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“Just tell me what happened.”
“He called my office. He said he wants to give himself up.”
“Why didn't he call me?”
“He thinks you're tapped.”
“Where is he, Clete?”
“I knew it.”
Chapter 32
WAS LATE afternoon when we put my boat into the Atchafalaya River and headed east into the basin and the huge network of bayous, bays, sandbars, and flooded stands of trees that constitute the alluvial system of the river. The sun was hot and bloodred above the willow islands behind us and you could see gray sheets of rain curving out of the sky in the south and waves starting to cap in the bay. I opened up both engines full throttle and felt the water split across the bow, hiss along the hull like wet string, then flatten behind us in a long bronze trough dimpled with flying fish that glided on the wind like birds.
Clete sat on a cushioned locker behind me, his Marine Corps utility cap on the back of his head, pressing rounds from a box of .223 ammunition into a second magazine for my ARI5. Then he inverted the magazine and jungle-clipped it with electrician's tape to one that was already in the rifle. He saw me watching him.
“Lose the attitude, big mon. You blink on this dude and he'll take your eyes out,” he said above the engine's noise.
I cut back on the throttle on the east side of the bay and let the wake take us into a narrow bayou that snaked through a flooded woods.
Cottonmouth moccasins lay coiled on top of dead logs and the lowest cypress branches along the banks, and ahead I saw a white crane lift from a tiny inlet matted with hyacinths and glide for a time above the bayou, then suddenly rise through a red-gold, sunlit break in the canopy and disappear.
Clete was standing beside me now. There was no wind inside the trees, and I could smell mosquito dope running in his sweat. He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand and swatted mosquitoes away from his hair.
“It's like being up the Mekong. It's got to be a setup,” he said.
“I think he's scared.”
“My ass. This guy's been killing people all his life. We can go around a corner and he can chop us into horse meat.”
“That's not it. He's had too many other chances.”
Clete pointed a finger at me, his eyes hard and big in his face, then went out of the cabin and worked his way forward to the bow, where he knelt on one knee with the ARI5 propped on his thigh, the sling wrapped around his forearm.
The sun fell through the canopy and illuminated a sunken houseboat and the pale, bloated carcass of a wild hog that had wedged under the porch roof. The metallic green backs of alligator gars rolled against the surface, then their long jaws and files of needlelike teeth parted as they went deep into the pocket where the hog's stomach used to be.
Up ahead was a blind corner. I began to believe Clete had been right.
Not only were the risks all ours, I had allowed myself to be convinced that an amoral, pathological man was more human, more capable of remorse, than he had ever shown himself to be previously. This bayou, shut off from light, filled with insects and gars and poisonous snakes, vaguely scented with the smells of decay and death, a place Joseph Conrad would have well understood, was Pogue's chosen environment, and so far we were operating on his terms.
I cut the engines, and in the sudden quiet I heard our wake sliding back across the sandbars into the woods, a crescendo of birds' wings flapping in the trees, a 'gator slapping its tail in water. But I didn't hear the St. Mary Parish sheriff's boat, with Helen Soileau on it, that should have been closing the back door on Emile Pogue.
I started to use the radio, then I saw Clete raise his hand in the air.
Someone was running in the woods, crashing through brush, splashing across a slough. I felt the bow bite into a sandbar and the boat become motionless. I went forward with Clete and tried to see through the tree trunks, the tangle of air vines, the leaves that tumbled out of the canopy, the pools of mauve shadow that seemed to take the shape of animals.
Then we heard the roar of an airboat out on the next bay.
“How do you figure that?” Clete said.
“Maybe he wants another season to run.”
We dropped off the bow onto the sandbar and worked our way along the bank and through the shallows to the corner. The back of Clete's neck was oily with sweat, inflamed with insect bites. He put an unlit cigarette in his mouth, paused at the bend in the bayou, then stepped out in the open, his face blank, his eyes flicking from one object to the next.
He pointed.
An aluminum boat with an outboard engine was tied with a chain to a cypress knee on the bank, and beyond it a shack was set back in the willows on pilings. The screens were webbed with rust, dead insects, and dirt, and the tin roof had long ago taken on the colors of a woods in winter. The base of the pilings glistened with a sheen like petroleum waste from the pools of stagnant water they sat in. Clete pressed a wadded handkerchief to his face. The dry ground behind the shack was blown with bottle flies and reeked of unburied excrement.
