Another thing that generally spelled trouble was rows of lit torches coming up a hill. Vern had lost count of the times he’d been dozing in one eyrie or another, only to be woken by the sound of a torch-bearing mob. Humans were stupid fuckers back in those days, attacking a dragon with torches, but they were persistent, and generally a guy would have to move on if he didn’t want to spend his days swatting away flaming arrows.
But the number one warning sign that his days in his current hangout were numbered was the sound of an explosion. Goddamn smart-ass Chinese guys with their gunpowder. That shit could get in a guy’s scales and itch like balls. And even if the humans weren’t searching for him specifically, big explosions tended to shine a light on everything underneath.
“One of these days,” said Vern to the squirrel, meaning that one of these days the humans would nail him with some kind of armor-piercing shell that would slice through his scales like butter.
“And then that will be all she wrote for every living thing in a mile radius.”
Of course that was an estimate. If Vern’s core was pierced, the blast radius could be much more than a mile. When they hit old Blue Ben by total freaking accident with an early-model torpedo, couple of centuries back, he took a large chunk of Cornwall to the bottom of the ocean with him.
“I better check it out,” Vern told the squirrel. “Put a stop to whatever this shit is before it can get started.”
Vern climbed out of the La-Z-Boy and carefully peeled off his Flashdance T-shirt, folding it neatly with the three-precise-creases method he’d picked up from the chirpy Netflix lady. It was one of his favorite shirts, and he didn’t want it getting ripped to tatters flying around the swamp.
SQUIB SHUT HIS eyes, cried a bitter tear, and waited for the end.
Except it didn’t come.
By some freak of physics Hooke’s grenade reappeared from the mist, going right back the way it had come, that is to say retracing its own flight pattern, landing square between Hooke’s feet, and clanking off down into the cruiser’s gunwales.
Most men would have cursed in disbelief, and many might have fallen to sobbing or collapsed entirely, but Regence Hooke was made of sterner stuff. He grunted a gruff “fuck,” then stepped lively off the prow of the boat and into the river. The constable had barely a moment to duck below the water before his grenade ignited and blew a ragged disk from the port side of the cruiser, which frisbeed cinematically into the mangroves and buried itself in the bulbous trunk of a tree with a whang like a hillbilly working a saw.
“Lucky,” said Squib.
And he wasn’t just talking about his own person. Hooke had God only knew what kind of non-standard-issue explosive hardware in his box of tricks. Half the island could have gone up in swamp lumps. They would’ve smelled the barbecued hog all the way to Slidell.
Squib dared to raise himself to all fours, praying to Jesus, God, Buddha, Aslan, and whoever else might be listening that Hooke was squashed flat between the keel of his sinking boat and the swamp bottom and would die slowly watching air bubbles leak from his nose. But he didn’t get to find out if his prayer was answered just at that point because something very strong grabbed him by the waistband of his jeans and yanked him high into the Louisiana night sky.
Two seconds was all it took from earthbound to sky-high.
What in the name of—?
But Squib never completed that thought because:
A: He was too petrified to think rationally.
And B: His balls had been forced halfway up his stomach with the sudden acceleration of what could be fairly described as a supersonic wedgie.
And so as Squib Moreau was lifted high above the bayou, the only coherent thought he could manage to string together before the Gs blacked him out was, Hey, I can see our cabin from here.
Chapter 3
HOOKE WAS A BENT COP, NO DOUBT ABOUT THAT, BUT THERE WERE degrees of bent. A patrolman taking his coffee on the house every now and then was one thing, but you get a constable systematically subverting his vested power to knock off drug pilots for crime lordlings, and that right there was a whole other level of corrupt.
What set Regence apart were his intentions. Any cop who ever sat down before a congressional hearing or an IA board eventually mumbled shamefaced into the microphone a declaration along the lines of I became a cop to help people, ma’am. I don’t know when that changed exactly.
Nothing had changed with Regence Hooke. From day one Regence was out to augment his own prosperity—or before day one, truth be told. It was biblical, actually, how Regence’s ambitions got forged. His daddy was a self-styled preacher out of Homestead, Florida, who never managed to whip up much of a flock on account of his fanatically strict adherence to the letter of the Bible, mostly the early chapters. Jerrold Hooke might have had more of a pickup in Mississippi, but Florida folk preferred the whitewashed version of Jesus, the one who didn’t point the finger at their fur-lined winter coats in church because Leviticus frowned on clothing woven of more than one kind of cloth. And retirees from the Northern states would not countenance a preacher who slapped cheeseburgers out of their hands because Exodus proclaimed that it was forbidden to consume meat and dairy in one meal.
Young Regence had little choice but to toe his daddy’s Old Testament line, and it put a serious cramp in his adolescence. Everything concerning beer and balls was off the table, and goddamn if those things weren’t the whole world for a teenager. Regence went the traditional route of outright rebellion and got himself spanked for his trouble, actually spanked, in the front yard with his buddies looking on, for flying in the face of Deuteronomy by being a profligate and drunken son. Young Regence, with his face as red as his ass, thought, Screw this shit, I’ll see that Bible-thumper dead and buried.
It wore Preacher Jerrold Hooke down, how few shits people gave about his churching, and he eventually took to altar wine, and from there it was a short hop to bourbon. And it was only a few hours’ sleep from bourbon to self-loathing. And that same self-loathing was passed on down to his wife and kids, as it generally is. Selma Hooke cracked one night following eight hours of preaching spat right into her face by a drunk man o’ God and took off with her daughter, Martha Mary, never to be heard from again.
Regence, she neglected to take along.
He was trouble.
It was written all over the boy: a linebacker-looking lump of resentment with violence bubbling under the surface. Selma Hooke knew that there would come a day of reckoning, and she didn’t want Martha Mary around to witness it.
This day of reckoning arrived maybe half a year later. Six months of boy and man living on their lonesomes out back of a timber-slat excuse for a storefront church with flaking paint and a spire that wasn’t much more than a stack of pallets. Worshippers were limited to the ranks of the homeless, drunk, and addled. And even those poor souls reckoned that old Jerry Hooke was losing the run of himself, drunk as he was most days, whipping that boy around for mostly fabricated infractions of his endless rules.
Seemed like Jerrold was going more Jesus-crazy by the day. He started to invest serious belief in the notion that he’d been chosen by God for something superspecial that would give his life relevance to more than the dozen or so Walking Dead extras who inhabited his pews.
When Hurricane Andrew swept in from the Bahamas, Jerrold felt that he had finally found his vehicle.