Page 29 of Blood Hymn

"He can want."

She glances back at me over her shoulder. Her face gives nothing away, but her knuckles have gone white around that little silver cross.

We spend the afternoon laying it out on the workbench, her binder beside Douglas's green ledger beside the black book from under Front Street, and I'm so deep in the three of them that I almost miss the birds stop singing.

The quiet reaches me first. Dusk in the marsh has a sound: frogs tuning up and nutria splashing and a thousand small wings settling into the cypress. At twenty past five, it stops. All of it at once, as though somebody shut a door on it.

I lift my head. Evie sees me do it and goes still over the ledger.

Far off to the southwest, down the channel I pole every morning, a dog bays. Another answers. Under the dogs, thin as a mosquito, an outboard motor drones.

"How?" she breathes.

I don't answer, because I've just worked it out. The Chevy didn't turn onto the levee road to let her go. That levee runs along the crest above the launch, and from up there a man with binoculars can see every truck that pulls in under those willows and every boat that pushes off. They never needed to catch her. They only needed to watch where she went into the water, and then send the dogs.

"Dry bag," I order. "Books, your mother's file, your sister. Now."

She's moving before I finish. She sweeps the three ledgers, the binder, and the manila folder into the orange dry bag hanging by the door, lifts Delilah's box off the shelf above the cot with both hands, wedges it in on top, rolls the neck down tight, and snaps the buckle. She slings it across her back. Her face is white, and her hands are perfectly steady.

I pull the shotgun off the wall and put it in her hands with a box of buckshot. I take the .30-06 and the machete and the belt with my knife on it, and I kill the lantern.

"There's a causeway off the north side," I tell her in the dark. "Old oil company planking. It runs a quarter mile to high ground. Get down under the dock and wait for me. If I don't come, you go up that causeway and keep going. You don't come back for me."

"No."

"Evie."

"I'll wait under the dock." She finds my arm in the dark and grips it once, hard. "Go."

Two boats. I spot them through the gap in the plank shutters, a flat-bottom with a spotlight on the bow and a smaller johnboat behind, easing up the channel with the motors throttled low. Four men in the first, two in the second. The first boat carries the dogs, two big redbone hounds with their front feet on the gunwale, baying at the shack. A man in the second boat stands with a red plastic gas can in each fist.

They haven't come to arrest anybody.

The spotlight hits the shack and slides across the shutters. Somebody bellows 'Cain!' across the water, drawing it out like he's calling a dog to supper, and laughs. The hounds lose their minds.

I go out through the trapdoor in the floor and drop into the water below.

It's colder than it has any right to be in October, and it closes over my head black and thick with silt. I surface under the pilings in the dark between the stilts and hang there with only my face above the waterline, the machete in my fist and the rifle propped on the crossbeam overhead where I can reach it. The first boat noses against the dock. Boots hit the boards above me. The dogs scramble off the gunwale onto the planking, snuffling, and one of them jams its nose down between the boards directly over my head and goes wild.

"He's under there!"

The johnboat swings toward the pilings, its spotlight sweeping the water, the gas-can man at the bow and another at the tiller. They creep in between the stilts, peering down.

I go under.

I come up beside the johnboat, seize the gunwale, and haul down with all my weight. It tips. The gas-can man pitches over the side with a yelp, and the cans go with him and bob away gurgling. The one at the tiller keeps his seat and swings a paddle at my skull. I block it with my forearm. The arm goes numb to the elbow, and I let go of the boat and take the gas-can man instead.

He's big and he's panicking. He thrashes for the surface, and I get behind him, lock my legs around his, and take us both down into the black. He claws at my arm. Something opens along my skin, hot, a line of fire from wrist to elbow, and I understand he pulled a knife off his belt on the way down. I pin his arm with mine and hold. The bottom is barely three feet under us. His struggling slows, and slows, and quits.

I let him go and come up for air directly under the second man's paddle. He's leaning over the side searching for us. I grab his collar and drag him in headfirst. He can't swim. I keep him under until the bubbles end.

Above me, the shack is burning.

I never heard them splash the fuel, but I smell it now, and orange light leaps across the water all around the pilings. They've soaked the porch and thrown it in through the door, and the old cypress boards catch like paper. My wall, my maps, the photographs, the rifles on their hooks, the ammunition I stacked in rows. Rounds start cooking off inside with flat pops and whines, and the men on the dock scatter back toward their boat, shouting.

The rifle is gone from the crossbeam, knocked loose, lost somewhere in the black water around my legs. I've got the machete and my knife.

One of the men on the dock spots me in the firelight between the pilings. He has a pump shotgun, and he swings it down at me. I throw myself sideways behind a stilt as the buckshot rips the water where my head just was. I come around the far side of the piling and go up the dock ladder in two pulls, and he's still racking the next shell when the machete takes him across the back of the knee. He drops screaming. I put the knife in his neck, take his shotgun, and turn.