The Brat (8 page)

The sight of her standing there was suddenly too much. I grabbed her close to me, kissing her, and we began to sink to the ground.

There was a rustle in the undergrowth nearby. I looked up and saw Berk Kaylor. He’d been standing not far away, hidden behind a wall of vine.

“Damn you!” he shouted. “Damn you, Rona—you told him!”

She gasped, holding me. I shook her off, got to my feet.

“No, Sullivan, don’t—”

I started out after Kaylor.

“Don’t,” Rona called. “Sullivan, don’t do it!”

• • •

I had to do it. It was as if Kaylor had gone out of his head. He raced bounding and leaping through the brush, and into the palmetto field, running swiftly toward the house.

“Sullivan!” Rona called from back there. “Please, don’t follow him!”

He was fast as hell. I didn’t have much breath as it was, the way she’d acted.

We both came out of the field, and Kaylor beat it around the rear of the house. I started after him, then heard the door of the convertible slam and at almost the same moment, the engine revved into a high whine. Tires screamed against the sand. I heard him flip it into reverse, gun the car into a vicious turn.

I ran for the Pontiac in the front yard.

“Here! What’s going on?”

Luz came off the front porch. I saw Rona running toward us along the riverbank, her hair streaming back over her shoulders, calling to me. She clutched the front of her blouse closed with one hand, waving at me to stop.

Grandma Helling came out the door as I reached the battered Pontiac.

“Sullivan,” Luz said. “You get to hell away from that car.”

I got it started. Berk Kaylor’s convertible swung away up the dirt road, headed in the direction of Hagar’s Point. There was no other way to go. Luz Helling’s place was the end of the road. Things had happened fast and at the wrong time, but I had to follow Kaylor.

I glimpsed Rona standing in the yard as I swung into the rutted sand behind the thickening dust cloud from Kaylor’s convertible. I had no idea where he was going, or why. But something urged me along, because there had been an angry wildness in his actions when he thought Rona told me something about Evis.

Maybe he knew where she was. Maybe they all knew. Maybe none of them wanted to tell me.

“Stop!” Luz Helling was running behind me along the road, choking in the dust.

The convertible roared on up ahead, its engine whining powerfully even above the battering thumping of the Pontiac.

The road banked slightly in a slow turn, and I saw the convertible make a skidding left, showering dust, as it swung along a dirt cutoff. At the same instant, another car—a gleaming white sedan—moved past where the convertible turned, and came toward me.

We passed and the driver turned his head. I looked straight into Hugo DeGreef’s face and saw the sudden hunch of his shoulders as he jammed down hard on the brakes.

I spun the Pontiac left, after Kaylor, and put the gas pedal to the floor.

I
HAD
to keep Kaylor in sight. At the same time, I had to get rid of DeGreef. It wasn’t going to be simple. DeGreef’s face, in that brief instant when he’d flashed by, had been struck with savage anger at sight of me.

He had already made the turn from the other road, and was gaining on the old wreck I drove. I cursed Luz for not owning something better.

Rona had known….

For some reason she’d held back telling about Evis. She wanted me to go away with her, take her out of the swamps. She wanted to save my neck. Great! So where
was
my sweet little bitch of a wife?

I recalled that there was a cabin on a small stream directly on the edge of the swamp. Kaylor was headed in that general direction.

An enormous stand of willow beside the road hid a fresh turning. I saw it late, but not too late, and took it. I had to take the chance that I could find Kaylor after I got rid of DeGreef.

If
I could lose DeGreef.

Again that gleaming white sedan seemed to spurt through the dust toward me. The Pontiac was beat. It groaned and clunked and thundered with the gas pedal to the floor. But there was that feeling you have in some cars: you can’t roll it over no matter how hard you try.

The crack of the pistol shot echoed above the sounds of the engines. A slug ripped through the steel of the car beside the rear window and plowed into the upholstery of the front seat.

I saw an open field with no ditch and wheeled the car into it, bumping and lurching toward further sparse pine. Almost immediately I felt the sluggish slowing of the car.

I cramped the wheels, put it in low, and held the speed as best I could. DeGreef wheeled off the road, too. The Pontiac began to creep. I turned at right angles to the route I’d taken toward the pines. DeGreef was coming like hell, the new car leaping in the field. My car found dry ground again. I cramped the wheel back toward the road and glanced back toward DeGreef. He was mired.

Showers of mud and clots of grass arched from behind his sinking rear wheels.

The Pontiac lurched like a loco heifer back onto the road. I hadn’t planned it this way, but it had worked out perfectly. DeGreef was out of the car, kneeling. He shot at me across the field. The guy must have really been hot, right then. He ran toward the road, knelt, fired—and missed wide.

I went back to the corner by the willows, then on along the road to where Kaylor had turned off, and stepped it hard in that direction. Dust still hung in the tepid air where the convertible had passed, and as I progressed along the pocketed dirt, the dust gradually thickened.

I came to another crossing. The road crossing the dirt stretch I was on was little more than a sand path, with half-foot ruts of black earth. An enormous sand-hill crane took off directly from the corner, lumbering and thrashing, neck out and jerking with effort. I heard its shouting cry as I slowed the car.

On ahead, there was little sign of dust in the air. To the right, I saw sharp tire markings in the sand and loam. I followed them, trusting to luck.

This road, I knew, led directly toward the swamp.

• • •

I drove down a gentle slope between two crumble-trunked pines that had been riddled by woodpeckers, and saw the cabin. It sat perhaps thirty feet from clear, stable swamp water on up the slope of land. The bank ran directly down into the water. Grass grew to within five feet of the water’s edge. There was a drainage canal to the right of the cabin, banked high and rough. A rusting bulldozer sat at a cockeyed angle halfway up the canal bank.

The convertible was parked beyond the cabin behind a narrow shack that edged the swamp. Beyond the stretch of water you could see the wall of swamp vegetation. It looked impenetrable, but I knew there were channels hidden by undergrowth.

I parked the car and ran for the cabin. There wasn’t a sound. I stepped warily along the rough-hewn sides to the slant-roofed porch. The front door stood open. Flies swarmed in the dark entranceway. A fish head lay on the porch floor, with more flies feeding and buzzing. I went inside, realized no one was there. Standing in the kitchen, I wondered where he’d gone and felt a tight emptiness in my chest, and there was a renewed feeling of futility and loss.

Down by the shed, I saw the broad flat markings on the beach where an air boat must have been moored. A rainbowed oil slick on the water told me he hadn’t left long before.

What chance was there of catching him if he were in an air boat? He could already be a mile or so away, deep in the swamp. I’d seen those air boats flying over the flats, skimming across land that was covered by little more than a mist of water. They could make fifty miles an hour with ease.

An unpainted, patched skiff was tied to a freshly built cypress pier. A twelve-foot outboard, the motor sticking up from the stern, was shipped close by. Beside that was a yellow canoe. Kaylor must have spent plenty of time in the swamps.

I was conscious of time now. Evis might be running, getting away. DeGreef might locate me.

Turning, I walked quickly back to the cabin.

The kitchen was a sorry mess. It was walled on three sides with beaverboard that had already been attacked by rot. The fourth side formed an alcove used for sleeping and living quarters. A double bed against the wall was covered with shredded patchwork quilting. There were no sheets or pillows. Two stringy-looking chairs sat beside a pine table covered with red oilcloth littered with ant-alive crumbs. There was a potbellied stove rusted orange, an old pineapple crate full of broken brown palm fronds and coconut husks. Along the far wall leaned perhaps a dozen gigs of various lengths, weights, and barb sizes. There was a pervading odor of fish.

I had already started for the door again, when I whirled and walked to one of the chairs by the table. On the back of the chair hung a blue sweater. I didn’t need to look closely to know it was Ed Fowler’s. I’d seen it many times.

Even certain they were here, prepared for it, it struck me hard. Nerves took over. I checked more closely and found a pair of Evis’s spike-heeled pumps. I stood there gripping them in my hands. They were the red ones I myself had bought for her.

They were twisting the knife.

Rona hadn’t lied. I remembered how she’d acted, and that was all jammed up with memories of Evis, half-formed thoughts of what she was doing right now. She and Fowler were here. Kaylor must have somehow hooked up with them.

I hadn’t eaten. I was exhausted, and once again it was as if I could hear her soft laughter coming straight up out of that bed.

Out there in that swamp …

Dropping the shoes, I went outside, off the porch, and then I heard the shots. Three of them, spaced apart by a five count. The explosions rang in the morning from a spot some distance away. I held my breath, waiting for more. They didn’t come. I tried carefully to place where they had come from, distance and direction.

They’d come from directly in the swamp, beyond the shallowed remnants of the river, over there through that wall of growth. I watched the sky. A flock of egrets shot along higher than usual, slanting toward the sun.

I started running toward the beach.

At the same moment I heard the car and turned.

It was DeGreef.

The white sedan plunged over the bank beyond the cabin and roared down into the humpy yard. It skidded to a stop.

He hadn’t seen me. I leaped off the pier onto the soggy beach and ran over to the outboard, praying there was gas in the kicker, that Kaylor had left the starter rope. I gave the boat a shouldering heave into the water and leaped in.

“Sullivan!”

DeGreef ran stumbling down across the grounds.

“Go ahead and shoot,” I said. “What’ll it get you?”

He stood above the beach on the thickly tufted grass, staring at me. He was a mud-covered mess. His short, thick hair gleamed in the sunlight.

“You better come back here, Sullivan.”

I found the starter rope under one of the seats, soaking in bloody water and fish scales. I whipped it against the gunnel, drew it back and forth across my trouser leg, drying it some. The boat had slipped about twenty feet from shore. DeGreef strode back and forth on the grass up there, fuming, looking at the skiff and the canoe.

“What, no paddle?” I said.

He said nothing.

“Why don’t you shoot?” I said. “Or could it be you were only trying to scare me those other times?”

I was pretty sure of this. He’d missed too wildly at the hotel, and in the field. Because DeGreef wasn’t yet certain of a lot of things. It would do him no good to try and kill me. It would be a very small feather in his Stetson. But if he could land me with the money, and maybe Evis, too, he’d be a shining knight. I knew this fact would hold only so long, though. He was bucking for something. But there’d come a time when he’d take his chances and plug me if he could. There was an obvious desperateness to the way he moved, now. I wondered what was behind it all.

I had the rope ready, checked the gas, spark, tipped the motor into the water and yanked. The motor spat once and a slow cloud of exhaust smoke erupted. I began to worry. DeGreef could flip; he had that look.

“Sullivan,” DeGreef said, talking matter-of-factly now, with all the gutty strain behind it. “Maybe we can discuss this. If we’re both after the same thing, why not work together? How far do you think you can go with that boat? You’ll be lost as soon as you’re out of sight of this landing.”

I knew he was right. Good men had gone in there, not knowing the ways of the country, and starved to death with food all around them, completely lost, with only a shield of thick vegetation between where they’d been found and habitation. But I had to go in there—there was no choice for me now.

The motor coughed twice on the next try. I was sweating and a little sick to the stomach, the nervousness catching up with me. The world swam.

“Try the canoe,” I said, working fast, rewinding the rope. “You can always paddle with your hands.”

“Don’t be an utter fool.”

“I’m not. I tried to tell you the truth. You wouldn’t listen.”

“I’ll listen now.”

“You lie like hell.”

“I’m going to get you, Sullivan. Don’t forget that. Don’t ever forget it!” He shouted now, his voice getting out of control, his face darkly red under the bright sheen of hair. “You think you’re getting away, but you’re not. What you think the God-damned Law’s doing? Sitting around talking it over? Are you crazy? I’ll get you, Sullivan—you hear me?”

I worked hard with the motor.

“I’ll sink your boat.”

At last he’d come to. “Try it.”

The motor caught, sputtered into vicious life. I knew he could do what he claimed. I humped in the stern, cramped the steering rod and opened it wide. The prow lifted, lurching, swinging, and I aimed the boat straight across the stretch of water, with the stern directly at DeGreef. This would afford him a fine target. My back.

I didn’t think Hugo DeGreef was the kind of man who would find his pleasure in shooting another in the back. He’d want to watch facial expressions. And he didn’t want me dead—not yet.

I was right.

I looked back at him and waved.

He fumed up and down the beach, growing smaller now, wading in the dark muck, holding the gun. He shouted something, but I couldn’t catch it above the splintering song of the kicker.

I knew that he’d follow me, that he meant everything he said. I thought how fine it would be with him dead. And then I remembered the stiff, glazed look on Ray Jefferies’ dead face….

I had to go in there, into the swamp, but I’d have to take some kind of bearings first. Already I could feel the threat of the Glades.