82 Desire

I’m the one who could be dangerous. In fact, if she happened to get a gander at my driver’s license, she’d probably wonder why someone named Edward Favret claims to be Dean Woolverton.
    Before he changed his appearance, he had looked quite a bit like Edward. What could be easier than lifting the wallet of someone whose coat was constantly hanging up a few doors away from Russell’s? Voila—license, cards, the whole nine yards. Of course, he couldn’t charge anything on the cards—and wouldn’t want to anyway. All he wanted was a picture ID to get on a plane, backup cards for it, and a Social Security number. That would be enough paper to open a bank account and buy a boat. The boat thing was a little sticky, because of taxes, but too bad; for that purpose he could just continue being Edward.
    Soon enough, though, he’d have to tackle the problem of getting a fake set of papers.
    The tangled-web cliché flitted briefly across his psyche, and he thought that in his case, it was more or less backward. The line went, “when first we practice to deceive.” For years, he and his pals had woven a magnificent mesh of deceit, not so much as a kink in the silk, much less a tangle. If not for one madman, Ray Boudreaux, they might have gone on doing it until they took over United Oil Company, which in time they might have, they were so successful at what they did.
    Which was screw people out of what was rightfully theirs.
    Of course, the company didn’t know that; they thought the Skinners (a name they’d never hear) got results just because they were brilliant strategists. Which was true. Oh, it was certainly true. Over the years, they had come up with some unbelievably brilliant schemes, many of them crookeder than a mountain trail. The one they’d pulled on Ray Boudreaux was about the best.
    In fact, that was the one that haunted Russell the most, the one he’d thought about most in the darkness of those five days. It was so relentlessly, revoltingly mean it made him wonder if there was any possible redemption for those who’d participated.
    But the Skinners hadn’t started out to be mean at all, or even to be dishonest. They were four perfectly ordinary young balls of fire (well, Favret and Seaberry were balls of fire—Fortier and Cavignac were just guys doing their jobs), who happened to get a nearly impossible assignment.
    That is, Seaberry got the assignment, and recruited his buddies to help him with it.
    Somebody at the top didn’t like Seaberry, or else (no doubt correctly) perceived that Seaberry posed a threat to him. While everybody else was out doing exciting stuff in the Gulf, Seaberry had been charged with the job of finding lucrative reservoirs in Jefferson and Plaquemines Parish. They were there, all right, and because of the new Three-D seismic equipment, they were being found. The problem was, they were often on land already leased to someone else—someone who wouldn’t be interested in selling.
    It was a stupid, thankless, frustrating assignment, and they were having fairly poor results. All of them were feeling tense, and one weekend they’d gone duck hunting.
    Russell hadn’t thought about it in so long he’d forgotten that part. They were in this camp, this male-bonding kind of place that belonged to a friend of Favret’s, where they’d just made some robust firehouse meal like spaghetti (“pasta” was far too effete) and garlic bread. They’d tossed back quite a few brews and probably some Scotches as well, and they were probably telling some sort of macho lies—about past football prowess or something—when somehow the talk took a swing toward the thing that was getting them down.
    They’d been tense with each other at the time—tense in general—and they were feeling relaxed for the first time in weeks or even months. How it happened, Russell would never know—maybe the stars were right for it.
    But the general atmosphere of guy-type exaggeration had somehow spawned it.
    One minute they were sitting there cursing the assholes who’d gotten them into this and the next they were joking about outrageous ways out of it—kill the guys who were doing the glamorous stuff, or maybe kill the guys with the leases.
    Russell could remember the exact moment it had started. He could see Beau Cavignac waving a beer, wearing some stupid flannel shirt that belonged on a lumberjack, and saying, “Listen, there’s more than one way to skin a cat—let’s just kill ’em