instrument to him, he dropped it onto the floor. It bounced with a jingling protest.
He cursed, retrieved the receiver, and pressed it to his ear. He found the wrist near the end of his left arm and squinted at his watch: 10:35. A glance at the window told him it was dark outside. The 10:35 was P.M.
“Carver?” a voice buzzed in his ear.
“I think so.”
“This is Alex Burr. I’m here in Solarville. We’ve got some action tonight. Wear some old clothes and meet us on South Loop, where it curves near the swamp just outside of town.”
Carver wondered who the “us” were. The DEA? He supposed so. “When?” he asked.
Burr seemed surprised by the question. “Now. As soon as you can.” He hung up.
Carver listened to the static of the broken connection for a few seconds, then terminated his end of the conversation.
He decided not to wake Edwina. He slipped into an old pair of jeans that he’d brought in his new suitcase, put on his wrinkled shirt with the sleeves rolled up above the elbows, and pulled on a fresh pair of socks and his moccasins. Then he got out of there, walking as lightly as he could with the cane.
“Now,” the man had said. Federal man. DEA. Best to listen. Now.
Carver carefully locked the motel-room door behind him, breathed in the warm swamp air with its fetid, primal scent, and woke up all the way.
The swamp loomed close and black around him, loud with the croaking cacophony of a thousand bullfrogs and the shrill, frantic buzzing of night insects. The moon was full and suspended low over the treetops, like an extraterrestrial mother ship overseeing all the wild madness below.
Working his tongue around the insides of his cheeks to remove the dry, sour taste from his mouth, Carver got in the Olds. He started the engine without gunning it, then pulled the car slowly and as quietly as possible from the parking lot. Then he drove fast toward South Loop.
He was eager now to find out what all the rush was about, and to learn what kind of action Alex Burr had planned for that night.
CHAPTER 30
As Carver slowed the Olds and steered it gently into the curve on South Loop, a uniformed cop stepped out of the brush and into the glare of the headlights. He held up a rigid arm and hand almost in a Nazi salute, as if he were halting three lanes of traffic.
Carver pressed his foot on the brake pedal hard enough to make the Olds’s long hood dip. The cop waved him over toward where he was standing, waiting for him like a Berlin Wall guard.
“You Carver?” he asked, when Carver had stopped the car and stuck his head out the window. The cop was young and already thick around the middle. Another ten years of sitting in patrol cars or at a desk and he’d be downright fat; already his face was the jowly one of a middle-aged man, but his eyes were young, consciously expressionless peering out from the curved-moon shadow of his cap’s visor. He was putting on the tough front, hardening to his trade.
Carver showed him some identification. Official paper. That did it. The pudgy cop smiled a one-of-us smile and said, “Follow that road, sir. They’re waiting just over that rise. And I’ve been instructed to tell you to turn off your headlights.”
Carver didn’t see any road, but he killed his lights and aimed the Olds’s long snoot at the blackness of the swamp. Then, by moonlight, he did see that there was a narrow, mostly overgrown road leading to the rise the cop had pointed out. It wasn’t a dry road. Long bent grass glistened wetly between the shadows cast by the trees. Carver could see recently made tire ruts in front of him, and now and then the car would lurch and he could hear the sucking sound of swamp water beneath the wheels, telling him he was driving where no car should go.
As the Olds’s hood topped the crest of the rise and then dropped, Carver saw four cars parked close to each other near what looked like a broken section of fence. Two of the cars bore Solarville Police markings. There was a knot of men standing by the cars. Carver recognized Alex Burr, the cop Rogers, who had retrieved his cane from the smoked motel room, and the aggressively paunchy form of Chief Armont.
When he parked the Olds by one of the police cars and got out, he could see the dark, humped shapes of two airboats. What had appeared to be broken fence was part of a decrepit dock; the two boats were moored to it. Though Carver could hear water lapping, the airboats weren’t bobbing. They were sitting in the kind of shallow water they were made to skim.
Burr said hello to Carver and introduced him to two other men who were DEA agents. Armont nodded to Carver. He was wearing dark slacks and a short-sleeved blue shirt. His two men were in uniform. The DEA agents, including Burr, wore dark pants and black windbreakers with DEA lettered on their backs in foot-tall orange letters. The better to know friend from enemy if the action got heated. And heated action seemed to be anticipated: two of the agents were carrying semi-automatic shotguns as well as the handguns Carver was sure were concealed beneath the windbreakers.
Everyone except Burr seemed calm. He was in control, of himself and the operation, but it was easy to see that his adrenaline was pumping. There was a stiffness to his features and his single eye moved rapidly. When he spoke, tension like taut, vibrating wire grated in his voice. “Come on,” he said to Carver in his DEA way. “I’ll explain as we go.”
Carver didn’t ask where they were going. He limped to the nearest airboat, almost stumbling as his cane sank into the soft ground.
“Need some help?” Burr asked, trying to hurry him.
Carver declined, and almost dropped his cane as he scrambled into the boat and sat next to Burr. The boats were aluminum, about twenty feet long, with the familiar wide propellers in high cages mounted on the stern, well out of the water. They had everything to make them aircraft except wings. Armont, along with one of the DEA agents and the two uniformed cops, got in the other airboat. That boat was older and sat higher in the water. Carver peered at the two boat trailers half concealed in the reeds but couldn’t make out the license plates. He guessed the newer boat he and Burr were in was a DEA boat, the other belonged or was on loan to the Solarville police. A DEA agent sat behind the low windscreen in front of Carver. Up in the bow, a boyish blond agent with a pug nose, whom Burr had introduced as Marty something or other, was hunched over what looked like a small radio and was wearing bulky earphones that lent him a curiously mouselike appearance. Marty made a circular motion with his right arm, then pointed toward the swamp.
Lines were unlooped from the moorings, and the two air-boats came alive with sputtering roars and hunkered lower in the water. Carver could feel the powerful vibration shake the boat, run up his back from the base of his spine. The seats they were sitting in were hard, with straight backrests, bolted to the standard bench-type seats built into the boat.
“Better strap yourself in,” Burr said.
That seemed like sound advice. Carver felt around, found a safety belt, and fastened it, yanking it hard a few times to make sure the buckle had caught. He stuck his stiff leg out in front of him to get as comfortable as possible.
The throbbing rumble of the engines rose, and the boat Carver was in led the way into the dark swamp. Carver was aware of thick saw grass and reeds bending and parting in front of and under the boat. Now and then there was a rough bounce and hard vibration beneath the hull as they briefly skimmed over land rather than water. They were only going about fifteen miles per hour. The propeller that drove them forward made a muted beating sound like a helicopter rotor, barely audible beneath the roar of the converted aircraft engine that powered it.
Marty raised his arm again in a silent signal and held it steady.
The engines of both boats died, and they were drifting in a shadowed clearing, surrounded by the black trunks of partly submerged trees. Moonlight silhouetted the branches and the elegantly drooping Spanish moss and vines. Some of the vines dangled all the way down into the water. Carver couldn’t see much on either side; the reeds they were near were taller than the boat.
The boats bobbed silently in softly lapping water. No one in either of them talked for a few minutes, until Burr leaned close and said to Carver, “The Malone brothers are out there somewhere in their airboat.”
