the pilot’s brown uniform, and the shotguns, the man and woman with the gold words on the backs of their coats, that they were cops. The gal cop had light brown skin, but he could tell she had some nigra blood in her, only not nearly as much as the dead lady warden, who’d been as black as a deer’s eyes. He remembered seeing the gal cop at the house where Doc got shot. He didn’t know if they had come because of what happened at the little house the night before, or because they were looking to find the warden trespassers, but he sure couldn’t imagine how they had found his camp.
He should have gotten rid of Doc’s body like he did the wardens’, let the alligators and varmints crap out the meat and scatter the bones. Maybe they had come to take his new boat. He didn’t have the pink papers because he didn’t know where Doc had put them. He tried to ask him, but Doc wasn’t able to tell Leland anything. He had looked through Doc’s pockets and in the briefcase, but there was no pink paper with a picture of a boat in there.
He’d watched the man and woman jump off the boat as it neared his dock. Leland aimed at them until they went inside. He could swim the bayou and go deeper into the swamp and wait until they left, but he couldn’t allow them to take his boat. He wasn’t of a mind to walk out and leave it behind.
The deputy tied up his police boat. Leland thought that the deputy, a man he was sure he’d seen before, was their pilot, and had guided them to his camp. He was pretty sure the deputy had helped arrest him and send him to the crazy house. If he didn’t do something, he might bring others another time, and Leland couldn’t afford to let that happen.
From forty feet away, Leland aimed the rifle at the pilot’s head, putting the sights on the man’s eye as he raised his radio to talk. When Leland fired, the deputy’s sunglasses fell off and his body froze for a split second, before falling backward to the planks. Now Leland would kill the other two and get rid of their boat, all the bodies, and then everything would be back to normal. Doc had told him a big storm was coming, and people would think they got killed by it. They might think he killed them, but they couldn’t prove it without the bodies to show a judge.
He would take his boat out, and sneak back to finish up. Once they were sure he was gone, they’d be easy targets. He broke cover, ran to his boat, started it, firing at the cabin to keep them inside until he got going.
He crouched down behind the pilot’s backrest so they couldn’t see to shoot him while he started it and gunned the engines. It went just as he planned, until two men on the bank shot his motor dead. He had turned toward the left bank and run off the boat and clambered to shore and to safety, carrying his Remington Nylon 66 carbine, a gun he’d inherited from his father. It was a good thing getting it wet didn’t keep it from working. That gun was one you didn’t ever have to clean but for running a brush through the barrel sometimes and oiling it a tad a couple times a year.
So there were two cops armed with high-powered rifles and two with shotguns. When Leland got on dry land, he looked back at where the shots had come from, and when he saw the men, he fired, hitting one in the leg. Everybody knew that cops wore bulletproof vests, so he had to make head shots on them-from closer range-or shoot them in their legs or arms to immobilize them. Wounded, the cop would be easier to finish off, after Leland dealt with the others.
Four wasn’t so many. Leland had ten rounds in the rifle.
He listened hard to see if he could hear any boats approaching with more cops in it. When he didn’t hear one, he smiled.
83
Waiting for Leland to break through the brush, Alexa was perspiring heavily beneath the vest, and her hands were clammy where they gripped the shotgun. She and the other detectives had firepower on their side, and even though they were unfamiliar with the place, she didn’t see how Leland’s knowledge of the immediate area was adequate to tip the balance to his advantage in the present situation.
Alexa could feel the positive weight of the Glock in its high-rise holster on her right side. To her left, she could see the wind-rough dark scummy water through the brush behind Manseur.
As far as she could tell, Leland had stopped coming toward them. Likely he was waiting for them to go to him. She was still looking at Manseur when some reeds in the water swayed suddenly. The surface of the water parted as Leland’s head and shoulders broke above the waterline and, to her horror, she saw he was aiming the gun.
Leland fired twice as Manseur was turning his shotgun toward him, and the detective fell sideways. The instant Manseur was down, Leland shifted his gaze, saw her, and swung the gun toward Alexa. She had reflexively put the tree beside her between them, and heard the twenty-two rounds smack the bark. She swung the shotgun up, jerked the trigger, and the gun roared, the recoil jarring her. The pellets had churned the water, but Leland had vanished below the surface. She thought she must have hit him, but there was no evidence of it.
Maintaining her aim, she scrambled over to Manseur, who looked up at her with dazed and frightened eyes. Alexa saw immediately that he had been hit twice in the head. There was a small hole in his cheek and another just above his lip, under his nose. When he opened his mouth to speak, blood poured out. He coughed and spit. Along with the blood, Alexa saw that he had expelled broken teeth and what appeared to be bone chips.
Alexa helped him sit up against the tree, his back to the water. “Stay still,” she told him. “Let me take a look at you. Can you open your mouth for me?”
Alexa was trained to evaluate gunshot wounds. While keeping the water in sight, Alexa laid the shotgun aside on the soft ground where she could grab it up quickly. She took a few seconds to hold Manseur’s head still while she inspected the bullet wounds. She quickly decided that, despite the amount of blood in his mouth, neither wound should be fatal. He seemed alert, and, for the moment, not going into shock.
“Michael, the round through your cheek exited your jaw. You’ve got some broken teeth, maybe some damage to the gums, and some tissue damage where the jawbone is hinged. The second went through your lip, hit your upper gum, and is probably lodged in your upper pallet. You understand what I said?”
Manseur nodded, and pointed behind him.
“I fired at him, but I don’t know if I hit him. I think I closed my eyes when I fired.” Admitting that she had flinched when she fired would have been embarrassing normally, because she had fired pistols and shotguns more times than she could count, and she had been trained and drilled, and drilled again, to teach her not to close her eyes when she fired a weapon. Watch the bullet hit your target. Don’t fire wildly and empty the magazine. Two- one-two-one. The firing range wasn’t real life, and more or less a stress-free environment, which this certainly wasn’t.
Manseur had been lucky. If Leland had used a larger caliber weapon, and had fired with the same degree of accuracy, the round placed under his nose would have penetrated his brain. He wouldn’t die from the wounds, but she had to get him to a hospital for treatment. Then she noticed the blood on his upper arm. He had also been shot in his left shoulder.
She heard footsteps behind her, grabbed up the shotgun, and aimed. Carrying his rifle at the ready, Larry Bond moved beside her, knelt, and looked gravely at Manseur.
“You okay, Michael?”
Manseur nodded mutely. Alexa told Bond what had happened, pointed to where Leland had surfaced, and told him she may or may not have hit him.
“I don’t see him floating,” Bond said.
“The sheriff’s people are on the way out,” Alexa told him. “It’s going to be a long wait, based on how long it took us to get here. They’ll have to launch boats.”
“We can’t just sit and wait. If Ticholet isn’t hurt really badly, he’ll pick us off before we get out of the channel,” Bond said grimly. “We have to kill him.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Alexa said. She had no problem with killing Leland Ticholet.
84
