they always do before they cock their wings and plunge down into a wave. However, they seemed to lose interest. Suddenly, a school of baitfish were skittering across a swell, as though someone were flinging handfuls of silvery dimes on the water.
The hammerhead burst to the surface, the line tangled in its gills, streaming blood, its side striped with lesions cut by the steel leader. Its back had been tanned by the sun, giving it the coloration of a sand shark. Its belly was as white as a toadstool that had never seen sunlight. Its eyes, set on the sides of its anvil-like head, gleamed disjointedly, similar to those inside a cubist painting. From nose to tail, it was at least eleven feet long.
All of this was on the sportsman’s cameraphone, along with images of the sportsman and another mate gaffing the shark in the gills and in its mouth and clubbing it with a mallet and finally dragging it high enough on the gunwale to hit it in the head with a hatchet. The sportsman rolled the hammerhead on its back and inserted a knife in its anus and split its belly open. The contents that spilled out on the deck were not what he was expecting to find.
A hammerhead has a small mouth for a shark of its size and takes a while to consume its prey. Evidently, this one had managed to eat and swallow everything it had been provided. The dismemberment of the prey looked like it had been done with a saw. The details are not pleasant to narrate. Only two details of the shark’s engorgement were of significance, at least from a forensic or evidentiary point of view. Glimmering among the spill on the deck were a Caucasian hand and part of a forearm. On the hand was a ring. Later, the coroner in Lafourche Parish removed the ring and found the name of Chad Patin engraved inside it. The other forensic detail of importance was the discovery of two. 223 rounds in the back muscles of the victim.
Chad Patin had tried to kill me with a shotgun blast fired from the freezer truck. But as I looked at the images on Helen’s computer screen, I could feel no enmity toward him. When he called me in the middle of the night from Des Allemands, begging for help, I discounted much of what he said, particularly his rant about a cabal of some kind that controlled events in the lives of those at the bottom of the food chain. Also, his mention of a mysterious figure called Angel or Angelle and his description of someone dying inside the iron maiden seemed the stuff of drug- induced psychosis. But I had been selective in listening to Chad Patin. He’d said he transported narcotics and prostitutes from Mexico into the United States. He also indicated he had abandoned his charges in a locked truck and perhaps left them to die of suffocation. Those were statements I believed. He admitted he had tried to kill me and in the same breath asked for money so he could get out of the country. In his mind, the request was perfectly reasonable. I had acted incredulously, but in reality, his point of view was one that people in law enforcement deal with every day. The real problem was not Chad Patin. The real problem lay in my discounting his story about a mysterious island where modern-day people made use of a torture instrument out of medieval Europe.
Helen was tilted back in her swivel chair, chewing on a hangnail, staring at her computer and the frozen image of Chad Patin’s remains on the boat deck. “I don’t get it,” she said.
“Why nobody took the ring off him?” I said.
“ That and the fact that he was dumped overboard. Didn’t they learn anything after they put Blue Melton over the side in a block of ice?”
“Maybe they didn’t put him in the water. Maybe he was running and somebody popped him with a couple of. 223 rounds, maybe from an AR-15 or M16. He fell off the boat, and they couldn’t find him in the dark.”
“You buy that stuff about an island and a torture chamber on it?”
“Patin was reporting something he heard on a tape. Maybe the tape was bogus, something excerpted from a slasher film. Who knows? Somebody fried Patin’s apartment with a flamethrower. That’s a tough act to follow. The bigger problem for me is this person Angel or Angelle. The notion of a cabal is too much like the New World Order or the Trilateral Commission.”
“You don’t believe in conspiracies?”
“Not the kinds that have formal names.”
“Was that a porn film I heard when I called you?”
“Not exactly.”
“You and Clete were watching an old Doris Day movie?”
“Give it a break, Helen. Clete is going through a bad time.”
“So am I. It’s called doing my job. Does he have somebody new working in his office?”
“She’s a temp.”
“What’s her name?”
“You made a crack about a porn film. Varina Leboeuf is probably extorting her lovers. Clete got involved with her.”
“Don’t change the subject. What’s the name of the temp?”
I got up from my chair and opened the door to leave. “Cut Clete a little slack. He’ll deliver. He always does. He’s the best cop either one of us ever knew.”
“I want to meet her.”
“Why?”
“You know why, Pops. Believe it or not, we’re on the same side. But you two guys don’t get to write the rules,” she said.
Clete called me an hour later. “I’m not on those memory cards. But a lot of other guys are,” he said. “A couple of them are insider contractors who got in on the big bucks rebuilding New Orleans. I recognize a couple of shysters and oil guys, and then there were a few guys I never saw before. Anyway, I don’t see any big revelations. Actually, I feel like going outside and puking. I’m not up to this stuff.”
“She’s blackmailing people. You don’t call that a revelation?”
“Maybe she’s just covering her ass.”
“Great choice of words. Listen to yourself.”
“Maybe she’s got a fetish. Who’s perfect? Anyway, she left me out of it.”
“I know what you’re thinking.”
“What?”
“You’re going back for seconds is what.”
“So she’s a little weird. That doesn’t make her the Lucrezia Borgia of South Louisiana.”
“What does it take? How bad do you have to get hurt before you see what you’re doing to yourself?”
“Maybe I still like her. The apartment manager in Lafayette must have told her I was in her place. But she didn’t dime me.”
“Most extortionists don’t call the cops to report the theft of their blackmail materials.”
“Dave, you’re crucifying me for something I haven’t done. I didn’t say I was going to get it on with Varina again. I was just saying nobody is all good or all bad. Look, I’m burning this stuff and forgetting about it. I wish I’d never seen it. I wish I hadn’t gotten in the sack with her. I wish I hadn’t accidentally killed a mamasan and her children in Vietnam. I wish I hadn’t flushed my career with NOPD. My whole life is based on the things I wish I hadn’t done. What else do you want me to say?”
“I think Pierre and Varina and Alexis Dupree are a tighter unit than they let on. They might hate one another, but they’re all in the same lifeboat.”
“Neither of us knows that,” he replied.
“Chad Patin’s remains just showed up in the belly of a hammerhead shark a guy caught south of Grand Isle. Lose the charade with Varina. She knows you’re a kindhearted guy, and she used you.”
“Why don’t you show some fucking respect?”
“You’re the best guy I’ve ever known. I’m supposed to stand around with my hands in my pockets while other people mess up your head?”
“Say that about Patin again?”
“There were two rifle slugs in the remains. He was probably trying to escape from his abductors when they popped him. He told me about an island run by people who made a tape of a guy being squeezed to death inside an iron maiden. I think he was probably telling me the truth. Wake up, Cletus. Compared to what we’re dealing with, Bix Golightly is the Dalai Lama.”
“Dave?”
“Yeah?”
