Never alone, Al, I said under my breath, then went back into the cabin with Batist and hit it hard for home.
That night I had an old visitor, the vestiges of malaria that lived like mosquito eggs in my blood. I woke at midnight to the rumble of distant thunder, felt the chill on my skin and heard the rain tin king on the blades of the window fan, and thought a storm was about to burst over the wetlands to the south. An hour later my teeth were knocking together and I could hear mosquitoes droning around my ears and face, although none were there. I wanted to hide under piles of blankets even though my sheet and pillow were already damp with sweat, my mouth as dry as an ashtray.
I knew it would pass; it always did. I just had to wait and, with luck, I would wake depleted in the morning, as cool and empty as if I had been eviscerated and washed out with a hose.
Sometimes during those nocturnal hours I saw an electrified tiger who paced back and forth like a kaleidoscopic orange light behind a row of trees, hung with snakes whose emerald bodies were as supple and thick as an elephant’s trunk.
But I knew these images were born as much out of my past alcoholic life as they were from a systemic return to the Philippines, just another dry drunk, really, part of the guignol that a faceless puppeteer in the mind put on periodically.
But tonight was different.
At first I seemed to see him only inside my head. He walked out of the swamp, his upper torso naked, with seaweed clinging to his ankles like serpents, his skin as bloodless as marble, his hair the same brightness and metamorphic shape as fire.
The storm burst over the swamp and I could see the pecan and oak trees flickering whitely in the yard, the tin roof on the bait shop leaping out of the darkness, wrenching against the joists in the wind. The barometer and the temperature seemed to drop in seconds, as though all the air were being sucked out of our bedroom, drawn backward through the curtains, into the trees, until I knew, when I opened my eyes, I would be inside a place as cold as water that had never been penetrated by sunlight, as inaccessible as the drop-off beyond the continental shelf.
What’s the haps, Streak? he said.
You know how it is, you get deep in Indian country and you always think somebody’s got iron sights on your back, I replied.
How about that Emile Pogue? Isn’t he a pistol?
Why’d you play their game, Sonny? Why didn’t you work with me?
Your heart gets in the way of your head, Dave. You’ve got a way of wheeling the Trojan horse through the gates.
What’s that mean?
They want my journal. After they get it, somebody close to you will snap one into your brain pan.
Rough way to put it.
He picked my hand up by the wrist, drew it toward his rib cage.
Put your thumb in the hole, Dave. That’s the exit wound. Emile caught me four times through the back.
I apologize, Sonny. I let you down.
Lose the guilt. I knew the score when I smoked Emile’s brother.
We should have kept you in lockdown. You ‘d be alive now.
Who says I’m not? Stay on that old-time R and B, Streak. Don’t stray where angels fear to tread. Hey, that’s just a joke.
Wait, I said.
When I reached out to touch him, my eyes opened as though I had been slapped. I was standing in front of the window fan, whose blades were spinning in the mist that blew into the room. My hand was extended, lifeless, as though it were suspended in water. The yard was empty, the trees swollen with wind.
The sheriff had dreamed of star shells popping above the frozen white hills of North Korea. I had lied and sought to dispel his fear, as we always do when we see death painted on someone’s face.
Now I tried to dispel my own.
At my foot was a solitary strand of brown seaweed.
Chapter 29
I slept until seven, then showered, dressed, and ate breakfast in the kitchen. I could feel the day slowly come into focus, the predictable world of blue skies and wind blowing through the screens and of voices on the dock gradually becoming more real than the experience of the night before.
I told myself the gargoyles don’t do well in sunlight.
Vanity, vanity.
Involuntarily I kept touching my wrist, as though I could still feel Sonny’s damp fingers clamped around it.
“Were you walking around last night?” Bootsie said.
“A little touch of the mosquito.”
“You have anxiety about going back, Dave?”
“No, it’s going to be just fine.”
She leaned over the back of my chair, folded her arms under my neck, and kissed me behind the ear. Her shampoo smelled like strawberries.
“Try to come home early this afternoon,” she said.
“What’s up?”
“You never can tell,” she said.
Then she pressed her cheek against mine and patted her hand on my chest.
A half hour later Clete Purcel sat across from me in my office at the department.
“A strand of seaweed?” he said.
“Yep.”
“Dave, you were out on the Gulf yesterday. You tracked it into the house.”
“Yeah, that’s probably what happened,” I said, and averted my eyes.
“I don’t like this voodoo stuff, mon. We keep the lines simple. You got your shield back. It’s time to stick it to Pogue and the grease balls... Are you listening?”
“The problem’s not coming from outside. It was already here.”
“This guy Bertrand again?”
“He’s the linchpin, Clete. If he hadn’t provided the opportunity, none of these others guys would be here.”
“He’s a marshmallow. I saw him in the grocery the other day. His old lady was talking to him like he was the bag boy.”
“That doesn’t sound right.”
“Maybe he has a secret life as a human poodle. Anyway, I got to deedee Just keep gliding on that old-time R and B, noble mon.”
“What did you say?”
“Oh, that’s just something Sonny Boy was always saying down in Guatemala,” he said, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “I never thought I’d say this, but I miss that guy... What’s wrong?”
I spent the next two hours doing paperwork and trying to update my case files, half of which I had to recover from Rufus Arceneaux’s office.
“I got no hard feelings,” he said as I was about to go back out the door.
“Neither do I, Rufus,” I said.
“We gonna work that double homicide at Cade together?” he said.
“No,” I said, and closed his door behind me.
I cleared off my desk, then covered it with all the case material I had on Johnny Giacano, Patsy Dapolito, Sweet Pea Chaisson, Emile Pogue, Sonny Boy Marsallus, the man named Jack whose decapitated body we pulled out of the slough, even Luke Fontenot — faxs, mug shots, crime scene photographs, National Crime Information Center printouts (the one on Dapolito was my favorite; while in federal custody at Marion he had tried to bite the nose off the prison psychologist).
What was missing?
A file on Moleen Bertrand.
It existed somewhere, in the Pentagon or at Langley, Virginia, but I would never have access to it. Neither, in all probability, would the FBI.
But there was another clerical conduit into the Bertrand home, a case file I should have looked at a long time ago.