Light of the World (Dave Robicheaux 20)

“You’re every man’s dream. Give yourself some credit.”

She spread her knees and knelt on his thighs and held his head against her breasts and kissed his hair. “Oh, Clete,” she said. “Don’t go away from

me. Not now, not ever.”

He didn’t know what to say or do. He closed his eyes and saw an image deep in his mind that made no sense. He saw his father’s milk truck driving away from him, the melted ice draining over the back bumper, swinging in a thick, dirty spray on the street.

ON MONDAY AFTERNOON I looked through the upstairs window and saw three cruisers pull up in front of the north pasture, and one deputy get out and unchain the vehicle gate. The three cruisers went inside the pasture, and the deputy chained the gate behind them. The vehicles drove through the grass and came to a stop thirty yards from Clete’s cabin.

Earlier in the day, Albert Hollister had dumped and scrubbed out and refilled the water tank by the barn. The horses were drinking out of it when Sheriff Elvis Bisbee and two uniformed deputies and a man in a suit stepped from the vehicles and fanned out and approached the cabin, each with the heel of his hand resting on the butt of his sidearm. The horses backed away from the tank, their skin twitching the way it does when they’re attacked by blowflies.

By the time I got downstairs and out the front door, I could see two deputies shaking down Gretchen against a cruiser, running their hands under her arms and inside her thighs. Clete was arguing with Bisbee, up close and personal, his face red, his hands barely held in check at his sides, like a ballplayer getting into the face of an umpire.

I went through the pedestrian gate, past the horses and the barn. “Hold on,” I said.

The sheriff turned around. So did the plainclothes. I realized he was the uniformed deputy who had ridiculed Gretchen.

“No, sir, Mr. Robicheaux,” the sheriff said.

“No, sir, what?” I replied.

“This time you back off.”

“What’s she charged with?” I asked.

“Put it in the plural,” he replied.

“You want me to tell him?” the plainclothes said.

“What’s your name?” I said.

“Detective Jack Boyd.”

“Sheriff, this is the same guy who called Miss Gretchen ‘butch’ up on the hillside,” I said.

“Then she can file a complaint,” he replied.

“I asked you what she’s charged with.”

“How about vandalizing a motel room?” said the sheriff. “How about kidnapping and assault and battery? How about conspiracy to commit kidnapping? Her partner in this is Wyatt Dixon. How do you like that?”

“Who’d they kidnap?” I said.

“A guy named Anthony Zappa,” the sheriff said. “Know the name? He worked for Love Younger.”

Behind him, the two uniformed deputies were hooking up Gretchen. Her shoulders looked wide and stiff against her shirt, her midriff showing.

“That’s ridiculous. She’s not a kidnapper or someone who vandalizes motels,” I said.

“She only kills them?”

“You’re talking about the guy on the river, the one who shot at her from a pickup truck? That was self-defense.”

“Yesterday evening Zappa was taped to a chair in a motel on West Broadway. He bailed through a window, probably because he was being tortured. In the meantime, the clerk chained up his Harley and dragged it down the street and left it burning in the middle of an intersection. When I asked if you knew Anthony Zappa’s name, I used the past tense.”

“He’s dead?” I said.

“He was when we found his body up Rattlesnake Creek this morning.”