Gone South (14 page)

Basile Park was about three miles from the house. “That’ll do. What time?”

“An hour or so, I guess. But listen: if a policeman comes with me, or they won’t let me take my own car, I won’t be there. They might follow me without me knowin’. Are you willin’ to chance it?”

“I am.”

“All right. I’m crazy for doin’ it, but all right. I’ll try to make it, but if I’m not there —”

“I’ll wait as long as I can,” Dan said. “Thank you, Susan. You don’t know how much this means to me.”

“I’ll try,” she repeated, and then she hung up.

He returned the receiver to its cradle. His spirit felt lightened. He and Susan had gone to several outdoor concerts at Basile Park, and he knew the amphitheater there. He checked his watch to give himself an hour, then he got back into the pickup truck and drove toward the Hideaway. He thought about the fifteen thousand dollars, and he wished he’d seen that much money in a year’s time. They wanted him caught fast, that was for sure.

Before he reached the turnoff to the motor court, it crossed Dan’s mind that Susan might be setting him up. The police might have been listening after all, and would be waiting for him at the park. There was no way to know for certain. He and Susan had parted on bitter terms, yes, but there
had
been some good times, hadn’t there? A few good memories to hold on to? He remembered some, and he hoped she did. He was Chad’s father, and that was a link to Susan that could never be broken. He would have to take the risk that she wasn’t planning on turning him in. If she was … well, he’d cross that bridge when he came to it.

He drove past the DeCaynes’ house on the way to his cottage, and he was unaware that the sound of his engine awakened Hannah from a troubled sleep.

She wasn’t sure what had wakened her. Harmon was snoring in the other bed, his mouth a cavern. Hannah got up from under the sweat-damp sheet, her red hair — the texture of a Brillo pad — confined by a shower cap. She recalled bits and pieces of a nightmare she’d had; the monster in it had been a warty frog with skinny human legs. Wearing only a bra and panties that barely held her jiggling mounds in check, she padded into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator’s freezer, and got an ice cube to rub over her face. The kitchen still smelled of blood and frog guts, and in the freezer were dozens of froglegs wrapped in butcher’s paper for delivery to the restaurant. While she was at it, Hannah opened the carton of vanilla ice cream that was in the freezer as well, and she got a spoon and took the carton with her to the front room to gorge herself until she was sleepy again. She switched on the radio, which was tuned to the local country music station. Garth Brooks was singing about Texas girls. Hannah walked to a window and pushed aside the curtain.

The lights were on in Number Four. Something about that man she didn’t like, she’d decided. Of course, she didn’t like too many people to begin with, but that man in Number Four gave her a creepy feeling. He looked sick, for one thing. Skinny and pale, like he might have AIDS or something. She didn’t like his tattoo, either. Her first husband had been in the merchant marine, was illustrated from wrists to shoulders, and she couldn’t abide anything that reminded her of that shiftless sonofabitch.

Well, he’d be gone soon enough. They’d be seven dollars richer, and every cent helped. Hannah plopped down on the sofa, her spoon strip-mining the ice cream. Reba McEntire serenaded her, and Hannah saw the bottom of the carton. The news came on, the newscaster talking about a fire last night in Pineville. The Alexandria town council was meeting to discuss pollution in the Red River. An Anandale woman had been arrested for abandoning her baby in the bus station’s bathroom. A mentally disturbed Vietnam veteran had shot to death an official at a bank in Shreveport, and —

“… fifteen thousand dollars reward has been offered …”

Hannah’s spoon paused in its digging.

“… by the First Commercial Bank for the capture of Daniel Lewis Lambert. Police consider Lambert armed and extremely dangerous. Lambert was last seen driving a gray 1989 Chevrolet pickup truck. He is forty-two years old, six-feet-one with a slim build; he wears a beard and …”

Hannah had a mouthful of ice cream. She stared at the radio, her eyes widening.

“… has the tattoo of a snake on his right forearm. Police advise extreme caution if Lambert is sighted. The number to call is …”

She couldn’t swallow. Her throat had seized up. As she bolted to her feet, she spat the contents of her mouth onto the floor and a cry spiraled out:
“Harrrrrrmon!
Harmon, get up
this minute!”

Harmon wasn’t fast enough for her. He found himself being grabbed by both ankles and hauled out of bed. “You crazy?” he yelped. “Whatzamatter?”

“He’s a killer!” Hannah’s hair, which had a life of its own, had burst free from the shower cap. Her eyes were wild, her mouth rimmed with ice cream foam. “I knew somethin’ was wrong with him I knew it when I seen him he killed a man in Shreveport got that tattoo on his arm fifteen thousand dollars reward hear me?”

“Huh?”
Harmon said.

Hannah grasped him by the collar of his red-checked pajamas. “Fifteen thousand dollars!” she shrieked into his face. “By God, we’re gonna get us that money! Now, stand up and put your clothes on!”

As Harmon pulled on his pants and Hannah struggled into her shapeless shift, she managed to drill the story through his thick skull. Harmon’s face blanched, his fingers working his shirt buttons into the wrong holes. He started for the telephone. “I’ll go call the law right n—”

A viselike hand clamped to his shoulder. “You listen to
me!”
she thundered. “You want to throw that money out the window? You think the cops won’t cheat us outta every damn penny, you’re dumber than a post! We’re gonna catch him and take him in
ourselves!”

“But … Hannah … he’s a
killer!”

“He ain’t nothin’ but a big ol’ frog!” she glowered, her hands on her stocky hips. “ ’Cept his legs are worth fifteen thousand dollars, and you and me are gonna take him to market! So you just shut up and do what I say! Understand?”

Harmon shut up, his thin shoulders bowed under the redheaded pressure. Hannah left the room, and Harmon heard her rummaging around in the hallway’s closet. Harmon got his ring of keys from the bureau and hooked them around a belt loop, his fingers trembling. When he looked up, Hannah was holding the double-barreled shotgun that was their protection against burglars. He said, “That gun’s so old, I don’t know if it’ll even —” She squelched him with a stare that would freeze time. Hannah also held a box of shells; there were five inside, and she loaded the shotgun and then pushed the other three shells into a pocket.

“We gotta get him out in the open,” she said. “Get him outside where he can’t get to his guns.”

“We ought to call the law, Hannah! Jesus, I think I’m ’bout to heave!”

“Do it
later!”
she snarled. “He might be a crazy killer, but I don’t know many men who can do much killin’ when they’ve got their legs blowed off! Now, you just do what I say and we’ll be rich as Midas!” She snapped the shotgun’s breech shut, slid her feet into her rubber flipflops, and stalked toward the front door. “Come on, damn it!” she ordered when she realized Harmon wasn’t following, and he came slinking after her as pale as death.

I
N NUMBER FOUR,
D
AN
checked his watch and saw it was time to go. He’d swallowed two aspirin and laid down for a while, then had put on clean underwear and socks and the pair of blue jeans from his duffel bag. Now he stood before the bathroom’s dark-streaked mirror, wetting his comb and slicking his hair back. He put on his baseball cap and studied his face with its deep lines and jutting cheekbones.

Susan wasn’t going to recognize him. He was afraid again, the same kind of gnawing fear as when he’d walked into the bank. More than likely, this was the last time he would ever see his son. He hoped he could find the words he needed.

First things first: getting to Basile Park without being stopped by the police. Dan hefted the duffel bag over his shoulder, picked up the cottage’s key, and opened the front door into the humid night. The frogs had quieted except for a few low burps. Dan went to hit the wall switch to turn off the ceiling’s bulb when he heard a metallic
clink
from the direction of his pickup truck, and he realized with a jolt that someone was standing there at the light’s edge, watching him.

Dan whipped his head toward the sound. “Hey, hey!” a man said nervously. It was Harmon DeCayne, sweat sparkling on his cheeks. He lifted his hands to show the palms. “Don’t do nothin’ rash, now!”

“You scared the hell out of me! What’re you doin’ here?”

“Nothin’! I mean to say … I saw the lights.” He kept his hands upraised. “Thought you might need somethin’.”

“I’m pullin’ out,” Dan said, his nerves still jangling. “I was gonna stop at your house and leave the key on the porch.”

“Where you headin? It’s awful late to be on the road, don’t you think?”

“No, I’ve got places to go.” He advanced on DeCayne, intending to stow his duffel bag in the rear of the truck, and the other man retreated, that clinking noise coming from the key ring that Dan saw was fixed to one of DeCayne’s belt loops. Dan abruptly stopped. His radars had gone up. He smelled a snake coiled in its hole. “You all right?”

“Sure I’m all right! Why wouldn’t I be all right?”

Dan watched the man’s eyes; they were glassy with fear.
He knows,
Dan thought.
Somehow, he knows.
“Here’s the key,” he said, and he held it out.

“Okay. Sure. That’s fi—”

Dan saw DeCayne’s eyes dart at something behind him.

The woman,
Dan realized. He had the mental image of a meat cleaver coming at him.

He set himself and whirled around, bringing the duffel bag off his shoulder in a swinging blow.

BOOM! went a gun seemingly right in his face. He felt the heat and the shock wave and suddenly the burning rags of the duffel bag were ripped from his hands and the fiery shreds of his clothes were flying out of it like luminous bats. Hannah DeCayne staggered backward holding a shotgun with smoke boiling from the breech. Dan had an instant to register that the duffel bag had absorbed a point-blank blast, and then the woman righted herself and a holler burst from her sweat-shining face. Dan saw the shotgun leveling at his midsection. He jumped away from its dark double eyes a heartbeat before a gout of fire spewed forth and he landed on his belly in the weeds. His ears were ringing, but over that tintinnabulation he heard a wet smack and the
crump
of buckshot hitting metal. He scrambled into the woods that lay alongside the cottage, his mind shocked loose of everything but the need to run like hell.

Behind Dan, Harmon DeCayne was watching his shirt turn red. The impact had lifted him up and slammed him back against the pickup truck, but he was still on his feet. He pressed his hands against his stomach, and the blood ran between his fingers. He stared, blinking rapidly, through the haze of smoke that swirled between him and his wife.

“Now you’ve done it,” he said, and it amazed him that his voice was so calm. He couldn’t feel any pain yet; from his stomach to his groin was as cold as January.

Hannah gasped with horror. She hadn’t meant to fire the first time; she’d meant to lay the barrels up against the killer’s skull, but his bag had hit the gun and her finger had twitched. The second time she’d been aiming to take him down before he could rush her. Harmon kept staring at her as his knees began to buckle. And then the rage overcame Hannah’s shock and she bellowed, “I
told
you to get out of the way! Didn’t you
hear
what I told you?”

Harmon’s knees hit the ground. He swallowed thickly, the taste of blood in his mouth. “Shot me,” he rasped. “You … damn bitch. Shot me.”

“It’s not
my
fault! I told you to move! You stupid ass, I told you to move!”

“Ahhhhhh,” Harmon groaned as the first real pain tore at his tattered guts. Blood was pooling in the dust below him.

Hannah turned toward the woods, her face made even uglier by its rubber-lipped contortion. “You ain’t gettin’ away!” she yelled into the dark. She popped the shotgun open and reloaded both barrels. “You think I’m lettin’ fifteen thousand dollars get away in my woods, you’re crazy! You hear me, Mr. Killer?”

Dan heard her. He was lying on his stomach in the underbrush and stubbly palmettos forty feet from where the woman was standing. He’d seen Harmon fall to his knees, had seen the woman reloading her shotgun. Now he watched as Hannah walked to her husband’s side.

She looked down at Harmon’s damp, agonized face. “You mess up every damn thing,” she said coldly, and then she lifted the shotgun and fired a shell into the pickup’s left front tire. The tire exploded with a whoosh of air and the pickup lurched like a poleaxed horse. Dan almost cried out, but he clasped a hand over his mouth to prevent it.

“You ain’t goin’ nowhere in your truck!” Hannah shouted toward the woods. “You might as well come on out!”

Dan still wore his baseball cap, beads of sweat clinging to his face. All his other clothes were blown to rags, his metallic-mist Chevrolet pickup crippled, his hopes of getting to Basile Park blasted to pieces, too. The red-haired witch held the shotgun at hip level, its barrels aimed in his direction. “Come on out, Mr. Killer!” she yelled. Beside her, Harmon was still on his knees, his hands pressed to the wet mess of his midsection and his head drooping. “All right then!” she said. “I can play hide-and-seek if you want to, and first chance I get I’ll blow your damn brains out!” She suddenly began stalking into the woods almost directly toward where Dan was stretched out. Panic skittered through him; there was no way he could fight a loaded shotgun. He bolted up and ran again, deeper into the thicket. His spine crawled in expectation of the blast. “I hear you!” Hannah squalled. He heard the noise of her stocky body smashing through the foliage. “Don’t you run, you bastard!”

She was coming like a hell-bound freight train. Low pine branches whipped into Dan’s face as he ran, thorns grabbing at his trousers. Under his feet, frogs grumped and jumped. His right shoe caught a root and he staggered, coming perilously close to falling. The underbrush was dense, and the noise he was making would’ve brought his Vietnam platoon leader down on his head like a fifty-pound anvil. He had neither the quick legs nor the balance of his youth. All he cared about at the moment was putting distance between himself and a shotgun shell.