Crusader's Cross (Dave Robicheaux 14)

You're being set up again, I told myself.

But sometimes your only option is to play out the hand, no matter what the consequences. Sometimes when you're deep in Indian country, the only speeds available are full throttle and fuck it.

The bridge's rotary system had locked against itself when the steel grid was only five feet from the asphalt. I backed off, then jumped into space and landed upright with a loud ping on the metal. People were starting to get out of their cars and stare. I raced to the other end of the bridge and jumped again, this time skinning my elbow and tearing the knee of my trousers on the road surface.

I got up and starting running toward the rear of the traffic jam. A fat man wearing a silver suit and a Stetson short-brim was getting out of a huge purple Cadillac. The factory hood ornament on the Cadillac had been replaced with a pair of needlepointed brass cattle horns. "What the hell is going on?" the fat man said.

"How much gas is in your car?" I said.

"Gas?"

"This is an emergency situation," I said, opening my badge holder in his face. "I'm taking your vehicle."

"Not my car, you're not. I've got to be at the Oil Center in Lafayette in thirty minutes."

"In about thirty seconds you're going to be on the ground in cuffs," I said.

I got behind the wheel, and with the driver's door still open I backed straight down the two-lane to the next intersection, cut the wheel, then floored the accelerator down Old Jeanerette Road toward Molly's agency, slamming the door as the cement raced by me.

I ran a stop sign at eighty, clipped a mailbox and a garbage can, passed a tractor-drawn cane wagon, and forced an oncoming truck into a rain ditch. Water oaks along the road and collapsed barbed-wire fences and shacks and single-wide trailers with broken windows sped by me, then I saw Molly's compound up ahead.

The grounds were empty, the blinds drawn in the administration building, the St. Augustine grass green and stiff with the rain, an inch higher since yesterday. I pulled into the entrance, my heart hammering, sweat breaking on my forehead. I saw no sign of Molly's car, nor any other vehicle.

Think, I told myself. Would Molly have gone to Andre Bergeron's house to confront him about the unauthorized use of her farm tools? No, she did things in a measured way and was not a compulsive person. Normally, she would have telephoned a person who had wronged her, asked him to explain himself, perhaps invited him to come by and have coffee and talk with her. That was Molly Boyle's way.

But Molly's recorded telephone message had mentioned that she was "disappointed" and the fact that someone had borrowed her tools without permission "again." She may not have been an obsessive person, but she had a low level of tolerance for people who lied or violated the trust of others, which she always referred to as an act of spiritual theft.

I parked by the administration building and rattled the doors, then walked next door to the cypress cottage which Molly used to share with a nun who had returned to the Midwest to care for her mother. The nun's car was parked under a pecan tree, covered by a clear plastic tarp fogged with humidity and pooled with wet leaves and

bird droppings.

I wiped my face with my shirt. The air stank of stagnant mud, raw sewage backed up from the treatment plant, the bloated body of a drowned cow that gars were feeding on in the shallows. I could hear bottle flies buzzing inside the plastic tarp on the nun's car.

When the sun broke through a cloud, the tops of the cypress trees along the bayou lit up as though they had been touched with a flame. I saw an aluminum boat snugged inside a clump of flooded willows, its motor pulled out of the water, an anchor consisting of a cinder block threaded by a rope thrown up on the bank.

Forty yards downstream, Molly's car was parked behind the barn, wedged between the back wall and the remains of a disease-eaten mulberry tree that had been uprooted by the storm. Both the driver and passenger doors hung open.

I felt a wave of nausea and fear wash through my system. I ran back to the tarp-covered vehicle of Molly's friend, a pressure band like a strip of metal tightening against the side of my head. I meshed the plastic in both hands and ripped it free of the roof, showering myself with water and birdshit. A cloud of beetles and greenflies and a stench of rats rose into my face. But there was no one inside the car and no footprints around the trunk area.

I flung the tarp down and headed for the barn.

Chickens were pecking under the pole shed and the live oak that arched high over the barn roof. I started to go down by the bayou and circle behind the barn and come up on the other side, but I remembered there was a window in back that gave a clear view down to the water. I removed my .45 from my holster and pulled back the receiver and slipped a hollow-point forward into the chamber.

A rooster came out from under the tractor, its wings spread wide, its throat warbling, scattering hens across the apron of dirt that extended out to the drip line of the oak tree. I pressed myself against the front of the barn, the .45 pointed upward, the pressure band on the right side of my head squeezing tighter. The barn door was ajar. From inside I heard a hissing sound and smelled an odor like scorched metal.

I ripped the door open and went inside, pointing the .45 into the gloom with both hands.

Molly's wrists were locked with plastic cuffs behind a chair, her head enclosed in a burlap bag that Andre Bergeron had cinched around her neck with his belt. An acetylene torch lay on the workbench, a concentrated blue flame knifing from its nozzle. Bergeron held the sharpened edge of a machete under Molly's chin. He was bare-chested, his skin glistening, a bandanna wrapped around his head to keep the sweat out of his eyes.

"T'row the gun down or I take her head off," he said.

I now realized how Valentine Chalons had played me. "Chalons set us both up, Andre. I'm supposed to pop you so he can inherit Mr. Raphael's estate."

"Don't matter. T'row down the gun. Both of us know you ain't gonna shoot it."

"That's a bad bet," I said.

"You t'ink? One more don't mean nothing to me," he said.