Highfire Read online

  Wax had won him over the previous night with hooch and a couple of lovely boar steaks done just right, burned on the outside and rare in the middle.

  “You got your travel bag with you, Vern?” the mogwai had asked him.

  “Nope,” said Vern. “Left in a hurry on the kid’s trail.”

  “I thought as much,” said Waxman. “No matter. I got me a spare waterproof sack here. Got a nice strap and everything.”

  “What do I need a sack for?”

  Waxman had plonked his creepy Gladstone bag on the table. “To get rid of this stuff. I’m done with all the killing, Vern. We’re all souls, right? So bury it real deep, far away from my spot. I don’t want none of this shit seeping into my garden. Or better still, vaporize the whole package. Use it for target practice, but don’t inhale none of the mist; that shit’ll rot your insides.”

  Vern slid the bag close to him. “So that’s it, huh? Your murdering days are over?”

  Waxman had raised his glass. “Self-defense only, brother. Will you toast to that?”

  And Vern, feeling no pain whatsoever after his feed of boar and booze, and well and drunkenly disposed toward the mogwai’s we’re all souls theory, did toast the sentiment, even though he did not subscribe to it his own self.

  By morning the dragon had an extra layer of regret laid on top of the self-loathing he usually felt after tying one on, and he got the hell out of Wax’s boathouse at first light, scything downriver, letting the tepid river water sluice through his crannies, feeling like he would throw up underwater from pure anxiety.

  What the hell was I thinking?

  A human familiar.

  A goddamn kid at that.

  And:

  This goddamn river is polluted as shit. I can’t taste nothing but diesel and piss.

  Which was not helpful when a dragon was already on the queasy side.

  Was a time this water was sweeter than lemonade.

  This morning it had been most decidedly acidic. No wonder his hide was turning gray, spending all day in cruiser runoff with the gators. When the sun hit the surface the wrong way, the entire river looked like a rainbow slick. Plus he was getting older, no denying that. A dragon only had so many millennia in him before the body began to give out. Was a time he could fly around all day and snort flame fountains for sport, but now Vern doubted he could put in more than a half dozen hours in the air without bringing on palpitations.

  That was how the day started for Vern, way down in the dumps. And it only got worse.

  My only buddy is gone down for three months.

  But it could be years.

  It could be forever.

  Mogwai often got so comfortable in the earth that they gave up the ghost entirely and allowed themselves to be assimilated. Wax had once told him during that post-interment funk when he was still mud-drunk, “Shit, Vern. A fella stops thinking down there. Everything goes away, you know? And alls you got is peace. An eternity of peace if you want it. That right there is an attractive proposition.”

  An eternity of peace. That was an attractive proposition.

  So Vern made it home and slunk back to his shack, ignoring the gators on the bank saluting him with jaws cranked open, feeling his mood darken with every step through the rushes.

  Goddamn, he thought. Here it comes.

  The “it” in question was one of his dark spells. It was only to be expected that any creature with half a brain would get the blues once in a while, especially in his situation. Everyone he loved had been murdered, along with everyone he sort of liked. Even most of the creatures he hated were dead. His mother had been cut up for keepsakes while his father’s head had adorned the gates of a local castle portcullis for about ten minutes, till Vern had razed the entire compound. He’d raged, razed, and raged some more. For years his grief exploded from him in extended bursts of dragon fire until he was down to skin and bone, and his mind felt somehow as emaciated as his body, as though it, too, did not have the energy or will to go on. And when the first wave of loneliness had landed like a rock on his chest, Wyvern, Lord Highfire, felt like it would crush him entirely.

  The world that had once been his had turned against him. More than that, it had forgotten him.

  I just clean the streets I used to own, he thought, paraphrasing winsome crooner Chris Martin.

  I am like the rats down in their holes, scrabbling about for scraps.

  But he wasn’t even like rats, because rats were rats.

  Plural.

  He was a dragon. The only one.

  SQUIB LOADED THE groceries into his boat, day after the burial, ballasting out the mineral water, cooking oil, and other heavier items and whistling like one of the seven dwarves as he worked so he could kid some part of himself that this was a normal evening. He checked the levels on his outboard, then cast off from the bar’s dock.

  The Pearl River was its usual fake quiet this evening: that is, quiet until a person started paying attention; then the ears picked up the wind sighing through the lace of moss, swamp frogs bouncing their burps across the water, crickets going nuts, and owls hooting exultantly like hillbillies who’d just found a crate of Bud. And under all of that was the constant symphony of water, from the hiss against the levee to the gurgle through the root bridges of water cypress. Usually Squib didn’t notice all this so much as become a part of it. Usually the swamp folded around him like a blanket, but tonight he felt as glaringly visible as a big-ass bug on a small windscreen.

  Goddamn dragon, he thought.

  But still.

  But still there was a part of him, the kid part maybe, that was a little excited about working for a mythical creature.

  A goddamn dragon.

  If he kept his mind right and made himself indispensable, as Waxman had suggested.

  Before you buried Waxman, said his little voice.

  Yes, before he asked me to bury him.

  If he made himself indispensable, then maybe the dragon might help him out with the Hooke problem. After all, Hooke was up to shady shit in the swamp, and if Vern wasn’t king of that swamp, then Squib was a gator’s granddad.

  And I ain’t no gator’s granddad.

  Squib felt a ray of light puncture his funk.

  Maybe Vern could help.

  Long shot, said his little voice. Vern hates the entire human race.

  Squib could allow to himself that this was true, but hadn’t his momma often told him that he could charm the birds from the trees? He certainly could charm dollar bills from tourists. In fact, the only person who had proved immune to his charms had been Regence goddamn Hooke.

  Maybe old Vern might find himself warming up to the Squib-man.

  It might not be much of a plan, but it was something like hope, and Squib determined to hold on to that feeling just to see him through the night.

  SQUIB WAS A little overexcited and took a couple of forays up the wrong tributaries before arriving at Vern’s digs. When he did finally get there, he found the shack deserted. On the table was a single scale acting as a paperweight for the note pinned beneath it.

  “Shit’s out back,” said the note, and followed this with a short shopping list that included vodka, the latest TV Guide, and a vegetable spiralizer, which Vern must have seen on QVC.

  Not a dragon in sight.

  Squib popped the scale into his mouth, thinking, This job ain’t as exciting as I’d hoped.

  And, Looks like Vern ain’t of a mind to help me after all.

  Chapter 9

  HOOKE HAD OVERDONE IT WITH HIS CALL TO G-HOP, AND AS Elodie Moreau had predicted, his snake-bite symptoms recurred and his eyes quit on him for almost a week. The doc also said there was some permanent damage to his kidneys, which Regence could give a shit about. The constable got himself hooked up to dialysis, morphine, and industrial-grade antibiotics. He wasn’t so contrary about bed rest now, as he found that he did some of his best thinking while under the influence of narcotics. Also, there comes a point when a man realizes tha
t being pigheaded just leads a fella to slaughter.

  So medical attention it was, and on day six Hooke’s sight returned and the mask of civility that he wore for the general public slipped on account of his dozy state.

  He opened his eyes, took one look at the nurse, and said, “Shit, Elodie, you done let yourself go.”

  To which the nurse said, “I ain’t no Elodie, asshole. She’s on the night shift.”

  Regence reckoned that this lady mustn’t be aware of his nature or she wouldn’t’ve been mouthing off. This was a good thing, as it meant his cover was intact. He preferred the reputation that preceded him to be one of civic responsibility, and so the constable did not admonish the nurse as he would surely have liked to do but instead apologized for his own rudeness, blaming his insensitive comment on the drugs coursing through his system.

  The nurse did not look in the least mollified and treated Hooke to a withering glare, the likes of which was usually reserved for unemployed cheaters on cable TV shows.

  Hooke gave the nurse time to finish her rounds of the small ward, then packed up his gear, dragged on his trousers, one leg at a time, and got the hell out of there.

  Ten minutes and one signed waiver later he was in his Chevy and back on the job.

  Because Regence Hooke did have an actual job he was supposed to be doing while he was clandestinely pursuing his dreams of constructing a metal pipeline up the Pearl and from there to California and NYC. He was the one and only constable for Petit Bateau and was two years into a six-year term. What had drawn Hooke to this ward was the vague nature of the qualifications required: An applicant needed only to be of good moral character and be able to read and write the English language. Hooke could read and write just fine, and he considered his own moral character to be in line with his ambitions. Luckily, the constable’s office was part-time, and so long as Hooke submitted reasonable expenses and kept up with his justice of the peace subpoenas, he was left pretty much alone. It was an open secret in Louisiana that the office of constable was a dinosaur from the previous century which was outrageously exploited all across the state by entrepreneurial part-timers who bumped up their expenses to hundreds of thousands of dollars per annum. There was a time when a smart operator could grease the right wheels and hold onto a constable’s badge for two or three decades, but with the advent of published expenses, the public was wising up to some extent and unlikely to reelect someone riding the city gravy train. So a constable’s options were to do the job right, or grab as much as possible over the six-year term.

  Hooke did the job right. He served whatever needed serving, no matter how deep into the swamp it took him, and he claimed his delivery fees and mileage back through his salary. He worked whichever three days a week suited him and did a little enforcement work on the side for the mayor and his buddies in the next ward. And in return, Mayor Shine gave Hooke the use of an office and secretary. Hooke wasn’t technically supposed to take on any city police duties, but constables generally did, and the Petit Bateau residents were glad to have an army man around to break up bar fights or transport the occasional burglar to the Slidell lockup.

  The previous constable had been the local bus driver, and it was said in the local bars that old Derrick didn’t know how to spell “good moral character,” never mind possess a bunch of it. So the public were satisfied enough with Hooke, who was, admittedly, a little intimidating, but there had been a vertical drop-off in larceny since he took it upon himself to walk a beat around the town in the evenings. And Hooke wasn’t a letter-of-the-law kind of guy either, in that he employed a live-and-let-live code. Drunks were generally dropped off at their own front doors rather than locked up, and kids smoking weed were given a swift kick in the seat of the pants rather than getting themselves a record.

  The townspeople felt safer in their beds, and Regence Hooke’s cover was complete.

  When he cashed out of the army, Hooke had put considerable research into where he would pitch his stall. The Colonel Faraiji model had appealed to him: i.e., get into law enforcement and open trade links to other regions. He had picked Petit Bateau because it was a gateway to the North through the swamp. Also, he had heard of this guy Conti through the dark web: a wannabe gangster who was buying up any soldiers on the force. Any force. Paying good money, too.

  The first thing Hooke did when the city hired him was spend his days off surveilling Ivory’s family, so when his hothead nephew Vincent got himself thrown into the beatdown room of a strip joint for pawing the dancers, Hooke was able to step in and defuse the situation, which got him on a bar stool adjacent to Rossano Roque, which led to an offer from Ivory. So now Hooke had two salaries, plus the sizeable nest egg from the military-fuel racket he’d had going in Iraq. That had been a sweet scam which had fallen apart months after Hooke’s discharge, resulting in a hundred-plus enlisted personnel and military officers being convicted of theft, bribery, and contract rigging valued at tens of millions of dollars during their deployment. Hooke had laughed his ass off when that news trickled back to him stateside.

  Tens of millions of dollars? Hundreds would be closer to the truth.

  He wasn’t worried it would ever come back to him. The army had barely scratched the surface, and his involvement was way subterranean. Subterranean and labyrinthine.

  In the negative column, his long-term plans vis-à-vis Ivory Conti’s infrastructure had hit a bump. He would need an act of God to dislodge Ivory from his perch at this rate, and where the hell was he supposed to come across one of those? Surviving that hurricane back in Florida was probably about as much as any god was prepared to do for him.

  Maybe if I hadn’t staked out Daddy like a vampire.

  Still, no use crying over spilled blood. Better to clear out his in-tray and turn his focus to Squib Moreau.

  Once his sight returned, Hooke was reluctantly cut loose by the hospital. He’d had to sign a waiver and was told by the doctor that he was lucky to be out so quick, that his heart had been put under considerable strain and he should take it easy for a couple of months, all advice Hooke intended to roundly ignore because, as fate would have it, Squib Moreau had fallen neatly into Hooke’s in-tray that very morning. He’d called Lori from the Chevy to see what was urgent, and the answer was “Nuthin’ much, Constable.” The half a dozen papers needing serving Lori had already foisted onto the college linebacker Hooke had sworn in as his deputy for twenty bucks a pop. It was money well spent in Hooke’s opinion, and easily earned, in the opinion of the college kid Duke McKlusker, who was known by all and sundry as Kluskerfuck, on account of how he would fuck a person up if’n they resisted his subpoena service.

  The only other matter of any note was a weeks-old noise complaint from one of the Beaujean brothers who lived downriver in a converted train carriage on the bayou. Maybe, Lori suggested, Hooke remembered that someone had been dynamiting catfish down there? It would mean a lot to the brothers if Constable Hooke would have a stern word with the usual suspects.

  Usual suspects, thought Hooke. I know exactly who’s king of that hill.

  He swung the Chevy around in the general store lot and set its grille toward the river.

  HOOKE DROVE SLOW down the Moreau lane. A couple of things were different from his last visit. There were no spinning wheels this time around, and his right hand was pretty close to normal, apart from a compression bandage which reminded him of the support tights his mother used to wear—he made a mental note to check if those bandages came in any other color besides nude.

  He shuddered, then wrenched his mind away from his mother’s varicose veins and to the problem of Squib Moreau.

  There were two ways he could proceed with this investigation, and it was best to settle on one before making his approach.

  There was a saying Colonel Faraiji used to throw about, “Softly softly catchy monkey,” to which Hooke often replied, “Shooty, killy motherfucking monkey.”

  A response which never failed to pain the colonel, who saw Hooke as his
padawan.

  “But Regence, my boy, what if you wish to interrogate the monkey?”

  “Then I shoot him in the leg.” Which Hooke still believed was a valid argument.

  But for today, he thought that perhaps the softly softly approach was the right one to take. Regence was fine with this approach and could pull it off easy enough, apart from one thing. Or two things, to be precise.

  His eyes.

  Another quote from Faraiji: “The eyes are the windows to the soul. But not in your case, Sergeant. I see no soul.”

  Hooke had to agree. He sincerely believed that his soul had been excised, or at least forfeited, so his gray eyes were windows to bedlam. To look into Regence Hooke’s eyes was to understand that this man’s religion was a blend of avarice and chaos.

  Hooke knew that people found it difficult to hold his gaze. They felt it in him, the deep well of aggression, the boundless need for conquest.

  Hooke could twist his mouth into a grin and relax the tension in his shoulders, but he couldn’t do shit about the eyes.

  So he bought himself some Wayfarers to disguise the animal bloodlust.

  Hey, it worked for Tom Cruise.

  HOOKE RAPPED ON Elodie’s front-window glass through the bug screen. He could have just as easily knocked on the door, but he’d found rapping on windows freaked people the hell out because they assumed that whoever had been knocking on the window had probably just been peeking through it. And most folks’ default emotion when they discovered a peeper was to feel guilty their own selves. Hooke liked interviewees to feel guilty, even the innocent ones.

  The curtains were closed, but they were threadbare, and Hooke could clearly see Elodie asleep on the sofa bed, face deep in the cushions, the curve of her thigh rising like the swell of surf, and he thought to himself, Someday, Regence, son.

  But not today.

  Even so, he resolved to take it easy on the girl. No need to burn bridges entirely.

  He rapped again, and Elodie jerked like she’d been prodded, rolling backwards off the sofa onto all fours, an unconscious but practiced move.