“Dana’s dead now, and that’s not the way the law works. You did the killings. It’s on you — and on me. Okay? We’re in this together — right?” He tried to modulate his voice, sound reasonable, not further piss off his crazy brother.
It was working. The hostile expression on Dunkan’s face had abated. He took the bundle of cash Joe offered him, flipped through it with a greasy thumb.
“Go to the other place,” Joe said. “You know the one — the old roundhouse at the abandoned switching yard. I’ll meet you there a week from now. Once they find this place is empty, they’ll think you’ve run for good. They’ll watch it for a couple of days, but when they give up, I’ll know. And once it’s safe to come back, I’ll tell you. In a little while, I’ll be able to sell the jewels. Until then, you just hold on to that cash and stay low.”
There was a long silence. Finally, Dunkan nodded. As Joe waited, the man turned back toward the tent and began gathering up his few pathetic things. Collecting them in a ragged sheet, he bundled it up, then turned back toward his brother. As he did so, his gaze went over Joe’s shoulder, and his face abruptly contorted with feral rage.
“Traitor!” he cried, raising the stone knife. “Judas!”
A shot rang out, the round singing past Joe’s ear. Dunkan cried out as the knife was knocked out of his hand with the sound of a ricocheting bullet. With a roar he turned and sprinted toward the wall of dry salt grass, vanishing into it in an instant. As Joe pulled his gun and spun around to confront their attacker, he felt a blow to the side of his head; the gun was torn from his hand; and a knee impacted the small of his back. In a second he was pinned to the ground, his wrists held in an iron grip. They were pulled behind him and the cold steel went on with a click. Next, he felt his legs being securely bound. Writhing on the ground, he finally saw who his attacker was.
“Pendergast!”
The FBI agent was wearing gray-and-black camos.
“I thought you were coming in the morning!” Joe said.
“That’s what you were supposed to think.” Pendergast got up, fetched the .22, shoved it into a pocket, and then vanished into the grass in the direction Dunkan had fled.
38
Pendergast pushed his way through the salt grass. Dunkan, the feral brother, had a head start, and Pendergast could tell from the distant crashing noises that he was moving with the speed and sureness of someone with knowledge of the marshlands. But Pendergast was an expert tracker; he had hunted lion and Cape buffalo in East Africa; and he undertook this pursuit with the same assurance and strategy he would employ in pursuing big game. It was very dark, but he used his flashlight as little as possible, hooding it with one hand to keep its glow from being observed.
He moved along the disturbed trail of grass made by Dunkan’s headlong passage. It was exceedingly hard to follow, but having been in the marshlands several times before, he knew now what to look for. As he ran, he considered his prey’s options. The man’s appearance was too bizarre for him to chance being spotted in daylight. Nor would he make for the “old roundhouse” now. Chances were that, for the time being at least, he would go to ground in the place he knew best: these very marshlands. He could hide out here for a while, formulating a plan, until the search parties and tracker dogs arrived.
Of course, if he managed to kill Pendergast, he might not have to leave at all. That seemed his most likely choice.
Ahead, the sounds of movement had ceased, masked by the wind. The path, too, became more difficult to follow, as it appeared Dunkan had slowed down and was now moving with greater care, following a faint animal trail. The breeze was from the southwest, however, and Pendergast could detect the man’s stink: a mixture of sweat, dirt, and urine. That put him upwind, to Pendergast’s left. The FBI agent corrected course, now moving stealthily as well.
A lion hunt was, in fact, an excellent metaphor. Pendergast could not hope to outsmart or outtrack Dunkan: the man was in his element. Pendergast would have to rely on his instincts and his acute senses.
A few stalks of freshly broken grass showed Pendergast that the man had deserted the animal path. He followed Dunkan’s trail, allowing himself just enough flashes from his light to keep on it. The track burrowed deeper and deeper into the heavy, tall grasses of the marsh. They were on a medium-size marsh island and eventually they would reach a mudflat and tidal channel.
After five minutes of silence, save for rattling gusts of the wind, there came a sound to his right — a sharp snap. Immediately, Pendergast stopped in place, sniffing the air. The raw human stink was no longer detectable. That meant only one thing: Dunkan was no longer ahead of him, no longer upwind.
But where was he? In an instant, Pendergast understood that the feral brother, unable to shake Pendergast, had decided to circle back and come up on him from behind.
Allowing himself another brief wink of the light, Pendergast veered southwest and pushed his way through the grass. After making a slow arc of about a hundred yards, he stopped. With any luck, he was either behind Dunkan now or — even better — perpendicular to his path. Keeping intensely still, gun and flashlight at the ready, he listened for any sound — an intake of breath, the faint snap of a twig — that would signal Dunkan’s approach.
Nothing.
Five minutes passed in which Pendergast remained in position, unmoving. And then he noticed it: Dunkan’s stink, drifting toward him once again from the southwest.
What had happened? After brief consideration, he realized that Dunkan had probably heard him and was abandoning his double-back. The stench that briefly reached his nostrils was fainter: Dunkan had used the time to put significant distance between them. Maybe he was trying to escape him, after all.
Rising from his place of concealment, Pendergast moved quickly upwind, in the direction of the odor, using his flashlight more often now in search of signs, more focused on speed than silence. Several minutes of running and pushing through the dense grass brought him to the edge of a mudflat. On the far side of the flat lay a wide tidal channel. The tide was coming in strongly: ripples of black water were moving inland with dangerous rapidity, filling in the labyrinth of tidal islands.
His flashlight made out a set of nearby footprints. They led out of the salt grass and went straight down to the water. Pendergast let his light play out over the channel. And there was Dunkan, head bobbing as he struggled across the water toward the mudflats on the far side.
Pendergast did not hesitate; stuffing his flashlight into the pocket of his camos, he ran down to the water’s edge and plunged in. The water was as cold as ice, with at least a ten-knot current and a vicious undertow, which threatened to drag him down and carry him away. He swam hard, stroking his way across, fighting against the cold and the tug of the salt water. As his head came up from above the waterline he could again make out Dunkan, now out of the water, upstream from him, struggling through the mud on the far side.
It was the work of three desperate minutes to get across, while being swept along for at least a hundred yards. At last, Pendergast found his footing on the other side and heaved himself out of the water, nearly frozen, and began to half wade, half crawl through the knee-deep muck of the island. The moon came out from beneath scudding clouds just long enough for him to catch a glimpse of Dunkan. He was standing at the edge of the wall of high grass, a hundred yards away, bayonet in hand. Covered head to toe in mud, only the whites of his eyes showed — and they stared at Pendergast with wild fury.
And then he turned and disappeared into the grass.
Pendergast struggled across the expanse of mud until he reached the point where Dunkan had disappeared. He noticed that the dried grass had been mashed and broken into such wild and random tangles it was nearly impossible to tell which broken stalks might have been the work of a passing man and which the result of wind and storms. But Dunkan had left traces of his passage in faint smears of mud.