got himself smoked because he assumed other people think the same way he did. So where does that leave you? Before it’s over, you’ll probably cool me out. But I’m going to get at least two of y’all before I go down, or maybe three, or maybe all of you. You wonder why that is? It’s because I’m old and I dread the thought of dying in a bed, and I get off splattering the grits of guys like you.”
I flung the rock in a high arc so that it fell through the canopy and landed on a solid spot outside the tree line, indicating that perhaps I had bolted from behind the water oak and was coming up hard on their flank, on the high ground, the sawed-off twelve-gauge pump about to spray buckshot all over their position.
If that was their conclusion, they were only half wrong. I ran through the trees like a broken-field quarterback, crashing over the undergrowth, weaving through the tree trunks directly at them. One man rose from a pool of water where he was crouched and began firing with a semiautomatic rifle on a wire stock. But the electricity in the clouds had died, and the stand of trees was almost totally dark; I doubted if he had a clear idea where I was. I heard a round blow bark out of a gum tree, and I felt wood splinters sting the side of my face, but I was already raising the shotgun in front of me and not thinking about anything other than killing the man whose gun had jammed and who was trying to knock a shell casing loose from his rifle bolt with his hand.
He twisted his body away from me when I squeezed the trigger, holding out his palm in a pushing position, his eyes squeezed tightly shut. I saw his fingers fly loose from his hand as though they had been snipped off with shears. I ejected the spent shell and jacked another one into the chamber, then realized that my adrenaline-fed confidence had been an illusion.
The second man had positioned himself behind the root-ball of a downed tree by the water’s edge, perhaps even sacrificing his friend so he could get me in his sights. I tried to swing the twelve-gauge toward him and lay down a masking shot before he let off the AR-15 he had raised to his shoulder. But I tripped on a log and tumbled down an embankment into a cluster of palmettos, the shotgun skittering down with me. The man with the AR-15 let off four rounds, but they were all high, clattering away in the trees like the sound of wood blocks falling down a staircase. I picked up the shotgun with both hands and, without aiming, fired at the shooter. But the barrel had become clotted with mud or clay. It exploded in a red-and-yellow balloon, the muzzle swelling into the deformed shape of a split sausage. I dropped the shotgun to the ground and reached into my belt for my.45, except I knew that this time my appointment in Samarra had come round at last.
I heard the sound of a car horn blowing and tires spinning on grass and mud. The shooter continued to hold the stock of his rifle against his shoulder, but he dissolved back into the darkness so quickly I had to blink to make sure my vision hadn’t failed me. I got to one knee with the.45 and scanned the trees and the undergrowth but could see no sign of him.
“Dave, are you in there?” I heard Clete shout.
I got up and started running up the embankment through the trees. I burst through the undergrowth and ran between two thick slash pines that whipped back into my face, then saw Clete behind the wheel of his Caddy, his window down, rain blowing inside, his porkpie hat clamped down on his brow. He looked like a giant albino ape hunched between the seat and the wheel. “What the hell is going on in there?” he said.
I pulled open the passenger door and piled inside. “I killed one guy and blew the hand off another. Four guys, including the wounded one, are still in there. Where’s your cell phone?”
“In the glove box. Who are these guys?”
“I don’t know. Cleaners, maybe. Vidor Perkins is dead. Get moving.”
He started to accelerate, but he was still looking at me. “You capped Perkins?”
“No, they did. They were shooting at me. Come on, Clete. Step on it. We’ll try to box them in.”
“You mean cleaners like government guys?”
“I didn’t say that. Will you get us out of here?”
“They’re already boxed. Let’s call the locals and pot them as they come out of the bush.”
“You don’t listen. You never listen. Your head is wrapped with iron plate,” I said.
I rolled down my window and opened up on the tree line, hoping to drive back anyone who was trying to set up on us.
“You don’t have to be so emotional about it,” Clete said. He mashed down on the accelerator, fishtailing two swampy tire tracks past the Acadian cottage.
I looked through the back window at the tree line but couldn’t see anyone emerging from it. I had the cell phone in my hand and dialed 911. There was no service. “What have you got on you?” I asked.
“Just my piece.”
“We’re going to be okay,” I said. “They’ve got the river at their back, and we’re between them and their vehicles. We can pin them down until somebody sees us and calls in a 911.”
“That van and the white car are theirs?”
“Yeah, Perkins’s body is inside the van.”
“You’re sure you killed somebody down there on the river?”
I looked at him and didn’t answer.
“You saw him close up?” he said.
“He took it through the lungs. He went down like a sack of horseshoes. You think I’m making this up?”
Something caught his attention. I looked through the windshield but didn’t see anything.
“At nine o’clock. They cut their lights,” he said.
To the left, angling off the paved road into the field, the grass flattening under their bumpers, were two black SUVs. They were neither official vehicles nor the vehicles of choice for people in this area, most of whom were poor. The SUVs divided in the field, creating a pincer movement, trying to seal us off from the road. In the dash light, the raindrops on Clete’s face looked like beads of water on a pumpkin.
“I don’t get this,” he said. “We were dealing with a bunch of local shitheads. Now we’ve got an army coming down on us. What do you want to do?”
He waited. I didn’t want to say what I had to say. “Cut your lights.”
“They’ve already seen us. That doesn’t solve the problem. Tell me what you want to do.”
“They’re behind and in front of us. Head south on the road. We’ll use the phone at the crossroads and then come back. Do it, Cletus. We’re running out of options.”
He stared hard at me, sweat and raindrops running out of his hair. “They’re gonna skate,” he said.
“I’m sorry I got you into this.”
“Forget sorry. We’re sending a real bad message to these guys, like they can spit in our mouths any time they want.”
“We’ll nail them later.”
“I’ve got a truck flare under the seat. We can set fire to the van. You said Perkins is in there?”
“It’s what they want, Clete. We’ll never get out of the field. Nobody will know what happened to us, and these guys will be around to piss on our graves.”
He gazed at me for a long time, fighting with conclusions he didn’t want to accept, steering with one hand. Then he angled toward the south, exhaling, depressing the accelerator. In the silence I could hear the grass raking under the Caddy’s frame. “How’d you know where I was?” I asked.
“I went to that filling station at the crossroads. The clerk in there said he’d talked to you.” The Caddy thumped onto the asphalt. Clete floored the accelerator, glancing in the rearview mirror at the same time. “Try the cell again.”
“No service.”
The flooded fields on either side of the road were flying past us. “We’re gonna get these guys, we’re gonna get these guys, we’re gonna get these guys,” he said.
I was used up and too tired to offer any support for his fantasies about revenge. My adrenaline-fed high had gone the way all dry drunks come and go, like a brief revisit to the psychological and moral insanity that had constituted my life when the cathedral I entered every afternoon was an empty New Orleans saloon with a long mahogany bar at the end of which a solitary corked bottle of charcoal-filter whiskey and a shot glass and a longneck Jax waited for me. Inside the amber radiance filtering through the oak trees outside, I was a faithful acolyte and was always respectful of the spirits that lived in the corked bottle and the power and the light I could acquire by simply tilting a small glass to my lips.
For me, unslaked bloodlust was no easier to deal with than unslaked sexual desire or a thirst for whiskey that at one time was so great I would swallow a razor blade to satisfy it. My skin was hot, my palms as stiff and dry as
