Later yet, the same night
Fuck it.
He’d backed into something rough and hard.
Justice grabbed his ankle and rubbed. He had hauled the pirogue away from the bayou, between trees and stumps, over snarled undergrowth, rocks, earth that went from shallow mud to deep mud, depending on the spot you were in. This was as far as he had to go…tonight.
It had taken too long to get back here. Finding the right boat had been hard enough. Getting way back into the swamps in the dark, among the boxy houses that looked and smelled as if they were made of sheet rust, corrugated, had about made him crazy. And locating a boat no one was watching too closely had taken hours of crouching and running in ankle-deep water. He’d had to go to a settlement far enough away that they wouldn’t come right on down to this part of the Teche after him and looking for their property.
Theft like that might make those swamp people, quiet though they might be, turn really ugly.
Ugly enough to punish someone so they could never do the same thing again.
Now he had to finish his practice run and retrace his path. This time it could be even harder.
Someone had to pay for the trouble that had come his way. If they’d left well enough alone, he’d still be on his way to getting exactly what he wanted, and no one ever the wiser about what they didn’t see or know.
But they couldn’t leave things alone. No, their sights had been set on change.
This next death had to be different. The sheriff and his boys would be looking for patterns. Well, he wouldn’t be giving them any. A man and his imagination, just the two of them was all it took.
What they said about killing was true. Once you did it, the next one got easier, and the next. He’d been hasty with the first one, but he’d learned his lesson: never start anything without having a complete exit plan. Afterward, he had panicked.
But that was history. He’d worked hard and covered his tracks well enough to make sure they never caught him—ever.
This murder was going to be brilliant—as pretty as a picture. Well, damn, he might try his hand at painting that pretty picture one of these days. He had a long life ahead of him to do what he fucking-well pleased.
This one would be pretty and so goddamn painful, he’d have to make sure no one heard anything.
Pain. Pain in the darkness, and confusion. Why are you doing this to me? What have I done to you? The questions would come first, then the begging and the promises. He curled his lip and whispered, “You were born, sucker, that’s what you did to me.”
The sacks of dirt were right where he’d left them, carefully weighed, tied shut. He hefted them, one by one, into the bottom of the pirogue.
They needed to be arranged so they’d be distributed like a person’s weight. A particular person.
Satisfied he had it as right as it was going to be, he retrieved a canvas duffel with a drawstring at the top.
“What are you doin’ to me?” he said in a falsetto.
He would pack the fool’s mouth then and say, “Why, there’s nothing for you to worry about. I’m going to make a nice hole in your brain so it won’t overheat anymore.”
From the duffel, he took an old-fashioned manual drill he’d found in a sale at a hardware store going out of business in New Orleans. They had stuff there he bet most folks didn’t know ever existed. The drill didn’t have a lot of choices when it came to the size of holes it made. There was nice-and-small, nice-and-big, and really big. He had finesse. Justice already knew he’d go for nice-and-small. Not such a mess that way; he didn’t want to get anything on him.
He didn’t need to, but he rested the point of the drill bit on the single bag of dirt at one end of the boat. A knob on top let him hold the tool in place with as much or as little pressure as he wanted. A handle in the middle of the shaft rotated under his free hand. Around and around it went, and the nice-and-small bit broke through the stretched sacking—just like it would through skin. It hit the rocky dirt he’d shoveled inside the sacks, and ground slower, kind of like going through gristle and bone.
That was good enough.
The job would be done.
He put the drill away.
Justice heaved and shoved. On the downhill path back to the bayou, the load moved faster than he’d expected. One of the benefits of soft mud and an incline. And the extra weight actually worked for him.
At the water’s edge, he looped a fat coil of rope over his head and around one shoulder. He knew just how many feet of line he had, because he knew how far it had to stretch.
The only thing that could mess with him now would be if the water’s current didn’t do what it was supposed to do here.
Once launched, the pirogue wobbled a bit then settled low in the water. Justice took the oar and gave the stern a mighty shove, playing out the line at the same time.
He almost whooped.
Gently, smoothly, the dark shape slid forward and kept on going.
Justice shrugged off the coil and tied one end of the rope to a piece of metal pipe conveniently abandoned in the same place he’d found the boat.
He ran along the bank, using the rope to stop his toy from floating away.
There were the lights of St. Cecil’s!
Hot shit—it would work.