A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux 23)

“You were in the Corps?”

“Is it Semper Fi or Semper Cry?” Bell said.

“That’s pretty clever. How about cleaning the potato salad out of your mouth?”

Bell went to the front door and opened it partway. “Come here a second, will you?”

“What for?”

“To show you something,” Bell said. He clicked off the light and opened the door wide. The salt air ballooned into the room. “See all that blackness out there? That’s the world, sport. That’s what I serve. I don’t make the rules or get a vote.”

“What are you talking about?” Clete said.

“You’re probably a PI because you were once a cop who got in trouble. Which means you understand how the system works.”

“Tell you what, bub,” Clete said. “I’ll take care of my friend, and you can roll it up and head on down the road. You know, hasta lumbago or whatever.”

“I was First Cav. Know what the Marines used to tell us about our insignia? ‘The horse they couldn’t ride, the line they couldn’t cross, the color that speaks for itself.’ A piece of shit like you is a gift.”

From his right-hand pocket, he pulled a blackjack and swung it across Clete’s temple. Clete went down like a sandbag, his arms at his sides, his jaw locked open, his face bouncing off the floor.

* * *

HE WOKE DRESSED only in his skivvies, suspended upside down, bound hand and foot, his head perhaps four feet above the ground, in a place where he could see buttonwood and gumbo-limbo trees and sandspits humped like the backs of sand sharks and mangroves and stacks of crab traps and a huge expanse of water and clouds as black as cannon smoke on the horizon.

His feet were attached to a cable that hung from the boom of a giant tow truck. His head felt as though all the blood in his body had settled in the top of his skull; his skin was frigid in the wind.

He remembered nothing after hitting the floor of the motel. One eye was swollen the size of an egg, with only a slit he could see through. For a second he thought he was going to vomit. The water sliding past the mangroves was green and frothy and phosphorescent, as though filled with electric eels. A few hundred yards from shore, he saw a tiered wooden ship, like an ancient prison vessel, its sails furled, its oars dead in the water.

Clete heard someone walking toward him. The steps were measured and heavy, like those of a man wearing boots, the soles crunching grittily, the sound of a man walking with a purpose. Clete thought he smelled gasoline. He felt his colon pucker, his skin shrink, his breath seize in his throat. A man in a cowl stepped into his line of sight. The man was wearing steel-toed boots and leather gloves and tight riveted trousers that were stiff with dirt and grease and hitched high on the hips and tight around the scrotum. Inside the cowl was a narrow face that had the iridescence of the bodies Clete had seen washed from their graves during the monsoon season in Vietnam.

“Know who I am?” the man said.

The voice was guttural, as though the speaker had sand in his throat. Clete had no doubt about the voice’s origins. It lived in his dreams and sometimes in the middle of the day. He’d carried it with him to El Salvador and to the brothels of Bangkok and Saigon’s Bring Cash Alley. The voice was one of ridicule and debasement and often came with a slap on the ear or a razor strop biting into his buttocks or grains of rice he was forced to kneel upon. He had no doubt someone had injected him with a hallucinogen or dropped it in his mouth.

“How you doin’, Pop?” he said. “Long time no see.”

“Know why we’re doing what we’re doing to you?” said the voice inside the cowl.

“I don’t care,” Clete said. “It’s not real.”

“Tell me that five minutes from now.”

Clete squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. “Pop, I know that’s you. Don’t tease me.”

“You’ve become a believer?”

“If that’s you, Pop, tell me about the greenhouse on St. Charles.”

“Still thinking about that, are you? You should. You were a bad boy.”

“Tell me.”

The man reached out and spun Clete around. “A rich lady asked you to come to her ice-cream party. You put on your Easter suit and knocked on her front door, but you got sent around back. The yard was full of raggedy-ass colored children. You went back that night with a bag of rocks and broke all the glass in her greenhouse. You cost me a customer.”

“Screw you, Jack.”

“I’m glad you said that. It makes me feel better about my duties.”