Mrs Jackson set the camera case end the binoculars on
a dresser next to a thick pile of
National
Geographic
magazines. Val was led
through to the kitchen and told to sit at the far end of an oak table. Roy
Jackson leant against a line of cupboards, his rifle still trained on Val’s
chest.
“How does eggs, link sausage and cinnamon toast
sound?’ Mrs Jackson asked.
“I’m not hungry. I’d rather talk about Donny.”
Ignoring Val, she opened a refrigerator and lifted out
a carton of orange juice.
“Mrs Jackson, your son has nothing to fear from me.
I’m the law. But there are other men looking for Donny. Men who won’t give up
easily.”
She cracked an egg into a skillet. “Then we’ll have to
take sure they don’t find him.”
“If you know anything about these people, you must
realize that you’re not doing your son any favor. I could bring the FBI in.
Donny might have to go to jail, but at least he would be alive.”
“Donny isn’t going anyplace.”
“Then think about yourselves. Your lives could be in
danger as well. Staying here is madness.”
The woman traded glances with her husband. “Our kin
have lived in this house for four generations, and we’re too old to think about
moving.”
Val ate nothing of the food she prepared. She was a
good cook and it smelt wonderful, but his insides weren’t up to handling
anything solid. When he finally pushed the plate away, Roy walked him outside
and had him carry a wooden porch chair into the living room and sit on it. His
wife produced a chromed Smith & Wesson revolver from her apron pocket and
held it on Val as her husband lashed his arms and legs to the heavy chair.
It was unreal. Had Bonnie and Clyde somehow survived the
Arcadia shoot-out, driven a further 250 miles south, taken the name Jackson and
settled down?
Jackson had an outdoor man’s way with rope. It would
take five minutes of determined sawing with a sharp knife before he could be
free. His wife slipped the revolver back into her apron pocket.
“No point in gagging you,” Jackson said. “There’s
nobody close enough to hear you.”
“What about his boat?” she asked.
“I could smash a hole in the bottom and sink it in the
bayou. He won’t be missed until tonight. They’ll not do anything about it until
midday tomorrow at the earliest, and that won’t be much. Just another city-boy
who capsized and drowned. Happens all the time.”
Val didn’t much care for the direction the
conversation was taking.
“My second-in-command knows why I came to St Francis.
He’s going to start wondering what has happened when I don’t report in. First
thing he’ll do is have the parish sheriff drive out here.”
“Then the sooner we decide what to do with you, the
better,” Mrs Jackson said. She turned to her husband. “Best call Donny and talk
it over with him. Not from here though.”
Her husband nodded thoughtfully. “Will you be okay on
your own?”
“Don’t see why not. He ain’t going anyplace.” She
patted the stock of the rifle.
He lifted a bunch of keys off the dresser, slipped
them into his pocket, and then pulled on a quilted vest and a John Deere
baseball cap. He shut the door after him.
“Roy won’t be long,” she said. “Meantime I’ve got
chores to be getting on with.” She propped the rifle against the frame of the
kitchen door and started to clear the breakfast table.
Val strained against his rope bindings for a few
minutes, tensing and relaxing the muscles in his arms, before admitting that it
was futile. The chair could be made to hop forward an inch or two at a time,
but what benefit was there to that?
He divided the room into segments and started a
detailed scrutiny of each, hoping to discover some way to free himself from the
fix he was in.
He took his time over the photographs on the polished
sideboard. There was a monochrome wedding scene, and a couple of Donny Jackson
as a young boy, wearing a Roy Rogers cowboy suit and holding a BB gun.
Presumably the yellowing, older pictures were of the grandparents. The largest
picture was a group of laughing and smiling men, dressed in vacation clothes,
posing under a coconut palm outside a hotel. Val recognized a younger Roy
Jackson standing on the edge of the group.
The telephone was on a small, circular oak table at
the far end of the couch. It might as well have been a million miles away.
Thirty minutes ticked by and he didn’t come up with
one viable option. He faced the disagreeable truth: he was at the Jacksons’s
mercy.
The woman washed and dried the dishes, stripped the
bed and put the sheets in the washing machine. Then she dusted the living room.
Twice, as she passed through the room, she checked the bindings around his
wrists. He tried to start up a conversation with her, but she didn’t want to
know. She went into the kitchen and assembled the ingredients to mix cake
batter.
The clock on the mantel read seven-thirty when he
heard the pick-up clatter on the boards of the bridge. Mrs Jackson emerged from
the kitchen and wiped her floury hands on a towel before she picked up the
rifle. A truck door slammed shut. She walked across the room and opened the
door.
Another truck door was slammed shut. Val shouted a
warning to her, but his words went unheard.
The blast from the shotgun caught her squarely in the
chest. It wasn’t like in the movies when a sawn-off’s victim is sent flying
backwards by the force. She just seemed startled, then for an instant looked
down at the blood staining her apron, before crumpling to the floor.
Two black men dragged an unconscious Roy Jackson into
the house, one of whom bent down and picked up the rifle before they stepped
across his wife’s lifeless body. The man carrying the sawn-off shotgun was
six-four, with an enormous chest and arms as thick as Val’s thighs. He had
dirty braided hair and a solid gold tooth. The man who had picked up the rifle
was three inches shorter and wore a New Orleans Saints T-shirt. There were two
angry red welts across Jackson’s forehead and blood had caked in the roots of
his white hair. He had taken a pistol-whipping.
It was clear from the expressions on their faces that
the men hadn’t been expecting to find anyone else in the house, much less
someone trussed up like a Christmas gift. T-shirt leveled the rifle towards
Val, but Gold Tooth spoke to him in rapid Haitian Creole and he lowered it.
They carried Jackson over to the couch and threw him down. T-shirt checked the
bindings holding Val, then went outside.
Gold Tooth rested his shotguns barrel against Val’s
forehead and smiled broadly. “I’ve seen your face on the TV news, Mister
Chiefman.” His English was good, but with a heavy accent. “You’ve been after
Donny too?”
“Which of you killed Trochan?”
“Trochan?”
“The man in the cemetery.”
He pulled the shotgun away. “Was that what he was
called? Sure hope he wasn’t a friend of yours, Mister Chiefman.”
T-shirt came back carrying a small blowtorch. He
turned the gas on and ignited it with a disposable lighter. On each of his
fingers was a heavy silver ring. It took him a moment to adjust the gas flow
until the flame was burning yellow. When he was satisfied, he handed the torch
to Gold Tooth.
“Experience has shown us that our purpose is best
served with a cooler flame. A clear flame destroys too many of the nerve
endings.” Gold Tooth moved over to the couch and said, “It’s time to wake up
our friend. He started to slap Jackson across the face. It took several blows
before he stirred. He opened his eyes and groaned.
T-shirt sat next to Jackson on the couch.
Gold Tooth glanced at Val. “Seems it’s you we have to
thank. We spent the night in a motel and were headed out here when we saw the
pick-up cross the bridge. Followed Jackson into town and watched him make a
call from the gas station pay-phone. We jumped him, but the stubborn old fool
wouldn’t tell us where his son is. I think he’ll talk now.”
Jackson was starting to make sense of the world again.
His eyes flicked from Val to T-shirt to Gold Tooth. He pushed himself upright
on the couch and shook his head. Pain made him wince. He caught sight of his
wife’s body and tried to launch himself at Gold Tooth in a desperate attempt to
tear the shotgun from his grasp. T-shirt pulled him off as easily as a puppy
dog.
“Hold him steady,” Gold Tooth ordered. His
fellow-islander pinioned Jackson’s arms high up his back and held them tight.
The old man struggled, but he was as helpless as Val was.
Gold Tooth pulled a stiletto blade from a leather
scabbard he had stitched to the lining of his trouser pocket and ran the
blued-steel blade down the front of Jackson’s shirt. The old man’s chest was as
white as candle wax.
“Giving up your son won’t save your life. You’re
already a dead man. But you could make your dying a little easier.”
Jackson spat full force in his face.
Gold Tooth wiped away the spittle, picked up the
blowtorch and touched the flame against Jackson’s chest. His screams filled the
room. Val gritted his teeth and flexed every muscle and sinew in his body,
twisting against the rope bindings. The rope sawed into his wrists, drawing
blood. It was to no avail.
“Where is
your son?”
“Fuck you,” Jackson bellowed.
That earned him another blast from the blowtorch. Gold
Tooth knew exactly what he was doing. Just enough flame to sear the top level
of skin, inflicting maximum damage to the greatest number of nerve endings, but
not enough to have Jackson lapse into unconsciousness again.
Val gagged as the nauseating stench of burning flesh
reached him. He strained on his bindings again. His wrists were beginning to
swell and the rope was tighter than ever, cutting deeper into his flesh. He
ignored the pain. It was a trifle compared to what Jackson was enduring. Gold
Tooth’s mouth was split in an obscene grin.
He seemed in no hurry. He lit a cigarette from the
flame and drew deeply on it before callously pressing the glowing tip against
Jackson’s nipple.
Val thought it impossible for a man to scream as
loudly. Jackson’s mouth opened, the cords in his neck stretched as taut as
steel wire, and an animal sound emerged up his throat. Val wanted to clamp his
hands over his ears to block off the sound.
Gold Tooth had finished the cigarette before he asked
once again, “Where is your son?”
Jackson’s pupils were the size of lead shot. He said
nothing.
This time the soft white flesh of his stomach was the
target for the scorching flame. Jackson’s mouth snapped open but no sound came
out. His body twitched and his eyes rolled back in his head as life left him.
Gold Tooth lost it. He brought the flame up into the
dead man’s face and watched the hair of the eyebrows and eyelids glow and
shrivel. He kept the flame steady until the skin turned black and started to
rend. Then, abruptly, he turned off
the
gas and faced Val.
“Two down, one to go.”
Val’s stomach fell through the floor of his abdomen.
Was he referring to Donny Jackson, or to him?
Gold Tooth handed T-shirt the stiletto blade, hilt
first. “Cut him loose. Mister Chiefman’s coming with us.”
“You sure? What about our orders?”
“Fuck them. I’m through being treated like shit.”
The stiletto was useless against the thick ropes and
T-shirt had to fetch a carving knife from the kitchen. His legs were freed
first, then his wrists. T-shirt pressed the kitchen knife to Val’s side and
told him to stand up slowly.
Gold Tooth stood in the kitchen doorway surveying the
carnage, resting the shotgun on one shoulder like a hunter. “Have Mister
Chiefman load them in the back of the pick-up. Find something heavy to attach
to them. We’ll give the gators an early lunch.”
T-shirt prodded Val forward with the kitchen knife. He
told him to pick up the woman’s body.
Val made sure his back obscured T-shirt’s view as he
hunkered down beside her lifeless form. He slid a hand under her shoulder
blades and raised her torso. She was as light as a bag of groceries. His other
hand went into her apron pocket and came out holding the revolver. He let her
drop and swung around to put two rounds in T-shirt’s chest. Without taking time
to rise, he brought the gun to bear on Gold Tooth.
For a big man the Haitian moved with surprising speed.
He sidestepped out of sight into the kitchen. Val fired but the bullet smacked
into the door jamb.
The barrel of the shotgun poked around the door and
Val dived behind the couch as double-ought shot ricochet off the iron-hard
cypress boards of the floor. The couch wouldn’t provide much protection, but
Gold Tooth needed to show himself if he wanted a clear shot. Val tried to
listen for the creak of a floorboard, but his ears were still ringing from the
gunfire.
Three rounds fired, three left in the revolver. He had
no idea how many Gold Tooth had in the pump-action. What if he had already left
by the back door and was circling around?