A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux 23)

“No, ma’am.”

“Then I’ll walk myself back to my car.”

“No, you won’t.”

“I beg your pardon?”

I cupped my hand on her elbow. “The sprinklers are on. I’ll walk you along the slope to my house. Things will work out for you. I’m sure they will.”

Her forearm felt as light as air in my palm as I stepped over the gnarled roots of the bamboo that grew wild along the bayou. I wondered if my gentlemanly conduct was a sham and a way to deceive myself and take me across the wrong Rubicon, a feat that in the past I achieved only by getting drunk.

* * *

TWO DAYS LATER, I got a call from the sheriff of Vermilion Parish. “We’ve got a couple of guys in a weighted barrel, Dave. Or rather, I think it’s a couple. One of them had a picture of your house in his phone.”

“Say again?”

“I’m a little bit southeast of Henry. I could use your he’p.”

A half hour later, I drove my truck up on a levee that overlooked the northern tip of Vermilion Bay. Two cruisers were already there, as well as an ambulance and a state police boat. The sun on the bay looked like a flame on a bronze shield. A polyethylene tarp had been pulled over a large metal barrel lying on its side. The sheriff walked toward me. He was a fat man named Eli Guidry. He wore rubber boots that were slick with mud, the trouser legs stuffed inside. The coroner had not arrived.

“Take a deep breath,” Eli said. “I think these poor bastards were ripe befo’ they went into the water.”

He peeled back the tarp, first off the barrel, then off the contents that had been piled outside it. I stepped back from the stench and the cloud of bottle flies and the crabs skittering on the sand.

“A fisherman hung his anchor on the cinder blocks,” he said. “You ever work one like this?”

“No, sir,” I said.

“Think it was a chain saw?”

“That’d be my guess.”

“One has gold hair,” Eli said. “Know who that might be?”

“Ray Haskell.”

“Who is he?”

“An ex-cop. A hard case. Called himself a PI. I think he was just a dirty cop.”

“How about this other guy?”

“Timothy Riordan. Same history.”

“Why would a picture of your house be in the phone?” Eli said.

“Which guy was carrying it?”

“The one still got part of a suit coat on.”

“That’s Haskell. He was the one with the brains.”

“You ain’t answered my question.”

“They were bird-dogging me. I got in their face about it. They probably wanted to square it.”

“Bird-dogging you why?”