Gone South (48 page)

Mitch was scared to death. Beads of sweat trickled down his face, his hand with the revolver in it shaking. He kept glancing back and forth from the bounty hunters to the house, wincing at the sounds of shots.

Pelvis suddenly gasped harshly and put a hand to his chest. Mitch’s pistol trained on him.

Oh my God! Flint thought. He’s havin’ another attack!

But Pelvis was looking at something past Mitch’s shoulder, his eyes widening. He let out a bawling holler:
“Don’t shoot us!”

Even as Flint realized that was the oldest trick in the book and it could never work in a million years, the terrified Mitch swung around and fired a shot at brown water and moss-covered trees.

Pelvis slammed his fist into the side of Mitch’s head and was suddenly all over the man like black on tar. Stunned, Flint just stood there, watching Pelvis beat on him with one flailing fist while the other hand trapped Mitch’s gun. Then the revolver went off again, its barrel aimed downward, and Flint got his legs moving and his fists, too. He attacked Mitch with grim fury. Mitch went down on his knees, his facial features somewhat rearranged. Pelvis kept hammering at the man like someone chopping firewood. Mitch’s fingers opened, and Flint took the pistol.

Footsteps on the planks. Someone running toward them.

Flint looked, his pulse racing, and there was the man from the watchtower unslinging his rifle. The man, a wiry little bastard in overalls, stopped thirty feet away and fired his rifle from the hip. Flint heard the sound of an angry hornet zip past him. Then it was Flint’s turn.

The first bullet missed. The second struck the man in the left shoulder, and the third got him a few inches below the heart. The man’s rifle had gotten crooked in his arms, and now his finger spasmed on the trigger and a slug smashed the windshield of one of the cigarette speedboats. Then the man went down on his back on the planks, his legs still moving as if trying to outdistance death. Flint didn’t fire the last bullet in the gun. In his mouth was the sharp, acidic taste of corruption; he’d never killed a man before, and it was an awful thing.

Now, however, was not the time to fall on his knees and beg forgiveness. He saw that Pelvis’s fists had made raw hamburger out of Mitch’s mouth, and Flint seized his arm and said, “That’s enough!”

Pelvis looked at him with a sneer curling his upper lip, but he stepped back from Mitch and the half-dead man fell forward to the pier.

They had to get out, and fast. But going through the swamp meant that Clint would surely drown. Flint wanted the derringer back. He ran to the dead man’s side, knelt down, and started going through his pockets. His fingers found the derringer, and something else.

A small ring with two keys on it.

Keys? Flint thought. To what?

Flint remembered this man had been driving the cigarette boat that had brought them here. Which of the two boats had it been? The one on the right, not the one with the broken windshield. He didn’t know a damn thing about driving a boat, but he was going to have to learn in a hurry. He pushed the derringer into his pocket and stood up. “Cecil!” he yelled. “Come on!”

In the kitchen, the doorway splintered to pieces and blood staining the side of Train’s shirt, Dan knew what had to be done.

“Go!” he said. “I’ll hold ’em off!”

“The hell with that! Runnin’, I ain’t!”

“You’re dead if you don’t. I’m dead anyway. Get out before they come around back.”

An automatic fired, the bullet chewing away more of the door frame. The girl was at work again.

“Don’t let them get to Arden,” Dan said.

Train looked down at his bleeding side. Rib was busted, but he thought his guts were holding tight. It could’ve been a whole lot worse.

The Ingram gun chattered once more, slugs perforating the walls, forcing Dan and Train to crouch down. Dan leaned out, burned the other two shots in that magazine, and then popped his last four bullets into the Browning.

“Okay,” Train said. He put his bloody hand on Dan’s shoulder and squeezed. “Us two dinosaur, we fight the good fight, ay?”

“Yeah. Now get out.”

“I’m gettin’.
Bonne chance!”
Train ran for the back door, and Dan heard him splash into the swamp.

He was in it for the long haul now. When the automatic fired again, the bullet shattered dishes stacked in a cupboard. Dan heard shots from out front, but surely Train hadn’t had time yet to get around the house. Where the hell were Murtaugh and Eisley?

“Come outta there, man!” Doc shouted. “We’ll tear down the wall to get you!”

Dan figured his voice was meant to hide the noise of someone —  the muscle man, probably — either reloading or crawling across the floor. Dan gave Train six or seven more seconds, then he fired a wild shot through the doorway and took off for the rear. He jumped from the platform into water already chopped up by Train’s departure. They’d hear the splash and be after him with a vengeance. He headed directly back into the swamp, through a tangle of vines and floating garbage spilled from the can the young man had dropped. Three steps, and on the fourth his shoe came down on the edge of a root or stump and his ankle twisted, pain knifing up his calf.

Gault had heard the second splash and had gotten up from the floor beside the pool table, ready to storm the kitchen, when there came another noise from out front. The flurry of gunshots had been enough to worry about, but now he heard the rumbling bass notes of one of the cigarette boat’s engines trying to fire up. “Get back there after them!” he yelled to Doc. “Try to take one alive!” Then he sprinted for the living room and the sliding glass door that opened onto the platform.

“Can’t you get it goin?” Pelvis was sitting in the white vinyl seat beside Flint, who felt he could have used two more arms to operate the complicated instrument panel.

“Just hang on and be quiet!” The key was turned in the ignition switch, red lights were blinking on some of the gauges, and the engine growled as if it were about to catch, but then it would rattle and die. They had untied the boat’s lines, and were drifting from the pier.

Pelvis held the revolver they’d taken from Mitch. He’d seen one bullet remaining in the cylinder. His knuckles were scraped and bleeding; he’d been coming out of his stupor for several minutes before he’d attacked Mitch, the immediacy of their situation having cleared his head of despair for Mama, at least for right now. As Flint struggled to decipher the correct sequence of switches and throttles, Pelvis looked back over his shoulder and his stomach lurched with terror. Gault was coming.

The muscle man had just emerged from the house. He stopped, some of the tan draining from his face at the sight of his two downed associates and the bounty hunters trying to escape in a speedboat. “The Flying Nun” was still playing on the television screen. Gault staggered, as if he were beginning to realize his swamp empire was crumbling; then he came running along the pier, a rictus of rage distorting his face and his finger on the Ingram’s trigger.

“Trouble!” Pelvis shouted, and he fired the revolver’s last bullet, but it was a wild shot and Gault didn’t slow down. Then Gault squeezed off a short burst as he ran, the slugs marching across the pier and chewing holes across the speedboat’s stern. “Down!” Flint yelled, frantically trying to start the engine. “Get down!”

Crack, crack!
another weapon spoke, and suddenly Gault was gripping his right leg and he stumbled and fell to the planks.

A man neither Flint nor Pelvis had ever seen before had come out from under the pier at the speedboat’s bow, and he was standing in the chest-deep water, holding a rifle with a telescopic sight. He fired a third time, but Gault had already crawled over to the far side of the pier and the bullet penetrated wood but not flesh. Then the man shouted to Flint, “I’m drivin’!” and he threw the rifle in and pulled himself over the boat’s side, his eyes squeezed shut with pain and effort.

Flint didn’t know who the hell he was, but if he could operate this damn boat, he was welcome. He scrambled into the back and picked up the rifle as the man got behind the wheel. “Cover us, you better!” the man yelled; he pulled a chrome lever, hit a toggle switch, and twisted the key. The boat barked oily blue smoke from its exhausts, its engine damaged by the Ingram’s bullets. Flint saw Gault getting up on one knee, lifting his weapon to shoot. There was no time to aim through the scope; he started firing and kept firing, and Gault flattened himself again.

The engine boomed, making the boat shake. The rifle in Flint’s hands was empty. Gault raised his head. The man behind the wheel grabbed a throttle and wrenched it upward, and suddenly the boat’s engine howled and the craft leapt forward with such power Flint was thrown across the stern and almost out of the boat before he could grab hold of a seat back. The man twisted the wheel, a mare’s tail of foamy brown water kicking up in their wake. A burst of Ingram bullets pocked the churning surface behind them. The boat tore away toward the bayou, passing the vacant watchtower, as both Flint and Pelvis held on for dear life. Around a bend ahead, blocking the channel, stood a partly submerged pair of gates made of metal guardrails and topped with vicious coils of concertina wire.

Train chopped the throttle back. “Somebody get on the bow!”

Pelvis went, stepping over the windshield as the boat slowed. “You see a way to get that gate open?” Train asked. “Bolt on this side, oughta be!”

“I see it!” The boat’s engine was muttering and coughing as Train worked the throttle and gear lever, cutting and giving power until the bow bumped the gate. The bolt, protected by a coating of black grease, was almost down at the waterline. Pelvis lay at the prow and leaned way over; he had to struggle with the bolt for a moment, but then it slid from its latch.

Train gave the engine power, and as Pelvis crawled back over the windshield, the bow shoved the gates apart through bottom mud. He smelled leaking gasoline. The oil gauges showed critical overheating, red caution lights flashing on the instrument panel. “Hang you on!” Train shouted, and he kicked the throttle up to its limit.

Dan heard a pistol shot. Water splashed three feet from his right shoulder.

“Put the rifle down! Drop it or you get dropped!” Dan hesitated. The next shot almost kissed his ear. He let the rifle fall into the water. “Hands up and behind your head! Do it! Turn around!”

Dan obeyed. Standing on the walkway that led between the house’s rear entrance and the incinerator were Doc and the girl, both of them aiming their guns at him.

“I saw you on television!” Doc said. His face glistened with sweat, his hair damp with it. His sunglasses had a cracked lens. “Man, how come you want to fuck us up like this? Huh? After I turned you loose?” He was whining. “Is that how you reward a fuckin’ good deed?”

“Get up here!” the girl snapped, motioning with her automatic. “Come on, you sonofabitch!”

Dan eased back through the vines, the pain of his injured ankle making him flinch. From the other side of the house there were more shots and the growl of a speedboat’s engine. “Where’re Murtaugh and Eisley?”

“Get your ass up here, I said!” The girl glanced at Doc. “You turned him loose?”

“Those two bounty hunters had him in handcuffs, back at St. Nasty. Takin’ him to Shreveport. I let him go.”

“You mean … it’s ’cause of
you
all this happened?”

“Hey, don’t gimme me any shit now, you hear? Come on, Lambert! Climb up!”

Dan tried. He was exhausted, and he couldn’t make it.

“I’m not gonna tell you again,” the girl warned. “You get up here or you’re dead meat.”

“I’m dead meat anyway,” Dan answered.

“This is true,” Doc said, “but you can sure lose a lot of body parts before you pass on from this vale of tears. I’d try to make it easy on myself if I were you.”

Playing for time, Dan grasped the planks and tried once more. With an effort of will over muscle, he got his upper body out of the water and lay there, gasping, on the walkway.

“Shit!” the girl said angrily. “You’re the damnedest fool in this
world!
How come you didn’t kill him and forget about it? Your mind’s gettin’ senile, ain’t it?”

“You’d better shut your mouth.” Doc’s voice was very quiet.

“Wait till this sinks in on Gault. You wait till he figures out it’s your fault all this happened. Then we’ll see whose ass gets kicked.”

Doc sighed and looked up through the trees at the sun. “I knew this minute would come,” he said. “Ever since you horned in, I did. Kinda glad it’s here, really.” He turned his pistol toward Shondra’s head and with a twitch of his trigger finger put a bullet through the side of her skull. She gave a soft gasp, her golden hair streaked with red, and as her knees buckled she fell off the walkway into the swamp.

“I just took out the garbage,” he told Dan. “Stand up.”

Dan got his knees under him. Then he was able to stand, the sweat streaming off him and his head packed with pain. “Move,” Doc said, motioning with the gun toward the house. “Gault!” he hollered. “I got one of ’em alive!”

They went through the destroyed kitchen, the shot-up dining room, and the bullet-pocked game room. Dan limped at gunpoint through a hallway and then entered a living room where there were a few pieces of wicker furniture, a zebra skin on the floor, and a ceiling fan turning. A sliding glass door opened onto the awning-covered platform, where the screen of a large television on wheels was showing a Pizza Hut commercial.

“Oh, Lord!” Doc said.

Gault was on the platform. He was lying propped up by an elbow on his side, a trail of blood between him and the place on the pier from where he’d crawled. The right leg of his jeans was soaked with gore, his hand pressed to a wound just above the knee. Next to him lay his Ingram gun. Sweat had pooled on the planks around his body, his face strained, his ebony eyes sunken with pain and shock.

“Don’t touch me,” he said when Doc started to reach down for him. “Where’s Shondra?”

“He had a pistol hid! Pulled it out and shot her clean through the head! I knew you wanted him alive, that’s why I didn’t kill him! Gault, lemme help you up!”