“Probably. Maybe Alexis Dupree has acolytes in the drug culture.”
“Those palm trees aren’t from the Gulf Coast.”
He was right. They had probably been transplanted from South Florida. They hadn’t rooted properly, and their fronds were yellow and frayed by the wind. The entire compound reeked of contrivance and artifice, a shabby attempt to create a Caribbean ambiance in an inhospitable environment where fresh water had to be brought in by boat and pumped into a tank that stood on steel stanchions behind the house. It was like a movie set. It was the kind of place that seemed indicative of the Duprees, people who not only had chosen to be first in Gaul rather than second in Rome but were satisfied to have one eye in the kingdom of the blind.
“How do you want to play it?” Clete said.
“Let’s knock on the door and see who’s home,” I replied.
“This place gives me the creeps.”
“It’s just a building.”
“No, it’s got something really bad inside it. I can feel it. Maybe it’s that stink. You see the eyes of those kids? They haven’t even started their lives, and they’re already zombies.” He wiped his mouth with his handkerchief.
I knew Clete wasn’t thinking of our new friends Rick and Sybil. He was thinking of Gretchen and his failure as a father. “I bet you five years from now, those kids will be fine,” I said.
“Yeah, they’ll probably be running Goldman Sachs. Give it a break, Streak. And screw knocking on the door.”
It was made of heavy oak and had three rusted strips of iron bolted across it. Clete used the butt of his rifle to break a pane out of a frosted viewing panel next to the jamb. He reached inside, careful not to cut himself, and twisted the deadbolt free. I pushed the door back on its hinges and walked in ahead of him. The vast tomblike emptiness of the house was stunning. The high ceilings and huge rafters and peaked skylights operated by pulleys and chains had the look of an abandoned cathedral. Our footsteps echoed throughout the entirety of the building.
“What the hell is this place?” Clete said.
“Whatever it is, it was gutted,” I said.
“Listen,” he said.
I could hear wind blowing through a broken door or window, and perhaps the flapping of birds taking flight, but nothing else.
Clete walked ahead of me, his AR-15 slung over his shoulder. Then he froze and made a fist with his right hand, the infantryman’s signal to stop in your tracks. This time I heard it, tinkling sounds mixed with a frenetic flapping of something alive and trapped in an enclosure.
We walked out of the main room and down a corridor into a kitchen. The cabinets and shelves and drawers and refrigerator were empty. I clicked on a light switch, but there was no power. Through the back window, I saw the crumbled brick shell of what probably was a lighthouse. Then I felt a puff of air through a side hallway and heard the tinkling and flapping sounds again. Clete unslung his rifle and moved down the hallway ahead of me, his hat and raincoat dripping, his silhouette massive against the light. He stepped down onto a bare concrete pad inside a room that had a barred window inset in one wall, the glass broken by a pelican that had flown directly into it and lay dead between the glass and the bars. Three concrete steps led down into a room that had been constructed beneath the level of the main floor. There was no mistaking where the sounds had come from.
Clete went down the steps first. At the far end of the lower room was another barred window, this one at ground level and as narrow as a gun slit. Like the room above it, the floor was concrete, but it was covered with gray sand that had seeped through the cracks in the walls.
Clete stared in disbelief. “It’s Didi Gee’s fish tank. Don’t tell me it isn’t. I saw it too many times. Jesus Christ, I told you this place gave me the willies.”
A huge aquarium rested on a stone block. Almost all the water had evaporated from it, and five piranhas were flapping violently in the soup at the bottom, scissoring and skittering across it, smacking their noses into the glass.
An iron bar ran across the top of the ceiling, and at least a dozen oiled and shiny steel chains hung from it, either a hook or a manacle attached to each. Clete touched one of the hooks, then wiped his hand on his handkerchief, swallowing drily. I walked closer to the chains and took my ballpoint from my shirt pocket and speared one of the links and lifted the chain against the light. The end of the hook was encrusted with matter that resembled dried jelly. Higher up on the chain, a strand of auburn hair glowed against the light.
I took a penlight from my pocket and shone it at the bottom of the far wall. “Take a look,” I said.
A rusted outline slightly larger than the size of a coffin was stenciled into the concrete floor. There was a long orange horizontal strip of rust on the wall, as though a heavy iron object had rested against it. The floor was speckled with what looked like dried blood. “I think this is where the iron maiden was,” I said. “I think the lid was pushed back against the wall. The victims were lowered into it, and the lid was shut on top of them. You see those three pools? That’s where the drain holes were.”
“Alexis Dupree?”
“Who else could create something like this?” I said.
“This operation isn’t being run by a bunch of geeks. Didi Gee stuck people’s hands in his fish tank, but the object was money, not payback. The people behind this stuff don’t have a category. You know what our problem is, Dave? We keep playing by the rules. These guys need to be naped off the planet.”
“So we drop a hydrogen bomb on Jeanerette, Louisiana?” I said.
“What do you want to do with the piranhas?”
“We have to put them under,” I said.
“Maybe those kids can dump them in an ice chest full of fresh water and take them somewhere.”