Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

I unchained our rental boats and hosed down the dock and started the fire in the barbecue pit. The sunlight broke through the trees and turned the Lincoln the color of an overly ripe plum. Water had begun streaming from the trunk. I touched the water, which felt like it had come from a refrigerator, and smelled my hand. At 8 A.M. I called the department and asked Helen Soileau to run the tag.

She called back ten minutes later.

“It was stolen out of a parking lot in Metairie two days ago,” she said.

“Get ahold of the locksmith, would you, and ask the sheriff if he’d mind coming out to my house,” I said.

“Has this got something to do with Remeta?” she asked.

The sun was hot and bright by the time the sheriff and the locksmith and a tow truck got to the dock. The sheriff and I stood at the trunk of the Lincoln while the locksmith worked on it. Then the sheriff blew his nose and turned his face into the wind.

“I hope we’ll be laughing about a string of bigmouth bass,” he said.

The locksmith popped the hatch but didn’t raise it.

“Y’all be my guests,” he said, and walked toward his vehicle.

I flipped the hatch up in the air.

Jim Gable rested on his hip inside a clear-plastic wardrobe bag that was pooled at the bottom with water and pieces of melting ice the size of dimes. His ankles and arms were pulled behind him, laced to a strand of piano wire that was looped around his throat. He had inhaled the bag into his mouth, so that he looked like a guppy trying to breathe air at the top of an aquarium.

“Why’d Remeta leave him here?” the sheriff asked.

“To show me up.”

“Gable was one of the cops who killed your mother?”

“He told me I didn’t know what was going on. He knew Johnny had cut a deal with somebody.”

“With who?”

When I didn’t reply, the sheriff said, “What a day. A molested and raped girl is going to be executed, and it takes a psychopath to get rid of a bad cop. Does any of that make sense to you?”

I slammed the hatch on the trunk.

“Yeah, if you think of the planet as a big blue mental asylum,” I said.

34

As a police officer I had learned years ago a basic truth about all aberrant people: They’re predictable. Their nemesis is not a lack of intelligence or creativity. Like the moth that wishes to live inside flame, the obsession that drives them is never satiated, the revenge against the world never adequate.

Johnny Remeta called the office at two o’clock that afternoon.

“How’d you like your boy?” he asked.

“You’ve killed three cops, Johnny. I don’t think you’re going to make the jail.”

“They all had it coming. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“You’ve been set up, kid.”

After a beat, he said, “Alafair wants to be a screen writer. Tell her to write better lines for you.”

“You cut a deal. You thought you were going to pop Gable and have it all,” I said.

“Good try,” he said. But the confidence had slipped in his voice.

“Yeah? The same person who sent you to kill Gable gave orders to the Louisiana State Police to shoot you on sight. There are two Texas Rangers sitting outside my office right now. Why is that? you ask yourself. Because you whacked a couple of people in Houston, and these two Rangers are mean-spirited peckerwoods who can’t wait to blow up your shit. You wonder why your mother dumped you? It’s no mystery. You’re a born loser, kid.”