The drugstore sat between two small cemeteries. Within each graveyard there was the odd wrought-iron mausoleum, but mainly they were filled with whitewashed tombstones. The drugstore building leaned crookedly, the shutters askew at the windows. A light was burning inside beyond the open door.
Leaving Spann. Rick Scarlett walked down the street to an all-night cash-and-carry. A sign over the counter warned: Because of food stamp regulations, there will be no drinking in front of the store. He purchased two po'-boy sandwiches, each one made from a French loaf; shrimp with mayonnaise and chowchow for Spann, an oyster loaf for himself. He bought himself a paper cup of coffee which he sipped as he walked back. The coffee tasted of chicory.
Spann was watching the drugstore through a pair of binoculars when he returned to the stakeout. After a while she passed them to him in exchange for the sandwich. He also took a look.
The pharmacy was dirty and broken down, the paint on its counter worn to the wood and grimed with decades of use. Behind the counter was an unglazed cupboard framing several sooty boxes and old hunks of root.
There were several people in the drugstore, most of them female. Two old women dressed in white lolled on the floor in front of the counter. They were smoking cigarettes and scratching their heads while at the same time running small cloth-covered bundles through arthritic fingers. These bundles had been removed from a small altar built into the base of the counter. Within the altar Scarlett could make out oleographs of St. Peter, St. George, and St. Patrick surrounding a statue. Beneath the pictures but above the floor were bottles of rum mid vermouth and whisky alternating with white porcelain pots. Then a weird old woman dressed in white sat down to join the others. She appeared to be holding her head in her hands.
Just then two other figures walked into the light beyond the doorway. One was a wizened old woman of at least seventy-live. She was wearing a faded print housedress and a pair of black laced shoes. Her thinning gray hair was pulled back Into a small bun at the nape of her neck. Her cheekbones tutted out over a toothless mouth. Walking behind the drug-tore counter she pointed up to seven drums, four of them I minted green, that hung by a rope from the ceiling. Then she indicated a bull whip hanging on the wall.
Che second figure, a man, began to take the seven drums down.
"That's our boy," Scarlett said, for the man was John Lincoln Hardy.
Spann looked at her watch. "You remember the telephone tap said 'The pot boils over at midnight?' Whatever's going to happen, we don't have long to wait."
All tour cars moved out at 11:00 p.m.
Scarlett and Spann counted seventeen people — fifteen blacks and two whites, all but five of them women — come out of the drugstore single file and climb into the vehicles. In a line the automobiles drove off, following the river.
"Let's take both cars," Rick Scarlett said. "If the group splits up we can fork the tail."
Once they were underway, each officer switched on the electric teeth underneath the dashboard. The electronic homing devices were just what Hodge had said — the latest and the best. Each device had a small screen that glowed a soft red color, imprinted upon which was a map of this section of New Orleans. As each vehicle moved, the map changed, following the route.
There were now four small lights blinking in unison on both computer screens. Scarlett and Spann could actually watch the drugstore vehicles as they moved across the electronic grid. A digital display at the side calculated the distance between each police car and the homing devices.
Out to the suburbs, then out of the town, then deep into the countryside. Rick Scarlett and Katherine Spann stalked John Lincoln Hardy.
In Terrebonne, the home of the Cajuns, the demarcation line between what is liquid and what is earth is vague and always changing. The bayou streams weave a sort of lace-work out of the land, curving and twisting and then curling back on their own curves to split and resplit again. Lose your way in such terrain and you could be lost forever. For here, hemmed in by decay and dripping trees, crowded by grass and sedge and palmetto, totally without a foothold on firm ground, terror can come quickly — followed just as quickly by death. Terrebonne sucks its victims into a grave of mud and buries them alive.
Beneath the light of the moon tonight, Scarlett and Spann followed John Lincoln Hardy deep into bayou country.
After the town of Houma and just east of Humphreys, the four cars from the drugstore left the highway and turned south onto a road made out of potholes. The potholes were filled with water, each one like a well.
At first there were several bayou shanties standing three and four deep on either side of the road, the air around them awash with a stench of fish, excrement, sweat, ashes, garbage, dogs and mud. Beside these hovels grew mango trees with their plump and heavy fruit hanging from long green navel cords. But after a distance of several miles the shanties disappeared. Now the moon shone down on the procession of cars and the air hummed gently with distant noise and the sound of crickets and frogs.
Scarlett and Spann dropped back to give their quarry some room. Both Constables switched from head to parking lights. Soon they doused the lights altogether and let the moon show the way, the teeth as their guide. Then twenty minutes later, the four blinking lights on each computer screen ceased moving across the map. Wherever they were, it seemed they had arrived.
It had been at least ten miles since they had last passed a sign of habitation. It was in fact questionable whether or not the road on which they were driving continued to exist.
Scarlett and Spann pulled off to the right and drove in behind some trees and bushes. The place where they finally stopped the cars could not be seen from the road. Spann was just switching off the engine of her vehicle when Scarlett came running up to the open driver's window.
"Come on, let's move, or we're going to lose them," he said. He pointed off to the left. Through the trees she could just make out several flickering torches. Spann climbed out of the car.
By the time they were back to the road again the torchlight had disappeared. Crouched low in case there was a guard they both moved swiftly toward the four cars parked up ahead. They found no sentry and turned off into the woods. By now the torches were gone from sight, swallowed by murky vapor. Within minutes the two cops were splashing through cypress woods where grasping roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them. A few seconds later they were both up to their thighs in smelly water. Then up to their waists. Their chests. Their necks — when Katherine Spann found herself wondering if this part of Louisiana was known for its amphibious snakes.
"What the hell is that?" asked Scarlett, stopping dead in the water.
The woman beside him strained her eyes and was surprised to see a pile of dank stones jutting up out of the murky bayou fifteen feet in front of them. It looked like a fragment of some rotting man-made monument built among these malformed trees, then flooded by the waters of the swamp. Beyond the atones and up on the ground which was bathed in silver moonlight, Spann could see a miserable huddle of huts. In front of them several bones hung from moss-covered gallows.
It was at this moment that the first sound of drums came
throbbing through the trees, the thump… thump… thump of an insistent and malevolent tom-tom beat.
"We found them," Scarlett whispered. "Let's go take a look."