Clete and I didn’t know the significance of the black sails we had seen, but obviously, Adonis did. He peeled back Clete’s raincoat and pulled the cut-down twelve-gauge from his shoulder, then disarmed both me and Carroll. Penelope’s eyes were shiny with shame.
“How about you, Johnny?” I said. “Whose side are you on? Where is Isolde?”
He stared at the floor. Carroll could not look me in the face.
“People know where we are,” I said.
“Afraid not,” Shondell said. “Your airboat pilot no longer exists. Your colleagues have no idea where you are, courtesy of Detective LeBlanc. You slapped me in public, Mr. Robicheaux. You cannot imagine the ordeal that awaits you and Mr. Purcel.”
“What about LeBlanc?” Clete said.
Shondell studied Carroll’s face. “Maybe we’ll make up some games. A behavioral study of sorts.”
Two men from the tugboat came heavily up the steps and hooked up our wrists behind our backs with plastic ligatures, then pulled black cloth bags with drawstrings over our heads. One of the men soaked our faces with a spray can. I smelled an odor like ether, then my knees caved as though I had been dropped through the trapdoor on a scaffold.
* * *
I WOKE ON A hard surface, wrists bound, hood secured tightly under my chin, surrounded by a humming sound like a ship’s engine. I realized my ankles were bound as well, and my Velcro-strapped hideaway was gone. I felt a pain like I had been kicked in the back, and I groaned when I moved.
“Is that you, Dave?” I heard Clete say.
“Yeah.”
“Glad you’re awake,” he said, perhaps three feet from me. “I can’t see anything.”
“Where’s Carroll?”
“There’s a third guy in here. I can hear him breathing. Maybe that’s him.”
“Where are we?”
“I think next to the engine room. I heard somebody slamming a hatch and clanging down a ladder.”
“I can’t remember what happened,” I said.
“No mystery. Carroll LeBlanc is a Judas. If we get out of this, I’m feeding him to the shrimp.”
I tried to twist the ligatures off my wrists. Instead, they cut into my veins. “Did you tell your receptionist where you were going?”
“No. After I fired those rounds at Shondell, I thought I’d keep my location unknown.”
“Tell me the truth, Cletus. Did you try to take Shondell out?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I still had a buzz on from the night before.”
“Maybe you’ll get him next time,” I said. But I knew there would be no next time, and so did he.
“I think we’re fucked, Streak,” he said. “Shondell is nuts, isn’t he?”
“I don’t think he’s crazy at all. I think he has evil powers.”
“Don’t talk like that. We’ve had these shitheads around us all our lives. They’re just coming out of the woodwork now.”
I heard a groan. “Is that you, Carroll?”
“Yeah,” he answered, his voice thin, hardly more than a gasp. “That’s you, Dave?”
“Sure,” I said. “Clete is here, too.”