SQUIB OFTEN FELT HARD DONE BY FORTUNE-WISE. EVERYBODY GOT some luck, a bone tossed their way by Mother Nature. Squib’s boon was common among Cajun folk in that the maringouins had never taken a shine to him. Maybe it was the French blood from way back, but more likely the Caribbean had more to do with the situation. Squib never could fathom how a person could even tolerate the bayou after sunset with the mosquitoes ripping chunks out of their flesh. You see those tourists in the morning wandering around welted like they got themselves tortured. Some Guantanamo-looking shit. Nothing took the cool out of a college calf tattoo like half a dozen septic lumps. Squib got maybe a handful of bites a season, and even then it was usually some zirondelle on a rampage.
So that was his luck.
Unblemished skin.
Hard to turn a fella’s life around on that, less’n he got spotted hanging at the mall by some model scout. And that wasn’t overlikely. Squib didn’t really hang per se. He was a not-enough-hours-in-the-day kind of guy. Always working, making a buck.
His Cajun skin made setting crawfish traps more comfortable, at least. Squib would motor up the bayou toward Honey Island and float half a dozen of those cages near telltale lily pads, then spend a few hours trawling with a scoop net until his traps were bursting at the wire. In all his years night fishing, Squib had only ever been bit the one time, and then it wasn’t no mosquito but a moccasin that got itself tangled up in a cage. The snake must have been jizzed out, though, because Squib suffered no more than a nub of swelling around the teeth marks.
Tonight I got bigger fish in my sights, thought Squib, going all melodramatic. A life of crime.
Squib knew that he was stepping over some kind of threshold and there wouldn’t be no crossing back, but Regence Hooke was a devil in a tasseled cap who had his sights set on Elodie Moreau, so it was up to him to buy them some distance.
Maybe if we’re living in the middle of a development with plenty of witnesses, then Hooke might settle down some and back off.
Squib’s warped reasoning was based on a child’s understanding of evil men. He couldn’t know that specimens like Regence Hooke didn’t get settled down; they got riled up.
The only time Hooke ever settled down was with a blister pack of Benzedrine, a quart of Old Forester’s, and a hooker at the door.
The skinny on Squib’s prospective boss was as follows: Willard Carnahan, a purveyor of all things legal and illegal. Wasn’t nothing beneath Carnahan, not so far as Squib knew. There was a story doing the grapevine that Willard had beat a corner-slinger into a coma recently in the French Quarter over a zip of coke that was actually baby powder and turned to rock in his nostrils, so Carnahan wasn’t ever crossing the Twin Span again, on account of the retribution that was waiting for him in New Orleans from the hustler’s higher-ups. Willard was a swamp sailor: He could navigate the Pearl River without ever once skimming a bank. He worked a tour boat during the day and at nighttime ran his own deals through the tiny feeder tribs—even with his eyes closed, if needs be. Carnahan had his own distillery, which was perfectly legal so long as a fella didn’t use it to manufacture white lightning. The official story was that Carnahan was distilling water, but in fact he was engaged in the age-old practice of running ’shine for the alcohol-blind swamp dogs on the bayou. The sheriff’s office in Slidell took their payoffs in a jug, and nobody else gave much of a crap. But those jugs were heavy, and Squib reckoned that Carnahan could use a humper who knew the swamp almost as well as he did.
They had arranged a late meet on the old Honey Island dock. Squib reckoned he would be allowed to collect from Carnahan’s own dock if he proved himself, but tonight he was being tested.
In case I’m some class of juvenile narc, thought Squib, keeping an eye out for Willard from his pirogue in the cattails on the west bank across the layered slate water from Honey Island itself.
The view was just fine, with the moonlight bouncing off the cypress leaves, and Squib saw Carnahan standing right there at the water’s edge in his drainpipe jeans and cut-off T-shirt. But Carnahan wasn’t alone. There were two people on the dock: Carnahan, with his Twisted Sister–style ratty hair, and one big refrigerator-sized guy. The big one was Regence Hooke, no doubt about that whatsoever.
What the hell? thought Squib. Why would Hooke be communing with a criminal like Carnahan?
He couldn’t tell what was going on from this distance—Hooke could be simply interrogating a suspect—but Squib doubted that. Regence Hooke wasn’t a man to put himself out, and especially not in the middle of the night.
There was too much bayou between Squib and the suspicious twosome on the far bank to hear what was going on, a fact which would have to be remedied. And if a person had to put his finger on exactly when things went ass-over-balls down the crapper, then that moment was imminent.
I need to get myself closer, thought Squib. Maybe I can get myself a little intelligence on Hooke in case I ever need a get-out-of-jail-free card.
And there it was: the moment that would change the course of young Everett Moreau’s life. Squib was about to commit the cardinal sin of watchers, spies, and stalkers everywhere, that being: Don’t put yourself in the picture. Keep the hell out of whatever’s being spied upon, and do not muddy the waters with your own person.
In Squib’s exact case, the waters were already plenty muddy, but the boy went right ahead and muddied them further. He cranked his propeller out of the water and paddled to the Honey Island bank, paying no heed to the bullfrogs croaking ominous warnings. His paddle grazed the rough hide of an alligator, but still Squib ignored the omens as he was at that age where every idea he had seemed like the best damn idea in the universe. So the boy forged ahead, keeping his torso bent over low and wishing he had some class of camouflage gunk to smear on his face and arms. Not that he possessed any of that specific stuff, but Momma had every cream under the sun and surely to Jesus one of her pots would have done the job. Still, too late to fret on that now. It wasn’t like he could have seen into the future and bargained on this encounter.
It didn’t take more than half a dozen strokes to propel the pirogue across the bayou to the overhanging levee of Honey Island. Squib grabbed a fistful of cattails and tugged, sliding his craft into the cover of reeds and roots. The entire maneuver was whisper-quiet, and Squib congratulated himself on his own sneakiness, thinking that in another life he could have been Special Forces, maybe, or one of those ninja characters who favored black slippers and headbands.
Hooke and Carnahan were still jawing away, and now Squib could catch snatches of conversation. He heard Hooke say, “I never saw any sign of it apart from a bend in the middle . . .”
Which could have been pertaining to just about anything from Santa Claus to a police snitch.
And a few seconds later Willard Carnahan remarked, “That wasn’t nuthin’ compared to this guy I met in Slidell.”
Which was even more vague apart from the mention of the parish’s main city.
This kind of harmless back-and-forth went on for an age, or so it felt, and Squib was beginning to doubt that anything useful could come of this eavesdropping. With the reeds rustling and the goddamn bugs kicking up their nightly swamp racket, he couldn’t track any conversation threads from end to end, and what he could hear sounded like regular bar bullshit.
Willard: “Totally serious, Constable. Motherfucker eyeballed me, ’fore I opened his . . .”
And Regence: “I swear, boy, Momma Hooke had this thing she did where two earthworms . . .”
It was all useless jabber, so all in all, his big plan was proving itself something of a clusterballs. And Squib was reckoning he might as well shut up shop and hunker down till Regence took himself off upriver.
I’ll shimmy in a little closer, he decided. Give ’er five minutes, then fuck it, I’m out.
Squib crawled from the bed of his pirogue to the bank proper and, figuring he couldn’t get much lower in life, slithered through the reeds like a serpent, making his way ever so slowly round back of the dubious midnight pair, hoping that he wasn’t literally going to get bitten on the ass by some real shithead snake.
He came around the bend of a stump just in time to see a swamp rat the size of a cantaloupe saunter off into the bush. The rat threw him a you’re lucky I ain’t hungry look before its hindquarters disappeared, and Squib was so rattled it took him a moment to pick up on a new tone in the Hooke-Carnahan conversation. Felt like the temperature was dropping a little between those boys.
I should take a photo, thought Squib, and pulled his smartphone from the waterproof pocket of his camouflage-type work jeans. And as is so often the case, things would’ve turned out a whole lot better if the kid could’ve kept it in his pants.
HOOKE WAS WONDERING whether there might be some way to avoid dropping the hammer on Willard.
I could just let the idiot walk. Tell him to shave his head and buy a suit. Start calling himself Wilbert instead of Willard. Ivory would never know the difference.
But Carnahan was one of those guys who was just too dumb to grasp the concept of consequences. Sooner or later he’d be shooting his mouth off down in the French Quarter about how he dodged Ivory’s bullet, and then Hooke himself would be in the crapper alongside Willard.
Shit, he thought. I ain’t got a choice.
Hooke took the job hoping he might find a little wiggle room somewhere along the line, but now that he was at the end of that line, so to speak, he could see that there was nothing for it but to complete the mission and then figure out some way to fill the Carnahan-sized hole in his own plans.
Because Hooke had big plans that extended a tad further than running out his years as constable in this shithole parish. He had his beady eyes on Ivory’s entire operation, which he aimed to consolidate and extend north to Canada, cutting out South America altogether.
He had been drip-feeding factoids about these plans, needing the smuggler to check out his theories, and Willard raised the subject now.
“I talked to my guy at the truck stop,” he said. “Ain’t no limit to the number of truckers he can bring over to us. Ivory’s guys are bored out of their minds, nothing but gas station hookers for distraction. They’ll carry anything, crank or guns. Makes no never mind to those boys so long as they get paid.”
“That’s good,” said Hooke, “real good, Willard. You write those names down?”
“Sure did, just like you told me.” Willard handed Hooke a scrunched-up till receipt with names scrawled on the back.
“I gotta say it, Willard,” said Hooke, pocketing the list, “you surely are rising to the challenge.”
Carnahan accepted the compliment with shining eyes, like a puppy. “Thanks, partner. So, how long ’fore we make our move on Ivory?”
“Soon, son,” said Regence. “I got to beef up my own end. I did some surveillance on G-Hop, found myself a few of my brethren. Two definite possibilities.”
“And you’re set on guns? No drugs? Drugs is awful light and guns is awful heavy.”
Hooke had been arguing this point with himself for months, so he was glad for a chance to lay it out for someone who wouldn’t be blabbing it in the bar later on.
“Listen close, Willard,” he said. “I’m about to set down our entire philosophy. Heroin sales are down, right? Cocaine is cheap and every asshole with legs is trafficking it now. All the gangs. The Mexicans won’t need us soon; they got their own people on this side of the border. The Albanians, Russians, Puerto Ricans, Irish—even the Canadians have gangs now. The Bacon Brothers—can you believe that name, Willard? So pretty soon nobody will need Ivory’s drugs pipeline. Every thug with a backpack will become a mule. That ship has sailed, even if Ivory don’t yet know it.”
“The goddamn pipeline is useless?” swore Willard. “What the hell are we taking it over for?”
“The pipeline ain’t useless,” Hooke corrected him. “A pipeline is always useful. Even the product is useful right now. But we gotta diversify.”
Willard played his part in the discussion by asking, “Yeah, but diversify into what?”
“Diversify into the famous Second Amendment,” said Hooke, saluting. “The right to bear arms.”
“We already got that right.”
“Some states more than others,” said Hooke. “California ain’t so lenient. New York makes it near to impossible to secure a permit. New Jersey, Connecticut, even Hawaii. All these red-blooded Americans are crying out for guns. And if there is one thing I know, Willard . . .”
Carnahan completed the thought. “It’s guns,” he said.
“Exactly. You buy low in Louisiana and sell high in California. That’s how the world works. Believe me, the NRA won’t hold out forever against the libs. And the best thing is, we keep it all on the mainland. No South American hotheads needed.”
“I get it now,” said Carnahan. “We’re a domestic operation.”
Hooke snapped his fingers. “A domestic operation. Go America.”
“You got it all figured, Constable,” said Willard. “Ain’t no way this can miss.”
And then Hooke reached one hand into the pocket of his windbreaker, and the temperature dropped.
SQUIB WAS ALL set up now, lying there proud as punch in the swamp gunk with his camera trained on Hooke and Carnahan. Looked like the buddy-buddy part of the evening was over. Wasn’t so much laughing and knee-slapping going on now.
“Here’s the problem, Willard,” Hooke was saying. “That beatdown you handed out in New Orleans.”
Carnahan laughed, and Squib saw his teeth glowed black in the camera’s night-vision mode. “Fuck that kid, Regence. That shit he sold me weren’t no shit. You hear me? Goddamn baby ass-powder. Fucked my sinuses up for a week. Hell, they still fucked up. Every morning I’m waking up, I can’t hardly breathe. That ain’t no way to do business.”
Hooke seemed to grow a little larger, like he was letting the real Regence out. “Thing is, son, that kid you whupped? You messed up his brain, so they pulled the plug. His momma had to sign off on that. Can you imagine?”
Carnahan used both hands to tease his hair into vertical spikes. “That’s a shame, Regence. A damn shame. But that kid was all about the product, telling me how gen-u-ine it was, all that shit. You can’t stiff customers and expect no payback.”
Hooke draped an arm around Carnahan’s shoulders: a bear hugging a deer. Usually the deer has the sense to know it’s on the menu, but Willard Carnahan must have been thinking himself indispensable.
“I shouldn’t even be paying for blow,” said Willard, all unawares, “with all the shit I run upriver for you. But I found myself in a party mood, ya know, so I dipped into my own goddamn pocket for some hard-earned. And what does that asshole do? Sells me fake shit. Me! The fucking coke pilot.”
“You got a point,” said Hooke, and he did this little upside-down thing with his mouth like he was actually considering Carnahan’s argument. “But see, the kid was Ivory’s nephew. Trying to prove himself. Wasn’t supposed to be on that corner. Young Vincent was supposed to be hitting the books.”
This was a lot of information, and specific, too, like Hooke had gotten it from the horse’s mouth.
“I . . . Ivory. F-fucking Ivory?” said Carnahan, stumbling over his words. “I didn’t have that knowledge, Constable. How could I know that? Ivory? He was just some Italian punk on a corner pushing baby powder, far as I was concerned. I got some credit with Ivory, don’t I?”
Hooke’s fingers clamped onto Carnahan’s shoulder. “Shit, boy. You used up the entirety of your credit, and half of mine, too.”
Squib was barely more than a kid, but he could see what was coming. This was way more leverage than he wanted. This here was the kind of information a guy volunteered to get lobotomized right out of his own head just to be certain he couldn’t testify to it.
“I’m the pilot, Constable,” said Willard. “There ain’t nobody can navigate the swamp like me. I ain’t lost a single package since we opened the pipeline. Not a goddamn gram.”
“That is true, son,” acknowledged Hooke, actual pain on his features. “So now you got me discomfited, too, because of how I got to train up a replacement.”
Willard had one more argument in his bank. “But we got plans, Regence. We’re partners.”
Regence sighed. “We was, right enough,” he said. “Until you fucked up Ivory’s nephew. I ain’t ready for heat yet. My plans ain’t been stress-tested.”
A fine mist of reality settled on the situation, and the hope drained out of Carnahan. He slumped in Hooke’s grasp like a punctured balloon man, and it looked like he might collapse on the spot, but the constable propped him up.
“Now, come on, son,” said Regence. “We all got to pay the piper.” At which point Hooke whistled a few bars of the reveille. “Get it, son? In your particular case, I’m the piper.”
Flat on his belly in the swamp mud, with crawfish and God knows what else nipping at his shoelaces, Squib had himself a Road to Damascus moment. It wasn’t God-related—Squib had little time for God or his boys. No, Squib’s epiphany was corporeal, vis-à-vis his own mortality. The boy was no fool. He knew in theory that he was gonna die at some distant time in the future. But to Squib, like most kids, that’s all it was: a theory. Also, Squib had half a notion that by the time his number was up, the whole death problem would’ve been solved by scientists.
But right there on the banks of a sluggish bayou, with the silver-dollar moon throwing shine on a dead man walking and the man about to kill him, Squib felt the yawning vacuum of his own mortality open right above him, and he knew with utter certainty that if he gave himself away, Regence Hooke would end him without even breaking a sweat.
“Aw, Constable,” said Carnahan, “we’s partners, ain’t we? Must be something can be worked out.”
“Not a damn thing,” said Regence Hooke, and he tipped his cap like a good old boy. “Now, listen. I got this single mom back in Petit Bateau waiting for me to crank her open, so I need to finish up here. You understand, right?”
Carnahan sighed, not really on the same page re: his own fate. “Yeah, I guess. Gotta chase that tail, right, Constable?”
“That’s right, son,” said Hooke, and took his hand out of his windbreaker pocket, two of the knuckles sheathed in the grip of a gut hook. He flicked the blade out with his thumb and sawed it across Carnahan’s midsection below the rib cage. The skinning blade opened the flesh in a W flap.
Willard jerked a little. “That’s chilly, Constable. Did you just murder me?”
Hooke wiped the blade on Carnahan’s shirt. “Yep, son. I did. My sincere regrets.”
And he pitched Carnahan into the Pearl like he was ejecting him from a club.
Willard Carnahan toppled onto the bayou, and the scrim of its spongy surface supported his 150 pounds with barely a splash. The wound was so devastating that Carnahan’s insides rushed out of him, and almost immediately the bottom-feeders lurking below took hold of this unexpected bounty of tendons and gore, reeling the man in. Willard had barely any strength in him, and all he could accomplish was a sideways leer into the reeds, drawing equal measures of sludge and air through his yawning mouth. For Carnahan, life had slowed to one-third, and nothing he wanted to do was feasible. Watching the world telescope away from him was about all he could manage.
“Hey, son,” Regence Hooke called after him, “the swamp is taking you to its bosom. That’s fitting, ain’t it?”
If Regence had only turned away before casting his final barb, then he might not have cottoned on to the movement in the rushes. Even then, no big deal. Lotta things moving in the rushes this deep in the bayou. However, usually none of those lotta things blurted out exclamations along the lines of Jesus goddamn Christ, which Hooke was pretty certain he heard coming out of the flora. And even if he hadn’t just murdered a person, an inquisitive man such as Constable Regence Hooke would be obliged to ascertain who exactly was playing fast and loose with the second commandment.
What had happened was this: Carnahan had bobbed on past the sagging jetty till he arrived level with young Squib, who’d long since abandoned any notion of blackmail and was wishing he had himself a pair of ruby slippers to click together. Poor Willard had that expression on that was halfway between fucked and dead, and with a pale slickness to the complexion which made it clear he was on the brief trip from one to the other.
Squib found his eyes glued to the dying man, wondering which embodiment of death would win the race to claim Carnahan, blood loss or drowning? Or perhaps a gator? As it turned out, there was another contender. A monster snapping turtle breached like a mottled, domed submarine, coming a full foot out of the water, its predator’s beak all hysterical, and tore Carnahan’s living face right off his skull, to which Squib exclaimed, “Jesus goddamn Christ!”
He had never seen a turtle of this girth: shell the size of a small car, and that long neck corded and erect like the dick his good friend Charles Jr. liked to wave about so much, proud as he was.
Swamp folk often spoke of the bloodthirsty nature of these generally docile creatures, but not many had seen it firsthand.
That was more than likely all she wrote for Willard Carnahan and his modern-day piratical escapades, but the boy did not see him and his flayed skull go under, for Squib’s own blasphemous mouth had named him a witness and therefore a target, so he upped off his belly and jinked like a jackrabbit into the island proper.
HOOKE SAW A figure hightail it into the island with the green glow of a phone in his hand and scowled in petulant frustration. “Mary, Mother of Jesus, I cannot believe this day.”
In Regence Hooke’s mind he had been much put-upon in the past twelve hours.
First the Elodie Moreau thing was souring his mood, then Ivory forced him to gut his pilot, and now some shadowy figure shoots a movie of the proceedings?
Leverage, thought Hooke. That goddamn Ivory was reckoning to tighten the leash. It seemed like he was misinterpreting their relationship, forgetting who had the badge here. Who else could be responsible? Ivory insisted on the hit, then planted some city kid up here to play Candid Camera. The drug lord would get even more information than he’d hoped for if he watched that video.
“Not tonight, Ivory,” said Regence Hooke, patting the service Glock in his holster. Gunfire traveled crystal clear over flat water, but there was no helping that. Shots in a swamp could always be explained. Video could not.
Regence did not waste bullets firing into the Spanish moss but instead picked his way carefully across the half-rotten jetty to his own swamp cruiser and cast off. He had two reasons for taking the boat: One, the idiot spy had marooned himself on an island, and two, he had a couple of toys in the strongbox.
I’m gonna bleed you with my pump-action, son, thought Regence, then put you down close quarters with the Glock.
It occurred to Constable Hooke, as he pushed the flat-bottomed craft back from the jetty, that this would only be the second time in his life he had killed two men in one night.
Oh, no, hold up, Regence. You’re selling yourself short. You did that Witness Security guy and his handler last year in Florida.
The WITSEC guy—not an easy hit.
So three times.
Definitely three.
In peacetime.
SQUIB’S FIRST EXPERIENCE of shotgun pellet sting came upon crashing through the mangroves on the western shore of Honey Island. He’d not been intending to crash through anything, but it came upon him all of a sudden, like the cliff in a Road Runner cartoon: One second he was stumbling along what could at a squint be called a trail, and the next his nose was out in the open and there was Hooke out on the water all pumped and ready to unload. Squib saw Regence Hooke’s jaw in the red glow of cigar ember, and then the cop’s barrel jerked upwards and Squib had himself a gunshot wound on the forearm. It wasn’t anything near fatal, not from a distance of sixty yards plus, mostly didn’t even break the skin, but he’d be feeling it for weeks to come.
That weren’t no shot to kill, thought Squib. Bastard’s herding me.
The shot’s recoil scooted the boat backwards across the bayou, forcing Regence Hooke to tend to his throttle, which gave Squib a second to duck out of sight, shuffle into the interior, and catch his breath.
He lay flat on his back, feeling the buckshot scalding in his arm and the cold swamp mud shrinking his ball sack.
How the hell do I get off this island? he thought. If Hooke don’t get me, the gators sure as hell will.
The smell of the oil-slick water gave him his answer.
As far as he could figure, Squib’s only option was to wait it out. Tours would start motoring through here from Crawford Landing at first light, dozens of out-of-towners eager to catch sight of the legendary swamp bigfoot. Wasn’t no way Regence Hooke could take a shot at him then, not with a multitude of cameras pointed his way, because social media sure did love itself a cop-discharging-his-weapon video.
I gotta keep my head down and my mouth shut, Squib realized. Simple as that.
But he knew in his heart that this assessment was pure optimism. Regence Hooke was no rookie to the blood-sport game, and he was hardly about to dissolve into a puddle of sniffles because Squib was taking shelter on an island.
This was confirmed seconds later when all hell broke loose.
Squib’s first thought was Volcano, which might seem like the thinking of an idiot, but in fairness to the boy, although he might have considered himself tough as nails, he had never been within a thousand miles of a war zone and had no frame of reference for the explosive chaos erupting all around. Thousands of man-hours on the PlayStation could not begin to do the experience justice.
The noise was terrific, a thunderous thooom rising from the earth and crashing over him in waves of sonic terror. Bayou mud, shellfish, mangrove root, and slate were liquidized and dragged skywards in drapes of swamp slop which fell in a harsh deluge upon the boy, scouring him to his pores. It felt to Squib like he was being summarily interred, buried by the sheer weight of debris tumbling on his slight frame from above.
Momma will never know what happened to me, he realized, and the thought terrified him. He tried to call out, but that turned out to be a mistake as his mouth was filled with falling debris. Squib’s eye sockets filled up with mud, and even his T-shirt was shredded by the assault.
I am surely dead, thought Squib. I can’t figure out nothing.
But gradually the earth’s revolutions settled down, and the whine in Squib’s ears was intruded upon by laughter from out on the water. Sounded like Regence Hooke was having himself one hell of a time.
“You like that concussion grenade, fella?” he called. “Was that your cup of iced tea? I bet you opened your stupid mouth, didn’t you? Took a gutful of swamp shit and shellfish.”
Hooke laughed again, and it might have been shell shock, but Squib could have sworn there was an animal tinge to his mirth.
“Every night after a firefight we’d have some fool greenhorn running around with his mouth open, getting himself a mouth of shrapnel. We had more busted teeth than limbs.”
Squib peeped between the rushes. He reckoned himself camouflaged enough. Regence Hooke was seated on the cabin of his boat, a squat weapon across his lap and his boots kicking against the windshield. His grenade launcher sat in his lap like a favored pet. Squib even knew the model from Call of Duty: the MM-1. Funny-looking chunky fucker. The barrel organ of death.
“Lovely night, ain’t it, boy? I bet you’re wishing you never set foot outside New Orleans, right? I bet you’re wishing old Ivory had sent someone else to do his spying.”
Ivory, thought Squib. Hooke don’t know who I am.
This meant that if he could give Constable Hooke the slip, then all he had to do was make it back to his pirogue.
Hooke hiked the grenade launcher to his shoulder. “Son, I bet you’re thinking that all you gotta do is crawl snakelike back to your boat and paddle out of here. Well, I got bad news for you on that front. Your boat just floated on past me toward the bay. I guess you didn’t secure it none too good.”
Squib squinted his eyes mostly shut, thinking that the whites might give him away. Was Hooke shitting him? Had he secured his boat?
Probably not.
He hadn’t exactly been planning the final step of this mission. So now he was stuck on this goddamn island with the boars and the cougars and maybe a bunch of fire ants forming an orderly line to crawl up his pecker. And if he tried to make a bolt for it, then Hooke would spiral a grenade up his ass like a rocket-powered snow cone.
What a peach of a night this had turned out to be.
Everett fucking Moreau: master planner.
Like that little French guy who used to get with tall ladies to prove a point. Napoleon.
But not like him at all, except for they both ended up fucked on an island, if he didn’t misremember his history. Or maybe it was Huck Finn who got fucked on an island.
Either way, he was the idiot getting fucked on a water-locked landmass this fine evening.
Sorry, Miss Ingram, he broadcast to his social studies teacher, the only teacher he had ever liked in the ten-year history of his education.
“Hey, son,” called Regence Hooke, his voice boomy across the sound, “I tell you what. Why don’t you toss out that cell phone you got there? It’s probably all sorry-looking and waterlogged anyways. Hell, I’ll even sign off on your police report for a new one. Because we both know you ain’t getting a lick of signal in this stretch of the Pearl.”
It ain’t sorry-looking, thought Squib. It’s safe and sound in my work pants pocket.
“You do me that favor,” continued Hooke, “and I’ll see myself off with my box of munitions and call it a night. What do you say to that? There’s a deal you won’t see in Target.”
Seemed like Hooke was in the mood for chitchat. This was his general mood, in Squib’s experience. Waxman once opined that Hooke’s brand of chitchat was akin to a prison cake: “All purtied up on the outside with sugar frosting, but you know there’s a blade lurking in there somewheres.”
It was like how Hooke always referred to Squib as “Monsieur Moreau” when Elodie was around, tousled his hair and such, said he was a fine figure of a “jeune homme,” but soon as Momma’s back was turned, the constable would lean in close and growl some off-color remark along the lines of Fine piece of tail, that, Squib. Sooner or later, boy. I’m giving your momma her head for now, then I’ll reel her in when she’s wore out. Spittle rimmed his lips as he leered: Regence Hooke, a prince among men.
“Otherwise,” said the prince now, “I surely do plan to blanket-bomb the island with half a dozen more of these grenades from this dandy launcher I got here. And just to assure you I mean business, here’s another firecracker to set you thinking.”
Shit, thought Squib. Shit and goddamn.
There was no time to figure the correct course of action. And even if he did have the time, he didn’t have the tactical experience. Should he hunker down or make a run for it? Which was best? Both seemed downright fraught with mortal peril.
While Squib was equivocating, Regence Hooke sat back on the roof of his cabin cruiser and, with a squeeze of his trigger, lobbed a metal cylinder high into the night. Up she flew into the drape of mist, trailing a plume of gray smoke, and Squib judged by what he could make out of the trajectory that he had about ten seconds to live.
This entire scheme was a fool’s errand.
“Bye, Momma,” he whispered, and the regret he would carry with him to his watery grave was that now there was nothing between Hooke and his mother but a screen door.
“Bless me, Jesus,” said Squib, just in case, and “I’m sorry for all the shit I done.”
Then he shut his eyes and waited for the end.
VERN WAS ALL set up in his La-Z-Boy watching Swamp Rangers on Netflix. Goddamn, but he loved that show. Those Everglades boys tooling around in their golf carts, wrangling tiny gators and such, making a big old deal out of it.
I would fuck those boys up, thought Vern good-naturedly. But in truth he probably wouldn’t. They were amusing guys, all confident and shit. It would be fun to see that braggadocio drain down to their boots.
Vern took a slug of vodka soda and laughed. Imagine their faces. Those stupid goatees would drop off in shock.
He did his best Jack Nicholson for the only squirrel on the island with enough nuts to sit on his windowsill. “Wait till they get a load of me.”
Then he heard the explosion.
“Well, shit,” he said resignedly, cranking up his chair. If there was one thing he’d learned from centuries hiding out in various remote spots round the globe, it was that certain things heralded discovery.
Elephants for one.
Elephants were assholes, and no one could tell Vern any different. Those big gray bastards had a nose for dragons, and that nose was called a trunk. There was this one bull who worked for one of the Mamluk sultans way back. Mean fucker with a cloudy eye and a grudge against fire lizards for some reason. Hunted Vern all over the Delhi province for ten years until Vern paid him a visit one balmy night in his paddock and stuck that trunk where the sun historically did not shine. Old Cloudy kept his dragon-seeking skills to himself after that.
Another thing that generally spelled trouble was rows of lit torches coming up a hill. Vern had lost count of the times he’d been dozing in one eyrie or another, only to be woken by the sound of a torch-bearing mob. Humans were stupid fuckers back in those days, attacking a dragon with torches, but they were persistent, and generally a guy would have to move on if he didn’t want to spend his days swatting away flaming arrows.
But the number one warning sign that his days in his current hangout were numbered was the sound of an explosion. Goddamn smart-ass Chinese guys with their gunpowder. That shit could get in a guy’s scales and itch like balls. And even if the humans weren’t searching for him specifically, big explosions tended to shine a light on everything underneath.
“One of these days,” said Vern to the squirrel, meaning that one of these days the humans would nail him with some kind of armor-piercing shell that would slice through his scales like butter.
“And then that will be all she wrote for every living thing in a mile radius.”
Of course that was an estimate. If Vern’s core was pierced, the blast radius could be much more than a mile. When they hit old Blue Ben by total freaking accident with an early-model torpedo, couple of centuries back, he took a large chunk of Cornwall to the bottom of the ocean with him.
“I better check it out,” Vern told the squirrel. “Put a stop to whatever this shit is before it can get started.”
Vern climbed out of the La-Z-Boy and carefully peeled off his Flashdance T-shirt, folding it neatly with the three-precise-creases method he’d picked up from the chirpy Netflix lady. It was one of his favorite shirts, and he didn’t want it getting ripped to tatters flying around the swamp.
SQUIB SHUT HIS eyes, cried a bitter tear, and waited for the end.
Except it didn’t come.
By some freak of physics Hooke’s grenade reappeared from the mist, going right back the way it had come, that is to say retracing its own flight pattern, landing square between Hooke’s feet, and clanking off down into the cruiser’s gunwales.
Most men would have cursed in disbelief, and many might have fallen to sobbing or collapsed entirely, but Regence Hooke was made of sterner stuff. He grunted a gruff “fuck,” then stepped lively off the prow of the boat and into the river. The constable had barely a moment to duck below the water before his grenade ignited and blew a ragged disk from the port side of the cruiser, which frisbeed cinematically into the mangroves and buried itself in the bulbous trunk of a tree with a whang like a hillbilly working a saw.
“Lucky,” said Squib.
And he wasn’t just talking about his own person. Hooke had God only knew what kind of non-standard-issue explosive hardware in his box of tricks. Half the island could have gone up in swamp lumps. They would’ve smelled the barbecued hog all the way to Slidell.
Squib dared to raise himself to all fours, praying to Jesus, God, Buddha, Aslan, and whoever else might be listening that Hooke was squashed flat between the keel of his sinking boat and the swamp bottom and would die slowly watching air bubbles leak from his nose. But he didn’t get to find out if his prayer was answered just at that point because something very strong grabbed him by the waistband of his jeans and yanked him high into the Louisiana night sky.
Two seconds was all it took from earthbound to sky-high.
What in the name of—?
But Squib never completed that thought because:
A: He was too petrified to think rationally.
And B: His balls had been forced halfway up his stomach with the sudden acceleration of what could be fairly described as a supersonic wedgie.
And so as Squib Moreau was lifted high above the bayou, the only coherent thought he could manage to string together before the Gs blacked him out was, Hey, I can see our cabin from here.