“Time will heal you,” Louise says. “Won’t nothing else do any good at all.”
I feel an eerie certainty that if I don’t start for the bridge now, I won’t make it to my car. Pushing down hard on the right pedal, I struggle toward the road that cuts through the woods toward the hunting camp.
The wind slaps the rain against my right cheek and ear, but soon I’m passing the shacks by the lake. The porches that were full of people an hour ago hold only dogs now. I’m alone again.
When I turn south on the camp road, the wind hits me full in the face, pushing against my body like a sail, trying to drive me back toward the lake. I lean low over the handlebars to cut my resistance and bear down hard on the pedals. The shoulder is so muddy in places that I almost take a spill, but the farther down the island I ride, the sandier the soil gets, and soon I’m making good time despite the weather.
Beneath the black storm clouds, the world has gone gray. Everything ahead looks as flat as a black-and-white photograph. The gray cabins of the hunting camp are almost invisible in the shadows beneath the trees. Even the grass has lost its color. Only a slight brightness low in the sky to the west lets me know the sun is there at all.
There should be a left turn soon. If not, I’ll come to the southern tip of the island, a rolling, mosquito-infested hell of scrub-covered dunes and muddy slews that I always avoided when possible.
Out of the grayness ahead, the old channel of the river appears, and relief washes through me. A mile up the road that runs along this channel is the bridge that leads to my car. I’m about to turn onto it when two bright beams of light swing across me from behind. I look back over my shoulder.
Headlights.
They look high enough to belong to a truck like the one Henry was driving. Louise told me she would send Jesse after me if he called her back.
I stop the bike at the turn and wait.
To my right, a blue-white beam much larger than those cast by the headlights illuminates the far shore, then sweeps south again. For a moment this puzzles me. Then I realize it’s the spotlight on a push boat. A quarter mile south of where I stand, the old channel runs back into the main channel of the Mississippi River. A push-boat captain driving a string of barges upstream is checking his course.
The driver of the pickup has spotted me. Forty yards away, he flicks his lights to high beam. The rain is blowing almost horizontally through their glare. I raise my hand to wave, then freeze.
The truck hasn’t slowed at all.
As the hair on my neck stands up, something Sean told me before we were lovers sounds in my head:
The truck engine roars with acceleration in the same moment that I dive into the ditch on the left side of the road. I regain my feet as the truck crushes Louise’s bicycle beneath its bumper and bounces after me across the ditch. My only hope is the trees, but I can’t outsprint a truck, not even for thirty yards.
An unholy grinding of gears gives me hope. The bike must have been caught in the truck’s linkage. As the driver tries to manhandle his vehicle off the twisted wreckage beneath it, I reach the first giant willow and dart behind it.
Looking back, I see headlights bouncing up and down. Then suddenly the truck’s motor dies. The headlights remain on though, and the interior light flicks on behind them. There’s a figure inside the cab-a man-but his face is obscured by distance and rain. He leans into the space between the door and the body of the truck. I’m squinting my eyes to try to see his face when a flash blooms in the dark and splinters pierce my left cheek. Only then does the super-sonic crack of the rifle bullet reach me.
I run.
Chapter 29
Panic drives me through the trees without direction. A single thought burns through the flood of endorphins in my brain: get away from the man in the truck. A second gunshot quickly follows the first, and one look over my shoulder tells me that the shooter has followed me into the woods. Now and then he flicks on a flashlight to find his way through the trees. From his careful progress, I know one thing: he’s driving me southward, down an ever- narrowing strip of land. It’s only a matter of time before he corners me on the tip of the island, a bare patch of sand with a mile of rushing water at my back.
I need to find a way to slip around him, but on this ground that’s almost impossible. The island here is like tropical jungle. The willow and cottonwood brakes give good cover, but there’s too much underbrush on the ground to move quietly, even in the rain. There’s only one other chance.
The boat ramp is on the west side of the island, facing the main channel of the river. If the shooter were farther behind me, I might have time to launch the fishing boat before he reached me. But he’s not. I’ve got to slow him down. But how? I have no weapons. As I fight my way through the underbrush, an image comes into my mind-
I veer south again. Tree branches whip my face, and peppervine claws at the legs of my jeans. Here the ground rises and falls in three-foot undulations, and I pray not to step on a cottonmouth as I splash through the dark slews. I’ve seen fifty moccasins together roiling the water in the drying pools.
The rain falls relentlessly, and the sound of my pursuer crashing through the brush grows nearer. Sweat pours from my skin, and my heart thumps against my breastbone. Free diving keeps me in good physical shape, but terror steals my breath, and alcohol withdrawal probably isn’t helping matters.
As I slow to get my bearings, the rifle cracks again, driving willow splinters into my left arm. I duck down and scramble between two cottonwood trunks, then crab-crawl through the dark until my arms begin to itch like fire.
Thirty yards into the thicket, I bear right, toward the boat ramp. Before I cover twenty yards, the sound of cursing floats through the trees. With a tight smile on my face, I rise and sprint for the west side of the island. A light beam cuts the air close by, but then a scream of male rage echoes through the trees. I can’t make out his words, or even if there were any.
My heart lifts with hope as I hit a level patch of sand, cause for joy until I spy a string stretched across my path at thigh level. It’s an old trotline strung with rusty fishhooks, and though I twist my body torturously in an effort to avoid it, nothing can stop my headlong flight. I swallow a scream as the hooks tear into my flesh. The line rips free from whatever held it as I fall, but the treble hooks are well and truly buried in my right thigh.
The rifle booms again, its echo rolling over sandy berms like cannon fire. My hunter heard my scream and got a new fix on my position. I pray he doesn’t know about the boat ramp, but what are the odds of that? I’m almost certain that it’s Jesse Billups behind me. Who else knew where I was?
At the top of a dune, I catch myself and stop. The main channel of the Mississippi has opened before me, its far shore a mile away, cloaked in rain and darkness.
Sliding down the dune, I race south along the bank, skirting cypress knees and driftwood snags. There’s the boat ramp, forty yards along the shore. Its concrete slab runs right down into the water at a steep angle. A glitter- coated bass boat sits on a trailer on the sand about five feet above the river. The problem is, it’s totally exposed. To launch that boat quickly, I’ll have to unsecure it from the trailer, lift the hitch end of the trailer, and heave both trailer and boat down the ramp into the water. If I can manage that, the boat should float free while the trailer sinks into the depths. I’ll have to swim freestyle with the fast current to catch the boat and board it, but I can do that. I’d rather swim the damned river with one arm than fight this island on foot anymore.
The boat ramp looks deserted from here, but that means nothing. If I walk into that open space unprotected, a ten-year-old could pick me off with a rifle. I crouch near the river’s edge, my senses primed for the slightest stimulus.
Something’s not right. I don’t hear my pursuer anymore. The wind is louder on the exposed bank, but I should
