Damn!
He edged around the tree line, meaning now to head straight to the prison compound a half mile ahead. But his eye snagged on something white. He focused, unable to recognize it, but saw that it was a human shape. Then he got it: it was a guard, naked, crawling ahead toward the trees. He must have surrendered.
Earl ran to him.
'Hey!'
'Don't shoot! Goddamn, don't shoot, I done give up. My leg's hurt bad, Mister. That fella done shot me ' the knee. I may die.'
But Earl didn't care. He just saw a bare-ass man in the dirt, crawling ever so slowly ahead.
He knelt by him.
The guard turned ever so slightly, looking up.
'You!'
'Me.'
'You's a haunt. You's a ghost. I seen you go down in that black water. I seen the river take you and?'
Earl put his Colt Trooper barrel against the nape of the man's neck and let him feel the slight grind of the cylinder wheeling around as he drew back and cocked the hammer with an oily click that must have filled the vault of the man's skull with its reverberations.
'I am the man who'll blow a goddamned hole in your head if you don't tell me what I want to know.'
'Sir, I?'
'You shut up now and listen hard and answer good. Where's that goddamned Bigboy?'
'That's why you're here! You come back from the dead for Big boy.'
'Where the hell is Bigboy? Was he off tonight? Was he in N'Awleens or Jackson, helling it up? Where is that man?'
'Bogart, sir, I don't know nothing. He's here, like every night. He ain't a goer. He's here all the time.'
'He worked over that boy Fish?'
'He worked ' all over. He done been hunting something for three weeks now. Working over colored boys every goddamn night.'
Earl blasphemed something dark and evil.
Then he said, 'When's last time you saw him?'
'He'd have been in the Whipping House. That's burning now, I can tell.
He may be in that fire, sir. That's where he'd be. If he ain't there, sir, no telling.' 'Goddamn,' said Earl.
'Sir, please don't kill me. I's only doing what they's telling me. We didn't have no choice in the matter neither.' But he saw that he was talking to nothing, took a deep breath, and continued his slow crawl. earl moved on toward the prison compound, but a noise came from an unexpected direction. He peered into the blackness of the piney woods and saw a small shed. Behind it dogs yowled savagely with fear.
Something in their brilliant but tiny dog brains had picked it up, the vibration of disaster. They knew. Somehow they knew.
He drew the Trooper and eased back. The shed was empty, though clearly men had been stationed there. Whether they took off at the first sound of shots, went in and were killed, or surrendered and crawled away stripped naked he didn't know. But the place stank of cigarettes, so it hadn't been abandoned too long ago.
He looked out back. This is where the farm's man-hunting hounds were kept, invisible in the aerial photo because of the tree cover. He remembered them nipping at his ass, driving him forward as he fought Bigboy on the levee road.
They were even madder now. Blood was in the air, and fire and gunsmoke.
They seethed and slithered against each other, piling up at the gate for a freedom that would never come.
'You boys are going to die,' he said. 'It's the way these things happen.'
He turned, but then turned back. Dogs scared him, ever since he'd seen them chewing up half-dead Japs in Tarawa's bunkers. But some odd feeling of remorse came. The dogs only did what the humans trained them to do.
They didn't have a choice in the matter.
He walked to the fence, lifted the hasp and opened the gate. If the beasts smelled blood on him or if their aggression would turn them loose on him, he would know in a second. But the dogs were hellbent on survival that night. They sped out, gray blurs in the dark night, and disappeared.
The two Irishmen had gotten in close. They crouched together under the legs of one of the machine-gun towers. Twenty feet above them, two unknowing guards shifted, spat, drank coffee from thermoses, groused quietly about the endless boredom of the duty, and one even pissed off the platform with a groan.
Then the shots rang out from the Store and the Whipping House. They just started up, a staccato of gunfire, rolling over the fields that separated the two. Audie and Jack heard some scuttling about up top, and one voice said to the other, 'What the goddamn hell is that?'
Audie lifted his black German attack rifle, as it was called. He had no hesitations whatsoever, for all hesitations had been ground mercilessly out off him that day in Italy when his friend Lattie Tipton had been gunned down. He fired the whole long, curved clip, and above them, the slugs poured through the floorboards, ripping and splintering as they went, the noise shattering the sleepy silence of the night.
For an old man, Jack moved swiftly. He got into the tower and didn't pause to look at the two freshly killed men. He'd killed a lot of animals in his time, and death held few fascinations for him. Now it was time to shoot.
He swiftly unslung his Model 70 and brought it to his shoulder, his finger flicking the safety off even as his hand guided the stock into the pocket of the shoulder, his knees and feet found a solid kneeling rested position with the forearm of the rifle resting pool-cue-like in the relaxed splay of his left hand on the ledge of the guard tower. His right index finger ran to the curve of the trigger, knowing it so well, so familiarly, and rested firm against it, feeling the slack just go out of it.
It was dim through the Lyman 4X Alaskan scope, but Jack had no problem finding the guard tower one hundred yards across the way from them, over the roof of the Ape House. He made out the silhouette of a moving man and a searchlight came on in that same moment. He squeezed carefully, and had the hunter's deepest pleasure of knowing that his shot had scored. He quickly threw the bolt, ejecting the used shell, lifting another.270 into the chamber, found the second target and put him down.
'Got ' both, old man,' screamed Audie.
Jack shifted fast; the third tower was also one hundred yards away, and quickly enough he found a target there, fired and was rewarded with a cry. He hunted for a second, found none, rotated to the last tower but was too late.
Next to him, Audie fired a long burst with his attack rifle. From the distance, Jack watched the slugs eat the place up. They danced over it, sparking oddly here and there, raising a spew of dust and wood chips.
The hot shells rained on Jack, but he was salty enough to ignore the discomfort?pain, even, when one got down his shirt collar and burned the flesh of his shoulder?as he hunted. He saw nothing.
He went back to the tower where he'd only hit one man, and sure enough the second was halfway down the ladder. Jack nailed him good, though he wobbled a few feet on shaky legs before he sat down and collapsed.
'You are a hell of a shot, Mr.,' said Audie.
'I have shot an animal or two in my time,' said Jack.
'Now as I understand it, you're to stay here till them other fellows arrive and cover for them when they move through to free them coloreds.'
'That's it. I will hunt for targets as they come available.'
'I believe I am to head over into them lean-tos and shanties outside the wire. That's where them women and old men live. I'll be getting them out of here.'
'You take that big fast-firing gun.'
'Well, sir, I am plumb out of ammunition for it and I can't get no other. I had sixty and I done shot ' all. Now it's time for Colt work.'
'Don't take your cowboy gun fighting style too seriously, Audie. This isn't the movies.'
'Well, sir, it isn't, but it sure seems like one.'
