Gone South (27 page)

“To Houma, first. Then on down south.”

“Ain’t much south of Houma but the bayou. You got relatives down there?”

“No, I’m on my own.”

“On your
own?
What about your friend?”

“He’s … goin’ somewhere else.”

“Lord, I wouldn’t go down in that swamp country by myself, that’s for gospel!” The woman had her finger on the bus station’s address, but first she felt bound to deliver a warning. “All kinda roughnecks and heathens livin’ down there, they don’t answer to no law but their own. Look right here.” She picked up the newspaper’s front page and thrust it at Arden. “Headline up top, ’bout the ranger. See it?”

Arden did. It said
Terrebonne Ranger Still Missing,
and beneath that was a smaller line of type that said
Son of Lafayette Councilman Giradoux.
A photograph showed a husky, steely-eyed young man wearing a police uniform and a broad-brimmed hat.

“Missin’ since Tuesday,” the woman told Arden. “Been the big news here all week. He went down in that swamp one too many times, is what he did. Swallowed him up, you can bet on it.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Arden said, “but it’s not gonna stop me from —” And then she did stop, because her gaze had gone to a story at the bottom of the page and a headline that read
Second Murder Attributed to Shreveport Fugitive.
A photograph was included with this story, too, and the bearded face in it made Arden’s heart freeze.

It wasn’t the best quality picture, but he was recognizable. It looked like a mug shot, or a poorly lit snapshot for a driver’s license. He was bare headed and unsmiling, and he’d lost twenty pounds or more since the camera had caught him. Beneath the picture was his name: Daniel Lewis Lambert.

“They found his boat,” the woman said.

“Huh?” Arden looked up, her insides quaking.

“Jack Giradoux’s boat. They found it, but there wasn’t hide nor hair of him. I know his folks. They eat breakfast every Saturday mornin’ at the Shoneys down the road. They thought that boy hung the moon, and they’re gonna take it awful hard.”

Arden returned to reading the story. “I’d be mighty careful in that swamp country,” the woman urged. “It’s bad people can make a parish ranger disappear.” She busied herself writing the bus station’s address down on a piece of notepad paper.

Arden felt close to passing out as she realized what kind of man Dan Farrow — no, Dan
Lambert
— really was. Vietnam veteran, had the tattoo of a snake on his right forearm. Shot and killed the loan manager at a bank in Shreveport. Shot and beat to death a man at a motel outside Alexandria and stole his station wagon. “Oh my God,” she whispered.

“Pardon?” The woman lifted her silver eyebrows.

Arden said, “This man. He’s —”
… the man God sent Miz Arden.

Jupiter had said it.
You the man God provided to take Miz Arden to the Bright Girl. You His hands, you gone have to steer her the right direction.

No, Dan Lambert was a killer. This newspaper said so. He’d killed two people, so what was to stop him from killing her if he wanted to? But he was sick, anybody could look at him and tell that. If he wanted to kill her, why hadn’t he just pulled off the highway before they’d reached Lafayette?

“You say somethin’?” the woman asked.

“I … yeah. I mean … I’m not sure.”

“Not sure? About what?”

Arden stared at the photograph.
The man God sent.
She’d wanted to believe that very badly. That there was some cosmic order of things, some undercurrent in motion that had brought her to this time and place. But if Jupiter had been so wrong, then what did that say about his belief in the Bright Girl?

She felt something crumbling inside her, and she feared that when it fell away she would have nothing left to hold her together.

“You still want the address?”

“What?”

“The bus station. You want me to tell you how to get there? It’s not far.”

The walls were closing in on her. She had to get out of there, had to find a place to think. “Can I take this?” She held the newspaper’s page so the woman couldn’t see Dan’s picture.

“Sure, I’m through with it. Don’t you want the —”

Arden was already going out the door.

“Guess not,” the woman said when the door closed. She’d wanted to ask the girl if that mark on her face hurt, but she’d decided that wouldn’t be proper. It was a shame; that girl would’ve been so pretty if she weren’t disfigured. But that was life, wasn’t it? You had to take the bad with the good, and make the best of it. Still, it was a terrible shame.

She turned her attention again to the crossword puzzle. The next word across was four letters, and its clue was “destiny.”

D
AN HAD STEPPED OUT OF
the shower and was toweling off when he heard someone speak his name. He looked at the television set. His face — his driver’s license picture — was looking back at him from the screen. He thought he’d been prepared for the shock, but he was wrong; in that instant he felt as if he’d simultaneously taken a gut punch and had icy water poured on the back of his neck. The newscaster was talking about the shooting of Emory Blanchard, and the camera showed scenes of policemen at the First Commercial Bank. And then the vision truly became nightmarish, because suddenly a distraught face framed with kinky red curls was talking into a reporter’s microphone.

“He went crazy when he found out we knew who he was,” Hannah DeCayne was saying. “Harmon and me tried to stop him, but he was out of his mind. Grabbed the shotgun away from Harmon and blasted him right there in front of me, and then he — oh, dear Lord, it was terrible — then he started beatin’ my husband in the head with the gun. I never saw anybody so wild in my life, there wasn’t a thing I could do!”

The camera showed the dismal Hideaway Motor Court in daylight, then focused on the crippled pickup truck. There was a shot of blood on the sandy ground. “DeCayne was pronounced dead early this morning at an Alexandria hospital,” the newscaster said.

Dan’s knees gave way. He sat down on the edge of the bed, his mouth agape.

“Police believe Lambert may be on his way to Naples, Florida, where his nearest family member lives …”

Christ! Dan thought. They’d brought his mother into this thing now!

“… but there’ve been reports that Lambert’s been seen both in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Repeating what we understand from Alexandria police, Lambert may be traveling under the name Farrow, and he should be considered extremely dangerous. Again, the First Commercial Bank of Shreveport has put a fifteen-thousand-dollar reward on Lambert, and the number to call with information is 555-9045.” The photograph of Dan came up on the screen again. “Lambert is forty-two years old, has brown hair and brown eyes and stands —”

Dan got up and snapped the TV off. Then he had to sit down once more because his bones felt rubbery and his head was reeling. Anger started boiling up inside him. What kind of damned shit was that woman trying to shovel? No, not
trying;
she was doing a pretty good job of it, fake tears and all. Dan saw what had happened. The bitch had killed her husband, and who was going to call her a liar? He sensed the net starting to close around him. Who would believe he hadn’t murdered DeCayne? Pretty soon the newscasts were going to make him out to be a bloodthirsty fiend who killed everybody in his path. With his picture on TV, the reward, the police looking for the station wagon — what chance did he have of getting to Vermilion, much less out of the country?

He clasped his hands to his face. His heart was beating hard, the pulse pounding at his temples. How much farther could he get? Even traveling with the shield of darkness he knew it was only a matter of time now before the law found him. And his time, it seemed, was fast ticking away. Should he try to keep going, or just give it up and call the police? What was the point of running anymore? There was no escaping prison; there was no escaping the disease that was chewing his life away. Gone south, gone south, he thought. Where could you run to when all roads were blocked?

He didn’t know how long he sat there, his eyes squeezed shut and his head bowed, his thoughts scrambling like mice in mazes. There was a tentative knock at the door. Dan didn’t say anything. The knock came again, a little louder this time.

“Go away!” he said. It had to be her. Or the police. He’d find out soon enough.

A long silence followed. Then her voice: “I … want to talk to you for a minute.”

“Just go away and leave me alone. Please.”

She was silent, and Dan thought she’d gone. But then he heard a rustling at the bottom of the door and something slid under it into the room. It was a newspaper page.

Dan had the feeling that the bad news was about to get worse. He put the towel around his waist, went to the door, and picked up the page. There at the lower right was his picture, the same photo he’d seen on television.
Second Murder Attributed to Shreveport Fugitive,
the headline read. He reached out, unlatched the door, and pulled it open.

Arden took a backward step, half of her face pale with fear, and she lifted a tire iron she’d taken from the back of the station wagon over her head. “Don’t touch me,” she said. “I’ll knock your head in!”

They stared at each other for a few seconds, like two wary and frightened animals. At last Dan said, “Well, you’ve got my attention. What’d you want to talk about?”

“That’s you, isn’t it? You killed two people?”

“It’s me,” he answered. “But I didn’t kill two people. Just the man in Shreveport.”

“Oh, is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“Right now I don’t give a damn what you feel. You’re not the one goin’ to prison. I guess you’ve already called the police?”

“Maybe I have,” she said. “Maybe I haven’t.”

“You saw there’s fifteen thousand dollars reward on me, didn’t you? That ought to be enough to get your birthmark off. See? This must be your lucky day.”

“Don’t try to rush me,” she warned. “I swear I’ll hit you.”

“I’m not rushin’ anybody. Where am I gonna go wearin’ a towel? You mind if I get dressed before the police get here?”

“I haven’t called ’em. Not yet, I mean.”

“Well, do what you have to do. I figure I’m through runnin’.” He turned his back on her and went to his clothes, which were lying on a chair near the bathroom door.

Arden didn’t enter the room. She watched him as he dropped the towel and put on his underwear and socks. His body was thin and sinewy, the vertebrae visible down his spine. His muscles looked shrunken and wasted. There was nothing physically threatening about him at all. Arden lowered the tire iron, but she didn’t cross the threshold. Dan put on his T-shirt and then his jeans. He sat down in the chair to slip his shoes on. “I didn’t kill the man in Alexandria,” he told her. “For what it’s worth, his wife did it and she’s blamin’ me. Yeah, I did steal their station wagon, only because the damn woman shot my pickup truck’s tire out. She blasted him with a shotgun, aimin’ at me, but when I left there he was still alive. She beat him to death and she’s tellin’ the police I did it. That’s the truth.”

Arden swallowed thickly, the fear still fluttering around in her throat. “The paper said you went crazy in a bank. Shot a man dead. That you’re supposed to be armed and dangerous.”

“They got the crazy part right. Bank was repossessin’ my truck. It was the last thing I had left. I got in a fight with a guard, the loan manager pulled a pistol on me, and … it just happened. But I’m not armed, and I never was carryin’ a gun. I guess I ought to be flattered that they think I’m so dangerous, but they’re wrong.” He sat back in the chair and put his hands on the armrests. “I meant it about the reward money. Ought to be you who gets it as much as anybody else. You want to go call the law, I’ll be right here.”

Her common sense told her to go to her room and use the phone there, but she hesitated. “How come you didn’t give yourself up after you shot that man?”

“I panicked. Couldn’t think straight. But I was tellin’ you the truth about the leukemia. The doctors don’t give me a whole lot of time, and I don’t care to pass it in prison.”

“So how come you’re just gonna sit there and let me turn you in?”

“Somebody will, sooner or later. I thought I could get out of the country, but … there’s no use in tryin’ to run when your name and face is plastered all over TV and the newspapers. It’s just hurtful to my family.”

“Your
family?
You married?”

“Ex-wife. A son. I stopped to see ’em in Alexandria, that’s why I was stayin’ at that damn motel. I was headin’ to a place called Vermilion. Cabin down there I was gonna hide in for a while, until I could decide what to do.” He shook his head. “No use in it.”

Arden didn’t know exactly what she’d expected, but this wasn’t it. After she’d digested the newspaper story, she’d gone to the station wagon to search it, looking for a gun. She’d found the tire iron in the back and in the glove compartment a couple of old receipts — for froglegs, of all things — made out to Hannah DeCayne from the Blue Gulf Restaurant. The hell of this thing was that the fifteen thousand dollars would bail her out of her financial troubles and buy her a car, but after the bills were paid off there still wouldn’t be enough left for the plastic surgery. The doctors had told her there would have to be two or more operations, and they couldn’t promise what the results would be. But here was fifteen thousand dollars sitting in front of her if she wanted it.

“Go on,” Dan said. “Call ’em, I don’t care.”

“I will. In a minute.” She frowned. “If you’re so sick, why aren’t you in a hospital?”

“Ever set foot in a V.A. hospital? I was in one for a while. People waitin’ to die, hollerin’ and cryin’ in their sleep. I wasn’t gonna lie there and fade away. Besides, most days I could still work. I’m a carpenter. Was, I mean. Listen, are you gonna call the police, or do you want to write my life story?”

Arden didn’t answer. She was thinking of what it had felt like when she was joy-riding in that car she’d stolen — speeding from nowhere to nowhere, trying to outrace reality — and the state troopers’ car had roared up behind her with its siren wailing and the bubble light awhirl. She remembered the snap of cuffs on her wrists, and the sharp, dark terror that had pierced her tough fuck-you attitude. She’d had a lot to learn in those days. If it hadn’t been for a few people like Mr. Richards and Jupiter and his wife, the lessons would’ve fallen like seeds on stony ground. Stealing a car was a lot different from committing murder, of course, and maybe Dan Lambert belonged in prison, but Arden wasn’t sure she was the one to put him there.