A Hard Death (38 page)

A
bove the engine, Brodie yelled, “Where's the girl?”

“What girl?” Jenner grinned feebly.

Brodie nodded, and Tarver kicked Jenner in the flank. He doubled up, gasping as the cord bit into his neck, his fingers trying to get under the rope. He lay there, gasping and retching from pain.

Brodie turned the airboat around and cut the throttle, moving back to the river opposite where they'd found the kayak; he was sure the ranger was in there somewhere, and he wanted her to see what he was going to do.

“Two questions. One: where is the girl? Two: what were you doing at the farm?”

Jenner was still struggling for breath. “I was looking for Lucy Craine at the farm; I saw her go into the farmhouse, and I was trying to get her. Then it exploded.”

Brodie snorted. “It didn't ‘explode'—I exploded it.” He grinned slightly. “So no need to worry about the Craine girl anymore. Where is the ranger, the one Nash shot?”

It was Jenner's turn to shrug. “I don't know. I put her in the kayak, told her to head to the sea. By the time I got back, she was long gone…”

Brodie looked at Jenner for a minute, then shook his head. “I sure wish we were playing poker tonight, doc—you can't lie to save your life!”

T
he light from the airboat had gone, and Deb couldn't see the snake, only feel it twisting next to her, a slab of dry muscle thick as a grown man's calf, curving up her side as the baby snakes swarmed her body.

They were crawling all over her now—she didn't know how many. Burrowing into her hair, sliding up her shirt, between her breasts. And the mother now, pressed against her. All of them touching her, pressing her, tickling her, twisting on her, as if she were being caressed by the fingers of a dozen insane men, men who'd kill her if she made the slightest movement.

The big snake pulled back; Deb felt its coils gathering, imagined the head rising.

Then she heard a small splash from the river; something was coming toward them.

The slow rattle began, then got louder.

A weak light shone into the buttonwoods from the water; there was a sharp intake of breath, and the snake rose up in front of her face, its rattle, lifted above the coils, shrilling quickly now. The narrow, deadly head, eyes hard and black as carbon, swayed as the snake prepared to strike.

She mustn't move. Whatever she did she mustn't move.

The light grew brighter, and Deb closed her eyes. She anticipated the attack, the snake's body shooting straight at her, recoiling in a fraction of a second leaving blood and venom and death in its wake.

The light flared through her eyelids, and she saw orange and she heard the rattle reach a crescendo, a high buzzing as dry as a cicada on a hot summer's day. Something hard nudged her leg.

She opened her eyes and saw the shotgun blast, the snake's head explode into a cloud of blood, the headless body thrashing and knotting, rolling over her hip to smear blood across her stomach. And when her ears could hear again, the first thing Deb heard was the shimmering rattle, still shaking as the snake's headless body writhed and twisted.

A small man, a shadow behind the glare of a flashlight, was leaning into the bushes, the shotgun now pointing at the ground by her leg. The light shifted as he reached in to grab her wrist, and she saw the lower part of his face was covered by a bandanna, bandit-style.

B
rodie's eyes scanned the banks of the river. Nothing. It was probably just thunder out over the Glades.

“Okay, enough of this shit.” He turned to Tarver. “Throw him over the back.”

Tarver was confused. “What?”

“Make sure he's tied to the seat rail, and toss him in! Jesus! Don't you even speak English?”

Tarver, muttering, dragged Jenner to the stern. Jenner struggled, tried to clutch onto something, anything, but Tarver moved him too quickly, pushing him against the low rim at the side of the boat, then rolling him over.

Jenner hit the water and was immediately dragged back behind the boat, choking and spluttering as he tried to get his face above the surface, fighting to wedge his fingers under the noose.

“Okay, let's see if we can get a rise out of your little pal…Tarver—watch the banks for movement.”

Jenner'd just managed to get his palm inside the rope when Brodie gunned the airboat; the rope snapped tight and they shot forward, Jenner bouncing and spinning behind. He had one hand jammed between the yellow rope and his neck, and with the other struggled to hold the tow rope for all he was worth, feeling his biceps tear as he fought to give his neck some slack.

The water banged against his back, flailing him from side to side, gasping and retching, gulping in water, vomiting it back out. The rope dug deep into his palm as the noose locked tight around his neck. His fingers went numb, his neck shredding as the rope cut a deep groove into his skin.

The boat slowed abruptly to an idle, and Jenner's momentum slammed him against the low transom.

Brodie leaned over him and said, “Where is she?”

Jenner, chest heaving as he fought for air, shook his head.

Brodie straightened, faced the dark mangroves.

He yelled, “Officer! You want to see me do him one more time? This next one will kill him, I figure.”

Brodie was pretty sure she was near. He muttered to Tarver to keep watching.

“You stupid bitch! You're going to die out here, you know that? If you're lucky, you'll bleed out before the gators find you…”

Tarver was moving the spotlight along the bank, shifting shadows through the foliage.

Jenner had worked the noose a little looser. He grabbed the back rail of the airboat, pulled himself a little bit out of the water, struggling to get his breath.

They stared into the mangroves.

Brodie sighed. “Well, doctor—looks like you're out of time. I don't think she wants to play.” He climbed back up onto the stick.

“Tarver, push him away, and let's finish this.”

A hundred yards behind them, some branches swayed, and Deb appeared, staggering in waist-deep water, exhausted, hands barely above her head.

Brodie nodded at her. “Wasn't expecting that.”

He turned to Tarver. “Okay, get him on board now, then help her in.”

Jenner lay on the floor of the boat. When he lifted his hands to loosen the rope, he saw his fingers were torn open, a grooved burn across the soft flesh of his palms where he'd fought the rope.

Deb grunted in pain as Tarver dragged her over the rail into the airboat. She lay next to Jenner.

He said, pointlessly, “You shouldn't have.”

“It'll be okay, Jenner. They were going to kill you.”

“They're still going to kill me. Now you, too.”

B
rodie turned the airboat back toward the farm, then let the engine idle and climbed down from the stick.

Jenner lay close to Deb on the floor, Tarver watching, pistol in hand. Tarver was getting antsy, peering toward the farm, prodding Brodie about when they could leave, when they could just get the fuck out of there.

Deb shook her head and whispered, “It'll be okay, Jenner. Just wait, it'll be all right, you'll see. We just need a little more time.”

Brodie squatted next to them.

“Okay, doc. Let's just do this. And let's save some time—we both know how this is going to go. I'll ask you some questions, you either answer or you don't. If you don't answer, I hurt you, or maybe her, until you answer. In the end, you'll answer—trust me on this.”

“What's in it for us?”

Brodie shook his head. “Enough. You know how this is going to play out—it's a question of whether or not there's pain.”

Jenner nodded. “Okay. No pain.”

“Good. We've all had enough of that.” Brodie spat into the dark water. “Who did you tell, and what have you told them? Call anyone in Port Fontaine?”

Jenner shook his head. “I called a friend in New York, he's bringing in the DEA.”

Brodie sat back and grinned. “Avoid the locals, smart. I mean, don't think the feds aren't for sale, but, yeah, you can buy a hick cop for the price of a doughnut and a pack of smokes.”

He looked at the girl. She was lying close to Jenner, eyes closed.

“Sorry about your ranger friend, doc. I'll make it quick.”

He looked at Jenner again. “Okay, the one last thing—there was some money, Craine gave you some money—I don't suppose…”

“He took it back.”

“Yeah, figured he would, that fucker. The rich get richer, eh, doctor?” He glanced over to Tarver and nodded, then looked back at Jenner. “Anything else I should know?”

And at that moment the night turned into day.

T
hey came out of nowhere, two boats, big searchlights flooding the whole estuary with light, Tarver and Brodie and Jenner blinking in the blinding light. Brodie threw an arm up to shade his dazzled eyes, and Tarver lifted his pistol; a shotgun blast blew his knee out from under him, and he collapsed, howling, on top of Jenner.

Jenner pushed out from under him and rolled on top of Deb to shield her. Looking up, he saw Brodie calmly lift both his hands and place them on his head.

He whispered to Deb, “Deb, the feds…Hold very still; for now, we're all suspects.”

She shook her head. “It's not the feds, Jenner.”

He struggled to sit up, back braced against the front-row seat struts.

The searchlights dimmed, and Jenner saw more boats arriving, sliding downriver, and out of the feeder channel, three smaller boats, not much more than canoes with an outboard. And the boats, small and large, were full of people, all told, Jenner figured, probably twenty men. They were short and dark, all wearing bandannas pulled up above their noses. Their faces were broad, hair black, skin mahogany from days in the sun. Some carried cane machetes, others held pistols and shotguns; most of the shotguns were pointing at Brodie, who was grinning wryly.

The boats formed a pontoon ring around the airboat. A man stepped onto the airboat, followed closely by the only big man in the flotilla, a hulking giant whose David Beckham T-shirt bulged like a frying sausage about to pop; in his hands, the shotgun looked like a squirt gun.

The first man ignored Tarver's moaning and turned his back on Brodie to squat next to Jenner. He peered at the rope burn on Jenner's neck and shook his head, then lowered his bandanna to speak. His English was heavily accented but fluid, and he spoke with an almost
elegant intensity. “Doctor, this is not your fight now. We will take you to land safely; you have no cause to worry.”

He looked at Deb. “Your lady…She is okay?”

Jenner said, “She's lost some blood; she needs to get to a hospital.”

The man spoke urgently to some of his followers in a dialect Jenner didn't recognize. The other men began to redistribute themselves among the remaining boats; Jenner realized they were making room for him and Deb.

“We will take you to land. We have a…” He turned and spoke to the man behind him in the same dialect.

The big man thought for a second, then said, “Pickup trock.”

“Yes, we have a pickup trock; we will take you to the hospital. We can only take you at the entrance, you understand?”

Jenner nodded.

“There is one thing we must ask of you.”

Jenner looked up at him expectantly.

The man gestured loosely to Brodie and Tarver. “This human filth, this
ordure
, they do not exist now. They are gone from the world. You do not see them.” His speech was measured and even. “You make your way to the land all by yourself, thanks to God, and a good stranger drives you to the hospital. You do not know what happen to this scum, this animal. You understand, gentleman?”

Jenner nodded.

The man said, “Lady? You understand what I say too?”

“Yes,” Deb said. “And thank you.”

The man tucked his pale gray bandanna higher up his face and nodded.

He reached out a hand to Jenner and helped him to his feet, then had his men move Deb to one of the outboards. He watched Jenner get into the smaller boat, then nodded to the man at the helm. As the boat picked up speed, he nodded at Jenner, then lifted one hand high in salute, fingers clenched into a fist.

The last time Jenner saw him, the man was turning to Brodie and Tarver.

I
n Port Fontaine, the heavy rain had started late enough to spoil no plans—the restaurants were all already empty, the shops closed, even the fairy lights in the trees were dark as Jenner drove up the Promenade to Stella Maris. The smaller pastel houses along the commercial strip gave way to the big white mansions, many now deserted as their owners made the annual summer pilgrimage to their cooler homes in East Hampton or Edgartown or Kennebunkport. To his left, the Gulf was vast and black and empty, the waves sliding onto an empty beach, silent and cold.

Between the slow swoop of the windscreen wipers, Jenner's headlights lit up the open gates of Stella Maris; the security team was gone, the fish-eye CCTV lens still and unseeing. Jenner parked on the carriage circle in front of the house; the driveway was empty.

He sat, seat belt still fastened, listening to the hushed rustle of rain on his roof, feeling the exhaustion eat his bones like acid.

Deb would be clean now, in a hospital bed in the small urgent-care center in Bel Arbre. He'd helped her into the reception and rung the bell. She'd hugged him, her arms tightening around his neck when he first started to pull back. She shook her head and murmured, “Please, please, just call the sheriff, Jenner.” But he couldn't do that.

He'd turned to look at the Mexicans waiting out on the road in their pickup, and she felt him start to turn, and held onto him; she knew they were taking him back to his car and that she couldn't stop him.

She told him to be careful and kissed him on the mouth, a soft, sad kiss, and then he pulled back, away from her. When he turned to look back through the glass doors, the nurses were running to her.

Jenner moved his seat back, pulled the Beretta out, and lay it across his lap, feeling the seriousness of its weight.

He looked up at the house, golden and bright in the floodlights. He saw no movement, but they'd be in there now, both of them. They'd have heard his car, seen his headlights.

He walked down the path, down the steps past the pool to the lower terrace. He stood at the white balustrade, looked out over the dock, where the swamp boat was now moored.

The house looked huge from the bottom of the garden, coffered by rectangles of light pouring from the windows. Jenner climbed the steps, remembering the first time he'd seen it, how perfect it had seemed, how luxurious, every man's dream.

He crossed the broad veranda, stripped of its furniture, now a barren plaza of rain-slick marble; he went in through the open sliding doors that led to the ground-floor breakfast room.

Lucy Craine's passport lay on the low glass coffee table; behind the table, the garbage bags had been flung onto a couch. Jenner opened them to check; the money was still there.

The kitchen tile was clinical white. The room was larger than most restaurant kitchens, with glass-fronted SubZero fridges and wall-mounted ovens and undercabinet wine coolers and an eight-burner Wolf range; a child could dogpaddle in the huge soapstone sinks.

Jenner stepped out into the back of the huge entrance hall. The floor was a checkerboard of large black and white marble tiles that gleamed under the light of an enormous crystal chandelier.

He heard the sound of muffled speech from upstairs, movement, too, as someone passed rapidly back and forth between rooms. Jenner lifted the Beretta and climbed the wide stairs, the conversation louder as he neared the landing.

On the second floor, his footsteps were silent in the deep pile of the carpet. The sound was clearer now, and Jenner recognized the rhythm and crackle of a police radio scanner; Craine was listening in on the sheriff's frequency, monitoring the situation up at the farm.

The sound came from the half-open door of the master bedroom, just off the stairwell. Jenner stood in the doorway, the Beretta in his hand.

There was an open carry-on bag on a large four-poster bed. Craine stood in the middle of the room, back to the doorway, packing his beau
tiful handmade shirts into the bag. His pistol, a small Walther, lay on his bureau next to the chattering scanner.

“Craine.”

The man straightened slowly and glanced toward the dresser.

“Don't,” Jenner said. “I'm not the world's best shot, but at this distance I won't miss.”

Craine raised his hands and turned slowly to face Jenner. He was smiling slightly.

“I like you, Jenner! You've got…
gumption
!”

“More importantly, I have a Beretta.”

“Yes,” Craine said. “Yes, you do.”

He backed over to the bed and sat. “Do I have to keep my arms up?”

“Suit yourself.”

Craine lowered his arms. “You know, you can still walk away from this a wealthy man.”

“It's too late for that.”

Craine laughed. “Good God, doctor! It's never too late for money!”

“Your granddaughter is dead because of you.”

Craine's smile slackened a little, and a tremor of emotion passed through the man's face; it could have been real. “You can have no possible idea of what a nightmare this has been for me.”

He paused a second, then said, “But of course, you have to understand I had no way of knowing what would happen there tonight.”

Maggie Craine said, “What would happen where?”

They both turned. She stood shivering in the doorway, hair wet, skin flushed; in her hand, she held Lucy's passport. There was something ominous, fevered in her expression.

Jenner turned to Craine and said, “Tell her.”

Craine stood; he looked at his daughter but stayed silent.

“Tell her or I will.”

“Where is she? Where's Lucy? For the love of God, what did you do?”

Craine said, “Maggie, listen…You need to pull yourself together. This is hard on all of us.”

“Where's my daughter?”
She was shaking violently now, the words chattering out of her mouth.

Craine looked at Jenner. “Doctor, my daughter needs help. I think we should get her to a hospital.”

The scanner crackled, and an urgent voice said, “Sheriff, this is Weeks. We're in the basement now…” The voice grew hesitant. “You maybe oughta see this. We have the body of a young female, a girl. She's pretty charred up, but…I'm sorry, sir, but she's a skinny little thing, and with the backpack, I'm pretty sure we got Lucy Craine here.”

Maggie howled, “NO! You fucking
bastard
! How
could
you! How
could
you?”

Craine shook his head helplessly. “Maggie, I didn't know what was going to happen. I just wanted to…”

“You wanted to what? You wanted to WHAT??? What were you doing with her in the basement?”

He smiled thinly. “I just took her to the farm for a nice evening with her papaw.”

Maggie pulled the pistol out of her purse so quickly Jenner had no time to react. She fired once. There was a spray of red from Craine's neck; the string went out of his spine and he collapsed vertically, folded into himself and on down to the floor. He lay there, gasping, eyes open but not moving, blood pulsing rhythmically out of the hole in his neck.

Jenner dropped to his knees, threw his gun aside, and said, “Jesus Christ! Jesus!”

He hovered helplessly over Craine, saw the blood pumping out. He covered the hole with his hands—he had to do something. He pressed firmly, feeling the shredded muscle beneath the skin ripple under his fingers.

Over his shoulder, he said, “I think it hit his spinal cord. Please, call 911, Maggie. Please, they can help him.”

“Move, Jenner.”

Hands pressing firmly on the wound, Jenner looked up at her. She was pointing the gun at him.

“Move now. Don't make me.”

“If I let go now, he'll die, Maggie. You'll be a murderer.”

“Let go, Jenner. It'll be on me.”

“This is a death penalty state, Maggie. He's not worth it.”

She lifted the gun slightly and fired. A shower of pulverized veneer and mahogany erupted from the dresser by Jenner's shoulder.

“Let go.” She pointed the gun at Jenner.

Jenner looked down at Craine, at the blood welling over his fingers, the muttering lips. He couldn't make himself lift his fingers up, couldn't just let him die like that. He said, “I…I don't think I can.”

Maggie stepped closer, leaned over Jenner, pointed the weapon down, and fired two more shots into her father's face.

“You can now.”