Willie glared at the floor; then he said, "Well, f.u.c.k both of you," and walked out.

Joey said, "Somebody ought to explain to that kid that the innocent good-old-boy routine don't exactly fly if it's sandwiched between shooting at you and telling you to f.u.c.k off."

"Who's going to go get him?"

Joey sighed and walked outside.

The m.u.f.fled sound of Joey calling Willie's name floated in on the night air. I set my duffel on the floor and fished keys out of my pocket as I walked through the living room to my study. Inside the study, I unlocked the dead bolt on the heavy closet door and stepped inside to retrieve my Beretta Silver Pidgeon over-and-under and an old humpback Browning twelve-gauge. I heard Joey and Willie come in the front door and called out for them. They entered the study just as I was emerging from the closet with an armful of fly rods.

Joey said, "I told Willie we changed our minds about sending him off by himself."

Willie smiled and tried to look appreciative.

As I dropped the tackle on a leather sofa, Joey said, "Tom, you got everything you need out of there?"

I said, "Everything that's worth anything."

A dim bulb seemed to light in Willie's eyes, and he just managed to get out, "What the...," before Joey clamped one hand on the back of Willie's neck and another on the boy's belt and sent him hustling into my gun closet. Joey slammed the door and wedged a foot against the bottom to keep it shut. I walked over and turned the key in the lock.

I looked at Joey. "Not very smart, is he?"

Joey said, "Doesn't look like it."

And Willie started screaming a furious line of insults, curses, and threats, the gist of which was that he wanted out of the closet. Joey and I left the room. I retrieved my duffel while Joey went outside to get the car. But when I stepped onto the porch and closed the door, the car was there and Joey wasn't.

Before I had time to worry, I heard what sounded like the roar of a race-car engine coming from the beach, and Joey came tearing around the side of my house in a mud-splattered four-by-four pickup mounted on elephantine circus tires. He skidded a little when he stopped; then he rolled down the window.

I said, "What are you doing?"

"We're headin' into the swamp. That little Ford over there might make it where we're going, and, then again, it might not. This thing was built for it. Get in."

I tossed my dive bag into the truck bed and stepped up and slid onto the pa.s.senger seat. I noticed a couple of spliced wires hanging down next to Joey's right knee. I said, "I guess you didn't ask Willie for the keys to his truck."

As Joey backed around to head down the gravel driveway, he said, "Didn't see where I needed 'em."

Minutes later, as we swerved onto Highway 98, I asked, "Have you got a good friend in the Baldwin County Sheriff's Office?"

Joey said, "How good?"

"I don't want Willie breaking out of that closet and trashing my house. If you know somebody who could go by and pick him up, the key's on the kitchen counter."

Joey nodded and fished a phone out of his pocket. As he punched in the number and then cajoled some deputy into picking up Willie, I rolled down the window and reached out to adjust the oversized outside mirror so I could watch the road behind us.

When Joey ended his call, I said, "Do you believe his grandfather got him out of bed or maybe even out of the hospital to come up here and check on me?"

I noticed Joey was also keeping an eye on the rearview mirror. He said, "Nope."

"You think someone else we didn't know about could have been back at the house?"

Joey looked again at the rearview mirror. "Nope."

I said, "But you're not sure there's not someone following us, are you?"

Joey concentrated on the road ahead. "No," he said, "I'm not."

chapter thirty-one.

A gray ribbon of pavement unwound beneath the yellow wash from our headlights as Joey sped toward Tate's h.e.l.l Swamp and a confrontation with a refugee s.a.d.i.s.t. He pushed Willie's ridiculous, steroidal truck hard, anxious to confront Carpintero and squeeze the truth out of him. I, on the other hand, wasn't much looking forward to meeting the man who had tortured and eviscerated Leroy Purcell. I was doing what I had to do to find Susan and Carli Poultrez.

Joey interrupted my thoughts. "The shotgun was kind of a giveaway."

"What?"

Joey motioned over his shoulder with his thumb, pointing at the window rack where he'd hung Willie's shotgun. "The kida"Willie Teetera"he screwed up bringing the gun to your house. It's kinda hard to believe his granddaddy sent him up to check on you armed with a shotgun."

"He didn't plan on having to explain it. He could have killed both of us." I said, "We were lucky."

"That's the trick in this business. Don't let anybody kill you, and stay lucky. Something usually turns up." Joey scratched his jaw. "I guess that's two tricks."

Relieved to think about somethinga"anythinga"other than Carpintero, I said, "You know, Willie does have the same last name as Rudolph Enis Teeter."

"Huh?"

"Sonny."

"Oh, yeah."

"And one of the guys who came after Susan and Carli on St. Georgea"the one who blasted out the picture window downstairsa"used a shotgun."

Joey flicked on the high beams. "Be hard to find a house on the Panhandle that doesn't have two or three shotguns. Something to think about though. Most men who wanna kill you from close up tend to bring a pistol. Not many professionals use a shotgun, but the ones who like 'em won't use anything else. Course, as far as we know for sure, the only profession Willie's got is shrimping."

I turned to study the shotgun Joey had lifted from Willie. "What kind of gun is that? It looks like it's made out of plastic."

"The stock's some kinda polymer. It's a Benelli. Loutie's got one at her place."

"Isn't that a riot gun?"

Joey said, "Can be. Some people use 'em for hunting. With interchangeable chokes, it's a pretty good all-around shotgun. They use 'em in Mexico and down in South America where doves are so thick they don't have any limits on how many you can kill. You can run forty boxes of sh.e.l.ls through one of these things without it jamming. Regular hunting guns like a Remington or a Browning aren't made for that." He looked at me. "But, a Benelli like this one is really designed to be an a.s.sault weapon."

I said, "Oh," and reached down to feel the outline of a switchblade in my hip pocket. It was the yellow-handled knife Joey had taken from Hayc.o.c.k at Mother's Milk, and it's sharp outline imparted a strange sense of comfort as we sped over that lonely, dark strip of highway. I leaned against the door and closed my eyes.

Some time later, a b.u.mp or turn or maybe nothing at all jerked me out of a deep sleep. My legs jumped, my chin bounced off my chest, and I said something along the lines of "Ooobah."

"Huh?"

I looked around. "Where are we?"

"Just pa.s.sed the turnoff to St. George."

A few miles past Eastpoint, Joey hung a left on 65. Minutes later, he pulled off onto a strip of sand next to a sign that read North Road.

We were five miles into the swamp, still on solid logging roads, when Joey accelerated around a curve, cut his lights, and turned into a side road.

I started to speak, and Joey said, "Wait."

Fifteen or twenty seconds pa.s.sed, and one set of headlights pa.s.sed by on the road behind us.

I asked, "Were they following us?"

Joey shrugged. "I'm not sure. People do live up in here. Not many, though." I noticed his hands twisting nervously on the steering wheel.

I smiled. "I thought you were good at this."

Joey turned the truck around and pulled back onto the road. He said, "I am good at it. But I'm a h.e.l.l of a lot better in daylight. Out here at night, one set of headlights half a mile back look pretty much like the rest of 'em. Just keep your eyes open."

More than an hour after leaving the blacktop, Joey stopped the truck. "We gotta turn over that way through that field for a pretty good ways. Three or four hundred yards."

I asked, "Is there a road?"

"You see the gra.s.s?"

I said that I did indeed see the thousand or so acres of gra.s.s extending out in front of us.

"That's all there is. Saw gra.s.s. And it's not like a field, really. The stuff grows in mud. And the mud can be a couple inches deep or it can be deep enough to swallow your a.s.s up. Like quicksand."

"You've driven over it before. Right? When you spotted Carpintero at the compound."

"Yeah. That was daytime, and I was followin' somebody, but... When you don't have a choice, you just do it, right?"

The ground wasn't a problem. Finding the turnoff through the brackish water surrounding the field was. But an hour later, as the first rays of sunlight preceded the sunrise, Joey spotted the machete marks on a pair of ancient cypresses that marked the entrance to the invisible road beneath the swamp.

As we moved from the field to the thick swamp, the beginning glow of sunlight we had been enjoying disappeared and was replaced by almost total blackness. Fifty yards in, the road descended into two feet of brackish water and disappeared from sight, and the machete marks on cypress trunks that Joey had followed in daylight were now invisible. The trees themselves were almost invisible.

I grabbed a flashlight and tried using it from the window. Twenty yards later, I crawled out through the pa.s.senger door and into the truck bed, where I moved the flashlight's beam back and forth like a poacher spotlighting for deer. When I managed to find a machete mark high up on a tree, I'd bang on the top of the cab.

It worked pretty wella"right up until the truck pivoted right as if sliding on oil, and the rear axle dropped into four feet of water.

A loud thump echoed across the swamp, and I realized the sound was my back pounding into the metal truck bed. The jolt sent me rolling into the tailgate, where I did a one-eighty into the swamp. I was under. Cool, black water engulfed me. The fall had knocked the wind out of me, and I could feel my diaphragm spasming. Seconds pa.s.sed when I couldn't tell which way was up, until my feet hit the quicksand bottom. I pushed hard and felt the mud take hold of my feet and suck me down as I pushed away.

I pushed harder, and the cold suction of sludge reached up to my calves. Blood thumped in my ears, and I concentrated on choking off the hard spasms in my chest. I reached down to pull at my knee, and only pushed the other foot deeper. Mud and algae leaked into my mouth, and I gagged and gagged again.

Stretching to reach high over my head, I felt my fingers break the water's surface. I turned my palms out and pulled two handfuls of water in hard, downward arcs, and my legs came free. Another sweep, and my head popped through the surface. I kicked hard and clamped one hand over the tailgate.

Joey was standing inside the truck bed. Black mud covered him from chest to toe, and the giant man's eyes were bright with fear. He reached over the tailgate, and pulled me into the bed. I scrambled to my knees and sucked in a lung full of air; then I bent double and honked. Breathe, honk. Breathe, honk. And, all the while, Joey just stood there looking at me.

Finally, he said, "I couldn't see where you went in."

I nodded and breathed deeply. "How long was I down there?"

"I don't know. As soon as we stopped, I jumped out on the roadbed and lost my feet and fell into this s.h.i.t up to my armpits. I got up and climbed back here as fast as I could. You came up seven or eight seconds after I got back here and started looking."

I said, "It feels longer when you're drowning."

"Yeah. I guess it would." He turned around to survey our mess. "You okay?"

"I'll live."

"You ready to get out of here?"

I stood next to Joey. "The engine's still going. It's a four-wheel-drive, and two tires are still on the roadbed. It's worth a try."

Joey reached forward and grasped the open driver's door. As he stepped over the side of the truck bed and swung a leg inside the cab, he said, "Get your a.s.s inside."

And I thought that sounded like a h.e.l.l of an idea.

While I scrubbed dark swamp mucus out of my eyes, Joey dropped the transmission into low and revved the engine. The roar choked and caught and the back b.u.mper eased out of the muck, sending an oily gray cloud of exhaust into the still, dank air. Joey yanked on the parking brake to hold his ground while he spun the steering wheel to get us off a diagonal and headed back in the direction of the road. With the clutch engaged and the transmission in low, he gunned the engine again to build up torque and reached for the parking brake release as exhaust fumes billowed across the black water and the roar of the engine echoed through thick stands of cypress.

And if it hadn't been for the fumes and the roara"if Joey hadn't been looking back at the submerged rear tires and I hadn't been rubbing muck out of my eyes and trying to shake off the delayed confusion of nearly drowninga"we might have heard the growing rumble of another monster truck hurtling toward us like a freight train.

chapter thirty-two.

I heard Joey shout and cuss, and the world exploded into swirling bits of gla.s.s and flying metal. Every bone and joint, every muscle and organ seemed to smash in one crashing millisecond of pain, and I was flying against the open pa.s.senger door and somersaulting once again into the swamp. Penetrating cold enveloped me, and I fought against the black ooze like a drowning animal. This time, I came up fast and banged the top of my head on the truck's undercarriage. I hooked throbbing fingers over rusted steel and hung on, not out of conscious thought but in the way a drowning man will grab another swimmer and pull him down with him into death.

So strong was my need for something solid to hold on to, if the truck had gone under in that hurt and dazed second after the crash, I would have held on and gone with it. But it stayed. It stayed bottomed out across the submerged roadbed with just enough air between the swamp and the rear axle for one scrambled head and ten locked fingers. I blew the swamp out of my nose and mouth and let go with one hand long enough to wipe at my eyes and face. And the world fell back into place.

m.u.f.fled voices carried across the water. I was on the left side of the roadbed, and my feet could touch something more solid than quicksand. My arms and hands worked; my legs and ankles ached but moved freely enough to rule out fractures or puncture wounds. I moved my neck to see if I could. And the voices came again, and I thought of Joey.

Using Willie's oversized rear tire for cover, I moved hand over hand to the side of the truck facing the vehicle that rammed us. An old, two-tone Chevy Blazer, mounted, like Willie's truck, on tractor tires, sat solidly on the roadbed. Its grill was smashed and separated by three or four feet from the decimated, left front quarterpanel of Willie's truck. Above the Blazer's buckled hood, two men were visible inside the cab. And they were screaming at each other.

The larger man sat in the pa.s.senger seat but had turned and leaned in toward the much smaller driver, whose shirtfront was gathered inside the big man's fist. The windows were up, and the words inaudible. But the sounds of the two contrasting voices were fury answered with fear.

Turning away from the Blazer, I slid my hands along the rear axle to the other side to put the truck between me and what I a.s.sumed were a couple of homicidal Bodines. The pa.s.senger door I had shot through like a stream of tobacco spit was still open, and, if it hadn't been spun into the swamp by the collision, my Browning was on the seat or in the floorboard or somewhere inside the cab. Moving around the right rear tire, I crawled up onto the roadbed and had raised up onto my knees in the shallow water when I heard one of the Blazer's doors open.

Up on my toes and staying low now, I scurried to the open pa.s.senger door of Willie's wrecked truck and popped my head up over the seat.

Joey sat crumpled against the steering wheel. Blood covered the side of his face and neck and ran in a viscous stream from his right ear, and shiny bits of gla.s.s stuck to the splattered blood covering his head and shoulders.