“You fixing to call somebody about a job?” his girlfriend said.
“There ain’t no jobs, girl,” he replied.
“I thought that’s why the man give you the phone. He was gonna give you a job. That’s what you tole me last night.”
Actually, Andre couldn’t remember what he had said the previous night. He’d drunk some wine and smoked a lot of weed, and at some point in the middle of a conversation a switch had clicked off in his head, then had clicked back on about nine this morning. “You ever dime a sister?” he asked.
“I ain’t never dimed nobody, Andre. I don’t like it when you talk like a criminal, either.”
The diapered infant who slept on his stomach in the bassinet on the far side of the tiny bathroom began to make gurgling sounds. This was bad timing for Andre, who wanted his girlfriend back in the sack, not changing diapers and feeding a baby.
“Give him a bottle. That’ll keep him quiet for a while,” he said. “Here, I’ll do it. Come on, lie down and get a li’l more sleep.”
“Cain’t you never think of anybody but yourself?” she said.
He stared reflectively into space, his fingers glazing the tautness of his stomach muscles. Andre’s new girlfriend was getting to be a drag. “Think I’ll go outside and make a phone call, check out a couple of sit’ations. Get some coffee started, will you, baby? maybe some eggs and li’l toast, too,” he said.
The man who answered Andre’s call told him to walk down to the highway and wait for an automobile to pick him up. One hour later, Andre Rochon was swallowed up by a black SUV with charcoal-tinted windows and deep leather seats and a destination finder that would take him to a place and an experience he never could have imagined.
His newly acquired friends did not waste time. They taped him to a chair that was bolted to the floor, gave him ten seconds to answer their first question, then drove their fists directly into his face. The blows seemed delivered with more force and energy than he thought human beings were capable of and were like red fire inside his head. In minutes, his mouth and eyes were filled with blood, the expanse of sawgrass and lagoons and saltwater channels outside the window part of a dreamscape that had nothing to do with Andre Rochon or the person who had been Andre Rochon only that morning.
Somehow he had thought betrayal of his friend would be all that was required of him. How could he know where the stones were? Bertrand had ripped him off as well as Sidney Kovick. He was a victim, just as these guys were. No, he didn’t know where Bertrand was, but he could find out. They were all working together, right?
When he passed out, they poured a bucket of water over his head. Then they wrapped his face in a towel, stretched his head back, and poured water in his nose and mouth.
After dark, he heard them drive away on the shale road atop the levee. When they returned, they smelled of hamburger and onions and coffee. Then they did things to him they had not done before. When he wept, they went outside and talked among themselves. Their voices were devoid of emotion, like football coaches discussing a game plan. Finally one of them said, “It can’t hurt. We put too much time into this guy just to throw him away.”
What did they mean? He had already told them everything he knew about Bertrand and the shooting and the looting at Kovick’s house. He had even told them he was a rapist and a meth dealer and a strong-arm robber, that he had too much on his own sheet to ever turn his abductors in. Maybe they were going to keep him around, use him in some way, give him a job as an inside man. Yeah, that was it. Just stay cool, he told himself. They’d send him after Bertrand, find the motherfucker who’d started all this, fix his black ass for bringing all this grief down on everybody.
They allowed him to use the privy in back, then taped him to the chair again. One of them tied the wet towel around his eyes. “Take it easy, kid,” he said. “We’ll be done pretty soon.”
Done with what?
Through the screen windows he could hear the wind in the sawgrass and fish flopping in the lagoons and the drone of a workboat out on the bay. Then car doors slammed and he heard the muffled voice of a woman as she was dragged into the room and thrown into a chair.
“Lady, we got no beef with you,” one of the men said. “But you found some money that wasn’t yours and didn’t return it. So we want to know what else you found. Don’t lie. That’s the worst thing you can do, worse than anything you’ve ever done. You hearing me on this, Ms. Degravelle? Just nod your head. Okay, we got that out of the way.
“You see this black kid here? By his own admission, he’s a rapist and a seller of narcotics to his own people. But worse than that, he lied to us after he promised to tell us the truth. So he’s got to pay the price. If he don’t, he’s making liars out of us, too. What’s about to happen isn’t cruel, it’s not undeserved. It’s just part of the deal. Don’t look away, Ms. Degravelle. You keep your eyes on him.”
There was a pause and a silence of no more than three seconds, but those three seconds were the longest in Andre Rochon’s life.
The pistol shots were loud and sharp inside the room, like shots fired from a.22 revolver. Andre took one round in the neck and two in the head, both of them as hot as wasp strings.
Later that night, his body roped to another person’s and a chain of cinder blocks, he awoke to starlight just as someone rolled him over a gunwale into water that smelled of diesel fuel and fish spawn. When he rose from the darkness of the water and walked up the slope of the sandbar, dragging the cinder blocks and the body of the woman with him, he remembered a priest chopping a hole in a church roof and he wondered why he would recall such a bizarre image at this particular moment in his life.
FRIDAY AFTERNOON betsy Mossbacher finished her account about Andre Rochon in my office. “He lived about six hours,” she said. “The woman was dead when she went into the water. She still had the plastic bag over her head. Our pathologist says she died of a coronary probably brought on by near suffocation.”
“Clete knows all this?”
“Yes. But he dummied up on us. How close were he and the woman?”
“They were seeing each other.”
“Too bad. Ronald Bledsoe is using Purcel as his alibi. That must be hard to take. Can you explain to me how Purcel can insert himself into every problem in this area?”
“Lay off him, Betsy.”
“That woman went through hell before she died. Save your brother-in-arms stuff for somebody else,” she replied.
I could hear the traffic out on the street. Betsy formed a pocket of air in one jaw, then got up from her chair and walked to the window. She was wearing jeans, a cotton shirt, cowboy boots, and a wide belt. One of the qualities I admired most in Betsy was the fact her eyes were always clear and she focused them on yours when she spoke. She turned around and looked at me. “Interpol thinks Sidney Kovick may have taken both the blood stones and the counterfeit currency off some al Qaeda operatives in South America. The fact is we’re not that interested in the blood stones. But we are interested in how Sidney Kovick got inside al Qaeda.”
“What does Sidney say?”
“Nothing. I tried to appeal to his patriotism. You knew he was in the 173rd Airborne Brigade?”
“John Ehrlichman was a recipient of the Distinguished Flying cross. Who cares?”
“You haven’t talked to Purcel?”
“No.”
“He was handling it okay.”
“You don’t know Clete. He doesn’t handle anything okay.”
“Regardless, he needs to stay out of this investigation. Your friend has a serious problem about minding his own business.”
“His neighbor is Ronald Bledsoe. His girlfriend was tortured to death. His City drowned while the most powerful politicians in the country sat on their asses. If these things aren’t his business, what is?”
On her way out of the office, she trailed a finger across the back of my neck. “People use me for a dartboard only once, Dave.”
THAT EVENING I went to Clete’s cottage at the motor court, but he was not there and he didn’t return my calls
