Crusader's Cross (Dave Robicheaux 14)

I woke up from the dream and went into the kitchen to make coffee. What did the dream mean? Bootsie had said that one day the brown pelicans would come back to the Teche. But I didn't need dreams to tell me there were no pelicans on Bayou Teche, and that my parents were as dead as the world in which I grew up.

"Up early?" I heard Molly say.

"It's a beautiful morning," I said.

She went outside and came back with both Tripod and Snuggs and filled their pet bowls. "There's a robin standing on top of the new birdhouse," she said.

"Andre Bergeron told me a story yesterday about Mr. Raphael saving a baby from a gator. Except his story seemed to be about something else."

"A baby?"

"Yeah, a black baby. A gator came after it. Bergeron said when he was a little boy he saw Mr. Raphael save the baby from the gator."

"The baby was Andre. At least that's what I always heard. The old man saved his life. Andre has ugly scars all over one calf."

"Funny guy," I said.

"Andre is sweet," she replied. She looked at the clock on the counter. "It's only five-thirty. You sure you don't want to take a nap before you go to work?" She pursed her lips and waited, her chest rising and falling in the soft blueness of the morning.

"You talked me into it," I said.

I attended the Friday noon meeting of an AA bunch known as the Insanity Group. The meeting was held in a dilapidated house in a poor section of town, and was supposedly a nonsmoking one. But people lit up in both the front and back doorways and flooded the house's interior with amounts of smoke that few bars contain. The people in the Insanity Group had paid hard dues — in jails, detox units, car wrecks, and the kind of beer-glass brawls that quickly turn homicidal. Few of the men shaved more than once every five or six days. Many of the women, most of whom were tattooed, considered themselves fortunate to have a job in a carwash. Anybody there whose life didn't trail clouds of chaos possessed the spiritual eminence of St. Francis of Assisi.

But their honesty and courage in dealing with the lot life had dealt them had always been an example to me. Unfortunately for me, the subject of the meeting was the Fourth Step of Alcoholics Anonymous., namely, making a thorough and fearless inventory of one's own conscience. It was not a subject I cared to broach, at least not since my encounter with Jericho Johnny Wineburger at Henderson Swamp.

I made no contribution during the meeting, although the previous week I had admitted my slip to everyone there.

"You want to say something, Dave?" the group leader said just before closing.

"My name is Dave. I'm an alcoholic," I said.

"Hello, Dave!" everyone shouted.

"I'm glad to be here and sober. Thanks," I said.

After the "Our Father," I bagged out the door and headed for the department before any overly helpful people decided to chat with me about the Fourth Step.

I buried myself in the baskets of paperwork that had been delegated to me since I had been put on the desk. But I could not get Jericho Johnny out of my head. Clete had cranked his engine. Now neither he nor I could shut it off. In the meantime, Val Chalons had no clue that he was potential sharkmeat.

I hated the thought of what I had to do and fought with myself about it the entire weekend.

By noon Monday I was worn out with it and picked up the phone and called Val Chalons's residential number. The voice that answered was unfamiliar. I could hear hammering in the background, an electric saw whining through wood.

"Where's Mr. Chalons?" I asked.

"Out on the bayou, popping skeets. Well, they ain't exactly skeets."

"Who's this?" I said.

"The carpenter."

"Would you ask Mr. Chalons to come to the phone? This is Detective Dave Robicheaux."

"He said I ain't suppose to bot'er him. Ain't you the guy who beat him up?"

I drove in my pickup down the bayou to the Chalons home. Only Saturday, the old man's ashes had been interred at a secular funeral. The transformation in progress at the property was stunning. A lawn crew of at least a dozen men was weeding out the flower beds, cracking apart and air-vacuuming layers of compacted leaves, ripping vines from the sides of the house, and stacking and burning piles of dead tree limbs.

Roofers, carpenters, brickmasons, and painters were at work inside and outside the house. The oak trees were dark green and looked stiff and clean against the sky. Both the yard and the house were now columned with sunlight. The terrace next to the side porch was already abloom with freshly planted flowers.