A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux 23)

“Mr. Bell, how about we drink mash and talk trash? You can drink the mash, I’ll talk the trash.” I had the semi-auto in my right hand. “Hey, I’m lonely out here,” I said.

No response.

“You doing all right, Mr. Shondell?” I said.

The entire yacht was quiet. The sailboat was closer, its black sails taut with wind, flecked with foam. I thought I could see someone in the wheelhouse. I also thought I saw a swimmer knifing through the waves, headed for the sailboat. I wiped my eyes and looked again. The swimmer had no flotation equipment, wore no shoes, and took long, even strokes, twisting his head sideways to breathe, like a long-distance pro. I couldn’t see the swimmer’s face, but I was almost certain I was looking at Adonis Balangie.

I was crouched on the ladder, just below the bridge. “Hey, Mr. Bell!” I said. “You were in the First Cav? That’s righteous, brother. Central Highlands, right? I was there. Came home alive in ’65. Sorry for the incoming. Let’s start over.”

Still no response. Bell was hard-core, the kind of cynic who concludes he’s going to hell the day he’s born.

“Did you hear me, Mr. Bell?”

“Yeah, I got the message. Come on in. Have some coffee.”

If he wasn’t a cop now, he had probably been one in the past. He knew what waited for him if he got locked up in a mainline joint. A cop in the shower is a bar of soap; on the yard, he can be shanked in the time it takes for a guard to turn his back; in the mess hall, his food is a cuspidor. In a joi

nt like Angola, multiply everything I said by ten. But I thought I’d give it a try anyway.

“I can guarantee you friend-of-the-court status,” I lied. “Maximum bounce, three to five. With luck, fifteen months. You can do it on your hands.”

“No kidding?” he said. “Come a little closer. My hearing aid isn’t working.”

“Sure,” I said. “If you guys can get a Mayday out, we’ll have the chopper on the way.”

“Can’t hear you, sweetheart.”

A bucket lay on its side between the ladder and the bridge. I picked it up and threw it across the deck. Bell tilted the Kalashnikov out the window and began firing, the ejected shells bouncing on the console and the deck. He had jungle-clipped a second thirty-round magazine to the one inserted in the magazine well. With a flick of his wrist, he could reverse an empty magazine and replace it with a fresh one and be back on rock and roll in less than three seconds.

Then I saw Clete’s silhouette looming behind him.

Bell had just eased off the trigger and was probably trying to see if he had ricocheted a couple of rounds into me. For just a second I looked straight into his face. He seemed to realize he had blown it and that Clete was standing behind him. I even thought I saw him smile as he would at a fellow traveler, one who poses as a servant of the people or the nation but secretly knows he’s a mercenary. Any way you cut it, I think he knew he was about to do the Big Exit and was trying to sign off with a measure of good cheer, perhaps with a few words such as “Way to go, laddie. Kiss the ladies for me and pour a toddy in my coffin.”

A bit romantic? Yeah, probably. But watching a violent death can eat your lunch, particularly when you’re a participant.

Clete formed his left arm into a hook and wrapped it under Bell’s chin and jerked back his head, curving the butcher knife into his heart. Bell’s lips pursed silently like the mouth of a fish out of water. It should have been over. Bell went straight down, his arms flopping at his sides, the Kalashnikov dropping out of view. I heard the steel butt strike the deck. In my mind’s eye, I saw myself running into the bridge, finding Penelope all right, looking at Clete with relief, convinced we were about to reenter the rational world and flee forever the web in which we had entangled ourselves, not unlike Stephen Crane’s soldier returning from the war and rediscovering the beauty in a buttermilk sky and green pastures blooming with wildflowers.

Alas, there is always the canker in the rose, the shaved dice in the cup, the loss of the nail in a horse’s shoe that brings down a kingdom. Clete could not believe his eyes. The Kalashnikov bounced once off the deck and landed in the lap of Mark Shondell.

“Oh, my, isn’t this a gift?” he said. “Thank you so much, Mr. Purcel.”

Clete barely got through the hatch before Shondell lifted the muzzle and opened up.

* * *

THE FIRE WAS spreading through the ship. I could see other people on the stern, but I didn’t know if they were crew members or prostitutes or Shondell’s goons. If the latter, I suspected they were calculating the risk of deserting Shondell by going over the side or getting into a firefight on the bridge. The half-clothed body parts of the two private investigators stuffed in an oil barrel and dropped in Vermilion Bay had been a reminder of Shondell’s policy regarding employee disloyalty or failure. Someone had tried to launch a lifeboat but had made a mess of the pulleys and tipped the boat over. Two people were trying to hold on to the sides. They wore life jackets and one of them may have been the man Clete threw overboard. If the yacht went down, the hull or the screws might take them with it.

Then I saw three men working their way forward. They stayed in the lee of the superstructure and were crouched in the manner of infantry approaching an objective. We were running out of time, and I saw no solutions to our problems. Johnny and Father Julian and Carroll LeBlanc and Clete and I were huddled in the shadows perhaps twenty yards aft of the bridge. We were a sorry-looking bunch, I’m sure. My system could no longer produce adrenalin, and Clete was in the same shape. We were hungry and cold and probably on the edge of physical and nervous collapse, unable to think clearly or distinguish the tricks of the mind from Gideon’s supernatural manifestations and the very real possibility that we were about to die.

Johnny was sitting on the deck, his knees pulled up before him, his head down.

Clete shook him gently by the shoulder. “Get out of it, kid. Slip the punch and swallow your blood. Don’t let your enemy know you’re hurt.”

“Isolde is dead,” Johnny said.

“You don’t know that,” I said.

“These things have happened before, Mr. Dave,” he said. “My uncle always wins. I have to stop him.”