Molly turned on the headlights and began backing up, craning her neck to see out the back window. The sidewalk and lawn area in front of Burke Hall were empty, the giant oak by the entrance obscuring the light from the intersection to the south.
“Miss Alafair, reach there into your book bag and give me that yellow tablet you were writing on,” Bledsoe said. “That’s right, reach in and hand it to me. You a good girl. You play your cards right, you cain’t tell what might happen. You might come out of this just fine.”
Bledsoe took the yellow legal pad from Alafair’s hand and examined the top page, all the while holding the .25 against Alafair’s head. “Miss Alafair, you just made a bunch of people very happy. Isn’t that something, Tom? It was sitting in your backyard all the time, under that big generator, I bet. It took an educated young woman to figure this out for us. She’s special is what she is. Hear that, darlin’? You special and that’s how I’m gonna treat you. You’ll like it when we get there.”
He picked a piece of glass out of her hair and flicked it out the window. He did not say where “there” was.
They pulled out on the boulevard and drove past a women’s dormitory to a stop sign on the edge of the campus. Then they turned onto University Avenue and headed toward the edge of town.
MOMENTS LATER, a few blocks up the avenue, between a Jewish cemetery that was covered with the deep shadows of cedar and oak trees, and an old icehouse that had been converted into a topless club, a jogger had to dodge a car that had plunged out of the traffic, across the median, and possibly had been hit by another car. The jogger could not see clearly inside the car because of the mist, but when he called 911, he told the dispatcher he had heard a sound like muffled firecrackers and he thought he had seen a series of flashes inside the windows.
space
I CLAMPED THE portable emergency flasher on the roof of my truck and let Clete drive. By the time Clete had driven us through the little town of Broussard, the highway was slick, the sky black, and traffic was backing up because of construction outside Lafayette. We went through a long section of urban sprawl that in my college days had been sugarcane fields and pecan orchards, threaded by a two-lane highway that had been lined on each side with live oaks. But that was all gone.
It was almost 10:00 p.m. I had called Molly’s cell phone three times en route, getting her voice mail each time.
“You’re worrying too much. They’re probably headed home by now,” Clete said.
“She always checks her voice mail. It’s an obsession with her,” I said.
“Think about it a minute, Dave. Nothing has changed since this afternoon, except for the fact we found out Claggart is Asswipe’s half brother. That doesn’t mean Molly and Alafair are in greater danger. You know what I think is bothering you?”
“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”
“You smoked Rydel and now you want to drink.”
When I didn’t speak, he said, “Remember when we did that bunch of Colombians? I’ve never been so scared in my life. I drank a dozen double Scotches that night and it didn’t make a dent.”
“Clete?”
“Yeah?”
“Will you shut up?”
He looked at me in the glow of the dash, then mashed on the accelerator, swerving across a double stripe to pass a tractor-trailer rig, rocking both of us against the doors.
I punched in 911 and got a Lafayette Parish dispatcher. “What’s the nature of your emergency?” a black woman’s voice said.
“This is Detective Dave Robicheaux, Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department,” I said. “I’m on my way to the UL campus to find my wife and daughter. They usually park by Cypress Lake, next to Burke Hall. They’re not responding to my calls. I think they may be in jeopardy. Will you send a cruiser to the campus and check out their vehicle, please?”
I gave her the make and model of Molly’s car.
“We have a five-car accident on University, but we’ll get someone over to the campus as soon as possible,” she said. “Do you want me to call Campus Security?”
“Yes, please.”
“You didn’t tell me the nature of the emergency.”
“Some guys tried to kill my family on Sunday. They’re still out there.”
“Give me your number and I’ll call you every ten minutes until we know they’re safe.”
“Thank you,” I said.
As I said, it’s the most humble members of the human family who remind us of the Orwellian admonition that people are always better than we think they are.
Clete hit a clear stretch of four-lane road and floored my truck. We went through a brightly lit shopping district, then entered the old part of Lafayette, where live oak trees hung with moss still form canopies over the streets. We turned left on University Avenue and passed the five-car pileup the 911 dispatcher had mentioned. The mist was gray, floating across the trees and shrubbery and hedges in the university district. A church bus passed us in the opposite direction, then a tanker truck and a stretch limo and a small car barely visible on the other side of the limo.