He let the busy signal ring four more times before he realized that the motel operator wasn't going to come back on the line, so he broke the connection and redialed the number.
"Operator."
"This is Larry Paxton," he said carefully and slowly, trying very hard to erase every trace of his black, South Carolina upbringing. "I'm a guest at your motel. Room one-three-eight. I need you to break into a call at room one-three-seven. The room is in the name of Paul McNulty, and it is an emergency."
"I'm sorry, sir, but I'm not allowed to do that without permission of the manager."
"Then would you please go get his permission?" Paxton asked in a voice that, in his thoroughly biased view, was far more polite and controlled than the young operator had any right to expect.
"I'm sorry, sir, but he's not in his office right now. If you could call back in a half hour-"
Paxton broke the connection with a flood of profanity. He was rapidly running out of time.
Which meant there was only one reasonable option left.
Okay, McNulty, he thought to himself, you're always telling us to be adaptable, think fast on our feet, make decisions on our own. Hope the hell you're right.
Working slowly in the streetlight-illuminated darkness because he didn't dare turn on the overhead interior light, Paxton took another half minute to decipher Sonny Chareaux's scrawled handwriting and then punch the correct sequence of numbers into the portable phone. It rang twice before an unfamiliar voice answered.
"Hello?"
"This Alex?" Paxton asked in his slow, South Carolina drawl.
"What?"
"Ah said, is this Alex?" Paxton repeated.
There was a long pause, and then a voice replied cautiously, "There is no one here by that name."
"Well, shit. Ah know this is the number Sonny told me to call, and Ah-"
"You said Sonny? Wait just a minute-"
"Hey, man, you wait just a minute! Who the hell is this?" Paxton demanded.
"This is Jacall. Please wait just one minute."
Paxton thought he heard a muffled voice yelling something in the background.
"Listen, man, Ah ain't waiting for nobody, and Ah ain't in the mood to play no fucking games. All Ah'm doing is what Sonny asked me to do. You just tell this Alex, whoever and wherever the fuck he is, that Sonny says everything's cool with the pilot, whatever the hell that means."
"No, wait! Don't hang up!" the voice said frantically. "What about Sonny? Where is he?"
"Probably in some po-lice car, heading to jail, seeing as how he just got himself in one hellacious bar fight. And Ah'm getting the hell out of here before Ah end up in the same place," Paxton said and then quickly disconnected before Alex could come on the line.
"Okay, Henry, I hope that buys you something," Paxton whispered as he slowly pulled himself up to a sitting position and looked again at Chareaux's keys. One of the keys belonged to a Chevy, and the key ring bore the emblem of a camper supply house. He reached for the door handle and got out.
There were at least seven or eight pickups with full-sized camper rigs in the parking lot, and as it turned out, four of them were Chevys. So it took Larry Paxton almost five more minutes to discover that one of the keys Sonny Chareaux had lost in the Cat's Paw bar fit perfectly into the back-door lock of the third camper.
Barely conscious now, but still on his feet, Paxton was just about to open the camper door-to see for himself whether or not he had guessed right-when he felt the cold, hard muzzle of a 9mm Glock pistol press hard against the back of his neck.
"Sir, without turning around, and without moving a single muscle in your entire body," the young patrol officer said as he stepped in with his left foot and wrist-locked the agent's left arm behind his back, "I want you to explain to me exactly why you and I might be on the same side."
Chapter Twenty-Two
"Are you certain?"
"Whoever it was, he just hung up," Roberto Jacall said as he replaced the handset into its receiver. He brought his hands up in an open-palmed shrug and then looked at Alex Chareaux with an expression that clearly said "Who knows?"
"Do you get many calls like that here? People who don't identify themselves, then just hang up?"
"No, not so many like that," Jacall shrugged again.
"And you are certain it wasn't Sonny?" Chareaux repeated, wanting to be sure.
"Alex, there was no voice. Nobody spoke. They just hung up."
Alex Chareaux stared at his taxidermist friend for a long moment before turning away and staring out the window at the open and illuminated door of the warehouse, where his other brother was parking their truck.
"I don't like this. I think I have made a mistake," he finally said, still staring out the window at the warehouse door as Butch Chareaux got out of the truck, shut off the warehouse lights, and started walking back toward the house. "I took on a man as a partner. A man I believed I could trust."
"Yes, so?"
"I think now that the man is an undercover agent for the government."
Roberto Jacall froze, stunned, as if he had never imagined that something might go wrong. "Are you sure?" he whispered.
"No." Chareaux shook his head slowly. "If I knew that for certain, I would have killed him long before now."
"But how-"
"Sonny was told to take this man's pilot aside, ask him questions, and then call me, tell me everything he found out. We arranged two times and places. Eight o'clock at a phone booth in Fishtail, or if he was delayed for some reason, ten o'clock here."
"Then something is terribly wrong," Roberto Jacall said.
"I know."
"This agent man, can you find him?"
Alex Chareaux almost smiled. "Yes, my friend, we can find him very easily. He is in the back of the truck right now. Unconscious certainly, and perhaps already dead."
"No, my brother, he is not dead," Butch Chareaux laughed as he came into the living room, "but I think he will be soon."
Unable to speak, Roberto Jacall simply shook his head.
"We have always trusted each other to do what is necessary," Alex Chareaux said. "We will continue to solve our problems together." He turned to his brother.
"Lightner," he whispered. "Kill him now."
Henry Lightstone was lying in the pitch-dark truck bed, fighting a sudden surge of nausea, when he heard the sound of footsteps coming back to the warehouse. Footsteps and then a cheerful whistling as the single individual continued on past the truck and into the warehouse.
Butch Chareaux, Lightstone thought, recognizing the tune that the younger Chareaux brother had frequently whistled during the hunt.
Usually after he had killed something.
Moments later, a light in the far corner of the warehouse came on, sending a faint beam through a tear in the canvas tarp.
Then, as Lightstone continued to listen, feeling weak and nauseous, and knowing that he was almost completely defenseless against a killer like Butch Chareaux, the footsteps returned to the truck.
Continuing to whistle cheerfully, Butch Chareaux drew a long-bladed hunting knife from his belt and quickly cut through the ropes that held the tightly stretched canvas over the truck bed. He pulled the tarp aside and climbed up into the bed. Then he plunged the knife into the rigored haunch of the larger bear-where it would be accessible when he needed it-and worked his way across the carcass until he was kneeling over the sprawled and bloody form of Henry Allen Lightner.
"Henry, can you hear me?"
Lightstone blinked his eyes slowly and tried to whisper something. He could see the knife sticking out of the bear's haunch, but it was down near the tailgate of the truck. Too far away.