Greg Iles - Blood Memory

It’s really a question of pain.

My fingers can’t grip the free hook firmly enough to rip out the other two, but my Tag Heuer watch has a steel band. Slipping the barb of the free hook into a crevice in the band, I turn my forearm so that I can jerk upward with maximum force. If I can stand the pain, this should rip the buried barbs out of my skin.

Taking a deep breath, I curl into a fetal position, then explode out of it, yanking my right arm up and my right leg down. The flesh of my thigh rises like a pup tent, and a scream bursts from my throat. Consciousness flickers, and my stomach starts to come up. My brain screams for me to stop, but in that moment I yank still harder, and something tears free.

Afraid it was only my watchband, I right myself in the water and look at my thigh. Where the hooks were embedded is now only a ragged hole streaming blood. It looks like a small, vicious animal took a hunk out of me. After retching in the water, I carefully remove the freed jeans leg, making sure I don’t hook myself again. I’m tempted to let the jeans sink into the river, but that would be a fool’s gesture. This pair of Banana Republics is going to save me.

Treading water with only my legs, I tie knots in both legs of the jeans. Then I put the jeans behind my head, take hold of each side of the waist, and whip them back over my head in a wide arc, trapping enough air in the makeshift life vest to keep me afloat for ten minutes. Then I lay my chin in the inverted crotch of the jeans, with the knotted legs sticking up like the arms of those inflatable figures you see at car dealerships. I learned how to do this on the swim team, and it works surprisingly well. Now I can devote some energy to trying to figure out where the hell I am in relation to the man who wants to kill me.

I’m fifty yards from the island now. All I can see is a narrow strip of beach, but then that, too, disappears. Fifty yards. Only fifteen hundred left to swim. Maybe seventeen hundred …

The safest thing to do would be to drift south along this bank for a mile or so, then climb ashore. The problem with that plan is that I’d be getting out of the river at a place called Iowa Point. This isn’t a town or even a crossroads, but only a dot on the map. The nearest telephone lies across five miles of uninhabited swamp. Uninhabited by humans, anyway. There are plenty of alligators and snakes to keep you company. Very little chance of a cellular transmission tower. But if I cross the river, I’ll come ashore less than a mile from Louisiana Highway 1, not far from the Morganza Spillway. There I can flag down a car-which shouldn’t be difficult in my underwear-or easily walk to a place where I’ll have cellular service.

Am I crazy to try it? Most people would say yes. But I swam this river fifteen years ago, and if I did it then, I can do it now. The fact that it almost killed me-under ideal conditions-is something best not dwelled upon. The trick, as I’ve told several people, is not to fight the current, or even to try to swim across the river. The trick is to float with the current and gradually vector out toward the thalweg, or deepest part of the channel. Once you reach that, the river will do its best to deposit you on the opposite shore of the next bend.

Under optimum conditions, that would happen about a half hour from now. But tonight there are complications. Darkness. Rain. Waves trying to beat me to death. A string of barges that I can’t see and that could crush me like a tractor-trailer squashing a mosquito. Any normal person dropped into this situation would drown within ten minutes. But I’m not normal. And at least the madman with the rifle has been removed from the equation.

My makeshift life preserver is steadily losing air. I’ll have to reinflate the jeans soon. Because of the pounding waves, I keep my right hand gripped over the jeans pocket that holds my bagged cell phone. Every time a wave carries me to its crest, I glance around to make sure I’m in no immediate danger. All kinds of debris gets swept into the river when it’s high. The biggest threat is logs. Some float high and dry, but others ride half-submerged, like alligators, tearing the props off pleasure boats and staving in the sides of barges. From the bridge at Natchez, I’ve watched hundred-foot trees bobbing like twigs in the muddy flood below.

Ten minutes of steady kicking move me into the main body of the river, and in that time I probably drift half a mile downstream. Now it’s barges that concern me. Though the last string has passed, others will come, and there’s simply no way to see them with these waves. The front barge in a string carries only two lights: green on the starboard side, red on the port. The push boat itself might be a thousand feet behind those lights, its pilot ignorant of anything happening below the bow of his waterborne freight train. If I’m crushed by barges, no one will ever know, not even the man who killed me.

The sound of an engine penetrates the hissing rain, and it chills my blood. The pitch is too high for a push-boat engine; it’s revving like a chain saw cutting its way across the surface of the river. If it were daylight, I might think it was a chain saw-sound travels amazing distances over water-but nobody’s cutting trees at this hour.

That revving sound is an outboard motor. Probably the Evinrude on the old bass boat I decided to leave on the island.

Jesse has come looking for me.

Kicking up onto a wave crest, I see a flashlight bobbing up and down about thirty yards away. It’s hard to believe my pursuer could get this close by design, but maybe he heard my scream. If it is Jesse Billups, he probably knows the river well. I try to calm myself with logic: the odds of his sighting me in this maelstrom are low. As long as I keep my head down.

Pulling the deflating legs of my jeans beneath my arms, I lie flat on the surface and stop kicking. The whine of the motor gets louder, then dies, only to return again closer to me. Jesse must be as scared as I am. A submerged log could tear off his propeller, leaving him without power, or smash the side of his fiberglass boat and dump him into the river with me. His rifle wouldn’t do him any good there. I wonder if he can swim. His cousin Henry admitted he couldn’t. But Jesse was in the army. The 101st Airborne. They teach men to parachute in the Airborne. Do they teach them to swim? Maybe. It doesn’t really matter, though. If I can get him into the water with me, I can kill him.

All I have to do is get close enough to tangle him up. Like a squid drowning a sperm whale. Even if he were choking me, I could drag him under and keep him there until his brain winked out like an old lightbulb. It’s a strange thing to contemplate. The only person I’ve ever thought about killing before is myself.

The motor revs suddenly, not twenty yards from my right ear. Sucking in a lungful of air, I duck my head and drop three feet underwater, clinging only to the jeans pocket that holds my cell phone. I hear the prop spinning, a high-pitched whine like a kitchen blender. The boat doesn’t seem to be moving, though, only holding its position in the river. Did Jesse catch sight of me in the waves?

For two minutes I float like the fetus in my womb, listening to the spinning prop. He must have seen me. Why else would he remain in one place? Surfacing slowly, I raise my eyes above the water. This time a white shaft of light slices through the rain like the eye of God. For an instant I think it’s a push boat, but the beam is too near the water. No…it’s a Q-Beam spotlight mounted on a pivot on the bass boat’s hull. Whoever is piloting that boat either just remembered that spotlight or just discovered it. Maybe the gunman isn’t Jesse Billups. The foreman of the island would have switched on that spotlight as soon as he launched the boat.