Highfire Read online

  Then again Vern, it seemed to him, could eat whatever the hell he wanted.

  Also, Momma would freak out if he disappeared. And Squib surely did hate upsetting his momma, after all she’d been through with his actual daddy, his fake daddy, and now Regence Hooke stalking her. Squib knew his momma had two distressed faces: the one she used when he was in the room, which was mostly tight and restrained with sporadic implosive gasps of air, like she was afraid to relax her jaw muscles for too long in case she lost control, and the second distressed face Elodie let out when she thought no one was watching. This face was a heartbreaker every time. Elodie would lay her cheek on the table and weep like there wasn’t a sadder situation on earth. She would cry until it looked like there was a spill on the tabletop, and loud, too, like a forlorn cat. Squib surely did hate that sound, and he did not like being the one who brought it on.

  On occasion, distressing Elodie Moreau upset him so much that Squib almost chose virtuous behavior patterns over his natural shady instincts.

  Almost.

  ONCE SQUIB DISCOVERED that his pirogue had not in fact drifted downriver but was actually snarled in the bulrushes, he cursed Hooke with each tug it took him to free the lacquered craft. The engine took a little more work, as every loose piece of crud in the bayou had apparently made a beeline for his mud motor’s prop.

  The sky was pale slate now and he was a goddamn target squatting out here, tugging at his long-tail propeller. Squib could see his own reflection in the water, and if he could see his reflection, then it stood to reason that his actual self was just as visible to anybody who cared to look.

  Anybody or anything.

  Spooked was how Squib felt. Every rustle of bamboo sent his head whipping around like a deer at the watering hole.

  Time to get gone, he thought.

  He pushed off his canoe and hopped in, priming the motor and tugging the cord with weeds still clogging the shaft—bad motor practice, but there was no time to strip the propeller when there was possibly a monster on his tail.

  The motor was a trusty Swamp Runner built from a kit, and it justified its reputation for reliability by spiralizing the vegetation and bursting into steady whining life. A sound like that would carry clear to the other side of the river, but Squib couldn’t be helping that now. Felt like the lesser of two evils to him.

  “The devil’s on my heels,” said Squib, twisting the throttle wide, not that the cc’s he had at his disposal could outrun a determined dragonfly, let alone an actual dragon, but it cheered him some to feel the water sluicing along the marine-ply sides of his pirogue.

  The trip north wasn’t more than ten minutes, but Squib felt like he was racing against the morning. He reckoned the dragon wouldn’t fancy parading his scaly self in front of the various tourists, fishermen, and hunters who relished getting out on the water early. A monster like Vern could hardly have survived by making field trips into populated areas, even to pick up his vodka.

  Unless some big-mouth kid eyeballed him.

  Yeah, unless that.

  The Pearl River ran swollen and sluggish down to the gulf, and Squib’s boat skipped along its surface like a palm frond on the front end of a gale even against the flow. Perfect design. The kids now preferred fiberglass—even the locals wouldn’t take the time to dig out a pirogue—but Waxman swore by the wooden craft, and Squib was thankful now he’d heeded the ancient asshole’s words. All the pirogue needed was a slap on the ass from the smallest engine and it was out of there, slicker than a pike.

  Squib kept himself bent over like that would make him invisible from above and ghosted the cypress line until he came upon a little dawn traffic. A couple of old boys saluted him from their crawfish boat, and Squib’s heart rate decelerated a few dozen bpms.

  Maybe the dragon won’t even recognize me, he thought, not actually fooling any level of his consciousness. Lotta kids with dark hair hanging around the river.

  So get yourself off the damn river, you dumb shit, his little voice told him. Let this ill wind blow over.

  Sometimes, it had to be said, Squib’s little voice made more sense than his big one.

  SQUIB GOT HIMSELF off the river, which wasn’t exactly a feat of tactical genius. The Moreau house was set in a squirt of switchback back from the main bayou. In truth, the place wasn’t much more than a shack on stilts, with a square of deck stained from a thousand catfish gutted by the previous residents. The wooden siding had probably been crimson at some point in the last century, but was now pink and flaking like the skin of a tourist after a day in the Louisiana sun. The only patch of deep red was a rectangle of fresh paint where the landlord had covered up a Confederate flag which somehow defied any attempts to permanently conceal its blue cross and had to be redone once a year.

  “Goddamn thing is haunted,” Bodi Irwin had commented. “I guess the Rebs will never lay down.”

  Squib nudged the tiller with the heel of one hand and brought the craft parallel to the dock, giving the engine a quick twist in reverse to put the brakes on. It ain’t much, but it’s home, he thought.

  And they wouldn’t even have that if it weren’t for the graces of Bodi Irwin, the aforementioned flag concealer, who’d been sweet on Elodie since prom or thereabouts, and was prepared to forgo any meaningful rent in exchange for her boy lugging beer crates in his bar a couple of shifts every week.

  That was a good deal, far as Squib was concerned. Plus it seemed like Bodi might have left it too long to ever actually ask his momma out, which was how Squib liked it, or at least how he used to like it. Squib was getting to the age where his developing brain was forcing him to consider Elodie as an actual person rather than as simply his momma. Waxman, as part of one of his droning lectures, referred to Squib’s insights as the development of his superego, which Squib thought for a flash meant that he was getting superpowers.

  But whatever the reason for his newfound awareness, it had prompted him to take stock of his momma. Elodie was beautiful to him, he knew that. Momma was always telling her nurse friends how her boy Everett used to propose to her on the regular.

  When I grow up, I’m gonna marry you, Momma.

  And he meant it at the time. Now, a few years after his proposal phase, Squib could see that the rest of town agreed with his assessment vis-à-vis his momma being beautiful. But that was just frosting on the doughnut: His momma was sweet on the inside too; she spent her nights caring for sick folk and her days worrying about Squib. She rarely spent a nickel on herself and would cut both her hair and Squib’s her own self. Elodie would turn some fella down gently maybe one time per week and that would be that—except for Hooke; he got turned down flat, which just made the constable come on harder.

  I sure wish Bodi would make a move, thought Squib now, especially knowing what he knew about Constable Hooke.

  But Waxman had assured him that the bar owner would never ask Elodie out: “That boy’s too goddamn ugly. Your mom’s a nine, objectively, and Bodi, he couldn’t get past a three with reconstructive surgery and a stepladder.”

  Which seemed a little less philosophical than Waxman’s usual lectures so far as Squib was concerned.

  Squib tied off on a brass ring which had ended up in one of his crawfish nets a couple of years back. He should sell it, he knew, but the ring had become something of a symbol. People spent their whole lives trying for the brass ring.

  And here’s Squib big shot Moreau with a big shiny brass ring screwed into his dock.

  That must mean something, right? “Auspicious” was the word, according to Miss Ingram.

  But “dock”?

  Really?

  More like a collapsed fence, truth be told.

  It had become Squib’s custom to rub the ring with his wrist to bookend every day, and he completed the ritual now, his filthy skin smearing the brass.

  “Still alive, thank the Lord,” he said, and snuck across the deck, avoiding the creaky spots in case by some miracle his momma had decided not to check on him when she
was done with her shift sticking clumsy drunks with tetanus shots in the Petit Bateau clinic.

  Like most wayward sons, Squib had figured a ninja-type sneaky method of entry into the stilt house. He thought of it as his “window of opportunity,” which sometimes cracked him up even as he engaged the maneuver, which kind of ruined the desired effect.

  There was no cracking up on this day of days. Today he had been hunted by the two most dangerous creatures he had ever encountered—more than likely the most dangerous he would ever encounter.

  If I die before I wake, most likely one of them two bastards done it.

  But the ninja method: Squib’s sequence involved one foothold on a gas tank, a second in the crook of an old anchor hung on the wall by some seafaring previous resident, then, with two hands gripping the upper rim of the windowsill, finishing off with a nice gymnastic-type swing through the skeeter screen, which was only secured on the top end. Done right, this little burglar routine deposited him sweetly on his own cot.

  Even in his rattled state, this was the kind of thing Squib could have pulled off in his sleep: one, two, three, and in, reminding himself as he fell to secure the window screen later. But on this occasion as he was already in midair, suspended in hang time with no way to abort the maneuver, Squib heard a voice beyond in what his momma called the parlor, and the voice was not his momma’s.

  It was Regence Hooke’s.

  And the voice was saying, “Snake-bit.”

  Well, ain’t that just the sewage icing on the shit cake? thought Squib Moreau before landing on his bed with a thump.

  I sure wish I could have left that thump outta my routine, he thought then.

  Thumps were like catnip to law enforcement. They couldn’t help but investigate. And here was the boy Squib Moreau slathered with just about as much shit as could be heaped on a fifteen-year-old, looking just exactly like a fella who’d just crawled outta the swamp.

  The kind of fella Hooke was searching for.

  REGENCE HOOKE FELT like shit, was the long and short of it, so he abandoned all notions of strategies and took Carnahan’s inflatable upriver just about as fast as he could, which was pretty darn fast, due to the hundred or so horses bolted to the stern. Boat didn’t look like much to Hooke, but Carnahan had never stopped singing its praises.

  “It’s a RIB, Constable,” he’d explained. “Rigid-hulled inflatable. Poseidon himself couldn’t flip this baby. I can spread a ton of product around the deck and still make top knots. Ordered her special from Canada. They sent a boat on a train. You believe that shit?”

  Wasn’t much more than a glorified dinghy, far as Hooke was concerned, but he had to admit she handled nice and easy. Turned on a crooked dime and responded eagerly to his touch like she was faking it.

  Like that double act in Ivory’s club, making out like they never had it so good.

  That had been quite a night.

  Quite a night.

  But nothing like this one. Hooke knew he had to find himself a quiet corner and forensically examine just what in hell had brought this shit storm down upon him.

  I gotta take this evening apart like an engine, see if I can’t reconstruct it some.

  But first things first.

  And first thing was to get this boat under a roof.

  “I oughta scuttle you,” Hooke told the boat. “I oughta cut you to ribbons.”

  It made sense: Forensics were microscopic these days, plus every character from here to Slidell knew who this boat belonged to.

  But Hooke was faced with the practical obstacle that the sun was clawing its way through the Spanish moss, and pretty soon he would be a big man on a smuggler’s bright orange inflatable in the middle of a flat patch of water.

  I’d be locked in a sheriff’s cell by margarita time.

  So it appeared his only option was to pull into the yard and tie off at his shed, then take his time cutting her up.

  Except for the engines. Those twins will fetch three grand for the pair.

  Hooke’s berth was on the blind corner of the Petit Bateau boatyard, which, like most everything else in town, was owned by the town’s resident shit-kicker mogul, Bodi Irwin. Hooke had rented one of the outlying boat sheds from Irwin and installed his own security cameras and motion sensors, all of which he could check from his phone.

  “Fuck balls!” Hooke swore. Now he had to get a new goddamn phone and set up his shit all over again. He must have twenty goddamn passwords and not a record of a single one.

  I shoulda got one of those pouches, he told himself. Five bucks and my phone would be safe and sound in a plastic envelope.

  Still, spilled milk and so forth. Better to cross the phone bridge when he came to it.

  Hooke came up on the boatyard a bit slower than he might usually. Round these parts, a man didn’t motor his boat at no snail’s pace, no sirree, a man liked to plow a furrow in the swamp coming in to tie off, show he had a little boat craft. Nothing the locals liked more than to sit on the porch of the Pearl Bar laughing their asses off at clueless tourists spinning their rented airboats like goddamn Frisbees on the bayou. Hooke didn’t like to be put in that category. He might be a blow-in, but he came from swamp himself and knew how to blow the exhaust out of any craft you cared to drop him in.

  Not this morning. Today, Hooke was content to slope into his shed with zero fuss. He didn’t want any eyes glancing up from their enamel coffee mugs, wondering about the source of the bass thrum of big outboards, and he didn’t want to embarrass himself scraping the gunwales of an unfamiliar craft. So, slow and steady it was.

  The shed wasn’t much more than a jetty with walls. A few tools and some tackle hung from the siding, and a couple of drums were triangled in the corner. Might have been oil, might have been nuclear waste, who the hell knew? Pretty run-of-the-mill digs for a constable on whatever salary a small municipality could pay him. Hooke was lucky he’d brung his own Chevy Tahoe to the position; otherwise he would have been lumbered with the town’s eco-Honda. Who the hell could maintain any kind of authority driving an electric Honda? The mayor owned the dealership, was the problem. He was pretty pissed Hooke wouldn’t go around town in his branded golf buggy, but Regence reckoned that there weren’t any moonshiners that would give a good goddamn when some out-of-towner pulled up in a car with an electric socket. He’d be a laughingstock. So his angle was that he was saving the city money by bringing his own vehicle to the job. Tough to argue with that.

  Hooke tied up and found that he was so depleted that he had to roll onto the jetty.

  “What the hell?” he mumbled. Where had his strength disappeared to?

  Then he saw his swollen knuckle and realized, Fuck, I been snake-bit.

  With all his abrasions and the general furor he hadn’t noticed till now. He remembered the cottonmouth he had punched.

  Looks like I didn’t get away with that like I thought.

  At least he hadn’t done it on purpose. It would be a shame to die a damned fool.

  As a parish constable and a St. Tammany Parish road patrol officer before that, Regence had been required to take not one but two first aid courses, and he tried to remember the specifics now regarding the various variables, but his senses were addled and all he knew was: Get help. Lickety-split.

  There wasn’t a jab of antivenom on the premises. He’d been meaning to and meaning to, et cetera, and the clinic was a couple of miles away.

  Tarantulas nesting inside every banana leaf and you don’t got no antivenom.

  Get to the truck, he told himself, and you’ll think of something.

  It was an optimistic plan at best, but Regence was drunk on poison, and before the depression came the optimism.

  I’m gonna be all right, thought Constable Hooke, when in fact all evidence was to the contrary.

  HOOKE’S PICKUP MORE or less steered itself to Elodie Moreau’s stilt house. It wasn’t more than half a mile down a pine-ridged dirt road: a tin-roofed wooden shack that folk from more northerly aspects c
ould barely credit existed anymore outside sepia images from the Civil War. Alone it stood, lapped by mud water and circled by a cyclone of dragonflies.

  The constable must have passed out for a moment at the wheel, but he was roused by a vicious throbbing around his knuckles and was petulantly dismayed to see his right hand puffed up to the dimensions of a catcher’s mitt. Hooke poked the swollen mess with a finger and found the skin to be tight as a balloon and filled with electricity.

  This is serious, Regence, my boy, the constable told himself. Elodie will have antivenom. She’s a nurse, ain’t she?

  Hooke’s pigheadedness carried him out of his truck to the Moreau stoop, and he stumbled up the steps using his forehead for leverage, stowing the injured hand close to his belly for protection.

  It pained him mightily to appear before Elodie Moreau in this way, brought low, as it were. Elodie Moreau was the only woman with whom he could imagine spending any length of time without it ending in violence. She’d come running into Slidell Memorial after her idiot son blew his finger off, and she near to smothered that kid with love. Hooke had never seen anything approaching that kind of public emotion, and it had repulsed him at the time. But he came around on it and was touched, somehow. The last time Regence Hooke had been touched was never, and so he set his cap at Elodie Moreau and swore a vow that he would try fair means first. For something like six months.

  The “fair means” he’d had in mind had not included showing up mud-crusted and snake-bit, but make hay while the sun shines, and so on.

  Except the sun ain’t shining, and I ain’t got no hay, thought Hooke. Nor no fuckin’ lemons neither.

  And then:

  Shit. I better knock on this here door.

  As it turned out, Hooke had already knocked plenty with his head on the steps, because the door opened and Elodie Moreau’s Crocs appeared before his eyes. Sports socks stuck out of the Crocs, and Hooke was flashed back to a high school memory and he said, “Jessica Milton wore tube socks. Used to spy on Jessie through a hole in the shower walls. Skinny ass but huge boobs. Rare combination.”