Creole Belle

by James Lee Burke

  She shook her head, her eyes on mine.

  “I’m sorry we didn’t get here sooner,” I said. “Two of Pierre’s gumballs were going to kill Gretchen Horowitz and Alafair.”

  Her mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out.

  “I can’t hear you,” I said.

  I brushed her hair out of her eyes and leaned my ear down to her mouth. Her hair was cold and felt as stiff as straw. There was no warmth at all in her breath. Her words were like a damp feather inside my ear. “It’s not Dupree,” she whispered. “They’re everywhere. You were right all along.”

  “Who is everywhere?”

  “I don’t know. I think I’m going to die, Dave.”

  “No, you’re not,” I said.

  She closed one eye as though winking at me. But I realized that there was something wrong with her facial control, and the eyelid had folded of its own accord.

  Clete was standing next to us, staring at the ceiling. At least three people were above us. I thought about spraying the rest of the magazine through the floor. Again I tried to remember the number of rounds I had fired. The magazine of Clete’s AK-47 was a solid banana-shaped block of light metal with no viewing slit. My guess was that I had fired a minimum of ten rounds, perhaps a maximum of fifteen. But in any rapid-fire situation, you almost always let off more rounds than you remember.

  “They’ve got one plan and one plan only, Streak,” Clete said. “None of us down here ever sees sunlight again.”

  He walked toward the staircase that led to the first floor and gestured at me to join him. He looked past my shoulder at Helen, wrapped to the chin in the tablecloth. “We could wait these guys out, but if we do, Helen might not make it,” he said.

  “Let’s take it to them,” I said.

  “We might not get out of this one, Dave. If we don’t, let’s write our names on the wall in big letters.”

  “Three feet high, all in red,” I said.

  “Fuckin’ A, noble mon. Everybody gets to the barn, right?”

  “What’s in your pocket?”

  “I don’t remember. But Pierre Dupree is mine. You copy that?”

  “The goal is to get their weapons. Shitcan the personal agenda.”

  He wiped his mouth on his hand and looked at me and grinned. There was blood on his teeth. I don’t believe he was thinking about mortality, at least not in a fearful way. He was looking at me and I at him as though we were seeing each other as we were when we walked a beat together on Bourbon Street over three decades ago, dressed to the eyes in our blue uniforms, our shoes spit-shined, the roar of a Dixieland band coming from the open door of Sharkey Bonano’s Dream Room. “I heard that damn paddle wheeler out on the bayou,” he said.

  “It’s not there, Clete. And if it is, it’s not there for us.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are forever,” I replied.

  He peeled a stick of gum with one hand, never taking his gaze off my face, a grin breaking at the corner of his mouth. “‘We don’t care what people say, rock and roll is here to stay,’” he said. “That’s from Danny and the Juniors, the greatest single line in the history of music.”

  Then he charged up the stairs, taking them three at a time, his weight almost tearing the handrail from the wall.

  CLETE HAD BEEN right. The Duprees and Varina and their employees wanted to seal us in the bottom of the house and sponge us off the face of the earth. What they had not expected was Clete Purcel coming full-throttle through the door, plunging into the darkness, knocking over a table loaded with crystal ware, creating havoc in their midst, burying himself somewhere near Alexis Dupree’s study. Nor did they expect me to be hard on Clete’s heels, firing first at a man unwise enough to silhouette himself against the French doors, then, from behind a couch, turning on a second man who had just emerged from the kitchen eating a po’boy sandwich with one hand and holding a semi-auto in the other.

  The first man fell against the French doors. I heard something hard knock against the wood floor and guessed that it was his weapon, but I couldn’t be sure. The second man was a different matter. He had left the refrigerator partially open, and I could see him clearly against the crack of white light through the door. He wore a tight-fitting olive-colored T-shirt and cargo pants with pockets all over them; his arms were round, and so were his face and his close-cropped peroxided head. He looked like a man who worked out daily but ate too much. He looked like a man who didn’t have a care in the world, except vague thoughts about the next time he would get laid. I suspected he was right-handed, because his coordination broke down when he realized what was happening around him. Rather than throw his sandwich away, he tried to set it down on a table while he shifted his semi-auto from his left to his right hand, as though all the clocks in the house would stop while he adjusted to the situation.

  “Put it down, bub,” I said. “You can have another season to run.”

  Like most men who commit murder for hire, he probably concluded long ago that as the giver of death, he would never be its recipient. When he aimed at me, his mouth was full of food. He also made a childlike gesture I had seen others make in their last seconds on earth. He extended his left hand in front of him, as though it could save him from the bullets that he knew were about to explode from the muzzle of the AK-47. I know I must have fired at least three times. The first round clipped his fingers from his left hand and patterned them on his T-shirt; the second round hit him in the mouth, and the third ricocheted inside the kitchen, breaking glass and pinging off steel surfaces.

  I crawled to the man who had died by the French doors and turned him over. His fingers were holding on to his Glock. I had to pick up his hand by the wrist and pull it free from its grip on the handles and the trigger guard. I searched in his pockets for a backup magazine or extra bullets but found none. I worked my way over to the kitchen entrance and took a Beretta off the man who had died with lettuce and shrimp and sourdough bread hanging out of his mouth. I found a backup magazine in one of the snap-button pockets of his cargo pants, this one a pre-AWB job that held fourteen rounds.

  I could hear movement upstairs and also out on the porch and in the camellia bushes by the windows. I found a telephone that had spilled on the floor, but there was no dial tone. I suspected the Duprees had cut the phone lines. I moved along the base of the living room wall toward the staircase that led down into the basement. When I peered into the darkness, I could hear someone breathing, then I made out a shape moving up the steps toward me.

  “Gretchen?” I said.

  “Is Clete all right?” she said.

  “He’s fine.” I handed her the Glock. “It probably has a full magazine, but check it. Where’s Alafair?”

  “With the sheriff. She found some blankets. The outside door is locked. We could hear guys talking in the yard. This is the only way out.”

  “I’ve got a Beretta with a reserve magazine that I’m going to give to Clete. How’s Sheriff Soileau?”

  “I think she’s in a coma. Can anybody see into the house from the highway?” she said.

  “I doubt it. The Duprees keep the cops on a pad, anyway.”

  “What if we start a fire?” she said.

  “We’ll have to get Tee Jolie and Helen out. A fire may also serve the Duprees’ purpose better than ours. They might seal us off inside it. We’re going to have to punch our way out, Gretchen.”

  “What happens when this is over?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Am I going down for the hit on Bix Golightly?”

  “I can’t answer that.” I wanted to tell her that perhaps it was time for her to stop thinking about herself. I’m happy I didn’t.

  “I just want to get one thing straight with you. I clipped Golightly, and I’m glad I did,” she said. “In case I don’t come out of this, I want other people to know I didn’t pop him for the money. I did it because he sodomized a six-year-old girl on her birthday.
He’s in hell, and he’ll never be able to hurt another child, and I’m glad I put him there. What do you think of that?”

  “I think Bix got what he had coming, kid.”

  “You mean that?”

  “Take care of Helen and Tee Jolie. When you and Alafair hear shooting, head up the stairs and run for the front door. We’re going to kill everything in sight, got it?”

  “How much ammunition do you have for the AK-47?”

  “Whatever is still in the mag. I’m going to find Clete now. If you get outside and Clete and I don’t get there in one piece, make sure the Duprees go down.”

  “What about Varina?” she asked.

  “In my opinion, Varina is an adverb.”

  “Is this state a fresh-air mental asylum?”

  “How’d you guess?” I said.

  I crawled to Clete’s position and gave him the Beretta and the backup fourteen-round magazine.

  “I think the old man is in the study,” he said. “I heard somebody knocking around in there. Why wouldn’t he have blown Dodge?”

  “His trophies are in there.”

  “Which trophies?” Clete said.

  “The locks of hair from his victims. They’re pressed between the pages of a travel diary.”

  Clete balled up a handkerchief in his hand and smothered a cough. “I feel like something sharp is moving around inside me,” he said.

  I WOULD LIKE to say that the events that were about to happen on the bayou were of a kind that assures us there is a semblance of justice in the world. I would like to believe that there is a resolution in the human tragedy and that order can be reimposed upon the earth in the same way it occurs in the fifth act of the Elizabethan drama that supposedly mirrors our lives. My experience has been otherwise. History seldom corrects itself in its own sequence, and when we mete out justice, we often do it in a fashion that perpetuates the evil of the transgressors and breathes new life into the descendants of Cain.

  I would like to believe the instincts of the mob can be exorcised from the species or genetically bred out of it. But there is no culture in the history of the world that has not lauded its warriors over its mystics. Sometimes in an idle moment, I try to recall the names of five slaves out of the whole sorry history of human bondage whose lives we celebrate. I have never had much success.

  William Faulkner was once asked what he thought of Christianity. He replied, in effect, that he thought it was a fine religion and perhaps we should try it sometime.

  Were the events about to transpire on the bayou that night justified? I wish I could say. If I have found any peace of mind in this world, it lies in accepting that we know almost nothing and understand even less. A fanatical university student murders an archduke and starts a war that kills twenty million people. A man with a fifteen-dollar mail-order rifle fires from the sixth floor of a book depository and changes American history forever. And a flawed engineering system on a drilling rig kills eleven men and fouls an entire ecosystem and almost destroys a way of life. If a person had the power to retroactively undo any of these events, where would he start? The question itself suggests an alpha and an omega that numb the mind.

  Clete Purcel had never thought of himself as a man of great historical significance. In my opinion, he was. He was not only the trickster of folklore, he was one of those who suffered for the rest of us. Many orthodox Jews believe in the legend of the thirteen just men. In their view, were it not for the presence of these thirteen just men who carry the weight of our sins, the world would be a far worse place than it is. Like the thirteen just men, Clete was not herculean. He was made of blood and bones and sinew like the rest of us. That’s the point. His courage and his nobility existed in direct measure to his acceptance of mortality.

  Evil men feared and hated Clete Purcel because they knew he was unlike them. They feared him because they knew he put principle ahead of self-interest, and they feared him because he would lay down his life for his best friend. I think Ben Jonson would have liked and understood Clete and would not have been averse to saying that, like his friend William Shakespeare, Clete was not of an age but for all time.

  I WENT INTO the study bent low, trying not to silhouette against the windows. I saw the shape of a tall figure by the French doors on the far side of the room. I raised the AK-47 in front of me and stood up in front of a bookcase lined with leather-bound reference books of some kind. I could hear Clete behind me. He coughed, choking, into his handkerchief. I saw the tall figure freeze, then seem to dissolve into the shadows.

  “Most of your men are dead, Mr. Dupree,” I said. “You have the power to put an end to this. Give it up and take your chances with the court. Who’s going to put away a ninety-year-old man?”

  “You’ll never leave this property, Mr. Robicheaux,” Alexis replied. “All your knowledge ends here. My wishes have nothing to do with it. The die has already been cast by people who are much more powerful than you and I.”

  “Pop him,” Clete whispered.

  I couldn’t see Dupree well enough to shoot. Also, he was probably the best hostage we could take; I wanted to see him exposed for the genocidal criminal that he was; and last, I wanted to expose all the people who had helped him create a fiefdom out of what once was a tropical paradise.

  “Drop him, Dave,” Clete said.

  I tried to push Clete back with one hand while I kept my eyes on Dupree or at least on the place where I thought he was standing.

  “Do I have to do it?” Clete said, wheezing in the darkness.

  I pushed Clete backward with one hand and moved quickly along the edge of the bookshelves, knocking into the back of Dupree’s swivel chair, tripping on a telephone wire and the connections to a computer. I lifted the AK-47 in front of me as Dupree went out the French doors, his travel diary held to his chest, his regal features as sharp-edged as tin in the starlight.

  I fired once through the glass and heard the round hit something in the gazebo and whine away in the distance.

  “We had a chance to cut the head off the snake, big mon,” Clete said. “You shouldn’t have shoved me like that.”

  “He was no good to us dead,” I replied.

  “Yeah? What if we don’t get out of here and he does? Did you think of that?”

  Clete was on one side of the French doors, and I was on the other. The fog was white and thick and rolling on the surface of the bayou. The tide was coming in, and the pontoon plane moored to the Dupree dock was bobbing up and down in the chop. “I made the call I thought was right,” I said. I looked at the handkerchief balled in his hand. “How you doin’, partner?”

  “I had a bad moment back there, but I’m okay now.”

  “You’ve got to have my back, Cletus.”

  “You saying you don’t want me on point?”

  “Do you have my back or not?”

  He glanced at me, then looked outside at the moss frozen in the live oaks and at the flooded bamboo that rattled in the wind and at a distant sugar mill lit as brightly as an aircraft carrier. “Hear it?” he said.

  “Hear what?”

  “The paddle wheeler. I can hear the steam engines. I can hear the wheel churning in the water.”

  This time I didn’t try to argue with him. “Clete, maybe there’s another way to think about this. Maybe we’re getting a second chance. Maybe we’re putting away some of the guys we didn’t get the last time out.”

  He gazed into my face and smiled. “I’ve got a suggestion.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Let’s just do it. High and hard and down the middle. Shake and bake, snake and nape, full throttle and fuck it. On three, here comes the worst shit storm in the history of Bayou Teche.”

  AND THAT WAS the way we did it. We came through the French doors and across the patio in tandem. I shot a man who stood up behind a camellia bush, and I saw part of his jaw fly from his head in a bloody spray. I shot a second man who dropped his gun and limped gingerly away into the darkness, past the gazebo, press
ing his palm against his thigh, as though he might have sustained a football injury rather than a bullet wound from an AK-47. I saw muzzle flashes from among the camellia and azalea bushes and from behind a restored slave’s cabin and from someone firing from the corner of the carriage house. I even thought I saw a tracer round streak into the distance and die like a tiny spark behind a cane field, but I couldn’t be sure. I fired until the AK-47 was empty, then I stooped over the first man I had shot and pulled a cut-down pump shotgun from his hands and fished in his pockets for the extra shells. He was still alive, his eyes as bright as polished brown marbles, his tongue moving where his jaw should have been. I could not make out the words he was trying to say.

  I did something then that some would consider bizarre. I broke my religious medal from its chain and pressed it in his hand. I don’t know if he had any idea what it was or if he cared, because I didn’t look at him again. Someone had gotten on board the pontoon plane and started up the engine. I ran toward Clete, on the far side of the gazebo, aiming the Beretta straight out in front of him with both hands, firing at the plane taxiing into the middle of the bayou, away from the overhang of the trees.

  “Let them go,” I said. “There’s a guy behind the carriage house. I couldn’t get him.”

  “If anybody got on that plane, it’s the Duprees,” he said.

  “We’ll get them later,” I said.

  “Screw that,” he said. He fired three more rounds, and I heard at least one of them hit the plane’s propeller. Then the bolt on his Beretta locked open on an empty chamber. He dropped the magazine from the frame and inserted the backup magazine and chambered a round.

  “Let the plane go, Clete,” I said.

  It wasn’t really a choice now. The pilot, whoever he or she was, had given it the gas. The plane lifted off the bayou briefly, sputtered once or twice, and set back down, the fog closing as it drifted around a bend with the incoming tide. Whoever was aboard was off the playing field, at least temporarily.