5

The monster outboard growled as the seventeen-foot-long boat shot between the soft grassy banks at thirty miles per hour. Standing at the center console, a tall, muscular man with a buzz cut swung the wheel hard at the intersections, casting walls of water when he turned the vessel sharply. Like a dog with his nose out in a car’s slipstream, the boat’s pilot, Leland Ticholet, luxuriated as the slipstream caressed his face.

Using the powerful searchlight to illuminate the scummy surface, Leland checked his intended path for any floating debris that could puncture the fiberglass hull. On the trip into the swamp, he had seen dozens of pairs of alligators’ eyes and enough nutria to fill a truck bed. If he’d had the time, he would have killed a few of the furry critters with his Remington Nylon 66, a .22 carbine made using as much nylon and as little steel as had been possible forty years before. The weather-resistant gun, a dependable and accurate weapon, had been his father’s favorite. Shooting was easier than trapping and if you made head shots, the skins and the meat were undamaged. The state paid a four-dollar bounty on each nutria skin. Leland had been told that nutria had been imported to Louisiana from South America for their pelts or some happy crap and then had bred there to beat the band, and started wreaking havoc on the ecosystem, destroying the vegetation that helped keep salt water out of the marshes. Since there were so many of the pesky critters in Louisiana, the state had encouraged chefs to prepare their meat in creative ways so they might become as close to extinct as redfish had become when a famous chef had the world eating pan-blackened carp until only emergency legislation instituting strict limits kept the poor things from being enjoyed off the face of the earth.

The network of interconnected bayous and canals in the snake-infested swamp was a maze navigable only to the few people who traversed it daily in order to scrape out an existence by fishing, crabbing, poaching, and trapping. Leland had spent his life running the light-green-algae-coated highway and he loved the solitude—a life of total freedom and self-sufficiency. The people who lived in the swamp knew better than to stick their noses in another man’s business or mess with his things. In the swamps, nobody called the cops, bullets were plentiful, and something hungry would always eat red meat before it raised a stink.

After rounding a familiar bend, Leland turned into his cove—its throat invisible because of tall grass that formed a solid-looking wall—cut the motor’s power back, then drifted toward the sagging pier connected to his floating fishing cabin, a twelve-by-sixteen-foot room set on a floating foundation of rusted steel barrels. He killed the motor and the night filled instantly with insects, frogs, and alligators sending warnings or invitations to others who spoke their language.

Mosquitoes swarmed around his head. After he tied the boat to the pier, Leland climbed onto the deck and played the flashlight over his small cabin. He didn’t think anything about the fact that one side of the building was closer to the waterline than the other, because it had been that way for as long as he could remember.

Leland reached down and lifted the hog-tied man into the air like he was made of feathers and draped him over his solid right shoulder. Stepping onto the pier, he walked to the cabin door, which he kneed open. He stepped over the first four floorboards, then used the toe of his sneaker to drop a section of plywood over those rotten boards, which were about as substantial as cigar ash.

“Once you get used to the skeeters you’re gone to really like it here,” he told the man he carried over his shoulder. “They’s nobody going to poke needles in you, and try and measure out your brain chemicals so they can control you.” Leland dumped his rope-bound guest onto the cot, grabbed a section of rope off the floor, and looped it around the man to bind him to the cot.

Leland went back outside to the boat and fished the new cell phone from underneath the back seat. Dialing the number he had learned by heart, he waited for the person to answer, but nothing happened. He shook the phone gently, assuming some crucial part must be loose, listened to it, then shook it harder. It was lit up like it was when Doc used it, but it wasn’t ringing and nobody was talking to him.

“Hello, Doc. I’m at my camp,” Leland said. He listened for a few seconds and repeated the message like Doc had told him to do when he got there. “HELLO!” he hollered. “ARE YOU THERE, DOC? ANSWER ME! ANSWER ME, DAMN IT!”

Leland didn’t know he had thrown the phone until he realized he was no longer holding it, and he had no idea which direction he had throw it in. Might be Doc would be mad about the stupid little phone. Leland didn’t give a damn. He was supposed to watch over the man in the cabin, but he knew Doc wouldn’t know it if he went out and checked on his catfish lines. It wasn’t like the man in the cabin was going anywhere.