“When all else fails, we whip out our biblical dirge, do we?”
“Maybe you’ll have better luck dealing with the dead than I. They go where they want. They sit on your bed at night and stand behind you in the mirror. Once they locate you, they never rest. And you know what’s worse about them?”
He smiled at me and didn’t reply.
“When it’s your time, they’ll be your escorts, and they won’t be delivering you to a very good place. The dead are not given to mercy.”
He did something I didn’t expect. He leaned forward in his chair, his elbows splayed on my desk. “I was once like you, determined to impose my moral sense on the rest of the world. I was in Sudan and Libya and Turkistan and Rwanda and the Congo. I was repelled when I saw peasants buried up to their necks and decapitated by earth graders, and women disemboweled with machetes on the roadside. But I learned to live with it, as I’m sure you and Mr. Purcel did. Don’t rinse your sins at the expense of others, sir. It’s tawdry and cheap stuff and unworthy of a good soldier and a knowledgeable man.”
“Clete Purcel and I have nothing you want.”
“When you cross the wrong Rubicon, you enter a harsh and unpredictable environment, Detective Robicheaux. It’s not a country where you can depend on the kindness of strangers or those who seem to be your friends. Do you get my drift?”
“No, not at all,” I replied.
“That’s too bad. I thought you were a more perceptive man. Good-bye, sir,” he said.
GRETCHEN HOROWITZ DID not deal well with emotions that involved trust or deconstructing her defense system. Her program had always been simple: Number one, you didn’t empower others to hurt you; number two, when people didn’t heed your warning signs, you taught them the nature of regret; number three, you didn’t let a man get in your head so he could get in your pants.
Her ongoing conversation with herself about Pierre Dupree was causing her problems she had never experienced. The more she thought about him, the more power she gave him. The more she shut him out of her thoughts, the more she lost confidence in herself. Since she was sixteen, she had never run from a problem. She could also say she had never been afraid, or at least she had never let fear stop her from doing anything. Not until now. She was obviously losing control, something she’d believed would never happen to her again. She felt weak and agitated and ashamed, and she felt unclean and refused to look directly at herself in the mirror. Had she secretly always wanted to be in the arms of a large and powerful and handsome man who was rich and educated and knew how to dress? In this case, the same man who had almost broken her fingers in his palm. Did another person live inside her, someone whose self-esteem was so low that she was attracted to her abuser?
She felt her eyes filming, her cheeks burning.
There was no harm in listening to what he had to say, was there? You kept your friends close and your enemies closer, right?
Don’t think thoughts like that, she told herself. He wants you in the sack.
So I won’t let that happen.
Who are you kidding, girl?
He did a good deed for the little cripple boy. I didn’t make that up. There was no way he could know I’d see him taking the little boy into the church.
He’s a con man. He’s probably having you surveilled. Tell somebody about this. Don’t act on your own. You’re about to sell out everything you thought you believed in.
She went into the bathroom and washed her face and sat down on the stool, her head spinning. She could not remember when she’d felt so miserable.
Pierre Dupree was not her only problem, and she knew it. The man named Marco had given her ten days to kill Clete Purcel and Dave and Alafair Robicheaux. Gretchen’s mother was no longer a hostage, but that would not change what was expected of her. She would either deliver or get delivered, along with Clete and his best friend and Alafair. Though her enemies knew where she was, she had no idea where they were, just as Clete had warned her. How could all of these things be happening right when she thought she might be beginning a new life, one that offered a chance at a career in filmmaking?
These were her thoughts when she glanced through the front screen and saw Pierre Dupree pull into her driveway early Thursday afternoon and begin fishing something out of a paper sack. Why was it that everything about him had become a mystery? Even his arrival at her cottage seemed unreal, like part of a dream that had detached itself from her sleep and reappeared during her waking hours. Leaves were drifting down on top of the Humvee, the sunlight on his tinted windows like a yellow balloon wobbling inside dark water. She could hear the heat ticking in the engine and the sprinkler system in the neighbor’s yard bursting to life.
Dupree leaned down and picked up a bouquet of mixed roses and opened the door of his Humvee. As he walked up on her porch, he was so tall that he almost blocked out the trees and the sky and the church steeple across the street. Even though it was not yet two P.M., his beard had already darkened, as though he had shaved in the predawn hours; a strand of black hair hung down over his forehead. There was a dimple in his chin and a dent in the skin at the corner of his mouth, as though he wanted to smile but did not want to be presumptuous. In his left hand, he carried a box wrapped in gold foil and red felt ribbon.
“I was on my way back from the airport in Lafayette and stopped and bought these for you,” he said.
She had rehearsed a reply, but she couldn’t remember what it was.
“Miss Gretchen, I don’t blame you for being suspicious of me,” he said. “I simply wanted to drop these by. If you like, you can give them to someone else. It’s just a small gesture on my part.”
“Come in.”
Had she said that?
“Thank you,” he said, stepping inside. “You have such a nice spot here. It looks so comfortable and restful. I hope I’m not bothering you.”
“It’s all right. I mean the place is all right. I rented it. The furniture came with it.”
“Can I put the flowers in some water?” he asked. He was peering into the back of the house, but he was so close she could smell the heat that seemed to exude from his skin. “Miss Gretchen?”