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"Son of a bitch!" she yelled.
She floored the accelerator as the road straightened out, and prayed there was nothing in the way. It was raining too hard for the water to run off the pavement, and plumes sprayed up from the wheels of the Jeep. The drag had to be pulling harder on the low-slung car, but it hung beside her, swerving in for another hit. Her side window shattered, chunks of it falling in on her.
A
A
Options streaked through A
She hit the brakes and went into a skid, downshifting. As the car shot past her, she bent the skid into a 180-degree turn and hit the gas. In the rearview, she could see the brake lights on the car glowing like red eyes in the night. By the time he got turned around, she would be halfway to the levee-if her luck held, if the trail out to Clarence Gauthier's camp wasn't under a foot of water.
Her headlights hit the sign. Nailed to the stump of a swamp oak that had been struck by lightning twenty years ago, the sign was a jagged piece of cypress plank, hand-lettered in blaze orange: keep out-trespasser will be ate.
Behind her the car was lurching around. A
If she couldn't make it across to higher ground, she was his, whoever the hell he was, for whatever the hell he wanted. She'd have to go for the Sig in the duffel bag on the passenger's seat, and hold the son of a bitch off until help came along.
She gu
"Come on, come on, come on!" A
The back end of the Jeep twisted to the right as the back tire slid toward the edge of the submerged trail. The engine was screaming. A
Then the front tires caught hold of firmer ground, and the Jeep scrambled to safety.
"Oh, Jesus. Oh, God. Oh, shit," A
Someone ran out of the shack where Clarence Gauthier kept his fighting dogs. A
Clear of the woods, the rain closed around her like a liquid curtain. Only the lightning allowed her nightmare glimpses of the world beyond the beam of her headlights. Black, dead, not a living thing in sight.
She felt ill. She was shaking.
Somebody had just tried to. kill her.
The Corners' store was closed. The light in Sos and Fanchon's living room glowed amber through the gloom across the parking lot. A
She thought of Mullen as she pulled the whiskey down and set it on the counter. He would have liked this moment on videotape-evidence of her sudden alcoholism. Son of a bitch. If she found out he'd been behind the wheel of that car tonight… what? The consequences would go far beyond having him charged with a crime.
Life should have been so much simpler, A
"You go
Heart in her throat, A
"I locked that door when I left," she said.
Fourcade shrugged. "And I told you before: It's not much of a lock."
"Where's your truck?"
"Out of sight."
Nick grabbed a dish towel and bent down to clean up the mess. "You're a mite on the edge tonight, 'Toinette."
He looked up at her standing beside the jaunty gator on her refrigerator. Her face was pale as death, her eyes shining like glass beads, her hair hanging in damp strings. He could feel the tension in her like the vibrations of a tuning fork.
"I suppose I am," she said. "Someone just tried to kill me."
"What?" He jerked upright and looked her over as if he expected to see blood.
"Someone tried to run me off the bayou road into the swamp. And he damn near succeeded."
A
The whiskey boiled in her empty stomach like acid. She could still feel its path down the back of her throat.
"Somebody tried to kill me," she murmured again, amazed. Dizziness swept through her like a wave. With as much cool and dignity as she could muster, she looked at Nick and said, "Excuse me. I have to go throw up now."