Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery (49 page)

Stacking the notebooks in order and rewrapping them, Nick wondered how the Chenerie sentinels had felt about Katogoula who left the Cutpine band and entered other cultures. He supposed they had their own qualifications for tribal disaffiliation, just as all tribes have rules for joining. Once a Katogoula married outside the tribe, left Cutpine and surrendered his Katogoula heritage by jumping into the mainstream, he was lost—and the ancient debt was paid—as surely as if he’d died childless. Nick had noticed many names with lines drawn through them, sprinkled throughout the notebooks; these must have been the Katogoula who turned their backs on their ancestral way of life.

The third bundle, a very fat one, contained the cache of Katogoula records that Tommy’s father had assembled, also stolen from the Shawes’ garage closet. There couldn’t be much doubt about that, now. Nick recalled Tommy saying that Brianne had forgotten to look for the papers
that wild afternoon, as he had asked her to do just before rushing off to meet with Chief Rafe Claude at the Chitiko-Tiloasha casino. Nick was wowed: this was a crucial collection of family-history documentation the BIA either had never received or had lost, for he had had no luck obtaining copies of this material from the agency, though he had gotten other valuable information.

Nooj must have seen the certainty of the tribe’s humiliating destruction snatched away from him the day word came of recognition. This blew his small private flame into a raging forest fire. And it was then that he began his last-ditch campaign to break the spirit of the tribe and halt its progress toward growth and prosperity.

He robbed the Katogoula of priceless genealogical material, terrorized them with impersonations of an angry spirit, framed the tribal leader with the death of his own brother, burned the museum and in the process killed the Dusongs, extinguishing two more Katogoula lines. It almost worked, too. The tribe members by now were terrified and interpreted their recent luck as the reason for the plague of misfortune. Who would join a tribe so cursed? Luevenia Silsby, motivated by her own secrets, unintentionally aided Nooj’s plan.

Nick wondered if Nooj, undetected, never satisfied with his psychological warfare, would have murdered the whole tribe in time, as Sheriff Higbee had suggested.

The sound of a truck engine echoed distantly through the dark forest.

Nick quickly rewrapped and replaced the last bundle in the stove, killed his flashlight, and groped his way toward the open door, straining to listen over his incredibly noisy breathing.

He’d never noticed how much racket the human machine makes.

What were his options? Stay in the tower, try to find a phone or radio in the darkness? No. He’d be trapped, on Nooj’s home turf. Help would take too long to arrive at this desolate place. He’d take his chances
down there on the ground—chances he made a bit more even by grabbing a pump shotgun from the wall rack and a handful of shells from a box on the table below. A shell dropped on the pine-plank floor; the noise boomed through the forest.

Great. You’re going to get yourself killed, klutz!

He fumbled with three shells until the gun swallowed them. The hunting regulations booklet had mentioned something about a magazine “plug” that limited the number of shells.
Nooj, law-abiding homicidal maniac
.

Outside on the catwalk, he heard nothing alarming, a fact which failed to put him at ease. He started down the stairs. Nick hadn’t fired a gun in thirty years. His father, who’d fought into Germany with General McAuliffe—of Bastogne and “Nuts!” fame—had always tried to familiarize him with guns, “In case we get another Hitler,” he often said. Nick hated hunting and thew up the first and only time he killed anything with a gun—a turtle.

He prodded sleeping pathways of memory, hoping to awaken some boyhood shooting lesson that might save him.

Starlight and a silver sliver of moon rising in the pines guided his steps. Halfway down, now.
The light at the bottom of the tower!
It was not casting its feeble illumination. It had been switched off. Through his racing heartbeat, he heard nothing but calming insect cadences.

He took the final steps down and crept watchfully into the pine-straw covered clearing where Nooj probably parked his department pickup. No truck. That was good.

He glanced up at the dark tower behind him and let out a breath of relief. Nothing to worry about, he decided, chuckling at his earlier skittishness. He was alone, except for the spirits of departed Katogoula, Yaknelousa, and Quinahoa warriors, fighting their bloody battle until the end of time.

Now his main problem was getting back to his car, which he’d hidden in the woods on a rutted logging trail that split off from the well-maintained gravel road that ran from the parish highway to the fire tower.

He wouldn’t need the shotgun, after all. Lucky thing; he’d probably just end up shooting himself. Maybe he should go back up, search a few minutes longer, and return the gun, the absence of which would surely alert Nooj that—

Something thwacked into the gunstock, very close to his hand. Nick instinctively crouched low. He looked down: a feathered blowgun dart the size of a pencil had burrowed itself into the wood of the stock. He heard another dart whiz past his head.

Then the pine curtains of darkness parted and a large animal raced toward him. It was cloaked in strange blue phosphorescence from the sky, moving rapidly but in jerks, as if in a video missing every tenth frame. In an awful moment of recognition, Nick knew this was the Sacred Cougar!

Animal, man, or spirit? . . . Nick didn’t have the luxury of time to find out. He fired once and tried to pump the next shell into the chamber. But the thing already had him by the throat. They both went down on the pine straw. The shotgun went flying.

Using his good left arm, Nick punched, clawed, and poked his attacker with every ounce of strength he could muster.

Liquid, metallic and hot!
He felt and smelled blood on his hands and face. Whose, he didn’t know.

Nick and the thing rolled over several times. The heavy beast crunched down on him, compressing his injured collarbone, shoulder, elbow, and ribs into a throbbing nucleus of agony. He yelped reflexively and lashed out savagely with his left fist, hitting a whiskered, toothy snout. The animal seemed stunned—but only for a moment.

A moment was all it took for Nick to realize he had a weapon within reach.
The lock pick!
And then he had the tool in his hand, driving the sharp shaft over and over again into the furry back of his attacker.

More hot, slippery blood leaked onto his hands.

The cougar shook him off, stood up abruptly, and then fell backward. Panting and groaning, it got to all fours. Nick was certain he’d hurt it.

“Nugent Chenerie!” he shouted, frantically searching the straw for the shotgun. “I know it’s you. Nooj, listen, it’s over! We know what you’re trying to do, and we’re not afraid anymore. Stop the killing! Don’t add to the tragedy of the Quinahoa with the death of more innocents. The battle ended long ago. You can’t change it!”

Nick saw the glint of Nooj’s badge below the cougar skin . . . or was it his pistol? Was it Nooj? Such questions were academic now. He kicked at the threatening metal and felt thudding contact.

On his feet now, he ran blindly into the unimaginable evil of the dark forest.

CHAPTER 35

D
eep in Tadbull woods, Wooty nervously waited in the night’s inscrutable blackness on the porch of his family’s disused, rustic hunting cabin. He heard something.

A backfire? A shot?

He couldn’t be sure. “Damnit!” he muttered. He’d chosen the instant before the distant noise to lay his pistol and flashlight beside him on the dusty boards, and that closer commotion had masked what he thought he’d heard. Now he sat on the porch ledge, his back to a thick old cypress post, tapping his shoes in the pine straw, listening, his jumpy right hand ready to grab for the gun. Though he’d given up smoking, he now drew deeply from the fourth cigarette of his vigil. When that one burned down to the filter, he used it to light the next one.

It was thirty-three minutes past nine o’clock. He’d pressed the night-light on his watch so many times the battery was weakening. Except for that noise a few minutes ago, Tchekalaya Forest slept restlessly.

His contacts were already an hour late. Three guys—he knew only the first name of one who’d made the trip before—were supposed to pick up the marijuana he’d stored in the old cistern here at the cabin, and then drive it on to a secret airfield, God knows where. He didn’t want to know that, either.

The cylindrical cistern hulked on stilt legs in the shadows to his right. Wooty imagined it as a fat, fifteen-foot-tall forest jester chuckling quietly at all the things that could go wrong.

He’d made some stupid decisions in his life, but this took the cake. He hated this drug-running idiocy, and it had taken external events to open his eyes. That bothered him, that he still lacked the maturity and savvy to figure things out for himself. He would have to get smart fast, if he wanted to run with the big dogs, Bayles and his crowd.

Anyway, this would be the last time, thanks to Nick and Holly.

Holly . . . he’d almost lost her today, on the Golden Trace. Earlier tonight, holding her naked body against him, he vowed to himself never to let her go again. They would leave this place of stagnation and death, he promised her; and she said she wanted only to be with him, wherever he went, whatever he did. Together they would chase the dream held out by state senator Augustus Bayles.

And then she’d raised holy hell when he wouldn’t let her join him on this final job. Luckily, she was exhausted and didn’t have all of the usual fight in her. She’d played gin rummy with his father, who was delighted to have a beautiful woman in the house, even though she beat the pants off him in every game; and now she slept in Wooty’s bed at Tadbull Hall, the television her babysitter. He ached to return to her strong embrace.

He lit another cigarette, upbraiding himself for all this self-pity, which was getting him nowhere and changing nothing. Regardless of his emotional dilemma, the dope had to move tonight. That’s one of the things he hated most: they called all the tunes, and he had to dance to them. He just hoped they held up their end of the bargain, and let him and Holly go their own way.

In the old days, when Wooty was just a boy, his father had used this camp every fall, for weeks at a time, entertaining politicos and moguls
from all over the country in a blood-sport marathon. That’s how he first met Representative Rufus Girn. The men shot anything that moved, occasionally even a hapless guide; Tchekalaya Forest became a battle zone. Lots of drinking, great open-air eating, and a good bit of whoring. The adult Katogoula of the time—most were gone now—worked the annual event as guides, cooks, and bartenders. He remembered a half dozen Katogoula round palmetto huts, constructed amid the trees every year to house the reveling men who didn’t rate a bunk in the cabin.

The place looked pretty good back then, and invitations were treasured things.

Wooty shook his head and laughed as he recalled one unfortunate guest—some Yankee lobbyist—who fell off the porch while taking a piss, right into the campfire. No major harm done, just minor burns. The Yankee said he’d had worse damage to his pecker, and less fun, with a few congressmen’s wives.

Thinking back to those heady times over twenty-five years before, Wooty recalled a different Mr. Tadbull: a dynamic, good-looking, irresistible man, who could spin a tale for hours in a duck blind on a slow day or laugh at your joke until he cried.

No, he didn’t really hate his old Pop. How could he hate a part of himself ? But there was another part of his soul that he’d inherited from someone else in the family, he didn’t know who. He’d seen heredity at work in horses, cows, and dogs; why not in humans, why not in feelings and personality and character? Sometimes he thought he was almost a new species. Unlike Mr. Tadbull, Wooty had a vision of larger horizons, a hunger to escape the anonymity of ordinary life, a hatred of the chains of somebody else’s rules.

He wondered if his yearning blood came from his great-grandfather Bascove Tadbull, the artist, or from his mother, who was supposed to have gone crazy and been sent back to her family in New Orleans in a
straight jacket? Maybe she had hot French or Spanish blood in her. He could conjure up only the vaguest images of his mother, based mainly on old photos he’d since lost track of and on one or two very early visits to New Orleans. But he knew his father well enough to suspect he’d unfavorably embellished her real nature and ultimate fate.

The faint sound of movement snapped Wooty back from his ruminations. He felt a difference in the forest. Someone was there, in the pitch blackness. He snuffed out his cigarette on a floorboard and took up his pistol, clicking the safety off.

Whoever it was out there knew the forest, knew how to move at night like a stalking animal. Definitely not his clumsy contacts, who were supposed to be tough city guys from New Orleans, but surely complete idiots in this environment. He would have heard their vehicle bouncing along the primitive road to the camp long before they arrived.

Wooty remembered the night several weeks before, when his buddy Travis Corbett had fallen to his death, the same night he had later seen the apparition of the deer and the cougar in the moonlight. Was this the same person, or entity, who’d led Travis on his fatal pursuit?

He aimed both his pistol and shining flashlight in the direction of the subtle rustling of pine straw fifteen feet in front of him.

“Identify yourself! Now!” he said, louder than he’d intended.

“No need to shout.” It was a woman’s voice. A familiar voice. “I can hear you, Wooty. If I was two miles away, I could hear you.”

The beam of light locked onto Luevenia Silsby, emerging from the scaly pine trunks toward an astonished Wooty. As if cradling an infant, she carried her shotgun propped over her left arm.

“What the . . . Miss Luevie, listen, you can’t stay out here. I’ve got . . . business. Visitors, uh, friends coming. It’s very confidential.”