John Miller - Too Far Gone

“What?” Alexa asked.

“He’s got some cottonmouths in a box under the floor. Looks like at some point some uninvited company got a big surprise.” He reached down and flipped over a hinged sheet of plywood to cover the snake hole.

“Might have been one of those missing game wardens,” Alexa said, showing him the badge she’d found.

“I’ll radio it in,” Boudreaux offered. “If Leland’s on the run, we’re done here. With luck, we’ll find his bloated corpse after the hurricane’s done with it. Unless the crabs beat us to him.”

Manseur lifted his walkie-talkie and pressed the TALK button. “Bond, Kennedy, Tinsdale’s DOA. Ticholet is out there somewhere. Based on the boat and some fresh nutria skins, he’s close by. Use extreme caution.”

“I can see the cabin’s roof,” Bond said. “We’ll be in position to cover you in a minute.”

Three sharp cracks, followed by something heavy falling on the deck, ended the transmission. Alexa moved to the door and looked out, to see Boudreaux sprawled on the dock.

“Boudreaux’s down,” Alexa said.

“That’s a. 22,” Manseur said.

“We have to get him inside,” she said.

“Damn it,” Manseur said. He keyed his radio. “Boudreaux’s down. You see Ticholet?”

There were two sharp cracks as rounds smacked into the outer wall of the cabin.

“Negative!” Bond yelled, excitedly. “We’re in position. He’s in his boat!”

Then a boat motor sprang to thundering life.

“Damn it, Bond, stop him!”

Stepping out, Alexa aimed her shotgun at the moving boat, whose bow was raised out of the water. She fired just as Manseur opened up beside her.

There was a swift succession of thunderous explosions as Kennedy and Bond fired high-powered rifles from the shore. The powerful outboard motor sputtered, but the boat was still gathering speed. Alexa looked out, aiming the shotgun at the boat. She couldn’t see the person piloting it because he was crouched behind the pilot’s backrest. She fired at the outboard. The motor seized, silenced by the shotgun and rifle rounds that had hit it. The boat turned sharply. As its bow ran onto the bank, Alexa had a bead on Ticholet, but when she squeezed the trigger, there was a dry snap. She had run the Mossberg dry.

Running, Leland leapt from the boat.

Mumbling curses, Alexa fed fresh rounds into the shotgun. Manseur fired in haste, missing the fast-moving target-who, armed with a. 22 rifle, scrambled with remarkable speed and disappeared into the shadowy tree line.

As Alexa watched over the bead sight of her shotgun, there were four quick cracks from the. 22, and she turned in time to see Kennedy collapse into the foliage. Ticholet was firing at the two detectives from cover. Bond returned fire.

She and Manseur moved to the deputy. Kip Boudreaux was dead. Blood pooled in his right eye socket-his aviator glasses, lenses shattered, lay six feet away, by his boot.

“If Ticholet gets away, we’ll never find him out here,” Alexa said.

Manseur keyed his radio. “Bond?”

“Kennedy’s hit in the lower leg. Looks like it broke the shinbone. It’s not bleeding too badly, but he isn’t going to be walking anywhere.”

“Deputy Boudreaux’s dead. I’ll radio it in.”

“Ticholet may double back on you. Give me a couple of minutes to tie off Kennedy’s leg. I’ll swing around your flank and cover you.”

Manseur lifted Boudreaux’s radio from his belt and keyed it. “Dispatch, this is Detective Michael Manseur. Patch me to Sheriff Tolliver.”

Manseur spent the next few seconds with the radio against his forehead like an ice pack.

Alexa loaded their shotguns, then watched the tree line over her barrel.

“You got Leland in shackles yet?” Tolliver’s voice asked.

Manseur lowered the radio and keyed it. “He killed Deputy Boudreaux and wounded one of my detectives. He’s still active and armed. We need medical, ASAP, and some backup.”

“We’re coming, Manseur,” Tolliver said, excitedly. “Just hold what you got.”

Alexa caught something-a flash of movement where Leland had vanished into the dense foliage. “Michael,” she said. “He’s coming this way. I saw him.”

Straightening, Alexa sprinted down the dock, hoping to cut Leland off before he moved inland from the point. Manseur was right behind her. Seconds later, they were kneeling side by side in the soft dirt, ten feet apart, watching the foliage from behind trees. Leland Ticholet would have to come by them. Alexa knelt beside a tree, her shotgun aimed toward the point. She glanced to her left at Manseur. He was aiming in the same direction.

Now they had him. He could still surrender and be taken into custody. If he chose to resist, Alexa was confident that one. 22 was easily divisible by two twelves.

From the cover of a scrub patch, Leland had watched the trespassers roar into his private inlet. He knew from the pilot’s brown uniform, and the shotguns, the man and woman with the gold words on the backs of their coats, that they were cops. The gal cop had light brown skin, but he could tell she had some nigra blood in her, only not nearly as much as the dead lady warden, who’d been as black as a deer’s eyes. He remembered seeing the gal cop at the house where Doc got shot. He didn’t know if they had come because of what happened at the little house the night before, or because they were looking to find the warden trespassers, but he sure couldn’t imagine how they had found his camp.

He should have gotten rid of Doc’s body like he did the wardens’, let the alligators and varmints crap out the meat and scatter the bones. Maybe they had come to take his new boat. He didn’t have the pink papers because he didn’t know where Doc had put them. He tried to ask him, but Doc wasn’t able to tell Leland anything. He had looked through Doc’s pockets and in the briefcase, but there was no pink paper with a picture of a boat in there.

He’d watched the man and woman jump off the boat as it neared his dock. Leland aimed at them until they went inside. He could swim the bayou and go deeper into the swamp and wait until they left, but he couldn’t allow them to take his boat. He wasn’t of a mind to walk out and leave it behind.

The deputy tied up his police boat. Leland thought that the deputy, a man he was sure he’d seen before, was their pilot, and had guided them to his camp. He was pretty sure the deputy had helped arrest him and send him to the crazy house. If he didn’t do something, he might bring others another time, and Leland couldn’t afford to let that happen.

From forty feet away, Leland aimed the rifle at the pilot’s head, putting the sights on the man’s eye as he raised his radio to talk. When Leland fired, the deputy’s sunglasses fell off and his body froze for a split second, before falling backward to the planks. Now Leland would kill the other two and get rid of their boat, all the bodies, and then everything would be back to normal. Doc had told him a big storm was coming, and people would think they got killed by it. They might think he killed them, but they couldn’t prove it without the bodies to show a judge.

He would take his boat out, and sneak back to finish up. Once they were sure he was gone, they’d be easy targets. He broke cover, ran to his boat, started it, firing at the cabin to keep them inside until he got going.

He crouched down behind the pilot’s backrest so they couldn’t see to shoot him while he started it and gunned the engines. It went just as he planned, until two men on the bank shot his motor dead. He had turned toward the left bank and run off the boat and clambered to shore and to safety, carrying his Remington Nylon 66 carbine, a gun he’d inherited from his father. It was a good thing getting it wet didn’t keep it from working. That gun was one you didn’t ever have to clean but for running a brush through the barrel sometimes and oiling it a tad a couple times a year.