“Yum-yum!” Doc said. “Candygram for Mongo!”
Virgil pushed Flint’s face toward the toilet bowl. The man’s strength was awesome, and though Flint did his damnedest at resisting, all he could do was slow the inevitable. He couldn’t get to the derringer and neither could he find the breath to command Clint to get it. His only hope was that he would pass out before his face broke the scummy, clotted surface.
“Sir?”
Doc turned his head toward the husky voice behind him. He gasped; Elvis Presley was standing there, framed by the hot white glare through the open doorway. Doc stood gaping and stunned as Pelvis Eisley reached up with his left hand and plucked off the sunglasses. Doc blinked, his pale green eyes overloaded with light.
“ ’Scuse me,” Pelvis said, and he lifted his right hand — the hand that held the red can of Mace he’d taken from the Cadillac’s glove compartment — and sprayed a burst of fine mist squarely into Doc’s face.
The result was immediate. Doc let out a scream that curled Pelvis’s ducktail, and he staggered back, raking at his inflamed eyeballs. In the toilet stall, Flint’s nose was two inches away from disaster when the scream echoed off the tiles and Virgil’s hand left the back of his head. Flint jabbed an elbow backward into the man’s chest, but Virgil just grunted and turned away to help Doc.
“Lord have mercy,” Pelvis said when he saw the size of the black man who’d just emerged from the toilet stall. Virgil took one look at Doc, who was down on the floor clutching his face with both hands and writhing in agony, then he stared at Pelvis as if seeing an alien from another planet. The shock didn’t last but three seconds, after which Virgil charged Pelvis like a mad bull.
Pelvis stood his ground and got off another spray of Mace, but Virgil saw it coming and he jerked his head to one side, throwing up a thick forearm to protect his face. The spray wet his shoulder and burned like the furies of Hell, but Virgil was still moving and he hit his target with a body block that all but knocked Pelvis out of his blue suede shoes. Pelvis slammed against the wall, his jowls and belly quaking, and Virgil chopped at his wrist and knocked the Mace out of his hand. The stomp of a Nike crushed the can flat. Virgil grabbed Pelvis by the throat and lifted him off his feet. Pelvis’s eyes bulged as he started choking, his fingers scrabbling to loosen Virgil’s massive hands.
Flint had staggered out of the stall. He saw Pelvis’s face swelling with blood and he knew he had to do something — anything — fast. He yanked his shirt open, pulled the derringer from its holster, and cocked it. “Leave him alone!” Flint shouted, but Virgil paid no attention. There was no time for a second try. Flint stepped forward, pressed the derringer’s double barrels against the back of Virgil’s left knee, and squeezed the trigger. The little weapon made only a polite firecracker pop, but the force of the slug couldn’t help but shatter the big man’s kneecap. Virgil cried out and released Pelvis, and he went down on the floor, gripping at the ruins of his knee.
“Gone pass out!” Pelvis gasped. “Lordy, I can’t stand up!”
“Yes you can!” Flint saw his wallet on the floor where Virgil had dropped it, and he snatched it up and then took Pelvis’s weight on his shoulder. “Come on, move!” He kicked the door open and pulled Pelvis out with him into the scorching light. The loading of the alligators was still proceeding, which made Flint think that the other three workmen had believed Doc’s scream of pain to be his own. The red-haired grocery girl had probably been too scared to come look; either that, or screams of pain were commonplace around there. But then one of two workers carrying a squirming alligator along the pier saw them and let out a holler: “Hey, Mitch! Doc and Virgil are down!” The third man was on the boat, and he reached under his muddy yellow shirt and pulled out a pistol before he came running across the gangplank.
It was definitely time to vacate the premises.
Pelvis, who could hardly stand up one second, was in the next second a fairly impressive sprinter. The man with the gun got off a shot that knocked a chunk of cinder block from the wall eight inches above Flint’s head, and Flint fired the derringer’s other bullet without aiming though he knew he was out of range. All the workmen threw themselves flat on the pier, the ’gator landing belly-up. Then Flint was running for the car, too, where Mama was barking frantically in the driver’s seat. He almost crushed her as he flung himself behind the wheel, and Pelvis did crush the sack of Twinkies, potato chips, and cookies that occupied his own seat. Flint jammed the key in, started the engine, and roared away from the store in reverse. The man with the gun hadn’t come around the corner yet. Flint put the pedal to the metal, the engine still shrieking in reverse.
And then there was the gunman, skidding around the building’s edge. He planted his feet in a firing stance and took aim at the retreating car. Flint shouted, “Get down!” and Pelvis ducked his head, both arms clutching Mama. But before the man could pull the trigger, the Eldorado got behind the cover of woods and Flint’s heart fell back into his chest from where it had lodged in his throat. He kept racing backward another fifty yards before he found a clear place on the weedy shoulder to turn the car around, then he gave it the gas again.
Pelvis had hesitantly lifted his head. The first faint blue bruises were coming up on his neck. “I come to the bathroom and heard ’em in there!” he croaked over the howl of wind and engine. “Looked through the hole in the door and seen ’em tryin’ to rob you! I ’membered what you said ’bout the Mace blindin’ a man!”
“They were crazy, that’s what they were!” Flint’s face glistened with sweat, his eyes darting back and forth from the rearview mirror to the road. The truck wasn’t following. He cut his speed to keep from flying off the dangerous curves into the marsh. Clint was still writhing, as if he shared his brother’s fury. “Goddamned swamp rats, tried to drown me!” Still the truck wasn’t following, and Flint eased up on the gas some more. Pelvis kept looking back, too, his face mottled with crimson splotches. “I don’t see ’em yet!”
In another moment Flint realized — or hoped — the truck wasn’t coming after them at all. The dirt road where they’d been sitting watching for Lambert would soon be on the left. It was time to take a gamble. What were the odds that the truck was following as opposed to the odds that it was not? Doc probably couldn’t see yet, and Virgil was going to need a stretcher. Flint put his foot on the brake as they approached the dirt road.
“What’re you doin? You ain’t stoppin’, are you?” Pelvis squawked.
“I’m here to get Lambert,” Flint said as he backed off the highway into the shade of the weeping willows once more. “I’m not lettin’ a bunch of swamp rats run me off.” He got far enough down the road so as not to be seen by anyone coming from either direction, then he opened the glove compartment, brought out a box of bullets for the derringer, and reloaded its chambers. He cut the engine, and they sat there, all four of them breathing hard.
A minute passed. “That toy gun might do fine in a pinch,” Pelvis said, “but I wouldn’t stake my life on it.” Flint didn’t respond. Five minutes went by, during which Pelvis kept mumbling to himself or Mama. After fifteen minutes they heard a vehicle approaching from the south. “Oh, Lord, here they come!” Pelvis said, scrunching down in his seat.
The truck passed their hiding place at a lawful speed and kept going. They listened to it moving away, and then its sound faded.
“I’ll be.” Pelvis sat up, wincing as pain lanced his lower back. If he hadn’t been carrying such a pad of fat around his midsection, he might be laid out on the bathroom floor right then. “What do you make of that?”
Flint shook his head. A lot of strange things had happened to him in his bounty-hunting career, but this might have been the strangest. What had all that been about? Doc and Virgil hadn’t been trying to rob him; they’d wanted to know who he was, why he was there, and who he’d been talking to on the phone. “Damned if I can figure it out.” He slid Clint’s derringer back into its holster. “You all right?”
/> “Hurtin’ some, but I reckon I’m okay.”
Flint kept listening for a siren that would be an ambulance or police car. If the cops showed up, they could wreck everything. But he was starting to have the feeling that the swamp rats didn’t care to see the police around, either. Law-abiding citizens didn’t usually carry straight razors and threaten the bodily parts of strangers. And what was all that about somebody named Victor Medina, and them thinking he might be there to rob them?
Rob them of what? A truckload of live alligators?
It made no sense, but Flint hadn’t come this distance to worry about some crazy ’gatormen. He turned his attention back to snaring Lambert. Stupid of Eisley to have lost the Mace; he should’ve held on to it, no matter what. Without the Mace, the job was going to be that much tougher.
“Mr. Murtaugh, sir?”
Flint looked at Pelvis, and saw that his face had turned milky white.
“Never seen a fella get shot before,” Pelvis said, in obvious distress. “Never been shot at, neither. Got to thinkin’ ’bout it, and … believe I’m gone have to heave.”
“Well, get out and do it! Don’t you mess up my car!”
“Yes sir.” Pelvis opened the door, pulled himself out and staggered into the woods, and Mama leapt from the car after him.
Flint grunted with disgust. Man who couldn’t take a little violence and blood sure wasn’t suited to hunt skins for bounty. His own nerves had stopped jangling several minutes earlier, but he was going to see that toilet bowl in his nightmares.
Clint had settled down to rest again. Flint looked into the crumpled sack of groceries, and he was gratified to find a small green bottle. He uncapped the lemon juice and took a long, thirsty swallow. Ever since he could remember, his system had craved acid. He decided that in a few minutes he should walk up to the cabin and make sure Lambert hadn’t arrived while they’d been gone.
Still there was no siren. The police and ambulance weren’t coming.
Alligators, he thought. What made alligators worth protecting with a pistol?
Well, it wasn’t his business. His business was finding Lambert and taking him back to Shreveport, which he was determined to do. He could hear Eisley retching out all that junk food he’d packed himself with. Flint took another drink from the green bottle, and he thought that this was a hell of a life for a gentleman.
14
The Small Skulls
DAN WAS ONE OF the first to reach the village. The sky was stained yellow by drifting smoke, the air thick with the reek of burned flesh.
He heard the wailing, like the sound of muted trumpets.
He moved forward through the haze at a slow-motion gait, his M16 clutched before him. Sweat had stiffened the folds of his uniform, his heart thudding in his chest like distant artillery. Someone was screaming up ahead: a woman’s scream, hideous in its rising and falling. The ugly smoke swirled around him, its smell stealing his breath. He pushed past a couple of other grunts from his platoon, one of whom turned away and vomited on the dirt.
At the center of the village was a smoldering pile of twisted gray shapes. Dan walked nearer to it, feeling the heat tighten his face. Some of the villagers were on their knees, shrieking. He saw four or five children clinging to their mothers’ legs, their faces blank with shock. Small orange flames flickered in the burned pile; nearby was a United States Marine-issue gasoline can, probably stolen from a supply dump, that had been left as a taunt.
Dan knew what had been set afire. He knew even before he saw the small skulls. Before he saw a crisped hand reaching up from the mass of bodies. Before he saw that some of them had not burned to the bone, but were swollen and malformed and pink as seared pork.
Someone clutched his arm. He looked into the wrinkled, tear-streaked face of an old Vietnamese man who was jabbering with what must have been a mixture of rage and terror. The old man thrust his hand at Dan, and in the palm lay a tiny airplane formed out of tinfoil.
He understood, then. It was from the Hershey bar’s wrapper. The Cong had circled around behind them, and had found this tinfoil toy as evidence of collusion with the enemy. How many children had been executed was difficult to tell. Flesh had melted and run together in glistening pools, bones had blackened and fused, facial features had been erased. The old Vietnamese staggered away from Dan, still jabbering, and thrust his palm in an accusatory gesture at another marine. Then he went to the next and the next, his voice breaking and giving out but his hand still flying up to show them the reason for this massacre of the innocents.
Dan backed away from the burned corpses, one hand over his mouth and nose and sickness churning in his stomach. Captain Aubrey was trying to take charge, yelling for someone to shovel dirt over the flames, but his face was pallid and his voice was weak. Dan turned his eyes from the sight, and he saw the young Bostonian with cornflower-blue eyes — Farrow — standing near him, staring fixedly at the fire as the Vietnamese elder thrust the tinfoil airplane into his face. Then Dan had to get away from the smoke before it overcame him, had to get away from the smell of it, but it was everywhere, in his khakis and his hair and in his skin. He had to get away from this war and this death, from the mindless killing and the numbing horror, and as he ran into the rice paddies he was sick all over himself but the odor was still in his nostrils and he feared he would smell it for the rest of his life.
He fell down in the wet vegetation and pushed his face into the muck. When he lifted his head, he could still smell the burned meat. Smoke drifted above him, a dark pall against the sun. Something strained to break loose inside him, and he was afraid of it. If this thing collapsed, so, too, might the wall of willpower and bravado he’d been shivering behind every moment, every hour, every day of his tour on duty. He was a good soldier, he did what he was told and he’d never gone south, never. But with brown mud on his face and black despair in his soul he fought the awful urge to get up and run toward the jungle, toward where they must be watching from the lids of their snake holes, and once there he would squeeze the trigger of his Ml6 until his ammo was gone and then they would emerge silently from the shadows and cut him to pieces.
Never gone south. Never. But he could feel himself trembling on the edge of the abyss, and he gripped handfuls of mud to keep from falling.
The feeling slowly passed. He was all right again. No, not all right, but he would make it. Death and cruel waste were no strangers in this land. He had seen sights enough to make him wish for blindness, but he had to stand up and keep going because he was a man and a marine and he was there to get the job done. He turned over on his back and watched the smoke drifting, a dark scrawl of senseless inhumanity, a sickening cipher. The wailing in the village behind him seemed to be growing more shrill and louder, a chorus of agony, though Dan clasped his hands to his ears louder louder though he squeezed his eyes shut and tried to neither think nor feel louder louder though he prayed for God to deliver him from this place and there was no answer but the wailing louder and louder and loud —
“Uh,” he said.
He sat up, his face contorted.
“Jesus!” somebody said. A female voice. “You ’bout scared the stew outta me!”
Wailing. He could still hear it. He didn’t know where he was, his mind was still hazed with the smoke of Vietnam. It came to him in another few seconds that he was no longer hearing the wailing from the village in his memory. A police car! he thought as panic streaked through him. He saw a window and started to get up and hobble toward it, but his joints had tightened and the pain in his skull was excruciating. He sat on the edge of what he realized was a bed, his hands pressed to his temples.
“I’ve been tryin’ to wake you up for five minutes. You were dead to the world. Then all of a sudden you sat up so fast I thought you were goin’ right through the wall.”
He hardly heard her. He was listening to the siren. Whatever it was — police car, fire truck, or ambulance — it was moving rapidly away. He rubbed his temples and tried to figure
out where he was. His brain seemed to be locked up, and he was searching desperately for the key.
“You all right?”
Dan looked up at the girl who stood next to him. The right side of her face was a deep violet-red. A birthmark, terrible in its domination. Arden was her name, he remembered. Arden Holiday. No. Halliday. He remembered the Cajun Country Truck Stop, a young man in a Hanoi Janes T-shirt, and a baseball bat studded with nails thunking down on the table.
“Brought you a barbecue,” she said, and she offered him a grease-stained white sack. “Restaurant’s right across the road.”
The smell of the charred pork made his stomach lurch. He lowered his head, trying to think through the pain.
“Don’t you want it? You must be hungry. Slept all day.”
“Just get it away from me.” His voice was a husky growl. “Please.”
“Okay, okay. I thought you’d want somethin’ to eat.”
She left the room. His memory was coming back to him in bits and pieces, like a puzzle linking together. A pistol shot. The dying face of Emory Blanchard. Reverend Gwinn and his wife’s crullers. The DeCaynes and a shotgun blast tearing the tire of his truck apart. Fifteen thousand dollars reward. Susan and Chad at Basile Park, and her telling him about the cabin in Vermilion. The bounty hunter with the flashlight, and Elvis Presley hollering for Mr. Murtaugh.
The girl, now. He’d given her a ride to Lafayette to see a man at a nursing home. Mr. Richards, the man’s name was. No, no; it was Jupiter. Old man, talking about somebody called the Bright Girl. Faith healer, down in the swamp. Take that mark right off your face. You His hands, you gone have to steer her the right direction.
A motel in Lafayette. That’s where he was. Slept all day, Arden had said. The sun was still high outside, though. He struggled to focus on his wristwatch’s dial, and read the time as eight minutes after four. His cap. Where was his cap? He found it lying on the bed beside him. His shirt was stiff with dried sweat, but there wasn’t much he could do about that. He sat there gathering the strength to stand up. He’d pushed himself yesterday to the limit of his endurance, and now he was going to have to pay the price. His headache was easing somewhat, but his bones throbbed in raw rhythm with his pulse. At last he stood up and staggered into the bathroom, where he caught a glimpse in the mirror of a white, sunken-eyed Halloween mask with a graying beard that couldn’t possibly be his face. There was a shower stall, this one thankfully with no frogs hopping about, and Dan reached in and turned on the cold tap and then put his head under the stream.