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 ahead 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.”
The man opened the door and walked out on the porch and shoved open the screen, sending it back on its spring. It swung shut behind him with a loud slap. “Is that you, Lou?” he said into the darkness.
CLETE MOVED QUICKLY, closing the space between himself and the man in the black T-shirt, the silenced.40-caliber semiauto extended in front of him. “Walk toward me, hands out by your sides. Do it now,” he said. “No, no, don’t put your hands on your head. It’s not a time to be clever.”
Clete began to back up. The man in the black T-shirt wore no hat, and the rain glistened on his face and hair. His gaze swept across the yard. “Where’s everyone?” he said.
“Guess. Walk to me, bub. Play it right and you can have another season to run.”
“I’ve heard about you.”
“Good. Now do what you’re told.”
“You were in El Sal. So was I. Except I wasn’t fighting for the Communists.”
“I was killing Communists before your mother defecated you into the world, asshole. Now move it.”
“You know the expression: A guy just has to try.”
Clete raised his left hand, patting at the air, his body hunched forward like that of a man frightened for his own life rather than someone else’s. “Don’t do it, pal. Think of all the beer you didn’t drink, the steaks you didn’t eat, the broads you didn’t call up. What you’re thinking now is the ultimate impure thought. Look at me. No, no, don’t do that. Look at me. Put your hand back in front of- Oh shit.”
The man in the black T-shirt had his hand on the grips of the.45 stuck down in the back of his belt. He was grinning, his arm twisted behind him, his body contorted when Clete pulled the trigger. He made a whooshing sound, like a man who had stepped on a sharp rock. Then he sat down heavily in the mud, one hand pressed against the wound in his stomach, his head lowered as he stared at the blood on his palm, his hair separating on his scalp in the rain.
Clete picked up the.45 and went through the back door like a wrecking ball.
I DON’T THINK I learned a great deal from life. Certainly I never figured out any of the great mysteries: why the innocent suffer, why wars and pestilence seem to be our lot, why evil men prosper and go unpunished while the poor and downtrodden are oppressed. The lessons I’ve taken with me are rather simple and possibly aren’t worthy of mention. But these are the two I remember most. When I was a young lieutenant in the United States Army and about to experience my first combat, I was very afraid and had no one to whom I could confess my fear. I was sure my ineptitude would cause not only my own death but also the deaths of the men and boys for whom supposedly I was an example. Then a line sergeant told me something I never forgot: “Don’t think about it before it starts, and don’t think about it when it’s over. If you have nightmares, there’s always an all-night bar open someplace, if you don’t mind the tab.”
The larger lesson I took from the sergeant’s statement was the implication about the arbitrary and accidental nature of both birth and death. Just as we have no control over our conception and our delivery from the birth canal, the hour of our death is not of our choosing, and neither are the circumstances surrounding it. An admission of powerlessness is not a choice. That’s just the way things are.
I can’t say these lessons ever brought me peace of mind. But they did allow me to feel that in the time I was on earth, I at least saw part of the truth that governs our lives.
When Clete came through the kitchen door, he had no idea what to expect. Kermit Abelard and Robert Weingart and Carolyn Blanchet were all standing under the kitchen light. Maybe it was the presence of a woman that caused Clete to hesitate, or the fact that Kermit did not have a weapon in his hand. Or perhaps his eyes did not adjust quickly enough to the change from darkness to light. But by the time he had swung the silenced Smith & Wesson toward Weingart, Weingart had raised his.25 semiauto and pointed it directly at Clete’s chest. Then, coward that he was, his face was averted when he pulled the trigger, lest Clete get off a shot before he went down.
The report of the.25 was like the pop of a firecracker. The bullet punched a small hole in the strap of Clete’s shoulder holster, inches above his heart. He crashed against the breakfast table, dropping the silenced semiautomatic to the floor, the.45 falling loose from his pants. I could see him fighting not to go down, struggling to get his.38 loose from its holster.
Carolyn Blanchet was screaming hysterically. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Molly cut through the tape on her ankles and tear the tape off her mouth and come toward me. I extended my wrists behind me, then felt the weight of the scissors wedge between my hands, the blades slicing into the tape. In the kitchen, Kermit was shouting at Weingart, “Shoot him! Shoot him! Shoot him!”
Clete straightened up, grasping the back of a chair with one hand, lifting his.38 in front of him. Weingart shot him again, this time high up on the right arm. Clete went down in the chair, doubling over. For a second, there was no sound in the house except the wind blowing a shower of pine needles across the roof. I took the scissors from Molly’s hand and freed my ankles. “Get Alf loose and go out the front,” I said.
“You have to come with us,” she said.
“Clete’s going to die,” I said.
“We’ll get help,” she said, her voice starting to break.
“I’ll never leave Clete,” I said. “My shotgun is in the closet. You guys go on. Please.”
“He’s right, Molly. Come on,” Alafair said, getting to her feet, the tape still hanging from her wrists and ankles.
I ran into the bedroom and pulled my cut-down twelve-gauge from the back of the closet. My hands were shaking as I got down the box of shells from the shelf and thumbed five rounds in the magazine. Then I dipped another handful of shells out of the box, stuffed them in my pocket, and went into the kitchen.
Clete still sat in the chair, his face white with the first stages of shock. The phone on the counter had been torn from the jack, the receiver broken in half. Carolyn Blanchet was huddled in a corner, trembling all over, her makeup running, her mouth contorted. Weingart and Kermit were gone, and so were my.45 and the silenced semiauto.
“Where are they?” I said.
“Bagged ass down the slope, I think. They were talking about a boat,” Clete said. “Maybe down toward The Shadows.”
His breathing was ragged, the color leaching out of his hands and arms. A single rivulet of blood was running from the hole above his heart. He looked into my face. “I know what you’re thinking, big mon,” he said. “Go after them. Don’t stay here. If they come back through the house, it’ll be to clip us both. Remember what I said. It’s a black flag. Don’t let these guys skate again.”
I turned to Carolyn Blanchet. “You get off your ass and take care of him,” I said. “You do whatever he says. If I come back and he’s not all right, you’ll leave here in a body bag.”
I went out the back door into the yard. I could see Tripod on the tree limb above his hutch, shaking with fear, his chain dripping from his neck. The rain had slackened, but the fog was thicker and whiter, the trees and camellia bushes glistening with it. Out on the bayou, I could hear a powerboat coming upstream from The Shadows. I suspected it was the one that Kermit and Weingart had planned to use for their escape. But the boat did not stop or pull into the bank. Instead, the driver gave it the gas, and a moment later it shot past the back of my property, whining into the distance.
Kermit and Weingart were on their own.
“Give it up,” I said.
The only sound in the yard was the ticking of the rain on the canopy. Weingart had manipulated the system all his life. Why should he either fear or heed it now? The same with Kermit Abelard. He had been born into wealth and privilege and had managed to convince others and probably himself as well that he was an egalitarian rebel. In reality, he had created an inextricable bond with another dysfunctional man, each finding in the other what he lacked, the two of them probably creating a third personality that was subhuman and genuinely monstrous.
I didn’t care to dwell on the psychological complexities of evil men. Whether their kind possesses the wingspread of a Lucifer or a moth is a question better left to theologians. Clete needed me. If I could be certain I had established a safe perimeter, I could return to Clete and let my colleagues take care of Kermit Abelard and Robert Weingart. But that was not the way things would work out.
The fog was like steam on my skin. My eyes were stinging and I couldn’t trust my vision. Across the bayou, I thought I saw lights burning in City Park. But I realized the luminosity inside the fog came from another source. The vessel was a double-decker, its passenger windows lamplit, its beam big enough to withstand ten-foot seas. I could hear the engines throbbing through the decks and the sound of water cascading off a paddle wheel on the stern.
“Look what you have wrought, Mr. Robicheaux,” Kermit’s voice said from the darkness. “You’re a controller. You poisoned my relationship with your daughter. You tormented my grandfather. Hubris is your bane. You’re like most alcoholics. You’ve superimposed all your character defects onto others and brought down your house.”
“If I harmed you in any way, Kermit, I regret not doing a whole lot more of it,” I said.
“If you’re so brave, Mr. Robicheaux, walk out here and face me man-to-man.”
In the darkness I could see little more than the shapes of the trees and the camellia bushes and the air vines and Spanish moss that dripped with rain. I doubted that Kermit Abelard wanted to duel under the oaks. He was a creature of guile, and I suspected he was trying to distract me until Robert Weingart could position himself and get a clear shot at me.
I knelt on one knee in the leaves and pine needles, the cut-down twelve-gauge tilted at a forty-five-degree angle. I heard footsteps to my right. As a parasite and a narcissist, Weingart had made a career out of earning the trust of others, making them dependent upon him, flattering them when need be, then quickly deflating them and injecting feelings of failure and guilt in them, and finally sucking the lifeblood from their veins. As with all his ilk, he didn’t do well on a level playing field. When I heard a rotted branch break under his foot, he was still forty feet from me, not close enough for an unskilled shooter to take out a target in the dark.
The wind gusted down the slope when I saw him. He was standing between a camellia bush and the bamboo border between my property and the neighbor’s. The bamboo swayed and rattled in the wind; the leaves and flowers on the camellia bush filled with air and motion. Weingart remained frozen, the only unmoving object in his immediate environment.
I snugged the stock of the shotgun against my shoulder and aimed at the silhouette. “I win, you lose. Throw your piece down. Make sure I hear it hit the ground,” I said.
But he chose otherwise. That was when I pulled the trigger. My shells were loaded with double-aught buckshot. My guess was he took most of the pattern in the face.
I ejected the empty casing and moved farther down the slope. Weingart was on his back, still alive, strangling on his own blood. I picked up his.25 auto and dropped it in my pocket.
“Robert?” I heard Kermit call. When there was no reply, he said, “Robbie, where are you? Are you hurt?”
I remained motionless by a slash pine and waited. My palms were sweating on the twelve-gauge. I thought I heard a siren coming down Main. The moon moved out from behind a cloud; a solitary band of cold light broke through the canopy and I saw Kermit standing three feet from an enormous live oak, one in whose heart the rusted mooring chains of a slave ship were encased in the wood.
“Last chance, Kermit,” I said.
He held both hands straight out by his sides, like a man surrendering himself for crucifixion. He was holding my.45 in his right hand. “Do it. I want you to,” he said.
“That’s a job for the state of Louisiana. Bend down slowly, your left hand on your head, and place my weapon on the ground.”
“Sure,” he said. But he made no move.
“You told Alafair this is your crucifixion year. Sorry, Kermit, but you just don’t make the cut.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really. You couldn’t even get a job as the Good Thief.”
I thought I heard the back door of the house slam behind me. But I couldn’t look away from Kermit. I saw him spread his feet in a shooter’s position and fold his hands in front of him, and I knew my.45 was aimed directly at my face.
The blast from the shotgun knocked him through a camellia bush. I think he cried out, but I can’t be sure. My ears were ringing, the air tannic with the smell of burnt gunpowder. My shoulder ached and my face was swollen out of shape from the blows I had taken in the house, the skin electric to the touch. I ejected the empty casing from the shotgun and watched it roll smoking down the embankment. Then I heard feet running behind me as Clete yelled from the back steps, “Dave, look out, she had a piece in her purse!”
I started to turn around, my left hand working the pump on the twelve-gauge, but it was too late. Carolyn Blanchet had slowed to a brisk walk, slow enough to aim with one outstretched arm, her face twisted like a harridan’s. “You thought you could talk to me like that? Who do you think you are?” she said.
And she shot me in the back.
Strangely, I felt little pain. The blow was like a smack from a fist between the shoulder blades, just enough to knock the breath out of me, to buckle my knees for a second or two, to make the trees and the bayou lose shape, to make me drop the shotgun and stumble down the slope to the place I knew I was now going.
I could see the paddle wheeler in the fog, a gangway lowered in the shallows. Behind me, Clete was lumbering off balance down the incline, calling my name. Maybe he shot Carolyn Blanchet, but I couldn’t be sure. The sounds inside my head were impossible to separate. I saw Molly and Alafair saying good-bye to me, and Tripod and Snuggs walking back up the slope to the house. I saw a black medic from my platoon pressing a cellophane cigarette wrapper on a hole in my lung, saying, Sucking chest wound, motherfucker. Breathe through your mouth. Chuck got to breathe. I heard steam engines roaring and hissing so loudly they seemed to be tearing the paddle wheeler apart. I heard the blades of the dust-off coming in over the canopy, the downdraft flattening the elephant grass, the twirling smoke of marker grenades sucking away into the sky. I felt a syrette of morphine go into my thigh and radiate through my body like an erotic kiss. I felt people gathering me up by my arms and legs and lifting me above their heads, but not onto the Huey. They were helping me to my feet, steadying me between them, leading up the gangway onto the deck of the paddle wheeler, a place I did not want to go.
I saw my father, Big Al, in his tin hard hat and my mother, Alafair Mae Guillory, in the pillbox hat she was so proud of, both of them on the bow, smiling, coming toward me. I saw men from my platoon, their rent fatigues laundered, their wounds glowing with a white radiance, and I saw boys in sun-bleached butternut and tattered gray, and I saw Golden Glove boxers from the state finals of 1956 and black musicians from Sharkey Bonano’s Dream Room on Bourbon. I saw grifters and martyred Maryknollers and strippers and saints and street people of every kind, and until that moment, I never realized how loving and beautiful human beings could be.
I heard the paddle wheel churn to life on the stern, showering the air with its spray. Then I saw Clete emerge from the fog on the bank, his face white from blood loss, his clothes streaked with water and dotted with mud. He stumbled up the gangway like an irascible drunk wrecking a party, wrapping his arms around me, locking his hands behind my back, pulling me back down toward the bank. His mouth was pressed against the side of my head, and I could hear the hoarseness of his voice an inch from my ear: “You can’t go, Streak. The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are forever.”
And that’s the way it went in the year 2009, the two of us locked together on a gangplank on the banks of Bayou Teche, in New Iberia, Louisiana, praying for the pinkness of another dawn, like finding safe harbor inside a giant conch shell, the winds of youth and spring echoing eternally.