Light of the World (69 page)

“Take them down to the basement,” Surrette said, breathing through his nose.

Molly was sitting in a chair by the door. She clutched a wadded tissue speckled with blood. “My name is Molly Robicheaux,” she said. “I saw the death squads at work in Guatemala and El Salvador.”

“Is that supposed to mean something to me?” Surrette asked.

“They had your eyes,” she said. “They always smelled of alcohol when they came into the village. They never spoke in any voice except a loud one. They chose their enemies carefully—innocent villagers who had no weapons. You remind me of them.”

“Take them downstairs, Jack, and don’t try to think,” Surrette said. The heat seemed to go out of his face. He smiled. “No judgment calls.”

“Sure,” Boyd said. “I’m with you all the way. You know that.”

“What do you want me to do?” Terry said.

“I’ll tell you when I’m ready. In the meantime, there’s no need for you to speak.”

Albert looked at Boyd and Terry. “I got a question for you fellows,” he said. “Do y’all think this man is going to let you walk away so you can extort him down the road?”

“Asa is a kidder. He knows who his friends are,” Boyd said. “You bet on the wrong horse, old-timer.”

There was a beat. Terry was silent, his concentration turned inward, as though he were examining a flyspeck inside his head.

“Right, Asa?” Jack Boyd said. “Mr. Hollister shouldn’t be placing any bets in Vegas, should he? You got any snacks in the refrigerator? I’m starving.”

W
E DROVE BACK
up the two-lane, slowing at the driveways that led down to the houses on the lake or up the hillsides through the cherry orchards. We went over a rise and down a long grade into an unlit area where there were no houses and the shoreline was dense with trees and underbrush. In my high beams, I saw a large rock partially broken on the asphalt. It looked like it had been dragged under a vehicle.

“That wasn’t there when we went up the road earlier,” I said.

“No, it wasn’t,” Clete said. “Pull over.”

I drove around the rock and parked on the north side of it. Gretchen and Alafair pulled in behind me. Up ahead was a dirt road that cut back up the hillside and disappeared inside trees tangled with vines and shrubbery. “Did you guys see this rock earlier?” I said.

“No, it wasn’t here,” Alafair said. She picked it up and set it on the shoulder. “Somebody ran over it. See the powdered spot about ten yards back?”

I took a flashlight from the glove box and walked to a dirt road that angled back up the hill. Stenciled in the dirt were the fresh tire tracks of a heavy vehicle. I shone the flashlight’s beam on a bend
about forty yards up the grade. At first I saw only the trees and their shadows moving in the wind; then the beam reflected off a bright surface, perhaps a bumper or a windshield or a strip of chrome.

I walked up the incline. The behemoth-like outline of Albert’s diesel rig, sheathed in dried mud, was unmistakable. Whoever had left it there had backed it up and parked it with the engine pointed downhill. “Up here!” I shouted at the others.

There was nothing in the cab, no keys in the ignition, no signs of a struggle. But I knew my wife. She was not only intelligent and brave, she never went with the flow. I opened both doors of the cab and searched under the seats and behind them and in the glove box. I knew that somewhere, somehow, Molly had left me a message.

“Call it in, Clete,” I said.

“You know what those cocksuckers are going to say, don’t you?” he replied.

“Yeah, I do, but call it in anyway,” I said, feeling down in the seats.

“It’ll take at least a half hour for them to get a guy out here. Then he’ll tell us to file a missing persons report.”

“I know that. Just make the call,” I said.

“Then wait for somebody to show up? I say fuck that.”

I took out my cell phone and started to punch in 911.

“All right, I’ll do it,” Clete said, walking off with his phone to his ear.

I had found nothing in the cab. My heart was beating, my eyes stinging with moisture even though the night was cool.
Where are you, Molly?
I thought. I stood erect and closed the passenger door.
Where could she have left a clue? It’s there someplace, I know it, I know it, I know it.
I turned in a circle.
On the truck itself,
I thought. I shone the flashlight on the door. There it was, right in front of me, two initials on the outside panel. She had probably hung her arm out the window and used her thumb to furrow the letter J, then the letter B, in the muddy splatter that had dried on the panel.

“You were right about Jack Boyd, Gretchen,” I said. “He’s got them. How bad did you work him over?”

“I did as much damage to him as I could in the time that I had,” she answered, holding her eyes on mine.

And Molly will pay the price,
I thought.

“Did you say something?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“They can’t be far away, Dave,” Alafair said.

I wasn’t so sure. Maybe Boyd or Surrette had a boat. Maybe Boyd had gotten past us on a dirt road up the hill. Maybe he had changed vehicles. We needed the state authorities. We needed roadblocks. We needed a police helicopter with a searchlight. We needed all the things I would have had access to as a police officer in the state of Louisiana. Our credibility with the locals was zero.

I had more information in my head than I could think about. Surrette was holed up in a place that had a basement. It was within earshot of a bay where amphibians landed and took off. Someone had held a revival or prayer meeting not far away. But where? The area was full of fruit pickers in the summertime, and they brought their hymnbooks and open-air churches and came and went with the wind.

“The marina,” I said.

“Yeah?” Clete said, flexing his right hand at his side.

“Rich guys own sailboats. They also own amphibians.”

“They don’t necessarily own both,” he replied.

“The marina has a bar. It’s a small one. But it stays open until two,” I said.

“How do you know?” he asked.

Because it’s what I think about all the time.
“I saw it when Alafair and I were waterskiing once,” I replied.

It didn’t take us long to get to the marina, but we were running out of options and time. I wished I hadn’t alienated Sheriff Elvis Bisbee. I wished I had not contended with Alafair when she said Surrette had survived the collision of the jail van and the gasoline truck. I wished I had accepted Wyatt Dixon’s belief that Surrette represented a mindless form of evil that seemed to have neither genetic nor environmental origins. I wished I were not so powerless with adversaries like the Youngers and others whose imperious vision of the earth is seldom challenged.

Did I learn anything from sorting through the history of our
relationship with Asa Surrette? No, not at all. At a certain point, I would come to a personal conclusion about who he was or who he wasn’t, but it would not be one that I would share. Why is that? Because some things are unknowable, such as the origins of evil.

In the meantime, I wanted to see Surrette and his minions body-bagged and dumped ignominiously in a potter’s field.

There were light poles on the docks at the marina, and moths swarmed around them and sometimes dropped in the water. Most of the sailboats in the slips were dark, their hulls rocking, their mooring ropes tensing against the chop. The bar had a counter with six stools, and a table where a chessboard had been set up. The bartender looked at his watch when we walked in. He was young and tan, wearing a yellow muscle shirt, probably a swimmer rather than a weight lifter. M
YSTERIOUS GALAXY BOOKSTORE, SAN DIEGO, CA
was printed on the back of his shirt. “I was going to close a little early tonight,” he said.

“Know a guy named Jack Boyd?” I said.

“He keeps a boat here?” he said.

“I doubt it.”

“I don’t think I know him. What’s the deal?”

“Any pontoon planes land around here?” Clete said.

“Some Hollywood guys flew in for the weekend. They left this morning.”

“You know about the guy who got dragged down the Eastside Highway?” Clete asked.

“Who doesn’t?”

“We’re looking for the guy who did it.”

The bartender looked past us at Gretchen and Alafair. “I don’t want to be rude, but I don’t think you guys are cops, and I don’t know why you’re asking me questions.”

I opened my shield. “My name is Dave Robicheaux. I’m a sheriff’s detective in New Iberia, Louisiana. This is Clete Purcel. He’s a private investigator there. This is my daughter, Alafair, and her friend Gretchen. We’d appreciate any information you can give us.”

There are two pieces of advice I’ve received in my life that I have
never forgotten. The first came from a line sergeant who had been at Heartbreak Ridge. My third day in Vietnam, I was ordered to go down a night trail deep inside Indian country and set up an ambush. It was a night trail that was probably salted with Chinese toe-poppers or 105 duds strung with trip wires. The sergeant read the fear and uncertainty in my face the way you read contour lines on a topography map. “Here’s the key, Loot,” he said. “You never think or talk about it before you do it, and you don’t think or talk about it after it’s over.”

The other piece of advice came from a corrupt and thoroughly worthless Teamster official in Baton Rouge, a man whose voice box had been eaten away by cigarettes and whiskey. He said, “It ain’t about money, Robicheaux. It’s about respect. That’s what every workingman and -woman on this planet wants. Anybody don’t know that should have a telephone pole kicked up his ass.”

I gazed up the slope at the orchards blowing in the wind and the two-story house constructed of yellowish-gray stone slabs and the mechanic’s shed and several concrete trailer pads that seemed to be no longer in use.

“Who lives in the stone house?” I asked.

“A lady from Malibu,” the bartender said. “Or she
did
own it. She used to come in here and stay late, know what I mean?”

“Where is she now?”

“I heard she went back to her husband or something. A lot of California people come out here but don’t stay. We call it the Banana Belt of Montana, but ten-below weather is a hard sell.”

“This isn’t ten-below weather,” Clete said.

“The lady had problems. She’d go off with guys I wouldn’t want to hang with.”

“Which guys?”

“Guys on the make, guys trolling for older women,” he said. “Anybody who’s in a bar at two
A.M.
has a problem. Know what the problem is?”

“He doesn’t have a home or family to go to,” I said.

Outside the window, I could see the moths fluttering in the electric glow of the light poles and dropping into the water, their paperlike
wings dissolving in the black shine of the waves. I could feel my energies draining, my concentration slipping.

“Can I fix you guys something?” the bartender said.

“Do you ever have any revivals or outdoor prayer meetings hereabouts?” I said.

“Funny you ask,” he said. “Some of the migrants have gatherings at that old trailer park there.”

“They’re Hispanic?” I said.

“Maybe the ones who have Saturday-night vespers are. But there’s a bluegrass bunch that really rocks. In winter, I play in a band in La Jolla. I’d like to take a couple of those guys with me.”

I waited, giving him no lead, avoiding any hint of what I wanted to hear him say. I heard Alafair and Gretchen step closer to the counter. “They’re pretty good, huh?” I said.

“When they sing ‘The Old Rugged Cross,’ it’d make an atheist weep.”

I nodded.

“You know the old union song ‘A Miner’s Life Is Like a Sailor’s’?”

“I do,” I said.

“It comes from a song titled ‘Life Is Like a Mountain Railway.’ These guys can really do it.”

“Son of a bitch,” Clete said.

“What did you say?” the bartender asked.

“Not you, buddy,” Clete said. He jabbed his finger at the air, indicating the darkened two-story house down the shore. “That’s got to be it, Streak,” he said. “We take these motherfuckers off at the neck, and we do it now. No thinking about it, no looking back. Full-throttle and fuck it, right?”

“Roger that,” I said.

“Who are you guys?” the bartender said.

“The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide,” Clete said. “You didn’t know that?”

“The
what
?” the bartender said.

“Hey, handsome?” Gretchen said.

“What?” the bartender said.

“You’re a nice guy,” she said. “You’ve done your part. We’ve got it covered. We’ll take care of the phone calls. Okay?”

“Yeah, I guess,” he said.

“I like your muscle tone. Maybe I’ll check back with you later. Keep a good thought,” she said. She winked at him.

He looked at her with his mouth open.

M
OLLY AND ALBERT
were sitting on the basement floor, their wrists tied behind them with wire twisted around a water pipe. Against the far wall, Molly could see a woman spread-eagled on a box spring, a sheet draped over her body. Behind a boiler, two girls were sitting in a wire cage. They were huddled against each other, their knees drawn up before them. Next to the cage was a ladder extending through a trapdoor in the ceiling. In another corner, she could hear Jack Boyd pouring liquid from a big white plastic jug into one of two washtubs set side by side. When he finished, he set the empty jug on the floor and took another one from a wall shelf. Boyd appeared to be holding his breath while he poured, his face pinched against the acidic stench.

Asa Surrette had come down the stairs twice to look at the woman on the box spring, placing his fingers on her throat to feel her pulse, staring into her face for a long time before returning to the first floor.

Terry came down the wood steps and watched Jack Boyd filling the second washtub. He glanced over his shoulder at Molly and Albert, then looked at Boyd. “Your man up there has a frontal lobe missing,” he said.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Boyd replied.

“He just told me what we’re doing.”

“You want to give me a hand here?”