“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Weingart said.
Kermit pulled aside a curtain and looked out front. “By the way, Mr. Robicheaux, one of our team just hooked a wrecker to the cruiser and is hauling it and the driver away. Don’t expect the cavalry anytime soon.”
I was on my face, my heart beating against the floor, the soiled odor of the carpet climbing into my nostrils. Down the bayou, I thought I heard the drawbridge clank open and rise into the air and the engines of a large vessel laboring upstream against the current.
Kermit squatted so he could look directly into my face. “I didn’t want any of this to happen. You forced the situation, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said. “You hate people of my background. You’ve spent a lifetime resenting others for the fact that you were born poor. Admit it.”
“You’re wrong about that, Kermit. The Abelards were a great source of humor for everybody around here. Everyone was laughing at you behind your back, you most of all. You didn’t get screwed at birth, Kermit. Your mother did when her diaphragm slipped.”
Kermit stood erect. “Get it done,” he said to the man who liked to call people “sir.”
CLETE PURCEL CHARGED along the side of the house behind a row of camellia bushes and clumps of bamboo and untrimmed banana plants. But he didn’t stop when he reached the backyard. Instead, he kept running down the slope, deeper into the trees and darkness, until he had a view of both the bayou and the entirety of the house. He could see the back porch and the kitchen and Alafair’s bedroom; he could see Tripod’s chain extending from the hutch up into the tree where Tripod was hiding; he could see the shapes of three men wearing rain hoods of the kind the men at the shoot-out on the river had worn.
Their backs were turned to Clete. They were looking down the driveway and down the walk space between the camellias on the far side of the house. Then one of them began to wander down toward the bayou, pointing the beam of a penlight ahead of him. Clete drew himself
against a live oak, one shoulder pressed tightly against the bark, and waited. The hooded man walked within two feet of him, his small hooked nose in profile against the green and red lights on the drawbridge. Clete put away his .38 and stepped quickly from behind the oak tree, wrapping his arms under the hooded man’s chin, snapping upward, all in one motion. For a second, he thought he heard a cracking sound, like someone easing his foot down on a dry stick. He pulled the hooded man deeper into the trees and dropped him in the leaves, then retrieved the penlight and the silenced semiautomatic the man had been carrying.
Clete moved quickly up the slope, threading his way between the trunks of the trees, his feet sinking into the soft pad of pine needles and decayed pecan husks and the leaves from the water oaks that were yellow and black and still lay in sheaves on the ground from the previous winter. The two men who had been looking down the driveway and the walk space on the far side of the house had returned to the center of the backyard and were now gazing down the slope. “You out there, Lou?” one of them said.
Clete stepped behind a big camellia bush strung with Spanish moss. He pointed the penlight toward the neighbor’s house and clicked it on and off three times. Then he stuck the pen between his teeth and said, “Got him.”
“You got him?”
“Yeah,” Clete said, the pen still between his teeth.
“Why didn’t you say something?” the other man said. “This whole gig sucks. These people are out of Gone With the Wind.”
“No, you got it wrong,” the other man said. “They’re out of Suddenly , Last Summer. It’s by Tennessee Williams. It’s about this New Orleans faggot that gets cannibalized on a beach by a bunch of peasants. Lou, quit playing with yourself and get up here.”
The bridge at Burke Street was opening, the surface of the bayou shuddering with the vibration of the machinery. The bow of a large vessel slid between the pilings, the lighted pilothouse shining in the rain. “What the hell is that?” one of the men said.
“I told you, it’s Gone With the Wind. This place is a fresh-air nuthouse.”
The two men had started walking down the slope almost like tourists, confident in their roles, confident in the night that lay ahead of them, unperturbed by considerations of mortality or the suffering of the people inside the house they had invaded.
Clete Purcel moved out of the trees with remarkable agility for a man his size. He lifted the semiautomatic and its suppressor with both hands, aiming with his arms fully extended. The hooded men did not seem to realize how quickly their situation had reversed. Clete shot the first man through the eye and the second one in the throat. They both fell straight to the ground and made no sound that he could hear inside the rain.
WHILE KERMIT HELD a pistol on me, the man who had duct-taped my wrists went into the kitchen. I heard the dry sound of a metal cap being unscrewed from a metal container, then a sloshing sound, and a moment later I smelled the bright stench of gasoline. Robert Weingart pushed Alafair on the floor next to me, then bound her wrists and ankles. He removed his belt and looped it around her throat but did not tighten it. He checked to see if I was watching him work.
“You guys can’t be this stupid,” I said. “You think anybody is going to buy it as anything except arson?”
“You’re going to die from a gas explosion, Mr. Robicheaux,” Weingart said. “A big yellow fireball that will go poof up through the treetops. When it’s done, you’ll all be nothing but ashes.”
“Listen to me, Kermit,” I said. “You can get out of this. You have money and power on your side. You can claim diminished capacity. There are always alternatives. What do you think Weingart is going to do when this is over? He’ll bleed you the rest of your life.”
Weingart raised his shoe just slightly, then pressed the tip into my ear, twisting the sole back and forth, gradually coming down harder and harder, crushing my face flat into the carpet.
“That’s enough, Robert,” Kermit said.
“Signing off now, Mr. Robicheaux,” Weingart said. He raised his foot and drove it into my forehead just above the eyebrow, bringing the heel into the bone.
“Don’t say any more to them, Dave,” Alafair said. “They’re not worth it. They’re both cowards. Kermit told me when he was little and did something bad, his mother would make him put on a dress and sit all day in the front yard. That’s why he’s so cruel. He’s been a frightened, shame-faced little boy all his life.”
“You’d better keep your mouth shut, Alafair,” Kermit said.
“You’re pathetic. That won’t change. We’ll be dead, and you’ll be alive and pathetic and an object of ridicule the rest of your life. Your lover is known in publishing as a piece of shit. That’s what you sleep with every night—a piece of shit. I suspect eventually he’ll dose you with clap or AIDS, if he hasn’t already.”
“Are you going to put a stop to this, or do you want me to?” Weingart said to Kermit.