Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“That’s strange,” he said. “I found the cell phone she was using to call you. I thought you two were quite close. Come on, Mr. Robicheaux. Say hello. I’m not taunting you or being cruel. I think she’s quite happy with the way things are. At first she was a little resistant about the abortion, but that’s all past history.”

“You made her have an abortion?” I said.

“I didn’t make her do anything. She’s a nice girl. You’re an incurable romantic when it comes to her kind.”

“Where are Gretchen and Alafair?” Clete said, starting toward Pierre.

A man with tattoos of a kind we had seen before stepped forward and touched the Taser to the back of Clete’s neck. Clete went down as though he had been blackjacked across the temple. I knelt beside him and cradled his head in my hands. His eyes were crossed, and his nose was bleeding.

I looked up at the man with the Taser. He was thin and had black hair and was unshaved and wore jeans with suspenders and a lumberjack shirt. He smelled of the woods and the cold; he smelled like a hunter. There was a long tattoo of Bugs Bunny eating an orange carrot inside his left forearm. “I’m going to square this, buddy,” I said.

“I don’t blame you for being pissed, but if I was you, I’d go with the flow,” he said. “It might work out for you. I carried a badge before I did this.”

“That’s enough, Mickey,” Pierre said.

Clete sat up and wiped the blood from his nose on his sleeve. He was slack-jawed and closing and opening his eyes. The back of his neck looked like it had been stung by a jellyfish. From aboveground we heard the sound of a diesel engine cranking to life.

“That’s the truck your vehicle is being loaded onto, Mr. Purcel,” Alexis said. “In five minutes it will be off the property. Before morning your vehicle will be crushed into a ball of tinfoil, and so will you.”

Pierre walked toward the rear of the basement and rested his hand on a doorknob. “Bring them here,” he said. “I think Mr. Robicheaux deserves a degree of closure. Come on, Mr. Robicheaux. Talk with her. See what she has to say about her situation.”

“With who?”

“The girl of your dreams. Tell me if you think she’s been worth it,” he said.

He pushed open the door slowly with the flat of his hand, exposing a room whose walls contained floor-to-ceiling plasma screens filled with scenes filmed through the windows of the stucco house on an island southeast of the Chandeleurs. Even the sound of the surf on the beach and the wind in the palm trees was being pumped through a speaker system.

Tee Jolie Melton was lying on a white brocade couch, wearing a blue evening gown and jewelry around her neck that looked like diamonds and rubies, although I doubted that was what they were. Her head was propped on a tasseled black satin pillow, the twists of gold in her hair still as bright as strings of buttercups. She seemed to smile in recognition. There were scabbed tracks on her forearms. She turned on her hip so she could see me better, but she didn’t try to get up. “That’s you?” she said.

“It’s Dave Robicheaux, Tee Jolie,” I said.

“Yeah, I knowed it was you, Mr. Dave. I knowed you’d be along someday.”

“What’d they do to you, kiddo?”

“They ain’t done nothing. It’s just medicine.”

“It’s heroin.”

“I couldn’t deliver the baby, see, ’cause I ain’t right inside. Don’t be mad at Pierre. Don’t be mad at me, either. Everyt’ing is gonna be all right, ain’t it?”

“We’ll be back later, darlin’,” Pierre said. “Mr. Robicheaux and I need to talk over some business.” He closed the door and slipped an iron bolt into a locked position. “She’s a sweet girl.”

“You turned her into a junkie,” I said.

“She injected herself. So did her sister,” he replied. “You know your problem, Mr. Robicheaux? You won’t accept people as they are. You’re only interested in them as abstractions. The flesh-and-blood reality isn’t to your liking. It’s you who is the elitist, not I.”

The door at the bottom of the stairwell that led from aboveground opened, and a man carrying an AK-47 with a banana magazine came inside and closed the door. “This was between the seat and the door of the convertible,” he said.

“Purcel had an automatic weapon in the front seat?” Pierre said.

“Yeah, it was covered by a blanket,” the man said.

“You were riding in the front seat and didn’t see it?” Pierre said to Varina.

“Oh, I’ve got it. His having a gun is my fault,” she said.

“I didn’t say that,” he replied. “I was trying to understand how he got an AK-47 into his car without you seeing it. It’s not an unreasonable question.”