Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

I jerked open the door and went inside fast, pointing the AK-47 in front of me, swinging it back and forth. The light inside the room was brilliant, every item on the butcher block and counters and walls and in the dry rack sparkling clean. There was nobody inside the room. At the back of the kitchen was a stairwell, and I heard someone slam a door at the top and then feet moving heavily across the floor immediately above our heads.

I set down the AK-47 on the butcher block and opened the top of the freezer. The trapped cloud of cold air rose like a fist into my face. Helen was rolled up in an embryonic position, her eyebrows and hair shaggy with frost, her cheeks gray and wrinkled as though they had been touched with a clothes iron, her fingernails blue.

Clete and I dipped our hands around her body and lifted her free of the chest and set her down on a throw rug in front of the sink. Clete found a tablecloth inside a drawer and wrapped her in it. Her eyelids looked as thin as rice paper, her nostrils clotted with frost. She was shaking so badly, I could hardly hold her wrists. She looked up at me with the expression of someone at the bottom of a deep well. So far we had seen no telephones or phone jacks in the basement of the house. “We’re going to get you to Iberia General, Helen,” I said. “We’ve put four of these bastards down so far. How many more guys are on the grounds?”

She shook her head, her eyes on mine.

“I’m sorry we didn’t get here sooner,” I said. “Two of Pierre’s gumballs were going to kill Gretchen Horowitz and Alafair.”

Her mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out.

“I can’t hear you,” I said.

I brushed her hair out of her eyes and leaned my ear down to her mouth. Her hair was cold and felt as stiff as straw. There was no warmth at all in her breath. Her words were like a damp feather inside my ear. “It’s not Dupree,” she whispered. “They’re everywhere. You were right all along.”

“Who is everywhere?”

“I don’t know. I think I’m going to die, Dave.”

“No, you’re not,” I said.

She closed one eye as though winking at me. But I realized that there was something wrong with her facial control, and the eyelid had folded of its own accord.

Clete was standing next to us, staring at the ceiling. At least three people were above us. I thought about spraying the rest of the magazine through the floor. Again I tried to remember the number of rounds I had fired. The magazine of Clete’s AK-47 was a solid banana-shaped block of light metal with no viewing slit. My guess was that I had fired a minimum of ten rounds, perhaps a maximum of fifteen. But in any rapid-fire situation, you almost always let off more rounds than you remember.

“They’ve got one plan and one plan only, Streak,” Clete said. “None of us down here ever sees sunlight again.”

He walked toward the staircase that led to the first floor and gestured at me to join him. He looked past my shoulder at Helen, wrapped to the chin in the tablecloth. “We could wait these guys out, but if we do, Helen might not make it,” he said.

“Let’s take it to them,” I said.

“We might not get out of this one, Dave. If we don’t, let’s write our names on the wall in big letters.”

“Three feet high, all in red,” I said.

“Fuckin’ A, noble mon. Everybody gets to the barn, right?”

“What’s in your pocket?”

“I don’t remember. But Pierre Dupree is mine. You copy that?”

“The goal is to get their weapons. Shitcan the personal agenda.”

He wiped his mouth on his hand and looked at me and grinned. There was blood on his teeth. I don’t believe he was thinking about mortality, at least not in a fearful way. He was looking at me and I at him as though we were seeing each other as we were when we walked a beat together on Bourbon Street over three decades ago, dressed to the eyes in our blue uniforms, our shoes spit-shined, the roar of a Dixieland band coming from the open door of Sharkey Bonano’s Dream Room. “I heard that damn paddle wheeler out on the bayou,” he said.

“It’s not there, Clete. And if it is, it’s not there for us.”

“How do you know?”

“Because the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are forever,” I replied.

He peeled a stick of gum with one hand, never taking his gaze off my face, a grin breaking at the corner of his mouth. “‘We don’t care what people say, rock and roll is here to stay,’” he said. “That’s from Danny and the Juniors, the greatest single line in the history of music.”

Then he charged up the stairs, taking them three at a time, his weight almost tearing the handrail from the wall.

CLETE HAD BEEN right. The Duprees and Varina and their employees wanted to seal us in the bottom of the house and sponge us off the face of the earth. What they had not expected was Clete Purcel coming full-throttle through the door, plunging into the darkness, knocking over a table loaded with crystal ware, creating havoc in their midst, burying himself somewhere near Alexis Dupree’s study. Nor did they expect me to be hard on Clete’s heels, firing first at a man unwise enough to silhouette himself against the French doors, then, from behind a couch, turning on a second man who had just emerged from the kitchen eating a po’boy sandwich with one hand and holding a semi-auto in the other.

The first man fell against the French doors. I heard something hard knock against the wood floor and guessed that it was his weapon, but I couldn’t be sure. The second man was a different matter. He had left the refrigerator partially open, and I could see him clearly against the crack of white light through the door. He wore a tight-fitting olive-colored T-shirt and cargo pants with pockets all over them; his arms were round, and so were his face and his close-cropped peroxided head. He looked like a man who worked out daily but ate too much. He looked like a man who didn’t have a care in the world, except vague thoughts about the next time he would get laid. I suspected he was right-handed, because his coordination broke down when he realized what was happening around him. Rather than throw his sandwich away, he tried to set it down on a table while he shifted his semi-auto from his left to his right hand, as though all the clocks in the house would stop while he adjusted to the situation.