Jacksonville? Digging his chopsticks into a plate of shaved beef and onions at a sukiyaki joint in downtown Atlanta? No. He was in a swamp, another swamp, a swamp that made this one look like a wading pool.
And so here he was at the Tender Sproats Motel in Ciceroville, Georgia, Gateway to the Okefenokee Wilderness. It was seventhirty at night and the neon sign glowed against the darkening sky in a halfhearted imposture of civilization. Lewis Turco was asleep in the passenger seat, reeking like a sewage plant. Mud encrusted his boots, clung to his fatigues, caked his beard and hair. They’d had a falling-out over the Dershowitz incident and hadn’t spoken more than ten words to each other all day. The moment the bulletin came through on Tanaka, Turco had dropped his stick (he’d been beating the bushes, literally), and without a word turned and stomped back to the big house, where he flung his gear into the Datsun and settled into the passenger seat. By the time Abercorn got there he was unconscious.
Abercorn pulled up to the motel office and shut down the wheezing engine. He figured he would check in, have a quick shower and a cup of coffee, coordinate with the local sheriff and interview Roy Dotson at his home. Then he would get a couple hours’ sleep and start the chase again in the morning. That was the plan. But he was tired, bone tired, and he didn’t smell too great himself.
The man behind the counter was short and dark, with the narrow shoulders and fleshless limbs of a child. He had the gut of an adult though, and a well-fed one, and he wore a caste mark beneath the greasy bill of his feedstore cap. His glittering dark eyes went directly to Abercorn’s face—he’d burned out there in the swamp, he knew it, and the burn made the dead-white discolorations of his condition stand out more than ever. Suddenly he felt self-conscious. “I need a double,” he said.
“Y’all mean a twin?” the little man drawled.
“Double,” Abercorn said. “Two beds. One for me and one for—for him.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the car, where Turco’s head and upthrust beard could just be made out over the dashboard.
The little man broke into a grin that showed off the bright red stubble of his teeth. He ducked down to spit something into a wastebasket under the counter, and then bounced back up again. “A twee-in, like Ah said. For a minute there—y’all ain’t from around Clinch County, am Ah correct in that assumption?”
Abercorn could feel the weariness settling into him like a drug, like the tingle of a good double shot of tequila on an empty stomach. Japanese. He should have stayed in Eagle Rock, busting Mexicans. “Savannah,” he managed. “L.A. originally.”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh.” The little man was nodding his head vigorously. “Ah coulda sworn it. Thought you was a Yankee—and for a minute there maybe a little, you know, funny. Wantin’ a double for two grown men …”
Abercorn was dragging, worn thin, but a tiny knot of inspiration flared in his brain. “Punjabi, right?” he said.
The little man beamed. “Chandigarh.”
“A twin. I need a twin.”
“Good,” the little man said, beaming still, beaming till he could have lit the room all by himself. “We take all kinds here.”
Turco was in a communicative mood the following morning, chattering on about the suspect as if they’d grown up together, as if they’d shared a bed in the orphanage and married sisters. “He’s a cagey one, this Nip—a whole lot cagier than we give him credit for, that’s for sure. He got this bitch to feed him—two bitches, if you count the old lady—and then he has the balls to bust out of jail and make for the last place on earth we’d expect to find him.” He paused reflectively and scratched at his newly washed beard. “Still, they don’t take to nature, the Nips— they’re a city people, subways and pigeons and that kind of thing—and ultimately he’s going to defeat himself, I’m about three-quarters sure of that.”
They were in the Datsun, heading into the swamp. It had rained the night before and the road was slick, but the sun was up already and burning it off in a dreamy drifting haze. Abercorn had gotten about four hours of fitful sleep, while Turco, who’d strung a hammock over the second bed, had snored blissfully through the small hours of the morning and well into the dawn. They’d passed on breakfast, nothing open that early but Hardee’s and a truck stop so full of potbellied crackers Abercorn couldn’t handle it and ordered a coffee to go. It was no loss to Turco, who seemed to have an infinite supply of roots and jerky tucked away in the folds of his rucksack. At the moment, he had a plastic bag of what looked to be dried guppies in his lap. From time to time he’d dip a hand into the bag and crunch them up like popcorn.
“And if you’re thinking disco and designer shirts, it ain’t going to work on this character,” Turco added, as if the ghetto blaster and Guess? jeans had been Abercorn’s idea in the first place. “No: we’re going to have to get a lot more devious than that.” He scratched his beard and a gentle drift of flaked guppy settled in his lap.
Abercorn looked away. Ever since the interview with Roy Dot-son, something had been troubling him. It was the question of Saxby. He liked Saxby, he did. And he didn’t think Saxby would consciously aid and abet a criminal —and an IAADA, at that—but it did look pretty bad. Ruth was capable of anything—he knew that from personal experience—and she could have put him up to it. Easily. “What do you think of Saxby, Lewis—I mean as far as his involvement in this thing?”
Turco turned to give him a look. “Who?”
“Saxby. You know, Ruth’s—I mean, Dershowitz’s—uh—”
“Oh, him. Yeah. He’s guilty. As guilty as she is. What do you think, it’s just a coincidence that he brings this Nip out here and lets him go like Br’er Rabbit in the briar patch? Are you kidding me? The guy’s as guilty as Charlie Manson, Adolf Hitler—and if he’s not, then what’s he doing camping out in the middle of the Okefenokee Swamp?” He dug into the bag of flaked fish. “The whole thing stinks if you ask me.”
They’d passed the sign welcoming them to Stephen C. Foster State Park several miles back and yet there was no indication that anyone except a construction crew had ever been here before them. The road cut a straight and undeviating line through the wet and the green, a green so absolute that Abercorn had to glance up periodically at the sky to be sure what planet he was on. He supposed some people found this beautiful or inspiring or whatever, but to him it was just one more pain in the ass—they could make a parking lot out of the goddamned place as far as he was concerned. He couldn’t stop thinking about Saxby and how embarrassing it was going to be to have to put the cuffs on him, if it came to that. And beyond Saxby, he was thinking of the Nip—and yes, he’d call a Nip a Nip and INS etiquette be damned—and wondering if he was going to spend the rest of his life getting sunburned three different colors and having his ears chewed off by mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds. (And that rankled him too—why the ears, of all places? His own ears, never exactly small by any measure, were swollen to twice their normal size and looked like slabs of salami stuck to the side of his head.) He drove on, trying not to look at himself in the rearview mirror.
Finally, buildings began to appear—long low wooden structures, a museum, a tourist center—and then he was pulling into a dirt lot behind a phalanx of police cars, two fire trucks and an ambulance. The lot was jammed with campers and pickups and there were people everywhere, though it was early, very early, so early it should have been the shank of the night still. People milled around the boats, peeked in the windows of the police cars, twirled binoculars round their necks, breakfasted out of picnic baskets, lifted brown paper bags to their lips. Bare- legged kids tore across the macadam, trying to lift kites into the lifeless air, an old man was watching TV in the back of a jeep and a woman with big meaty arms and breasts backed away from a battered Ford with a birdcage and set it down in the middle of the lot. It was crazy. It was like the Fourth of July or the beginning of a music festival, only worse. Abercorn felt his stomach sink.
“Lewis, you don’t think all these people—?” he began, but the idea of it, the fear of it, locked the words in his throat and he couldn’t go on. These people weren’t just happy campers and holiday makers gathered here inadvertently at 7 A.M. on a weekday morning. No. They were gathered here as they gathered at the site of any disaster, patient as vultures. They were waiting for bloodshed, violence, criminality and despair, waiting for excess and humiliation, for the formula that would unlock the tedium of their lives. “But how in Christ’s name did they know? We just found out about the Nip—I mean, the Japanese—I mean, the Nip—ourselves. Am I right?”
Turco didn’t answer, but he looked grim.
The moment Abercorn swung open the door a group of people detached themselves from the crowd and converged on him. He’d noticed them out of the corner of his eye as he maneuvered into the parking space—they were too well dressed for tourists and they seemed nervous, edgy, as if they were about to break into a trot, and what was that, a camera?—but now everything came clear: the press. They were on him before he could unfold
