Creole Belle dr-19

by James Lee Burke

  I crouched behind a divan and tried to calculate how many rounds I had fired, but I couldn’t. The plasma screens in the walls were exploding, the tropical sunsets and the iridescent spray of waves and the groves of coconut palms cascading in sheets of glass on the terrazzo floor.

  I had hit the man in the bathroom at least once, but he had gotten behind the protection of the wall, where he had probably used a speed loader, because all at once he was back on rock and roll.

  I saw Clete crawl on his hands and knees through the broken glass, the handle of his KA-BAR clenched in his right palm. He reached the far wall and inched his way to the bathroom door, looking in my direction. I saw him mouth, Now. I raised up above the divan and fired two rounds at the bathroom, blowing splinters out of the doorjamb, shattering the lavatory and a mirror. The man with the greased hair ducked back behind the wall, and Clete reached around the side of the door and drove the blade of the KA-BAR into his thigh, then grabbed him by his necktie and dragged him to the floor and fastened one hand under his chin and the other on the back of his head and broke his neck.

  The shooter’s revolver had fallen into the toilet. Clete retrieved it, shaking water from his hand, and began searching the dead man’s pockets for bullets, growing more frantic as he pulled each pocket inside out. He was saying something to me, but the gunfire had taken its toll; my ears felt like they were stuffed with cotton, and I couldn’t make out his words. “What is it?” I shouted.

  He pointed to the cylinder of the nickel-plated revolver, then held up his index finger and silently formed the words One fucking round. One of the cabinet doors under the lavatory had swung open. I saw Clete pick up a plastic bottle and stick it in his trouser pocket. Then he wiped his knife clean on a towel and eased out of the bathroom door, his eyes fastened on the entrance to the kitchen, where at least two men were barricaded. My hearing had started to clear.

  We had forgotten about Pierre Dupree. He had gotten to his feet and was trying to steady himself by holding on to a chair. I also realized I had misjudged him. He had not been frightened, just temporarily traumatized by the shock of the Taser. There was glass in his hair and on his shoulders, and blood was running from his right ear. “Give it up,” he said. “This property is sealed. Even if you get to the yard, you’ll be killed. I’ll make a deal with you. We can work this out so everyone wins.”

  “Tell the fat guy to come out of the cell,” I said.

  “All these men are trained never to surrender their weapons. Just like police officers,” Dupree replied.

  “Except they’re not police officers. They’re hired dipshits,” I said.

  Clete stumbled through the furniture, looking backward over his shoulder at the bullet-pocked doors to the kitchen. He inserted the blade of the KA-BAR between Dupree’s thighs and raised the sharpened side into his scrotum. “Tell the blob in there to throw his piece out of the cell and to walk after it with his hands on his head.”

  “Or you’re going to castrate me?” Pierre said.

  “More like split you in half,” Clete replied.

  “No, you won’t, Mr. Purcel. Do you know why? You don’t have the courage. You’re like most people who admire comic-book heroes. You think courage is about showing mercy. It’s the other way around. It takes courage to give no mercy, to face life as it is, to accept that the weak wish to be ruled by the strong, that the weak would not have it any other way.”

  “Tell that to yourself while you’re holding your guts in your hands,” Clete said.

  “Then do it. I’ve had a good life. Outside of marrying a woman who is probably the worst cunt in the history of this state, I have few regrets.”

  “You shouldn’t use that word,” Clete said.

  “I shouldn’t use that word? One man is dead and two others are dying, but I shouldn’t use a word that perfectly describes the most hypocritical creature I’ve ever known? I don’t think either one of you understands the culture you live in. Varina was queen of the Carnival at Mardi Gras, cheered and loved by hundreds of thousands. How about my grandfather? He gassed whole families and used children in medical experiments. He shared a mistress with Josef Mengele. But no one will ever believe your story about him. Even if people do, he’ll never be punished. He’s old and kindly and charming, and people will say, ‘Oh, Mr. Robicheaux, all that was so long ago.’”

  Clete looked at me. “I think he’s probably right. We should cool Pierre out now and get the rest as we go.”

  I didn’t think he meant it, but I wasn’t going to take the chance. Also, we were running out of time. Helen Soileau was probably close to death from hypothermia. I hit Pierre Dupree across the face with the AK-47. His bottom lip split, and the back of his head hit the wall. I watched him slide down on the floor.

  “You should have let me wax him,” Clete said. He began going through Dupree’s pockets. “He’s not carrying.”

  Pierre Dupree’s lack of a weapon on him wasn’t the issue. We knew we had to make a choice. Did we get Helen out of the deep freeze first or deal with the fat man in Gretchen and Alafair’s cell?

  “Can you deal with the two guys inside the kitchen while I talk with Fatso?” Clete said.

  “You’ve only got one round.”

  “He doesn’t know that.”

  “If you miss, he’ll kill the girls,” I said.

  “Then what do you want to do?”

  “Stop talking about it and do it.”

  We worked our way along the wall until we reached the conventional door over the barred door of the cell. I eased the outside door back until I had a clear view of the cell’s interior. The fat man had been busy while we were dealing with Pierre Dupree and the other three men. He had placed Gretchen in the sarcophagus and pulled the hinged lid partway from the wall so that its spiked weight loomed over her body and would fall upon her if anything caused him to release his grip. In his right hand, he held a small blue-black automatic with white handles. He had found the exact point of balance for the lid so that it caused the least amount of exertion in his arm and shoulder, but the strain was starting to show in his face.

  “Your name is Harold?” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  He had the small mouth and cleft chin of the Irish, his face splotched like that of a man with a bloated liver. He had removed his coat, and his armpits were dark with sweat.

  “Clete has your bud’s. 357 aimed at the side of your head. You need to ease that iron lid back against the wall,” I said.

  “That’s not what’s gonna happen,” he replied. “You two lovelies are going to throw your pieces inside the cell.”

  I saw Gretchen raise her head from the sarcophagus. He had torn the tape loose from her mouth. She fixed her eyes on Clete but said nothing.

  “Did you know she was supposed to clip you?” Harold said. “I think she planned to do it. Maybe we saved your life.”

  “It’s not true,” Gretchen said.

  “We got the word on her, buddy,” Harold said. “When she wasn’t balling guys from the Gambino crime family, she was blowing heads for them. She pulled a train in a fuck pad in Hallandale.”

  I felt around the edges of the cell door and moved it slightly in the jamb. It wasn’t locked. “Get a couple of cushions off the couch,” I said to Clete under my breath.

  “Stop whispering over there and throw your pieces to me,” Harold said. “I got a bad heart. I can’t hold this lid much longer. What’s it gonna be?”

  “Your employers have bagged ass,” I said. “Why take their fall? With the right lawyer, you might skate. Angola is a bitch, Harold. Do the smart thing.”

  He bit down on his lip, then shook his head. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Clete retrieve two huge leather-covered cushions from the couch.

  “The problem is he’s not smart,” Gretchen said. “Right, Harold? But low intelligence is not your biggest problem. Did you ever see Shack Out on 101 with Lee Marvin and Frank Lovejoy? Lee Marvin plays a Communist agent whose cove
r is working in a greasy spoon north of Los Angeles. Frank Lovejoy is the FBI agent who hunts him down in the last scene. Frank is holding a harpoon gun on him in the kitchen, and Lee is staring at the harpoon in this filthy apron with his mouth hanging open. Frank says, ‘You know what you are, fella? You’re not only a Commie, you’re a slob. And you know what a slob is, don’t you?’

  “Lee shakes his head. He’s so covered with grease and kitchen shit, you can smell the BO coming off the screen. Frank says, ‘A slob is a guy who’s still dirty after he takes a shower.’ Then Frank shoots him through the chest with his harpoon gun. In the last frame, you see the rope on the harpoon quivering, which is a real skillful touch, because you know Lee is in his death throes on the floor, but the camera doesn’t show it.”

  “Why should I care about a couple of dead actors?” Harold said.

  “Because you’re about to join them,” Gretchen said.

  I lifted the AK-47 and steadied it on one of the cell bars and framed Harold’s face in the iron sights. Clete had already positioned himself on my right side, the cushions hidden by the wall. “Last chance, Harold. I hear hell is pretty hot even in the wintertime,” I said.

  “We’ve got your jacket, Robicheaux,” he said. “You’re not a cowboy. So fuck off on all this John Wayne stuff.”

  The timing had to be perfect. If Clete was one second too slow getting inside the cell, Gretchen would die. If I was one second too soon in squeezing off a round, Gretchen would die. If the shot wasn’t clean and I didn’t cut Harold’s motors, Gretchen would die.

  “Do it. Do it now, Dave,” Clete whispered.

  I was breathing through my mouth, trying to control my heart rate, my eyes stinging with sweat. As I tightened my finger on the trigger, I saw the fat man’s eyes lock on mine and a strange moment of recognition swim through them, as though he had seen the entirety of his life reduced to a flip of a coin that had only one outcome: Harold had stepped through the door in the dimension.

  The AK-47 long ago won great respect from anyone who ever went up against it. Unlike the early M16, which often jammed unless you burned the whole magazine, the AK was smooth-firing and had almost twice the penetrating power of its American counterpart and used a bullet that was over twice the weight of the M16 round. In semi-auto mode at close range, it was deadly accurate. I centered Harold’s forehead inside the hooded sight and whispered “One, two, three” to Clete, then snapped off two rounds just as he bolted through the door, the ejected casings bouncing off the steel bars onto the floor.

  I had never seen Clete move so fast. The 7.62?39mm rounds blew the back of Harold’s head onto the wall, but before the lid of the sarcophagus could crush Gretchen’s body, Clete threw both thick burgundy-colored leather cushions on top of her and caught the edge of the lid before its full weight had swung down.

  I peeled the tape off Alafair’s mouth and cut the ligatures on her wrists and ankles with my pocketknife. “Did you find Julie Ardoin?” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said, looking back over my shoulder through the bars, not knowing whether she had witnessed Julie’s death.

  “I couldn’t stop it,” she said. “I tried.”

  “It’s not your fault, Alafair. They were planning to kill all of us.”

  “Why do they hate us so?” she asked.

  “Because we’re not like them,” I said. “Did you see Helen Soileau?”

  “No. She’s here?”

  “She’s being held in the kitchen. Do you know how many guys might be in there?”

  “No, the only guys Gretchen and I saw were the fat one and the one with the grease in his hair.”

  “Do you know where they might have any other guns?” I asked.

  “No, they blindfolded us after they took us out of the park. I heard Varina’s voice, but I didn’t see her. Pierre came to the cell and watched us, but he didn’t say anything.”

  “He did what?”

  “He watched us like we were in a zoo. He was smiling. Alexis Dupree was standing behind him. Alexis said, ‘They’re attractive girls. Too bad they have to go up the chimney so soon.’”

  “Keep Gretchen here,” I said. I hit Clete on the shoulder and pointed at the kitchen area. “How many rounds did you load in the magazine?” I said.

  “The full thirty.”

  “The two guys in the kitchen are dead as soon as we go in the door. We get Helen out of the freezer and take their guns and go aboveground.”

  “What about Tee Jolie?”

  “First things first,” I replied.

  “Dave, I got to tell you something. I don’t know if I’m going crazy or not. I heard that song.”

  “What song?”

  “The one you’re always talking about. The one by what’s-his-name. You know, Jimmy Clanton. ‘Just a Dream’? That’s the title, isn’t it?”

  “You didn’t hear that song, Clete.”

  “I did. Don’t tell me I didn’t. I don’t believe in that kind of mystical mumbo jumbo, so I don’t make it up. It was calling us, Dave.”

  I wasn’t interested anymore in the year 1958 or the era that for me encapsulated everything that was wonderful about the place where I grew up. We had saved our daughters and now had the challenge of saving Helen Soileau from one of the worst fates a human being could experience-to wake inside total darkness, abandoned by the rest of the human race, the senses assaulted by a level of cold that was unimaginable.

  Clete and I crunched over the broken glass down the hallway, past Tee Jolie’s bedroom, until we were at the painted-over metal doors that gave onto the kitchen. I looked at the stiff shape in his trouser pocket.

  “What did you take out of that bathroom cabinet?” I said.

  “Mouthwash,” Clete replied.

  I looked at his eyes. They were flat, with no expression. “I’ll go in first,” I said. “Are you ready?”

  He held the. 357 upward. “Let’s rock,” he replied.

  I jerked open the door and went inside fast, pointing the AK-47 in front of me, swinging it back and forth. The light inside the room was brilliant, every item on the butcher block and counters and walls and in the dry rack sparkling clean. There was nobody inside the room. At the back of the kitchen was a stairwell, and I heard someone slam a door at the top and then feet moving heavily across the floor immediately above our heads.

  I set down the AK-47 on the butcher block and opened the top of the freezer. The trapped cloud of cold air rose like a fist into my face. Helen was rolled up in an embryonic position, her eyebrows and hair shaggy with frost, her cheeks gray and wrinkled as though they had been touched with a clothes iron, her fingernails blue.

  Clete and I dipped our hands around her body and lifted her free of the chest and set her down on a throw rug in front of the sink. Clete found a tablecloth inside a drawer and wrapped her in it. Her eyelids looked as thin as rice paper, her nostrils clotted with frost. She was shaking so badly, I could hardly hold her wrists. She looked up at me with the expression of someone at the bottom of a deep well. So far we had seen no telephones or phone jacks in the basement of the house. “We’re going to get you to Iberia General, Helen,” I said. “We’ve put four of these bastards down so far. How many more guys are on the grounds?”

  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.