Sunset Limited (Dave Robicheaux 10)

"What's the point?"

"I'm gonna have my pound of flesh from Archer Terrebonne. You gonna be the man cut it out for me."

He straightened his tall frame inside his raincoat, his face draining with the effort. He saw me watching him and raised the barrel of the Ruger slightly, so that it was aimed upward at my armpit. He put his hand on the towel tied across his side and looked at it, then wiped his hand on his pants.

"Terrebonne paid my partner to shoot my liver out. I didn't think my partner would turn on me. I'll be damned if you can trust anybody these days," he said.

"The man who helped you kill the two brothers out in the Atchafalaya Basin?"

"That's him. Or was. I wouldn't eat no pigs that was butchered around here for a while… Take that exit yonder."

We drove for three miles through farmland, then followed a dirt road through pine trees, past a pond that was green with algae and covered with dead hyacinths, to a two-story yellow frame house whose yard was filled with the litter of dead pecan trees. The windows had been nailed over with plywood, the gallery stacked with hay bales that had rotted.

"You recognize it?" he asked.

"It was a brothel," I said.

"The governor of Lou'sana used to get laid there. Walk ahead of me."

We crossed through the back yard, past a collapsed privy and a cistern, with a brick foundation, that had caved outward into disjointed slats. The barn still had its roof, and through the rain I could hear hogs snuffing inside it. A tree of lightning burst across the sky and Scruggs jerked his face toward the light as though loud doors had been thrown back on their hinges behind him.

He saw me watching him and pointed the revolver at my face.

"I told you to walk ahead of me!" he said.

We went through the rear door of the house into a gutted kitchen that was illuminated by the soft glow of a light at the bottom of a basement stairs.

"Where is Jessie Rideau?" I said.

Lightning crashed into a piney woods at the back of the property.

"Keep asking questions and I'll see you spend some time with her," he said, and pointed at the basement stairs with the barrel of the gun.

I walked down the wood steps into the basement, where a rechargeable Coleman lantern burned on the cement floor. The air was damp and cool, like the air inside a cave, and smelled of water and stone and the nests of small animals. Behind an old wooden icebox, the kind with an insert at the top for a block of tonged ice, I saw a woman's shoe and the sole of a bare foot. I walked around the side of the icebox and knelt down by the woman's side and felt her throat.

"You sonofabitch," I said to Scruggs.

"Her heart give out. She was old. It wasn't my fault," Scruggs said. Then he sat down in a wood chair, as though all his strength had drained through the bottoms of his feet. He stared at me dully from under the brim of his hat and wet his lips and swallowed before he spoke again.

"Yonder's what you want," he said.

In the corner, amidst a pile of bricks and broken mortar and plaster that had been prized from the wall with a crowbar, was a steel box that had probably been used to contain dynamite caps at one time. The lid was bradded and painted silver and heavy in my hand when I lifted it back on its hinges. Inside the box were a pair of handcuffs, two lengths of chain, a bath towel flattened inside a plastic bag, and a big hammer whose handle was almost black, as though stove soot and grease had been rubbed into the grain.

"Terrebonne's prints are gonna be on that hammer. The print will hold in blood just like in ink. Forensic man done told me that," Scruggs said.

"You've had your hands all over it. So have the women," I replied.

"The towel's got Flynn's blood all over it. So do them chains. You just got to get the right lab man to lift Terrebonne's prints."

His voice was deep in his throat, full of phlegm, his tongue thick against his dentures. He kept straightening his shoulders, as though resisting an unseen weight that was pushing them forward.

I removed the towel from the plastic bag and unfolded it. It was stiff and crusted, the fibers as pointed and hard as young thorns. I looked at the image in the center of the cloth, the black lines and smears that could have been a brow, a chin, a set of jawbones, eye sockets, even hair that had been soaked with blood.

"Do you have any idea of what you've been part of? Don't any of you understand what you've done?" I said to him.

"Flynn stirred everybody up. I know what I done. I was doing a job. That's the way it was back then."

"What do you see on the towel, Scruggs?"