The Tin Roof Blowdown (Dave Robicheaux 16)

“No, sir.”

“How long have you been working on this dock?”

“A couple of years, maybe.”

“A lot of strangers come through here?”

“I just fuel up Mr. Wiggins’s boats. I don’t pay much mind to what-all goes on around here, I mean, folks fishing and that sort of thing.”

“You ever hear of a guy named Ronald Bledsoe?”

“I can’t say that I have.”

“He’s a strange-looking guy. His head and face look like the end of a dildo.”

He coughed out a laugh and looked sideways onto the bay. He removed a pair of yellow-tinted aviator glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on, even though the sun had gone behind clouds and the marshland surrounding us had dropped into shadow. He spread his arms on the dock railing behind him and kept shaking his head, as though mulling over a question, although I had not asked one.

“Can you look at me, Mr. Tolliver?”

“I’m telling you all I can, Mr. Robicheaux. I don’t know any more.”

I kept my eyes fixed on his face until he had to look at me. “Ronald Bledsoe is an unforgettable person, Mr. Tolliver. I also think he’s a man of great cruelty. If you shake his hand, you’ll feel a piece of black electricity go right up your arm. Tell me again you don’t know this man.”

“I’m not familiar with the gentleman. No, sir,” he said, shaking his head. But I saw the tic under his left eye, just like a bee had walked across the skin.

I took a business card from my wallet and handed it to him. “You look like a man of some wisdom. Be forewarned, Mr. Tolliver. Ronald Bledsoe is an evil man. Serve his cause and he’ll consume you.”

Tolliver tried to keep his face blank, but when he swallowed he looked like he had a walnut in his throat.

THAT EVENING I dug out an old .22 ruger semiautomatic from my trunk and took Molly to the police firing range and showed her how to thumb-load the individual cartridges into the magazine and how to chamber a round. Then I taught her the use of the safety and how to dump the magazine from the gun butt and to pull back the slide to ensure a round was not still in the chamber. I did these things methodically and without joy. I did them with both reservation and a sense of depression.

The sky was mauve-colored, the trees along the state road dark with shadows and pulsing with birds. It felt strange watching Molly take a shooting position, her arms extended, one eye closed, the foam-rubber ear guards clamped on her head. It was hard to accept the fact that my wife, a former nun and a member of Pax Christi, was popping away at a paper target with a human silhouette printed on it. When she fired the last round in the magazine, the slide locked open and a tiny tongue of smoke rose from the empty chamber.

“You look unhappy,” she said.

“It’s been a long day, that’s all.”

“Are you disappointed in me?”

“No,” I said.

“You believe we’re giving power away to Ronald Bledsoe, don’t you?”

“No,” I said.

“You’re good at lots of things, Dave, but lying isn’t one of them.”

I took the ruger from her hand and dropped it in the canvas rucksack in which I kept all my shooting equipment. I put my arm over her shoulders and we walked to where my truck was parked in the trees. Hundreds of birds were throbbing in the shadows, and in the west the sun had become a red pool tucked inside a bank of rain clouds. I had the same heavy feeling in my chest that I experienced as a child when my parents set about destroying their home and family. The feeling is related to what psychiatrists call a “world destruction fantasy.” I lived with it in my dreams before I went to Vietnam and long after I returned. I addressed it with both Jim Beam and VA dope, and when they didn’t work, I addressed it with the heart-pounding adrenaline that comes with the recoil of a pistol in your palm and the smell of gunpowder in your nostrils and the whirring sound that a tumbling round makes when it flies past your ear.

I felt that something irreplaceable was about to go out of my life, but I could not tell you why. Was it just the pull of the earth that you feel at a certain age? There are times when the scrape of a shovel pushed deep into dirt can become a sliver of glass in the ear. Was I more afraid of death than I was willing to admit? Or was Ronald Bledsoe causing my family to remake itself in his image?

When we got home, Molly oiled and cleaned the ruger and did not return it to me.

AT 9:17 MONDAY MORNING my desk phone rang. “Mr. Robicheaux?” a familiar voice said.

“What do you want, Bertrand?” I replied.

“I come here for some help. I cain’t take it no more.”