I saw Clete begin firing into the cabin, the spent cartridges flying from the ejector port of the AR-15, the rounds whanging off the woodstove. I also heard popping from somewhere else, but I didn’t know where. I began running at Clete, yelling incoherently, waving my arms. I smashed into him and knocked him to the ground. He stared up at me, his eyes like green Life Savers inside the mud on his face. I grabbed his shirt with both hands and shouted, “You wouldn’t listen! You never listen!”
His face dilated with the implication of my words. “Oh, God! Oh, God, Dave! Tell me I didn’t do that.”
I dropped my cut-down in the grass and pulled the rifle from his hands and threw away the half-spent magazine and inserted the fresh one from my coat pocket into the well. I started running for the cabin door, keeping the cabin between me and the cove and the levee. The flames in the woodstove were blazing brightly because of the holes Clete had drilled in the iron plate. The hatted figure was slumped forward in a chair. The figure next to it had fallen to the floor. I stepped inside the doorway, indifferent to whatever harm might befall me at the hands of Desmond Cormier or Lou Wexler.
The head rolled loose from the figure in the hat. The figures were mannequins. Shell casings were scattered on the floor and the top of the stove. Two were still unfired and inside the skillet that had probably been filled with them. I felt my eyes fill with water, my lungs swell with air that was dense with salt and the coldness of the Gulf.
I turned and went back through the door onto the gallery. “It’s not Alafair, Clete!”
He was on his feet now. He grinned at me, my cut-down hanging from his hand. Then there were pops and slashes of light from the darkness, and he went down on both knees, two red flowers blooming on his windbreaker, his jaw dropping, his arms dead at his sides.
Chapter Forty-Three
I went out the back door just as the headlights of the Humvee came on and shone directly into my eyes. I raised my hand against the glare and saw Lou Wexler by the side of the Humvee. He had a semi-automatic rifle aimed at the center of my face. Desmond Cormier lay on the ground, his hands wrapped with wire behind him and tied to his ankles, a blue rubber ball strapped in his mouth.
“Lay your piece aside or never see your daughter again,” Wexler said.
My eyes were watering in the headlights.
“I’ll pop both her and Des right now,” he said.
I let the AR-15 drop.
“Back away,” he said.
I did as he said. He reached down and picked up the AR-15 by the barrel and flung it into the darkness. “The whore gave me away, did she?”
“Which whore?” I asked.
“The one I had a romp with in City Park,” he said.
“Where’s Alafair?”
“Snug as a bug in a rug.”
“What do you get out of this, Wexler?”
“Tons of fun, and a bit of payback for what you and your ignorant kind did to my uncle in your parish prison.”
“Helen Soileau and our friends and I had no part in that.”
“Oh, yes, you did, laddie. You pretend to be the knight errant, but you’re an ill-bred wog, just like Cormier. I kept his little three-penny opera afloat for years, and bankrupted both myself and that poor sod Butterworth, while the Golden Globes and Academy nominations went to this pitiful puke on the ground.”
“Why did you kill Lucinda Arceneaux?”
“I saved her.”
“What?”
“She could have been my queen bee. She opted for a life of mediocrity. So I eased her into a role no one around here will ever forget. You have to admit, it’s been pretty good theater.”
I had no doubt he was mad. But that didn’t make his cruelty any the less. Desmond twitched on the ground. Wexler placed his foot on Desmond’s neck and squeezed. I could hear the waves starting to hit the cabin cruiser’s hull, a steady slap that threw salt spray higher and higher in the air.
“Alafair isn’t a player in this,” I said. “If you really believe in the ethos of the Templar knight, you have to let her go, Lou.”
“On a first-name basis, are we? Get on your knees.”
“Is she on the boat?”
“Could be. But let’s get back to our biblical lesson. You remember the biblical quotation, don’t you? ‘Before me every knee shall bow’?”
“Can’t do it.”
“Maybe this will help.”
He fired a round through the top of my foot. I felt a moment of intense pain, as though the bones between ankle and toes had been struck with a ballpeen hammer, then nothing, my shoe filling with blood. I wanted to say something brave or clever, but I could not. My best friend was down and maybe dead, and Alafair might have already suffered the same fate as Hilary Bienville. If she and Clete were gone, I was ready to go also.
“Put the next one between my eyes,” I said.
“What was that?”
“Now is your chance. I want you to do it.”
“Don’t tempt the devil.”
“The devil wouldn’t let you clean his chamber pot.”
He butt-stroked me with his rifle, knocking me to the ground. He pointed the muzzle into my face. “Kiss it.”
“Fuck you.”
I had to keep him talking. Once he was gone, Alafair would be gone also, probably forever. Where are you, Bailey? Where are you, Helen? I held my holy medal, my eyes shut. I was completely powerless and knew that whatever happened next was out of my hands.
I heard Wexler walk away. When I opened my eyes, I saw him step off a small dock onto a boarding plank that hung from the entry port of the cabin cruiser. The hull was dipping deeply into the waves, rocking and hitting the dock and the cypress knees along the bank. He clicked on the cabin light and pulled Alafair from the deck and held her so I could see her face. Blood was leaking from her hair.
I got up from the ground and began limping toward the dock as though half of me had melted. I thought I heard a helicopter droning over water, and I wondered if I had gone back in time to Southeast Asia and the sounds and images from which I had never freed myself. The thropping of the blades was unmistakable.
“You’re not going anywhere, bub,” I said.
“I’m honoring your war record,” he said. “Be humble enough to recognize and accept an act of clemency by a brother-in-arms.”
“You taped Bella Delahoussaye’s eyes because you couldn’t look her in the face while you killed her, you yellow-bellied, sorry sack of shit.”
He knotted Alafair’s hair in his fist. Her wrists were handcuffed behind her back. I was within fifteen feet of the cruiser now. The waves were bursting against the dock, drenching my hat and face. I saw lights coming in low over the surf in the distance.
“Hear that sound?” I said. “That’s the cavalry. They’re going to spike your cannon, Wexler. And after they do that, I’m going to kick it up your ass.”
“You won’t be here to see it. Neither will she.”
Alafair’s face was white with exhaustion or shock or blood loss; she looked like she had been beaten. Her bottom lip was cut and puffed, her hair matted with blood. I bet she had fought back. No, I knew she had fought back. And I was determined to be no less brave than she. Then, just to the south of the cabin cruiser, I saw a shadow moving through the trees, humped, off balance, leviathan, and unstoppable in its course and purpose.
“Pop me if you want,” I said. “I’m no big loss. But before I check out, tell me one thing, will you?”