Highfire

  Dedication

  For Emily and Jo who gave the dragon wings.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Eoin Colfer

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  VERN DID NOT TRUST HUMANS WAS THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT. Not a single one. He had known many in his life, even liked a few, but in the end they all sold him out to the angry mob. Which was why he holed up in Honey Island Swamp out of harm’s way.

  Vern liked the swamp okay. As much as he liked anything after all these years. Goddamn, so many years just stretching out behind him like bricks in that road old King Darius put down back in who gives a shit BC. Funny how things came back out of the blue. Like that ancient Persian road. He couldn’t remember last week, and now he was flashing back a couple of thousand years, give or take. Vern had baked half those bricks his own self, back when he still did a little blue-collar. Nearly wore out the internal combustion engine. Shed his skin two seasons early because of that bitch of a job. That and his diet. No one had a clue about nutrition in those days. Vern was mostly ketogenic now, high fat, low carbs, apart from his beloved breakfast cereals. Keto made perfect sense for a dragon, especially with his core temperature. Unfortunately, it meant the beer had to go, but he got by on vodka. Absolut was his preferred brand. A little high on alcohol but easiest on the system. And Waxman delivered it by the crate.

  So Vern tolerated the swamp. It wasn’t exactly glorious, but these weren’t exactly the glory days. Once upon a time, he had been Wyvern, Lord Highfire, of the Highfire Eyrie, if you could believe that melodramatic bullshit name. Now he was king of jack shit in Mudsville, Louisiana. But he’d lived in worse places. The water was cool, and the alligators did what they were told, for the most part.

  If I tell you fuckers to dance, then you goddamn well better synchronize the hell out of a routine, Vern often told them in not so many words. And it was truly amazing what common gators could achieve with the right motivation.

  So he spent his days in the bayou blending in with the locals, staying downwind of the swamp tours, though there were days he longed to cut loose and barbecue a barge full of those happy snappy morons. But putting the heat on tourists would bring the heat on him, and Vern hadn’t gotten to the age he was now by drawing attention to himself. Shining a spotlight on your own head was the behavior of an idiot, in Vern’s opinion. And his opinion was the only one that mattered, in his opinion. After all, Vern was the last of his kind as far as he knew. And if that was the case, then he owed it to his species to stay alive as long as possible.

  He also wasn’t feeling suicidal just at the moment. He often did, but mindfulness helped with that. A guy had plenty of time to meditate floating around the swamp’s little feeder tribs.

  Still, it got lonely being the last dragon. Vern could drink about fifty percent of the blues away, but there were always those nights with the full moon lighting up the catspaws on the Pearl River when Vern thought about making a move on a female alligator. God knows they were lining up for a shot at the king. And once or twice he’d gotten as far as a little nuzzling on the mudflats, which was not a euphemism for anything. But it didn’t feel right. Maybe the alligators were close enough to him on the DNA spectrum, but no matter how much vodka he consumed, Vern could not drink himself into believing that he wouldn’t be taking advantage of a dumber species. Not to mention the fact that gators had no personalities to speak of and were uglier than the ass end of a coyote.

  They were cold-blooded. He had a molten core.

  It was never going to work out.

  Vern spent his nights in a fishing shack on Boar Island, which had been abandoned sometime in the middle of the last century. The shack sat back from the shore on a little side bayou and was being slowly crushed by the curling fingers of a mangrove fist, but it would do for now, and Vern had it set up pretty nice with a generator and some of the basics. He had himself a little refrigerator to keep his Absolut chilling, and a TV with a bunch of cable. Waxman up the bayou had set up a supply line to the outside world so Vern could keep himself occupied during his nocturnal hours.

  It was all about survival, and survival was all about profile, or the total lack of one. Absolute zero. No credit cards or cell phone. No trips to Petit Bateau and no online presence. Vern had set himself up a social media account a while back, cobbled together a fake persona calling himself Draco Smaug, which he thought was pretty cute, but then Facebook started adding location services and some Lord of the Rings fanatics began asking probing questions, so Vern shut it down.

  Lesson learned.

  From then on, he contented himself with reality shows and surfing the net. All the information Vern needed was out there; he just had to find it.

  But no one could find him.

  Ever.

  Because whenever humans found him, to paraphrase Maximus Decimus Meridius, hell was most definitely unleashed.

  And Vern carried hell around inside him, so he could survive it.

  But the human who found him would not.

  SQUIB USED TO have a daddy.

  And back in those days his daddy said things along the lines of:

  Don’t you go sneaking dollars outta my pocket, Squib, or I’ll tan your hide.

  And:

  You seen my beer, boy? You better not be sipping on my Bud, Squib, or I’ll tan your hide.

  Or:

  How come you ain’t minding your business, Squib? You heard about the curious cat, right? That cat got its hide tanned and then some.

  It didn’t take Squib long to figure out that Daddy’s sayings usually ended up with someone’s hide getting tanned, and generally that hide was his. Squib reckoned it was probably mostly his own fault, as he did have a little trouble keeping his nose out of other people’s business.

  It’s a free country, he reasoned in his defense, so everyone’s business is my business.

  But then his daddy left on Squib’s thirteenth birthday, as apparently buying a gift card for his kid was more responsibility than he cared for, and none of his talk mattered much anymore. And in actual fact that daddy wasn’t even Squib’s real daddy no matter how much Squib conned himself that he was. Waxman, who lived on a houseboat across the river, said that Squib’s real daddy had found this world a bit too much for him, and this guy was just some freeloader who turned up when Squib wasn’t much more than a rug rat and his sainted mother was a mess. This replacement poppa was nothing but a goddamn fool who was always shooting his mouth off, as Waxman told it—prison jabber that he most likely picked up in Angola or some other state farm, judging by the ink crawling up outta the neck hole of his T-shirt.

  “You and Elodie are better off without that no-account loser,” he told Squib when the boy delivered his groceries. “Most he can read is off cigarette cartons. Just taking advantage of your momma’s kind nature is what he was doing.”

  Mostly Waxman was full of bullshit swamp wisdom, but this time he hit the nail on the head, especially where Elodie was concerned.

  Squib’s momma surely did have a kind nature, nursing folks like she
did all hours for two dollars above minimum wage, then coming home to his delinquent ass. Squib was overly familiar with that particular term, “delinquent,” being that it was read to him off a report card or charge sheet often enough. Sometimes he thought he should dial it down a notch, the bad-boy act, for his momma’s sake, because he loved her so much that it made him furious at all the assholes who had broken her heart: His own original poppa, who had checked himself out when he had folks who relied on him. And then Fake Daddy, who left when he had sucked Elodie’s heart dry, like he was some kind of vampire but with a taste for love instead of blood. So Squib tried to rein himself in, but it never took.

  Squib could allow that he missed having a daddy, even a fake one, so long as he kept that thought inside his own head.

  Even if that daddy did drink beer like it was keeping him alive instead of the opposite. Even if he did raid Momma’s coffee tin for change and spend it on lottery scratch tickets.

  Even if he did swing for Squib whenever he had a drunk on.

  Squib reckoned he’d loved his daddy, a little, anyways. A person can’t help loving their kin. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t hate him, too. And when Fake Daddy left his momma, Elodie, with nothing more than an empty coffee tin and a string of gambling notes running all the way down to New Orleans, which, turned out, the holders had zero problem transferring to his common-law wife, Squib hated his fake daddy with a laser intensity that was pretty focused for a boy without even a scrap of fuzz on his chin.

  And now, two years later, Squib hadn’t seen much improvement in the fuzz department, but he was half a foot taller and working on a scrappy attitude that had him on the cops’ radar even at the age of fifteen. There was a constable by the name of Regence Hooke who got shot down by Squib’s momma in the Pearl Bar and Grill one time in front of a packed house, and ever since that night Hooke had himself a hard-on for Squib and made sure to take any complaint against the minor real personal. It seemed to Squib that every time he farted, old Regence would be knocking on the door offering to “forget all about it” for a little consideration from Squib’s momma.

  Goddamn Hooke, Squib thought. He ain’t gonna back off till someone gets fucked.

  Matter of fact, it had been Regence Hooke who bestowed the nom-de-crime “Squib” upon Squib, whose given name was Everett Moreau. As Hooke had commented, Squib’s first time in the station, “‘Moreau’ like the doctor with the island of freaks, right, kid? ’Cept you’re one o’ them freaks, not the doctor.”

  The nickname incident was back when Squib’s fake daddy was still bunking in the Moreau shack and young Everett went out on the lake one night fixing to dynamite a few catfish with a boomstick he bought off a kid in school whose poppa had a strongbox. No catfish were harmed in the experiment as Everett had succeeded only in blowing off both the little finger of his left hand and the stern of a canoe he’d borrowed for the job. Regence Hooke had been waiting when the patched-up boy, hampered by overkill manacles, was brought into the station.

  “I hear that weren’t much of an explosion, boy,” he’d said. “More of a damp squib.”

  And there it was.

  Everett Moreau came away from that night with nine fingers and a nickname. So, when the time came for Regence Hooke to really take against Squib on account of his humiliation, they were already acquainted. And Squib wasn’t hard to recognize with his hands over his head.

  BEHOLD SQUIB MOREAU at fifteen: a swamp-wild, street-smart, dark-eyed Cajun-blood young man with a momma driven to near despair and no future to speak of unless he wanted to work creosote or hump bricks in Slidell. Long on dreams, short on plans most of the time. He was doing his best to stay straight, but it seemed like straight didn’t pay the bills, even with his own three jobs and his momma’s shifts at the Petit Bateau clinic.

  But change was a-coming, for Squib had been presented an opportunity. On this summer evening with the bloodsucking gauze of mosquitoes hovering above the swamp murk and the cypress trees standing sentry on the shores of Honey Island, Squib would be shaking on a deal to buy himself and his mother a little wiggle room from the attentions of Regence Hooke, who was escalating his courtship of Elodie Moreau. Felt like hardly a day went by when he didn’t make time to swing by the Moreau landing with some bullshit excuse for being in the ass end of a dirt lane:

  Noise complaint.

  Truancy office.

  Disturbing the peace.

  Jaywalking, for Christ’s sake—whatever shit he could dredge up. Always with a bottle of sparkling wine packed in blue ice packs in his Chevy’s cooler. Blush. Momma’s favorite. And it was only going to be a matter of time before Regence got a foot in the door, and then the only thing standing in his way was a fly screen. And you didn’t put a halt to a man like Hooke with a fly screen. Squib knew that his momma hadn’t warmed to the constable, not nowhere near it, but nights are long in the bayou, and with Regence Hooke pissing all over the boundary, the other dogs were staying the hell away.

  “Regence could provide for us, cher,” Elodie told Squib one night, eyes heavy after a long shift at the clinic. “And he could straighten you out. Lord knows I can’t do it.”

  Squib knew that his momma must be bone-tired and a long way down in the dumps, having maybe nursed a favorite patient through their final hours on God’s earth, even to talk like Hooke was an option for her. He knew that the only reason Elodie Moreau would allow such a world-class asshole across the threshold would be to put a stop to Squib’s own criminal gallop, and he felt responsible for that. Sometimes he dreamed of Constable Hooke in some kind of embrace with his momma, with kissing and such, and he woke up in a cold sweat that had nothing to do with bayou heat.

  So for maybe the hundredth time Squib swore he would shape up: He vowed it most fervently and, to his credit, believed his words to be gospel at the time. But he was fallible, by virtue of his youth. After barely a week Squib was back to skipping class.

  This is me, he realized. I can’t never change.

  And so when school broke up, he had approached Willard Carnahan in the Pearl Bar lot. Carnahan was perhaps the only man in Louisiana who knew the swamp better than Squib himself, and so the boy offered his two hands and strong back to the swamp moonshine runner. A trial run was offered, and tonight was the night that Squib kicked off his apprenticeship.

  Just for the summer, Squib told himself. And just hooch or cigarettes. Maybe machine parts. No drugs, nor people neither. I’ll make enough to pay off our debts and maybe get us a place in town. Far away from Hooke and Fake Daddy’s reputation.

  AND SO SQUIB crept out into the swamp without bothering to communicate any particulars with Elodie, who was on night shift at the clinic and would have chained him to the water pipe if she knew who he was fraternizing with.

  He launched the marine-ply pirogue he had fashioned himself, with some pointers from Waxman, into the water not ten feet from the porch of the Moreau river shack, but decided against starting up the long-tail engine bolted to the stern. It’s all gonna change tonight, he thought, as he paddled his little flat-bellied pirogue upriver in mud-slick levee wash-off, sticking close to the borders of bulrush.

  I got a black T-shirt on and a pack of jerky in case of emergency, thought the nine-fingered boy. Ain’t nuthin’ can go wrong.

  REGENCE HOOKE WAS without doubt a colorful individual. There wasn’t hardly a crime he hadn’t participated in or turned a blind eye to at one point or another. Safe to say that he didn’t get to where he was by attending church regular and baking cookies for Africa. Hooke had gotten into law enforcement via the military, and he’d gotten into the military by virtue of the fact that he judged it better than the federal penitentiary. Those had been his options at the time. When eighteen-year-old Regence stood up before a Miami-Dade judge, the clerk had to draw breath before reading the charges, which included, but were not limited to:

  Conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud, intimidation, bribing a witness, grand theft auto, narcotics possession wit
h intent to sell, assault, and obstruction.

  The judge responded to this litany with the expletive “Jesus Christ on a broomstick, kid,” which effectively put him in contempt of his own court, and presented young Regence with:

  Option A: Army.

  Or option B: Baker Correctional Institution.

  Regence chose A, got his records sealed, signed up, shipped out, killed a passel of folks, and came home some decades later with a ton of medals, then moved three states west to Petit Bateau, Louisiana, which welcomed the decorated veteran with open arms, having zero clue as to the many and varied sins of his past.

  And now, aged two score and more, he was constable of the tiny ward and driving his own vehicle with total impunity. Regence could barely credit how rosy things had turned out. His daddy had always told him, “Good things come to the righteous,” so Regence considered every crooked dollar he tucked into his billfold a big screw you to his dead daddy, because he sure as hell had never been righteous.

  Regence’s main source of crooked dollars was running errands for Ivory Conti, who was the New Orleans receiving agent for the Los Zetas cartel. Ivory had dozens of cops on the payroll, but Regence was rising through the ranks real fast due to his unflinching nature and willingness to transport whatever would fit in the trunk of his Chevrolet Tahoe across the Pontchartrain Bridge. Regence did not give a shit what Ivory’s boys put in there so long as it didn’t leak or seep or otherwise transfer evidence.

  On the night our tale begins, Regence parked up his Chevy at Bodi Irwin’s boatyard and took his beloved cabin cruiser up the Pearl River for a little talk with a guy who had messed up grievously on Ivory’s turf.

  It was unfortunate that this talk had to take place at all, because the guy he had to talk with was a useful guy—unique, even. But at the same time, doing this business for Ivory meant he was crossing a line, and crossing a line meant a bump up to a lot more than the usual $2,400 a month.

  So fuck you, Daddy, thought Regence and gunned his boat upriver, cutting a swathe through the algae with the Elodie’s aluminum prow.