We made a wide turn east of the national wildlife refuge, rain hitting the windshield, the wings wet and slick and bright against a sky growing blacker by the minute. In the distance, I could see an island with a biscuit-colored apron of beach around it and a cove on the near side and a compound with palm trees in it. My ears began popping as we started our descent. “Anybody want a ham-and-onion sandwich?” Clete said.
“Tell him to shut up unless he wants to walk,” Julie said, her eyes fixed on the cove and the waves sliding across a sandbar at the entrance and capping inside it.
We leveled out at about one hundred feet above the water, the rain hitting as hard as pellets on the windshield and cabin roof, a downdraft pounding us so violently that for a moment I didn’t hear the engine. Up ahead I could see a strip of beach and pilings sticking out of the surf and what appeared to be a fortress with ten-foot walls around it. The tapered trunks of palm trees extended above the walls, beating in the wind. Our plane dipped down toward the water, then suddenly, the pontoons smacked the surface, and a dirty spray of foam blanketed the windshield and whipped back in strings across the side windows. A piling that probably once supported a dock or jetty missed the starboard wing by under six feet.
“Wow!” Clete said. “What do you do for kicks on your days off?”
Julie had cut the engine and was opening and closing her mouth, as though clearing her ears. “Would you mind?” she said.
“Mind what?” Clete said.
“Removing your onion breath from my face.”
“Sorry,” he said.
The rain was dancing on the chop and drumming on the wings and roof. The wind had pushed us into the shallows almost to the beach. There were wheels built into the pontoons, and I wondered why Julie didn’t take us onto the sand, but I did not want to ask. I suspected she was feeling less and less sure about the wisdom of our mission, and I couldn’t blame her. The walls around the house, like the house itself, were built of stucco and painted magenta. The glass from broken bottles was strewn along the top of the walls, but the security measure was of no value. The walls had been breached and reduced to rubble in several places, probably by Hurricane Katrina, exposing the cinder blocks inside. The interior of the compound was littered with flotsam and tangles of seaweed and shrimp nets and rotting tarps and hundreds of dead birds. The entirety of the beach was dotted with tar balls.
Clete and I put on our raincoats and hats and dropped down in the shallows up to our knees. Clete pulled his duffel bag from the baggage compartment and slung it over his shoulder. Through the rain, I could see a boat with two outboard engines and a small cabin moored on the south side of the island.
“I’ll come with you,” Julie said.
“Better stay here,” I said. “We might have to get out of Dodge sooner than we planned.”
“I thought I’d ask. Suit yourself,” she said, her voice almost lost in the rain.
I smiled at her and tried to indicate I appreciated her gesture, but Julie was not the kind of person you made a show of protecting, not if you wanted to retain her friendship.
Clete and I walked out of the surf onto the sand. The smell from the dead birds was eyewatering. Clete looked over his shoulder at the plane and at the silhouette of Julie Ardoin inside it. “She’s cute,” he said.
“Will you concentrate on the objective?”
He blew his breath on his palm and smelled it. “You got any mints?” he said.
“I can’t believe you.”
“What did I do wrong? I just said she’s cute. I take that back. She’s more than cute. I bet she’s heck on wheels. Is she getting it on with anybody?”
“When will you grow up?”
“I was just asking. When she yelled at me, my johnson started doing jumping jacks. That only happens with a very few women. It’s not my fault.” He pulled the Remington from the bag and handed it to me, then slung the AR-15 upside down on his right shoulder. “Oops, at ten o’clock,” he said.
“What?”
“A campfire. By that boat. I saw somebody look at us from behind that tree.”
Beyond the angle of the wall, I could see the salt-eaten, sun-scalded, wind-polished trunk and root system of a thick tree, one that had probably floated from the Mississippi or Alabama or Florida coastline. Clete and I worked our way along the edge of the wall until we reached a berm that sloped down to the beach and a polyethylene tent staked into the sand with aluminum pins. The rain had slackened, but the wind was blowing hard, popping the tent.
The barrel of the shotgun was cradled across my left arm; there was no round in the chamber. “My name is Detective Dave Robicheaux of the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department,” I said. “I need to see y’all’s hands out here in the light. Do it now.”
Clete moved left, unslinging his rifle. He had jungle-clipped two magazines together with electrician’s tape, so when one magazine was empty, he could release it and insert the second one in the frame with hardly any interruption in his rate of fire. Water was dripping off his hat brim; his face looked as taut as a bleached muskmelon. He held up two fingers.
“Did you hear me?” I called out.
There was no answer.
I moved around to the front of the tent so I could see through the flap. The campfire had flattened in the wind and smelled from a can of beans that had boiled over and burned in the ashes. I could smell another odor, too.
The boy and the girl inside looked like they were in their late teens or early twenties. It wasn’t their age that defined them. They were tanned from head to foot, as though they had never lived anywhere except under a blazing sun. Their eyes were lustrous and too big for their faces, like the eyes of anorexics or survivors of famines. The girl was sitting barefoot on an air mattress and wearing cutoff blue jeans and a halter. She pulled a shirt over her left arm, covering a tattoo, then took a hit off a pair of roach clips, even though I had already identified myself as a sheriff’s detective. They said their names were Sybil and Rick and that they were from Mobile and were taking refuge from the storm. Rick wore sandals without socks and a Speedo swimsuit and a Gold’s Gym T-shirt that exposed the bleached tips of the hair under his arms. He and Sybil climbed out of the tent, smiling broadly, neither of them showing any reaction to the cold wind.
“Who’s up in the house?” I asked.
“They come and go, man. They’ve got this big fucking yacht you wouldn’t believe,” Rick said. His hair was black and oily and as thick as carpet weave; it hung in rings on his shoulders and resembled a seventeenth-century wig on his narrow head. “If the yacht is anchored on the other side of the island, that means they’re here, no fucking mistake about it.”
“That’s what we were doing when y’all came,” Sybil said. She opened her mouth wider than necessary when she spoke, and huffed out her breath instead of laughing.
“Doing what?” Clete asked.
“What Rick just said. We were fucking,” she replied.
Clete looked at me.
“Why are y’all in a tent and not on your boat?” I asked.
“I got seasick and puked,” Sybil said. She huffed out her breath. “I always get seasick when it rains, and then I puke. I got to brush my teeth.”
“Who owns this place?” I said.
Rick turned to Sybil. “What’s the name of that old dude?”
“I can’t remember.” She felt her head. “My hair’s wet. This weather sucks. Where’d y’all say you’re from?”
“New Iberia, Louisiana. I’m with the sheriff’s department there.”
“This isn’t Louisiana, man,” Rick said.
“Then where are we?” Clete asked.
“Fuck if I know,” Rick replied.
Sybil combed her hair with her fingernails. The wind puffed the sleeves of her shirt, and I saw the tattoo of tangled barbed wire wrapped around her upper left arm. More important, I saw a red swastika tattooed like a clasp in the center of the wire.
“Is the old dude named Alexis Dupree?” I said.
“I don’t know, man. He’s just a kindly old dude, maybe a little weird, but there’s a lot of that going around these days,” Rick said. “Y’all want to eat some hot dogs? They’re a little bit scorched, but they’re not bad with mustard.”
“I tell you what, you guys sit tight while my friend and I look around,” I said. “By the way, Miss Sybil, I like your tattoo. Where’d you get it?”
She began fooling with her hands, examining them as though she had just discovered them. “I used to have this biker boyfriend that was kind of nuts on the subject of Nazi memorabilia and shit, so I told him I had a surprise for him on his birthday, but he got real pissed off ’cause he thought he was gonna get a blow job instead.”
“Yeah, that’s fucked up, isn’t it, man?” Rick said, pointing a finger at me to emphasize his disappointment with the world.
“Like Dave says, hang loose. We’ll be back and chat you up on some of this stuff,” Clete said. “Go easy on the stash.”
“That’s not gonna be a problem, is it? Because if it is, we’ll get rid of it,” Rick said. He smiled vacantly. “Actually, we’re in recovery now, so maybe we shouldn’t be smoking it, huh?”
“A big ten-four on that,” Clete said.
I heard Clete say “Jesus, God” under his breath, then we walked back up the berm and entered the compound and found ourselves surrounded by the stench of dead birds; their feathers ruffled every time the wind gusted. Clete choked and held a handkerchief to his mouth. “You see the tracks inside that girl’s thighs?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, my eyes on the house.
“Think she and her boyfriend were coming here to shoot up?”
“Probably. Maybe Alexis Dupree has acolytes in the drug culture.”
“Those palm trees aren’t from the Gulf Coast.”
He was right. They had probably been transplanted from South Florida. They hadn’t rooted properly, and their fronds were yellow and frayed by the wind. The entire compound reeked of contrivance and artifice, a shabby attempt to create a Caribbean ambiance in an inhospitable environment where fresh water had to be brought in by boat and pumped into a tank that stood on steel stanchions behind the house. It was like a movie set. It was the kind of place that seemed indicative of the Duprees, people who not only had chosen to be first in Gaul rather than second in Rome but were satisfied to have one eye in the kingdom of the blind.
“How do you want to play it?” Clete said.
“Let’s knock on the door and see who’s home,” I replied.
“This place gives me the creeps.”
“It’s just a building.”
“No, it’s got something really bad inside it. I can feel it. Maybe it’s that stink. You see the eyes of those kids? They haven’t even started their lives, and they’re already zombies.” He wiped his mouth with his handkerchief.
I knew Clete wasn’t thinking of our new friends Rick and Sybil. He was thinking of Gretchen and his failure as a father. “I bet you five years from now, those kids will be fine,” I said.
“Yeah, they’ll probably be running Goldman Sachs. Give it a break, Streak. And screw knocking on the door.”
It was made of heavy oak and had three rusted strips of iron bolted across it. Clete used the butt of his rifle to break a pane out of a frosted viewing panel next to the jamb. He reached inside, careful not to cut himself, and twisted the deadbolt free. I pushed the door back on its hinges and walked in ahead of him. The vast tomblike emptiness of the house was stunning. The high ceilings and huge rafters and peaked skylights operated by pulleys and chains had the look of an abandoned cathedral. Our footsteps echoed throughout the entirety of the building.
“What the hell is this place?” Clete said.
“Whatever it is, it was gutted,” I said.
“Listen,” he said.
I could hear wind blowing through a broken door or window, and perhaps the flapping of birds taking flight, but nothing else.
Clete walked ahead of me, his AR-15 slung over his shoulder. Then he froze and made a fist with his right hand, the infantryman’s signal to stop in your tracks. This time I heard it, tinkling sounds mixed with a frenetic flapping of something alive and trapped in an enclosure.
We walked out of the main room and down a corridor into a kitchen. The cabinets and shelves and drawers and refrigerator were empty. I clicked on a light switch, but there was no power. Through the back window, I saw the crumbled brick shell of what probably was a lighthouse. Then I felt a puff of air through a side hallway and heard the tinkling and flapping sounds again. Clete unslung his rifle and moved down the hallway ahead of me, his hat and raincoat dripping, his silhouette massive against the light. He stepped down onto a bare concrete pad inside a room that had a barred window inset in one wall, the glass broken by a pelican that had flown directly into it and lay dead between the glass and the bars. Three concrete steps led down into a room that had been constructed beneath the level of the main floor. There was no mistaking where the sounds had come from.
Clete went down the steps first. At the far end of the lower room was another barred window, this one at ground level and as narrow as a gun slit. Like the room above it, the floor was concrete, but it was covered with gray sand that had seeped through the cracks in the walls.
Clete stared in disbelief. “It’s Didi Gee’s fish tank. Don’t tell me it isn’t. I saw it too many times. Jesus Christ, I told you this place gave me the willies.”
A huge aquarium rested on a stone block. Almost all the water had evaporated from it, and five piranhas were flapping violently in the soup at the bottom, scissoring and skittering across it, smacking their noses into the glass.
An iron bar ran across the top of the ceiling, and at least a dozen oiled and shiny steel chains hung from it, either a hook or a manacle attached to each. Clete touched one of the hooks, then wiped his hand on his handkerchief, swallowing drily. I walked closer to the chains and took my ballpoint from my shirt pocket and speared one of the links and lifted the chain against the light. The end of the hook was encrusted with matter that resembled dried jelly. Higher up on the chain, a strand of auburn hair glowed against the light.
I took a penlight from my pocket and shone it at the bottom of the far wall. “Take a look,” I said.
A rusted outline slightly larger than the size of a coffin was stenciled into the concrete floor. There was a long orange horizontal strip of rust on the wall, as though a heavy iron object had rested against it. The floor was speckled with what looked like dried blood. “I think this is where the iron maiden was,” I said. “I think the lid was pushed back against the wall. The victims were lowered into it, and the lid was shut on top of them. You see those three pools? That’s where the drain holes were.”
“Alexis Dupree?”
“Who else could create something like this?” I said.
“This operation isn’t being run by a bunch of geeks. Didi Gee stuck people’s hands in his fish tank, but the object was money, not payback. The people behind this stuff don’t have a category. You know what our problem is, Dave? We keep playing by the rules. These guys need to be naped off the planet.”
“So we drop a hydrogen bomb on Jeanerette, Louisiana?” I said.
“What do you want to do with the piranhas?”
“We have to put them under,” I said.
“Maybe those kids can dump them in an ice chest full of fresh water and take them somewhere.”
“They’ll get cut to pieces.”
“I got to ask you something,” Clete said.
“Go ahead.”
“Who’s more messed up, my daughter or kids like those two out there?”
“I don’t know, Clete. What does it matter? Young people make mistakes. Some come out of it, some don’t. Stop beating up on yourself.”
“I want your promise on something. You don’t jam Gretchen. She deserves a better life than the one I left her with. You cut her some slack or we go our separate ways. I want your word.”
He had never spoken like that to me in all the years I had known him.
“I was never big on loyalty oaths,” I said.
“I want your word, Dave.”
“I can’t give it to you.”
I saw a great sadness come into his eyes. “All right, let’s get those two down here and see what they have to say. Blow the shit out of those fish first. Yeah, lock and load, Dave, paint the fucking wall.”
When we went back outside, the sky was a bright metallic gray, the wind blowing a dirty chop on the cove where we had set down, the plane rocking in the swells that swirled across the pilings of a submerged jetty. I could see Julie Ardoin in the cabin. I waved at her to indicate we would be along in a few minutes. Sybil and Rick were squatting on the sand, rolling up their tent. Rick had a joint between his lips.
“I fixed y’all sandwiches from our wieners,” Sybil said. “They’re a little bit sandy, though.”
“That’s nice of you, but I want y’all to come into the house and check out a room we found,” I said.
“Is someone home there?” she replied. “I don’t know if we should go in there if nobody’s home.”
“Have you been in that house before, Miss Sybil?” I asked.
“No, sir,” she replied.
I continued to look directly into her face.
“Maybe once,” she said.
“Who’d you see in there?” I asked.
“Just that old man. He was nice. He said I looked like a model, somebody named Twiggy.”
“Did y’all meet somebody named Angel or Angelle?” I said.
“That last one, I heard that name.”
“You heard the name Angelle?” I said.
“Yeah, I think I did, but with all kinds of shit happening, I mean, you can’t always be sure.”
“I’m not reading you, Miss Sybil. What kind of shit?”
“We were inside the house once, talking to the old dude,” Rick said, his pupils dilated into big drops of black ink. “Then somebody started screaming. The old guy said it was a crazy person he was taking care of. We hauled ass. I mean, fuck, man, who wants to have lunch with crazy people screaming and probably throwing food and shit at the table? We didn’t come all the way out here for that.”
“So why’d y’all come back?” I said.
“He gave us some crystal,” Sybil said.
“That’s why you had a swastika tattooed on your arm?” I said. “You wanted to score meth from the old man?”
“No, I told you. It was for my boyfriend’s birthday, except that’s not what he wanted. What does my tattoo have to do with the old guy?” She squeezed her eyes shut in consternation and exhaled loudly, letting her mouth remain open, as though silently laughing.
“You made these sandwiches for us?” I said.
“I got to make a confession. I think a crab was eating on one of the wieners,” she said. She scratched at a scab on her tattoo. “I’m sorry for probably telling you some lies today. I say things I kind of make up and they seem real, but later, they don’t.”
What can you say to kids like these? You might as well fill reams of paper with all the wisdom of the ancient and the modern world and pack them down a ship’s cannon with a plunger and stand back and ignite the fuse and blow six thousand years of knowledge into confetti and watch it float away on the next wave.
“There’s a torture chamber in that house. You could have been hung up in it. Don’t come back here,” I said.
“Wow, that’s seriously fucked up, man,” Rick said.
Clete and I walked past the dead birds in the compound, not speaking, our weapons across our shoulders, our raincoats flapping in the wind, the sun cold and gaseous in the pewter-colored sky.
Clete stopped. “We didn’t take the sandwiches she fixed,” he said.
“Forget it.”
“It’ll hurt her feelings. What’s the harm? I’ll see you at the plane.”
I waded out into the water and climbed into the cabin of the Cessna. I could think of only a few instances in my life when I had felt as depressed as I did then.
“What’s in that house?” Julie said.
“Pure evil.”
“Like what?”
“Nothing anyone will believe.”
“What’s your podjo doing?”
“He was worried we hurt a young woman’s feelings.”
“That’s why he went back?”
“Clete is a cross between Saint Francis of Assisi and Captain Bly. But you never know who’s coming out of the jack-in-the-box.”
I saw her watching him through the windshield as though seeing him for the first time, her thoughts hidden.
“I’m going to tell you something that maybe I have no right to say, but I’ll say it anyway,” I said. “When people kill themselves, particularly when they bail off buildings or leave blood splatter on the ceiling, it’s usually because of a chemical assault on the brain. They can free themselves of their rage only by creating a legacy of guilt and shame and depression that is equal to their own suffering and that other people will buy into. In their fantasy, they survive their death and witness the discovery of their remains by the people they want to injure. Don’t let that be your fate, Julie. The world belongs to the living. Let the dead stay under their headstones.”
“Boy, you know how to say it, don’t you?”
“I think you’re a nice lady, too good to carry the weight of a guy who decided to mess you up as bad as he could,” I said.
“You’re the only person who ever had the guts to talk to me like that.” She looked in Clete’s direction again. “Something happen between you and your friend?”
“I let him down. Or at least he thinks I did.”
“How?”
“It doesn’t matter. He’s my friend. You don’t let your pals down. Right or wrong, you brass it out. Right?”
“You’re a funny guy, Dave. Here he comes now. He’s smiling. I bet he’s forgotten all about it.”
Clete climbed into the cabin and sat down heavily in the backseat, a smear of mustard on his cheek. His face was flat, his eyes empty when he looked at me. “Let’s blow this dump,” he said.