Her mouth formed a pucker and released the word 'Bows.'
'Where's Willy, Mrs. Benoit?'
She leaned to one side and craned her face toward the TV. I moved between them. 'Willy,' I repeated. 'Will Lindy. Where's Willy?'
'Bows,' she said, more forcefully.
'Will Lindy!' I yelled into her face, hoping volume would align her shifting plates of memory. Ms. Clay wrung her hands but didn't intervene.
'Bows,' Mrs. Benoit said to me. Her hand shot to my face like a brittle claw and held tight. I tried to picture what she was seeing.
She had lived beside the Lindys. On the Tombigbee River. Farmhouse.
Outbuilding. Field. Trees. What else had I seen in Ms. Clay's photos? Water. The boat hulls in the tree line.
'Boats?' I asked Ms. Clay, her aunt's nails digging into my face.
Ms. Clay whispered across the room. 'On back of the Lindy property by the river. Two old rotting boats, fishing boats I think, the ones with the big arms coming away from them? Nets? One was on its side, a rust shell. The other was upright, stuck in the mud. They're long gone, but maybe that's where he hid when he got the chance.'
I nodded. 'Boats?' I asked Mrs. Benoit. My eyes stared from between her fingers. She leaned forward until electric springs of white hair grazed my forehead. Her teeth clicked as she spat slurred words into my face.
'Tha crazy-eyed… li'l monkey… was always hiding… in them fucking… bows.'
Two major rivers empty into Mobile Bay, the Mobile and the Tensaw.
Between and surrounding them is the second-largest river delta in the country tens of thousands of acres of marsh and swamp and bottomland, gators and snakes, relentless clouds of hungry insects. We slogged upriver at maybe twenty knots, all I could wrench from the big Merc with this much water surging back at us. I cocked my head down to keep the bill of my cap between the rain and my eyes. I was damn glad the boat had been blessed. Jabbing hard ahead with my finger, I yelled,
'Watch the water, Harry!'
'For what?'
'Logs, stumps. Anything. Yell it out.'
The same storm that Ava and I had made love in had moved northwest and bumped a front stretching down from Canada. The storm had stalled, spending three days flooding the upper portion of the Mobile River system's 44,000-square-mile watershed. A second storm moved in behind it, the one pounding us now. Harry yelled, pointed. A tumbling snarl of uprooted tupelo raced at our bow. I jerked the wheel. Tendrils screeched down the hull. Harry closed his eyes and whispered to himself.
Working with the county cops, MPD quickly discovered Lindy had sunk a goodly portion of his $73,000 annual salary into land. Seven parcels in Baldwin County, five in Mobile County. It took a gut-snarling two hours to identify the parcels and outline them on a map. Most seemed speculator parcels, raw acres in the middle of nowhere waiting for sprawl to bring developers to the door, paying dollars over dimes. More of Lindy's long-range planning. Teams of cops were spreading onto the parcels now, moving low, bristling with armaments.
Way up the Mobile River was Lindy's only parcel on water, two acres in the middle of nowhere with fifty yards of river frontage. There'd be a fish-camp shack, maybe. Or a boat. I was rolling the dice he'd be on water; it was his retreat, his sanctuary. We could have come in from the land side, but the map showed it tough slogging even for an ATV, slough and marsh. The weather was too wild for a chopper.
We'd asked only for the boat and the command staff gave it readily, happy to concentrate on their heavy- assault strategies, figuring Lindy would never head to his most inaccessible piece of land. Most suspected he was already in Mississippi or Florida and making survival choices based on logic and planning. To me he was years of sizzling wires checked only by paper-thin insulation. Seeing Ava had peeled the insulation away like dead skin, leaving loose wires sparking and crackling and making random and mystifying connections.
'We'll never get there if you slam into something,' Harry yelled. 'Can you cut it back a little?'
I looked at him. Caution wasn't a Harryism.
'I can't swim,' he said, looking away.
The boat slapped a standing wave and for a moment we were airborne.
Harry clawed at the windscreen as we slammed down and continued grinding upriver. I kept one eye on the water while scrabbling through the under seat storage. I found a bouyancy vest and threw it to him.
'Got a plan?' he yelled, squeezing into a ridiculous yellow vest at least two sizes too small.
'It'll be full dark in a half hour. I'm hoping he's running power from a generator. Making noise. We'll slip up and take him down.'
'If he's there.'
'It's his tree fort, Harry. He's there.'
'It's raining, Mama. Remember how you love the rain?'
The interior of the shrimp boat was dry, the rotting overhead replaced, joints caulked. It was a small craft, a thirty-six-foot wooden box perched on wormy four-by-four's, three hundred feet from the river, a hundred from the silted side channel. The boat was surrounded by trees, almost hidden.
The low-roofed central cabin was large enough to accommodate the bright metal table. Belowdecks was the heavy bank of car batteries for power.
He had a gasoline generator for charging the batteries; he'd run it yesterday, all was set. The TV, a thirty- two-inch flat screen sitting on a shelf at the back of the cabin, wasn't as large as he wanted, but a person couldn't have it all. A drive-in-sized screen would have been perfect, bolt Mama to the hood of her old Buick and park her front-row center.
Lights, camera and… Look how I'm changing since you left, Mama! I can save you!
Mama was strapped to the table at her neck, wrists, and ankles. He'd had to leave her belly open, of course, though it gave him pause; Mama was strong as a bear when she got her blood up. He'd doubled the other straps just to be safe.
Lindy's hands began tearing open the dress, shredding it away. Mama was beginning to stir and moan. Now was when he'd have to be most careful. The police were out there somewhere, but compared to Mama's powers they were ants on the far side of the world.
Mama's breasts quivered in her bra as he pulled remnants of dress from beneath her. He let his eyes roam her skin and heard the bad girl inside her begin singing. He hummed loudly to blot it from his head.
MMMMmmmmm. This was when Mama was most dangerous. MMMMMmmmmmmmm.
Willet Lindy hummed louder as he aimed the TV at the autopsy table and began wiring his magic show together.
The rain fell heavier as the light faded. Visibility was failing and disappeared entirely when blasts of wind threw rain into my eyes. I glanced at the river chart; we were close. I didn't want to overshoot Lindy's place and alert him to someone on the river. We were the only boat I'd seen since leaving the bay.
'Carson!'
Harry jabbed his finger ahead. I looked up to see a silver ramp charging our hull. I reflexively cut the wheel, but there was no way to miss it. An explosive whump and we skidded sidelong up the ramp, seeing water and then only tumbling sky. The engine roared as the boat pitched on its side and the disintegrating prop cleared the water.
Sheared metal whipped the air like bullets. Brown water slashed over the gunwales. The boat roared onto the bank with a squeal of agonized metal and stopped dead, canted high on its side, lodged in mud. I pulled myself upright with the wheel. The only sound I heard was the rain. There was no Harry.
'Harry? Harry!'
I heard sloshing. 'Damn. I can't walk.'
I stumbled aft and saw Harry wading in from the river, struggling through the hard laminar flow at his legs. My feet slid over the side and I sank to my ankles in black muck. I struggled to Harry and pulled him to the bank.
'What the hell happened?' He said, wiping his eyes with a sodden sleeve. 'I got flipped straight up and the next thing I know I'm in the river.'
