Clete was sleeping with his head on his chest. I could feel the airframe shuddering in the updrafts. “That’s Grand Gosier Island,” Julie said. “I’m going down on the deck. Hold on to your ass.”
WE MADE A wide turn east of the national wildlife refuge, rain hitting the windshield, the wings wet and slick and bright against a sky growing blacker by the minute. In the distance, I could see an island with a biscuit-colored apron of beach around it and a cove on the near side and a compound with palm trees in it. My ears began popping as we started our descent. “Anybody want a ham-and-onion sandwich?” Clete said.
“Tell him to shut up unless he wants to walk,” Julie said, her eyes fixed on the cove and the waves sliding across a sandbar at the entrance and capping inside it.
We leveled out at about one hundred feet above the water, the rai
n hitting as hard as pellets on the windshield and cabin roof, a downdraft pounding us so violently that for a moment I didn’t hear the engine. Up ahead I could see a strip of beach and pilings sticking out of the surf and what appeared to be a fortress with ten-foot walls around it. The tapered trunks of palm trees extended above the walls, beating in the wind. Our plane dipped down toward the water, then suddenly, the pontoons smacked the surface, and a dirty spray of foam blanketed the windshield and whipped back in strings across the side windows. A piling that probably once supported a dock or jetty missed the starboard wing by under six feet.
“Wow!” Clete said. “What do you do for kicks on your days off?”
Julie had cut the engine and was opening and closing her mouth, as though clearing her ears. “Would you mind?” she said.
“Mind what?” Clete said.
“Removing your onion breath from my face.”
“Sorry,” he said.
The rain was dancing on the chop and drumming on the wings and roof. The wind had pushed us into the shallows almost to the beach. There were wheels built into the pontoons, and I wondered why Julie didn’t take us onto the sand, but I did not want to ask. I suspected she was feeling less and less sure about the wisdom of our mission, and I couldn’t blame her. The walls around the house, like the house itself, were built of stucco and painted magenta. The glass from broken bottles was strewn along the top of the walls, but the security measure was of no value. The walls had been breached and reduced to rubble in several places, probably by Hurricane Katrina, exposing the cinder blocks inside. The interior of the compound was littered with flotsam and tangles of seaweed and shrimp nets and rotting tarps and hundreds of dead birds. The entirety of the beach was dotted with tar balls.
Clete and I put on our raincoats and hats and dropped down in the shallows up to our knees. Clete pulled his duffel bag from the baggage compartment and slung it over his shoulder. Through the rain, I could see a boat with two outboard engines and a small cabin moored on the south side of the island.
“I’ll come with you,” Julie said.
“Better stay here,” I said. “We might have to get out of Dodge sooner than we planned.”
“I thought I’d ask. Suit yourself,” she said, her voice almost lost in the rain.
I smiled at her and tried to indicate I appreciated her gesture, but Julie was not the kind of person you made a show of protecting, not if you wanted to retain her friendship.
Clete and I walked out of the surf onto the sand. The smell from the dead birds was eyewatering. Clete looked over his shoulder at the plane and at the silhouette of Julie Ardoin inside it. “She’s cute,” he said.
“Will you concentrate on the objective?”
He blew his breath on his palm and smelled it. “You got any mints?” he said.
“I can’t believe you.”
“What did I do wrong? I just said she’s cute. I take that back. She’s more than cute. I bet she’s heck on wheels. Is she getting it on with anybody?”
“When will you grow up?”
“I was just asking. When she yelled at me, my johnson started doing jumping jacks. That only happens with a very few women. It’s not my fault.” He pulled the Remington from the bag and handed it to me, then slung the AR-15 upside down on his right shoulder. “Oops, at ten o’clock,” he said.
“What?”
“A campfire. By that boat. I saw somebody look at us from behind that tree.”
Beyond the angle of the wall, I could see the salt-eaten, sun-scalded, wind-polished trunk and root system of a thick tree, one that had probably floated from the Mississippi or Alabama or Florida coastline. Clete and I worked our way along the edge of the wall until we reached a berm that sloped down to the beach and a polyethylene tent staked into the sand with aluminum pins. The rain had slackened, but the wind was blowing hard, popping the tent.
The barrel of the shotgun was cradled across my left arm; there was no round in the chamber. “My name is Detective Dave Robicheaux of the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department,” I said. “I need to see y’all’s hands out here in the light. Do it now.”
Clete moved left, unslinging his rifle. He had jungle-clipped two magazines together with electrician’s tape, so when one magazine was empty, he could release it and insert the second one in the frame with hardly any interruption in his rate of fire. Water was dripping off his hat brim; his face looked as taut as a bleached muskmelon. He held up two fingers.
“Did you hear me?” I called out.
There was no answer.