“Sssh,” Angie said suddenly, and put a finger to her lips.
I turned my head back toward the hut, heard a door close quietly from the far side. I raised the binoculars and stared through them as a man exited the far side of the shed and walked along the plankwood toward the stand of thick trees.
I could only see the back of him. He had blond hair and stood maybe six-two. He was slim and moved with a casual fluid ease, one hand in the pocket of his trousers, the other swaying languidly at his side. He wore light gray trousers and a white long-sleeved shirt rolled up to the elbows. His head was tilted back slightly, and the sound of his soft whistling carried back over the mist and bogs to us.
“Sounds like ‘Camp Town Ladies,’” Bubba said.
“Nah,” Angie said. “That’s not it.”
“Then what is it, you know so much?”
“I don’t know. I just know what it isn’t.”
“Oh, sure,” Bubba said.
The man had almost reached the middle of the planks and I waited for him to turn and look back so I could see his face. The whole point of coming here had been to see who Miles was meeting, and if the blond guy had a car in those trees, he’d be long gone even if we gave chase right now.
I picked a rock up off the ground and arced it out through the trees and over the bog. It dropped into the watery mass of bobbing fruit about six feet to the blond guy’s left and made a distinct plunking sound that we could hear thirty yards away.
The man didn’t seem to notice. He didn’t break stride. He kept whistling.
“I’m telling you,” Bubba said, picking up his own rock, “it’s ‘Camp Town Ladies.’”
Bubba threw his rock, a hefty two-pounder that only reached halfway across the bog but made twice as much noise. Instead of a plunk, we got a heavy splash, and still the blond man showed no visible reaction.
He’d reached the end of the planks, and I made a decision. If he knew someone was following him, he might vanish, but he was going to vanish anyway, and I needed to see his face.
I screamed, “Hey!” and my voice ripped the mist and sullen bog air, sent birds shredding upward through the trees.
The man stopped at the tree line. His back tensed. His shoulder turned ever so slightly to the left. Then he raised his arm so that his hand was held up at a ninety-degree angle from his body, as if he were a traffic cop halting the flow, or a party guest waving goodbye as he left the party.
He’d known we were there. And he wanted us to know it.
He lowered his hand and disappeared into the dark tree line.
I bolted from our stand of thin trees and out onto the soggy shore, with Angie and Bubba right behind me. I’d been loud enough that Miles Lovell would have heard my call across the bog, so our cover was blown in either case. Now our only hope was to get to Lovell while he was alone on a bog, before
As our heels hammered the plank wood and the sharp scent of the bog turned bitter in my nostrils, Bubba said, “Come on. Back me up, man. It was ‘ Camp Town,’ right?”
“It was ‘We’re the Boys of Chorus,’” I said.
“What?”
I picked up my pace and the hut canted from side to side as we bounded toward it; the planks felt like they’d give way underfoot.
“From the Looney Tunes cartoon,” I said.
“Oh, yeah!” Bubba said, and then he sang it: “Oh, we’re the boys of chorus. We hope you like our show. We know you’re rooting for us. But now we have to go-oh-oh!”
The words, as they boomed from Bubba’s mouth over the still, silent bog, rode up my spine like insects.
As I reached the hut, I grasped the doorknob.
Angie said, “Patrick!”
I looked back at her and froze in her glare. I couldn’t believe what I’d almost done-run up to a closed door with a potentially armed stranger waiting on the other side and been about to throw open the door like I was going home.
Angie’s mouth remained open, her head cocked and her eyes blazing, stunned, I think, by my almost criminal mental lapse.
I shook my head at my own stupidity and stepped back from the door as Angie pulled her.38 and stood to the left, pointed it at the center of the door. Bubba had already pulled his gun-a sawed-off shotgun with a pistol grip- and he stood to the right, pointing it at the door with all the trepidation of a geography teacher pointing out Burma on a dated classroom map.
He said, “Uh, we’re ready now, genius.”
I pulled my Colt Commander, stepped to the left of the doorjamb, and rapped the wood with my knuckles. “Miles, open up!”
Nothing.
I rapped again. “Hey, Miles, it’s Patrick Kenzie. I’m a private detective. I just want to talk.
I heard the sound of something hitting cheap wood inside, followed by the rattle of tools or some metal in a corner.
I knocked a last time. “Miles, we’re going to come in. Okay?”
Something banged up and down against the floorboards inside.
I flattened my back against the wall and reached around to the knob, looked at Angie and Bubba. They both nodded. A bullfrog croaked from somewhere out on the bog. The breeze died and the trees were still and dark.
I turned the knob and threw open the door and Angie said, “Jesus Christ!”
Bubba said, “Wow,” with a touch of admiration, if not awe, in his voice, and lowered his shotgun.
Angie lowered her.38, and I stepped in front of the doorway and looked in the shed. It took me a second or two to realize what I was looking at because there was so much to digest and yet nothing you really wanted to.
Miles Lovell sat tied to the motor of a septic pump in the center of the shed. He’d been fastened to the motor by a thick electrical cord wrapped tight around his waist and tied off behind his back.
The gag in his mouth had darkened with blood that seeped past the corners of his mouth and down his chin.
His arms and legs had been left untied, and his heels kicked the floorboards as he writhed against the metal block.
His arms, however, hung immobile by his sides, and the man who’d done this to him hadn’t been worried Miles would use them to untie himself because Miles no longer had possession of his own hands.
They were on the floor to the left of the silent motor, chopped off above the wrists and neatly laid, palms down, on the floorboards. The blond man had applied tourniquets over both stumps and left the ax embedded in the wood between the hands.
We approached Lovell as his eyes rolled back to whites and the hammering of his heels began to seem less like pain and more like shock. Even with the tourniquets, I doubted he could live much longer, and I willed myself to put the horror of his maiming in the back of my mind and try to get him to answer a question or two before either the shock or death set in permanently.
I pulled the gag from between his lips and jumped back as a mouthful of dark blood spilled out onto his chest.
Angie said, “Oh, no. No fucking way. You have got to be kidding.”
My stomach slid east, then west, then back east again, and a soft, warm buzzing found my brain.
Bubba said, “Wow,” again, and this time I was sure I detected awe in his voice.
Miles, shock or no shock, death or no death, wouldn’t be answering my questions.
He wouldn’t be answering anyone’s questions for a long, long time.
And even if he lived, I wasn’t sure he’d be happy about it.
While we’d waited in the trees and the mist had ridden gently over the cranberry bog and his BMW had sat waiting on the shore, Miles Lovell’s tongue had gone the way of his hands.
