THE TWO MEN to my south had sought cover when they heard me fire. I was sure they could distinguish the difference between the report of a pistol and a shotgun, and by now they had concluded their leader had made a serious mistake in judgment and had taken himself off the board. I hoped the loss of their leader would cause them to cut and run, but I knew better. They were obviously professionals, probably with military or mercenary backgrounds, and if the crop duster I had seen was actually part of their operation, they had radio communication with people who had far more authority and power than the man I had just killed.
Don’t try to figure it out, I told myself. Just get through this afternoon. The storm will pass, the sun will break out of the clouds, and these men will go back under their rocks. At least that is what I told myself.
I strained my eyes against the darkness. The undergrowth was shiny with rainwater, the canopy dripping. I could see no movement among the trees. Nor could I hear any sounds that didn’t belong in a drenched woods. Which meant that perhaps, with good luck, the two men to my north had gone to ground and had not decided on a plan. I stood up behind a water oak and studied the underbrush and the riverbank and the slash pines and the gum trees and the willows and the direction the wind was blowing and the patterns it created in the leaves and pine branches. I remembered how the wind had been my friend years ago when it swept through the elephant grass in a tropical country and how it redefined the shapes of the trees on a rubber plantation; I remembered it swelling inside the canopy of a rain forest where the birds had gone silent and where the shadows that did not move abruptly came into focus and caused your breath to seize in your chest.
But I saw nothing except the foliage of a riparian environment that for me had become a black-green tiger cage.
I looked to the south again and saw something that instilled in me more fear than even the two men who were probably crouched in the undergrowth. At the mouth of the river, where it widened into a fan and met a saltwater bay, I saw the same double-decker I had seen on Bayou Teche. I saw its twin scrolled stacks, its scrubbed finish, its rows of passenger cabins, its pilothouse, and the water cascading off the paddles of its great steam-powered wheel, all of it caught inside a column of translucence that looked more like ether than light. I knew that what I was watching was not a delusion, and I knew what the paddle wheeler represented and who the crew and passengers were and why all of them were here, beckoning at me, their lips moving without sound, saying, It’s time.
I ducked back behind the trunk of the tree, my chest quivering, my clothes all at once cold, as though my body were no longer capable of generating enough heat to warm the soaked fabric. I peered around the tree and in the distance saw only the blackness of the sky. The paddle wheeler was not in sight, but I heard a bush shake and raindrops scatter on the ground and I knew my adversaries were still with me. I pressed my spine against the tree trunk, holding the pump shotgun straight up in front of me like a human exclamation mark, a rock in my left hand.
“You two guys try to follow my logic,” I said. “Your leader was probably the smartest guy among you, but he got himself smoked because he assumed other people think the same way he did. So where does that leave you? Before it’s over, you’ll probably cool me out. But I’m going to get at least two of y’all before I go down, or maybe three, or maybe all of you. You wonder why that is? It’s because I’m old and I dread the thought of dying in a bed, and I get off splattering the grits of guys like you.”
I flung the rock in a high arc so that it fell through the canopy and landed on a solid spot outside the tree line, indicating that perhaps I had bolted from behind the water oak and was coming up hard on their flank, on the high ground, the sawed-off twelve-gauge pump about to spray buckshot all over their position.
If that was their conclusion, they were only half wrong. I ran through the trees like a broken-field quarterback, crashing over the undergrowth, weaving through the tree trunks directly at them. One man rose from a pool of water where he was crouched and began firing with a semiautomatic rifle on a wire stock. But the electricity in the clouds had died, and the stand of trees was almost totally dark; I doubted if he had a clear idea where I was. I heard a round blow bark out of a gum tree, and I felt wood splinters sting the side of my face, but I was already raising the shotgun in front of me and not thinking about anything other than killing the man whose gun had jammed and who was trying to knock a shell casing loose from his rifle bolt with his hand.
He twisted his body away from me when I squeezed the trigger, holding out his palm in a pushing position, his eyes squeezed tightly shut. I saw his fingers fly loose from his hand as though they had been snipped off with shears. I ejected the spent shell and jacked another one into the chamber, then realized that my adrenaline-fed confidence had been an illusion.
The second man had positioned himself behind the root-ball of a downed tree by the water’s edge, perhaps even sacrificing his friend so he could get me in his sights. I tried to swing the twelve-gauge toward him and lay down a masking shot before he let off the AR-15 he had raised to his shoulder. But I tripped on a log and tumbled down an embankment into a cluster of palmettos, the shotgun skittering down with me. The man with the AR-15 let off four rounds, but they were all high, clattering away in the trees like the sound of wood blocks falling down a staircase. I picked up the shotgun with both hands and, without aiming, fired at the shooter. But the barrel had become clotted with mud or clay. It exploded in a red-and-yellow balloon, the muzzle swelling into the deformed shape of a split sausage. I dropped the shotgun to the ground and reached into my belt for my.45, except I knew that this time my appointment in Samarra had come round at last.
I heard the sound of a car horn blowing and tires spinning on grass and mud. The shooter continued to hold the stock of his rifle against his shoulder, but he dissolved back into the darkness so quickly I had to blink to make sure my vision hadn’t failed me. I got to one knee with the.45 and scanned the trees and the undergrowth but could see no sign of him.
“Dave, are you in there?” I heard Clete shout.
I got up and started running up the embankment through the trees. I burst through the undergrowth and ran between two thick slash pines that whipped back into my face, then saw Clete behind the wheel of his Caddy, his window down, rain blowing inside, his porkpie hat clamped down on his brow. He looked like a giant albino ape hunched between the seat and the wheel. “What the hell is going on in there?” he said.
I pulled open the passenger door and piled inside. “I killed one guy and blew the hand off another. Four guys, including the wounded one, are still in there. Where’s your cell phone?”
“In the glove box. Who are these guys?”
“I don’t know. Cleaners, maybe. Vidor Perkins is dead. Get moving.”
He started to accelerate, but he was still looking at me. “You capped Perkins?”
“No, they did. They were shooting at me. Come on, Clete. Step on it. We’ll try to box them in.”
“You mean cleaners like government guys?”
“I didn’t say that. Will you get us out of here?”
“They’re already boxed. Let’s call the locals and pot them as they come out of the bush.”
“You don’t listen. You never listen. Your head is wrapped with iron plate,” I said.
I rolled down my window and opened up on the tree line, hoping to drive back anyone who was trying to set up on us.
“You don’t have to be so emotional about it,” Clete said. He mashed down on the accelerator, fishtailing two swampy tire tracks past the Acadian cottage.
I looked through the back window at the tree line but couldn’t see anyone emerging from it. I had the cell phone in my hand and dialed 911. There was no service. “What have you got on you?” I asked.
“Just my piece.”
“We’re going to be okay,” I said. “They’ve got the river at their back, and we’re between them and their vehicles. We can pin them down until somebody sees us and calls in a 911.”
“That van and the white car are theirs?”
“Yeah, Perkins’s body is inside the van.”
“You’re sure you killed somebody down there on the river?”
I looked at him and didn’t answer.
“You saw him close up?” he said.
“He took it through the lungs. He went down like a sack of horseshoes. You think I’m making this up?”
Something caught his attention. I looked through the windshield but didn’t see anything.
“At nine o’clock. They cut their lights,” he said.
To the left, angling off the paved road into the field, the grass flattening under their bumpers, were two black SUVs. They were neither official vehicles nor the vehicles of choice for people in this area, most of whom were poor. The SUVs divided in the field, creating a pincer movement, trying to seal us off from the road. In the dash light, the raindrops on Clete’s face looked like beads of water on a pumpkin.
“I don’t get this,” he said. “We were dealing with a bunch of local shitheads. Now we’ve got an army coming down on us. What do you want to do?”
He waited. I didn’t want to say what I had to say. “Cut your lights.”
“They’ve already seen us. That doesn’t solve the problem. Tell me what you want to do.”
“They’re behind and in front of us. Head south on the road. We’ll use the phone at the crossroads and then come back. Do it, Cletus. We’re running out of options.”
He stared hard at me, sweat and raindrops running out of his hair. “They’re gonna skate,” he said.
“I’m sorry I got you into this.”
“Forget sorry. We’re sending a real bad message to these guys, like they can spit in our mouths any time they want.”
“We’ll nail them later.”
“I’ve got a truck flare under the seat. We can set fire to the van. You said Perkins is in there?”
“It’s what they want, Clete. We’ll never get out of the field. Nobody will know what happened to us, and these guys will be around to piss on our graves.”
He gazed at me for a long time, fighting with conclusions he didn’t want to accept, steering with one hand. Then he angled toward the south, exhaling, depressing the accelerator. In the silence I could hear the grass raking under the Caddy’s frame. “How’d you know where I was?” I asked.
“I went to that filling station at the crossroads. The clerk in there said he’d talked to you.” The Caddy thumped onto the asphalt. Clete floored the accelerator, glancing in the rearview mirror at the same time. “Try the cell again.”
“No service.”
The flooded fields on either side of the road were flying past us. “We’re gonna get these guys, we’re gonna get these guys, we’re gonna get these guys,” he said.
I was used up and too tired to offer any support for his fantasies about revenge. My adrenaline-fed high had gone the way all dry drunks come and go, like a brief revisit to the psychological and moral insanity that had constituted my life when the cathedral I entered every afternoon was an empty New Orleans saloon with a long mahogany bar at the end of which a solitary corked bottle of charcoal-filter whiskey and a shot glass and a longneck Jax waited for me. Inside the amber radiance filtering through the oak trees outside, I was a faithful acolyte and was always respectful of the spirits that lived in the corked bottle and the power and the light I could acquire by simply tilting a small glass to my lips.
For me, unslaked bloodlust was no easier to deal with than unslaked sexual desire or a thirst for whiskey that at one time was so great I would swallow a razor blade to satisfy it. My skin was hot, my palms as stiff and dry as cardboard. I wanted to return to the field with as much ordnance as I could get my hands on and blow our hooded adversaries into a bloody mist. But I knew how things were going to play out. The men who had killed Vidor Perkins and who had tried to kill me had sanction. Perhaps it didn’t come from local or state officials, but a group as well organized and trained and financed as this one was not born in a vacuum. The question was whom did they serve.
We pulled into the filling station at the crossroads and called the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Department. My report on the gun battle up the road and the death of Vidor Perkins obviously seemed surreal and was probably more than the dispatcher could assimilate. I had to keep repeating who and where I was. In the background I could hear a half-dozen dispatchers trying to talk over one another. There were obviously power outages and downed electrical wires in people’s yards and automobile accidents all over the parish. A large-scale shots-fired called in by a police officer from another parish who said he’d just killed a man and wanted backup at the scene he had fled probably sounded like the ravings of a lunatic.
Clete was staring at me as I hung up. “So?” he said.
“They’ll probably put us in straitjackets,” I replied.
Clete and I drove back up the road, wondering how long the response would take. Surprisingly, two cruisers showed up at the field at the same time we did, their spotlights piercing deep into the darkness, sweeping over the Acadian cottage and the rusted tractor and the acres of grass and weeds that stretched all the way back to the line of trees along the riverbank. I could still see swaths of tire tracks in the grass. I could see the coulee that I had raced down and hidden inside. I could even see the two slash pines where I had exited the tree line. But all the vehicles, including my pickup truck, were gone.
“Do you believe this?” Clete said.
“No, I don’t,” I said.
A plainclothes detective named Huffinton walked with us through the field. The rain had slackened, and the sky was turning pale at the edges. He was a big man whose clothes fit him badly, and he wore a felt hat with a wide wilted brim and a necktie that was twisted in a knot. Halfway across the field, I pointed out the spot where Vidor Perkins had died.
“There’s nothing there but dirt,” Huffinton said.
“That’s the point. Somebody spaded out the grass,” I said.
He walked a few feet from me and swept a flashlight over the ground. “This is about where you took cover behind your truck and started firing at the van? Because if it is, I don’t see any brass.”
“You’re not supposed to. If they’d take my truck, they’d take everything else.”
He nodded. Then he lit a cigarette. He puffed on it in the breeze, the smoke damp and smelling of chemicals and blowing back into my face. I knew any serious investigation of the crime scene was over. Huffinton stared at a golden flood of sunlight under the cloud layer in the west. “Let’s take a look down by the river,” he said.
We walked along the coulee and stood on the spot where I had shot the hooded man. My.45 shell casings were nowhere to be found. The body of the man I had killed was gone. There was no visible trace of blood on the ground. Nor did we find any ejected shells inside the stand of trees that grew along the river embankment. There were boot and shoe marks in the dirt, but none of a defined nature. The only tactile evidence of the gun battle were the gouges in the tree trunks from the AR-15 and a thin spray of blood on a persimmon branch at the spot where I had taken off the man’s fingers with the twelve-gauge.
“Come on down to the department and we’ll write it up,” Huffinton said.
“This isn’t our parish. Dave’s job is not to ‘write it up.’ Dave’s truck is probably on a semi headed for a compactor,” Clete said. “Call the state police.”
“Why don’t you do it?” Huffinton said.
Clete looked away at a distant spot, hiding the angry light in his eyes. “There was a crop duster flying around. Where’s the closest airport?” he said.
“Anywhere there’s a flat space. You have someplace else you need to be?” Huffinton said.
“I’ll be back tomorrow and take care of the paperwork,” I said.
“Yeah, I’d appreciate it,” Huffinton said. “No offense meant, but somebody might say you were back on the sauce when this one happened.”
“Tell me which it is: Streak is delusional or I’m a liar,” Clete said.
“Say again?”
“Forget it,” Clete said.
Huffinton walked toward his vehicle, his back to us, his blunt profile pointed into the freshening breeze.
“I hope his wife has congenital clap,” Clete said.
“During the firefight, I saw a steamboat down by the mouth of the river.”
“You mean a floating casino?”
“That’s not what it was. I’ve seen it before. On Bayou Teche.”
“I don’t know if I want to hear this.”
“I thought that was where I was going. I thought they were waiting for me.”
“Who?”
“The people on board.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“You’re the best, Cletus.”
“No, we’re the best. One is no good without the other. The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide have one agenda only. We make the dirtbags want to crawl back in their mothers’ wombs. We’re gonna hunt down the cleaners or whatever they are and salt their hides and nail them to the barn door.”
“You’ve already said it for both of us. It’s only rock and roll.”
“That’s because I was ninety-proof. You don’t have permission to die.” He grabbed my shirt. “You hearing me on this?”
“I was just telling you what I saw. Who else am I going to tell?”
I cupped my hand on the back of his neck as we walked to his car. I could feel the hardness in his tendons and the heat and oil in his skin. I could feel his heartbeat and the fury and mire of his blood in his veins, and in his intelligent green eyes I could see the misty shine that my words would not make go away.
MONDAY MORNING I went into Helen Soileau’s office and told her everything that had happened in the field and river basin during the storm on the southern end of Jeff Davis Parish. She listened and did not speak, her gaze never leaving my face. When I finished, she continued to stare at me, her lips pressed together, her chest rising and falling.
Unconsciously I cleared my throat. “I’m going back over there in a few minutes,” I said.
“Really? That’s interesting.”
“I’m going to the courthouse and try to find what I can on the seven arpents of land owned by Bernadette Latiolais.”
“Can you tell me what Clete was doing with you yesterday?”
“He saved my life.”
“What you mean is he had to save your life. That’s because you went over there without backup or informing me or coordinating with the Jeff Davis Sheriff’s Department.” Before I could reply, she raised her hand for me to be silent. “You killed one man and wounded another?”
“I did.”
“You shot one guy’s hand off with the twelve-gauge?”
“His fingers.”
“But you’re sure you wounded him, and you’re sure the guy you hit with your forty-five is dead?”
“I don’t know how else I can say it, Helen.”
“I don’t get Vidor Perkins’s relationship to these guys.”
“There was a red knot on his collarbone with two puncture marks in it. I think he was tortured with a stun gun. They made him walk to me and shot him by mistake.”
Her irritation with me had passed; she was looking at the broadening circumstances of the case. “And you saw a plane you think might have been the control center for these guys?”
“I saw the plane. Its purpose is a matter of speculation.”
“We can start checking the hospitals for gunshot admissions, but I doubt the wounded man sought conventional treatment if he’s working for the sophisticated operation you describe. You think these guys work for Timothy Abelard?”
“It’s a possibility. He was a big defense contractor. He’d have the connections.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I don’t want to believe it of Mr. Abelard,” I said.
“Am I developing a hearing defect?”
“I want to believe Mr. Abelard is an anachronism, a decayed vestige of the old oligarchy. All of them weren’t bad. Some of them probably did the best they could with what they had.”
“Hermann Göring loved his mother, too,” she said. “The guy you shot with your forty-five?”
“What about him?”
“You okay with it today?”
“He dealt the play. I identified myself and told him to throw his weapon away.”
“That’s the ticket,” she said. “But it wouldn’t hurt to take a couple of days off, would it?”
I didn’t even bother to answer. My eyes were lidless, staring into hers. She smiled to herself.
“Something funny?” I said.
“Why is it in any conversation with you I always know what you’re going to say and not say? Why do I even have conversations with you, Pops?”
It was a light moment, reminiscent of the days when she and I were investigative partners and both prone to err on the side of immediate retaliation in dealing with the army of miscreants who like to make life unpleasant for the rest of us. But I knew Helen’s cheerful expression was only a temporary respite from the morgue photos that were still in my file cabinet.
I got up from my chair and walked to her window. Helen’s potted petunias were overflowing in the vase, and down below I could see the trusty gardeners from the stockade trimming the grass around the grotto that was dedicated to Jesus’s mother. I propped my hands on the windowsill.
“Did you want to drink last night?” she asked.
“I thought about it.”
“You think you ought to find a meeting today?”
“I have drunk dreams every third night. They’re not dreams of desire. They’re nightmares.”
“I don’t understand what you’re telling me.”
“Wanting to drink is not really wanting to drink. It’s like a desire to cup your hand over a candle flame and snuff it out.”
She stood next to me and touched my arm. I didn’t want to look at her. Two or three women lived inside Helen’s skin, and one of them was not only androgynous but had no erotic parameters. “Slow down, bwana. We’re going to avenge those girls. I give you my word.”
I kept my eyes straight ahead. I felt her fingers on top of my wrist, felt them run along the hairs on the back of my hand and rest on my knuckles. Then her fingers moved away from me, and in the silence I could hear her breathing.
“I think there are two sets of killers in this case, two sets of interests, and two sets of motivation,” I said.
She didn’t reply until I was forced to turn and look into her face. Her gaze was steady and curious, her head tilted slightly to one side, her mouth red, her cheeks somehow leaner than they were a few minutes earlier. “What do you base that on?” she asked.
I had to concentrate in order to answer. “I think our mistake is that we keep looking for a single motive that will fit only one or two individuals. That’s natural in a sex-related homicide. But we keep discovering information that doesn’t fit the profile. Now we’re dealing with guys who seem to be cleaners. Guys like this don’t get involved in sex crimes. What I’m saying is we need to turn the pyramid upside down.”
“Too abstract, Pops.”
“You said Hermann Göring loved his mother. That’s the point.”
“What point?”
“He probably did love his mother. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t a sonofabitch. There’s nothing reasonable about human behavior. Did you see Citizen Kane?”
“About William Randolph Hearst?”
“On his deathbed, he whispers the word ‘Rosebud.’ No one can figure out what it means. Rosebud was the name of the sled he played with in the snow when he was a little boy. All his life this man who created a war in order to sell newspapers was driven by memories of his lonely childhood.”
“That’s what you think we’re dealing with?”
“Maybe. But whatever it is, we’re looking right at it. We just don’t see it.”
“I’m going with you to Jeff Davis.”
“What for?”
“I don’t like the way they treated you,” she replied. I started to speak. She raised one finger. “Not a word.”
TWO HOURS LATER, in the Jefferson Davis Parish courthouse, I didn’t find any documents that were revelatory in themselves. However, I did find a pattern. During the previous three years, within an area of approximately five hundred acres, blocks and strips of land had been sold at nominal prices to seven buyers. Most of the acreage was fallow or partially underwater. It possessed neither great agricultural or mineral value. The buyers were located in Louisiana, Dallas, Oklahoma City, and Jackson, Mississippi. In the middle of the five hundred acres were the seven arpents apparently inherited by Bernadette, all fitting like narrow pieces of a pie along the bank of the river where I had almost been killed. Under old Napoleonic law, inherited land had to be divided evenly among all the children of the deceased. When access to a navigable waterway was involved, the key issue was equal access: Hence the strange pie-slice divisions along a riverbank.
The land around Bernadette’s arpents had been sold eighteen months ago. Bernadette’s land was still in her name, although I suspected the title had reverted to the grandmother.
I made a list of the seven buyers and underlined the name of the group that had purchased other land that was part of the Latiolais estate: Castaways, Ltd., in New Orleans.
A floating casino operation? It was possible. When it comes to twenty-four-hour casinos that serve free booze to lure the compulsive and the uneducated into their maw, the altruistic oversight provided by people from Vegas and Atlantic City, the state of Louisiana is always ready to rock.
Or maybe somebody had a marina in mind. But people who build marinas don’t have young girls killed because they happen to inherit a small amount of land on a mud-choked river in a part of the country known for its poverty and illiteracy.
It had to be a casino.
When Helen and I got back to New Iberia, I dialed the number of Castaways, Ltd. The man who answered sounded young and earnest, with a voice like that of a scrubbed-face Bible-college student tapping on your door. When I told him who I was, he seemed anxious to please.
“I was looking at some properties in Jeff Davis Parish,” I said. “I see that your company purchased some acreage down by the river. Can you tell me if y’all are planning to build a marina there?”
“Could be. I remember that deal. We build boat docks and waterfront resorts and such. But you might be talking to the wrong guy.”
“How’s that?”
“We got all kinds of initiatives going here, particularly since Katrina and Rita. Let me switch you over to Edward. He’s more up to speed on that Jeff Davis deal.”
“Who is Edward?”
“I’m fixing to put him on right now. Just hang on. Thanks for calling Castaways.”
Thirty seconds later, someone else picked up on the line. “This is Edward Falgout for the St. Jude Project. How can I help you?” the voice said.
I leaned forward in my chair, the phone pressed a little tighter against my ear. “The St. Jude Project?” I said.
“Yes, sir, what can I do for you today?”
“I’m trying to clear up some title information regarding a tract in Jeff Davis Parish,” I said. “Specifically the Latiolais estate.”
“If this is about oil rights, we don’t own them. You’ll have to check the courthouse for that information.”
“My name is Dave Robicheaux. I’m with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department. We’re investigating a shooting that took place near the old Latiolais property.”
“Sorry, I was confused. I thought you were a landman with an oil company. We get a lot of inquiries about oil rights.”
“I’m writing up a report, and I was confused about some land boundaries. The Latiolais land belongs to the Castaways Corporation?”
“Yes, sir, to my knowledge. Right now it does.”
“I didn’t catch that last part.”
“It does and it doesn’t. The St. Jude Project is a charitable group. I think that piece of land you’re talking about is being transferred to us. We get land donations from various corporations. One of those corporations we work real close with is Castaways.”
“Yes, I think I’ve heard of you guys. You all do a lot of good,” I said.
“Castaways and the St. Jude try to create what we call ‘empowerment zones,’” he said. “I’m not qualified to speak on it, but the short version is that Castaways buys run-down properties and rejuvenates and donates them to the St. Jude, more or less to put local people back to work.”
“That sounds like a noble endeavor. I’m glad to learn this. My question concerns seven arpents in the name of Bernadette Latiolais. Know anything about them?”
“No, sir, afraid not.”
“Just out of curiosity, does that empowerment zone include a casino?”
“Not likely.”
“Say again?”
“These are religious people. They don’t believe in legalized gambling. The St. Jude Project is real big on the work ethic, what they call ‘workfare, not welfare.’”
“Do you know what they might be building down there? That’s one of my favorite duck-hunting spots.”
“Maybe nothing. Or maybe something ten years from now.”
“What kind of something?”
“I got no idea.”
“I appreciate your time.”
“Yes, sir, happy to help,” he replied.
I set the phone back on its base. The man named Edward Falgout may not have given me the keys to the dark tower, but inadvertently he had dropped the dime on the St. Jude Project, which meant he had put Robert Weingart and Kermit Abelard and, by extension, Timothy Abelard right back in the middle of the investigation.