Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery (51 page)

Limp with exhaustion and slightly delirious, Nick believed he saw in that light every mythos in history, broken into final, fatal, jagged beauty, a tragic testament to mankind’s hopeless quest to touch the infinite. It called to him, this light, and then he saw transcendent dancers in a magic ceremony moving to a magnificent, frightening requiem of all the prayers ever sent into the starry blackness to all gods. How he wanted to join these dancers in their celebration! He was so tired and the light and the dance and the sound were unbearably alluring.

No! You can’t dance with them and live!

Duck blinds floating on the water seemed to Nick to shoot holes in the scintillating skin covering the lake. On the far shore, in the orange glow of a lone sodium-vapor security light, Nick could just discern oil tanks, pipes, and pumps siphoning liquid prehistory to the surface, from wells drilled into the lakebed. This lot across the lake was where the duck hunters parked, and where Holly had shot some of the evocative background footage for her documentary. The rest of the shoreline that he could make out offered merely the suggestion of darker trees at the dark water’s edge. Mourners at his funeral?

Nick lurched over to a mammoth old cypress tree, a few feet from the softly lapping water, and leaned back on it. He was dizzy and shivering. He wasn’t thinking right; maybe one of those drugged darts had actually hit him.

He didn’t see a way out of this. His breath condensed before him and rose into the cold night sky. He envied its freedom from the doomed prison of his body.

Was he going to end up like Carl Shawe and Travis Corbett, nailed to a tree, a martyr to a murderer’s genealogical obsession? Or like the Dusongs, but smothering in another elemental force, water in place of fire? He’d rather take his chances swimming. His pursuer, though probably injured, had the advantage in these woods. Yeah . . . it seemed worth a shot. He was a good swimmer, or used to be. Maybe he could make it to the closest duck blind—fifty, seventy-five yards?—without being detected. Did he have the strength? How cold was the water? What if his attacker followed him?

He’d always heard that drowning was peaceful, as ways of death go.

He waded in, and the frigid shallows crawled up his calves.

A hand covered his mouth. He felt himself being spun around.

“Quiet! I don’t know how close he is,” Wooty said, his voice scarcely a murmur above the lake sounds. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I . . . I think so, aside from the fact that I’m running on empty. Nooj, or whoever, is chasing me. He’s wounded. I shot him and stabbed him.”

“What the hell you need me for then?” Wooty asked sarcastically. “Miss Luevie—my mother—told me about how you uncovered her secret. I’m beginning to think
you’re
the spirit walking these woods. . . . We were together when we heard you were in trouble. Let’s get to some cover. I’m hoping the sheriff ’ll be here soon.”

“No spirit,” Nick said through chattering teeth. “I’m very human tonight, and I want to keep it that way. What about hiding in one of those duck blinds?”

“I got a better idea.”

Wooty told him that Carl Shawe usually kept several pirogues hidden around the lakeshore, to accommodate his illegal activities. Wooty confessed that he had sometimes hunted, fished, and trapped with Carl, outside of the law. Their best bet was to find one of the dugout canoes and head for the landing on the far side of the lake, about a mile’s journey. They could then make a run for the highway and the nearest residence.

Wooty pointed to some brush nearby. “Come on. It’s shallow enough to walk. Hasn’t been enough rain this year. There! There it is!”

Nick saw the vague shape of the crude wooden boat, wedged into the grass and clay of the shoreline. If walking across the water Sacred Cougar–style was out of the question, he’d settle for a less spectacular miracle that kept him alive.

A gunshot shattered the darkness. Wooty crumpled.

Nick crouched down, searching the shore. He saw the shadowy shape of the cougar and the gleam of a handgun in its extended arm. It began splashing unsteadily toward him.

“My gun,” Wooty gasped from the water. “In the . . . holster. Gun.” He was silent.

Nick yanked off his Russell chukkas and arranged them under Wooty’s head. High-tops: a bit stodgy in the fashion department and bearing scorches from the museum fire, but right now they seemed positively brilliant! The extra inches would keep the injured man’s mouth and nose above the water—
if
he was still alive.

Then Nick found the holster and Wooty’s pistol. It was wet, slippery, unfamiliar. He tried to pull back the slide, but this was too much for
him. The cold, his exertion, and his aggravated old injuries had turned him into a veritable infant, lacking adult strength. He cursed the frailty of the human body as he fought to make his hands and arms obey.

He looked up. The cougar was standing fifteen feet away, staggering from side to side on rubber legs. Like a drunk tightrope walker struggling for balance, the cougar waved its gun arm in a wild meaningless pattern, which tightened and tightened until the oscillations ceased.

Nick stared into the deadly void within the silver ring of the barrel.

Using both thumbs against the hammer of Wooty’s pistol, he finally was able to cock it. Was there a bullet in the chamber? Was the safety on or off ?

He raised the gun and drew a wobbly bead on the advancing cougar.

CHAPTER 39

L
uevenia Silsby dropped to her knees in the muddy clay of the lake-shore. She had never seen a god before, and here was one thirty feet in front of her.

She stared through tears at the Sacred Cougar walking on the surface of Lake Katogoula, standing over the carcass of the deer it was offering to the wandering, weary tribe. She’d heard the story hundreds of times, but it had never moved her as the real thing did now.

Was this the real thing? Had she traveled back centuries, millennia, to the era of her ancestors? Was this a sign that she’d been chosen for some special role, like her priestly forebears of the Vulture Cult? Devout Catholic though she was, no saint’s tale or church service or claim of a weeping garden statue had ever made her feel this way, thrilled by the immediate presence of the divine.

And if the ancient gods were not dead, then maybe Nick Herald was wrong about Nooj, wrong about many things. What if . . . what if he was indeed the evil that had turned everything upside down, as she’d once suspected?

No. This is all illusion
.

She shook her head and closed her eyes, blotting out the false vision on the sparkling lake. As much as she wanted to believe in this epiphany, she knew it was a lie. Love cleared her mind, steeled her certainty. Love
for Wooty. She had come to the lake to protect her son. He was her religion now. And he was out there, too. Which was he, the crouching, moving one or the stretched out, motionless figure?

She stood up and aimed the shotgun two inches above the cougar, high enough, she calculated, to avoid scattering shot on the two shapes in the shallow water below. The first shell held pellets intended for small game. But it could kill.

She squeezed the trigger. The gun barked and she leaned into the mild kick of recoil.

The cougar jolted forward, but righted itself and turned toward her.

This time she aimed only fractionally above the cougar’s head. Her second shell was loaded with a slug, a lump of lead that could fell a deer at fifty yards. At this short distance, gravity would pull the quarter-ounce projectile down only slightly.

She fired.

The cougar fell backward into the water.

Timeless peace, like omnipotent death, settled again upon the lake, as bloody ripples murmured ancient funeral rites on the shoreline.

CHAPTER 40

“T
he new Katogoula Tribal Center,” Tommy Shawe said, spreading his arms out as if to embrace the future. The circles under his eyes were as dark as ever, but a pure childlike joy radiated from the eyes themselves.

Nick thought about the contrast of sadness and elation Tommy’s face presented, and decided it was a perfect metaphor for the Katogoula’s month of terror, which had ended with the death of Nugent Chenerie, two weeks before this cool, bright mid-November day.

Katogoula men and women hammered and wielded power tools and poured concrete and slathered mortar between bricks.

“By summer, we’ll be in,” Tommy shouted over the shriek of a circular saw. “In time to celebrate the Green Corn Ceremony here.”

The ceremony had its roots in prehistory and once marked the beginning of the Katogoula year. It was a renewal on a personal and communal level. In the distant days when the ancient traditions still reigned, tribe members prayed to their gods for a good harvest, sought reconciliation with the living and the dead, and expelled the past year’s demons.

Nick particularly liked the expulsion-of-demons part.

Tommy turned away from Nick and Sheriff Higbee and gazed at the burial mounds, not far away across the grassy meadow. The tribal center would face the ancestral graves. Tommy rubbed his eyes now and
then, and Nick and Big John noticed his stubby pony tail shaking as he tried to regain control of his emotions. He had let his fair hair and beard grow; as with the rest of the tribe, his outward appearance was evolving, mirroring the growth of Katogoula identity inside. He looked like a sane version of his brother, Carl, people said teasingly around Three Sisters Pantry.

The foundation of the center was still only pipes and lumber sticking up. Circular, following archaeological studies of traditional Katogoula village architecture. Nick and Big John walked with Tommy around the perimeter of the large complex. Tommy explained enthusiastically where the meeting rooms, infirmary, new museum, and library would be.

“That Atlantic City company wanted to put the casino here. Right here!” Tommy said, his tone a mixture of exasperation and wonder at how close they’d come to selling their souls for a few casino chips. “I called them right after I got re-elected tribal president. Those Vegas and Tahoe folks, too. Told them all to shove it up their ass. It took the deaths of my brother and the Dusongs and all the other bad things that happened to show us our blood is way more than just a jackpot.”

Nick didn’t want to spoil the moment by mentioning the dark debt owed to Nooj Chenerie. Through his rampage of retribution, Nooj, descendant of proud warriors as well as humiliated slaves, had taught his enemies to fight for their heritage, but not to live in self-destructive bondage to the past. Nooj, as, in a way, the most recent incarnation of the Sacred Cougar, proved to the Katogoula that they could provide for themselves in the modern, alien land of twenty-first century America. His deadly masquerade had been as true and instructive as any myth.

“It took their suffering,” Tommy was saying, “for us to learn who we want to be. And a big part of that is knowing who we were, the good and the bad of it. For that, we thank you, Nick.”

“Hey, you can bet I’ll take advantage of my honorary tribal membership, too. Count on me shaking a leg at every pow-wow.”

The three men laughed.

“Well, Tommy, you sure didn’t make many friends in the Louisiana Legislature and the U.S. Congress,” Big John said. “I understand they’re especially pissed off at your tribe ’cause you upset a cozy little relationship they had with the gambling interests.”

“They’ll just have to find another cow to milk. We don’t need to beg and bargain anymore. The FBI can worry about those guys, from now on. I’m sure not.”

“From what my sources tell me,” Big John said with the steely innuendo of a prosecutor ready to press charges, “that’s not at all unlikely.”

Then the sheriff, giving Nick due credit for his brilliant hunches and damning, if sometimes improperly gathered, evidence, sketched out the still-evolving picture of Nooj’s deadly crusade from the moment the BIA envelope arrived.

That afternoon, the wildlife agent heard the devastating news while visiting Three Sisters Pantry, that his ancestral enemy, the Katogoula, would be rescued from oblivion through federal recognition. He also learned that Tommy had driven to meet with Chief Claude. He began to set his first devastating murder in motion, a crime that would implicate Tommy. Circumstances aided Nooj, and his night of terror developed better than he could have hoped.

Nooj must have remembered Tommy’s atlatl from their childhood together; he stole it and the genealogical records—the records perhaps a lucky find—from the Shawes’ garage, after dark. On his way to ambush Tommy, Nooj inadvertently caught the attention of Wooty Tadbull and his two partners; and even though he was a supremely skilled woodsman, he almost didn’t escape the raging Travis Corbett. Nooj led poor Travis into a pit trap he knew was there.

Having shot Tommy with the blowgun dart, Nooj led the drugged man into the woods, securing him out of sight while he put on a spooky cougar show for Wooty, who was engaged in his gruesome task on the burial mounds—a show that got the unexpected cooperation of the trophy deer Carl Shawe had been hunting for several nights. Carl probably would have bagged that buck, had Nooj not shown up first and impaled him with an atlatl spear.