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"No. He never did."
"Then when the water comes up and his men start drowning, he's got one place to go." She taps the little square of the church on the map. "Inside."
It's a good plan. It's cold and simple, and it uses everything they built against them. It keeps the girls asleep on a floor where nobody reaches them, drowns the Guidry crew in the same water they drowned girls in, and backs Judah into a building with only one way out.
It also puts her alone in that bowl in the dark with forty men who have been told she's theirs.
"No," I tell her.
"No to what?"
"To you as bait. I'll walk down there."
"They're afraid of you, Silas. That's the difference." Her voice stays level. "You show yourself, and those men scatter to the tree line and shoot from cover, and Judah is in his car before you're halfway down the slope. Nobody goes into the water. The gates open on an empty basin, and at ten-thirty the masks walk to the fellowship hall and collect eleven girls, and you're pinned in the trees by rifles." She leans toward me. "For me they bring rope. They come close. They come into the water."
"And if one of them doesn't wait for the water?"
"Then you'll be there."
"And if I'm not?"
"Then I shoot him." She rises onto her knees in front of me and takes my face in both hands. Her palms are cool against my jaw. "Listen to me. Every man who drowns in that bowl is a man who never walks through the fellowship hall door. Every single one. There isn't another way to keep all eleven of them breathing."
I'd have drawn it the same way if it were anybody else going down that slope.
"You're right," I tell her.
She searches my face a moment longer, then presses a brief, dry kiss to my forehead and lets me go.
She lies down on the cot with the binder under one hand and the phone on her chest. Within ten minutes she's asleep, her lips shaping words I can't hear.
I sit against the cinder block and watch the lantern gutter.
I agreed because she's right. I also agreed because I already know what I'll do if a mask reaches her before the water does. I'll abandon the high side and the church steps and the whole careful plan, and I'll go into that bowl after her without a half second's thought. I keep that to myself. She'd call it weakness. The old man certainly would have.
For six years, Saturday night has been the reason I opened my eyes every morning. I've lived in the marsh on what I could catch, let the parish believe I was bones in a gator hole, and kept myself alive for one purpose: to walk into that church and finish what I promised Judah the night I let him up off the floor.
I look at her asleep with her sister's locket closed in her fist.
For the first time since I walked into the swamp, I'm not sure Judah is what I most want to walk out of that church for.
CHAPTER 13
EVIE
Silas steals the welding truck at four in the afternoon from a pipeline contractor's yard off Parish 20, and he does it in daylight, which I didn't think anybody did.
"Nobody looks twice at a man in coveralls driving a welding rig," he explains as we bump down the lease road with the steel bed rattling behind us. "There are two hundred of these trucks in this parish. The crews knocked off at noon for Halloween weekend. Nobody will miss it until Monday."
He's found coveralls somewhere, gray, stenciled BAYOU PIPELINE SVC across the back, and a ball cap pulled low. I'm in a canvas jacket two sizes too big and a pair of his old boots stuffed with socks, with my hair shoved up under a knit cap and the AR-15 lying across my knees under a feed sack. My left eye has opened most of the way. The stitches in my brow itch.
We come up the back side of the ridge at dusk on a gravel road that serves the reservoir and nothing else. The trees open, and there it is, flat and gray and wider than I remembered, the water holding the last of the light like a sheet of tin. At its southern end the dam slopes away, and halfway down that slope sits the gatehouse, a squat concrete box with a steel door and a rusted railing, and below it the spillway runs down the hill in a stone channel toward the old cemetery.
Silas parks behind a stand of cedar and kills the engine. We sit in the cab a moment, listening. Nothing but wind in the cedars and a heron croaking somewhere along the waterline.
"The door has a padlock," he tells me. "Boudreaux keeps the key. I'll be forty minutes, maybe less. The welder's loud. If anything comes up that road, you knock twice on the gatehouse door with the rifle butt and get down."
"And then?"
