ed above the Caddy’s shell. The tires had exploded and the air stank of burnt rubber and the leather in the seats and the wiring and hoses that had melted in the engine. But one odor in particular overpowered all the others. It was one that lived in my sleep, and the image and sound that went with it—a burst of flame from a nozzle, an incongruous mewing sound, like that of a newborn kitten—were etched forever in my unconscious, and no amount of booze or hospital dope will ever remove them.
I walked through a dry coulee full of leaves and came up on the driver’s side of the Caddy. The door hung ajar and the window was rolled down. The convertible top had settled like an ashy veil on the shape of a man who sat slumped forward on the steering wheel.
The figure was that of a big man, or at least he had been a big man until the fire had seared and buckled his flesh and boiled his blood and deformed his features. I touched the door handle, then pulled my hand away from the heat that was still trapped inside the metal. I removed a handkerchief from my pocket and clasped the handle with it and pulled the door completely open.
The veil of ash on the man’s head fell away and powdered in his lap. His mouth was locked open, his eyes cavernous and poached, his ears little more than red-black stubs. I backed away and fell to one knee, the butt of my shotgun propped up in the leaves. I tried to suppress the sob in my chest, but to no avail. I cried, as a child would, my back heaving, my hand clenched over my eyes. A Beretta lay on the floor, by the foot pedals, the pistol grips blown off by the rounds that had exploded in the magazine. It was the same model, with a fourteen-round magazine, that Clete had carried.
I backed away into the coulee and looked again at the cabin. The sun had dipped over the horizon, and someone in the cabin had either lit a lantern or turned on a battery-powered light. I circled far to one side of the cabin, so I could see the back as well as the front entrance. Farther down the slope was a canal and a boathouse and a shed inside of which at least two vehicles were parked.
I knelt behind a tree and studied the cabin. My cell phone was in my pocket and I could have called for help. But I knew I wouldn’t, and I also knew I was not even going to think about the things I was about to do. I would just do them and add up the score when it was all over. My ears were filled with a sound like a train entering a tunnel, a taste like copper pennies in my mouth. My hands were damp and tight on the stock and pump of the twelve-gauge, my breath almost rasping with anticipation. In my mind’s eye, I already saw the pink mist I was going to create out of the faces inside the cabin.
I moved quickly up the coulee until I was in a place that was overhung with cypress boughs and black with shadow, swimming with clouds of mosquitoes and gnats. The back entrance was actually a ramp that led to a screened porch that was stacked with collapsible-wire crab traps. I saw a silhouette against a back window, then the silhouette disappeared and the glass was filled with an unobstructed yellow radiance again.
This one is under a black flag, Cletus. This one is for you, I thought.
I entered that adrenaline-fed dead zone of bloodlust that requires no pretense of moral justification for its inhabitants. I pushed off the safety behind the shotgun’s trigger guard with my index finger and sprinted across the backyard, bent low, my neck running with sweat, the wind suddenly cold on my face. Then I pounded up the ramp, ripped open the screen, and crashed over a tangle of fishing tackle and cartons of preserve jars into the cabin’s interior, the sound of my shoes like hammers on the floor, the shotgun’s stock against my shoulder.
At first I couldn’t assimilate the scene and situation I had burst into. Trish Klein lay in a corner, hog-tied wrists-to-ankles, her mouth wrapped round and round with silver duct tape. Clete Purcel was not only alive, he had been propped up in a heavy oak chair, his forearms and calves cinched to the wood with plastic ligatures. His eyes were swollen into puffed slits, his face streaked with blood, his bare chest and shoulders and arms burned by cigarettes. A coarse piece of hemp rope hung down from his throat.
Lefty Raguza had stripped to the waist and slipped on a pair of leather gloves before going to work on Clete’s face. Had he not been wearing gloves, perhaps he might have been more successful in pulling a .38 revolver from a shoulder holster hanging on the back of a chair. When I squeezed the trigger on the twelve-gauge, the load of double-aught bucks caught him across the collarbone and in the throat and exited into wallpaper that was printed with garden scenes of children watering flowers from sprinkler cans.
Lefty fell heavily against the wall, as though stunned that an event he had always associated with other people was now happening to him. In fact, the cool green fire in his eyes never died. As he slid toward the floor, he looked straight ahead, never blinking, his gaze steady, his mouth pursed like a fish’s when it feeds at the surface of a lake. One hand came to rest on his genitalia, then he made a puffing sound and died.
I heard Trish Klein trying to talk behind the tape over her mouth, then Clete raised his head and spit and whispered something I couldn’t understand. I ejected the spent shell from the chamber and heard it hit the floor.
“What is it?” I said, my ears still ringing from the roar of the shotgun inside the room.
Clete nodded at a door to a side room.
Too late.
Whitey Bruxal came out shooting. He was holding a chrome-plated .25-caliber automatic straight out in front of him, squeezing off rounds as fast as he could pull his finger, his face averted from the shotgun blast he knew he would probably have to eat. One round lasered across my scalp, then a second one caught me on the rotator cuff, just as though someone had punched the bone with a hammer and cold chisel.
I spun away from him, my left arm held out defensively in front of me, and swung the shotgun haphazardly in his direction. When I fired, the shotgun jerked upward in my hand and I saw Whitey tilt forward, as though he had been struck by a violent attack of nausea. He laced both arms across his stomach, his mouth open, and sat down heavily in a chair. His forehead was pinpointed with sweat and the level of pain and terror in his eyes made me look away from his face.
I lay the shotgun across the tabletop and pressed a towel between Whitey’s forearms and the exposed entrails he was trying to hold inside his stomach cavity.
“Hang on,” I said. “I’m calling for the paramedics.”
“You read it all wrong, Dave. In the bedroom,” I heard Clete say hoarsely behind me.
But at that point I trusted none of my own faculties. My shoulder ached miserably and my ears were popping as though I were aboard an airplane that had suddenly lost altitude. Who was the man in the burned Caddy? How did the car burn? I sank into a chair and reached for my cell phone.
Then a shadow cast by a light inside the bedroom fell across my hand. I turned my head and stared into the face of Valerie Lujan.
“I’m sorry it’s come to this, Mr. Robicheaux. I wish you had left us alone,” she said.
She was standing in the doorway now, supported by an aluminum brace whose socket fitted around her left forearm. In her other hand she held a small pistol. Her flesh tone was pink, her eyes clear, as though she had been suffused with new life from an iniquitous enterprise.
I looked at the shotgun, the blue-black of the steel, the damp imprints of my hands still on the stock, the safety still pushed to the off position. But I had not ejected the spent shell after I had shot Whitey. Even if I could pick up the gun, I would never have time to jack another round into the chamber before Valerie Lujan shot me at point-blank range.
“How many mistakes can one man make?” I said.
“Did you think an ignoramus like my husband amassed a fortune by running cockfights and handling oil leases that usually resulted in dry holes? He could hardly write his name. Half the money Miss Klein stole from Mr. Bruxal belongs to me.”
I was losing more blood than I had thought and the room was spinning around me. Whitey was bent forward across from me, the tops of his forearms glistening with blue and red lights.
“Let m