Kent Conwell - Tony Boudreaux 13 - The Diamonds of Ghost Bayou (19 page)

I lay motionless after the door closed, listening to their footsteps crossing the hall. A door squeaked open. Moments later,
Buzz mumbled, “She’s still out. Satisfied?”

“Yeah. Now, let’s get that drink.”

Their footsteps receded down the hall.

Turk called out, “These stairs are about to fall down”

Abruptly, I rolled from the bed, hoping to free the chain before they got back downstairs. I lifted the leg of the bedstead
and slipped the chain from under it; then, holding the chain in
my hand, I eased to the door and opened it a crack.

A dim bulb burned at one end of the hall, its pale glow barely
reaching my door. I heard the two men downstairs. Moving as
silently as possible, I opened each of the dresser’s drawers and
rifled through them.

Rain continued to pelt the house, with chain lightning performing an intermittent slashing dance across the darkness.

My fingers found a safety pin, the size once used on cloth diapers. Opening the pin, I knelt by the partially open door and
quickly fit the point into the ancient padlock. Seconds later, it
snapped open, and I unscrewed the locking pin in the manacle.

Voices echoed from the stove. On tiptoe, I eased across the
room and opened the door in the stove’s belly. The empty stove
amplified their words like a loudspeaker. My blood ran cold as
I eavesdropped on their conversation.

“How long you figure we’ll be out here?”

Buzz grunted. “Can’t tell. Just depends on what he’s got in
mind.”

When Turk replied, there was a trace of concern in his voice.
“You don’t suppose he’ll want us to waste them, do you?”

“All I know is, we was told to snatch them. What’s the matter?” Buzz snorted. “You getting religion all of a sudden?”

“Nah. It ain’t that. It’s the woman. I ain’t never whacked no
woman.”

“We wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t missed him with the chandelier last night. If you’d busted him up good, maybe he
would have gotten the message. He’s going to keep looking.
That’s what he told the woman last night.”

Last night! Frantically I thought back. That’s exactly what I
had said to Diane when she called before bed. I muttered a curse.
Our telephones were bugged.

“It wasn’t my fault,” Turk responded.

“Well, that don’t make no difference. He tells you to whack
her, you whack her-or you get it, understand?” He cleared his
throat. “He’s already got three under his belt. A couple more
ain’t going to make no difference. Gimme that bottle. I want
another drink.”

“When are we going to know something?”

“Why don’t you settle down? He’ll send somebody out here
later. Then we’ll know.” I could hear the agitation in Buzz’s voice.

“He could call on his cell.”

“He could, but he won’t. You know that. And I ain’t about to
call him.”

A cold chill had settled over me. I felt around in the dark for
the chain and picked it up, holding it so the heavy padlock was
on the end, a formidable weapon.

Feeling the weight of the padlock in my hand, I peered through
the crack in the door.

A blinding flash of lightning followed instantly by an explosion of thunder shook the house. The light in the hall flickered once or twice, then went out, plunging the floor into
darkness.

Excited curses rolled up the stairs. From what I heard, it seemed
the electricity was out throughout the house.

Buzz shouted, “Stop griping. Use your cigarette lighter and
see if you can find some candles or a lantern. Old place like this
is bound to have something.”

Arms extended, I eased across the hall and felt my way along
the wall to the first door. I opened it slowly in an effort to keep
it from squeaking, although in all probability, any sound would
have been lost in the noise of the storm raging outside.

Lightning cast a brilliant white rectangle across the floor and bed, illuminating Diane’s shoulders and face. I slipped forward and, in the next explosion of light, placed my hand over
her lips. “Diane! Diane! It’s me, Tony!”

She jumped and slammed my hand away instinctively before
realizing I wasn’t one of her abductors. “Tony?”

I sat on the bed. “Yeah. You all right?”

“My head hurts, and I feel sick to my stomach.”

“That was the chloroform they gave us” I took her arm. “Can
you get up?”

“Yes. But where are we?”

“I’ve got no idea. Some old house way out in the middle of
nowhere. Electricity’s off. All I know is we’ve got to get out of
here. Buzz and Turk are downstairs.’ ‘I didn’t go into detail.

She sat up and groaned. “My head is killing me”

“Forget about it. Come on, but stay on tiptoe. We’re on the
second floor. They can hear any noise up here.” I took her hand.
“Follow me.”

Using the brief flashes of lightning to show us our way, we
eased from the room and down the pitch-black hall to the top of
the stairs. I turned to her. “Wait. Let’s try to find out where they are.”

“All right,” she whispered.

Looking down the hall, I caught a glimpse of the stairway. It
swept down to the foyer in a graceful curve.

Through the darkness I caught the tiny glow from a cigarette
lighter as Turk came through a doorway and crossed the foyer
at the bottom of the stairs. “I ain’t found no candles yet,” he
called out as he entered an adjoining room. “You find anything?”

From deep in the rear of the house, Buzz replied, “No. Keep
looking.”

I flexed my fingers about the chain, swinging the padlock back
and forth just in case. “Easy,” I whispered. “We’re going downstairs and outside if we can.”

“Outside?”

“The van. I’ll hot-wire it, and we’ll get out of here.”

Diane halted abruptly. “What if he comes back?”

All I could do was tighten my grip on the chain.

Holding our breath, we eased down the stairs. When we were
halfway across the foyer, a dim yellow light appeared in the
darkness of the room off to our right, heading straight toward us.

I pushed Diane against the wall beside the open door and
then seized the chain with both hands. Just as the faint flame
appeared in the doorway, I swung the chain and padlock.

The heavy weight caught Buzz on the forehead, sending him
staggering back into the living room. I jerked Diane after me.
“Quick. Let’s go.”

Just as I wrenched open the door, Turk shouted, “Stop, or I’ll
shoot!”

I yanked Diane onto the porch and shoved her to one side of
the door. I leaped to the other.

Turk charged out the open door after us. I lunged at his back,
shoving him as hard as I could down the ten-foot flight of steps
to the ground below. Lightning lit the sky as he sailed through
the air and hit the ground hard. He lay motionless.

I waved at Diane. “Quick. The van.”

We sloshed through the water and mud to the van parked on
the graveled circular drive and jumped in. The driving rain
pounded the metal roof, and lightning crashed on every side.
Diane shouted for me to hurry.

To my surprise, the keys were in the ignition. The engine
roared to life, and as I jerked the transmission into drive, a hole
exploded in one side of the windshield. I didn’t hesitate. I
jammed the accelerator to the floor, and the van fishtailed around the curve and along the drive toward the road, the headlights
struggling to penetrate the driving rain.

Just before we reached the road, another set of headlights
turned down the drive, heading in our direction. They blinked
several times, signaling us to stop.

“Don’t stop!” Diane shouted, sitting on the edge of the seat
and clutching the dash so hard, I’m certain her nails left deep
gouges.

“Don’t worry about that!” I exclaimed through clenched teeth
as I fought the gumbo mud trying to rip the steering wheel
from my fingers.

We shot past the car. I caught a glimpse of the driver in the
beams of my headlights. I wasn’t certain, but he reminded me
of one of the pool players back at the Golden Crystal Casino,
the one they called Mule. If that were true, that meant the “he”
that Turk and Buzz had spoken of could be Anthony O’Donnell.
Otherwise, what was Mule doing here?

In the side mirror, I saw the vehicle’s brake lights flicker and
then go off as it raced toward the house.

Diane craned her neck around like a stork’s. “He stopped at
the house,” she shouted.

By now, we had reached the road. I turned right, hoping I wasn’t
taking us into a dead end.

“He’s coming, he’s coming!” she shouted. “Faster, Tony, faster.
He’s coming.”

I shot a quick look in the side-view mirror, just as the car
burst from the drive and fishtailed from shoulder to shoulder on
the slick macadam road. “See if there’s anything in the glove
compartment we can use.”

She opened the door, and in the light emanating from inside
the compartment, I spotted the butt of a pistol. “There’s a gun!”
she exclaimed, pulling out a snub-nosed revolver. It looked like
a .38. I knew from our time together, she knew nothing about
guns. That was then. This was now. “You ever learn to shoot a
pistol?”

”No.

I took it from her and tucked it under my belt. “Great,” I
mumbled.

We were racing down the road, too fast for my comfort, but
there was no choice. The darkness and the rain enveloped us,
muting the glare of the pursuing headlights.

Our own headlights carved out a fuzzy cone less than a
hundred feet before us. Instinctively, I slowed. Rain and wind
whistled through the hole in the windshield.

My only consolation was that those behind us were facing
the same problems. “Find something to stuff in the hole in the
window.”

Fumbling behind the seat, she found several rags and stuffed
them into the hole. Her breathing was shallow. “Tony, they shot
at us”

I kept my eyes on the road. “Yeah.”

Her voice was strangled. “You think-I mean, were-”

Flexing my fingers about the wheel, I muttered, “I don’t know.
Not now.”

She moaned.

To my relief, the narrow macadam road angled back to the
northwest, toward 1-10. A sign appeared on the right: PIRATES
LANDING, 2 MILES. I looked at my watch: almost four. Another sign appeared, warning drivers of a series of S-curves
ahead.

The reddish glow from the dash lights emphasized the fear
scribed over Diane’s face.

I took the curves as fast as I dared. We whipped around a
sharp curve and shot into the small village of Pirates Landing.
Except for an all-night convenience store, the town was closed
down. A single flashing caution light hung in the middle of a
four-way intersection.

Half a block beyond the intersection, the road curved back to
the south. A car lot faced the curve. Behind the lot, a shell road
cut back east. I braked quickly, then turned off the macadam
and pulled into the shadows behind the car lot’s service garage.
From where we sat, we could see the front of the convenience
store through a row of storm-battered trees.

Diane shouted in alarm. “Why are you stopping?”

I turned off the lights but kept the engine running. “I’m
guessing there’s only one car. Whichever way it goes at the intersection, we’ll head back the way we came.”

The shadows hid her face, but I could imagine the disbelief
on it when she exclaimed, “The way we came?”

“I figure that’s the last thing those bozos would think of.”
Headlights slashed through the rain, and a tan car slid in at the
convenience store. The front right fender had several deep scars
along it as if it had scraped a fence post. I learned later it was
a Lexus, but my recognition of automobiles was limited to
Chevrolet Silverado pickups. All of the boxy shapes or extreme
curves of contemporary cars looked the same to me.

A figure jumped out of the car and rushed inside.

“Turk,” I muttered.

Diane was breathing hard. She was whispering under her
breath. I couldn’t make out what she was saying, but I sure hoped
it was a prayer for us.

Turk raced from the store and jumped into the Lexus, which
then sped northwest. I pulled out from where we were hiding
and headed back in the direction we had come from.

Several miles beyond the antebellum mansion in which we
had been held prisoner, I took the first hardtop back to the
north, hoping to hit 1-10 somewhere.

According to the radio, the storm would continue until at
least midmorning. Flood advisories were out for all the lowlying areas of the state, which was pretty much everything
south of the interstate. Grimly, I hoped we wouldn’t run into a
low-water crossing.

I glanced at my watch: almost four thirty. Another hour or so
before the first gray glimmers of false dawn. Keeping my eyes
on the winding road ahead of us, I said, “We’ve got to ditch this
van somewhere.” From the corner of my eye, I saw Diane look
around at me. “They’ll be looking for it, so we’ve got to drop it
off someplace where they won’t find it too fast. That’ll give us
time to get back to Priouxville. We can’t go back for the Cadillac. They’ll be watching it.”