Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery (41 page)

The three men sat in the office of Emery’s service station, enjoying cans of soda. Big John had paid for all three. The customer bell clanged as a vehicle rolled across the black hose by the pumps. Emery hollered, “Luther!”, and eventually a surly young man with slicked back hair sauntered from the garage in filthy overalls.

Big John knew that Emery had no love for Native or African Americans. The police chief was renowned for his repertoire of racist jokes, and among friends he’d always referred insultingly to the Katogoula as
sabines
,
redbones
,
griffes
, or
zambos
. Sheriff Higbee, only partly out of professional courtesy, a few days before had delivered the summons for
Emery to appear in district criminal court in Armageddon. Payback like that doesn’t come along every day.

Big John hoped to get a lead from Emery. Many Katogoula lived in the city limits of Cutpine; and if the killer was a member of the tribe, or someone else with a grudge against them, Emery just might have picked up some loose talk while adjusting a fan belt. The sheriff knew that most criminals have a compulsion to blab or brag about their crimes.

But Emery had nothing helpful to say about the murder of Carl Shawe, the arson at the museum, the resulting deaths of Grace and Irton Dusong, and the assaults on the Shawe twins and the genealogist. Big John had another unsolved case: a troublemaker by the name of Travis Corbett had been reported missing. A regular crime wave, something you’d see in New Orleans or Baton Rouge or Shreveport, not around here.

The Sangfleuve Parish DA demanded action. Big John wanted answers, too. Emery was more worried about his upcoming hearing before the State Police inspection-sticker committee. He showed Big John various administrative orders to appear in Baton Rouge, and picked his nose with a greasy finger while the sheriff explained what was expected of him.

After the fruitless meeting with the police chief of Cutpine, Sheriff Higbee and Lt. Sprague drove out of the sleepy town, onto the highway leading past closed Tadbull Mill, and along the privately owned enclaves of planted or harvested fields carved out of Tchekalaya Forest. Mostly Katogoula small farms, traditional lands occupied long before the arrival of the European powers. It was cotton-picking time. Soybeans and corn had already been harvested. Sugar cane was ready for cutting. Pecans were just popping out of their big green cases.

Big John hoped the fall harvest would be a good one. The idea of serving foreclosure papers on Katogoula farmers who’d lost their main source of income—Tadbull Mill—saddened him. Though a casino in the parish would inevitably bring more bankruptcies, broken marriages, and petty crime, he wished the Katogoula could get their act together.

Fall so far had been fairly pleasant, with no killer hurricanes charging up from the Antilles. Now the days were reliably below eighty and the nights getting into the low fifties. The early teal season had already closed. Real hunting weather only a duck and duck hunter could love—gray, rainy, and cold—was just a few weeks away. Football weather. He would never forget the cheers from the bleachers of floodlit podunk ball fields on cool November nights. . . .

Uninterrupted dense pine forest hugged the road here. Big John tuned out Ray Doyle, who hadn’t stopped blabbing about the forensics conference he’d just attended. He was all fired up, which, Big John, reflected, was a pretty good reason to send someone.

He was heading to the scenes of the crimes, Lake Katogoula and the remains of the museum, hoping to put Ray Doyle’s enthusiasm to use, to discover some new angle for investigation. Later he would send Ray Doyle and his other detectives to canvass the Katogoula again. As an experienced lawman, Big John knew that changes in stories often broke cases. A second or third visit from a detective usually riled people and sometimes goaded perpetrators into incriminating admissions. Interviewing was an art; Lt. Sprague would have to get over his excessive politeness if he wanted to solve crimes outside of textbooks and seminars.

Big John had the cruise control at fifty. With a lot on his mind, and nothing for miles ahead, for a split second he didn’t register the movement at the verge of the forest. Before the thought activated his muscles, he realized what was happening: an animal, a large one, breaking from the trees, heading fast for his lane. Too fast.

“Hold on, Ray Doyle!”

Big John stomped the brake pedal to the floor with both huge feet. Tires screamed and smoked. Even so, the ABS on the big cruiser wasn’t going to stop him in time. The animal entered his lane, and though the vehicle was slowing rapidly, Big John knew it wasn’t going to be good. He recalled that in vehicle-pedestrian collisions at 40 mph, there was an 80% chance of fatal injuries. There was nothing to do but grip the steering wheel, hope he had slowed more than that, and pray for the animal’s soul, if it had one. It was all physics, now.

He felt the sickening thud. The windshield shattered but remained intact.

“Gawd! what the—” was all Ray Doyle could say before the air bags inflated with loud pops like gunshots and then several milliseconds later deflated.

A dark-yellow blur had glanced off the bumper and the passenger-side windshield, over the car, heavily onto the trunk, and then had disappeared.

The car skidded to a stop after what seemed like years. Big John looked over at Ray Doyle: he was all right except for blood running into his precious mustache. The young man had already switched on the interior emergency lights and now spoke to the dispatcher on the radio, dabbing at his nose with a tissue.

This boy might make it after all, Big John was thinking as he grabbed the shotgun, heaved himself out of the car, and looked back at the thing that lay on the faded centerline.

The road was quiet. No other vehicle in sight. Big John jogged the hundred and fifty feet to the heap of mangled fur. No sense letting the poor thing suffer.

He slowed about six feet from the animal, holding the shotgun at hip level, ready to end the misery or to protect himself if it suddenly
attacked him in its dying pain. He could see that it was still breathing. Blood had started to fill a pothole.

Now his own breath left him. It looked like a cougar—but the strangest one he’d ever seen. The skin and fur seemed to have come off the body. Had the impact literally skinned the beast?

And then it moaned.
A human moan!

Big John knelt down and warily, gingerly pulled the cougar’s head away, and then the rest of the skin. It was a costume, a damn hokey costume, at that!

Below was a sweat-drenched, bloodied young man, with black hair and the complexion of an Indian. Although the man’s mouth was a red mess, Big John could see that he wore braces. Probably late teens or early twenties. He didn’t recognize the victim as Katogoula, who in general were indistinguishable from whites.

He made a quick inventory of the obvious injuries: facial and oral damage, both legs broken, an arm, too. Then he ran through the scary possibilities: concussion, broken hip, broken back, organ injuries. Most of the visible bleeding came from the left leg, where the tibia had punctured the skin. That, at least, he could do something about.

Running back to his car, Big John traded the shotgun for a comprehensive first-aid kit and some flares. The victim was feeling what had happened to him by the time the sheriff returned and set two flares out; his moaning was low and constant, pitiful. Big John worked skillfully to stop the bleeding. The splint he made for the leg satisfied him. Shock was a danger now. He called to Ray Doyle for blankets.

And then he noticed, in the back pocket of the boy’s jeans, a crumpled, leaking can of lighter fluid. Big John removed it and set it aside.

The boy kept looking at the forest edge, stark fear on his dazed face. As if something horrible were pursuing him, he tried to crawl away.

“It’s okay, now, son.” Big John held him down effortlessly and spoke in a calming tone. “Ambulance is coming. Everything’s gonna be fine, you hear? What’s your name? Can you tell me your name, son.”

The boy kept repeating Chief Claude’s name. “You ain’t Chief Claude, son. . . . Is he the one you want me to call? Is that it?”

“Chief. Yes. Oh! Oh! Hurts . . .”

“Yeah, I expect it does. You took a bad thumping, there. What’s your name, son? Can you tell me?”

“Stu—” he coughed, spluttering blood, crying now from the pain. “Stu George. I saw it. The real one! Eating a man! The real one!”

Lt. Sprague put a blanket under the boy’s head and another over his torso.

When Big John had done what he could to quieten Stu George, he stood up and forced his mind into detective mode through the fading adrenaline rush. Biting his lower lip, tasting his sweat, he critically took in the scene.

His eyes traced the probable path of the victim. Was this just a young idiot drawn to mischief by the press reports, or had he been running from someone else, there, where the grassy shoulder of the highway met the dense tree line?

The real one
. The tribe had been upset by reported sightings of the mythical cougar. Maybe it wasn’t a myth, after all. What was it that had forced Stu George to run heedlessly in front of a moving car? The boy was terrified, even now.

Lt. Sprague, standing next to him, said: “This costume, Sheriff. Got me thinking. The twins, only eyewitnesses we got to anything, say a cougar attacked them. Cougar that acted mighty funny. Walked upright. We found cougar signs where Carl was killed. And that lighter fluid the boy had. The museum fire. You think maybe we done run down our killer?”

“I think we just stopped another murder. You get some men in there,” Big John said, pointing to Tchekalaya Forest. “And be quick about it. There’s more to this than a boy in a cougar suit.”

Big John, cradling his old Ithaca 12-guage pump, moved with watchful speed through the pines and light underbrush. He hadn’t waited for more men to find out what Stu George had been fleeing. The killer was close. He could feel it.

This was state forest, a beautiful testament to intelligent natural resource management. Big John marveled at the tall longleafs, just as he did every time he hunted in these woods. The trees had spaced themselves in a natural orderly pattern older than civilization, older than human beings, who had turned the clock back for the longleafs through science and public policy.

Forests still covered half of Louisiana, and trees were the state’s number one crop. Tchekalaya Forest was famous for its restored longleaf stands, though in some less intensively managed areas loblolly and slash pines predominated. With prescribed burns in the spring, Nooj and his fellow agents and foresters cleared out faster growing bushes and trees that could fuel major, devastating fires.

Even deliberately set, strictly controlled fires were something else, Big John remembered. Surreal, hellish. The fire starters would walk down roads with diesel or kerosene and gasoline in fuel cans called drip-torches, drizzling fire that soon clawed through the tangled understory. Turpentine-sharp smoke billowed up, dimming the sun to a peculiar orange color and causing a noticeable drop in the temperature.

How they kept those fires from raging out of control was beyond him. Had something to do with backfires, firebreaks, plowed borders, and the longleaf ’s resistance to natural, lightning-kindled fires.

Yep, this forest was another world, Big John reflected, walking beneath a squirrel chattering maniacally; here, the laws of man must yield to a more ancient way. We may think we have it all hemmed in and prettified, but we’re just kidding ourselves. There was something here, something violent and unpredictable and elemental, that laughed at laws, roads, and prescribed burns. He’d seen it in people, too, for instance when some formerly peaceable dude snapped and shot everybody in his family, including the dog and the refrigerator on the porch full of Budweiser. You just never know when it’s going to happen. We’re all at its mercy.

Different language here, too, the language of silence, that really wasn’t silence. What’s it saying? Made the hairs stand up on your arms.

But at first glance, if you didn’t think too hard, the forest
was
beautiful, benign on the surface. Hard to believe that this thriving ecosystem had not always been here, that this area at the turn of the twentieth century had looked like the site of an asteroid impact, clear-cut of every tree. Now there was a delicate but healthy truce that benefited the whole community: loggers could harvest trees, hunters could pursue their traditional pastime, and environmentalists could savor victory on behalf of dozens of saved species.