“I thought I saw a light on the first floor,” he said. “It was on, then it went off. Maybe it was a reflection off the lake.”
“You see any vehicles?” I asked.
“I can’t tell. The cherry trees are in the way. How do you want to play it?”
It was a good question. “We need to confirm we’ve got the right house,” I said.
“He’s in there, Dave. I can smell that guy through the walls.”
I stopped the truck and cut the engine. Gretchen did the same. The wind was out of the west, and I could hear it rustling loudly through the cherry trees. I could also hear waves lapping on the shore, and I could almost hear the echoes of migrant farmworkers singing an ode about a legendary engineer taking his train through the Blue Ridge and Smoky mountains to a place beyond the stars. All the clues to Surrette’s location fitted the place. The only question was whether we should call the sheriff’s department.
Clete read my thoughts. “Don’t do it,” he said. “It will take them two hours or more to pull a team together. They’ll either get here too late or screw it up.”
Both of us knew that was not the reason for his objection. Clete had decided that Surrette and anyone working with him were DOA. In case I doubted that, he added, “You cut their motors and they go straight down, dead before their knees hit the ground. Bad guys lose; hostages come home. End of story. Listen to me on this, Streak. Molly’s and Albert’s lives depend on us, not on anyone else.”
I heard a popping sound and realized someone was firing bottle rockets over the lake. Alafair walked up to my window. “What’s the holdup?” she said.
“This is one we can’t make a mistake on,” I said. I dropped my eyes to her right hand. “Where’d you get the Beretta?”
“It’s Gretchen’s. Let’s get on it, Dave. You’ve never met this guy. I have. He needs ten seconds to ruin the life of a human being. Think about that.”
I got out of the pickup with Albert’s M-1 rifle and the bandolier stuffed full of .30–06 clips. Clete stepped out on the other side, bareheaded, his hair blowing on his forehead. There was an innocence in his face that made me think of the little boy going to the rich lady’s house in the Garden District, expecting ice cream and cake and discovering he had been invited there as an object of pity, one of many tattered children whom in reality the rich lady would not touch unless she were wearing dress gloves. He opened the cast-iron toolbox welded to the bed of my pickup and removed a pair of wire cutters and a crowbar. Gretchen came up behind us, an AR-15 slung over her shoulder, a pair of binoculars in her right hand.
“Did you all see a light inside?” she asked.
“A few minutes ago,” Clete said.
“Where?”
“On the first floor, maybe in the living room.”
“For just an instant I saw a light at ground level, like somebody had pulled back a curtain on a basement window,” she said. “Hear me out before we start busting down doors. I think Felicity Louviere is dead. Maybe the girls, too. With luck, Molly and Albert are still alive. This is what I think will happen when we go in: Surrette will kill everybody in his proximity, then himself. He’s a coward, and he’ll die a coward’s death at the expense of everyone else.”
“What’s the alternative?” I asked.
“There isn’t one,” she said. “I just thought you might like to know what we’re looking at.”
We walked four abreast down the driveway while someone on a boat or an island in the middle of the lake continued to fire rockets into the sky, all of them bursting into giant tentacles of pink foam high above the vastness of the lake.
I spoke earlier of advice that I had received from others and always remembered. Now I heard a nameless voice repeating an admonition that I had pushed aside, a premise that almost all investigative law enforcement officers never forget. Crime is about money, sex, or power. If you have the money, you can buy the sex and power. So follow the money.
The other admonition I had forgotten was from my old friend the line sergeant: Don’t let them get behind you.
Chapter 38
The combination of fear and fatigue and the bruises and cuts on her face had worked like a cancer on Molly’s spirit. No matter how hard she tried to hold her head erect, her eyes kept closing and her chin sinking to her chest. She could feel herself slipping away, as though she were dissolving inside warm water, the breakdown of her body becoming its own anodyne, as though a voice were whispering that it was no sin to let the soul depart from the body and be on its way.
Asa Surrette had gone back upstairs, leaving Jack Boyd and Terry in charge.
“Do you fellows know what a fall partner is?” Molly heard Albert say.
“Queer bait on the stroll in October?” Boyd said.
“The guy you get pinched with,” Terry said.
“Surrette never had a fall partner,” Albert said.
“Meaning he works alone?” Terry said. “What else is new?”
“He’s not that smart,” Albert said. “But when it’s over, he’s the only guy left standing. What’s that tell you?”
“I know where you’re going with that,” Terry said. “Look, go out with some dignity, old-timer. Don’t start turning dials on the wrong guy and treating other people like they’re simpletons.”
There was a popping sound, high in the sky. Terry climbed on a chair below the window that was taped over with a black leaf bag. He peeled the bag from the corner of the glass and peered out.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Boyd said.
“That noise. It’s people shooting off fireworks over the lake.”
“Tape up that window!” Boyd said.
“All right, don’t shit your pants. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Jack, but I think you’re out of your depth. You should stick to taking bribes.”
Surrette opened the upstairs door and came down the steps. “What’s going on down here? What were you doing on that chair?”
“People are shooting fireworks on the lake,” Terry said. “I’m a little tired of the way I’m being talked to, here. I’d like to finish this up and get paid and be on my way, if you don’t mind too much. I don’t like that stuff with the kids, either.”
Surrette approached, his formless suit loose on his body, his Roman sandals scudding on the concrete floor, a malevolent glow in his face. He took a coil of clothesline from his coat pocket. It seemed to drop like a white snake from his palm as he pressed it into Terry’s hand. “So show me what you can do,” he said.
“The broad and the old guy?”
“Yeah, you up to it?” Surrette said.
“I’ll handle my end.”
“Sure you will,” Surrette said. “Go ahead, get started.”
“The woman on the bed? She keeps moaning,” Terry said.
“That’s about to end. You dropped the rope. Pick it up.”
Terry shook his head. “I’m going back to Reno.”
“Walking, are you?” Surrette said.
“I’m saying include me out. I’m DDD on this. Deaf, dumb, and don’t know. I got no issue with you. I got no issue with these people. You don’t owe me anything. I’m gone. Okay?”
“No, not okay,” Surrette said. “Let me show you how it’s done. You might develop a taste for it.” He walked to the bed and took a switchblade from his coat pocket. He pushed the release button. The blade, seven inches long with the wavy blue-and-white glimmer of an icicle, sprang to life in his hand. Felicity opened her eyes.
“It’s time, is it?” she said.
“Maybe,” he said.
“Go ahead.”
“You really want me to?”
“I do. Untie my hand, please.”
“What?”
“I’ll help you. You mustn’t be afraid.”
“I shouldn’t be afraid?”
“Please. Just release my right hand.”
“So you can do what?”
“Touch you.”
His mouth moved
as though he wanted to smile. “You have things a little turned around.”
Her right wrist pulled against the rope. “Please,” she said.
“All right, your highness,” he said. He gripped the rope and sliced it in half. “Now what?”
She fitted her fingers around his wrist and guided the blade to her breast. “Push it in,” she said. “Make it quick.”
“Asa! Listen to that noise out there!” Boyd said.
“What noise?” Surrette said.
“Like thousands of people roaring in a stadium,” Boyd said.
“That’s the wind,” Surrette said. “Storms come off the lake almost every night here. The wind makes a roaring sound through the orchards.”
“You hear that? You call it wind? What the fuck is it, man?” Terry said.
“I don’t hear anything,” Surrette said.
“I’m out of here,” Terry said.
Surrette started to reply. Then somebody began tapping on the window glass, the one he had blacked out with a leaf bag.
“Can you hear me, Mr. Surrette?” a voice said. “It’s Alafair Robicheaux. How have you been? We’ve surrounded your house and cut your phone line. No police are on their way. The people with me plan to do you great physical injury, but we will not bother your friends. If you release your prisoners, you can live. Otherwise you will die, and probably not at once. Tell us what you want to do.”
Surrette’s face went white, like a prune that had never seen light, his eyes brightening, his nostrils swelling like a feral animal’s.
* * *
Alafair remained crouched on one side of the basement window, listening for a response. She stood up and stepped away from the window.
“Could you hear anything?” I asked.
“I think I heard Surrette talking. Maybe Jack Boyd, too. There may be another guy down there, too.”
“Did you hear Molly or Albert?” I asked.
She shook her head, her eyes not meeting mine.
Clete had positioned himself at the rear of the house; Gretchen was in the front yard. I signaled to both of them. Clete picked up a scrolled-iron chair from the patio and threw it through the French doors, then broke two windows in back with stones the size of grapefruit that he had picked up from the rock garden. Seconds later, Gretchen flung a flowerpot through the picture window in the living room. Alafair and I moved around to the back of the house, staying close to the walls so no one on the second floor would have an easy shot. There was no sound or sign of movement inside the house.
“I hate to admit this, Dave, but this one has me creeped out,” Clete said.
“Why?”
“None of it makes sense. It’s like a story written for us by somebody else. Felicity turns herself over to this sick fuck, and now Molly and Albert and those girls are in his hands. One guy can’t have this much power and do this much damage.”
“Hitler did.”
“Bad comparison. They were just waiting for the right guy to come along and tell them it was okay to turn people into bars of soap. Let’s call for backup.”
“Do it,” I said.
He opened his cell phone. “No service,” he said.
“Good. He doesn’t have any, either,” I said. “I don’t think Surrette will do too well on his own. You want the M-1?”
He pulled his .38 from his shoulder holster. “No,” he said. “Streak, even if he puts a bullet through my brain, I’m going to kill him. But if this is my last gig, I want you to make me a promise. Take care of Gretchen. She doesn’t realize how talented and smart she is. She got a crummy deal from the day she came out of the womb, and it’s because her old man was a drunk and a bum.”
“Don’t ever say that, Clete. At least not around me,” I said. I could see the pain in his eyes, and I knew he didn’t understand what I was telling him. “You’re one of the best people on earth,” I said. “No daughter could have a better father. You saved Gretchen’s life, and you saved my life and Molly’s. You changed the lives of dozens of people, maybe hundreds. Don’t you ever speak badly of yourself.”
His eyes were shiny, his face dilated. “Let’s blow up their shit.”
“A big ten-four on that,” I replied.
Clete kicked the back door once, twice, and on the third try, he splintered the wood from the hinges and the dead bolt and knocked the door in on the kitchen floor. Alafair came in behind us. In the living room I could hear Gretchen raking the glass out of a window frame with a hard object before she stepped inside.
The first floor was completely dark. Through the window, I could see the shadows of the trees moving on the lawn, and waves from the lake sliding up on the lighted sand by the marina. I kept hearing the sergeant’s voice inside my head: Their sappers are the best, Loot. They beat the French with the shovel, not the gun. They’re behind you, Loot. They’re coming through the grass.
I felt like someone was pulling off my skin, the way you feel when someone is pointing a gun at you and you’re unarmed. Clete was in front of me. He froze and cocked one fist in the air. He turned and pointed two fingers at his eyes, then at a hallway door that was partially ajar.
I couldn’t concentrate on what he was telling me. I knew our vulnerability did not lie in the basement; it was behind us. You follow the money, I thought. It’s been about money from the beginning. Surrette got rid of Caspian Younger’s daughter so Caspian could appropriate the oil lands she would inherit from a trust fund left by her parents. Surrette got rich by killing Angel Deer Heart, and Caspian got free of his father’s control.
I had no doubt that Asa Surrette and Caspian Younger were joined at the hip. I placed my hand on Clete’s shoulder. He turned and stared into my face, the lines at the corners of his eyes stretched flat. “We have to take them now,” I whispered. “Our back door’s open.”
Wrong choice of words. He shook his head, indicating that he didn’t understand.
“Caspian Younger just inherited his father’s empire,” I whispered. “He’s coming. Maybe he wants to cool out Surrette, too.”
“Caspian is a punk. I don’t buy it,” Clete said.
“He’s a greedy punk,” I replied.
Gretchen approached the door in the hallway from the opposite direction, the AR-15 at port arms, a thirty-round and twenty-round magazine jungle-clipped together and inserted in the rifle’s frame. She moved between us and the door. She cupped one hand on the back of Clete’s neck and pulled his ear close to her mouth. “I think I heard something upstairs. I’m not sure,” she said. “Watch your ass. I’m going down. If I get hit, don’t stop. Go over me and clear the basement.”
“No,” I said to her.
She smiled at me, then opened the door wider with her foot and eased her way down the stairs — fearless, beautiful — a warm odor like flowers brushing past me in the dark.
In only one or two instances have I seen a firefight portrayed realistically in a motion picture. The reason for that artistic failure is simple. The experience is chaotic and terrifying, and the sequence of events is irrational and has no order that you can remember with any degree of clarity. There is nothing dignified about it. The participants leap around like the shadows of stick figures dancing on a cave wall. The instinct to live often overrides morality and humanity, and any sense of the former self disappears into a vortex of fear, pain, and sometimes explosions akin in volume and heat to train engines colliding and blowing apart.
Later, images will come aborning in your sleep that you cannot deal with during your waking hours: shooting a man who is trying to surrender; firing an automatic weapon until the barrel is almost translucent and your hands are shaking so badly you can’t reload; lying paralyzed on your back in the mud while a medic straddles your hips as a lover might, trying to close a sucking chest wound with a cellophane wrapper from a package of cigarettes.
It’s that intense and that fast, all of it irreversibly installed in your unconscious. To relive it and try to reason your way out of it is like trying to re
ason yourself out of sexual desire or an addiction to opiates.
The first bursts came from somewhere in the corner of the basement and chewed away part of the wall and the ceiling. Then I saw Gretchen begin firing, squeezing off the magazine of .223 rounds at a rate of three or four rounds a second, the brass shell casings jacking into the light, bouncing on the concrete floor.
* * *
For Molly, the gunfire within the confines of the basement was deafening and impacted on her skull like a jackhammer. Terry had armed himself first and started shooting at the top of the stairs from behind a concrete pillar. Molly thought she saw Gretchen Horowitz on the steps, firing a semi-automatic rifle, her upper body in shadow, the rounds ricocheting off the pillar, the air filling with dust from the chipped concrete. Albert was trying to raise himself to his knees, the wire rimming his wrists with blood.
Jack Boyd had hidden behind the bedstead, his fingers hooked into the box spring; he was peering over Felicity Louviere’s prone body, his face terrified. “I’m unarmed! I’m not part of this!” he cried. “I was working undercover! You’re gonna hurt innocent people down here!”
Albert tore one hand from the wire, then began freeing his other wrist. The air was thick with smoke and dust, the bare bulbs on the ceiling jiggling in their sockets. Asa Surrette crawled on his hands and knees to the closet and pulled a semi-automatic rifle with a short barrel and a black stock out on the floor. He reached inside again and pulled out an armored vest and a box of rounds and another rifle and two banana-shaped magazines. He still wore his suit coat and sandals and a pale yellow shirt with long-tailed birds on it, like a man who had just gotten off a plane from Hawaii. “Shut your mouth, Jack, and get in the fight,” he said. He slid one of the rifles across the floor.
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