Dead Man (29 page)

Silence from Dain. A charred timber in the cabin collapsed in a shower of sparks, jerking Maxton’s head around. He turned
back quickly. A third bush was moving. Feebly. Yes! He went into his firing crouch.

He called softly, “All I’ve ever wanted is the bonds!”

No answer.

“I don’t want the girl. Not any more.”

Hell no, he didn’t want her. Trask already had her. The top of the next bush moved slightly. He brought up his gun. Sidled
closer.

Dain was lying on his back under the bushes, dappled with moonlight. He held a long willow stick in his good hand, angled
up against a branch of an overhead bush three yards away. Unlike Maxton, he had kept count of the shots fired.

“Just two more, damn you,” he muttered to himself.

At almost the same time, Maxton’s voice came again.

“What do you say? Not you, not the girl. Just the bonds.”

For answer, Dain jammed the stick hard against the bush, and so close together they were almost one, two slugs ripped
through the undergrowth where he should have been. He was already on his feet and bursting out of the thicket.

Maxton was five yards away, digging a handful of shells from his pocket to feed into the gun’s open cylinder. Dain’s charge
rocked him back on his heels, sent the bullets flying. But Maxton swung the .38 in a vicious arc—the barrel slammed down on
Dain’s injured shoulder.

Dain cried out with the pain, spun away, fell, rolled away from Maxton’s surprisingly quick and viciously kicking feet, was
as quickly on his own feet, ready. They circled like fighting dogs seeking advantage. But Dain was backing up as he circled,
away from the last embers of the burned-out cabin.

Maxton sprang.

He was a powerful adversary and he had the use of both arms and a pistol as a club. They grappled, fell, rolled over and over,
striking, kicking, grabbing. Dain, hampered by his useless arm and the need to protect his wound from Maxton’s blows, was
fading fast. His bandages were soaked in new blood.

He managed to break free, get to his feet, back up a low rise with a big sycamore tree in the dip beyond it. He was staggering.
Maxton swung the heavy revolver again, Dain ducked, but the gun sight raked across his forehead. Blood ran down into his eyes.
Maxton laughed.

“I’ll chop you to pieces, Dain.”

He feinted twice, then leaped in with another terrible swing of the gun. But Dain sprang forward inside the blow, with his
last despairing strength got his good hand on Maxton’s windpipe. Squeezing. Maxton’s eyes began to bug out. The gun slammed
into Dain’s back, but because they were chest-to-chest there was little force in the blows.

Then Dain fell backward to land at the very lip of the knoll, dragging Maxton down on top of him, with a leg already drawn
up to his chest so the raised foot would plant itself firmly in Maxton’s belly. As the big man came down on top of him, the
leg pistoned straight up. Maxton’s momentum, guided by the throat grip and given terrific force by the thrust of that catapult
leg, sent him right over Dain’s body in a flip.

Under the wide-spreading sycamore the flat black slowly seething depths of the tar vat sent up sluggish bubbles. Dain released
his grip on the throat and Maxton went out beyond him and down, screaming horribly when he landed spread-eagle on his back
in the bubbling tar, still clutching his useless gun. He tried to rise, pull free, but he was already burning. Several jerky
motions, still screaming, but all they did was send waves of tar from the sides of the vat rolling back over him. In a few
moments, he subsided to a shapeless smoking mass.

Dain missed that part. He had passed out.

Vangie was leaning against a tree, panting, half a dozen yards off the road through the woods. She could hear the sounds of
Trask’s supposedly stealthy pursuit behind her, but she didn’t move. Not too far behind, Trask also stopped, panting, to listen
for sounds of his fleeing prey. His face was cut by slashing branches, blackberry thorns.

As he dashed sweat from his forehead with the back of his gun hand, Vangie burst in apparent wild terror from cover a dozen
yards away. She was gone even as he fired—still low, still trying to bring her back alive. He was a good soldier, a good button
man. He had his quirks, but he knew how to obey orders.

He plunged away after her.

But it was harder now, the moon was lower, its light dimmer. He stopped, listened. He didn’t know that Vangie was sitting
on the ground a few yards ahead of him around a bend in the track, also listening. She had been hard-pressed to keep from
losing him. She was poised for flight, but there was nothing to flee from. She couldn’t hear him moving around. She took her
big Bowie knife from the sheath, nervously, put it back.

It was time. Life or death. She wondered how Dain was. Out of sight of each other, they still were fighting in tandem.

She picked up a rock from the trail, hesitated, then heaved it back the way she had come.

Trask’s head jerked around toward the crashing from the undergrowth. He had been concentrating all of his attention in the
wrong direction, but now he had that little bitch!

Gun in hand, he charged around the bend in the track.

Vangie was half-sitting a few yards beyond, one leg drawn up, massaging her ankle with an agonized look on her face. She screamed
in apparent surprise and fear.

“I did your folks, now I’m gonna do you!”

And he charged her. There was no way she could escape him. Oh, she tried. She leaped up but cried out, fell, rolled, holding
her ankle, trying unsuccessfully to scrabble away from him. Not this time. He was upon her…

But just a yard short of Vangie, in shadow that made it even more invisible, was one of Papa’s tight lines—eight feet above
the ground where Trask would never see it unless he was looking up. Instead of the original hooks on the stagings, now at
their three-foot intervals were strung the muskrat traps Vangie had been greasing, each one open and set.

Trask, charging, yelling, gloating down at his prey helpless at his feet, ran face-first right into one of the gaping traps.
She had led him to it as carefully as a mother bird feigning a broken wing will lead a fox away from her nest.

The trap’s powerful spring snapped jagged steel teeth shut on his face with a vicious metallic snap. He screamed and danced,
jumped and jerked—and his wildly swung gun hand smashed into a second trap, which snapped shut around it, crushing the fingers,
piercing the wrist. The gun fell.

Vangie came up off the ground in a lithe drive of piston legs, right at him with her huge gleaming Bowie knife in both hands,
cutting edge down, held the way a Mayan priest might hold the knife to rip open the chest of a blood sacrifice.
He was the one! The one who had killed her folks!

Her face distorted with the killing lust, she slammed the blade down into the center of the screaming man’s belly in a long
disemboweling slash like a hunter gutting a hung deer. She cried out formlessly as she did it; a splash of hot blood hit her
across the face as her attack carried her right past the flopping, shrieking man.

Vangie dropped her knife and staggered a few steps away
into the woods exactly like a drunkard, then collapsed. She slumped there in a huddle, unmoving, sobbing.

For ten years her life had been without consequence, without meaning. Now she had killed two men. She had stolen $2 million.
Her folks were dead because of her and she had mourned them with a knife. She could never again be whoever she had been for
those ten years.

She cried for who she had been and for who she had become. She cried for Dain, for her folks, for Jimmy.

She didn’t cry for Trask.

Finally cried out, she fell silent. After a time, animal, bird, and insect noises began again, tentatively at first, then
soaring in a triumphant discordant chorus to greet the first predawn lightening of the forest.

There was the faintest of pale gold horizontal slashes drawn on the utmost horizon. Everything below was a cold gray blanket
of ground mist, the big cypresses rising from it here and there like sentinels. In the woods, just the woolly polls of the
overstory trees stood above it like tight-packed heads. On the bayou a flatboat drifted in the gray world where air and water
were barely separate, as if floating in a dream.

Inverness came abruptly erect on the seat. Looked around in an almost dazed manner. Splashed water in his face. Even the splashes
were muted, distant, dreamlike. He began to row.

Vangie appeared at the mouth of the road walking listlessly, shoulders slumped, face innocent as a sleepwalker’s. Trask’s
pistol dangled from one hand by the trigger guard. Overlaying the scents of the morning swamp was the sweetish
smell of barbecued meat, not entirely pleasant. She shuddered when she realized what it was.

Dain was limping toward her across the open ground past the rectangle of ash and charcoal, still faintly warm, that marked
her father’s cabin. He looked pale, drawn, dragged off center by pain, bloodstained from his reopened wound. She knew she
couldn’t look much better.

They stopped three feet from each other, not touching. Vangie finally reached out to lay a hand on his good arm. Only then
did they come together, clasp each other fiercely with nothing of lovers in it, only the intimacy of warriors who have survived
the battle. They finally stepped back. An uncontrollable shudder ran through Vangie, somewhat like the sudden diminishing
little gasping intakes of breath after a fit of hysterics.

She said tentatively, “You ought to see the other guys?”

“What other guys?” he said in the same tone.

Wonder was in her voice. “It’s… over? Truly all over?”

“Yes. For you it’s all over.”

A final shudder ran through her. “Inverness?”

“Strategic withdrawal. He’ll be back.”

Vangie made an aborted gesture back toward what she had left hanging from the tight line in the woods. “I… I don’t know if
I can… again…”

“If I could get out of it, I wouldn’t either,” he said. “But you can get out. You must get out. I couldn’t stand it if after
all of this you…” His voice had harshened; now he said in softer tones, “Go bury your dead, Vangie.”

They started walking slowly down toward the water, Dain limping, his good arm around her shoulders for support.

“Will you be all right?” he asked.

She didn’t answer.

“Please. Take the bonds and run.”

“I’ll have to,” she said finally. “If I’m still here when he comes back, he’ll have to kill me, won’t he?” Right along with
you, she seemed to be implying, though she didn’t say it. “But if I’m back in civilization, shocked, explaining that I was
camping out in the bayous, I didn’t know my folks had been murdered, I’ve never heard of any of you… Then I’ll be safe.”

“Take the gun.”

“I have the gun.” She gestured with it. “You hid the pirogue with the bonds in it. He can’t follow me in a flatboat, he has
to go the long way around. So don’t worry about me.”

Couldn’t you worry about me? he thought. Just a little? He’d wanted her to leave, but hadn’t really expected that she’d do
it.

It was dawn but the sun had not yet broken through the haze. At the rear of the island, where the bayou had cut its ancient
channel, Inverness’s flatboat drifted soundlessly out of the fog to ground with only a whisper of keel against mud. With an
almost incredible swiftness, Inverness was up over the gunwale and into the bushes.

He kept going swiftly but carefully, slipping from cover to cover, stopping often to let the birds tell him what or who might
lie ahead. Totally alert, he was the hunter in his element.

As they shambled down toward the water, Vangie was shocked at how much weaker Dain was. How was he going to stand up to Inverness?
He might already be dying; he’d sustained a terrible amount of damage.

“What about you? You can’t just stay here and wait for him.”

“He has to end it. End me. To him I’m a nightmare that isn’t over when you wake up.”

“He killed your wife, Dain,” she said cruelly. “He’ll find Trask, I used the knife on him. That ought to slow him down…”

Dain nodded. “That’s his only failure as a hitman. It’s our only edge.”

“What? I don’t understand.”

“His imagination. He’s got a vivid imagination.”

“If that’s your edge, use it. What are you going to do? What’s your plan?”

“Delay him, that’s the plan.” That wasn’t what she had
meant. “I’ll get you as much time as I can. I’m not strong enough to fight him, he’s too wary to be tracked down, and I’m
not good enough in the woods to ambush him. So—”

“So you have to make him come to you.”

“When he does, how will he do it?”

“Under cover of this fog. He’ll row around to the rear of the island, work up through the woods afoot, probably along Papa’s
fishing road…”

Dain gave a short mirthless laugh, started coughing at the end of it. “The man… who won’t… die…”

He was coughing up blood. She didn’t know if he was talking about Inverness or himself. She couldn’t leave him here in this
state, she couldn’t stay with him, she couldn’t take him with her.

Inverness stopped with one foot raised and a hand extended to push aside a branch. He had heard, reduced by distance, robbed
of words and given mere tones, the raised voices of Vangie and Dain. He began to trot through the woods toward them, turning
into the fishing road when he crossed it, because the going was easier and faster.

And stopped dead, a horrified look on his face. Trask’s gutted body, still held by the deadly traps, had dragged the nylon
tight line down so he was held up in a sort of grotesque half-curtsy. One arm was held out head-height by its trap, his legs
were bent in an awful parody of a ballet dancer’s
plié.
He had been neatly disemboweled. As for his face, in
its
trap…

Inverness edged around the body, unable to look away, then was free of it. They’d been thorough. One burned to death, one
gutted. Not a squeamish pair. He wondered what they had done to Maxton. Not that he cared too much. There was nothing squeamish
about the survivors of this world, and he was a survivor.