Dead Man (28 page)

“Jesus, what blisters!”

“Man jerks off as much as you oughta have calluses half an inch thick,” guffawed Nicky, who’d had gloves.

Maxton followed Inverness as he crawled to the top of the rise. They parted the rushes and peered through. On a spit of land
a hundred yards away was the rough-built cabin. Vangie was just walking toward it, alone, careless, unhurried.

“We could wing her from here if we had a rifle,” muttered Maxton regretfully.

“You’re forgetting about Dain.”

“Fuck Dain. He’s lying dead in the swamp somewhere.”

Inverness looked over at him, shook his head. “You’re a fool, Maxton. He’s over there. Waiting.”

“And you’re a fucking paranoid.” Maxton swung around so his back rested on the sloping earth as if were the back of a chair.
He took out a cigarette, but Inverness shook his head.

“They might smell the smoke.”

Maxton shrugged, put it away again, his face mean.

“They?
You sure are scared of a dead man, Inverness. Why’d you blow away his family in the first place?”

“I was hired. Even now a certain number of big-city cops hire out as hitmen on the weekends. You do one, two a year—good money,
easy work…” He gave an easy chuckle. “Usually.”

“You’re a cold-blooded fucker, aren’t you?”

Inverness just stared at him. Maxton looked away first.

Dain was crouched on the floor about three feet from the back wall, working on the end of a floorboard with a small pry bar,
when Vangie finally entered the cabin. She left the door open; the windows were both already open. The big red gasoline tank
from the flatboat was on the table.

“I can feel them,” said Vangie, “the way I could feel you before you even got to New Orleans. Stay away from the windows in
case they have binoculars.”

Dain straightened up, still on his knees. “How long?”

“There’ll be a moon tonight, so the first cloud that covers it after full dark will bring them in.”

“Then let’s finish up here.”

He returned to his floorboard, Vangie began pulling the bedding off the bunks, laying it out like gunpowder trails. With the
harsh squawking protest of nails being drawn from wood, Dain raised one end of the plank. Vangie began gutting the mattresses,
strewing the dried moss around. He fed the end of one of the blankets down through the slot he had opened.

Vangie suddenly gasped.

“My God, the pirogue! If they see that they’ll know—”

“I moved it up beyond that big cypress and covered it with branches.” He chuckled. “I put the attaché case in it, too.”

Vangie started to whirl toward the place she had hidden it, behind some sacks in the storeroom, then froze, her head coming
up, her nostrils flaring like those of a spooked mare.

She said, “It’s time.”

“Okay. You shut the windows and then get into position. Let me know when you’re ready.”

After Vangie had gone around shutting the windows, he stood up and, on an unspoken common urge, they embraced.

Vangie said in a small voice, “Good luck, Dain.”

“Good hunting, Vangie.”

Somehow the phrases seemed inadequate, especially if they turned out to be the only epitaphs either would get; but what else
was there to say? He watched her go out the door and around to the back of the cabin in the darkness, and ached to call her
back. But it was too late for that.

There was the slightest lingering sunset over on the western horizon, but moonlight was already laying down cold fingers of
light as the four manhunters wrapped rags around the tholes of the oars. Nicky and Trask were very clumsy at it, Inverness
swift and adept. Nicky stood up in frustration.

“Can’t we use the fucking flashlight? Can’t see a—”

“Quiet!”
hissed Inverness. “Voices carry at night.”

He stuck an oar pin in the oarlock, tried it by moving the oar back and forth. It made no sound. He nodded and looked up at
the sky. Clouds thickly edged with silver were massing across the face of the moon, fading its light.

“That cloud will give us twenty minutes,” he said in a very low voice. “Let’s move out.”

Now that he could not be seen from outside, Dain had the kerosene pressure lantern on the table, by its light was pouring
gasoline over the blankets and ripped mattresses Vangie had strewn about. He especially drenched the blanket trailing down
under the floor. At her three measured knocks, he
released the pressure of the lantern, by the dying light poured out the rest of the gasoline, dropped the can, and went to
the door.

His dark silhouette darted out through the door, closed it as the lantern died. He dropped nimbly to the ground, flitted across
the open knoll and without pausing hopped down over the lip of earth where he had hidden the two-by-six.

As he waited, peering through his screen of branches, he gradually became aware of the night life around him. A week ago he
would not have been. That was it! Marie had always been so much more intensely alive than he; now, if he died this night,
it would be knowing he had returned to life before it happened.

Was it the knowledge of death out there that made life so precious? Blind, urgent, unquenchable life? The night was alive
with animal cries, whistles, songs, chitterings. First, flying squirrels emerged from abandoned woodpecker holes to soar through
the dimness, chattering shrilly. Then a fox trotted by a yard from the immobile Dain without being aware of him ambushed there.
An armadillo waddled across the open ground. A carefully stepping deer made little splashes at the edge of the channel.

Through the forest drifted a great horned owl. It floated across the tops of the trees, swooped down over the bayou, landed
in a tree near the point of the island. Dain’s eyes, accustomed to the dark, followed its flight, could pick out its dark
bunched shape in the top of the tree. It looked about fiercely and gave its distinctive
hoo, hoo-oo, hoo, hoo
hunting cry.

It was glaring down at the water, its light-gathering eyes picking up the dark moving shape with its four hunched hunters.
A fish broke water right beside the flatboat’s gliding hull. There was a vague squeak of oar, a slight gurgle of water along
the strake. The slog of the prow into mud.

Four silent shapes left the boat, melted into tree shadow. Silent was a relative term; their clumsy presence muted the life
around them. The owl flew off unnoticed by these other hunters, noted only by Dain as the light began to pick up with the
moon’s emergence from the clouds.

* * *

Crouching in their cover together, the raiders looked across the now once again moon-drenched open ground to the cabin, dark
and peaceful. They spoke in low tones, although Maxton couldn’t keep the elation out of his voice.

“She doesn’t have a fucking clue we’re here!”

“Even so, we wait fifteen minutes,” breathed Inverness. “Watch the animals. They’ll always tell you if somebody’s around.
Did you see the owl telegraphing our presence below his tree? If Dain is watching—”

Maxton came out of his crouch and massaged his knees.

“If that bitch was wise to us, she’d be ten miles down the bayou with my bonds. Instead she’s alone in there, asleep. I want
to hit her now. You got us here, great, that’s what you’ll get your percentage for. But now I’m taking over the assault.”

“I’ll cover you from here,” said Inverness drily.

“Like hell you will.” He turned to the other two silent killers. “Trask and I will each take a window. Nicky, you bust in
through the door. And remember we need her alive long enough to tell us where the bonds are.”

“What if Dain’s in there? What do I do then?”

“Kill him,” said Maxton. “Inverness, you’ll take the back of the—”

“Pass.”

“You’re passing up your cut of the bonds, too, you know.”

“You don’t get it, do you? All I want is Dain—dead. I’d be a fool to risk myself over the bonds if he already is.”

“And if he isn’t?”

“Then maybe you’ll get lucky and kill him for me—or at least maybe cripple him up some more, I know I winged him the other
night. If he kills you, I’m no worse off.”

Maxton just chuckled and turned away.

“The yellow streak shows at last,” he sneered, then said to Nicky, “Remember—we need her alive to get the bonds from her.”

“And to have a little fun with after,” added Trask.

* * *

The pilings gave just enough headroom for Vangie to lie on her back under the cabin with her head turned so she could see
out from beneath it. She stiffened momentarily when, out on the moonlit ground, the moving feet of the three attackers appeared.
They took up their positions around the cabin.

Gun in hand, Nicky approached the front steps, tense and crouched and ready. He silently mounted them, crossed the porch.
A second small cloud started across the face of the moon, dimming its light again, so the flash in his left hand flickered
for one instant to show him the simple iron latch.

Nicky jerked open the door and leaped through the opening, yelling, gun quartering the room.

Everything happened at once, in the five seconds it took for his light to show the room was empty.

Dain was already charging silently at a dead run from his place of ambush under the bushes. His two-by-six slammed the door
shut as he smashed it down into the cleats Vangie had made for it. He was already spinning away at a dead run for cover.

“Now!” he yelled.

Vangie touched her already struck match to the blanket-fuse coming down through the cabin floor, rolled away from the searing
heat as it went up in a whoosh of igniting gasoline.

Inverness already was drifting back from his tree-shadow cover toward their flatboat pulled up on the mud behind him, even
as his quick eyes picked out Dain’s dark moving shape hitting the safety of the bushes on his return.

“That goddam Dain,” he muttered aloud. “Waiting.”

The whole inside of the cabin was already blazing. Nicky was slamming his forearm against the barred door, but it didn’t give.
He dropped his gun, ran back a few paces—and the fire running up the gasoline-soaked fuse Vangie had ignited whooshed up around
him.

Blazing now, screaming, he hurled himself again and again against the door.

The door of the cabin burst outward, the cleats ripping from the wall, and out came a screaming fireball. Air sucked inside
made the cabin a sudden massive torch. The fireball rolled in the grass and then quit screaming and quit moving as inside,
the shells in its dropped gun began to explode.

Maxton came running around the corner of the cabin from the far side toward their drawn-up boat, gun in hand, yelping in fear,
ignoring the burning Nicky. At the water’s edge, in full moonlight, panting, he ran back and forth like a dog left behind
by the family car. Their boat was gone. He could just see Inverness on the water, rowing it toward the open marsh.

“Inverness!”
he shrieked.
“For God’s sake
…”

Inverness kept on rowing with long, full, unhurried strokes. Maxton ran up and down the bank in a frenzy.

Vangie rolled out from under the huge torch the cabin had become, jumped to her feet, ran for the safety of Papa’s fishing
road through the woods. The burning cabin made everything as bright as day, and at the edge of the undergrowth she ran right
into Trask’s arms.

“Got you, bitch!” he panted.

She ripped his face just as her mother had done, he staggered back, letting go of her, so she had room for a high dancer’s
kick, the sort where they try to touch their nose with their knee. Only his scrotum was in the way. He emitted a pneumatic
“Whoosh!”
and Vangie ran into the woods. He got one shot off, aiming low despite his pain, but missed. Bent over, cursing foully, he
staggered after her.

Even through his panic, Maxton heard the shot. It helped ease his fear, he began looking around. And shit, ten yards away
up the bayou, there was Vangie’s flatboat drawn up nose-to on the bank. He trotted toward it, still wobble-kneed from the
shock of that screaming fireball rolling out of the cabin at him.

Dain, grunting, hit him like a blocking lineman. He went sprawling, the gun went flying.

Maxton scrabbled for it in the mud as Dain put a foot against the prow of the flatboat and, with a great heave, sent it shooting
backward out into the channel. Maxton came up with his gun, but Dain was already zigzagging away as he fired. Lucky for him,
no barrel-clog of mud. Two more shots, but Dain was gone, back into the undergrowth.

Maxton whirled back toward the flatboat. It was being carried away by the current in the same direction Inverness had disappeared—around
the front of the island. He looked back to where Dain had disappeared, then back to the boat.

He could dive in, swim after it—he did his dutiful laps at his health club in Chicago three days a week. But what if Dain
had the pirogue hidden somewhere, came out after him, smashed in his head with a paddle? He would be too vulnerable in the
water, even with the gun…

The underbrush rattled behind him. He spun and fired again. There was instant crashing and thrashing, then sudden silence.
Almost reluctantly, Maxton edged across the clearing
past the settled angry red remains of the cabin and the black ugly charred remains of Nicky.

His cocked and ready Colt airweight .38 six-shot revolver was outthrust toward a patch of shadow where he feared Dain might
be lurking. He was feeling better again. He had a gun, Dain didn’t. Trask obviously had winged the little bitch, would have
her waiting for him. He couldn’t remember how many shots he had fired, but he had a fistful of extra bullets in his pocket.

A couple of yards to the right of where he thought Dain was, the top of a bush moved slightly. He shifted his aim without
making any noise.

“Dain?” he called.

The next bush moved, surreptitiously, slightly. Maxton edged closer. Hell, he’d hit him with one of those shots, Dain was
trying to crawl away. But he had to make sure.

“Maybe we can deal.”