I saw Alafair standing motionlessly in the bedroom window, the curtains pulled back on either side of her. If there was any expression on her face, I couldn’t see it. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Clete moving toward the cruiser that was parked back in the shadows. My heart was racing, my throat dry, the rain clicking on my hat. Behind me, I heard Clete rip open the front door of the cruiser.
“Dave, don’t do it!” he called out.
I knocked Carolyn Blanchet on her butt getting into the house.
CHAPTER 26
The body of the deputy assigned to watch our house never moved when Clete opened the cruiser’s door. The deputy’s eyes were half-lidded, their stare forever fixed on nothing. His head was tilted slightly to one side, almost in a quizzical manner, a thread of blood leaking from his hat down one cheek. His handheld radio was gone, and the wiring had been ripped out from under the dashboard. The interior light had been manually turned off, and Clete couldn’t find the switch to get it back on again. The battery in his cell phone was dead, and a car he tried to flag down veered around him and kept going. Clete pulled the body of the deputy from behind the wheel and left it in the street to draw as much attention as possible to the scene. Then he started running through the side yard toward the back of the house, his .38 gripped in his right hand, water and mud exploding from under his shoes.
* * *
As soon as I came through the front door, a man I had never seen kicked the door shut behind me and swung a blackjack at my head. I raised my arm and took part of the blow on my shoulder and the rest just behind the ear, enough to bring me to my hands and knees but not enough to knock me unconscious.
Through our bedroom door, I could see Molly in an embryonic position on the floor, her mouth duct-taped and her arms stretched behind her, her wrists duct-taped to her ankles. The room was in disarray, a sewing box and the cosmetics that had been on her dresser broken and stepped on and tracked across the throw rugs. It was obvious she had put up a fight. Robert Weingart was pointing a.25 auto straight down at the side of her face. Alafair stood in the shadows, staring at me, blood patina’d on the tops of her bare feet, her pink dress streaked with mud, her hair matted. “I couldn’t warn you. He was going to shoot Molly,” she said.
“Don’t worry about it, Alf,” I said.
“Lie down on your face, sir,” the man who had hit me said. “Arms straight out. You know the drill.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
He reached down, ignoring my question, pulling my .45 from its holster.
“You were one of the guys at the river?” I said.
“Just a guy doing a job. Don’t make it personal, sir,” he said.
“What did they do to you, Alafair?” I said.
“They took my shoes and my feet got cut, but that’s all that happened,” she said.
“You sure have a way of blundering into things, Mr. Robicheaux,” a voice said from the kitchen.
I twisted my head around so I could see the figure silhouetted in the hallway. Kermit Abelard stepped into the light. “Waiting on Mr. Purcel, are you?” he said. “I wouldn’t. This time your friend went way beyond his limits.”
“You think you can create a clusterfuck like this and just walk away from it?” I said.
“Let’s wait and see,” he replied. His expression was serene, his cheeks splotched with color as though he were blushing, his eyes warm. He seemed to be waiting on something, like a man whose prescience is confirmed with each tick of the clock. “Ah, there it is. That guttural, puffing sound, like a man with strep throat trying to cough? That’s Mr. Purcel eating a couple of rounds from a silenced forty-caliber Smith and Wesson. You put him up to killing my grandfather, didn’t you? The quixotic knight-errant, waging war on a crippled old man.”
“That’s really dumb, Kermit,” I said. “I hate to tell you this, but your trained yard bitch in there has put the slide on you. He hung your grandfather up like a side of beef. Think about it. Who else would do something like that? Not me, not Clete Purcel, not anybody you know except the guy you sprung from Huntsville and who paid you back by offing your grandfather.”
“I have no illusions about Robert. But he respected my grandfather. He didn’t kill him. Your fat friend did, and you and your family are going to pay for it.”
The man who had hit me began taping my wrists behind me. “Better talk to your employer, bud,” I said. “You guys are pros. This is Louisiana. You pop a cop, you’re going to the injection table, provided you ever make the jail.”
I could hear the man breathing as he worked, his fingers winding the tape around my wrists, notching it into the bones. Then he taped my ankles. “Who are you guys?” I said. “Mercs? You know the score. Use your head.”
But he made no reply.
“Hundreds of millions, maybe even billions, are hanging in the balance, Mr. Robicheaux,” Kermit said. “Somebody will end up owning that money. It might be the government or the state or plaintiffs in a civil suit or me and Robert and Carolyn. But somebody will own it. And whoever owns and keeps it will have these kinds of men working for them. Are you so naive that you don’t believe the most powerful families in this country aren’t guilty of the same crimes Robert and I might have committed?”
He began to rake through a litany of collective sins that ranged from the Ludlow massacre to support of the Argentine junta to the abandonment of a girl in a submerged car by a famous United States senator. Paradoxically, he seemed oblivious that his grandfather had been friends with some of the very people he was denigrating.
“You had better get done with this, sir,” said the man who had wrapped my wrists.
“See what’s going on in back,” Kermit said.
“We can take care of this, sir. I think you should go.”
Kermit gazed at Alafair through the doorway, his eyes wistful. “Do everybody except her,” he said.
“You’re taking her with you, sir? I wouldn’t advise that.”
“No, Robert will be handling Alafair before we leave.”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Weingart said.
Kermit pulled aside a curtain and looked out front. “By the way, Mr. Robicheaux, one of our team just hooked a wrecker to the cruiser and is hauling it and the driver away. Don’t expect the cavalry anytime soon.”
I was on my face, my heart beating against the floor, the soiled odor of the carpet climbing into my nostrils. Down the bayou, I thought I heard the drawbridge clank open and rise into the air and the engines of a large vessel laboring upstream against the current.
Kermit squatted so he could look directly into my face. “I didn’t want any of this to happen. You forced the situation, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said. “You hate people of my background. You’ve spent a lifetime resenting others for the fact that you were born poor. Admit it.”
“You’re wrong about that, Kermit. The Abelards were a great source of humor for everybody around here. Everyone was laughing at you behind your back, you most of all. You didn’t get screwed at birth, Kermit. Your mother did when her diaphragm slipped.”
Kermit stood erect. “Get it done,” he said to the man who liked to call people “sir.”
* * *
Clete Purcel charged along the side of the house behind a row of camellia bushes and clumps of bamboo and untrimmed banana plants. But he didn’t stop when he reached the backyard. Instead, he kept running down the slope, deeper into the trees and darkness, until he had a view of both the bayou and the entirety of the house. He could see the back porch and the kitchen and Alafair’s bedroom; he could see Tripod’s chain extending from the hutch up into the tree where Tripod was hiding; he could see the shapes of three men wearing rain hoods of the kind the men at the shoot-out on the river had worn.
Their backs were turned to Clete. They were looking down the driveway and down the walk space between the camellias on the far side of the house. Then one of them began to wander down toward the bayou, pointing the beam of a penlight ah
ead of him. Clete drew himself against a live oak, one shoulder pressed tightly against the bark, and waited. The hooded man walked within two feet of him, his small hooked nose in profile against the green and red lights on the drawbridge. Clete put away his .38 and stepped quickly from behind the oak tree, wrapping his arms under the hooded man’s chin, snapping upward, all in one motion. For a second, he thought he heard a cracking sound, like someone easing his foot down on a dry stick. He pulled the hooded man deeper into the trees and dropped him in the leaves, then retrieved the penlight and the silenced semiautomatic the man had been carrying.
Clete moved quickly up the slope, threading his way between the trunks of the trees, his feet sinking into the soft pad of pine needles and decayed pecan husks and the leaves from the water oaks that were yellow and black and still lay in sheaves on the ground from the previous winter. The two men who had been looking down the driveway and the walk space on the far side of the house had returned to the center of the backyard and were now gazing down the slope. “You out there, Lou?” one of them said.
Clete stepped behind a big camellia bush strung with Spanish moss. He pointed the penlight toward the neighbor’s house and clicked it on and off three times. Then he stuck the pen between his teeth and said, “Got him.”
“You got him?”
“Yeah,” Clete said, the pen still between his teeth.
“Why didn’t you say something?” the other man said. “This whole gig sucks. These people are out of Gone With the Wind.”
“No, you got it wrong,” the other man said. “They’re out of Suddenly, Last Summer. It’s by Tennessee Williams. It’s about this New Orleans faggot that gets cannibalized on a beach by a bunch of peasants. Lou, quit playing with yourself and get up here.”
The bridge at Burke Street was opening, the surface of the bayou shuddering with the vibration of the machinery. The bow of a large vessel slid between the pilings, the lighted pilothouse shining in the rain. “What the hell is that?” one of the men said.
“I told you, it’s Gone With the Wind. This place is a fresh-air nuthouse.”
The two men had started walking down the slope almost like tourists, confident in their roles, confident in the night that lay ahead of them, unperturbed by considerations of mortality or the suffering of the people inside the house they had invaded.
Clete Purcel moved out of the trees with remarkable agility for a man his size. He lifted the semiautomatic and its suppressor with both hands, aiming with his arms fully extended. The hooded men did not seem to realize how quickly their situation had reversed. Clete shot the first man through the eye and the second one in the throat. They both fell straight to the ground and made no sound that he could hear inside the rain.
* * *
While Kermit held a pistol on me, the man who had duct-taped my wrists went into the kitchen. I heard the dry sound of a metal cap being unscrewed from a metal container, then a sloshing sound, and a moment later I smelled the bright stench of gasoline. Robert Weingart pushed Alafair on the floor next to me, then bound her wrists and ankles. He removed his belt and looped it around her throat but did not tighten it. He checked to see if I was watching him work.
“You guys can’t be this stupid,” I said. “You think anybody is going to buy it as anything except arson?”
“You’re going to die from a gas explosion, Mr. Robicheaux,” Weingart said. “A big yellow fireball that will go poof up through the treetops. When it’s done, you’ll all be nothing but ashes.”
“Listen to me, Kermit,” I said. “You can get out of this. You have money and power on your side. You can claim diminished capacity. There are always alternatives. What do you think Weingart is going to do when this is over? He’ll bleed you the rest of your life.”
Weingart raised his shoe just slightly, then pressed the tip into my ear, twisting the sole back and forth, gradually coming down harder and harder, crushing my face flat into the carpet.
“That’s enough, Robert,” Kermit said.
“Signing off now, Mr. Robicheaux,” Weingart said. He raised his foot and drove it into my forehead just above the eyebrow, bringing the heel into the bone.
“Don’t say any more to them, Dave,” Alafair said. “They’re not worth it. They’re both cowards. Kermit told me when he was little and did something bad, his mother would make him put on a dress and sit all day in the front yard. That’s why he’s so cruel. He’s been a frightened, shame-faced little boy all his life.”
“You’d better keep your mouth shut, Alafair,” Kermit said.
“You’re pathetic. That won’t change. We’ll be dead, and you’ll be alive and pathetic and an object of ridicule the rest of your life. Your lover is known in publishing as a piece of shit. That’s what you sleep with every night — a piece of shit. I suspect eventually he’ll dose you with clap or AIDS, if he hasn’t already.”
“Are you going to put a stop to this, or do you want me to?” Weingart said to Kermit.
“Let them talk. Maybe you’ll be able to pick up some good dialogue,” Kermit said.
“I thought that’s what you were working on underground, there by the river,” Weingart said. “What did you call it? The flowers of evil having their final say. Remember what you said? They always beg.”
The front door opened and Carolyn Blanchet came inside, wiping the rain off her head. “I thought you were going to take them somewhere,” she said.
* * *
Clete Purcel grabbed one of the hooded dead men by the wrists and pulled him away from the house and dropped him behind the toolshed. Then he went back and got the second man and did the same. He went through their pockets, looking for a cell phone. But neither man carried one. Nor did either man carry a wallet or wear jewelry other than a wristwatch. Apart from coins that might have been used for parking meters, the dead men’s pockets contained only keys, each of a kind that might have fit the ignition of a car or SUV or boat. Their wristwatches were identical, the bands made of black leather, the titanium cases and faces black also, the numerals fluorescent. One man wore a tattoo of Bugs Bunny eating a carrot; the other man had one of the Tasmanian Devil. The figures were overly round, the coloration bright and festive, the singularity of the cartoon on an otherwise bare piece of skin like a cynical theft from one’s childhood.
The neighbor’s house was dark, and there was no sound of traffic on the street. The rain was pattering on the tree limbs above Clete’s head, the fog spreading thicker on the ground, rising like smoke around the bodies of the men he had killed. Out on the bayou, he thought he heard the sound of a large boat straining upstream, the draft too deep for the channel, the keel scouring huge clouds of mud from the bottom. But when he looked over his shoulder, he could see nothing in the fog except the lights across the water in City Park.
Clete stripped the raincoat off the body of one of the dead men and put it on. It smelled of wet leaves and humus and tobacco and wood smoke, like the smell of a man who had been sitting in a winter deer camp. Clete removed his .38 from his holster and looked down at the face of the man he had killed. The man’s eyes were blue and seemed to have no pupils. His mouth was parted slightly, as though he had been interrupted in midspeech. “Hang tight,” Clete said. “I’m about to send you some company.”
* * *
“See what’s keeping those guys out there,” Kermit said.
The man who had been sloshing gasoline through the kitchen and back bedroom set down the can in the hallway. “They’re probably bringing up the boat,” he said.
“‘Probably’ isn’t a good word in a situation like this,” Kermit said.
The man who had knocked me down and taped my wrists walked to the glass in the back door and rubbed it with his forearm. A cartoon of Goofy was tattooed just above the inside of his wrist. He wore a black T-shirt and bleached chinos and half-topped boots. He was one of those men who seemed ageless, wrapped too tight for his own skin, the modulation in his voice disconnected from the visceral energy
in his eyes. He had pushed my .45 down into the back of his belt. He was having trouble seeing into the backyard, and he rubbed the glass again. “I think that’s Lou,” he said.
“Think?” Kermit said. He went into the kitchen. Weingart walked into the hallway also, unable to contain his curiosity or perhaps his fear, glancing back at us briefly.
Alafair’s face was inches from mine. “Molly’s got the scissors,” she whispered.
Through the bedroom doorway, I could see Molly’s eyes bulging and the indentation of her lips behind the tape stretched across her mouth. Her upper arms were ridging with tubes of muscle as she tried to work the pair of scissors from the sewing box between the strands of tape wrapped around her wrists. Then I saw her blink unexpectedly, saw her shoulders expand slightly as she severed the tape.
Carolyn Blanchet walked past me and Alafair into the kitchen. “I’m going now,” she said to the others.
“No, you’re not,” Kermit said.
“I did what you asked, and I’m no longer connected with anything that happens here. So I’ll say ta-ta now, with just one request: Kermit, please don’t call me for a very long time.”
“Do you believe this crap?” Weingart said.
I could see the man in the black T-shirt looking out a window, kneading the back of his neck.
“You’re not leaving,” Kermit said.
“That’s what you think, love,” Carolyn replied.
“I wouldn’t provoke Kermit,” Weingart said. “He has a penchant for certain kinds of female situations I don’t think you want to enter into.”
“Mr. Abelard, I think we need to concentrate on priorities,” the man in the black T-shirt said.
“What’s the problem?” Kermit asked.
“My friends and I didn’t sign on for a catfight, sir.”
“Really? Then why don’t you take care of your bloody job and mind your own fucking business?” Kermit said.
The man in the black T-shirt seemed to process Kermit’s remark, his shoulders slightly rounded, his chest flat as a prizefighter’s, his face uplifted, his incisors exposed with his grin. “I’ll be outside taking care of my fucking business, sir,” he said. “I think this will be our last assignment, though. The boys and I have been a unit a long time, Senegal to South Africa, Uzbekistan to the Argentine. I can’t say this one has been a pleasure.”
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