“Dave!” Molly said. “Somebody else is in the house! Asa Surrette is a fiend. Kill him!”
“When this is over, I’m going to take my time with you, bitch,” Surrette said.
WHEN CLETE REACHED the landing, he saw two doors on either side, a third directly before him, and an alcove that gave onto a balcony overlooking the lake. He paused, not moving, listening, pointing his .38 snub-nosed revolver in front of him with both hands. He opened the door on his right and let it swing back toward the wall while he aimed into the gloom. There was nothing inside except an exercise machine. He stepped back onto the landing, a board squeaking under his weight, and opened the second door. He could see a toilet bowl, a sink, and a bathtub with a shower curtain. He peeled back the curtain, looking over his shoulder through the open door.
There was water in the bottom of the tub and a layer of grit on the sides. He went back on the landing and eased his way along the wall until he could reach the third door without stepping in front of it. He twisted the knob and gently pushed the door open.
“My name is Clete P
urcel. I’m a PI from New Orleans,” he said. “I don’t know who you are, but our issue is with Asa Surrette, not anybody else. If you’ve got a piece on you, slide it out here and let me know who you are.”
An odor that was like body grease and moldy towels and unwashed hair and sewage struck Clete’s face with such force that he gagged and had to cover his mouth with his hand.
“Are you a prisoner here?” he asked.
He heard a voice that sounded like someone forming words in his throat without being able to hold the syllables together.
“Who are you, buddy?” Clete said. “Are you hurt?”
There was no answer. Clete eased closer to the doorframe, his .38 lowered, his shoulder and arm pressed flat against the wall. Inside the room, he could hear someone breathing with a clotted hoarseness that made him think of a wounded animal cornered in its lair.
“You heard all that shooting down below,” he said. “That means other people will be here soon, including paramedics. Everything is going to be okay. Come on out, podjo.”
He counted to ten, his throat drying up, his eyes stinging with perspiration. “You want a flash grenade in there? They can really mess up your ears. Come on, bud, this is a pain in the ass for both of us.”
Whoever was in the room was not going to cooperate. Was this how it was going to end, confronting a barricaded suspect, someone he had never seen or against whom he held no grievance? Clete took a breath and gripped the .38 with both hands, his back and massive shoulders pressed tightly against the wall. Showtime, motherfucker, he thought. Then he swung himself into the doorway, his arms stretched straight out in front of him, his snub-nose aimed in the face of a man who had the physical proportions of a steroid addict, whose wide-set eyes and long upper lip were the classic signs of fetal alcohol syndrome, whose cheeks were covered with a soft simian pad of hair, whose mouth was twisted out of shape as though made of rubber.
“Throw it away,” Clete said. “You’ve got no reason to be afraid. We can help you. Surrette has killed lots of people, and he has to pay for it. Guys like you and me are just doing our job. Whatever your problem is, we can fix it. Put down your weapon and back away from it.”
He knew how it was going to play out, no different from a filmstrip that had snapped in half and was spinning out of control on the reel. He saw himself and the impaired man caught forever in a series of black-and-white fragments that Clete would never be able to scrub from his dreams. The impaired man pointed a single-barrel .410 shotgun pistol at Clete’s chest.
Clete began firing, not counting the number of rounds he squeezed off, his ears ringing, the man going straight down on his knees, looking up at Clete. Clete kept pulling the trigger, the cylinder turning, the hammer snapping dryly on spent cartridges, both hands shaking even after his target had slumped sideways on the floor.
Clete hit the light switch. The dead man’s mouth was hanging open, the overhead light shining into it. “Good God,” he said, his stomach turning.
He leaned against the wall, his eyes shut, his head exploding with sound and color, wondering who he was or who he had become and at the lengths he would go in order to stay alive.
CLETE CAME DOWNSTAIRS; his green eyes were the only color in his face. He paused and dumped his spent cartridges in his palm, then clinked them into his coat pocket, as though walking around inside a dream.
“What happened up there?” I said.
“I killed a guy. He had a four-ten pistol,” he replied. “I tried to make him put it down. He was making sounds like he was trying to talk, and I shot him.”
“Who was he?” I said.
“I never saw him before. Dave, his tongue was cut out. I smoked a guy who couldn’t talk. Maybe he was retarded. I don’t know what he was.”
“Slow it down. Are you sure what you saw?”
“You think I could make something like that up? He must be some guy who works for Surrette. Maybe there are more like him on the property, like some kind of cult.”
“You’ve got to keep it together, partner,” I said. “There’s nothing supernatural about Surrette. Psychopaths network.”
But Clete’s mind was obviously concentrated on the image of the man who had died in front of his revolver, and he was not interested in hearing anything I had to say.
“I tried to go down in the basement twice but got kicked back up the stairs,” I said. “Someone is in the corner with a semi-auto and a high-capacity magazine.”
“Where’s Alafair?” he asked.