The Federal agents rented half of the nearest motel, the Day’s Inn suites. Just a few miles outside of Metairie, they had occupied the last of the vacant rooms. Eachann and his group having arrived earlier, had reservations at a Bed and Breakfast just a mile or so from the juvie home, with closer access to the scene.
The Feds had also set up a mobile Command Center, several large tents that had air-conditioning and electric, loaded with all their gear and techs who didn’t look as enthusiastic as the agents.
The three had agreed to meet for dinner at the Golden Corral. Sanderson came in after the other two and he wasn’t alone. The amiable SAR dog handler was with him. Greeting them with a pleasant ‘hello’, she sat down with them.
“The Feds called you in to help search?” Matt asked. He looked as if he had spent the day searching through the swamps. The others had taken the time to clean up.
She nodded. “Since my dogs have his scent already, and there wasn’t another SAR team available on the East Coast.”
“Where are your dogs?”
“I have crates in my room and the hotel has kennels available. It’s not like pets, the hotels make accommodations for service animals.”
Sanderson said, “I saw Jane and invited her to dinner with me.”
She laughed. “I was going to eat at McDonald’s.”
“Great to see you again and that Jonas rescued you from the horrors of a McDouble,” Matt said. “You find any sign of the kid?”
“No. I talked to that one dog handler, the local guy. His name is Bob Lee Roberts. His dogs tracked the scent trail in about 5 miles to a huge tree. He said he’d never seen a tree that big except maybe the Sequoias. It was every bit of twenty feet around, with multiple trunks. Carved on the backside toward the water were two names in English. Little Fox and Falling Rain.”
As she said the names, Matt froze. Those names touched something in his mind and a cold chill raced up his spine.
The waitress came over and asked if they wanted the buffet and told them to help themselves. The three waited for Eachann as he sat there, frozen in a stillness that was creepy. It took Jake’s hand on his shoulder to bring him back from his fugue state.
“Matt, what is it?” Jacobs asked. For the first time, he used the detective’s name.
“I know those names,” he said slowly. “I don’t know how or why but Little Fox was the name of a boy called Crispin Lacey. Falling Rain or Rain Falling on the Rocks was a Native American woman who adopted him. And that tree – that tree marked the spot where the native tribes met for sacred rituals.”
“How do you know this, Matt?” Sanderson questioned, curious.
The detective turned his darkened eyes on the three. “Don’t ask me, I don’t know. I can see it in my memories, yet I have no idea how they got there.” He looked around the dining room, threw a $50 on the table. “Dinner’s on me.”
“Want us to bring you back something?” Jane asked. He shook his head.
“If I ate, I’d just get sick. Something has got my stomach in knots,” he confessed and walked off. They shook their heads, they knew that the ‘something’ was the unusual connection that existed between the boy and Eachann. Even though the one had never met the other.
The three ate hurriedly, a sense that time was running out. Upset over the detective’s odd behavior and that strange sense of foreboding, all three finished at the same time. No one lingered over coffee, instead they went to their prospective rooms at the Bed and Breakfast. Jane had a room there, also. She was familiar with the Inn from a previous search for a tourist lost in the swamp just a year earlier.
The light was off in Eachann’s room so none of them bothered to knock on his door and see how he was feeling. Instead, each one went to their rooms and turned in for the night.
It was near dawn when Eachann screamed out loud enough to wake the entire Inn and as they descended on his room, they found him wide awake. His face was paler than usual, dead white and his eyes huge blue pools of fear. He was soaked in sweat, his t-shirt and drawstring pants clung to him like saran wrap.
“Matt!” Jake said and charged into the room. “What’s wrong?”
He turned his face to the rookie cop and gasped out a slurry of words that they had to get him to slow him down to understand.
“It’s Crispin! They’ve found him and are killing him!” He flung himself out of bed, struggled into his clothes, took his weapon in the holster and ran for the car. The rest of the Inn’s clients stared at his fleeing back from their open doorways.
Jane told Jake to follow and call when they got wherever Eachann was headed. They would dress and bring the Feds with them. Sanderson threw Matt’s dirty clothes from the day before and Jake caught them on the fly. He snagged a pair of waders on the way out.
“I’ll let you know where we wind up,” he yelled over his shoulder as he raced down the stairs after Mathieu.
By the time he joined the Detective, Eachann was already in the SUV and headed down the driveway. The only reason that he stopped was because Jake stood in his way and to keep going, he would have to drive over him.
“Jesus, Matt!” he cried, sliding into the passenger seat. Eachann spun out in a swirl of gravel that hit the front of the Inn, pinging off the glass windows.
“He came to me in my dreams, Jake. Crispin Lacey. He was born in the 1800’s, and an outlaw named Johannsen is…was responsible for murdering him. He was eight years-old. He would have raped him first if he had the chance. Cris is Crispin. Reborn as has been Johannsen. Tempe Neige is Johannsen and he’s had Cris for ten years. That’s why his mother ran away from Neige and took Cris. He’ll kill him, just like he’s killed him over and over in every lifetime he’s lived.”
“And who are you, Matt?” Jake asked seriously.
“I’m Crispin’s father, a Captain in the early American Army, Captain Faille Lacey. I killed myself when I lost my son.”
Jake didn’t say anything for a long minute. “Do you know where Cris is now? The Deputy has him?”
“Not yet. I saw it all in my dream, my vision but it hasn't happened yet. We have time to save him. Neige has hired local slime-bags to hunt him down and make him disappear.
“They know the swamp, they know where he’s hidden and where he has to exit. They’re waiting for him, driving him into a trap. He’s riding right for it.”
“Riding? I thought Neige shot his horse?” Jake asked puzzled.
Matt stared ahead on the dark gravel road that circled the swamp and took them away from the city. “He’s on a ghost horse.”
"Mathieu, don't take this the wrong way, but – are you on any medications?" Jake asked earnestly. "I mean, dreams? Visions? Re-incarnation, past lives?"
Eachann laughed dryly. "You think I don't know how crazy this sounds? But I know it's true. I've lived through this before. All of us here with Crispin have done this before. Many times. We just keep replaying it, like that stupid movie."
"You mean 'Groundhog Day'? I liked that movie," the young cop protested. "I love Bill Murray."
"Yeah, well he got to go home with the girl."
"Where are we going, Sarge?"
Bachmann shrugged. "I'll know it once I get there."
The SUV had already chewed up fifteen miles from the Spanish Oak Inn. In that time, no other vehicles traveled the road past or approached them. On the back road, they were totally alone.
On a slight curve, Eachann slowed down from high speed and jammed on the brakes so hard that the rear end of the car shivered in the air. He kept it from fishtailing as both hit the locked seat-belts.
Matt turned the wheel, bounced across the opposite lane and entered a narrow, invisible dirt track barely wide enough for the rental car. How he even knew that it was there defied logic. Trees scratched angrily at the paint, potholes rocked the suspension and he was reduced to creeping along at 5 mph.
"What the hell?!" Jake burst out as the headlights made it no further than ten feet before they disappeared into the thick brush.
"He said, 'turn here,'" Matt answered.
"He? He who? You're hearing voices in your head, Matt? You know how that sounds? The Lieutenant told me to keep an eye on you, but he didn't say you were crazy!"
He slammed on the brakes, opened the driver's door, his hand on his gun. He worked the slide, his face dark and grim. "We walk from here. It's too wet for the car."
The look he gave Jacobs promised a confrontation later over the news that he was the Lieutenant's spy. Eachann disappeared in four strides, the wet bushes slapping back as he pushed through.
"Mathieu! Wait!" Jake yelled from the front seat, still in his pajamas. He pulled the detective's clothes on over his PJs and dove into the waders. Checking his own service weapon, he wracked the slide and tucked it into the pocket on the waist of the rubber boots. He fled after Eachann; it took him minutes to catch up and only managed it by finding the light from the detective’s tactical flashlight.
The road, such as it was, turned into a grassy trail with four-wheeler tracks the only sign that it was still used. There were large puddles of rainwater laying across and neither man knew how deep they might be. The ground was boggy underfoot which Matt avoided without seeming to look; his focus intensely forward.
Abruptly, he stopped, and Jake ran into him. The impact was barely noticed as they stared at a huge lake, surrounded by a marsh of cattails and duckweed. The feeble moonlight glinted off the surface of a lake, not a ripple marred the flat stillness of the dark water.
To Jake's utter disbelief, he watched in amazed terror as a spectral mist gathered out of the darkness. A horse dark as night yet glowing with luminescence galloped toward them. On its back was the small form of a child, hunched over on its neck. He could see the pale glimmer of a fragile fist tangled in the thing's hair.
The spectral horse galloped atop the water's surface and into the marsh without sinking into the mud or water. Disturbed neither.
"Holy Mother of Jesus!" Jake whispered as the first rays of daylight struck the pair. Behind them, Jake heard the stutter of air-boats and saw the lights flash as they bounced across the surface of the lake.
The specter dissolved just as Matt leaped forward into the bog, sinking to his knees and sending up a giant plume of brackish mud. He snatched the boy out of the air, hugged Cris into his chest, turned and bulled his way through the mud until he was running on solid ground. Jake stood there in disbelief, jaw hanging before he pulled out his Sig, loosing off several shots at the bobbing headlights. Two blew out.
"Jake, run!" Matt screamed as he wove through the trees heading back for the car. He didn't wait to see if Jake followed but flew through the thick brush trying to track their way back to the car.
It was Jake that found it; by running into the side and slamming himself into the driver’s door. He bounced off and then back, pulling it open, and jumped in as Matt ran around to the other side, sliding into the back seat. Jake started the SUV and punched it in reverse, head and shoulders cranked around so that he could see where he was driving.
The sun had come up and that helped light his way, that and the trail of broken branches and deep ruts in the dirt gave him a reasonable clue that he was still on the same track by which they had reached the lake.
Matt clicked the seat-belt around the semi-conscious small child, noting the bruised look of his skin, the filthy cast and clothes, the fragile bones and heat of the boy’s body.
“How is he, Matt?” Jake called as he drove faster backward than Matt had forward.
“His hands are like ice, he’s soaking wet. Turn the heat on. The rest of him is burning up. He’s really thin, lips and fingertips blue. I can barely feel his pulse and his breath sounds are raspy,” Matt said. “You have your cell phone?”
Jake shook his head. “I ran after you without stopping for anything except my Sig, your dirty clothes and the hip waders. So, unless you left the iPhone in your pants pocket, no, I don’t have it. Where’s yours?””
“In my pants pocket,” Matt returned, patting his pants. He pulled it out only to find that he had not plugged it into his charger, and it was almost dead.
“The battery is nearly dead,” he said as he texted a short message to Sanderson’s SAT phone.
Hve Cris. Nd bus n backup. By big lake n gravel rd nw of water. Perps in pursuit. Taking fire. Matt.
That was all he managed before the cell died. He didn’t know if the text message went through. Looking up, Matt saw the bright lamps of the air-boats cutting through the brush into the windshield of the SUV. One of the advantages of the peculiar craft was that it was equally adept at traveling over boggy ground as the water. He caught the flashes of gunfire and knew that they were shooting at the car.
“Jake!” he said urgently. “Go faster!” Matt opened a window and leaned out, one hand holding the boy onto the seat as they bounced on the trail. He tried to steady his arm enough to aim and fire his gun, but the car was bucking like a rodeo bronc. Jake risked a glance forward and nearly hit a tree before he turned back to the rear view.
“They’re catching up! I can’t go any faster or we’ll crash into a tree!” he yelled.
As he said that, they felt the rear tires hit solid pavement and the car backed onto a state road. How they came out somewhere different was a miracle that neither dwelt on, only took it for granted.
Jake did a perfect bootleg turn, pointed the nose of the SUV into the rising sun and hit the gas with a sudden whine of the powerful engine. In seconds, he was doing eighty-eight on state highway 101, an arterial that led to the Interstate. Sign posts went by so fast that neither could read them yet the GPS in the car gave them directions to the nearest intersection. Unfortunately, they did not have the means to inform the Feds where they were or that the hired killers were on their tail.