The Glass Rainbow: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (58 page)

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Weingart said.

Kermit pulled aside a curtain and looked out front. “By the way, Mr. Robicheaux, one of our team just hooked a wrecker to the cruiser and is hauling it and the driver away. Don’t expect the cavalry anytime soon.”

I was on my face, my heart beating against the floor, the soiled odor of the carpet climbing into my nostrils. Down the bayou, I thought I heard the drawbridge clank open and rise into the air and the engines of a large vessel laboring upstream against the current.

Kermit squatted so he could look directly into my face. “I didn’t want any of this to happen. You forced the situation, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said. “You hate people of my background. You’ve spent a lifetime resenting others for the fact that you were born poor. Admit it.”

“You’re wrong about that, Kermit. The Abelards were a great source of humor for everybody around here. Everyone was laughing at you behind your back, you most of all. You didn’t get screwed at birth, Kermit. Your mother did when her diaphragm slipped.”

Kermit stood erect. “Get it done,” he said to the man who liked to call people “sir.”

C
LETE
P
URCEL
C
HARGED
along the side of the house behind a row of camellia bushes and clumps of bamboo and untrimmed banana plants. But he didn’t stop when he reached the backyard. Instead, he kept running down the slope, deeper into the trees and darkness, until he had a view of both the bayou and the entirety of the house. He could see the back porch and the kitchen and Alafair’s bedroom; he could see Tripod’s chain extending from the hutch up into the tree where Tripod was hiding; he could see the shapes of three men wearing rain hoods of the kind the men at the shoot-out on the river had worn.

Their backs were turned to Clete. They were looking down the driveway and down the walk space between the camellias on the far side of the house. Then one of them began to wander down toward the bayou, pointing the beam of a penlight ahead of him. Clete drew himself against a live oak, one shoulder pressed tightly against the bark, and waited. The hooded man walked within two feet of him, his small hooked nose in profile against the green and red lights on the drawbridge. Clete put away his .38 and stepped quickly from behind the oak tree, wrapping his arms under the hooded man’s chin, snapping upward, all in one motion. For a second, he thought he heard a cracking sound, like someone easing his foot down on a dry stick. He pulled the hooded man deeper into the trees and dropped him in the leaves, then retrieved the penlight and the silenced semiautomatic the man had been carrying.

Clete moved quickly up the slope, threading his way between the trunks of the trees, his feet sinking into the soft pad of pine needles and decayed pecan husks and the leaves from the water oaks that were yellow and black and still lay in sheaves on the ground from the previous winter. The two men who had been looking down the driveway and the walk space on the far side of the house had returned to the center of the backyard and were now gazing down the slope. “You out there, Lou?” one of them said.

Clete stepped behind a big camellia bush strung with Spanish moss. He pointed the penlight toward the neighbor’s house and clicked it on and off three times. Then he stuck the pen between his teeth and said, “Got him.”

“You got him?”

“Yeah,” Clete said, the pen still between his teeth.

“Why didn’t you say something?” the other man said. “This whole gig sucks. These people are out of
Gone With the Wind
.”

“No, you got it wrong,” the other man said. “They’re out of
Suddenly
,
Last Summer
. It’s by Tennessee Williams. It’s about this New Orleans faggot that gets cannibalized on a beach by a bunch of peasants. Lou, quit playing with yourself and get up here.”

The bridge at Burke Street was opening, the surface of the bayou shuddering with the vibration of the machinery. The bow of a large vessel slid between the pilings, the lighted pilothouse shining in the rain. “What the hell is that?” one of the men said.

“I told you, it’s
Gone With the Wind
. This place is a fresh-air nuthouse.”

The two men had started walking down the slope almost like tourists, confident in their roles, confident in the night that lay ahead of them, unperturbed by considerations of mortality or the suffering of the people inside the house they had invaded.

Clete Purcel moved out of the trees with remarkable agility for a man his size. He lifted the semiautomatic and its suppressor with both hands, aiming with his arms fully extended. The hooded men did not seem to realize how quickly their situation had reversed. Clete shot the first man through the eye and the second one in the throat. They both fell straight to the ground and made no sound that he could hear inside the rain.

W
HILE
K
ERMIT
H
ELD
a pistol on me, the man who had duct-taped my wrists went into the kitchen. I heard the dry sound of a metal cap being unscrewed from a metal container, then a sloshing sound, and a moment later I smelled the bright stench of gasoline. Robert Weingart pushed Alafair on the floor next to me, then bound her wrists and ankles. He removed his belt and looped it around her throat but did not tighten it. He checked to see if I was watching him work.

“You guys can’t be this stupid,” I said. “You think anybody is going to buy it as anything except arson?”

“You’re going to die from a gas explosion, Mr. Robicheaux,” Weingart said. “A big yellow fireball that will go poof up through the treetops. When it’s done, you’ll all be nothing but ashes.”

“Listen to me, Kermit,” I said. “You can get out of this. You have money and power on your side. You can claim diminished capacity. There are always alternatives. What do you think Weingart is going to do when this is over? He’ll bleed you the rest of your life.”

Weingart raised his shoe just slightly, then pressed the tip into my ear, twisting the sole back and forth, gradually coming down harder and harder, crushing my face flat into the carpet.

“That’s enough, Robert,” Kermit said.

“Signing off now, Mr. Robicheaux,” Weingart said. He raised his foot and drove it into my forehead just above the eyebrow, bringing the heel into the bone.

“Don’t say any more to them, Dave,” Alafair said. “They’re not worth it. They’re both cowards. Kermit told me when he was little and did something bad, his mother would make him put on a dress and sit all day in the front yard. That’s why he’s so cruel. He’s been a frightened, shame-faced little boy all his life.”

“You’d better keep your mouth shut, Alafair,” Kermit said.

“You’re pathetic. That won’t change. We’ll be dead, and you’ll be alive and pathetic and an object of ridicule the rest of your life. Your lover is known in publishing as a piece of shit. That’s what you sleep with every night—a piece of shit. I suspect eventually he’ll dose you with clap or AIDS, if he hasn’t already.”

“Are you going to put a stop to this, or do you want me to?” Weingart said to Kermit.

“Let them talk. Maybe you’ll be able to pick up some good dialogue,” Kermit said.

“I thought that’s what you were working on underground, there by the river,” Weingart said. “What did you call it? The flowers of evil having their final say. Remember what you said? They always beg.”

The front door opened and Carolyn Blanchet came inside, wiping the rain off her head. “I thought you were going to take them somewhere,” she said.

C
LETE
P
URCEL
GRABBED
one of the hooded dead men by the wrists and pulled him away from the house and dropped him behind the toolshed. Then he went back and got the second man and did the same. He went through their pockets, looking for a cell phone. But neither man carried one. Nor did either man carry a wallet or wear jewelry other than a wristwatch. Apart from coins that might have been used for parking meters, the dead men’s pockets contained only keys, each of a kind that might have fit the ignition of a car or SUV or boat. Their wristwatches were identical, the bands made of black leather, the titanium cases and faces black also, the numerals fluorescent. One man wore a tattoo of Bugs Bunny eating a carrot; the other man had one of the Tasmanian Devil. The figures were overly round, the coloration bright and festive, the singularity of the cartoon on an otherwise bare piece of skin like a cynical theft from one’s childhood.

The neighbor’s house was dark, and there was no sound of traffic on the street. The rain was pattering on the tree limbs above Clete’s head, the fog spreading thicker on the ground, rising like smoke around the bodies of the men he had killed. Out on the bayou, he thought he heard the sound of a large boat straining upstream, the draft too deep for the channel, the keel scouring huge clouds of mud from the bottom. But when he looked over his shoulder, he could see nothing in the fog except the lights across the water in City Park.

Clete stripped the raincoat off the body of one of the dead men and put it on. It smelled of wet leaves and humus and tobacco and wood smoke, like the smell of a man who had been sitting in a winter deer camp. Clete removed his .38 from his holster and looked down at the face of the man he had killed. The man’s eyes were blue and seemed to have no pupils. His mouth was parted slightly, as though he had been interrupted in midspeech. “Hang tight,” Clete said. “I’m about to send you some company.”

“
SEE WHAT’S KEEPING
those guys out there,” Kermit said.

The man who had been sloshing gasoline through the kitchen and back bedroom set down the can in the hallway. “They’re probably bringing up the boat,” he said.

“‘Probably’ isn’t a good word in a situation like this,” Kermit said.

The man who had knocked me down and taped my wrists walked to the glass in the back door and rubbed it with his forearm. A cartoon of Goofy was tattooed just above the inside of his wrist. He wore a black T-shirt and bleached chinos and half-topped boots. He was one of those men who seemed ageless, wrapped too tight for his own skin, the modulation in his voice disconnected from the visceral energy in his eyes. He had pushed my .45 down into the back of his belt. He was having trouble seeing into the backyard, and he rubbed the glass again. “I think that’s Lou,” he said.

“Think?” Kermit said. He went into the kitchen. Weingart walked into the hallway also, unable to contain his curiosity or perhaps his fear, glancing back at us briefly.

Alafair’s face was inches from mine. “Molly’s got the scissors,” she whispered.

Through the bedroom doorway, I could see Molly’s eyes bulging and the indentation of her lips behind the tape stretched across her mouth. Her upper arms were ridging with tubes of muscle as she tried to work the pair of scissors from the sewing box between the strands of tape wrapped around her wrists. Then I saw her blink unexpectedly, saw her shoulders expand slightly as she severed the tape.

Carolyn Blanchet walked past me and Alafair into the kitchen. “I’m going now,” she said to the others.

“No, you’re not,” Kermit said.

“I did what you asked, and I’m no longer connected with anything that happens here. So I’ll say ta-ta now, with just one request: Kermit, please don’t call me for a very long time.”

“Do you believe this crap?” Weingart said.

I could see the man in the black T-shirt looking out a window, kneading the back of his neck.

“You’re not leaving,” Kermit said.

“That’s what you think, love,” Carolyn replied.

“I wouldn’t provoke Kermit,” Weingart said. “He has a penchant for certain kinds of female situations I don’t think you want to enter into.”

“Mr. Abelard, I think we need to concentrate on priorities,” the man in the black T-shirt said.

“What’s the problem?” Kermit asked.

“My friends and I didn’t sign on for a catfight, sir.”

“Really? Then why don’t you take care of your bloody job and mind your own fucking business?” Kermit said.

The man in the black T-shirt seemed to process Kermit’s remark, his shoulders slightly rounded, his chest flat as a prizefighter’s, his face uplifted, his incisors exposed with his grin. “I’ll be outside taking care of my fucking business, sir,” he said. “I think this will be our last assignment, though. The boys and I have been a unit a long time, Senegal to South Africa, Uzbekistan to the Argentine. I can’t say this one has been a pleasure.”

The man opened the door and walked out on the porch and shoved open the screen, sending it back on its spring. It swung shut behind him with a loud slap. “Is that you, Lou?” he said into the darkness.

C
LETE
MOVED QUICKLY
, closing the space between himself and the man in the black T-shirt, the silenced .40-caliber semiauto extended in front of him. “Walk toward me, hands out by your sides. Do it now,” he said. “No, no, don’t put your hands on your head. It’s not a time to be clever.”

Clete began to back up. The man in the black T-shirt wore no hat, and the rain glistened on his face and hair. His gaze swept across the yard. “Where’s everyone?” he said.

“Guess. Walk to me, bub. Play it right and you can have another season to run.”

“I’ve heard about you.”

“Good. Now do what you’re told.”

“You were in El Sal. So was I. Except I wasn’t fighting for the Communists.”

“I was killing Communists before your mother defecated you into the world, asshole. Now move it.”

“You know the expression: A guy just has to try.”

Clete raised his left hand, patting at the air, his body hunched forward like that of a man frightened for his own life rather than someone else’s. “Don’t do it, pal. Think of all the beer you didn’t drink, the steaks you didn’t eat, the broads you didn’t call up. What you’re thinking now is the ultimate impure thought. Look at me. No, no, don’t do that. Look at me. Put your hand back in front of— Oh shit.”

The man in the black T-shirt had his hand on the grips of the .45 stuck down in the back of his belt. He was grinning, his arm twisted behind him, his body contorted when Clete pulled the trigger. He made a whooshing sound, like a man who had stepped on a sharp rock. Then he sat down heavily in the mud, one hand pressed against the wound in his stomach, his head lowered as he stared at the blood on his palm, his hair separating on his scalp in the rain.