Sunset Limited (Dave Robicheaux 10)

CISCO FILMED LATE THAT night and did not return home until after 2 a.m. The intruders came sometime between midnight and then. They were big, heavy men, booted, sure of themselves and unrelenting in their purpose. They churned and destroyed the flower beds, where they disabled the alarm system, and slipped a looped wire through a window jamb and released the catch from inside. Each went through the opening with one muscular thrust, because hardly any dirt was scuffed into the bricks below the jamb.

They knew where she slept, and unlike the men who admired Megan for her strength, these men despised her for it. Their hands fell upon her in her sleep, wrenched her from the bed, bound her eyes, hurled her through the door and out onto the patio and down the slope to the bayou. When she pulled at the tape on her eyes, they slapped her to her knees.

But while they forced her face into the water, none of them saw the small memo recorder attached to a key ring she held clenched in her palm. Even while her mouth and nostrils filled with mud and her lungs burned for air as though acid had been poured in them, she tried to keep her finger pressed on the "record" button.

Then she felt the bayou grow as warm as blood around her neck just as a veined, yellow bubble burst in the center of her mind, and she knew she was safe from the hands and fists and booted feet of the men who had always lived on the edge of her camera's lens.

* * *

SEVENTEEN

THE TAPE ON THE SMALL recorder had only a twenty-second capacity. Most of the voices were muffled and inaudible, but there were words, whole sentences, sawed out of the darkness that portrayed Megan's tormenters better than any photograph could:

"Hold her, damnit! This is one bitch been asking for it a long time. You cain't get her head down, get out of the way."

"She's bucking. When they buck, they're fixing to go under. Better pull her up unless we're going all the way."

"Let her get a breath, then give it to her again. Ain't nothing like the power of memory to make a good woman, son."

It was 2:30 a.m. now and the ambulance had already left with Megan for Iberia General. The light from the flashers on our parked cruisers was like a blue, white, and red net on the trees and the bayou's surface and the back of the house. Cisco paced back and forth on the lawn, his eyes large, his face dilated in the glare.

Behind him I could see the sheriff squatted under the open window with a flashlight, peeling back the ruined flowers with one hand.

"You know who did it, don't you?" I said to Cisco.

"If I did, I'd have a gun down somebody's mouth," he replied.

"Give the swinging dick act a break, Cisco."

"I can't tell you who, I can only tell you why. It's payback for Anthony."

"Walk down to the water with me," I said, and cupped one hand on his elbow.

We went down the slope to the bayou, where the mudbank had been imprinted at the water's edge by Megan's bare knees and sliced by heavy boots that had fought for purchase while she struggled with at least three men. An oak tree sheltered us from the view of the sheriff and the uniformed deputies in the yard.

"Don't you lie to me. With these guys payback means dead. They want something. What is it?" I said.

"Billy Holtzner embezzled three-quarters of a million out of the budget by working a scam on our insurance coverage. But he put it on me. Anthony worked for the money people in Hong Kong. He believed what Billy told him. He started twisting my dials and ended up with big leaks in his arteries."

"Swede?"

"We were playing chess for a lot of the evening. I don't know if he did it or not. Swede's protective. Anthony was a prick."

"Protective? The victim was a prick? Great attitude."

"It's complicated. There's a lot of big finance involved. You're not going to understand it." He saw the look on my face. "I'm in wrong with some bad guys. The studio's going to file bankruptcy. They want to gut my picture and inflate its value on paper to liquidate their debts."

The current in the bayou was dead, hazed over with insects, and there was no air under the trees. He wiped his face with his hand.

"I'm telling the truth, Dave. I didn't think they'd go after Megan. Maybe there's something else involved. About my father, maybe. I don't understand it all either… Where you going?" he said.

"To find Clete Purcel."

"What for?"

"To talk to him before he hears about this from someone else."

"You coming to the hospital?" he asked, his fingers opened in front of him as though the words of another could be caught and held as physical guarantees.