carbonation bubbling inside the bottle in my hand.
MOLLY WAS ASLEEP when I got home, her face turned toward the wall, her hip rounded under the sheet. I lay my shirt and trousers across the back of a chair, but I didn’t get in bed. Instead, I sat on the floor, in my skivvies, inside a box of slatted moonlight, my spine against the bed frame. I sat there for a long time, but I cannot tell you exactly why. Outside, I could hear the drawbridge clanking at Burke Street and the droning of a deep-draft workboat laboring down the bayou.
“What are you doing down there?” Molly said above me.
“I didn’t want to wake you up.”
I could hear her moving herself across the mattress so she could see me better. “You’re not going crazy on me, are you?”
She meant it as a joke.
“I have memories I can’t get rid of, no matter what I do,” I replied. “It’s like trying to self-exorcise a succubus. I don’t have your degree of spiritual conviction, Molly. I remember events that happened either yesterday or years ago, and I remember the bastards who caused them, and I want to go back in time and do them great injury. That’s not honest. I want to paint the wall with them.”
She lay on her stomach, propped on her elbows, her head hanging down close to mine. “You can’t confide in me? You don’t think we’re a partnership in dealing with whatever problems come down the road? Is that where we are in our marriage?”
She tapped a finger on my neck. “I asked you a question, trooper.”
“I just put the screws to a black kid in Jeanerette. He’s a street puke and meth dealer and maybe a rapist. But you don’t rip out their spokes when their wheels are already broken.”
Her face hovered on the side of my vision. I could smell the shampoo in her hair. She put one hand on my shoulder and squeezed it. “You never deliberately hurt an innocent person in your life, Dave,” she said. “You take on other people’s suffering without their ever asking. Your greatest virtue is your greatest weakness.”
I turned my head and looked into her face. Her mouth was pink, her skin shiny in the moonlight. She’d had her hair cut short so that it was thick and even on the ends where it hung down on her cheeks. One of her nightgown straps had pulled loose and I could see the spray of freckles on her shoulder. She walked her fingers through my hair. “Will you get off the floor, please?” she said.
I lay down beside her and pulled her against me. I could feel her breath against my ear. Her hands pressed me hard in the small of my back. She hooked a thumb in the elastic of my underwear and began to work the fabric down on my hip. Then she gave it up and let me undress by myself while she pulled off her panties and nightgown. I started to get on top of her, but she pushed me back and sat on my thighs, her arms propped by my shoulders. She stared down at me in a way I didn’t understand. “I don’t know what I would do if anything happened to you, Dave. I never thought I would feel that way about a man. But I do about you,” she said.
“Molly-” I began.
“No, that’s the way it is. Anyone who tries to hurt you will have to kill me first.”
She lowered her hand and pressed me inside her. When it was over, I placed my head against the dampness of her breast and could hear her heart beating as loud and full as a drum.
THE NEXT DAY, Thursday, a homeless man was rooting in a Dumpster behind a Baton Rouge veterinary clinic, spearing cans out of it with a stick that he had mounted a nail on. All the animals had been removed from the clinic in advance of Hurricane Rita and the veterinary had not returned to reopen his business. The bar next door had opened at 7:00 a.m., but the only movement inside was the swamper airing out the building and sweeping trash through the back door into the alley. The homeless man filled his vinyl bag with cans and was tying the top when he heard a sound that did not fit into the normal routine of his morning.
He set his bag down gingerly on the asphalt and let the cans settle inside the vinyl. He listened for the sound to repeat itself but heard nothing except the wind blowing through the trees in the cemetery at the end of the block. He walked down to one end of the alley and looked both ways, then went to the other end and did the same. The swamper, a black man, paused in his work. “Something wrong?” he said.
“You ain’t heard that sound?” the homeless man asked.
“What sound?” the swamper said.
“A sound like an animal trapped in the wall or something.”
“There ain’t no animals in that building. Owners came and got ’ em all. Lightning burned out the air- conditioning. Ain’t no animal in the wall, either.”
The swamper went back in the bar, but the homeless man continued to stand in the middle of the alley, turning his head one way, then another, as the wind gusted and died. He picked up his bag of cans and flung it over his shoulder, the heavy load of it hitting him solidly in the back. Then he heard the sound again. This time there was no doubt where it came from. The homeless man set down his bag and pulled open a heavy metal door that gave onto a foyer and the delivery entrance to the clinic.
Deep inside the gloom, he could make out a gurney that had been left by the clinic door. On top of it was an oblong shape someone had wrapped with a sheet and strapped down against a rubber pad that smelled of urine. The homeless man lifted up the sheet, revealing the crown of a black man’s head. He peeled back the sheet farther and saw the black man’s eyes and unshaved jaws and a bandaged wound in his throat. But it was the eyes and the expression in the black man’s face that caused the homeless man’s hands to shake.
“I’ll get help. I’m coming back. I promise,” he said.
He tripped over his bag of cans as he ran for the back door of the bar, waving his arms.
THAT SAME AFTERNOON I received a call from Special Agent Betsy Mossbacher in Baton Rouge. She had grown up in Chugwater, Wyoming, and wore jeans and boots and on one occasion tracked horse-shit into Helen Soileau’s office and to Helen’s face referred to her as a member of “the tongue-and-groove club.” oddly, they became the best of friends.
“How’s it going, Dave? I’m taking over the shooting of Eddy Melancon and Kevin Rochon. I thought I should update you.”
Betsy Mossbacher was an in-your-face cowgirl, probably the most socially inept federal law officer at the Bureau, and the worst nondrunk automobile driver I ever worked with. But her level of integrity and courage was unquestionable. I had previously thought that the investigation into the shooting of Melancon and Rochon would either die as a result of investigative dead ends or simple bureaucratic inertia. Betsy’s assignment as the new case officer was not good news for whoever had pulled the trigger.
“I’m only involved in the Melancon-Rochon investigation in a tangential way,” I said.
“I love your vocabulary. But cut the crap. A homeless guy found Eddy Melancon behind an animal hospital early this morning.”
“Melancon is dead?”
“That would be one way of describing him. He has sensation from the neck up, but there’s no way to know about his brain. There were adhesive traces over his mouth and nose. I suspect he was tortured in some fashion involving air deprivation. My guess is he didn’t have anything to give up and it took a long time for his abductors to accept that.”
She paused to let the implications sink in. “What have you got on your end?”
“Not much. It started as a lend-lease investigation following Katrina,” I said. “I talked with Bertrand Melancon in a bar in Jeanerette last night. I think he’s holding goods he stole from Sidney Kovick’s house and is afraid to keep them and even more afraid to give them back.”
“You were with Bertrand Melancon and didn’t bust him?”
“Our Ritz-carlton is full-up. How about yours?”
I could hear her frustration building. “Listen, Dave, this case would go away except for the fact somebody put a bullet through the brain of a seventeen-year-old black kid with no record. Too many white swinging dicks were having a fine time shooting black ass in uptown New Orleans. Or at least that’s what my boss thinks. Secondly, Sidney Kovick is a person of ongoing great interest to the Bureau. When you interview perps who are in my caseload, I want to know about it.”
“Bertrand told me he’s holding stones of some kind from Kovick’s house. He was talking about stones that have
