slide, and brought up the barrel into Ronald Bledsoe’s face. His eyes were filled with disbelief. But his bigger problem was the fact he was twisted in the seat, his own brother fighting with him over a raincoat, his shoulder jammed against the seat so he couldn’t get off a shot at Alafair. The next second was probably the longest in Ronald Bledsoe’s life.
“Suck on this, you freak,” Alafair said.
She pulled the trigger four times. The first round went into his mouth and punched through his cheek. The second embedded in his forearm when he lifted it in front of him, the third clipped off the end of a finger, and the fourth shattered his chin, slinging blood and saliva across the seat and the back window.
Molly’s ears were deaf in the blowback of the Ruger. In the rearview mirror she saw Bledsoe staring back at her, his ruined mouth twisted like soft rubber, his concave face like a cartoon that was incapable of understanding the damage it had just incurred.
Molly’s car struck the curb and came to a stop, cars swerving around her in the mist, their horns blowing. Alafair jumped from the car and pulled Bledsoe out the back door onto the concrete. She reached down and picked up his gun from the floor and threw it into the shrubbery on the edge of the cemetery. Tom Claggart sat frozen in the seat, his raincoat and shirt whipsawed with blood.
Bledsoe stared up at her from the gutter, waiting, his eyes genuinely puzzled, as a child might look up from its crib at the looming presence of its mother. Alafair extended the Ruger with both hands, aiming it into the center of his forehead.
“Alafair-” Molly said, almost in a whisper.
Alafair’s knuckles whitened on the Ruger’s grips.
“Hey, kiddo,” Molly said.
“What?” Alafair said angrily.
“We never give them power.”
“He’ll be back.”
“I doubt it. But if he does, we still don’t give them power.”
Alafair widened her eyes, releasing her breath, and stepped backward, clicking on the Ruger’s safety with her thumb. She swallowed and looked at Molly, her eyes filming.
By the time Clete and I arrived at the scene, Alafair and Molly were sitting in the back of a cruiser, talking to a detective in the front seat. Tom Claggart was in handcuffs behind the wire-mesh grille of a second cruiser, and two paramedics were loading Ronald Bledsoe into an Acadiana ambulance.
Alafair got out of the cruiser when she saw me walking toward her from the truck. The detective had given her a roll of paper towels and she was scrubbing her hair with them, lifting her chin, flipping a strand out of her eyes. She looked absolutely beautiful, like a young girl emerging from a sun shower. “What’s the haps, Streak?” she said.
“No haps, Alf,” I said.
“Don’t call me that stupid name,” she said.
Molly leaned forward in the backseat of the cruiser, beaming. She gave me the thumbs-up sign with both hands. “What kept you?” she said.
Epilogue
I HAVE LONG SUBSCRIBED to the belief that the dead lay strong claim on the quick, that indeed their spirits wander and manifest themselves in the middle of our waking day and whisper to us when we least expect it. Many years ago, during a very bad time in my life, my murdered wife would talk to me out of the rain. Members of my platoon who I knew were KIA would call me up long-distance during an electric storm. Inside the static, I could hear their voices-cacophonous, sometimes frightened and nonsensical, sometimes breaking apart, like a walkie- talkie transmission when the sender is too far away.
A psychotherapist told me I was experiencing a psychotic episode. I didn’t argue with him.
But if these experiences have ever happened to you, I’m sure you have come to the same conclusion about them as I. You know what you heard and you know what you saw, and you no more doubt the validity of your experience than you doubt the existence of the sunrise. A great change has occurred in you, and the change lies in the fact you no longer have to convince others about your vision of the world, not of this one or the next.
New Orleans was a song that went under the waves. Sometimes in my dreams I see a city beneath the sea. In it, green-painted iron streetcars made in the year 1910 still lumber down the neutral ground through the Garden District, past block upon block of Victorian and antebellum homes, past the windmill palms and the gigantic live oaks, past guesthouses and the outdoor cafes and art deco restaurants whose scrolled purple and pink and green neon burn in the mist like smoke from marker grenades.
Every hotel on Canal still features an orchestra on the roof, where people dance under the stars and convince one another that the mildness of the season is eternal and was created especially for them. In the distance, Lake Pontchartrain is wine-dark, flanged with palm trees, and pelicans skim above the chop, the rides at the waterside amusement park glowing whitely against the sky. Irving Fazola is playing at the Famous Door and Pete Fountain at his own joint off Bourbon. Jackson Square is a medieval plaza where jugglers, mimes, string bands, and unicyclists with umbrellas strapped on top of their heads perform in front of St. Louis Cathedral. No one is concerned with clocks. The city is as sybaritic as it is religious. Even death becomes an excuse for celebration.
Perhaps the city has found its permanence inside its own demise, like Atlantis, trapped forever under the waves, the sun never harsh, filtered through the green tint of the ocean so that neither rust nor moth nor decay ever touches its face.
That’s the dream that I have. But the reality is otherwise. Category 5 hurricanes don’t take prisoners and the sow that eats its farrow doesn’t surrender self-interest in the cause of mercy.
New Orleans was systematically destroyed and that destruction began in the early 1980s with the deliberate reduction by half of federal funding to the City and the simultaneous introduction of crack cocaine into the welfare projects. The failure to repair the levees before Katrina and the abandonment of tens of thousands of people to their fate in the aftermath have causes that I’ll let others sort out. But in my view the irrevocable fact remains that we saw an American City turned into Baghdad on the southern rim of the United States. If we have a precedent in our history for what happened in New Orleans, it’s lost on me.
Ronald Bledsoe was sentenced to twenty years in Angola Prison for the abduction of my wife and daughter. I believe he and Bobby Mack Rydel and probably others murdered Andre Rochon and Courtney Degravelle and Sidney Kovick’s hirelings, but Bledsoe gave nobody up.
I do not believe Bledsoe qualifies as a “solid” or “stand-up” con. Ronald Bledsoe belongs to that group who take their secrets to the grave. They never reveal the nature of their compulsion, their motivations, or the methods they use. Paradoxically, psychiatrists and prison administrators and journalists eventually create a composite explanation for sociopathic behavior that gives them a human personality and works in their interests. My own belief is that people like Bledsoe pose theological questions to us that psychologists cannot answer.
My only fear is that one day Ronald Bledsoe will be released from prison. If that happens, I’ll be waiting for him. I would like to say the last statement brings me consolation. But it doesn’t. Sometimes I have a disturbing dream about Bledsoe and I wake before dawn and go out into the yard and drink coffee at our redwood table until the darkness leaves the sky. Then the day takes on its ordinary shape and I go about doing all the ordinary things that ordinary people do.
Tom Claggart, Bledsoe’s half brother, tried to implicate everyone he could, except himself. If he is to be believed, he unknowingly became involved with a diamond-smuggling operation in Buenos Aires, one fronted by Mideastern operatives, and raised capital through Sidney Kovick and Bo Diddley Wiggins. Sidney got hit with a bolt of patriOtism and took the diamonds off a Mideastern courier, along with his dope and a pistol and thousands of dollars in counterfeit money. Sidney ’s patriotic fervor did not include turning the diamonds or the queer bills over to the Treasury Department, Homeland Security, or U.S. Customs.
The upshot?
Guess.
