“Dave, that’s Andy Swan, the guy who was on the execution team at Raiford,” Clete said.
“You’re sure?” I said.
“I ought to know. I kicked his ass.”
I got on my knees in the water and leaned down to the window. “I’m Detective Dave Robicheaux. My daughter is the owner of this car. Where is she?” I said.
Swan’s gaze would not focus. I realized that one of his eyes had been knocked askew inside the socket. “Did you hear me?” I said.
He didn’t answer. I shone the light inside the car, the beam spearing into the crevasses between the crushed metal and the seats, and over the buckled doors and the folded glass that looked like green ice blown from a fountain. I could smell gasoline and oil and brake fluid and the dirty burnt odor of rubber that had been scoured off the tires.
“What are you doing inside Alafair’s car?” I asked.
Andy Swan made no reply. Clete knelt next to me, one hand propped against the car body. “Remember me?” he said through the window.
Swan’s good eye watered in the glare of the flashlight.
“I’m going to line it out for you,” Clete said. “I’ve got no reason to deceive you. One way or another, we’re going to get Alafair back. But right now you’ve got about eight minutes before you do the big gargle. If you do the right thing now, Dave and I promise you we’ll pick up this car with our bare hands and get you out of this ditch and into federal custody and on the way to a federal hospital. Your pals screwed you with a RotoRooter, Andy. Are you going to take their weight on a kidnap and maybe a murder beef? This is Louisiana. You thought Raiford was a bitch? You know what it’ll be like on death row at Angola for a guy who was on an execution team? Every trusty in the kitchen will spit in your food before it’s brought to your cell. In the shower you’ll be anybody’s bar of soap. Think the hacks will be looking out for you? Most of them wouldn’t blow their nose on your shirt.”
Swan opened his mouth to speak, and I realized that something was wrong with his throat or that something was broken inside his chest. His words were clotted, wrapped with phlegm, blood leaking over his lip from a dark gap in his teeth. “Under the hay,” he said, almost in a whisper.
“What hay?” I asked.
“Baled hay. Go through the door. It’s under the hay.”
“What’s under the hay?” I said.
“The place they were taking her. By the river.”
“What place? Which river?” I said.
“I’m not from here. There’s a tractor—” he began.
“Say it.”
The coulee was running higher, the current sweeping along the crown of his skull, startling him, his eyes opening wide. “I don’t know the name of the place.”
“Who took her?” I said.
He twisted his head and looked straight into my face, his ruined eye protruding obliquely from the socket, his good eye almost luminous, as though it were seeing through me, watching a scene or images that no one else saw.
“Talk to me,” I said. “Don’t let go. Don’t let a collection of shits write your epitaph.”
Then he did something I had seen in a dying man only two or three times in my life. His face became filled with dread, the jaw going slack, the tissue transforming to a puttylike gray, even though his blood had already drained into his head. The exhalation of his final breath was as rank as sewer gas.
I hit the side of the car with my fist.
“What was he talking about?” Clete said. “A tractor? Baled hay?”
“By a river,” I added.
Clete’s face was round and hard in the reflection of the flashlight. “What are you thinking?” he asked me.
“The video from Herman Stanga’s DVD player,” I said. “The stones in the wall. They’re not indigenous to Louisiana. They’re the kind that were carried as ballast in nineteenth-century sailing ships. The place in the video was a barracoon.”
“I didn’t get that last part,” he said.
“A jail for slaves. A lot of blackbirders were bringing in slaves from the West Indies after the prohibition of 1809. Jim Bowie and Jean Lafitte brought them up the Mermentau River and sold them into the cane fields.”