15 upside down on his right shoulder. “Oops, at ten o’clock,” he said.
“What?”
“A campfire. By that boat. I saw somebody look at us from behind that tree.”
Beyond the angle of the wall, I could see the salt-eaten, sun-scalded, wind-polished trunk and root system of a thick tree, one that had probably floated from the Mississippi or Alabama or Florida coastline. Clete and I worked our way along the edge of the wall until we reached a berm that sloped down to the beach and a polyethylene tent staked into the sand with aluminum pins. The rain had slackened, but the wind was blowing hard, popping the tent.
The barrel of the shotgun was cradled across my left arm; there was no round in the chamber. “My name is Detective Dave Robicheaux of the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department,” I said. “I need to see y’all’s hands out here in the light. Do it now.”
Clete moved left, unslinging his rifle. He had jungle-clipped two magazines together with electrician’s tape, so when one magazine was empty, he could release it and insert the second one in the frame with hardly any interruption in his rate of fire. Water was dripping off his hat brim; his face looked as taut as a bleached muskmelon. He held up two fingers.
“Did you hear me?” I called out.
There was no answer.
I moved around to the front of the tent so I could see through the flap. The campfire had flattened in the wind and smelled from a can of beans that had boiled over and burned in the ashes. I could smell another odor, too.
The boy and the girl inside looked like they were in their late teens or early twenties. It wasn’t their age that defined them. They were tanned from head to foot, as though they had never lived anywhere except under a blazing sun. Their eyes were lustrous and too big for their faces, like the eyes of anorexics or survivors of famines. The girl was sitting barefoot on an air mattress and wearing cutoff blue jeans and a halter. She pulled a shirt over her left arm, covering a tattoo, then took a hit off a pair of roach clips, even though I had already identified myself as a sheriff’s detective. They said their names were Sybil and Rick and that they were from Mobile and were taking refuge from the storm. Rick wore sandals without socks and a Speedo swimsuit and a Gold’s Gym T-shirt that exposed the bleached tips of the hair under his arms. He and Sybil climbed out of the tent, smiling broadly, neither of them showing any reaction to the cold wind.
“Who’s up in the house?” I asked.
“They come and go, man. They’ve got this big fucking yacht you wouldn’t believe,” Rick said. His hair was black and oily and as thick as carpet weave; it hung in rings on his shoulders and resembled a seventeenth-century wig on his narrow head. “If the yacht is anchored on the other side of the island, that means they’re here, no fucking mistake about it.”
“That’s what we were doing when y’all came,” Sybil said. She opened her mouth wider than necessary when she spoke, and huffed out her breath instead of laughing.
“Doing what?” Clete asked.
“What Rick just said. We were fucking,” she replied.
Clete looked at me.
“Why are y’all in a tent and not on your boat?” I asked.
“I got seasick and puked,” Sybil said. She huffed out her breath. “I always get seasick when it rains, and then I puke. I got to brush my teeth.”
“Who owns this place?” I said.
Rick turned to Sybil. “What’s the name of that old dude?”
“I can’t remember.” She felt her head. “My hair’s wet. This weather sucks. Where’d y’all say you’re from?”
“New Iberia, Louisiana. I’m with the sheriff’s department there.”
“This isn’t Louisiana, man,” Rick said.
“Then where are we?” Clete asked.
“Fuck if I know,” Rick replied.
Sybil combed her hair with her fingernails. The wind puffed the sleeves of her shirt, and I saw the tattoo of tangled barbed wire wrapped around her upper left arm. More important, I saw a red swastika tattooed like a clasp in the center of the wire.
“Is the old dude named Alexis Dupree?” I said.
“I don’t know, man. He’s just a kindly old dude, maybe a little weird, but there’s a lot of that going around these days,” Rick said. “Y’all want to eat some hot dogs? They’re a little bit scorched, but they’re not bad with mustard.”
“I tell you what, you guys sit tight while my friend and I look around,” I said. “By the way, Miss Sybil, I like your tattoo. Where’d you get it?”
She began fooling with her hands, examining them as though she had just discovered them. “I used to have this biker boyfriend that was kind of nuts on the subject of Nazi memorabilia and shit, so I told him I had a surprise for him on his birthday, but he got real pissed off ’cause he thought he was gonna get a blow job instead.”
“Yeah, that’s fucked up, isn’t it, man?” Rick said, pointing a finger at me to emphasize his disappointment with the world.
“Like Dave says, hang loose. We’ll be back and chat you up on some of this stuff,” Clete said. “Go easy on the stash.”
“That’s not gonna be a problem, is it? Because if it is, we’ll get rid of it,” Rick said. He smiled vacantly. “Actually, we’re in recovery now, so maybe we shouldn’t be smoking it, huh?”
“A big ten-four on that,” Clete said.
I heard Clete say “Jesus, God” under his breath, then we walked back up the berm and entered the compound and found ourselves surrounded by the stench of dead birds; their feathers ruffled every time the wind gusted. Clete choked and held a handkerchief to his mouth. “You see the tracks inside that girl’s thighs?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, my eyes on the house.
“Think she and her boyfriend were coming here to shoot up?”
“Probably. Maybe Alexis Dupree has acolytes in the drug culture.”
“Those palm trees aren’t from the Gulf Coast.”
He was right. They had probably been transplanted from South Florida. They hadn’t rooted properly, and their fronds were yellow and frayed by the wind. The entire compound reeked of contrivance and artifice, a shabby attempt to create a Caribbean ambiance in an inhospitable environment where fresh water had to be brought in by boat and pumped into a tank that stood on steel stanchions behind the house. It was like a movie set. It was the kind of place that seemed indicative of the Duprees, people who not only had chosen to be first in Gaul rather than second in Rome but were satisfied to have one eye in the kingdom of the blind.
“How do you want to play it?” Clete said.
“Let’s knock on the door and see who’s home,” I replied.
“This place gives me the creeps.”
“It’s just a building.”
“No, it’s got something really bad inside it. I can feel it. Maybe it’s that stink. You see the eyes of those kids? They haven’t even started their lives, and they’re already zombies.” He wiped his mouth with his handkerchief.
I knew Clete wasn’t thinking of our new friends Rick and Sybil. He was thinking of Gretchen and his failure as a father. “I bet you five years from now, those kids will be fine,” I said.
“Yeah, they’ll probably be running Goldman Sachs. Give it a break, Streak. And screw knocking on the door.”
It was made of heavy oak and had three rusted strips of iron bolted across it. Clete used the butt of his rifle to break a pane out of a frosted viewing panel next to the jamb. He reached inside, careful not to cut himself, and twisted the deadbolt free. I pushed the door back on its hinges and walked in ahead of him. The vast tomblike emptiness of the house was stunning. The high ceilings and huge rafters and peaked skylights operated by pulleys and chains had the look of an abandoned cathedral. Our footsteps echoed throughout the entirety of the building.
