Voodoo River

power and slipped inside the building. LeRoy and Rene and the guy from the Cadillac hurried in after it. Pike and I skirted the edge of the lighted area until we could see through the truck door. I had thought that we'd see people loading bales of marijuana onto the barge or maybe forklifting huge bricks of cocaine off the barge, but we didn't. Inside, maybe three dozen people were climbing off the towboat and into the trucks. Many of them looked scruffy, but not all. Many of them were well dressed, but not all. Most of them were Hispanic, but two were black, three were white, and maybe half a dozen were Asian. All of them looked tired and ill and frightened, and all of them were carrying suitcases and duffel bags and things of a personal nature. Pike said, 'Sonofabitch. It's people.'

When the trucks were full, the guys in the parkas pulled down canvas flaps to hide their cargo, climbed back into the cabs, pulled out of the building, and drove away into the rain. When the trucks were gone, a couple of hard-looking guys came up out of the barge dragging a skinny old man and carrying something that looked like a rag doll. The old man was crying and pulling at the hard guys, but they didn't pay a lot of attention to him. The old guy went over to the guy from the Eldorado with a lot of hand-waving, and then fell to the ground, pulling at the Eldorado's legs. The guy from the Eldorado kicked at the old man, then pulled out a small revolver, put it to the old man's head, and we heard a single, small pop.

My breath caught and I felt Pike tense.

The guy from the Eldo kicked the old man's body away, then said something to LeRoy Bennett, and Bennett nodded. The guys from the towboat climbed back aboard, and LeRoy and the guy with the gun walked out to the Eldo. The shooter opened the Eldo's trunk, took out a small handbag, and gave it to LeRoy. LeRoy brought it to his Polara. The towboat's engines revved, it backed from the shed, spun slowly into the canal, then eased back the way it had come, still without lights, the low gurgle of its engines fading into the mist. The shooter got into his Eldo and followed after the trucks. Now there were only four of us.

Pike said, 'Too late for the old man. What do you want to do?'

'Let's see what happens.'

LeRoy took a shovel from the Polara, then he and Rene dragged the old man and the rag doll along a little trail into the weeds. Pike and I crept after them, moving closer. Rene dug a small depression in the wet earth, dumped in the bodies, covered them, then went back to their car. LeRoy turned off the generator, and the swamp was suddenly dark. He and Rene got into their car, and then they, too, were gone.

I said, 'Okay.'

Pike and I moved to the shallow grave and pushed the mud away with our hands and found the old man and a little girl. The girl was maybe five. She was small and thin, and perhaps she might have been ill, but maybe not. Her face was dark with the rich earth, but as the rain kissed her skin the dirt washed away. I stroked her hair and felt my breath slow and the muscles along my neck and back and across my ribs tighten. She might have been the old man's granddaughter, but maybe not. Maybe she was alone, and he had befriended her. Maybe he just cared, and in the caring expressed his outrage at her death, and for his outrage he'd been killed. We went through his pockets hoping for some sort of identification, but there was none. There was only a small photograph, bent and water-stained, of the man and a group of people who may have been his family. The man was smiling. I put the photograph in my pocket. I said, 'Let's get them out of here.'

Pike touched my arm. 'We can't, Elvis.'

I looked at him.

'If we move them, Rossier will know. We have to wait. We have to know more before we help them.'

I breathed deep in the wet air, and then I nodded. I didn't like it, but there you are.

We sat in the rain with the old man and the little girl, and after a while we left.

CHAPTER 27

W e returned to the motel at a little before two the next morning, driving slowly along roads that were glassy with rain, through a town so still that it seemed as lifeless and empty as the bodies we'd left in the mud and the sawgrass. We were all that moved in Ville Platte, Joe and I, neither of us speaking, lit only by flashing yellow signal lights that whispered caution.

We showered and changed, Joe going first, and when we were done and the lights were out, I said, 'Joe?'

I heard him move on the floor, but it took him several seconds to answer. 'Yes.'

'Oh, Jesus, Joe.'

Pike might have slept, but I did not. I was in the dry room, yet not. I was with the old man and the girl, yet not. I crouched in the sawgrass beside them, the night air dank and muggy, the rain running out of my hair and down my back, the great fat drops falling on the faces below me, washing circles of perfect clarity on the muddy skin, but a clarity that did not maintain and soon faded, obscured by more drops, as if every new truth clouded an old.

The rain stopped falling a few minutes after four, and at 7:05 we called Lucy at her home and told her what we had seen. She said, 'Do you think these people were illegal aliens?'

'We counted thirty-five people climbing onto the trucks, but there could've been more. A few Asians, a few whites and blacks, but the majority were Hispanics.' I told her about the old man and the girl.

Lucy said, 'Oh, my God.'

'We left them in place. Rossier wasn't at the scene, and I'm not certain we can tie this to him. We'd get Bennett and LaBorde for sure, but maybe not Rossier.'

She said, 'Did you get the Cadillac's license number?'

I gave it to her.

Lucy said, 'Stay where you are. I'll call you as soon as I have something.'

'Thanks, Luce.'

She said, 'I miss you, Studly.'

'I miss you, too, Luce.'

One hour and thirteen minutes later Lucy called back. 'The Eldorado is registered to someone named Donaldo Prima from New Orleans. He's thirty-four years old, originally from Nicaragua, with three felony convictions, two for dealing stolen goods and one fire-arms violation. There's nothing in his record to link him to illegal immigration, but the feds are out of the loop on most of this stuff. I've got a friend here in Baton Rouge you can talk to. She works for an alternative weekly called the Bayou State Sentinel, and she's done some pretty good work covering the immigration scene. She might be willing to help.'

'Might.'

'You'll see.' Lucy gave me directions, hung up, then Pike and I drove to Baton Rouge.

The Sentinel had their offices in a little clapboard house on a street just off the LSU campus that was mostly rental houses for students and people who enjoyed the student lifestyle. Some of the houses had been converted to businesses, but the businesses were all places like used-CD stores and grunge shops and a place that sold joss sticks and papier mache alligators. Alternative. A couple of mountain bikes and a Triumph motorcycle were chained to a bikestand in front of a house with a little sign that said BAYOU STATE SENTINEL – THE LAST BASTION OF TRUTH IN AMERICA. I guess being a bastion of truth didn't prevent people from stealing your bicycles.

Pike and I parked at a meter, and Pike said, 'I'll wait in the car.' Pike's not big on alternative.

I went up a little cement walk and in through the front door to what had probably been the living room when people were living here instead of working here. Now, five desks were wedged into the place, along with a coffee machine and a water cooler and a lot of posters of Kurt Cobain and Hillary Clinton and framed Sentinel covers. The covers had headlines like LIFE SUX and FIVE REASONS TO KILL YOURSELF NOW. Alternative. A couple of African-American women in their late twenties were working at Macintosh computers farther back in the room, one of them on the phone as she typed, and an athletic white guy with short red hair was at a desk just inside the door. A parrot sat on a perch in the waiting area, copies of the New York Times and the New Orleans Times-Picayune spread on the floor beneath it. The parrot flapped its wings when it saw me, then lifted its tail feathers and squirted a