The JetRanger edges up to the colossal tree, chopping branches into kindling like the world’s biggest Weedwacker. A choking lump rises in my throat. Caitlin is sitting with her back against the cypress. She’s still too far away for me to see if her eyes are open or closed, but if she were all right, she would be jumping and waving at the helicopter.

“Get us down, Danny! Hurry!”

With an expert hand, Danny noses the chopper still closer to the enormous cypress, descending all the while. Suddenly Carl is at my shoulder, staring through the side window with me.

“I’ll go down first,” he says. “With the hoist.”

“Bullshit you will.” I grab the handle on my chest and pop the harness free.

Carl opens the side door, then begins prepping the rescue basket. When I look forward, Danny is holding a pair of field glasses to his eyes.

“What do you see?” I ask, dread filling my chest.

“She’s got blood on her chest. A good bit. Her eyes are closed. We’ve got to get her out of there ASAP. Let Carl go down first.”

“I’m going down.”

“Penn, wait.” Danny looks back, his eyes searching mine from beneath his helmet. “Your father’s down there, too. He’s lying face-up, his eyes are closed, and he’s not moving.”

I scramble back to where Carl is prepping the aluminum mesh basket for descent and drop to the floor. From here, I can see the pilot was right. Dad is lying on his back about ten feet from Caitlin, near the water’s edge.

How the hell did this happen? How did he get here? In less than a second I know the answer: Snake Knox brought him here.

Carl checks the hoist’s cables, then gives Danny a thumbs-up. We’re only six feet above the water now. I’m going to jump. As though reading my mind, Carl grabs for my arm, but I twist away and leap through the door before he can stop me.

My feet dig into soft mud as icy water closes around my chest. The chopper’s rotors fling a stinging storm of spray and debris into the air, nearly forcing my eyes shut. Just above me, Carl slides the rescue basket through the open door.

At six foot one, I can bull my way over to the cypress without swimming. Pushing through the sulfurous water, I see a dark vertical slash in its trunk, like a great scar left by the sword of a giant. She really found it, I think. That’s the fucking Bone Tree. This realization transforms the cold iron of dread into molten terror—not of the tree and its legends, but of the men who use it as their killing ground.

Clawing my way out of the water, I scrabble up onto the tussock beside my father. “Dad!” I shout, shaking him. “Wake up!”

He doesn’t move. Checking the pulse at his throat, I feel nothing, but my fingers are already stiff from the cold water. Leaving him for the moment, I crawl to Caitlin, whose stomach and lap are red with sticky blood. My right hand goes straight for the artery beneath her jaw. Her lips are blue and her neck strangely swollen, but she’s faintly warm, as though life still thrums somewhere beneath her skin.

There’s no pulse in her throat.

“Caitlin!” I shout, taking her cheeks in my hands and squeezing tight. “Caitlin, can you hear me?”

She doesn’t move. With rising panic I turn and wave to Carl for help. He’s fighting through the water now, nose and eyes just above the surface, dragging the rescue basket behind him. Turning back to Caitlin, I slide my hand over her belly, searching for her wound. My palm hits something hard: a Bic pen, stuck to the blood on her stomach. Six inches above it is a small hole beneath her left breast. A bullet made that. . . .

A loud splashing sounds behind me, and the ground thumps as Carl drops to his knees at my side. “Any pulse?”

“Nothing. She’s bled out, Carl. She’s dead!”

His dark fingers go to her throat, where mine were moments ago. “My ass,” he says. “I feel something!” He presses his ear to her chest. “This girl ain’t dead till a doctor tells me she is. Let’s get her in the chopper. We can make Baton Rouge General in fifteen minutes!”

“The basket?” I ask numbly.

“Fuck the basket! Danny’s practically on the surface. I’ll carry her. You get your old man. He’s bigger.”

As Carl turns to the hovering chopper and waves Danny still lower, I run to my father and grab him beneath the arms. Struggling with his heavy bulk, I see Carl drag Caitlin away from the Bone Tree, lift her slim body over his shoulders, and charge into the blast of spray coming off the water. Replaying the scene in Brody’s basement two nights ago, I drop to my knees and heave my father’s body over my shoulder, then march down into the black water while Danny’s screaming rotors smash bone-thick branches off the towering tree above me.

CHAPTER 72

WALT HAD KEPT nearly a mile between himself and Forrest’s cruiser as he followed his quarry southward. The GPS tracker allowed him that luxury. He prayed that Knox and Ozan were driving to wherever Tom was being held. If they weren’t, then Forrest might already have given the kill order, and Tom could be dead or dying at this moment.

For the thousandth time Walt cursed Mackiever for not bugging Knox’s car, but there was nothing to be done now. All he could do was follow Knox and the Redbone to wherever they were bound. The cruiser was following a roundabout back road that looked as though it might lead around the Lusahatcha Swamp, toward the Mississippi River. Walt couldn’t actually see any water, but he could smell it. When you lived in a dry state like Texas, you got to where you could smell rain from a hundred miles off.

When he slowed Drew’s pickup to soften the sickening drop of a pothole, the guns in the bag on the floor behind him made a reassuring clank. Thinking himself at the end of this empty, winding road, Walt visualized various scenarios. No matter what odds he confronted, he could not hesitate to fire, as he’d done back at the Bouchard lake house. In fact, he decided, he would shoot the bastards in the back if he got the chance. Kidnapping was a felony, after all.

I ain’t proud today, he thought. Or particular.

FORREST KNOX LEANED AGAINST the side of his cruiser and watched the pirogue glide toward him out of the cypress trees. Ozan looked back from the water’s edge and gave him a thumbs-up sign. If the boy in the boat had done as instructed, then Caitlin Masters was no longer a problem.

Forrest had parked his cruiser right beside the boy’s junk pickup truck. He left his engine running, so he couldn’t hear the hum of the trolling motor as the pirogue neared the shore. Harold Wallis raised his left hand and waved. Ozan waved back. As Wallis cut his motor and drifted toward them, Forrest could see the kid was surprised to find them waiting for him.

“Hey there, Colonel!” Wallis called. “I didn’t expect to see ya’ll out here.”

The pirogue’s bow bumped the shore.

“I guess you didn’t,” Ozan said, “since you didn’t call us back.”

Harold opened his mouth but no answer emerged.

Forrest took a couple of steps toward the water’s edge. It surprised him that a drug courier like this boy couldn’t sense the danger in what he had done.

“That was a big job you did for us, Harold,” he said. “We want you to know we appreciate it.”

The boy relaxed a little, but he didn’t move to get out of the boat.

“What about the girl?” Ozan asked. “She dead?”

Harold ducked his head with an exaggerated nod. “Yes, sir. She gone. Long gone.”

“How many times did you shoot her?”

Wallis’s eyes flicked back and forth. “Oh, three, fo’ times. Right in the chest. She died inside the tree.”

“You checked to be sure?”