He told his son, who really could not give a damn, “We shall stand together in the temple though it crumble around us, and then they shall see.”
Regence started giving a damn sharpish then because if he understood his poppa’s rantings, they were going to stick it out in a church made of rusted nails and plywood while the rest of the city got itself evacuated the hell out of Dodge.
Fuck that, thought Regence.
And so he turned on his father.
Or at least he tried to turn. Regence was big, but Jerrold was bigger. The son got in one good swing before Preacher Dad coldcocked him with his King James.
Regence woke up on the church altar with Armageddon swirling around his head and his crazy-ass father standing naked above him, calling to the Lord to show him a sign.
A sign? thought Regence. A goddamn sign? Someone is shitting someone.
And why the hell was his dad buck-ass naked?
None of it made a lick of sense to Regence, and he knew that the hurricane bearing down on them like the world was turning itself inside out was sure to send the both of them to whatever afterworld there actually was. And while the idea of a heaven would have been of some comfort at that moment as Andrew unwrapped the church from around them, flittering it to toothpicks, Regence half hoped the entire heaven thing was bullshit just so his dad’s final thought might be something along the lines of Oh, hell. I was wrong.
Some tiny squib of Hurricane Andrew landed on father and son, punching the pair straight through into the basement, where they lay gasping and covered with debris while the fury of nature passed above. Miraculously, both Hookes survived.
Momentarily, at least.
Regence was first to gather himself and stood over his father thinking, Maybe my daddy was actually right. Maybe Jesus delivered us.
Then Jerrold Hooke opened his eyes and said, “Regence. A pity the Lord did not take you so my survival would have been all the more miraculous. Also, I would have cut a tragic figure for my flock.”
And Regence picked up a jagged plank, staked his father through the heart like a vampire, then lay beside him on the mud floor and waited to be rescued.
And right then, lying there with the heavens torn apart above him, young Regence learned that the biggest clouds had the biggest silver linings—if a body was prepared to take advantage of chaos.
I have a gift, Regence had realized. And that gift was that he could keep his shit together while the whole world was freaking the hell out. Years later, a mentor in Iraq would toss out a quote that hit the nail on the head: “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs . . .”
The rest of that Brit poem didn’t really suit Regence’s purposes, so Hooke took what he wanted and finished it off as follows: If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, then there is serious money to be made.
BUT ON THIS night in the Pearl River bayou, with his large frame hunched under six feet of water and his own cruiser coming down on his head, Regence Hooke knew that there was more than cash on the line. His own traumatic upbringing had granted him the gift of presence of mind, which he employed to lunge out of harm’s way. That particular harm, at any rate. There were plenty of other options on the harm menu that night, one being the cottonmouth snake which Hooke near to punched in the mouth accidentally while dragging his knuckles to shore, and another being the twelve-foot gator which, shocked awake, was eager to bite something on the ass but too addled to zone in on the constable. And to top it all off, when Regence Hooke dragged himself out of the churned slop, he was met nose-to-nose by a red-eyed boar, which took one look at his murderous expression and decided to break off eye contact and back away.
Hooke bludgeoned a path through the reeds and stalks, his anger intensifying with each swing of his fists. He was pissed about the boat, yes. So much for bringing Elodie around now with his grand gesture. And he was pissed about the ten grand’s worth of firepower that had drowned with her. But there were always more bullets and more boats, and this neck of the parish had a surfeit of both. In fact, Willard Carnahan’s inflatable was moored around the bend, and Hooke would bet his badge that there were plenty of weapons stashed in the cubbies. And a bottle of Willard’s moonshine to drive out the chill would be most welcome.
What had really shaken Hooke’s composure was his own confusion. What the hell had just happened? Best he could figure, his grenade had come home like it was on a string. In his long and varied experience of projectiles in general, that class of shit just didn’t happen. That grenade didn’t operate on any sort of independent guidance system. The direction a person aimed it was the direction it went.
Until today.
He grabbed hold of two stakes of cypress and hauled himself over the ridge of the levee, plopping onto the bank proper.
This ain’t dignified, he thought, lying here on my belly like a washed-up corpse. And what’s more, I’m wide-open.
Though if he was honest, the lack of dignity worried him more.
I get double-tapped now, and this is how they’ll find me.
So Regence Hooke rose, sloughing off his jacket and maybe ten pounds of swamp crap along with it.
“Come and get me, asshole,” he called into the spectral curtains of Spanish moss. “I got plenty in me yet.”
It was true. Hooke was ready to go toe-to-toe. His drill sergeant back in Polk once remarked, “You’re like the fuckin’ Hulk, ain’t you, Private Hooke? The more shit I pile on you, the more you got that glint in your eye. I like that, Private. You’re a killing machine, ain’t you, boy?”
And Hooke had said, “Yessir, Sergeant. A killing machine is what I am.”
But he hadn’t said it loud, like he’d been trained to. He said it real quiet, like the words came from his heart.
The drill sergeant near to crapped his camos, and he didn’t trouble Hooke too much after that.
Hooke had that glint in his eyes now, and there was nothing he would have liked more than to go rampaging across the length and breadth of this godforsaken island hunting down Ivory’s boy.
But . . .
But there had been a couple of explosions which would draw attention.
And his sidearm was no doubt clogged with shit.
And maybe Ivory’s boy was already heading toward Petit Bateau, the closest landing, on whatever craft had taken him up here since Regence had been lying about seeing it drift by earlier.
The smart move was to take Willard’s boat upriver and maybe get the jump on whoever had been videoing him. That was the smart move.
“Stay smart, Sergeant Hooke,” he told himself, imitating his Iraqi mentor, Colonel Faraiji. “Remain calm.”
Hooke closed his eyes and counted to ten, breathing in deeply through his nose, which was a relaxation exercise he’d picked up from a whore in the French Quarter. When he opened his eyes again, the killer was tucked away for the moment.
For the moment, thought Hooke. But something happened here, and I’ll be back to find out what.
Chapter 4
VERN OFTEN THOUGHT OF THE OLD DAYS, WHEN DRAGONS HAD ruled decent patches of the earth from high in their eyries. Dragons kept that shit on track for centuries, lording it over the rest of creation, no predators to threaten their supremacy. And Vern was royalty, too: heir to the Highfire Eyrie, including the castle itself and the entire town, not to mention the caverns of assorted riches stashed in the catacombs. It was an excellent package with top-class benefits. But what the dragons in general hadn’t realized was that, in the absence of physical predators, time itself becomes a predator. Dragons got accustomed to being top dogs. They started to enjoy the whole shock-and-awe thing. They forgot that humans weren’t just dumb sheep with thumbs.