Greg Iles - Blood Memory

“Depends on the rain. But if it’s flooded out, somebody can take you back to your car by boat.”

“I appreciate it, but I think I’d rather get back to my car now, if you think I can make it.”

She turns from the window and looks at me. “Oh, you can make it, if you don’t mind getting wet. You can use my bike. Ain’t much lightning out there. And if you cut through the woods, the rain won’t be as bad, ’cause the trees make a tunnel over the road. Cut down through the hunting camp, then-when you hit the road to the boat ramp-turn back up along the shore till you come to the bridge.”

“I can do that.”

“Sure you can. It ain’t even dark yet, really. Just cloudy. And I got a light on the front of my bike. I’ve ridden around this island in the middle of the night when I needed to. It’s safe. Just watch you don’t slide off the gravel into a ditch or something. Lots of snakes this year on the back side.”

I shiver, recalling the hallucinatory snakes I saw in my apartment as the d.t.’s began. “How fast can the water rise? Could the bridge be covered up already?”

“I doubt it. If the river wasn’t already so high, you wouldn’t have nothing to worry about. But you’ll be at the bridge in ten minutes. If you do have a problem, call my cell phone. Stay where you are, and I’ll come get you.”

“How will you come?”

“On my two feet.” She takes my cell phone from me and programs her number into its memory. “If I need to, I can get there in no time. And if Jesse calls back, I’ll send him after you. He can drive you across and bring my bike back both.”

I move to the door, then turn back and hug Louise.

She squeezes me tightly. “You going through some tough times, girl. You come back and see me sometime.”

I promise that I will, though I suspect I won’t ever be here again. Then I walk onto the porch and carry her bicycle down to the path.

“Hey!” Louise calls through the rain. “Wait!”

I stand in the rain while she disappears inside for a minute. The air out here has a greenish tinge, like the look the sky gets before a tornado. The wind is blowing hard from the south, and the raindrops sting my face. I hope she’s getting me a raincoat, but when she returns, she’s carrying what looks like a Ziploc sandwich bag.

“For your cell phone!” she says over the wind.

Taking the Baggie, I slip my phone and car keys inside it, crush the bag to get the air out, then zip it shut and stuff it into the front pocket of my jeans. I start to pedal away, but Louise grabs my arm, her eyes desperate.

“I know you didn’t tell me everything,” she says. “I know you got something bad on your back. All I know is this: ain’t no man all good or all bad. And if you find out something bad about Luke, I don’t want to know. Okay?”

I wipe the rain from my eyes and nod.

“Time will heal you,” Louise says. “Won’t nothing else do any good at all.”

I feel an eerie certainty that if I don’t start for the bridge now, I won’t make it to my car. Pushing down hard on the right pedal, I struggle toward the road that cuts through the woods toward the hunting camp.

The wind slaps the rain against my right cheek and ear, but soon I’m passing the shacks by the lake. The porches that were full of people an hour ago hold only dogs now. I’m alone again.

When I turn south on the camp road, the wind hits me full in the face, pushing against my body like a sail, trying to drive me back toward the lake. I lean low over the handlebars to cut my resistance and bear down hard on the pedals. The shoulder is so muddy in places that I almost take a spill, but the farther down the island I ride, the sandier the soil gets, and soon I’m making good time despite the weather.

Beneath the black storm clouds, the world has gone gray. Everything ahead looks as flat as a black-and-white photograph. The gray cabins of the hunting camp are almost invisible in the shadows beneath the trees. Even the grass has lost its color. Only a slight brightness low in the sky to the west lets me know the sun is there at all.

There should be a left turn soon. If not, I’ll come to the southern tip of the island, a rolling, mosquito-infested hell of scrub-covered dunes and muddy slews that I always avoided when possible.

Out of the grayness ahead, the old channel of the river appears, and relief washes through me. A mile up the road that runs along this channel is the bridge that leads to my car. I’m about to turn onto it when two bright beams of light swing across me from behind. I look back over my shoulder.

Headlights.

They look high enough to belong to a truck like the one Henry was driving. Louise told me she would send Jesse after me if he called her back.

I stop the bike at the turn and wait.

To my right, a blue-white beam much larger than those cast by the headlights illuminates the far shore, then sweeps south again. For a moment this puzzles me. Then I realize it’s the spotlight on a push boat. A quarter mile south of where I stand, the old channel runs back into the main channel of the Mississippi River. A push-boat captain driving a string of barges upstream is checking his course.

The driver of the pickup has spotted me. Forty yards away, he flicks his lights to high beam. The rain is blowing almost horizontally through their glare. I raise my hand to wave, then freeze.

The truck hasn’t slowed at all.

As the hair on my neck stands up, something Sean told me before we were lovers sounds in my head: That hair standing up on the back of your neck is two hundred million years of evolution telling you to get the hell out of wherever you are -

The truck engine roars with acceleration in the same moment that I dive into the ditch on the left side of the road. I regain my feet as the truck crushes Louise’s bicycle beneath its bumper and bounces after me across the ditch. My only hope is the trees, but I can’t outsprint a truck, not even for thirty yards.

An unholy grinding of gears gives me hope. The bike must have been caught in the truck’s linkage. As the driver tries to manhandle his vehicle off the twisted wreckage beneath it, I reach the first giant willow and dart behind it.

Looking back, I see headlights bouncing up and down. Then suddenly the truck’s motor dies. The headlights remain on though, and the interior light flicks on behind them. There’s a figure inside the cab-a man-but his face is obscured by distance and rain. He leans into the space between the door and the body of the truck. I’m squinting my eyes to try to see his face when a flash blooms in the dark and splinters pierce my left cheek. Only then does the super-sonic crack of the rifle bullet reach me.

I run.

Panic drives me through the trees without direction. A single thought burns through the flood of endorphins in my brain: get away from the man in the truck. A second gunshot quickly follows the first, and one look over my shoulder tells me that the shooter has followed me into the woods. Now and then he flicks on a flashlight to find his way through the trees. From his careful progress, I know one thing: he’s driving me southward, down an ever-narrowing strip of land. It’s only a matter of time before he corners me on the tip of the island, a bare patch of sand with a mile of rushing water at my back.

I need to find a way to slip around him, but on this ground that’s almost impossible. The island here is like tropical jungle. The willow and cottonwood brakes give good cover, but there’s too much underbrush on the ground to move quietly, even in the rain. There’s only one other chance.

The boat ramp is on the west side of the island, facing the main channel of the river. If the shooter were farther behind me, I might have time to launch the fishing boat before he reached me. But he’s not. I’ve got to slow him down. But how? I have no weapons. As I fight my way through the underbrush, an image comes into my mind- bull nettle. Bull nettle is a twisting green vine about four feet high that bristles with thousands of hypodermic needles. Those needles inject a painful toxin into any animal that rubs against it. Horses will lie down in bull nettle to avoid brushing against more of it. In humans it causes painful itching and hives, and the effect is immediate. The southern tip of DeSalle Island is covered with bull nettle.