Page 30

The fire roars. The whole back half of the shack is gone, and the heat comes off it like a hand against my face, and through the smoke I see the flat-bottom pulling away from the dock with one man at the motor. He's running and leaving the others. I fire after him, rack, fire again, and he jerks and slumps over the tiller, and the boat careens crooked down the channel with the motor screaming until the dark takes it.

Two men left, and the dogs.

The dogs are baying on the north side, and so are the two men.

The north side is the causeway.

I sprint along the dock through the smoke. The planks are scorching under my boots. One gives way, burned through, and my leg plunges to the thigh. I wrench it free and keep going. At the corner of the porch where the causeway begins, the old oil company boardwalk runs away north across the marsh on tar-black pilings, and I see her.

She's thirty yards up the planking with the orange dry bag on her back and the shotgun at her shoulder. Two men are coming up the boardwalk behind her with the hounds out front on leashes. The lead man is swinging a rifle up. The other has a pistol.

She doesn't run. She turns around.

The first blast of buckshot catches the lead man square and sends him over the rail into the marsh. The dogs jerk loose and scatter. The second man fires wildly with the pistol, three, four times, and her head snaps sideways and she staggers back against the rail. Everything in me stops. She straightens, racks the pump, and fires again, and he folds in the middle, sits down on the planks, and tips over.

She stands on the causeway with the shotgun still shouldered, breathing hard, looking down at him through the smoke.

By the time I reach her, she's lowered the gun. Blood is running down the left side of her face from her eyebrow, sheeting over her eye and dripping off her jaw onto her sweater.

"You're hit."

"I fell. The rail caught me going down." She swipes at it with the back of her wrist and smears it into her hair. "You're bleeding."

I look down. My right sleeve is sodden red from elbow to cuff.

Behind us, the shack collapses into the water with a long hissing roar, and a column of sparks climbs into the night. The last cartridges are still popping in the flames. The smoke will be visible from Parish 9, the man in the flat-bottom might not be dead, the dogs are loose, and we have to go.

"Where?" she asks.

"Somewhere nobody knows."

The causeway ends on a hummock of live oak and palmetto a quarter mile north. From there we go on foot through water to our knees and then our waists, holding the dry bag over our heads, for close to an hour by the stars. She doesn't ask where we're headed. She keeps her fingers hooked in the back of my belt and steps exactly where I step.

The second hide is an old gauge house. An oil company poured a concrete pad out here in the fifties and built a cinder-block shed on it to shelter their meters, and abandoned it in the eighties. The roof is tin. The only door is steel, and I rehung it myself with a hasp and a padlock three days after I walked into the swamp. I've never brought anyone here. I've never told a living soul it exists.

Inside, I light the lantern. There's a cot with a wool blanket, five-gallon water jugs along one wall, and two ammo cans of dry rations. On a shelf of cinder blocks and boards sit an AR-15, a Mossberg, two pistols, and eight hundred rounds sealed in a pickle bucket. A Pelican case waits under the cot.

Evie drops the dry bag on the floor and sits down beside it hard, like her legs have quit on her.

I get the Pelican case open. It's a real trauma kit, the kind the army issues its medics: suture packs, hemostatic gauze, lidocaine, a skin stapler, antibiotics, scalpels in sealed sleeves. I lay it out on the blanket in the lantern light the way the old man taught me.

"Where did you get all this?"

"Bought it one piece at a time. Paid cash in six different parishes."

"Why?"

"Because a tool that needs a doctor is a tool that talks." I tear open a suture pack with my teeth. "The old man taught me that at twelve. If I got hurt on a job, I fixed it myself or I didn't get fixed. A doctor writes things down. A doctor asks how. Then there's a record, and records get people killed."

I do her first. I clean the split through her eyebrow with saline, swab it with iodine, and inject lidocaine along the edges while she grips the side of the cot and fixes her eyes on the ceiling. It's a clean cut, an inch long, down to the bone at one end. Five stitches. I tie each one small and close to the skin so it'll scar thin. She holds perfectly still. When I finish, I brush her hair back off her forehead with my good hand and let it rest there a moment.

My arm is worse. The knife went in near the wrist and ran up the inside of the forearm almost to the elbow, deep through the middle, still welling slow and red and running off my fingers onto the concrete. I flush it. I skip the lidocaine, since I'd need two good hands to inject it and I haven't got them. I thread a curved needle, pinch the edges of the wound together with my thumb, and push the needle through.

She's watching me.

I feel it before I look up. She sits on the end of the cot with her stitched brow and her blood-crusted hair, studying my face while I drive the needle through my own skin, draw it out the far side, pull the suture through the meat of my arm, and tie it off. I don't know what my face is doing. Nothing, most likely. That's what it was trained for. Stitch after stitch, in and out, the thread dragging through, tie, cut, begin again.

When I finally raise my eyes, hers are wet.