The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [87]
“Land,” he said, and steered this time to his left, those walls still around us. “If it had been only the land, there would have been no need for all these forensic pyrotechnics. No need for the degloving of hands and the blasting away of any dental records an indigent male of my approximate height, weight, and skin coloring might have revealed, rounded up with no questions from me by my loyal sidekick, Deputy Thigpen. I could have simply gone in with the rest of the boys and made an offer to you. But you and I both know what good that’s done. Delbert Yandle as front man? Come now. Even you’re not going to give in for that.”
“Let them go,” Unc said. “Let them all go. You want me. It’s only me, Charlie.”
“Noble, certainly,” Simons said. I still couldn’t make out his face for the shadow across it, only pictured that file footage, him standing at a podium and waving in triumph, his wife seated beside him, looking up at him.
“Noble, unto death. But if you believe I’m merely after a blood sacrifice, you are mistaken, and prove yet again you haven’t the ability to grasp the scope of things around you. To my way of thinking”—and now he turned us again, the moon swinging through the sky above us, the walls of marsh grass the same, all of us weaving deeper and deeper into the marsh—“there is a vast array of information that has been disseminated by hook or by crook to each one of you, including the deaf-and-mute young virgin beside me.” He nudged Tabitha, and she flinched again. She had no idea what was being said here, her eyes on us. “Even Miss Dorcas here possesses information quite detrimental to my endeavors, and though you, Leland Dillard, are responsible for her sifting through cybertrash, that responsibility isn’t enough to have you serve as stand-in at her execution.”
“Goddamn you, sir,” Miss Dinah said, and I heard on the words a tremble, and heard steel at the same time.
“There is no God, Miss Gaillard,” Simons said, in his voice a kind of laugh. “But if it gives you a certain semblance of comfort to call down on me the wrath of your empty faith, please do so.”
“No need,” she said, that tremble gone now. “You done that work yourself.”
“Quick-witted to the end,” Simons said, “and just in case I forget later on when things will get ugly between us, let me say thank you for all those biscuits and eggs and bacon and grits and fried chicken you’ve served me over the years Saturday mornings at Hungry Neck.” He turned the boat again, that moon moving once more, and now in my line of sight fell one of those nameless islands, a small one, a rough rise of brush and a single palmetto, black and silhouetted in black above the marsh. It was maybe a hundred yards off, the snake of this cut maybe headed there, maybe not, and I wondered if the plan was just to kill us all and bury us out on one of these islands and be done with it, head back to Hungry Neck and whatever was so valuable even the land itself was taking a backseat.
“What do you want?” Unc said, his voice low, too hard and sharp for a whisper but nearly silent all the same.
“What you don’t know will kill you, Leland,” Simons said, and gave that same sort of laugh. “But if you must know, it’s money. Hate to be as vulgar as all that, and as predictable, but it’s money. And with the money to which I am laying claim comes all its attendant joys, chief among them a new life. Born again, as it were, Miss Gaillard.” He leaned to his left, looked past us and nodded at her.
She said nothing. Mom had stopped her crying, was breathing quick and shallow.
He looked back at Unc, that gun still out and pointed. “It occurred to me only a few years ago,” he said, “after having lost a patient to anaphylactic shock, that there were certain fiduciary amenities available only to the dead, Leland. This was a woman of great standing in Charleston society, a fervent supporter of Spoleto, a Junior League charter member.” He gave a shake of his head. “In for a breast implant and liposuction, two birds with one stone. But with her cadaver there on the table before me, what