Dead Man (23 page)

“Who in hell could it be?”

Dain said, “I have a pretty good idea, but why ask me? You’re the boy’s been blazing a trail for them all day that even I
could have followed.”

Neither man shifted his position, but the gauntlet had been thrown. There was a subtle tension in their poses, yet from a
distance they still could have been a couple of old friends discussing the day’s events in the camp. The fire crackled, sending
sparks swirling up into the darkness.

“Why would I do a thing like that?” Inverness asked lazily.

“For the same reason you ran us all over this swamp day before yesterday when you knew damn well where the Broussards’ store
was. So the killers could get there first.”

“You think I wanted her folks—”

“No, I think you wanted Vangie caught because you’re on somebody’s pad and were told to want her caught.” Dain sat up, drew
up his knees, hooked his arms around them, feeling as if there were cobwebs on his brain. “She wasn’t there and things got
out of hand and the old people died.”

Inverness shifted his position while remaining in his tireless
wide-kneed squat. His voice did not match his face, which was tense, watchful, perhaps even a little regretful.

“And whose pad are you suggesting I’m on?”

“Whoever told you I was in New Orleans. I think you’re even more interested in me than in Vangie.”

“You think too much, Dain.”

“Five years ago
—”

“I don’t know anything about five years ago.”

Dain got control. “Five years ago a contract was put out on me because I was too good at finding out things. My wife and child
died. Five years ago you soured on mankind, took to the swamps. Is there a connection? I get the feeling there is.”

“Don’t be a fool,” said Inverness scornfully. “If you want to find someone to pay for your family, go after the guy who put
out the contract.”

“He died. That leaves me with the man who brokered the hit and the men who carried it out. It’s taken me five years of looking,
but I think I’ve finally hit a raw nerve.”

Inverness chuckled. “Christ, Dain, you’re really out of your tree. What’s the word they used to use? Overwrought? Having the
vapors? Which one am I supposed to be? The guy who brokered it or the guy who carried it out?”

“I didn’t say that. But hitmen aren’t thugs, you know—they’re specialists.”

“Like me.”

“Like you,” he said stubbornly.

He knew Inverness was right, he was reaching, there was a hollow feeling in his gut he’d never had when he’d been playing
chess. Paranoia. But he couldn’t stop himself. It was like he was a kid again, that feeling of helplessness from childhood,
the unnamed fears that playing chess had conquered. Five years ago he’d quit playing chess, but had kept them at bay by playing
other, more dangerous games. Now, all finished.

“Why did you drag me up to view Zimmer’s body?” he heard himself asking like a betrayed kid. “You aren’t even a Homicide cop.
And Maxton. Somebody told Maxton where to find Vangie so he could get to her before I did, and I think…”

Inverness stood up in one smooth movement, his head touching the hissing kerosene lamp so it danced on its tent pole hook.
It cast moving light and shadow down over his face.

“I’ve had enough of this crap.”

Minus entered the rim of lantern light holding up a massive wriggling catfish. “Lookit dis catfish was on de—”

Inverness, startled, spun toward Minus. His boot grated on a fallen branch, a silver ring glinted on his left hand.

A bulky man, a sawed-off shotgun in his hands, was silhouetted in moving shadow by moonlight through the trees outside the
cabin. His heavy boots grated on the bare plank floor. A silver ring glinted on his finger.

Dain wasn’t ready. He gaped in total astonishment even as the .357 Magnum boomed, blowing Minus backward, arms flying, fish
flying, blood spilling. Belatedly, he reacted, kicking the coffeepot and already rolling as it hit Inverness in the gut. The
gun roared again and dirt jumped where his chest had been.

He was zigzagging out of the firelight as the Magnum roared three more times, chipping wood from a tree in front of him, blowing
a branch off a bush just beside him, splattering mud at his heel. He was out of the light when the final shot brought a cry
and a loud splash.

Inverness flipped out the cylinder, shaking out the spent brass. By the hissing lamplight he reloaded methodically, his movements
casual, unhurried. A minor thrashing in the brush flared his nostrils and sent him into his predator’s crouch; but then he
relaxed, got down the lantern and walked to the sprawled body of Minus. He sighed and holstered his gun and grabbed the dead
Cajun by an ankle.

He dragged Minus down to the water, heaved him as far in as he could one-handed, then, still keeping the lantern raised high,
used his boot to shove him out far enough for the slow surge of current to take him. The body slid downstream into darkness.

Crouching, Inverness checked the edge of the stream for the deep muddy marks where Dain had run down into the water. He edged
forward a foot at a time until he was satisfied.

“No blood,” he said aloud.

He came erect, still holding the lantern up high, staring out into the darkness of swamp and swirling muddy water.

“Dain!” he shouted. He lowered his voice slightly. “You don’t have a boat or a gun or a knife. No food, no drinkable water.
All you’ve got is a choice. Me or the swamp.”

Across the narrow arm of waterway, below the far bank of the bayou, Dain stood submerged in thick swamp water up to his neck.
His intent face was touched by the light, but he had smeared mud across it so it reflected nothing.

He was motionless, unblinking, watching the enemy whose voice was coming across the water.

“Your wife was part of the contract, Dain, but for what it’s worth, I’m sorry about your kid. You called that one about right.
I’ve been a straight cop since then.”

Dain stood in the thick brown water in stunned silence, not believing what he had heard. Was it this easy? Or this hard? Did
the enemy at last have a face, a name?

He’d sought this confrontation, prayed for it, had trained for five years for this moment. He’d thought he’d created a killer
to face this professional killer—and here he stood neck-deep in the muck and the other guy had the gun.

So who was he now? A computer nerd, a chess groupie, a games freak who’d gotten his wife and child killed. Trying to undo
that unspeakable evil, he’d gone right on to a new game even worse. A game that was relentlessly killing, one by one, every
poor bastard who crossed his path. Except Inverness, who, lantern high overhead to create a white core in the darkness, would
have made a beautiful target for a man with a gun. Dain, of course, was empty-handed. He could have howled like a wolf with
the agony and the irony of it.

Inverness was declaiming to the swamp as if it wore Dain’s face. Fucking Demosthenes yelling at the ocean. He sickened Dain,
revived his hatred. If he could hold on to that…

“When I was told you were on your way to New Orleans, I thought you were after me…”

Who told you, bastard? Who who who?

“It was my idea, not Maxton’s, to try and scare you off. When that didn’t work, I thought you’d made me—so I wanted to get
you out here in the swamp where killing you
wouldn’t make any more stir than swatting a skeeter. I figured showing you Zimmer would make you come running out here to
save the girl.”

What about poor Minus, you fucker?

As if he heard the thought, Inverness said, “I needed Minus to guide us so you wouldn’t get suspicious. I figured he’d go
after you, but he startled me and so I took him first. Just as good. We gotta talk, don’t we? Just you and me.”

Dain almost answered. He
wanted
to—wanted to explain himself, wanted to know why this killer was diabolically yoked to him, wanted answers to the questions
tormenting him more than he wanted revenge. He started to clear his throat to yell across the narrow channel, then grabbed
hold of his mind, let the other man’s spate of words stay him.

“It’s just you and me and the swamp, Dain. The girl, Maxton—they don’t matter. It’s you and me who share the nightmares. You
and me who gotta talk. Or maybe we gotta fight.” He gave a short laugh. “Maybe I’ll fuck up again…”

He paused, holding the lantern aloft to make a white-hot halo around him, peering earnestly into the darkness where Dain,
shivering in the thick water, almost answered that almost seductive voice. It was that short laugh that stopped him.

That and the loathing that had swept through him at mention of the nightmares.
His
nightmares. They were all he had, and the killer even wanted to take those away from him.

“What do you say, Dain? I can’t bring back your wife and child, but… can’t we let the past die, go on from here?”

Was Inverness asking forgiveness? Maybe, after all…

What the hell was he thinking of? This was a
hitman
asking forgiveness, asking Dain to speak, to show himself, standing there with a lantern in one hand—and a gun in the other.
A gun he had methodically reloaded after killing Minus.

Forever the amateur, Dain, his thinking screwed up by what he’d learned tonight. An amateur with a patchwork body that ached
to give in to the swamp, and maybe fever, a body that wanted to just slip under the water and…

Inverness would be counting on that. But goddammit, Inverness wasn’t the only killer in this swamp. All day Dain had watched
things die, none of them willingly. Hatred and weakness rose like bile in his throat—and he was silent.

Right now, silence was the only weapon he had.

It worked. Inverness had talked too much, and realized it.

“You’ll be dead by nightfall tomorrow, Dain!” he yelled, as if suddenly enraged that he wasn’t able to end it right now. “If
the fucking swamp doesn’t get you, I will!”

He turned away from the bayou, just a pale aureole moving away into the night, dropping Dain back into total darkness. The
mud on his face had dried. He could feel it cracking as the tenseness left his features. He patted water on it noiselessly
with his hands. He waited.

With Inverness gone, the swamp that was waiting with him gradually came alive again. The dark air again was filling with its
humming, croaking, cackling song. Dain almost sang along with it.
Inverness was afraid of him!
He’d tried to kill Dain twice and had failed both times. He was the professional and Dain was the amateur, but the slaughter
was working on him in a way it wasn’t working on Dain.

That gave Dain an edge. He felt he could stand there in the heavy water of the swamp all night if he had to. Which is when
he sagged and his head went under. His groping hand caught a branch trailing down into the water from the bank, he pulled
himself erect, spluttering, fighting his gag reflex, a tremendous urge to cough and snort. Inverness was still not that far
away.

On his way back to the tent, Inverness passed the twenty-pound catfish whose thrashing had startled him earlier. It was still
flapping its tail and gasping in the grass. He picked it up and carried it back to the water, threw it in. Almost, he thought
with sudden self-anger, as if placating some god of the predators—the only deity he would have acknowledged if any gods had
existed at all.

Was Dain after all tough enough to have known Inverness was trying to lure him, and so had kept silent out there in the swamp?
How in the fuck had he missed with all six shots?
Come to that, how the fuck had he missed killing Dain five years ago after putting three charges of double-0 buckshot into
him and burning a cabin down around him?

Or had Dain been hit after all tonight, but hadn’t started bleeding until he was in the water?

Back at camp, moving slowly and thoughtfully, Inverness killed the lantern and went into the tent to wait out the dying of
the fire’s dim light.

It was very late and through drifting tatters of mist a gibbous moon showed the tent flaps were closed. The fire was dead
except for one or two dully glowing embers. An owl swooped across the clearing on huge silent wings. A fish broke water. A
raccoon came hesitantly out of the brush to begin nosing around the front of the tent.

On the side of the flatboat where the pirogue was lashed, the very top of Dain’s head broke water very slowly. He stood, mouth-breathing,
water streaming off his flattened hair and down his face, for a full two minutes, waiting, listening. Four baby raccoons trundled
out to join their parent in foraging around in front of the tent. All else was silence and darkness. Safety.

He turned to work on the ties holding down the pirogue, unfastening them one by one. Out in the bayou behind him a fish jumped.
He had it all planned out. Steal the pirogue, head for Vangie’s fishing camp as quickly as possible. Maybe she would have
guns there. If not, get her away immediately, out into the swamp where Maxton and his men couldn’t find her.

Inverness would be coming after him first, but would be blazing that trail for the others to follow. He had no illusions about
Inverness being able to find the place. Inverness knew the swamp well enough to have gotten a clear idea from Minus of the
camp’s location on Bayou Noire. But Dain doubted the pursuers would have another pirogue. They would have to go the long way
around, giving him time to make Vangie safe.

And to prepare for whatever destiny faced him in this swamp. He wasn’t going to be a rabbit cowering in its burrow
when they came. More a tough and wily badger they’d have to dig out. A badger with teeth and claws and a will to live.

All the ties were loosened. He reached for the pirogue and began moving it off the flatboat with infinite care.

Torchlight hit his back and Inverness fired down the beam of light from the brush where he had been waiting for five cramped
and silent hours. The slug hit Dain in the back by the top of his shoulder blade, just below his trapezius muscle. He was
driven forward by the blow, splashing and stumbling, his clutching nerveless hand flipping the pirogue over the top of him
as the fading thought went through his mind,
Rabbit, not badger after all…