While she was speaking, my mind slipped back to the hotel room with Dwight Stone and Kaiser, and their surreal narrative played behind my eyes like a black-and-white sequel to JFK. At this point, there’s nothing Mom could say that would stop me from keeping my appointment at the Concordia Parish Sheriff’s Office.
“Mom, I have to go. It’s that simple, and it’s my best shot at helping Dad. Now, what do you think about sending Annie back to school?”
“It’s a terrible idea. We’re fine right here.”
“Are you sure it’s not too much? I can have patrol cars watch the school. Chief Logan will do that for me.”
Mom actually snorts at this idea. “She’s not half the trouble you were. She’s staying right here.”
“All right. But I’m going to have Kirk Boisseau come over and sit with you.”
“Kirk Boisseau? Why not one of those policemen your father treated?”
“We need a different skill set than that. Kirk was a recon marine. He can handle real trouble.”
Mom sighs as though this is unnecessary, but she doesn’t argue further.
As I power up my burn phone, a text pings through. It’s from Sheriff Dennis, and it reads: I left a present at your house. OOOO. I dropped the keys through the mail slot. See you at seven.
“The keys?” I murmur. Then it hits me: the four O’s in his text are meant to be the Audi rings. “Walker found my S4!”
“What?” asks Mom, looking worried. “Who found what?”
“I think Sheriff Dennis found my car.”
“Oh. I thought that was something about your father.”
I shake my head. “Wherever Dad’s hiding, he’s doing a good job.”
Her eyes betray both anxiety and satisfaction.
“Tell Annie I’ll be down in one minute.”
Whipping the sheet off the bed, I wrap it around me and hurry into the bathroom. There’s no time for a shower. Unless Walker Dennis ran into a problem I don’t know about, sometime during the last hour he busted the senior surviving members of the Double Eagle group on meth trafficking charges. And if he did, then everybody who thought the shit hit the fan yesterday is going to have their mind blown today.
CHAPTER 51
“HELICOPTER,” SAID JORDAN Glass, cocking her ear to the wind. “Sounds like a JetRanger.”
Caitlin spun around, scanning the tops of the cypress trees. She saw nothing but looming clouds in the gray morning sky, but Carl Sims was clearly impressed by this deduction, staring at Jordan with a mixture of curiosity and admiration.
Caitlin heard nothing at first. Then she caught the whup-whup-whup of rotor blades slicing the air. The sound grew steadily louder, and suddenly the engine was roaring and the chopper came in over the tree line, pointed straight at them.
“Is that Danny McDavitt?” she asked.
“Who else?” Carl pulled the women toward his truck as the JetRanger flared and settled into the dirt clearing in a roaring cloud of dust.
Caitlin instinctively looked at Jordan for guidance, but the photographer was already running in a crouch toward the helicopter. She obviously knew that the most comfortable place in relation to a chopper was inside the machine, not out of it.
Once Carl shut Caitlin inside and she put on the headset Danny McDavitt handed her, the noise dropped considerably. Danny was a handsome man with a craggy face, close-cropped steel-gray hair, and kind eyes that missed nothing. He was basically a more rugged version of John Kaiser. Pulling off her headset, Caitlin motioned for Jordan to do the same, then gave her a sanitized version of their pilot’s personal history, taking care to leave out a few details that had become the feast of local gossips some time ago. She described Danny as a retired air force major—and decorated veteran of Afghanistan—who’d married the widow of a local physician. Jordan looked as if she wanted to ask for more details, but Carl was signaling that they should put their headsets back on.
“I appreciate you helping us out, Major,” Caitlin said into her headset.
“All we’re doing is a routine marijuana-crop search,” Danny said with a wink in his voice. “No thanks necessary.”
“Can we set down and pick some if we find any?” Jordan asked.
Carl Sims laughed, then leaned between the seats and double-checked that both women were strapped in. Satisfied, he nodded to McDavitt, who pushed forward on the collective and lifted the bird into the air.
Long shafts of sunlight streamed down through breaks high in the clouds, but there was a gray wall to the east.
“Do you think it’s going to rain?” Caitlin asked.
“In an hour or two,” Danny said. “If you go into the swamp today, you’re going to get wet.”
Carl handed Danny the map and pointed at it, probably at the X, Caitlin figured. Danny nodded and banked to the west. Caitlin saw patches of grassy land between the cypresses below, and spooked game ran everywhere. At least thirty deer burst from cover as they roared over a dense thicket, followed by enormous black animals that looked like giant hogs.
“They hunt those damn pigs from horses at Valhalla,” said Carl. “With spears. Some of ’em weigh eight hundred pounds.”
Caitlin was going ask Carl about Valhalla, which she’d read about in Henry Sexton’s notebooks, but Danny said, “Carl’s just jealous. The farmers around here pay him to shoot those hogs at night with his sniper rifle, to keep them from eating their crops. Every one a hunter gets is less money in his pocket.”
“True enough,” Carl admitted.
“Hey, look!” Jordan cried, pointing down at a wide circle of water.
Caitlin saw an old man in a green johnboat staring up at them with what appeared to be shock and even fear on his face.
“What’s he doing?” Jordan asked.