Tami Hoag - Cry Wolf

They turned off the bayou road and onto a narrow dirt track that led deeper into the swamp. Branches slapped at the sides of the truck as it crept down the path. The growth was so thick, the headlights barely penetrated. Laurel felt cocooned within the dark confines of the Blazer, cocooned in a bizarre world where Mozart played while a murderer calmly told her his life story.

She tried to memorize the turns they took, tried to gauge how far they had gone, but everything seemed distorted-time, distance, reality. Her arms ached abominably from being held in such an unnatural position. Every lurch of the truck sent pain shooting between her shoulder blades.

She glanced into the backseat at Jack, and her heart flipped over as his left eye blinked open for a moment. He was alive. Though not much, it was something to hang on to.

"You surprised me, Laurel," Danjermond said. He slowed the Blazer to a crawl as he piloted it through a shallow stream. As they climbed back onto what passed for solid ground out here, he stared at her across the cab, his lean face lit by the glow of the dashboard instruments. "I really didn't think you would break into my home. Even after you lied to Kenner, I believed you were too 'by the book' for that."

"I don't give a damn about the book," she said. "I believe in justice. I'll take it whatever way I can get it."

He smiled at that, truly pleased, and faced forward again as the path turned and ran along a bank. "I was right. You're much stronger than you thought, Laurel. It's really too bad I had to catch you with evidence that could incriminate me. I would have enjoyed a longer game."

He would have put her through Scott County all over again-the accusations, the disbelief, the desperation, all of it-for his own amusement. Laurel wanted to berate him for calling life and death a game. She wanted to rail at him for playing with the system he had sworn to uphold, but there seemed no point in it. He believed he was above it all-the law, the rules of society. And to date he had no reason to think otherwise. He had fooled everyone, had gotten away with the ultimate crime again and again.

"What will you do with us?" she asked flatly, deciding it was better to know than to imagine.

"I will lead the sheriff out to the site of a grisly murder-suicide I heard about through an anonymous tip. Poor Jack went over the edge at last. Couldn't deal with what he'd done to you. Took a gun and shot himself in the head."

Thereby obliterating the head wound Danjermond had already dealt him. And she would die exactly as the others had died, tying Jack firmly to the series of murders. Danjermond would see to every detail. No one would question the outcome.

"Not quite the glamour of a trial," she muttered.

"No. I do regret that. But still, there will be a good deal of regional and national news coverage, and as district attorney I will, naturally, act as spokesman for the parish."

"Naturally."

"Don't take it too hard, Laurel," he said, as he piloted the Blazer into a ramshackle shed that was tucked between trees and nearly obscured by vines. He cut the engine and turned to face her. "You couldn't have won. You couldn't have stopped me."

Laurel said nothing. She stared at him across the narrow space of the cab, remembering clearly the way he had looked over the dinner table in the house she had grown up in. "You believe in evil, don't you, Laurel?"

Yes, she did believe in evil, and she knew without a doubt that she was looking into the face of it.

He hauled Jack out of the truck first, carrying him out of the shed and out of her sight. Laurel struggled against the cloth that bound her hands, while her gaze scanned the cab for some kind of weapon-both acts useless. Danjermond was back for her quickly, and guided her ahead of him by her bound hands, down the muddy bank to an old bâteau that bobbed among the reeds.

At his prodding, she climbed in and sat on a black tarp on the flat bottom of the boat, with Jack lying in a heap behind her. Laurel leaned back and brushed her fingertips along the scuffed leather of his boots, trying to take some comfort in his nearness, and then her fingers stumbled over the lump of a knot.

Danjermond's attention was on the outboard motor. With a snap of his wrist, it roared to life and the boat eased away from the shore.

The black water gleamed like glass under the light of a partial moon. Bald cypress and tupelo trees jutted up from the smooth surface, straight and dark, looming above the swamp. In the near distance, thunder rolled and lightning flashed pink behind a bank of clouds. South, Laurel thought automatically, fingers picking awkwardly at the knot behind her. A storm moving up from the Gulf.

A storm, Jack thought dimly. Or was the rumbling in his head? Dieu, his head felt like an overripe melon that had met abruptly with the business end of a hammer. He forced his eyelids open-a monumental effort-and tried to take stock of his surroundings. A boat. He could hear the weak whine of a small outboard, feel the buoyancy of water beneath him, smell the rank aromas of damp and decomposing vegetation that was the bayou.

Fighting against the urge to cry out, he turned his head a scant inch and tried to make out the image above him. Women. Two. One. The shape blurred and multiplied, came together, then divided. Trying to clear his vision drained his strength, and he slipped back toward oblivion.

"I find the swamp a fascinating place, don't you, Laurel?"

Laurel. He struggled into full consciousness again, the strain making him dizzy. Laurel. Danger. Danjermond. The fight came back to him in broken snatches, just the memory intensifying the pain in his head. Danjermond had clubbed him. He had a concussion at the very least. At worst, what he was lapsing in and out of was not consciousness but existence. He forced a message down from his battered brain to his fingers, flexing them slowly, slightly. They moved-he thought.

He rested then, and conversation came to him in bits, fading in and out like a radio with poor reception.

"… a perfect world in many ways," Danjermond said, his voice hollow and distant, as if it were coming down a long tunnel.

"… for predators… senseless killing…"

"… thrill of the hunt…"

"… sadistic son of a bitch…"

He almost smiled at that. Laurel. She would stand up to a tiger and spit in its eye before it had her for lunch. Her courage never ceased to amaze him. She wouldn't back down from Danjermond. But Danjermond would kill her just the same.

While I lie here and let it happen.

Blackie's face loomed up behind his eyelids, snarling, taunting. "Good for nothin', T-Jack. Always were, always will be."

The boat seemed to spin beneath him, and nausea crawled up the back of his throat. An old hand at hangovers, he fought off the sensations, opened his eyes, and focused them hard on Laurel's back until the pounding in his head was so loud and relentless, he thought it a wonder no one else heard it. Gathering his strength, he made one effort to push himself up, but at that moment the motor cut and the bâteau bumped gently against a dock. Knocked off balance, he slumped back down, groaning as his head hit the bottom of the boat.

Laurel fought against the overwhelming urge to turn toward the faint moan. It was best not to react. If Jack was coming around, she didn't want Danjermond to know. They needed whatever slight edge they could get. She groaned, twisting her head to the side, as if trying to alleviate a cramp in her neck. Danjermond flicked a glance at her as he tied the boat off.

They had moved toward the storm as the storm had been moving toward them. It was overhead now. The sky was rumbling and crackling. The first flurry of fat raindrops hurled down on them, as Danjermond grabbed her by the arm and hauled her up on the rickety dock beside him. The boards groaned and dipped, elastic with rot, but they held as he turned and herded her onto shore and toward a tar-paper shack that teetered on stilts a few yards back from the dock.