cardboard. I wanted to return to the field with as much ordnance as I could get my hands on and blow our hooded adversaries into a bloody mist. But I knew how things were going to play out. The men who had killed Vidor Perkins and who had tried to kill me had sanction. Perhaps it didn’t come from local or state officials, but a group as well organized and trained and financed as this one was not born in a vacuum. The question was whom did they serve.
We pulled into the filling station at the crossroads and called the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Department. My report on the gun battle up the road and the death of Vidor Perkins obviously seemed surreal and was probably more than the dispatcher could assimilate. I had to keep repeating who and where I was. In the background I could hear a half-dozen dispatchers trying to talk over one another. There were obviously power outages and downed electrical wires in people’s yards and automobile accidents all over the parish. A large-scale shots-fired called in by a police officer from another parish who said he’d just killed a man and wanted backup at the scene he had fled probably sounded like the ravings of a lunatic.
Clete was staring at me as I hung up. “So?” he said.
“They’ll probably put us in straitjackets,” I replied.
Clete and I drove back up the road, wondering how long the response would take. Surprisingly, two cruisers showed up at the field at the same time we did, their spotlights piercing deep into the darkness, sweeping over the Acadian cottage and the rusted tractor and the acres of grass and weeds that stretched all the way back to the line of trees along the riverbank. I could still see swaths of tire tracks in the grass. I could see the coulee that I had raced down and hidden inside. I could even see the two slash pines where I had exited the tree line. But all the vehicles, including my pickup truck, were gone.
“Do you believe this?” Clete said.
“No, I don’t,” I said.
A plainclothes detective named Huffinton walked with us through the field. The rain had slackened, and the sky was turning pale at the edges. He was a big man whose clothes fit him badly, and he wore a felt hat with a wide wilted brim and a necktie that was twisted in a knot. Halfway across the field, I pointed out the spot where Vidor Perkins had died.
“There’s nothing there but dirt,” Huffinton said.
“That’s the point. Somebody spaded out the grass,” I said.
He walked a few feet from me and swept a flashlight over the ground. “This is about where you took cover behind your truck and started firing at the van? Because if it is, I don’t see any brass.”
“You’re not supposed to. If they’d take my truck, they’d take everything else.”
He nodded. Then he lit a cigarette. He puffed on it in the breeze, the smoke damp and smelling of chemicals and blowing back into my face. I knew any serious investigation of the crime scene was over. Huffinton stared at a golden flood of sunlight under the cloud layer in the west. “Let’s take a look down by the river,” he said.
We walked along the coulee and stood on the spot where I had shot the hooded man. My.45 shell casings were nowhere to be found. The body of the man I had killed was gone. There was no visible trace of blood on the ground. Nor did we find any ejected shells inside the stand of trees that grew along the river embankment. There were boot and shoe marks in the dirt, but none of a defined nature. The only tactile evidence of the gun battle were the gouges in the tree trunks from the AR-15 and a thin spray of blood on a persimmon branch at the spot where I had taken off the man’s fingers with the twelve-gauge.
“Come on down to the department and we’ll write it up,” Huffinton said.
“This isn’t our parish. Dave’s job is not to ‘write it up.’ Dave’s truck is probably on a semi headed for a compactor,” Clete said. “Call the state police.”
“Why don’t you do it?” Huffinton said.
Clete looked away at a distant spot, hiding the angry light in his eyes. “There was a crop duster flying around. Where’s the closest airport?” he said.
“Anywhere there’s a flat space. You have someplace else you need to be?” Huffinton said.
“I’ll be back tomorrow and take care of the paperwork,” I said.
“Yeah, I’d appreciate it,” Huffinton said. “No offense meant, but somebody might say you were back on the sauce when this one happened.”
“Tell me which it is: Streak is delusional or I’m a liar,” Clete said.
“Say again?”
“Forget it,” Clete said.
Huffinton walked toward his vehicle, his back to us, his blunt profile pointed into the freshening breeze.
“I hope his wife has congenital clap,” Clete said.
“During the firefight, I saw a steamboat down by the mouth of the river.”
“You mean a floating casino?”
“That’s not what it was. I’ve seen it before. On Bayou Teche.”
“I don’t know if I want to hear this.”
“I thought that was where I was going. I thought they were waiting for me.”
“Who?”
“The people on board.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“You’re the best, Cletus.”
“No,
“You’ve already said it for both of us. It’s only rock and roll.”
“That’s because I was ninety-proof. You don’t have permission to die.” He grabbed my shirt. “You hearing me on this?”
“I was just telling you what I saw. Who else am I going to tell?”
I cupped my hand on the back of his neck as we walked to his car. I could feel the hardness in his tendons and the heat and oil in his skin. I could feel his heartbeat and the fury and mire of his blood in his veins, and in his intelligent green eyes I could see the misty shine that my words would not make go away.
MONDAY MORNING I went into Helen Soileau’s office and told her everything that had happened in the field and river basin during the storm on the southern end of Jeff Davis Parish. She listened and did not speak, her gaze never leaving my face. When I finished, she continued to stare at me, her lips pressed together, her chest rising and falling.
Unconsciously I cleared my throat. “I’m going back over there in a few minutes,” I said.
“Really? That’s interesting.”
“I’m going to the courthouse and try to find what I can on the seven arpents of land owned by Bernadette Latiolais.”
“Can you tell me what Clete was doing with you yesterday?”
“He saved my life.”
“What you mean is he
“I did.”
“You shot one guy’s hand off with the twelve-gauge?”
“His fingers.”
“But you’re sure you wounded him, and you’re sure the guy you hit with your forty-five is dead?”
“I don’t know how else I can say it, Helen.”
“I don’t get Vidor Perkins’s relationship to these guys.”
“There was a red knot on his collarbone with two puncture marks in it. I think he was tortured with a stun gun. They made him walk to me and shot him by mistake.”
Her irritation with me had passed; she was looking at the broadening circumstances of the case. “And you saw a plane you think might have been the control center for these guys?”
“I saw the plane. Its purpose is a matter of speculation.”
