Light of the World (Dave Robicheaux 20)

“Don’t say anything. It’s their turf. They have the right to do whatever they want here.”

“So do the patients in a mental asylum.”

The sticker read DA BRO GOTTA GO.

“There’s Younger coming out of the house,” Alafair said. “Who’s the guy with him?”

“Take a guess.”

“The son who poured Coke all over Clete’s head?”

“I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. Then we’re leaving.”

“Clete just headed for the beer tent.”

I had the feeling that not only was our situation starting to unravel but Alafair had decided to go with the flow and enjoy it. I left her standing under a canopy and cut off Love Younger and Caspian between the ranch house and the crowd. “You promised me fifteen minutes,” I said.

His eyes were sky blue, his face flushed and soft-looking as a baby’s, loose strands of his white hair moving in the breeze. “Step inside the house with me,” he said.

“Get rid of him, Daddy,” Caspian said. “He’s here to cause trouble. It’s written all over him. He’s a drunk and a cooze hound.”

“Go find your wife,” his father said.

“She’s just over there someplace. She’s fine.”

“Did you hear me?” the older man said.

I saw Caspian’s scalp constrict visibly. He looked like a child who had been struck in the face by a trusted parent.

“I don’t think you need me here. I think I’ll take a drive into town,” he said.

“Goddammit, son, for once just do what I ask. It’s time to act like the husband of your wife and the father of your dead child,” Younger said. His face softened. He squeezed his son’s shoulder. “Come on, boy. Buck up and get us a table. I’ll be along directly.”

As Caspian walked away, a flatbed truck turned off the highway and drove under the arch. Several people began pointing, then a ripple of laughter spread through the crowd that quickly turned into collective joy. On the back of the truck, boomed down with chains, were two portable toilets with the name of our current president and the words WHITE HOUSE spray-painted on them. Both toilets had been shot full of holes.

Love Younger’s gaze remained on his son. Then he turned back to me. “You coming?” he said.

The ranch house was constructed of teardown lumber that was probably a century old, the rusted impressions of iron bolts and steel spikes and bits of chain deliberately left in the wood. The exterior of the house was cosmetic and had nothing to do with the interior. The lighting was turned on and off by voice command; the faucets and sinks in the kitchen were gold-plated. The living room had a fireplace the size of a Volkswagen; there was an elevator in the hallway that evidently accessed a parking garage under the house.

Through the kitchen window, I could see people lining up at the serving tables. “That’s my daughter in front of the cold-drink tent,” I said. “I pulled her out of a submerged plane when she was five years old.”

“Yes?”

“I don’t plan on losing her to Asa Surrette.”

He didn’t seem to hear me. He rolled up his sleeves in front of the sink and turned on the water and began soaping his hands and forearms, scrubbing them as a surgeon might. He squeezed a disinfectant on his hands and ran cold water up and down his arms, then dried them with paper towels and stuffed the towels in a waste can under the sink.

“So you don’t plan on losing your daughter?” he said. “What should I make of a statement like that, Mr. Robicheaux?”

“I think you’re one of those who have ears that don’t hear and eyes that don’t see.”

“I see. That’s your mission here? Carrying your spiritual wisdom to the halt and the lame?”

“Your employee, the rapist, was killed with three forty-four-caliber balls. Why would somebody use a nineteenth-century firearm to commit a murder?”

“I’ve talked to the sheriff about that. He says Dixon is still under the microscope on that.”

“Dixon is not your man. I think the forty-four was used to point suspicion at him and perhaps you.”