Fever Dream - Douglas Preston [134]
63
HAYWARD EMERGED INTO THE BRIGHT SUN and stepped onto the motel balcony to see Pendergast below in the courtyard, loading his suitcase into the trunk of the Rolls. It was unreasonably hot for the beginning of March, the sun like a heat lamp on the back of her neck, and Hayward wondered if all those years living in the North had made her soft. She lugged her overnight bag down the concrete steps and threw it into the trunk beside Pendergast’s.
The interior of the Rolls was cool and fresh, the creamy leather chilly. Malfourche lay ten more miles down the road, but there were no motels left in the dying town; this had been the closest one.
“I’ve done some research into the Black Brake swamp,” Pendergast said as he pulled out onto the narrow highway. “It’s one of the largest and wildest swamps in the South. It covers almost seventy thousand acres, and is bounded by a lake to the east known as Lake End and a series of bayous and channels to the west.”
Hayward found it hard to pay attention. She already knew more about the swamp than she wanted to, and the horrors of the previous evening clouded her mind.
“Our destination, Malfourche, lies on the eastern side on a small peninsula. Malfourche means ‘Bad Fork’ in French, after the bayou it sits on: a dead-end slackwater branch-lake that to early French settlers looked like the mouth of a river. The swamp once contained one of the largest cypress forests in the country. About sixty percent of it was timbered before 1975, when the western half of the swamp was declared a wildlife refuge and, later, a wilderness area, in which no motorized boats are allowed.”
“Where did you pick up all this?” Hayward asked.
“I find it remarkable that even the worst motels have Wi-Fi these days.”
“I see.” Doesn’t he ever sleep?
“Malfourche is a dying town,” he went on. “The loss of the timbering industry hit it hard, and the creation of the wilderness area cut deeply into the hunting and fishing businesses. They’re hanging on by the skin of their teeth.”
“Then perhaps arriving by Rolls-Royce might not be the best idea—if we want to encourage people to talk.”
“On the contrary,” murmured Pendergast.
There was no sign at a crossroads and they had to stop and ask for directions. Soon after, they passed a few dilapidated wooden houses, roofs sagging, yards full of old cars and junk. A whitewashed church flashed by, followed by more shacks, and then the road opened into a ramshackle main street, drenched in sunlight, running down to a set of docks on a weedy lake. Virtually all the storefronts were shuttered, the flyspecked glass windows covered with paper or whitewashed, faded FOR RENT signs in many of them.
“Pendergast,” she said suddenly, “there’s something I just don’t understand.”
“What’s that?”
“This whole thing is crazy. I mean, shooting Vinnie, trying to shoot me. Killing Blackletter and Blast and the Lord only knows who else. I’ve been a cop for a long time, and I know—I know—there are easier ways to do this. This is just too extreme. The whole thing is a dozen years old. By trying to kill cops, they’re bringing more attention to themselves—not less.”
“You’re right,” Pendergast said. “It is extreme. Vincent made a similar point about the lion. It implies a great deal. And I find it rather suggestive… don’t you?”
He parked in a small lot up the street from the docks. They stepped out into the ferocious sun and looked about. A group of slovenly dressed men were hanging out down by the boat slips, and all had turned and were now staring at them hard. Hayward felt acutely aware of the Rolls-Royce and once again questioned Pendergast’s insistence on driving such a car for his investigations. Still, it had made no sense to drive two cars here, and she’d left her rental at the hospital.
Pendergast buttoned his black suit and looked about, cool as ever. “Shall we stroll down to the boat slips and chat up those gentlemen?”
Hayward shrugged. “They don’t exactly look talkative.”
“Talkative, no. Communicative, possibly.” Pendergast headed down the street, his tall