But Molly's recorded telephone message had mentioned that she was "disappointed" and the fact that someone had borrowed her tools without permission "again." She may not have been an obsessive person, but she had a low level of tolerance for people who lied or violated the trust of others, which she always referred to as an act of spiritual theft.
I parked by the administration building and rattled the doors, then walked next door to the cypress cottage which Molly used to share with a nun who had returned to the Midwest to care for her mother. The nun's car was parked under a pecan tree, covered by a clear plastic tarp fogged with humidity and pooled with wet leaves and bird droppings.
I wiped my face with my shirt. The air stank of stagnant mud, raw sewage backed up from the treatment plant, the bloated body of a drowned cow that gars were feeding on in the shallows. I could hear bottle flies buzzing inside the plastic tarp on the nun's car.
When the sun broke through a cloud, the tops of the cypress trees along the bayou lit up as though they had been touched with a flame. I saw an aluminum boat snugged inside a clump of flooded willows, its motor pulled out of the water, an anchor consisting of a cinder block threaded by a rope thrown up on the bank.
Forty yards downstream, Molly's car was parked behind the barn, wedged between the back wall and the remains of a disease-eaten mulberry tree that had been uprooted by the storm. Both the driver and passenger doors hung open.
I felt a wave of nausea and fear wash through my system. I ran back to the tarp-covered vehicle of Molly's friend, a pressure band like a strip of metal tightening against the side of my head. I meshed the plastic in both hands and ripped it free of the roof, showering myself with water and birdshit. A cloud of beetles and greenflies and a stench of rats rose into my face. But there was no one inside the car and no footprints around the trunk area.
I flung the tarp down and headed for the barn.
Chickens were pecking under the pole shed and the live oak that arched high over the barn roof. I started to go down by the bayou and circle behind the barn and come up on the other side, but I remembered there was a window in back that gave a clear view down to the water. I removed my.45 from my holster and pulled back the receiver and slipped a hollow-point forward into the chamber.
A rooster came out from under the tractor, its wings spread wide, its throat warbling, scattering hens across the apron of dirt that extended out to the drip line of the oak tree. I pressed myself against the front of the barn, the.45 pointed upward, the pressure band on the right side of my head squeezing tighter. The barn door was ajar. From inside I heard a hissing sound and smelled an odor like scorched metal.
I ripped the door open and went inside, pointing the.45 into the gloom with both hands.
Molly's wrists were locked with plastic cuffs behind a chair, her head enclosed in a burlap bag that Andre Bergeron had cinched around her neck with his belt. An acetylene torch lay on the workbench, a concentrated blue flame knifing from its nozzle. Bergeron held the sharpened edge of a machete under Molly's chin. He was bare-chested, his skin glistening, a bandanna wrapped around his head to keep the sweat out of his eyes.
"T'row the gun down or I take her head off," he said.
I now realized how Valentine Chalons had played me. "Chalons set us both up, Andre. I'm supposed to pop you so he can inherit Mr. Raphael's estate."
"Don't matter. T'row down the gun. Both of us know you ain't gonna shoot it."
"That's a bad bet," I said.
"You t'ink? One more don't mean nothing to me," he said.
My eyes had adjusted to the poor light and I could see him clearly now. He was standing on the opposite side of Molly, much of his body protected by hers. His skin was powdered with dust and bits of hay, his chest running with sweat, the top of his beltless trousers soaked with it. He tightened the machete against Molly's throat, lifting her chin upwards, the burlap stretching against her face.
"Okay, we'll work it out," I said, and began to lower my weapon.
I saw his lips part over the whiteness of his teeth. "That's more like it. Yes, suh, it gonna go smooth now," he said.
His back was slightly stooped, his arm probably stressed by the unnatural way he had to hold the machete under Molly's chin. He straightened up slightly, shifting a crick out of his back.
I locked my sights on the top of his sternum and pulled the trigger. The round hit him at an angle and spun him against the side of a stall. The round had cored through his back and blown a white swatch out of the wood. He lay on the floor, his head against the stall, his fingers spidered across the entry wound. Like most people who are the gunshot victims of a weapon like a.45 auto, his face could not register the amount of damage his body had just incurred. His mouth hung open, his stomach went soft and trembled like a bowl of Jell-O, his eyes fluttered and rolled as he went into shock.
Then he turned on his side and curled into an embryonic ball. Beneath one of his love handles was a half-moon incision, as thick as a night crawler, where he had given up a kidney for the father who had relegated him to a shack on the back of the family property.
But I didn't care about the fate of Andre Bergeron or the perverted genes or social injustices that had produced him. In fact, I didn't even care enough about him to hate him or deliver another round into his body, which I could have done and gotten away with. I uncinched the belt from Molly's neck and pulled the burlap bag from her head. I held her face against me and kissed the sweat in her hair and touched her eyes and mouth. I opened my pocketknife and sliced the plastic cuffs on her wrists and stroked her shoulders and arms and wiped the hair out of her eyes and lifted her to her feet, my hands shaking so badly she had to hold them tightly in hers.
In the distance I could hear a siren coming hard down Old Jeanerette Road.
Molly placed her forehead on my chest, and the two of us stood there a long time like that, not speaking, listening to the wind blow through the open door and out the back window, the green-gold splendor of the outside world beckoning like an old friend on the edges of our vision.
epilogue
Capitalists are hanged by the rope they sell their enemies. Mystics who help formulate great religious movements writhe in sexual torment over impure thoughts a shoe salesman leaves behind with adolescence. A Crusader knight in search of the True Cross returns to Marseilles from Palestine with a trunkful of Saracen robes, inside of which is a plague-infested mouse.
My experience had been, like George Orwell's, that human beings are possessed of much more courage and self-sacrifice than we give them credit for, and when the final test comes, they usually go down with the decks awash and the guns blazing. Our moral failure lies in the frailty of our vision and not in our hearts. Our undoing is in our collective willingness to trust those whom we shouldn't, those who invariably used our best instincts against us. But as a police officer I also learned long ago that justice finds us in its own time and of its own accord, and in ways we never, and I mean absolutely never, anticipate.
I would like to say I tacked up Valentine Chalons with a nail gun. But I didn't. Not even close. Val's denouement began and ended with his own peers and his own machinations. First, there were rumors he was the son of a pimp, then suspicion spread that out of fear for his own reputation he had concealed his intuitions that Andre Bergeron was the Baton Rouge serial killer, allowing Bergeron to continue murdering innocent women, including Val's own sister, with whom some said Val had conducted an affair.
The woman who had filed molestation charges against me admitted she was paid by one of Val's employees. The photographer who had stuck a camera in my face after I gave Val a beating in Clementine's told an alternative news magazine he had been personally assigned by Val Chalons to take my life apart with vise grips.