IT WAS ALMOST dusk when we arrived at the southern end of Terrebonne Parish and parked on the levee. We walked down the slope into water over our ankles. I had put on a canvas coat and a hat to keep the tree limbs out of my eyes, and had stuffed one pocket with double-aught bucks and pumpkin rounds, and slung my cut-down pump from my shoulder. I had a flashlight in my other coat pocket, and a spare magazine for Clete’s AR-15. He had taken it off a drug mule he’d busted as a bail skip on Interstate 10. It was outfitted with a bump-fire stock and fired as fast as a machine gun.
The sandspits were blanketed with egrets that rose clattering in the canopy while we tried to work our way silently through the sloughs and over logs and piles of organic debris that squished under our feet and smelled like fish roe.
Air vines hung in our faces, and a bull gator slithered on its belly into a deep black pool six feet from us, and cottonmouths that had not gone into hibernation were coiled on cypress limbs just above the waterline. Behind us, out on the Gulf of Mexico, the sun was a giant dull-red orb that seemed to give no heat. Clete was ahead of me, his shoulders humped, his rifle in a sling position, a thirty-round magazine inserted in the well. He cocked his left arm, his fist clenched, signaling me to stop. Through the flooded trees and the late sunlight dancing on the water, I could see a dry mound and a cabin built of untreated pine that had turned black from lichen and water settlement and lack of sunlight. Wind chimes tinkled on the gallery, and smoke rose in the twilight from an ancient chimney and flattened in the trees. I could smell either crabs or crawfish boiling in a pot. The scene could have been lifted from 1942, just before a United States Coast Guard plane came in low over the water and dropped a single charge and broke the back of a Nazi sub.
In back of the cabin were a privy and a stump that served as a butcher block with an ax embedded in it, the nearby ground scattered with turkey and chicken feathers; a boat shed containing a pirogue that hung on wires from the ceiling; and an unmaintained levee overgrown with willow saplings and palmettos. Through the trees, I could see a white cabin cruiser in a cove, rising and falling with the incoming tide. Clete eased down into a squat and scooped mud with his left hand and rubbed it on his face, around his eyes, and on the back of his neck. He looked over his shoulder at me and pointed to the left, indicating that I should flank the cabin.
I shook my head. I didn’t know why. For the second time that day, I didn’t trust what I was looking at. The silence, the lack of motion, and the rigidity of the cabin seemed to contain an intensity on the brink of tearing itself apart. I had only one precedent for the feeling. Imagine a village surrounded by rice fields, a fat harvest moon above the hooches, water buffalo snuffing in a pen, villagers nowhere in sight, a shiny strand of wire stretched across the trail leading into the ville.
What do you do?
Light it up, Loot, whispers a sweaty black kid from West Memphis, Arkansas, his hands knuckling on his blooker, his breath rife with fear. Light the motherfucker up.
Clete gestured at me again. We were both on one knee now. I pointed two fingers at my eyes, then pointed at the front of the cabin. The sun was almost gone, the hummock sliding deeper into shadow. The cabin door was open. I could see a fire burning inside a woodstove, like liquid yellow-red lines sketched against the surrounding blackness. I also thought I saw the shapes of two figures, both motionless, but I couldn’t be sure. Even though we were on the cusp of winter, the air was dense with humidity, as though the environment itself were sweating. I pushed the moisture out of my eyes with the heel of my hand and tried to see clearly through the door. But as with anything you stare at too long in poor light, I could not determine where reality ended and fear and fantasy began.
Charlie’s in there. Ain’t no time to be kind to animals. Time to bring the nape, Loot.
But that was what someone wanted us to do. That’s what the bad guys always want us to do. I could hear the chop slapping against the hull of the cabin cruiser, a gator rolling in a channel and probably ripping through tangles of water hyacinths, flinging mud and water into the trees. I picked up a dirt clog and flung it to the left of the cabin.
Nothing.
Clete began working to the right. I can’t tell you how I knew something was wrong. Maybe it was Clete’s determination to mete out summary justice regardless of the attrition. Or maybe I remembered all the times he and I had gone in under a black flag and later had to deal with the specters that ask you why.
Or maybe my angle of vision was better than his. I knew there were two silhouettes beyond the doorway. One was larger than the other. The smaller figure wore a hat. Both figures were as still as the oil paint on a canvas.
I wished we had brought Bailey and backup. I tossed a piece of dirt at Clete, trying to get his attention. He kept moving in a crouch to the right, past the cabin door, then into the shadows of the trees, easing down into grass that was three feet high. I had to make a decision. I couldn’t communicate with Clete. I had no way of knowing whether he had seen the two figures. I also had no idea who they were. What if the cabin cruiser was not Wexler’s or Desmond’s but the property of a recreational fisherman who had decided to drop anchor and boil a load of crabs?
I stepped back into the overhang of the trees and worked my way around the left side of the cabin. Then I realized I had not seen everything that was behind it. Desmond’s Humvee was parked below the levee, black leaves stuck to the windows, a bullet hole pocked through the windshield on the driver’s side.
I took a chance. I was ready to eat a bullet rather than let the situation go south, which I believed was about to happen at any moment. I stood up, the breeze suddenly cool on my face. My finger was curled through the trigger guard on the twelve-gauge, my left hand on the fore-end.
“Iberia Sheriff’s Department!” I said. “We don’t care who you are or what you’re doing, but it’s going to stop! Nobody needs to get hurt! We’ll work it out!”
There was no response. The last sunlight on the Gulf had turned to pewter. The air was dense with a cold smell like waves bursting on a beach, like piled kelp, like coupling and birth, like a disinterred grave.
“You’ve got my daughter, you sons of bitches!” I said. “You’ll give her back to me or I’ll stake you out and send you into the next world one limb at a time!”
I would like to say my words were theatrical. They were not; I meant them. The problem was not ethical. The problem was they did no good.
I saw Clete rise from the grass, the bump-fire stock of his rifle pressed against his shoulder.
The next images were like stained glass breaking on a stone floor and to this day difficult to reconstruct. The first sound I heard was the popping of shells, like a string of firecrackers thrown carelessly from an automobile. At the same time I saw flashes inside the doorway of the cabin. I also thought I saw a tracer round streak from either the levee or the cove and float out over the water like a piece of broken neon.
I saw Clete begin firing into the cabin, the spent cartridges flying from the ejector port of the AR-15, the rounds whanging off the woodstove. I also heard popping from somewhere else, but I didn’t know where. I began running at Clete, yelling incoherently, waving my arms. I smashed into him and knocked him to the ground. He stared up at me, his eyes like green Life Savers inside the mud on his face. I grabbed his shirt with both hands and shouted, “You wouldn’t listen! You never listen!”
His face dilated with the implication of my words. “Oh, God! Oh, God, Dave! Tell me I didn’t do that.”
I dropped my cut-down in the grass and pulled the rifle from his hands and threw away the half-spent magazine and inserted the fresh one from my coat pocket into the well. I started running for the cabin door, keeping the cabin between me and the cove and the levee. The flames in the woodstove were blazing brightly because of the holes Clete had drilled in the iron plate. The hatted figure was slumped forward in a chair. The figure next to it had fallen to the floor. I stepped inside the doorway, indifferent to whatever harm might befall me at the hands of Desmond Cormier or Lou Wexler.
The head rolled loose from the figure in the hat. The figures were mannequins. Shell casings were scattered on the floor and the top of the stove. Two were still unfired and inside the skillet that had probably been filled with them. I felt my eyes fill with water, my lungs swell with air that was dense with salt and the coldness of the Gulf.
I turned and went back through the door onto the gallery. “It’s not Alafair, Clete!”
He was on his feet now. He grinned at me, my
cut-down hanging from his hand. Then there were pops and slashes of light from the darkness, and he went down on both knees, two red flowers blooming on his windbreaker, his jaw dropping, his arms dead at his sides.
Chapter Forty-Three