The Tin Roof Blowdown (Dave Robicheaux 16)

The roof of the car had the same rusty tin

t as Molly’s. I turned around in the seat and looked through the back window, but I had lost sight of the car.

“Was that Molly and Alafair?” Clete said.

“I’m not sure.”

“Want me to turn around?”

I thought about it. “No, check Burke Hall first,” I said.

“You got it, noble mon,” Clete said.

space

AS THEY DROVE DOWN University Avenue past a five-car pileup, Ronald Bledsoe propped both his arms on the back of Alafair’s seat to conceal the .25 automatic he had wedged against her spine. He smelled her hair again and ticked the back of her neck with his fingernail. When she tried to lean forward, he hooked his finger in her collar.

“Why’d you kick me in the park?” he asked.

“Where are we going?” Molly said.

“Straight ahead. I’ll tell you what to do. You don’t talk anymore until I tell you to,” he replied. He nudged Alafair with the automatic. “You didn’t answer my question, darlin’.”

“I kicked you in the mouth because you asked for it,” she said.

“I did no such thing. You shouldn’t lie.”

Alafair’s face was growing more intense, her features sharpening. He put his lips on the nape of her neck, then mussed her hair with his free hand.

“Do you believe we let this sick fuck take over our car?” she said to Molly.

“Miss, don’t talk like that to Ronald,” Tom Claggart said. “You don’t want to do that.”

“What else can you do to us? You’re going to kill us. Look at you, you’re pathetic. You both have heads that look like foreskin. Who was your mother? She must have been inseminated by a yeast infection.”

The effect of her words on the two men was different from what she had expected. Bledsoe cupped his hand under her chin and drew her head close to his mouth. Then he bit her hair. But it was Claggart who seemed to be losing control, as though he were witnessing a prelude to events he had seen before and did not want to see again. He became agitated, his eyes twitching. He rubbed his hands up and down on his thighs. Then he realized his raincoat was caught in the door. He began jerking at it, as though he were happy to have something to distract him.

“Pull over. My coat is caught,” he said.

“There’s a semi going fifty miles an hour on my bumper,” Molly said.

“I don’t care. Pull over right now. Make her pull over, Ronald,” Claggart said.

Then Claggart opened the door while the car was still moving. Molly swerved the wheel and he lurched sideways. Bledsoe wasn’t sure what was happening. In seconds, the environment he had imposed total control on was coming apart. He spit Alafair’s hair out of his mouth and grabbed Claggart’s arm, just as the open door was hit by a car traveling in the opposite direction.

Alafair reached down on the floor. All in one motion, she pulled Molly’s .22 Ruger from her purse, worked the slide, and brought up the barrel into Ronald Bledsoe’s face. His eyes were filled with disbelief. But his bigger problem was the fact he was twisted in the seat, his own brother fighting with him over a raincoat, his shoulder jammed against the seat so he couldn’t get off a shot at Alafair. The next second was probably the longest in Ronald Bledsoe’s life.

“Suck on this, you freak,” Alafair said.

She pulled the trigger four times. The first round went into his mouth and punched through his cheek. The second embedded in his forearm when he lifted it in front of him, the third clipped off the end of a finger, and the fourth shattered his chin, slinging blood and saliva across the seat and the back window.

Molly’s ears were deaf in the blowback of the Ruger. In the rearview mirror she saw Bledsoe staring back at her, his ruined mouth twisted like soft rubber, his concave face like a cartoon that was incapable of understanding the damage it had just incurred.

Molly’s car struck the curb and came to a stop, cars swerving around her in the mist, their horns blowing. Alafair jumped from the car and pulled Bledsoe out the back door onto the concrete. She reached down and picked up his gun from the floor and threw it into the shrubbery on the edge of the cemetery. Tom Claggart sat frozen in the seat, his raincoat and shirt whipsawed with blood.

Bledsoe stared up at her from the gutter, waiting, his eyes genuinely puzzled, as a child might look up from its crib at the looming presence of its mother. Alafair extended the Ruger with both hands, aiming it into the center of his forehead.

“Alafair—” Molly said, almost in a whisper.