This was going to hurt even more. And it did. Ben reached the edge and leaped into space. He dropped ten feet and then the foliage was ripping and clawing and scraping at his face and body as he went crashing downward through the branches. His fingers locked on to a thicker limb and he managed to arrest his fall. He scrambled down the tree as far as the lower branches, until his legs dangled free. It was maybe an eight-foot drop to the patchy grass of the back garden. He steeled himself and let go. The agony as he hit the ground went through him like a spear, but he didn’t make a sound.
The neighbour’s garden was all in shadow. Ben remained in a still crouch at the foot of the tree for a few moments, catching his breath and listening hard until he was sure his escape from the guesthouse hadn’t been observed. Then he picked himself up and ran for the back fence and scrambled over it into the next garden, hoping he wouldn’t drop down the other side into the waiting jaws of someone’s pit bull. He landed in the bushes and kept running.
A tumult of sirens was growing steadily louder. It sounded as if every cop in Louisiana was racing to the scene. Probably a couple of ambulances, too, one for Lottie and one for Sheriff’s Deputy Mason F. Redbone, who would soon be enjoying a little holiday in hospital. It was less than he deserved.
Ben crossed that garden, and the next, and then pushed through a hedge over a low wall and found himself in an adjacent street, maybe a couple of hundred yards from the guesthouse as the crow flew. The homes at this end of the neighbourhood were all in darkness, as if the residents here didn’t care what kinds of major emergency situations took place up the road. That suited Ben just fine.
He kept going. A blind man could follow the trail of glistening spots and spatters that marked his route, but there was nothing he could do about that. The best he could achieve was to get away from here before he passed out from pain and shock and blood loss and collapsed in the street for the cops to find.
Quarter of a mile away, in a quiet little avenue on the edge of Chitimacha far away from the hubbub and excitement, he came across an old Ford pickup truck parked under the shadow of a spreading oak tree.
The SAS had taught him how to steal cars to make him an efficient operator behind enemy lines, when you sometimes had to improvise modes of transportation. He’d had a lot of practice at it since those days. Old vehicles were the best to steal. The older the better, as long as they were driveable. No alarms, no immobilisers, no on-board GPS trackers. Thirty-nine seconds later he was inside the Ford’s cab, bleeding all over the cheap vinyl seats as he got to work hotwiring the ignition. Another half minute after that, he was gone and disappearing into the night.
Ben drove fast away from Chitimacha, knowing that he couldn’t stay on the road long. The state troopers would already be cordoning off the whole area, roadblocking every exit and stopping and searching any car within a perimeter that would rapidly expand state-wide as the manhunt intensified. Every hotel, motel and hospital would be flushed looking for him.
By dawn the horror story of the sabre murder would be airing on local TV, in all its gruesome detail for citizens to relish over breakfast. By midday the whole parish would be so jumpy about the desperate killer on the loose that they’d be loading up their guns and watching out of their windows for any sign of a suspicious-looking stranger lurking about the vicinity. By mid-afternoon he wouldn’t be able to walk down the street without getting his head blown off by some trigger-happy Louisianan doing their civic duty.
That was, if he could walk at all. He could feel himself getting weaker with every passing mile. The blood was pooling under him on the car seat and leaking down to the floor, flooding the rubber matting and making his boot soles slippery on the gas and brake pedals. The pain was keeping him alert. He focused closely on it to keep from flaking out at the wheel.
He found a forestry track leading off-road and headed up it. He was grateful for the fact that when it came to stealing cars in rural Louisiana, virtually every vehicle you were likely to get hold of was a go-anywhere four-wheel-drive with rugged tyres and suspension. He bounced and lurched along for miles, bogging down here and there in deep ruts left by the last rains. Eventually he left the track to carve his way for another quarter of a mile into thick forest.
Unable to go any further, he stopped the truck, killed the lights and engine, clambered down from the blood-smeared seat and stood listening for a whole ten minutes, leaning against the side of the truck for support. Only the sounds of nature could be heard, along with the tick of cooling metal.
Wincing and clutching his wound through his bloody shirt, he hauled himself up onto the pickup flatbed and started rooting around in the dirty old crates loaded aboard. The truck belonged to someone with a handy set of skills and the tools to match. An outdoorsman or a hunter; at any rate the kind of guy who carried around a saw, a small sharp hatchet, a couple of green canvas tarpaulins, and a coil of light but strong rope. Among the assorted trash in the glove box Ben found an autographed photo of Dolly Parton, a roll of gaffer tape and an unlabelled quarter-sized liquor bottle whose clear liquid contents smelled like some kind of illicit home-brewed moonshine. He had no use for Dolly but took the tape and the moonshine.
Ben badly needed to rest but he had work to do first. The truck had been resprayed more than once in its life. In its current paint job it was bright orange, and couldn’t be left as it was without standing out like a beacon to any police helicopter overflying the woods. He couldn’t burn it, for the same reason.
He unfolded the larger of the two tarps and dragged it across the roof of the truck to cover it, then lashed the cover down at the corners with lengths of the rope. Next he spent thirty painful minutes sawing branches from trees and laying them over the tarp, until the shape of the truck was so well camouflaged that a passing deer would be unlikely to notice it, let alone a police chopper. Then he put the hatchet and saw in his bag with the remainder of the rope, strapped the rolled-up smaller tarp on top of it like a soldier’s bedding roll, and set off on foot.
It was a weary march. Nothing he hadn’t done before, but a knife hole in his side didn’t make it any easier. A mile deeper into the woods, ready to drop, he stopped at a great fallen oak tree whose uprooted base had left a large hollow in the ground, an earthy cave deep enough for a man to crawl into and remain hidden. He could lie up and rest here for a while.
Using the small tarp as a groundsheet he wedged himself among the roots, as far from the mouth of his little cave as he could fit. The hollow was damp and smelled of leaf mould and the small animals that had burrowed into it before him. He’d spent time in much worse places.
Risking a little torchlight, he peeled off his jacket and unbuttoned his bloody shirt to inspect his injury. It was still bleeding profusely. Not as deep as he’d first feared, but still pretty damn deep, an ugly gash stretching seven inches diagonally from ribcage to navel.
Open wounds were always an infection risk, especially roughing it outdoors, but Ben had an excellent immune system. With a fastidious doctor for a lady friend he couldn’t avoid being all up to date with his tetanus immunisations, too. Right now, though, what concerned him most was the continuous bleeding. If it had been his arm or leg, he might have been able to stem the flow with a tourniquet. Injuries to the torso were harder to deal with. He’d seen men bleed to death from abdominal traumas, and knew enough about the physiology of such injuries to worry him. Half a litre’s worth of blood loss causes mild faintness, increasing in severity after a litre or so, when the heart rate begins to increase and breathing quickens. That was where Ben was at now. Another half litre drained out of his body, and he would be in danger of losing consciousness. Anything over 2.2 litres or four pints gone, death wasn’t far off.
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