“What the hell is this place?” Clete said.
“Whatever it is, it was gutted,” I said.
“Listen,” he said.
I could hear wind blowing through a broken door or window, and perhaps the flapping of birds taking flight, but nothing else.
Clete walked ahead of me, his AR-15 slung over his shoulder. Then he froze and made a fist with his right hand, the infantryman’s signal to stop in your tracks. This time I heard it, tinkling sounds mixed with a frenetic flapping of something alive and trapped in an enclosure.
We walked out of the main room and down a corridor into a kitchen. The cabinets and shelves and drawers and refrigerator were empty. I clicked on a light switch, but there was no power. Through the back window, I saw the crumbled brick shell of what probably was a lighthouse. Then I felt a puff of air through a side hallway and heard the tinkling and flapping sounds again. Clete unslung his rifle and moved down the hallway ahead of me, his hat and raincoat dripping, his silhouette massive against the light. He stepped down onto a bare concrete pad inside a room that had a barred window inset in one wall, the glass broken by a pelican that had flown directly into it and lay dead between the glass and the bars. Three concrete steps led down into a room that had been constructed beneath the level of the main floor. There was no mistaking where the sounds had come from.
Clete went down the steps first. At the far end of the lower room was another barred window, this one at ground level and as narrow as a gun slit. Like the room above it, the floor was concrete, but it was covered with gray sand that had seeped through the cracks in the walls.
Clete stared in disbelief. “It’s Didi Gee’s fish tank. Don’t tell me it isn’t. I saw it too many times. Jesus Christ, I told you this place gave me the willies.”
A huge aquarium rested on a stone block. Almost all the water had evaporated from it, and five piranhas were flapping violently in the soup at the bottom, scissoring and skittering across it, smacking their noses into the glass.
An iron bar ran across the top of the ceiling, and at least a dozen oiled and shiny steel chains hung from it, either a hook or a manacle attached to each. Clete touched one of the hooks, then wiped his hand on his handkerchief, swallowing drily. I walked closer to the chains and took my ballpoint from my shirt pocket and speared one of the links and lifted the chain against the light. The end of the hook was encrusted with matter that resembled dried jelly. Higher up on the chain, a strand of auburn hair glowed against the light.
I took a penlight from my pocket and shone it at the bottom of the far wall. “Take a look,” I said.
A rusted outline slightly larger than the size of a coffin was stenciled into the concrete floor. There was a long orange horizontal strip of rust on the wall, as though a heavy iron object had rested against it. The floor was speckled with what looked like dried blood. “I think this is where the iron maiden was,” I said. “I think the lid was pushed back against the wall. The victims were lowered into it, and the lid was shut on top of them. You see those three pools? That’s where the drain holes were.”
“Alexis Dupree?”
“Who else could create something like this?” I said.
“This operation isn’t being run by a bunch of geeks. Didi Gee stuck people’s hands in his fish tank, but the object was money, not payback. The people behind this stuff don’t have a category. You know what our problem is, Dave? We keep playing by the rules. These guys need to be naped off the planet.”
“So we drop a hydrogen bomb on Jeanerette, Louisiana?” I said.
“What do you want to do with the piranhas?”
“We have to put them under,” I said.
“Maybe those kids can dump them in an ice chest full of fresh water and take them somewhere.”
“They’ll get cut to pieces.”
“I got to ask you something,” Clete said.
“Go ahead.”
“Who’s more messed up, my daughter or kids like those two out there?”
“I don’t know, Clete. What does it matter? Young people make mistakes. Some come out of it, some don’t. Stop beating up on yourself.”
“I want your promise on something. You don’t jam Gretchen. She deserves a better life than the one I left her with. You cut her some slack or we go our separate ways. I want your word.”
He had never spoken like that to me in all the years I had known him.
“I was never big on loyalty oaths,” I said.
“I want your word, Dave.”
“I can’t give it to you.”
I saw a great sadness come into his eyes. “All right, let’s get those two down here and see what they have to say. Blow the shit out of those fish first. Yeah, lock and load, Dave, paint the fucking wall.”
When we went back outside, the sky was a bright metallic gray, the wind blowing a dirty chop on the cove where we had set down, the plane rocking in the swells that swirled across the pilings of a submerged jetty. I could see Julie Ardoin in the cabin. I waved at her to indicate we would be along in a few minutes. Sybil and Rick were squatting on the sand, rolling up their tent. Rick had a joint between his lips.
“I fixed y’all sandwiches from our wieners,” Sybil said. “They’re a little bit sandy, though.”
“That’s nice of you, but I want y’all to come into the house and check out a room we found,” I said.
“Is someone home there?” she replied. “I don’t know if we should go in there if nobody’s home.”
“Have you been in that house before, Miss Sybil?” I asked.
“No, sir,” she replied.
I continued to look directly into her face.
“Maybe once,” she said.
“Who’d you see in there?” I asked.
“Just that old man. He was nice. He said I looked like a model, somebody named Twiggy.”
“Did y’all meet somebody named Angel or Angelle?” I said.
“That last one, I heard that name.”
“You heard the name Angelle?” I said.
“Yeah, I think I did, but with all kinds of shit happening, I mean, you can’t always be sure.”
“I’m not reading you, Miss Sybil. What kind of shit?”
“We were inside the house once, talking to the old dude,” Rick said, his pupils dilated into big drops of black ink. “Then somebody started screaming. The old guy said it was a crazy person he was taking care of. We hauled ass. I mean, fuck, man, who wants to have lunch with crazy people screaming and probably throwing food and shit at the table? We didn’t come all the way out here for that.”
“So why’d y’all come back?” I said.
“He gave us some crystal,” Sybil said.
“That’s why you had a swastika tattooed on your arm?” I said. “You wanted to score meth from the old man?”
“No, I told you. It was for my boyfriend’s birthday, except that’s not what he wanted. What does my tattoo have to do with the old guy?” She squeezed her eyes shut in consternation and exhaled loudly, letting her mouth remain open, as though silently laughing.
“You made these sandwiches for us?” I said.
“I got to make a confession. I think a crab was eating on one of the wieners,” she said. She scratched at a scab on her tattoo. “I’m sorry for probably telling you some lies today. I say things I kind of make up and they seem real, but later, they don’t.”
What can you say to kids like these? You might as well fill reams of paper with all the wisdom of the ancient and the modern world and pack them down a ship’s cannon with a plunger and stand back and ignite the fuse and blow six thousand years of knowledge into confetti and watch it float away on the next wave.
“There’s a torture chamber in that house. You could have been hung up in it. Don’t come back here,” I said.
“Wow, that’s seriously fucked up, man,” Rick said.
Clete and I walked past the dead birds in the compound, not speaking, our weapons across our shoulders, our raincoats flapping in the wind, the sun cold and gaseous in the pewter-colored sky.
