As he fell again, hard, one of the leg-supports snapped in half, making it impossible for him to rise. Ryan could see the damage more clearly. It looked like the heavy caliber bullet had angled up and sideways, smashing the upper jaw, boring through the top of his mouth, exiting through the cheekbone, just below the right eye.
It had torn the eye itself from the socket, leaving it hanging on his cheek, like a pendulous ornament.
Ryan stood up, leveling the G-12, ready to chill the wounded man.
“Pull that trigger, and I’ll ice you, Ryan,” came the cold voice of Jak Lauren, also standing, his big Magnum looking absurdly large in his small fist. But it was very steady.
“What do you want, Whitey?”
“Couple things.” He walked to stand by the thrashing man, and leveling the pistol, carefully shot Tourment four times. Once through each elbow and the center of each knee. The giant black man rolled helplessly, moaning in pain, unable to move.
His face like stone, Jak unbuttoned the front of his trousers. Keeping his threat, he urinated in the baron’s upturned face, the yellow liquid splashing in the man’s eyes and mouth, making him gag and choke.
“That’s for my father. The bullets are for all my friends. But this last is for me,” said the boy, bolstering the pistol and unwinding a length of thin cord from around his waist and beckoning for Ryan to help him.
Ryan Cawdor had always seen the justice of making the punishment fit the crime. For a man as blackly evil as Baron Tourment, that wasn’t a simple matter. But Jak’s plan was simple and would fit the bill.
IT WASN’T EASY to manhandle the flopping, screaming giant down to the water, and roll him into the soft warm mud of the shallows while he tried to scream through his broken jaw and smashed mouth. Blood kept choking him, and he coughed and moaned.
The rope was tied around his waist, the other end knotted to the stern of one of the canoes. Both Jak and Ryan got into it, pushing off and paddling as hard as they could. The cord tightened, and for a few moments they were paddling and getting nowhere. Then the Baron was sucked free of the slime, rolling and flailing in their wake.
Jak looked back, nodding in satisfaction. Stopping for a moment, he slapped at the brown water with the flat of the wooden paddle.
“What’s that for?” asked Ryan.
“You see,” replied the boy.
Glancing over his shoulder, Ryan saw a huge log, motionless on the far shore, suddenly jerk into clumsy, waddling life and slither into the water and disappear. A V-shaped ripple on the surface of the swamp, arrowing toward them, indicated that the beast was approaching.
Ryan bent to his paddling, but Jak Lauren had stopped once more, gazing back at the floundering figure of the baron with an expression of gentle content on his narrow, scarred features.
In turn, Ryan stopped. Ahead of them the last portion of the roof of the Best Western Snowy Egret collapsed in a great shower of sparks, soaring skyward. For a moment, smoke billowed across the lagoon, making it difficult to, make out what was happening. Then it cleared.
The cayman was swimming alongside the towed body. It reared out of the water for a moment, its eyes gazing into the ruined face of its master as though it couldn’t believe what it saw. Then the jaws opened, gaping, row on row of teeth.
And closed.
RYAN WOULD NEVER FORGET that sickening crunch of bone and meat being devoured, stripped from a living body.
By the time they had paddled back to the dock where the others waited for them, the end of the rope was just a bloodied knot. Nothing else remained.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“NO, WHITEY.”
“Come on, Ryan.”
“No. Your fucking place is here. They’re your people. We helped you beat the baron. Now it’s up to you.”
“I’m coming.”
“No, you’re not. What about the windmills? The clearing and draining of the land? The planting of crops and the founding of a settled ville for you and your folks?”