CHAPTER
26
THE BODY OF the deputy assigned to watch our house never moved when Clete opened the cruiser’s door. The deputy’s eyes were half-lidded, their stare forever fixed on nothing. His head was tilted slightly to one side, almost in a quizzical manner, a thread of blood leaking from his hat down one cheek. His handheld radio was gone, and the wiring had been ripped out from under the dashboard. The interior light had been manually turned off, and Clete couldn’t find the switch to get it back on again. The battery in his cell phone was dead, and a car he tried to flag down veered around him and kept going. Clete pulled the body of the deputy from behind the wheel and left it in the street to draw as much attention as possible to the scene. Then he started running through the side yard toward the back of the house, his .38 gripped in his right hand, water and mud exploding from under his shoes.
AS SOON AS I came through the front door, a man I had never seen kicked the door shut behind me and swung a blackjack at my head. I raised my arm and took part of the blow on my shoulder and the rest just behind the ear, enough to bring me to my hands and knees but not enough to knock me unconscious.
Through our bedroom door, I could see Molly in an embryonic position on the floor, her mouth duct-taped and her arms stretched behind her, her wrists duct-taped to her ankles. The room was in disarray, a sewing box and the cosmetics that had been on her dresser broken and stepped on and tracked across the throw rugs. It was obvious she had put up a fight. Robert Weingart was pointing a .25 auto straight down at the side of her face. Alafair stood in the shadows, staring at me, blood patina’d on the tops of her bare feet, her pink dress streaked with mud, her hair matted. “I couldn’t warn you. He was going to shoot Molly,” she said.
“Don’t worry about it, Alf,” I said.
“Lie down on your face, sir,” the man who had hit me said. “Arms straight out. You know the drill.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
He reached down, ignoring my question, pulling my .45 from its holster.
“You were one of the guys at the river?” I said.
“Just a guy doing a job. Don’t make it personal, sir,” he said.
“What did they do to you, Alafair?” I said.
“They took my shoes and my feet got cut, but that’s all that happened,” she said.
“You sure have a way of blundering into things, Mr. Robicheaux,” a voice said from the kitchen.
I twisted my head around so I could see the figure silhouetted in the hallway. Kermit Abelard stepped into the light. “Waiting on Mr. Purcel, are you?” he said. “I wouldn’t. This time your friend went way beyond his limits.”
“You think you can create a clusterfuck like this and just walk away from it?” I said.
“Let’s wait and see,” he replied. His expression was serene, his cheeks splotched with color as though he were blushing, his eyes warm. He seemed to be waiting on something, like a man whose prescience is confirmed with each tick of the clock. “Ah, there it is. That guttural, puffing sound, like a man with strep throat trying to cough? That’s Mr. Purcel eating a couple of rounds from a silenced forty-caliber Smith and Wesson. You put him up to killing my grandfather, didn’t you? The quixotic knight-errant, waging war on a crippled old man.”
“That’s really dumb, Kermit,” I said. “I hate to tell you this, but your trained yard bitch in there has put the slide on you. He hung your grandfather up like a side of beef. Think about it. Who else would do something like that? Not me, not Clete Purcel, not anybody you know except the guy you sprung from Huntsville and who paid you back by offing your grandfather.”
“I have no illusions about Robert. But he respected my grandfather. He didn’t kill him. Your fat friend did, and you and your family are going to pay for it.”
The man who had hit me began taping my wrists behind me. “Better talk to your employer, bud,” I said. “You guys are pros. This is Louisiana. You pop a cop, you’re going to the injection table, provided you ever make the jail.”
I could hear the man breathing as he worked, his fingers winding the tape around my wrists, notching it into the bones. Then he taped my ankles. “Who are you guys?” I said. “Mercs? You know the score. Use your head.”
But he made no reply.
“Hundreds of millions, maybe even billions, are hanging in the balance, Mr. Robicheaux,” Kermit said. “Somebody will end up owning that money. It might be the government or the state or plaintiffs in a civil suit or me and Robert and Carolyn. But somebody will own it. And whoever owns and keeps it will have these kinds of men working for them. Are you so naive that you don’t believe the most powerful families in this country aren’t guilty of the same crimes Robert and I might have committed?”
He began to rake through a litany of collective sins that ranged from the Ludlow massacre to support of the Argentine junta to the abandonment of a girl in a submerged car by a famous United States senator. Paradoxically, he seemed oblivious that his grandfather had been friends with some of the very people he was denigrating.
“You had better get done with this, sir,” said the man who had wrapped my wrists.
“See what’s going on in back,” Kermit said.
“We can take care of this, sir. I think you should go.”
Kermit gazed at Alafair through the doorway, his eyes wistful. “Do everybody except her,” he said.
“You’re taking her with you, sir? I wouldn’t advise that.”
“No, Robert will be handling Alafair before we leave.”