“If Carolyn Blanchet shows up, tell her to wait outside. We’re on our way.”
I closed the cell phone and replaced it on the dashboard. We crossed the city limits into New Iberia. Yellow pools of electricity spilled through the clouds and spread across the sky and died without making a sound.
“Carolyn Blanchet was talking about a mysterious group of some kind that can pull cell-phone transmissions out of the air,” I said.
“Who knows?” Clete said. He removed the cigarette from his mouth and widened his eyes, unable to conceal his fatigue. “Know what I’m going to do?”
“No.”
“Watch.” He slid the cigarette back in the package, then rolled down the window and sprinkled all the cigarettes in the package into the wind stream. He took off his hat and kept his head outside the window for a long time, looking back into the darkness. Then he rolled up the window, his hair sparkling with raindrops. “Shoot me if I ever buy a pack of smokes again.”
“I promise,” I replied.
“Carolyn Blanchet would steal the pennies off a dead man’s eyes.”
“It’s the only game in town,” I said.
He didn’t argue.
BECAUSE OF FLOODING and the collapse of a sewer drain four blocks up from my house, East Main had been barricaded and the street was virtually deserted. It was strange to see Main devoid of people, like it was part of a dream rather than reality, the asphalt as sleek and black as oil under the streetlamps, rainwater coursing through the gutters, a dirty cusp surging over the sidewalks. The lawns of the antebellum and Victorian homes along the street had been windblown with camellia and bougainvillea and hibiscus petals and pieces of bamboo and thousands of leaves from the live-oak trees. The grotto dedicated to the statue of Jesus’s mother was lit by a solitary flood lamp next to the library, the stone draped by the shadows of the moss moving in the trees. I felt that I had moved back in time, but not in a good way. I felt like I had as a little boy during the war years, when I experienced what a psychiatrist would call fantasies of world destruction, of things coming apart and ending, of people going away from me forever.
The temperature had dropped, and fog was rolling off the bayou and puffing through the trees onto the street. Up ahead, I could see a cruiser parked close by my house. No other vehicles were parked on the street or in my driveway. I saw a woman come out my front door and approach the sidewalk, holding a newspaper over her head, jiggling her fingers at us the same way I had seen Kermit Abelard jiggle his fingers. At first I didn’t recognize her. She was wearing a raincoat and a bandanna over her hair. It was Carolyn Blanchet.
“Go around the block,” Clete said.
“What for?”
“I’m not sure. You called Emma a Judas goat. I think that was Emma’s teacher right there.” He picked up my cell phone from the dash.
“What are you doing?”
“Calling your house,” he said.
“Screw that.”
“They’re desperate, Dave. It’s all or nothing for them now.”
“It doesn’t matter.” I turned in to the drive and cut the engine. My front yard was flooded, the house lights burning brightly inside the rain, like the image of a snug sea shanty battered by a coastal storm, a place where a lamp stayed lit and bread baked in an oven.
I opened the truck door and got out. Carolyn Blanchet smiled at me. “Where’s Molly?” I asked.
“She’s still in the bathroom,” Carolyn replied.
Her statement didn’t compute, but I didn’t pursue it. The cruiser was parked in the shadows of the neighbor’s oak trees, backlit by a streetlamp. I could see the deputy’s silhouette behind the wheel, his hat cocked at an angle, as though he were dozing. I heard Clete get out of the truck.
“What kept you?” Carolyn said.
“Nothing. We were doing ninety all the way.”
She gave me a funny look. “You don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?”
“Alafair got away. We tried to reach your cell phone, but the service was down. Molly was calling you from the bathroom. I thought she got through.”
I never took my eyes from her face. Her skin glistened with moisture. Her chin was uplifted, her eyes happy, like those of a woman waiting to be kissed. Her mouth was beautiful and alluring, exuding warmth and affection and a promise of exploration, and I suspected it had charmed many men and women out of their heart and soul.
“You’re such a crazy guy, Dave. There she is,” she said.
I saw Alafair standing motionlessly in the bedroom window, the curtains pulled back on either side of her. If there was any expression on her face, I couldn’t see it. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Clete moving toward the cruiser that was parked back in the shadows. My heart was racing, my throat dry, the rain clicking on my hat. Behind me, I heard Clete rip open the front door of the cruiser.
“Dave, don’t do it!” he called out.
I knocked Carolyn Blanchet on her butt getting into the house.
CHAPTER 26
THE BODY OF the deputy assigned to watch our house never moved when Clete opened the cruiser’s door. The deputy’s eyes were half-lidded, their stare forever fixed on nothing. His head was tilted slightly to one side, almost in a quizzical manner, a thread of blood leaking from his hat down one cheek. His handheld radio was gone, and the wiring had been ripped out from under the dashboard. The interior light had been manually turned off, and Clete couldn’t find the switch to get it back on again. The battery in his cell phone was dead, and a car he tried to flag down veered around him and kept going. Clete pulled the body of the deputy from behind the wheel and left it in the street to draw as much attention as possible to the scene. Then he started running through the side yard toward the back of the house, his.38 gripped in his right hand, water and mud exploding from under his shoes.
AS SOON AS I came through the front door, a man I had never seen kicked the door shut behind me and swung a blackjack at my head. I raised my arm and took part of the blow on my shoulder and the rest just behind the ear, enough to bring me to my hands and knees but not enough to knock me unconscious.
Through our bedroom door, I could see Molly in an embryonic position on the floor, her mouth duct-taped and her arms stretched behind her, her wrists duct-taped to her ankles. The room was in disarray, a sewing box and the cosmetics that had been on her dresser broken and stepped on and tracked across the throw rugs. It was obvious she had put up a fight. Robert Weingart was pointing a.25 auto straight down at the side of her face. Alafair stood in the shadows, staring at me, blood patina’d on the tops of her bare feet, her pink dress streaked with mud, her hair matted. “I couldn’t warn you. He was going to shoot Molly,” she said.
“Don’t worry about it, Alf,” I said.
“Lie down on your face, sir,” the man who had hit me said. “Arms straight out. You know the drill.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
He reached down, ignoring my question, pulling my.45 from its holster.
“You were one of the guys at the river?” I said.
“Just a guy doing a job. Don’t make it personal, sir,” he said.
“What did they do to you, Alafair?” I said.
“They took my shoes and my feet got cut, but that’s all that happened,” she said.
“You sure have a way of blundering into things, Mr. Robicheaux,” a voice said from the kitchen.
I twisted my head around so I could see the figure silhouetted in the hallway. Kermit Abelard stepped into the light. “Waiting on Mr. Purcel, are you?” he said. “I wouldn’t. This time your friend went way beyond his
