The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux 22)

I bent down to the eyepiece again. This time I saw a fin slicing through a wave. Then it disappeared. I rose up from the telescope.

“I take it back.”

“Told you,” he said, smiling. “Mind if I look?”

He bent down to the eyepiece, his denim shirt ballooning with wind, his wispy hair blowing. “He’s gone now. He’ll be back, though. They always come back. Predators, I mean.”

“Actually, they’re not predators, at least no more than any other form of fish life,” I said.

“You could fool me,” he said. “Let me fix you and your friend a plate.”

I started to refuse.

“I could go for that,” Sean said.

Desmond slid the roast off the rotisserie and began slicing it on a platter with a fork and a butcher knife. Butterworth pulled the towel off his loins and began wiping down his skin, indifferent to the sensibilities of others, his face pointed into the breeze, his eyes closed.

I leaned down to the telescope again. The bay and the current through Southwest Pass were glazed with the last rays of the sun. I moved the telescope on the swivel and scanned Weeks Bay. Then I saw an image that seemed hallucinatory, dredged out of the unconscious, a superimposition on the natural world of humanity’s penchant for

cruelty.

I rubbed the humidity out of my eyes and looked again. The tide had reversed itself and was coming toward the shore. I was sure I saw a huge wooden cross bobbing in the chop. Someone was fastened to it, the arms extended on the horizontal beam, the knees and ankles twisted sideways on the base. The cross lifted on the swell, the headpiece rising clear of a wave. The air went out of my lungs. I saw the person on the cross. She was black and wearing a purple dress. It was wrapped as tightly as wet Kleenex on her body. Her face was wizened, from either the sun or the water or her ordeal. Her head lolled on her shoulder; her hair hung on her cheeks and curled in tendrils around her throat. She seemed to look directly at me.

“What’s wrong, Dave?” Desmond said.

“There’s a woman out there. On a cross.”

“What?” he said.

“You heard me.”

He bent to the telescope, then moved it back and forth. “Where?”

“At three o’clock.”

“I don’t see anything. Wait a minute, I see a shark fin. No, three of them.”

I pushed him aside and looked again. A long wave was sliding toward the shore, loaded with sand and organic trash from a storm, its crest breaking, gulls dipping into it.

“You probably saw a reflection and some uprooted trees inside it,” Desmond said. “Light and shadow can play tricks on you.”

“She was looking right at me,” I said. “She had thick black hair. It was curled around her neck.”

I felt Antoine Butterworth breathing on me. I turned, trying to hide my revulsion.

“Let me see,” he said.

I stepped aside. He bent to the telescope, holding his wadded towel to his genitals. “Looks like she floated away.”

I looked once more. The sun was as bright as brass on the water. I could feel Butterworth breathing on me again. “Would you step back, please?” I said.

“Pardon?”

“I’m claustrophobic,” I said. “Been that way since I was a child.”

“Perfectly understandable,” he said. He put on a blue silk robe and tied it with a sash. “Better now?”

“We’ll be running along,” I said to Desmond. “We’ll call the Coast Guard.”