The Brat (10 page)

We were aground. It had happened suddenly. I sailed flat out, crashed along the bottom of the boat. The engine screamed, tearing at the water.

I looked up. Rona had the kicker slowed to a mild sputtering.

“Saw that coming,” she said. “You didn’t. I’ll take it now, like I said. Better get out and shove us off.”

I looked at her, then got up and went over the side. My feet sank deep in black muck. The water was as clear as air, white and sparkling. I got my shoulder against the bow and gradually eased the boat back into deeper water, leaped in again.

At that same moment a shot came from nearby.

Rona gunned the kicker, turned, and we plowed at the undergrowth. In another instant we were beneath real jungle, traveling very fast down a deep, narrow channel.

“Here we are!” she called. “That’s Berk’s boat!”

I looked up ahead and felt like picking up our boat. and hurling it across the water. It was really getting to me now. She began to slow the motor again.

A rowboat floated in the middle of the channel, perfectly stationary. An empty rowboat.

“God damn it,” I said. “They’re gone.”

We came alongside and I reached over, grabbed the side of the rowboat. Rona cut the motor. A man, bare to the waist, lay in the bottom of the boat, sloshing in bloody water.

“Lee? Is that you?”

It was Ed Fowler. I didn’t have to be told that he was dying. His once ruddy coloring was a sick, fishbelly white. He’d been shot.

F
OWLER’S EYES
were rolled halfway into his head. He tried desperately to focus on us, but I knew he wasn’t seeing much. He knew who I was, and that was about all.

“Ed? Who did this?”

He groaned quietly. There was nothing to do for him. He was bare to the waist. A torn hole in his right thigh showed where one slug had entered. Another had ripped the meat and bone of his right shoulder. Still another had shredded the flesh, leaving a gaping, blood-gashed wound in the left side of his mid-section. He had bled plenty. Slivers of white bone protruded in jagged splinters from his shoulder.

Here was the son-of-a-bitch who had helped put me where I was. Who had slept with my wife, probably even encouraged her to rob and kill. And I couldn’t do anything. It was all done.

“Don’t try to stop her,” he said. “Let her go. Let her go, Lee.”

Rona glanced at me and moved her hands in a helpless gesture. She, too, knew there wasn’t a damned thing we could do for him. He was hanging to life by thin, frayed energies.

“Know how you feel, Lee.”

“The hell you do.”

Rona and I knelt in our boat, holding to the other, and water lapped gently at the sides. A bird began yelling someplace, sobbing off into silence.

Suddenly I didn’t hate him any more.

“Which way did she go, Ed?”

“They went east … air boat.”

I glanced at Rona. “They?”

He made a sound and coughed. He strained, trying not to cough, and went into a violent spasm. He gasped for breath, finally lay there panting. There was nothing to do but sit here and watch it. For a moment, his eyes came into clear focus and he looked at me, moved his head slowly from side to side.

“No excuses, Lee—no excuses.”

“Did she do this?”

He moaned softly. “He came along in that damned flying floorboard.” He paused, wanting to say something more. His voice became weaker, a dry sound, without tone. “She was waiting for him. See? That’s why we were here. A nice place, she said—so pretty. Waiting for him to come. Son-of-a—” He paused again, closed his eyes, resting. I saw the coagulation of blood and the pulsing bright crimson under the dark surface and how it broke and flowed freely again when he breathed. His life poured out into the bottom of the boat. “Tried to signal,” he said. “Anybody … Gun.” His hand flicked toward the shadowed underside of the seat by his head and I saw the revolver. “Gave me strength when I heard your motor. No use now.”

“Did she shoot you?”

His lips tipped in a half grin, eyes blearing.

“Ed!”

“You’re a fool, Lee. Been sleeping with her for months. Months! She planned like a crazy woman. I know that now.”

“Why did you do it, Ed?”

He began to laugh, and went into another wringing fit of coughing. By the time he quieted down, you could see him slipping fast. He still was able to talk.

“We were going to kill you, Lee. Honest to God, how you like that? She had me that far under. I don’t condemn her—leave you at the office, there. You and poor Jefferies. I finally talked her out of that—last minute. We planned I’d beat her up, see? She’d call police and I’d hold the money—we’d be all clear. With you out of the way. You’d even be a hero. A robbery, see—unknown men.” He laughed very softly. “Talked her out of that. What a fool! She was right. All that money. Tried to keep her from coming down here—but she’s crazy—crazy—”

“Where did they go?”

“Lay low some place.”

“Where?”

“Never write this one up. Not this one. This is the last of them.”

“Where did they go?”

“Hell do I know?”

“Didn’t they say anything you could tell me?”

I shook the boat, trying to keep the man alive with my own bitterness. Rona hadn’t said a word.

“No,” Ed said. “Might try and make Tamiami Trail … Police after you. Maybe after her, too. Hell—they’ll be along the highways. Send posses—only a matter of time.”

Rona said, “They’ll never try that. They know it won’t work. Berk knows the swamp.”

“They don’t know he’s with her,” Ed said. “You her sister?”

“Yes.”

“Run, Lee,” Ed said. “Turn around and run like hell! They’re crazy!”

“Steady.”

His face shriveled with sudden pain, his mouth dragged down, his body stiffened out, trembling.

“Gonna die, Lee.”

“Did she do it?”

“Go ‘way!”

“Do they have that money with them?”

He laughed, silently. He opened his mouth and his throat worked, but that was all. He had trouble getting breath now.

I turned to Rona. “You’ll have to take him back. Can you do it? The oars for his boat are there.”

“I can’t leave you here.”

“I’m going to try and find them.”

“You’ll never find them, Sullivan. You’ll just get lost.”

“I’ve got to.”

She stared at me. “You want me to take him back to Hagar’s Point?”

“Yes.”

She was looking past my shoulder at Ed. I’d been watching her. Her voice was gentle.

“He’s dead, Sullivan. He just died.”

He lay there with his eyes not quite closed, the slits showing clothlike white, and his mouth open, choked for air he’d never get, the head arched back.

A jay screamed once from not far away. The water slapped against the sides of the boat, and I wanted to get my hands on her, find her, hear all this from her lips. If the Law reached me, they’d never believe it when I told them what she’d done. Meanwhile she and Kaylor would escape.

“You’ll have to take his body back, Rona.”

We knelt there, facing each other, her black hair streaming down one shoulder and that screwy look in her eyes, with the whole cockeyed mess between us now.

“It’s got to be this way.”

“We bury our people in the swamp.” She said it simply, as if we were in church or something, and there was a load of the backwoods pouring out of her right then.

“Not this time,” I said. “That body is evidence. I’ve got to get it back, Rona. I’d like nothing better than to leave it here. I can’t—don’t you see? Will you help me?”

“We can still go—we don’t have to—”

“Don’t make it worse than it is!”

“Did you believe him?”

“About what?”

“What he said about Evis and me? About
me
being crazy. I’m not like Evis. Did you believe him?”

I sighed. “No, I didn’t believe him.”

“All right. I reckon I will take him back, then.” She turned away and stood up. She stepped into the other boat. A flash of sunlight gleamed on the golden locket chain, and I sat there, lost already. “I’ll be a while,” she said. “It would be best if you wait right here for me. I’ll come back.”

“Be better if you didn’t.”

She didn’t speak for a moment. “You don’t really mean that.”

“All right. I don’t mean it.”

“The swamp will take you, Sullivan. It has no respect, sometimes. You must know its ways.”

I suddenly wanted to curse her. Her with her damned levelheaded thinking. Levelheaded thinking was the wine in the gravy. Talking soft, bury them in the swamp … and I heard her speak again.

She was looking down at the body. Then she looked at me. “It’s just—I guess I don’t want to lose you, Sullivan.”

“That’s one hell of a laugh,” I said. “Lose me?
Me?
It would be the best thing that ever happened to you never to see me again.”

Her face didn’t change expression. “If you get lost and can’t find any sign of them,” she said, “start a small fire—a smudge. I’ll see it and come….”

“And so will DeGreef, and God knows who else.”

“No. Just do that and stay hidden. Some place away from the fire.”

“Yeah. All right.”

She stood there a moment, looking at me. Then she smiled and pouted her lips in a kiss.

I turned away. She was really screwy. When I looked back, she was smiling. She picked up the oars from the seats of the other boat, fastened them in the locks. “They had a motor on this boat,” she said. “It was Berk’s big Johnson—a beauty. Thirty horses. It went like the wind.”

“You know a lot about Kaylor.”

“He was a friend of the family.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m not lying, Sullivan. I’m not like Evis.” She paused. “Anyway, there’s the motor. They sank it, so he’d have no chance. Maybe they thought he was dead.”

She pointed over the side toward the darker waters of the channel I saw the small propeller blades of the kicker. The rest of the motor was sunk in the muck. It wouldn’t do any good to try and save it now.

“They have Berk’s air boat,” she said. “If they went east, you’ll be able to pick up their trail. Watch for fresh breaks in the grass. Watch the weeds. Watch for islands, and how the birds fly—if they seem startled. You can tell. If there’s any sign of them, for goodness’ sake, cut the motor and pole. You shouldn’t even be using a motor. I’d advise you to cut a pole, anyway, so you’ll have it, just in case.”

She drew the sheathed knife from the slash pocket of her fawn skirt, and tossed it to me. It was a big knife, a sort of small machete. The blade was thick German steel.

• • •

After she was gone I was alone in the world. Now I let the anger seep into me and slowly expand. When she was with me it was different. Now there was a strong bitter vengeance inside me, working me like a sickness. My nerves were raw and jumping at the slightest sound that seemed out of the ordinary.

I started the motor, idled it slowly, as I probed along the winding, canyonlike channel, deeper into the swamp. I knew Rona would make her way safely and quickly back to Hagar’s Point. Then I began wishing I hadn’t forced her to go. But I had to get Fowler’s body back there. It was more than just the fact that I wanted it for evidence. Fowler had been a human being, and there was something wrong about just leaving him out here for the alligators to munch, or the buzzards to search out.

Rona said they buried their dead in the swamps. I’d heard that before. Maybe somebody would bury me in this crazy country.

If I didn’t find Evis, nobody would. Ever. She and Kaylor would hide in here until everything was clear, until all the disturbance was over with and the Law had relaxed. Then they would leave.

I fed the kicker another notch of gas.

Mangroves grew thickly on either side of the channel. The clotted hammocks were a darkly shadowed green, roots knotting into the water, with an occasional Caribbean pine spiking toward the sun, struggling through a matted network of jungle vines. Cabbage palms, shorn and twisted with strangler fig, showed on a grass-thick rounding of ground in the middle of the channel.

If they’d left Fowler and headed east, they had to take the same route I was on, for the time being.

In the distance I detected the clean pale light of day and sensed open expanse. Trying to reach it was something else again.

The channel never got there. I couldn’t find the break. Yet when I looked back, there was only the choking jungle green. It pressed toward me, growing on all sides, and the channel narrowed till it was little more than a narrow trough among rotting and newly born trees.

It narrowed until bird lime scraped from mangroves and sifted onto my shoulders and into the boat. Then it ceased altogether. The prow of the boat nudged a great dead cypress.

I reached to shove off, the kicker ticking softly, nearly laid my hand on a snake that became suddenly brilliant. It was a blue indigo water snake, half in the water, half on the gray-white root of cypress. It slid swiftly over the root, dripped into the water and flipped silently away, head up, eyes pinpoints of gleaming light.

Turning abruptly, I tripped the gas lever. The boat slowed and turned in a roaring circle, cut directly at a wall of vine and burst through.

I was in the middle of a calm lake surrounded by water lilies to the sheath of mangroves that circled it. I plowed straight across the lake, saw another channel, then checked the position of the sun.

I was headed west now. Then I wasn’t so sure. Panic lightly touched me, like the feathered black wings of a great bird. I talked to myself, chasing it away, and kept going.

In another few moments, I sliced through what looked like a vast plain, directly under the sun, the daylight world a fresh blinding. The narrow path of a boat separated the grass, air bubbles clinging along the rigid blades.

I followed this, touched with anxiousness.

In ten minutes, I was again in jungle. Something seemed recognizable. I slowed the motor, looked around.

A flash of metal beneath the crystal water caught my eye and I sat there in a kind of stupor, sweating, staring at the propellor blades of Berk Kaylor’s kicker that Rona had noticed when we were here a short time before.

Something plopped with a splash into the water. It was a fat cottonmouth moccasin. It swam steadily toward me with a fearless eagerness that brought me to my feet. The boat drifted along the channel, motor slowly turning. The snake kept coming, gaining. I grabbed the rifle from the bottom of the boat. It was a .30-.30 Winchester carbine. I worked the lever rapidly in rising desperation, pumping slugs at the snake until the firing pin pinked on an empty chamber.