
“All right. You?”
Train’s face had paled, purplish hollows under his eyes. “Been better. Hurtin’ a li’l bit. See, I knew bein’ ugly as ten miles of bad road’s gonna pay off for me someday. That ol’ bullet, he say I gettin’ in and out mighty quick, this fella so ugly.”
“You need to get to a hospital.”
“That’s where we bound.” Train leaned a little closer to him. “Listen, you gonna have to start associatin’ with some more regular fellas, you know what I be sayin? I take one look at that li’l bitty hand and arm movin’ ’round on that fella’s chest, my mouth did the open wide. Then I look at that li’l bitty head hangin’ down, and I like to bust my teeth when I step on my jaw. And that other fella — the quiet one — he look in the face like somebody I seen, but no way can I figure where.”
“It’ll probably come to you,” Dan said. He felt his consciousness — a fragile thing — fading away again. “How’d you get ’em out? The speedboat?”
“Oui. Skedaddled outta there, fired up Baby and huuuuuwheeee! she done some low-level flyin’.”
“You didn’t have to come back.”
&
nbsp; “For sure I did. You rest now, we gonna get where we goin’ in twenty, thirty minute.” He patted Dan’s shoulder and then went away. Arden stayed beside Dan and took one of his hands in hers. His eyes closed again, his senses lulled by the throbbing of the engine, the languid heat, the aroma and caress of the saltwater breeze sweeping across the deck.
They passed through clouds of glistening mist. Sea gulls wheeled lazily above the boat and then flew onward.
“There she is!” Train called, and Arden looked along the line of the bow.
They had gone by several other small islands, sandy and flat and stubbled with prickly brush. This one was different. It was green and rolling, shaded by tall stands of water oaks. There were structures of some kind on it.
As the boat got nearer, Flint stood at the starboard siderail watching the island grow. He was wearing Train’s T-shirt because he felt more comfortable with Clint undercover and because the sun had blistered his back and shoulders. Train had come up with a first-aid kit from a storage compartment and Flint’s arm wound was bound up with gauze bandages. He had taken off his remaining shoe and his muddied socks and tossed those items overboard like a sacrifice to the swamp. Next to him stood Pelvis, his bald pate and face pink with sunburn. Pelvis hadn’t spoken more than a few words since they’d gotten aboard; it was clear to Flint that there was a whole lotta thinkin’ goin’ on in Pelvis’s head.
Train turned the wheel and guided them around to the island’s eastern side. They passed spacious green meadows. A herd of goats was running free, doing duty as living lawn mowers. There was an orchard with fruit trees, and a few small whitewashed clapboard buildings that looked like utility sheds. And then they came around into a natural harbor with a pier, and there it was.
Flint heard himself gasp.
It stood on the green and rolling lawn, there on a rise that must have been the island’s commanding point. It was a large, clean white mansion with multiple chimneys, a fieldstone path meandering between water oaks, and weeping willow trees from the harbor to the house. Flint’s heart was racing. He gripped the rail, and tears burned his eyes.