Light of the World (Dave Robicheaux 20)

“You know what those cocksuckers are going to say, don’t you?” he replied.

“Yeah, I do, but call it in anyway,” I said, feeling down in the seats.

“It’ll take at least a half hour for them to get a guy out here. Then he’ll tell us to file a missing persons report.”

“I know that. Just make the call,” I said.

“Then wait for somebody to show up? I say fuck that.”

I took out my cell phone and started to punch in 911.

“All right, I’ll do it,” Clete said, walking off with his phone to his ear.

I had found nothing in the cab. My heart was beating, my eyes stinging with moisture even though the night was cool. Where are you, Molly? I thought. I stood erect and closed the passenger door. Where could she have left a clue? It’s there someplace, I know it, I know it, I know it. I turned in a circle. On the truck itself, I thought. I shone the flashlight on the door. There it was, right in front of me, two initials on the outside panel. She had probably hung her arm out the window and used her thumb to furrow the letter J, then the letter B, in the muddy splatter that had dried on the panel.

“You were right about Jack Boyd, Gretchen,” I said. “He’s got them. How bad did you work him over?”

“I did as much damage to him as I could in the time that I had,” she answered, holding her eyes on mine.

And Molly will pay the price, I thought.

“Did you say something?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“They can’t be far away, Dave,” Alafair said.

I wasn’t so sure. Maybe Boyd or Surrette had a boat. Maybe Boyd had gotten past us on a dirt road up the hill. Maybe he had changed vehicles. We needed the state authorities. We needed roadblocks. We needed a police helicopter with a searchlight. We needed all the things I would have had access to as a police officer in the state of Louisiana. Our credibility with the locals was zero.

I had more information in my head than I could think about. Surrette was holed up in a place that had a basement. It was within earshot of a bay where amphibians landed and took off. Someone had held a revival or prayer meeting not far away. But where? The area was full of fruit pickers in the summertime, and they brought their hymnbooks and open-air churches and came and went with the wind.

“The marina,” I said.

“Yeah?” Clete said, flexing his right hand at his side.

“Rich guys own sailboats. They also own amphibians.”

“They don’t necessarily own both,” he replied.

“The marina has a bar. It’s a small one. But it stays open until two,” I said.

“How do you know?” he asked.

Because it’s what I think about all the time. “I saw it when Alafair and I were waterskiing once,” I replied.

It didn’t take us long to get to the marina, but we were running out of options and time. I wished I hadn’t alienated Sheriff Elvis Bisbee. I wished I had not contended with Alafair when she said Surrette had survived the collision of the jail van and the gasoline truck. I wished I had accepted Wyatt Dixon’s belief that Surrette represented a mindless form of evil that seemed to have neither genetic nor environmental origins. I wished I were not so powerless with adversaries like the Youngers and others whose imperious vision of the earth is seldom challenged.

Did I learn anything from sorting through the history of our relationship with Asa Surrette? No, not at all. At a certain point, I would come to a personal conclusion about who he was or who he wasn’t, but it would not be one that I would share. Why is that? Because some things are unknowable, such as the origins of evil.

In the meantime, I wanted to see Surrette and his minions body-bagged and dumped ignominiously in a potter’s field.

There were light poles on the docks at the marina, and moths swarmed around them and sometimes dropped in the water. Most of the sailboats in the slips were dark, their hulls rocking, their mooring ropes tensing against the chop. The bar had a counter with six stools, and a table where a chessboard had been set up. The bartender looked at his watch when we walked in. He was young and tan, wearing a yellow muscle shirt, probably a swimmer rather than a weight lifter. MYSTERIOUS GALAXY BOOKSTORE, SAN DIEGO, CA was printed on the back of his shirt. “I was going to close a little early tonight,” he said.

“Know a guy named Jack Boyd?” I said.

“He keeps a boat here?” he said.

“I doubt it.”