“Get in the car and leave the doors open. Then start the engine.”
“Sure,” Marco said. “Don’t point that thing. This isn’t happening here. You’re having some fun. I can understand that. Take it easy.”
“I’ll count backward from three,” Smiley said.
“Okay, we’re on it,” Marco said. “We all work for the same guys. We got to keep that in mind.”
“Three,” Smiley said.
“I hear you,” Marco said. He worked his way across the seat, followed by Jerry Gee. Both of them stared at Smiley, waiting for approval, unable to look directly at the wand of the flamethrower.
“Roll down the windows,” Smiley said.
“All four? What are we doing here?”
Smiley didn’t reply.
“Okay, we’re on it,” Jerry Gee said, fumbling at a window button. “You want your recorder back? It’s in the glove box.”
The faces of the men looked like colorless prunes twisted out of shape. Their eyes were filled with a level of helplessness they probably had never experienced.
“Close the doors. Don’t touch the gearshift,” Smiley said.
The men eased the doors shut. Jerry Gee lifted his eyes to Smiley. “Please, man. I got a family. I ain’t a bad—”
Smiley stepped backward into the darkness, ten feet, twenty feet, almost thirty feet. The wind was cool, out of the south, smelling of salt and rain. He tightened his finger inside the trigger guard. The stream of flame arced through the Buick’s window and turned the interior into a firestorm, curling over the roof, blowing the windshield onto the hood. When he released the trigger, the dashboard was bubbling, and Marco and Jerry Gee sat amid the receding flames like shriveled mannequins powdered with white ash.
The thick-bodied woman opened the door of her room and stared in disbelief.
“Run,” Smiley said.
“Sir?”
“It might explode. Get the other bad woman and run. You have been very bad. Don’t do these kinds of things anymore.”
“I won’t.”
“My friends call me Smiley. You can call me Smiley, too. What’s your name?”
“Dora.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Miss Dora. Tell the other lady what I said. You should not keep company with bad men or go to bad places.”
“You’re not going to come back and hurt me, are you?”
“I don’t hurt good people. I’m sure inside you are a very nice person.”
She eased the door shut and gently set the bolt. Smiley walked to his vehicle, placed the flamethrower into the trunk, and drove away. The neon sign in front said VACANCY. The office light was on. No one seemed to be at the desk. The motel and its semi-tropical ambiance had become a still life — orderly, tranquil, each thing in its proper place, washed clean as though a mystical rain had fallen.
In less than forty-five minutes, Smiley was back in his rented room, sound asleep, his comic on the pillow next to him, the cover tilted so Wonder Woman could watch over him.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I got the call from the sheriff in St. Mary Parish at four-fifteen a.m. “We got two guys fried outside a hot-pillow joint,” he said. “I think it’s your boy, that crazy pissant who was killing people about eighteen months back.”
“Wimple?”
“A security camera in the parking lot of a nightclub caught him. About five-three, propane tanks on his back, looks like he fell in a bag of flour? How many people match that description?”
“He had a flamethrower?”
“Come down if you want. I got to get on it. We cain’t find the night clerk.”
I called Bailey Ribbons and picked her up fifteen minutes later.
More than a dozen squad cars, ambulances, and fire trucks were parked at the crime scene, flashers ripping or blinking in the sunrise. The ground and asphalt and motel and nightclub were damp with humidity and partially in shadow, the air the color of a bruise, an odor like old fruit wafting on the breeze. The two victims were in the front seat of a Buick pockmarked with paint blisters, heads on their chests as though they had tired of the show and gone to sleep.
“The drip line from the flamethrower doesn’t go back much more than twenty-five feet,” the sheriff said. He was a huge man, about six and a half feet, over fifty, his stomach still flat. He was originally from Amarillo and once was a Texas Ranger. “If the gas tank had blown, it might have taken that little asswipe with it.”
“I think Smiley Wimple would have liked that,” I said.
“Say again?”
“He would have made a great pilot in the Japanese air force,” I replied.
The sheriff looked into space. He was from another generation. “We found the clerk.”
We followed him to the office. There was a doorway behind the counter. I looked up at the surveillance camera.
“Somebody already dumped it,” the sheriff said. He went through the doorway, then looked back at me. “You coming?”
The living area had a small kitchen and a table and one chair and a small bed. A harsh lightbulb hung from the ceiling. Porn magazines were on the table and stacked on a wall shelf. Both doors of a cabinet under the sink were open. A bare-chested thin man wearing a vinyl vest was inside the cabinet, so packed under the pipes that he was almost a ball. As far as I could tell, there were three entry wounds in his face and one in the throat and one in the mouth. No visible exit wounds.
“The shooter picked up his brass, but I figure it was a twenty-two, maybe hollow points,” the sheriff said. “You reckon this kid was trying to hide?”
Bailey touched a can of Ajax on the floor with her shoe. “No, he was put in there. Wimple wanted to humiliate him. He was probably locked in a small space when he was a child, so he visits the same fear on anyone who mocks him.”
“I’ve got a hooker in the back of my cruiser,” the sheriff said. “Her name is Dora Thibodaux. The Buick was parked right in front of her room. The room was rented by a guy named Jerry Gemoats, the same man the Buick is registered to.”
“Can we talk to the woman?” I said.
He handed me a key. “I put her on a D-ring. I don’t think you’ll get anything. Her teeth are rattling.”
Bailey and I walked to the sheriff’s cruiser. The windows were down. Dora Thibodaux was handcuffed by one wrist to a steel ring on the floor of the back seat, her shoulder at an awkward angle. Her eyeliner had run and her hair was a tangle of snakes. Two Band-Aids were affixed end to end along a vein inside her left forearm. Her face was out of round from either hangover or withdrawal.
I gave Bailey the handcuff key. She got in the other side and unlocked the woman’s wrist. “I’m Detective Ribbons, Ms. Thibodaux. This is Detective Robicheaux. We’re homicide detectives in Iberia Parish. We’re investigating the deaths of the two men in the Buick, nothing else. Understand?”
“I didn’t see nothing,” Thibodaux replied.
I leaned down to the window. “We’re not asking you to describe what you didn’t see, Miss Dora. We already know who killed the two men. His name is Chester Wimple. Sometimes he calls himself Smiley.” I saw the recognition in her eyes. “He told you his nickname?”
“I ain’t saying nothing, me.”
“Smiley doesn’t give everyone permission to use his nickname,” I said. “It’s a compliment.”
She raised her face, her eyes on mine.
“You think Smiley might hurt you?” I said.
“No.”
“A guy who hosed down two people with a flamethrower wouldn’t do that?”
“I know somet’ing about men. He said I was a nice person.”
“Your friend in the next room, she took off on you?”
“She ain’t no good. Ain’t no loss.”
“Why didn’t you leave?”