Gone South (39 page)

He watched the cigarette’s tip glow as the man inhaled. Then the glow vanished. Either the man was cupping the cigarette in his hand or he’d walked away, it was hard to tell in the dark. Pelvis stood there, stroking Mama for a moment, but when she let out a few exhausted yaps at something that rustled in the watery weeds under the platform, he decided it was time to get back inside. He wondered how many snakes must be watching him, and the thought made him shudder as if someone had just stepped on his grave.

I
’M GOING TO TAKE
a shower,” Flint told Pelvis when he walked through the door. “I want you to sit in there and watch him, hear? Take the gun and just sit there. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” He’d taken Dan to the shed and found a grimy cake of soap in the cramped little shower stall. Though he had no towel, he couldn’t bear his own body odor any longer. He started to turn away, but he had to ask a burning question. “Eisley, where’d you learn the Chopin piece?”

“Sir?”

“The Chopin piece. The classical music you played. Where’d you learn it?”

“Oh, that was somethin’ my piana teacher taught me. Mrs. Fitch was her name. Said it was a good quick finger workout and ’cause you had to think about what you were doin’ it calmed you down. I reckon it did the trick for my nerves.”

“I never would’ve thought you could play classical music.” Pelvis shrugged. “No big thing. Them fellas pooted in their pants like everybody else. You go on and take your shower, don’t worry ’bout Lambert.”

Flint left the cabin, not quite sure he would ever again listen to his tape of Chopin preludes with quite the same reverence.

Pelvis went into the bedroom Flint had chosen for himself and found the killer lying on one of the cots, his right hand cuffed to the iron bed frame. Pelvis sat down on the other cot, laid Mama aside, and held the derringer aimed at Dan.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” Dan said twenty seconds later, when it was clear Eisley meant to point the gun at him until Mur-taugh returned. “I’d hate for that to go off.”

“Mr. Murtaugh told me to watch you.”

“Can’t you watch me and aim that gun somewhere else?”

“I could. I don’t want to.”

Dan grunted and allowed a slight smile. “You must think I’m a big bad sonofabitch, huh?”

“You killed two men. That don’t make you an angel in my book.”

Dan started to sit up, but he thought better of making any quick moves. “I didn’t kill the man at that damn motel. His wife did it.”

“His
wife?
Ha, that’s a good one!”

“He was alive when I left there. His wife had already shot him in the gut with a shotgun, aimin’ at me. She beat him to death after I was gone. Maybe she was mad at him because I got away.”

“Uh-huh. I reckon somebody else popped up and killed that fella at the bank, too. And you just happened to be standin’ there.”

“No,” Dan said. “That one I’ll bear the blame for.”

“Surprised to hear it.”

Dan cupped his left hand under his head and stared up at the ceiling. A moth was going around and around up there, searching for a way out. “Blanchard had a family. It wasn’t his fault things are how they are. There’s no way on earth I can live with what I did, so I might as well die in prison.”

Pelvis was silent for a moment. The derringer had wandered. He’d never met anybody who’d committed murder before, and he found his nervousness being replaced by curiosity. “What’d that fella do to you was so bad you had to kill him?” he asked quietly.

Dan was watching the trapped moth beating itself against the stark, bare light bulb. He was too tense to sleep yet, and the room was too hot. “I didn’t go to that bank meanin’ to do it,” he answered. “Blanchard was takin’ my pickup truck away from me. It was the last thing I had. I lost my temper, a guard came in, and we fought. Blanchard pulled a pistol on me. I had the guard’s gun, and … I squeezed the trigger first. Didn’t even aim. I knew Blanchard was finished when I saw all that blood. Then I got in my truck and ran.”

Pelvis frowned. “You should’ve stayed there. Maybe pleaded self-defense or somethin’.”

“I guess so. But all I could think about right then was gettin’ away.”

“How ’bout the girl? We thought you took her hostage. Is she … kinda off in the head?”

“No, she’s just scared.” Dan explained how he’d met Arden, and about her belief in the Bright Girl. “In the mornin’ she wants to go find some Cajun fisherman called Little Train. He’s supposed to live in a houseboat a mile or so south of here. That fella who runs the cafe’s takin’ her. I don’t have the right to tell her not to go, and I don’t think she’d listen to me, anyway.” An idea struck him, and he angled his face toward Eisley.
“You
could go with her.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. They’re leavin’ at six.” He managed to twist his cuffed wrist around so he could see his watch. “Goin’ on two-thirty. You could go with her, make sure she’s all right. If the supply boat doesn’t come till afternoon, you’ll be back in plenty of time.”

“Back from
where?”
Flint peered through the doorway, his hair still wet. He had carefully and methodically scrubbed the grime from his and his brother’s flesh. It had been torment to buckle the sweat-stiff miniature shoulder holster against his skin and then put on his swamp-tainted clothes again. Under his oncewhite shirt Clint was sleeping, but Flint could feel the soft bones shift every so often deep in his constricted guts.

“He was askin’ me to go with the girl,” Pelvis said. “Burt —  y’know, from the cafe — is gonna take her at six o’clock to see a Cajun fella lives a mile south. She’s tryin’ to find a —”

“Forget it.” Flint took the derringer from him. “We’re not nursemaids. I don’t know what her story is, but we’re leavin’ here on that supply boat and she can go with us or not, it’s up to her.”

“Yes sir, but if it’s just a mile off, I’ll be back before —”

“Eisley?” Flint cut him off. “The girl’s crazy. She’d have to be crazy to come down here knowin’ who Lambert is. Get up off there, I’ve gotta lie down before I fall down.”

Pelvis cradled Mama in his arms and stood up. Mama awakened and gave a cranky growl, then her bulbous eyes closed and she went limp again. Flint lay down on the cot. Springs jabbed his back through the thin mattress, but he was so tired, he could have slept on a bed of nails.

“Arden shouldn’t go off in the swamp with somebody she doesn’t know,” Dan pressed on. “It doesn’t matter what you think of her. She could still get in a lot of trouble.”

“She’s not our business. You are.”

“Maybe that’s so, but she needs help.”

“Not from us.”

“Not from
you,
I guess.” Dan looked up at Pelvis. “How about it? Would you —”

“Hey!” Flint sat up again, his deep-sunken eyes red-rimmed and angry. “He doesn’t have any say-so about this! I’m callin’ the shots! Now, why don’t you shut your mouth and get some sleep? Eisley, you go on, too!”

Pelvis hesitated. The electric lights, and their pools of shadow, gave him little comfort. Several times already he had imagined he’d caught a slow uncoiling from the corner of his eye. “How come Mama and me have to sleep in a room by ourselves?”

“Because there’re only two cots in here, that’s why. Now go on!”

“That was an awful big snake that fella found. I wonder which cot it was under.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what,” Flint said. “You and the mutt can sleep in here. Just curl up on the floor between us, maybe that’ll make you feel safer.”

“No, I don’t think it would.”

“The lights are on. All right? Nothin’s gonna crawl out and get you with the lights on.”

Pelvis started to retreat to the other room. It seemed a vast distance away from the protection of Flint’s derringer. He paused again, his face furrowed in thought. “Mr. Murtaugh, don’t you think it’d be wrong if we knew somethin’ might happen to that girl and we didn’t try to help her?”

“She can take care of herself.”

“We don’t know that for sure. Lambert says she’s from Fort Worth, and she don’t have any way to get home.”

“It’s
not
our problem, Eisley.”

“Yeah, I know that and all, but … seems to me we oughta have a little feelin’ for her situation.”

Flint glared at Pelvis with a force that seemed to scorch the air between them. “You haven’t learned a thing from me, have you?”

“Sir?”

“Bounty hunters don’t
feel.
You start feelin’, and you start gettin’ interested. When you start gettin’ interested, you start lettin’ your guard down. Then you wind up with a knife in your back. If the girl wants to go see some Cajun swamp rat, it’s her business. She knows the supply boat’s leavin’ in the afternoon. If she wants to be on it, she will be.” He held Pelvis’s gaze a few seconds longer, then he lay back down, the derringer in his right hand. “I’ve met all the swamp rats I care to, in case you’ve forgotten the marina.”

“No, I ain’t forgotten.”

“I’d say we were lucky to get out of that alive. While you’re with me, I’m responsible for you — much as I hate it — so you’re not goin’ off in the swamp with some crazy girl and end up gettin’ your throat cut. Now go to sleep.”

Pelvis chewed on Flint’s logic, his brow still creased under his lopsided wig. Dan said, “She’s not crazy. She’s a decent person. I wish you’d help her.”

“Lambert? One more word from you, and you’re gonna spend the night with both arms between your legs and a sock stuffed in your damn mouth!”

“Sorry,” Pelvis told Dan. “I can’t.” He summoned up his courage and went into the other room, where he laid Mama down on the cot and then settled himself beside her. He lay very still, listening for and dreading the sound of scales slithering across the planked floor.

Dan’s head had been aching, a slow, insistent throb, for the past two hours. The pain kicked in again, getting between him and sleep. He would have given his left nut — whatever it was worth these days — for a bottle of Tylenol. Strangely, though, it was a relief his running was over. He didn’t have to be afraid anymore of what might be coming up behind him. The idea of getting out of the country, he realized now, had always been an illusion. Sooner or later he would have wound up in handcuffs. He would learn to deal with prison in the time he had left. He was just sorry Arden had gotten mixed up in this.

Dan thought Murtaugh was asleep, but suddenly the bounty hunter shifted on his cot and said, “What the hell made that girl come down here with you, anyway?”

“She believes there’s a faith healer livin’ in here somewhere. Called the Bright Girl. She thinks that if she finds the Bright Girl, she can get that birthmark off her face.”

“A faith healer? Like Oral Roberts?”

“A little quieter, I reckon. And poorer, too. I don’t believe in such things, myself.”

“I don’t either. It’s a shakedown for the rubes.” Carnival talk, he realized as soon as he’d spoken.

“Arden’s desperate,” Dan said. “She found out who I was, but she still wanted me to bring her down here. She doesn’t have any money, no car, nothin’. Lost her job. She’s convinced herself that if she finds the Bright Girl and gets that mark off, her bad luck’ll be gone, too, and her whole life’ll change.”

“To you, desperate,” Flint said. “To me, that’s crazy.”

“I guess people have believed stranger things.”

Flint was silent. He and Dan suddenly heard a noise like a buzz saw starting up, followed by a swarm of enraged bees trapped in a tin bucket. Pelvis was snoring.

“Yeah, I knew that was comin’,” Flint sighed. He shifted again, trying to get comfortable. The heat was squeezing sweat from his pores, and his body was exhausted, but his mind wasn’t ready to shut down and let him sleep. “Lambert, where’d you think you were gonna run to?”

“I don’t know. Anywhere but prison.”

“I’m surprised you got as far as you did. You’ve been all over the TV and newspapers. Is that why you killed the fella at the motel? Was he about to turn you in?”

“I told you I didn’t do that. His wife did.”

“Come on, now. You can level with me.”

“I didn’t kill him, I swear to God.”

“Uh-huh,” Flint said with a knowing half-smile. “I’ve heard that from a lot of guilty bastards.” He recalled what Lambert’s tae kwon do — loving ex-wife had said in the park:
It was self-defense, he’s not a cold-blooded killer.
Another question came to him that he had to ask. “Why didn’t you shoot me? When you had my gun, and I was on the ground. Why didn’t you just blow my brains out? You didn’t want to kill me in front of your family, right?”

“Wrong. I didn’t want to kill you, period.”

“You should have. If I’d had the gun and you’d been the bounty hunter after my ass, I would’ve shot you. At least blown away your knees. Didn’t you think of that?”

“No.”

Flint turned his head to look at Dan, who had his eyes closed. Of the twenty or so felons — mostly bail jumpers and small-time criminals, with a couple of real bad boys in the bunch — Flint had tracked over his seven years in the employ of Eddie Smoates, this one was different. There was something about Lambert he couldn’t decipher, and this fact greatly agitated him. If Lambert had just finished killing the man at the motel before he’d come to Basile Park — if he was a “mad dog,” as Smoates had said — then he would have had nothing to lose by putting a couple of bullets through Flint’s knees, which was the fastest way to keep anybody from chasing after you. And why hadn’t Lambert kept the gun? Why had he been carrying no weapons at all? Why had he brought the girl with him and not planned to use her as a hostage? It just didn’t make sense.

It was self-defense, he’s not a cold-blooded killer.

Cold-blooded or not, Flint thought, Lambert
was
a killer. Maybe Lambert had just snapped or something. Maybe he hadn’t gone into that bank wanting to kill anybody, but the fact was that Lambert was worth fifteen thousand dollars and Flint wanted his share of it. Bottom line.

He listened to Lambert’s deep and steady breathing. He thought the man was asleep, but he was going to keep the gun in his hand all night. Though Lambert couldn’t get out of that cuff, he might go crazy, try to drag the cot across the space between them and attack Flint. It had happened before. You never knew what set killers off, and the quiet ones were the most dangerous.