Chapter
46
* * *
I slept badly that night, wound up by my conversation with Woolrich and troubled by dreams of dark water. The next morning, I had breakfast alone after tracking down what seemed to be the only copy of the New York Times in Orleans Parish, over at Riverside News, by the Jax Brewery. Later, I met Rachel at Café du Monde and we walked through the French Market, wandering between the stalls of T–shirts and CDs and cheap wallets, and on to the fresh produce at the Farmers’ Market. There were pecans like dark eyes, pale, shrunken heads of garlic, melons with dark red flesh that held the gaze like a wound. White–eyed fish lay packed in ice beside crawfish tails; headless shrimp rested by racks of “ ‘gator on a stick” and murky tanks in which baby alligators lay on display. There were stalls loaded with eggplants and militones, sweet onions and elephant toe garlic, fresh Roma tomatoes and ripe avocadoes.
Over a century before, this had been a two–block stretch of Gallatin Street on the riverfront docks between Barracks and Ursuline. Outside of maybe Shanghai and the Bowery, it was one of the toughest places in the world, a strip of brothels and lowlife gin mills where hard–faced men mixed with harder women and anyone without a weapon had taken a wrong turning somewhere that he was bound to regret.
Gallatin is gone now, erased from the map, and instead tourists mix with Cajun fishermen from Lafayette and beyond, come to sell their wares surrounded by the thick, heady smell of the Mississippi. The city was like that, it seemed: streets disappeared; bars opened and, a century later, were gone; buildings were torn down or burned to the ground and others rose to take their place. There was change, but the spirit of the city remained the same. On this muggy summer morning, it seemed to brood beneath the clouds, feeling the people as a passing infection that it would cleanse from itself with rain.
The door of my room was slightly ajar when we returned through the courtyard. I motioned Rachel against the wall and drew my Smith & Wesson, keeping to the sides of the wooden stairway so that the steps wouldn’t creak. The noise of Ricky’s Steyr sending bullets raking past my ear had stayed with me. “Joe Bones says hello.” I figured that if Joe Bones tried to say hello again, I could spare enough powder to blow him back to Hell.
I listened at the door but no sounds came from inside. If it had been the maid in my room, she’d have been whistling and bumping, maybe listening to a blues station on her tinny portable radio. If there was a maid in my room now, she was either asleep or levitating.
I hit the door hard with my shoulder and entered fast, my gun at arm’s length, scanning the room with the sight. It came to rest on the figure of Leon sitting in a chair by the balcony, flicking through a copy of GQ that Louis had passed on to me. Leon didn’t look like the kind of guy who bought much on GQ’s recommendation, unless the Q had made a big play for the JCPenney contract. Leon glanced at me with even less interest than he gave to GQ. His damaged eye glistened beneath its fold of skin like a crab peering out of a shell.
“When you’re finished, there are hairs in the shower and the closet door sticks,” I said.
“Room falls down around your ears, I could give a fuck,” he replied. That Leon, what a kidder.
He threw the magazine on the floor and looked past me to Rachel, who had followed me into the room. His eyes didn’t register any interest there either. Maybe Leon was dead and no one had worked up the guts to tell him.
“She’s with me,” I said. Leon looked like he could have keeled over from apathy.
“Ten tonight, at the nine–sixty–six junction at Starhill. You et ton ami noir. Anyone else, Lionel cornhole you both with a shotgun.”
He stood to leave. As I moved aside to let him pass, I made a pistol of my finger and thumb and fired it at him. There was a flash of steel in each of his hands and two barb–edged knives appeared inches from each of my eyes. I could see the tops of the spring loaders in his sleeves. That explained why Leon didn’t seem to feel the need to carry a gun.
“Impressive,” I said, “but it’s only funny until someone loses an eye.” Leon’s dead right eye seemed to gaze into my soul, as if to rot it and turn it to dust, then he left. I couldn’t hear his footsteps as he walked down the gallery.
“A friend of yours?” asked Rachel.
I walked out of the room and looked down at the already empty courtyard. “If he is, I’m lonelier than I thought.”
? ? ?
When Louis and Angel returned from a late breakfast, I went to their door and knocked. A couple of seconds went by before there was a response.
“Yeah?” shouted Angel.
“It’s Bird. You two decent?”
“Jeez, I hope not. C’mon in.”
Louis sat upright in bed, reading the Times–Picayune. Angel sat beside him outside the sheets, naked but for a towel across his lap.
“The towel for my benefit?”
“I’m afraid you might become confused about your sexuality.”
“Might take away what little I have.”
“Very witty for a man screwing a psychologist. Why don’t you just pay your eighty bucks an hour like everyone else?”
Louis gave us both bored looks over the top of his newspaper. Maybe Leon and Louis were related way back.
“Lionel Fontenot’s boy just paid me a visit,” I said.
“The beauty queen?” asked Louis.
“None other.”
“We on?”
“Tonight at ten. Better get your stuff out of hock.”
“I’ll send my boy.” He kicked Angel in the leg from beneath the sheets.
“The ugly queen?”
“None other,” said Louis.
Angel continued to watch his game show. “It’s beneath my dignity to comment.”
Louis returned to his paper. “You got a lot of dignity for a guy with a towel on his dick.”
“It’s a big towel,” sniffed Angel.
“Waste of a lot of good towel space, you ask me.”
I left them to it. Back in my room, Rachel was standing by the wall, her arms folded and a fierce expression on her face.
“What happens now?” she asked.
“We go back to Joe Bones,” I said.
“And Lionel Fontenot kills him,” she spat. “He’s no better than Joe Bones. You’re only siding with him out of expediency. What will happen when Fontenot kills him? Will things be any better?”
I didn’t answer. I knew what would happen. There would be a brief disturbance in the drug trade, as Fontenot renegotiated existing deals or ended them entirely. Prices would go up and there would be some killing, as those who felt strong enough to challenge him for Joe Bones’s turf made their play. Lionel Fontenot would kill them; of that I had no doubt.
Rachel was right. It was only expediency that made me side with Lionel. Joe Bones knew something about what had happened the night Tante Marie died, something that could bring me a step closer to the man who had killed my wife and child. If it took Lionel Fontenot’s guns to find out what that was, then I would side with the Fontenots.
“And Louis will stand beside you,” said Rachel quietly. “My God, what have you become?”
? ? ?
Later, I drove to Baton Rouge, Rachel accompanying me at my insistence. We were uneasy together, and no words were exchanged. Rachel contented herself with looking out of the window, her elbow resting against the door, her right hand supporting her cheek. The silence between us remained unbroken until we reached exit 166, heading for LSU and the home of Stacey Byron. Then I spoke, anxious that we should at least try to clear the air between us.
“Rachel, I’ll do what I have to do to find whoever killed Susan and Jennifer,” I said. “I need this, else I’m dead inside.”
She did not reply immediately. For a while, I thought she was not going to reply at all.
“You’re already dying inside,” she said at last, still staring out the window. I could see her eyes, reflected in the glass, following the landscape. “The fact that you’re prepared to do these things is an indication of that.”
She looked at me for the first time. “I’m not your moral arbiter, Bird, and I’m not the voice of your conscience. But I am someone who cares about you, and I’m not sure how to deal with these feelings right now. Part of me wants to walk away and never look back, but another part of me wants, needs, to stay with you. I want to stop this thing, all of it. I want it all to end, for everybody’s sake.” Then she turned away again and left me to deal with what she had said.
Stacey Byron lived in a small white clapboard house with a red door and peeling paint, close to a small mall with a big supermarket, a photo shop, and a twenty–four–hour pizzeria. This area by the LSU campus was populated mainly by students, and some of the houses now had stores on their first floor, selling used CDs and books or long hippie dresses and overwide straw hats. As we drove by Stacey Byron’s house and pulled into a parking space in front of the photo shop, I spotted a blue Probe parked close by. The two guys sitting in the front seats looked bored beyond belief. The driver had a newspaper folded in four resting on the wheel and was sucking on a pencil as he tried to do the crossword. His partner tapped a rhythm on the dashboard as he watched the front door of Stacey Byron’s house.
“Feds?” asked Rachel.
“Maybe. Could be locals. This is donkey work.”
We watched them for a while. Rachel turned on the radio and we listened to an AOR station: Rush, Styx, Richard Marx. Suddenly, the middle of the road seemed to be running straight through the car, musically speaking.
“Are you going in?” asked Rachel.
“May not have to,” I replied, nodding at the house.
Stacey Byron, her blond hair tied back in a ponytail and her body encased in a short white cotton dress, emerged from the house and walked straight toward us, a straw shopping basket over her left arm. She nodded at the two guys in the car. They tossed a coin and the one in the passenger seat, a medium–sized man with a small belly protruding through his jacket, got out of the car, stretched his legs, and followed her toward the mall.
She was a good–looking woman, although the short dress was a little too tight at the thighs and dug slightly into the fat below her buttocks. Her arms were strong and lean, her skin tanned. There was a grace to her as she walked: when an elderly man almost collided with her as she entered the supermarket, she spun lightly on her right foot to avoid him.
I felt something soft on my cheek and turned to find Rachel blowing on it.
“Hey,” she said, and for the first time since we left New Orleans there was a tiny smile on her lips. “It’s rude to lech when you’re with another woman.”
“It’s not leching,” I said, as we climbed from the car, “it’s surveillance.”
I wasn’t sure why I had come here, but Woolrich’s remarks about Stacey Byron and her interest in art made me want to see her for myself, and I wanted Rachel to see her as well. I didn’t know how we might get to talk to her but I figured that these things had a habit of working themselves out.
Stacey took her time browsing in the aisles. There was an aimlessness about her shopping as she picked up items, glanced at the labels, and then discarded them. The cop followed about ten feet behind her, then fifteen, before his attention was distracted by some magazines. He moved to the checkout and took up a position where he could see down two aisles at once, limiting his care of Stacey Byron to the occasional glance in her direction.
I watched a young black man in a white coat and a white hat with a green band stacking prepackaged meat. When he had emptied the tray and marked off its contents on a clipboard, he left the shop floor through a door marked Staff Only. I left Rachel to watch Byron and followed him. I almost hit him with the door as I went through, since he was squatting to pick up another plastic tray of meat. He looked at me curiously.
“Hey, man,” he said, “you can’t come in here.”
“How much do you earn an hour?” I asked.
“Five twenty–five. What’s it to you?”
“I’ll give you fifty bucks if you lend me your coat and that clipboard for ten minutes.”
He thought it over for a few seconds, then said: “Sixty, and anyone asks I’ll say you stole it.”
“Done,” I said, and counted out three twenties as he took off the coat. It fitted a bit tightly across the shoulders, but no one would notice as long as I left it unbuttoned. I was stepping back onto the shop floor when the young guy called me.
“Hey, man, ‘nother twenty, you can have the hat.”
“For twenty bucks, I could go into the hat business myself,” I replied. “Go hide in the men’s room.”
I found Stacey Byron by the toiletries, Rachel close by.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” I said, as I approached, “can I ask you some questions?”
Up close, she looked older. There was a network of broken veins beneath her cheekbones and a fine tracery of lines surrounded her eyes. There were tight lines, too, around her mouth, and her cheeks were sunken and stretched. She looked tired and something else: she looked threatened, maybe even scared.
“I don’t think so,” she said, with a false smile, and started to step around me.
“It’s about your ex–husband.”
She stopped then and turned back, her eyes searching for her police escort. “Who are you?”
“An investigator. What do you know about Renaissance art, Mrs. Byron?”
“What? What do you mean?”
“You studied it in college, didn’t you? Does the name Valverde mean anything to you? Did your husband ever use it? Did you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please, leave me alone.” She backed away, knocking some cans of deodorant to the floor.
“Mrs. Byron, have you ever heard of the Traveling Man?”
Something flashed in her eyes and behind me I heard a low whistle. I turned to see the fat cop moving down the aisle in my direction. He passed Rachel without noticing her and she began moving toward the door and the safety of the car, but by then I was already heading back to the staff area. I dumped the coat and walked straight through and on to the back lot, which was crowded with trucks making deliveries, before slipping around the side of the mall where Rachel already had the car started. I stayed low as we drove off, turning right instead of passing Stacey Byron’s house again. In the side mirror I could see the fat cop looking around and talking into his radio, Byron beside him.
“And what did we achieve there?” asked Rachel.
“Did you see her eyes when I mentioned the Traveling Man? She knew the name.”
“She knows something,” agreed Rachel. “But she could have heard it from the cops. She looked scared, Bird.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But scared of what?”
? ? ?
That evening, Angel removed the door panels of the Taurus and we strapped the Calicos and the magazines into the space behind them, then replaced the panels. I cleaned and loaded my Smith & Wesson in the hotel room while Rachel watched.
I put the gun in my shoulder holster and wore a black Alpha Industries bomber jacket over my black T–shirt and black jeans. With my black Timberlands, I looked like the doorman at a nightclub.
“Joe Bones is living on borrowed time. I couldn’t save him if I wanted to,” I told her. “He was dead from the moment the Metairie hit went wrong.”
Rachel spoke. “I’ve decided. I’m leaving in a day or two. I don’t think I can be part of this any longer, the things you’re doing, the things I’ve done.” She wouldn’t look at me and there was nothing that I could say. She was right, but she wasn’t simply preaching. I could see her own pain in her eyes. I could feel it every time we made love.
Louis was waiting by the car, dressed in a black sweat top and black denim jacket over dark jeans and Ecco boots. Angel checked the door panels one last time to make sure they slipped off without any trouble, then stood beside Louis.
“You don’t hear anything from us by three A.M., you take Rachel and clear out of the hotel. Book into the Pontchartrain and get the first plane out in the morning,” I said. “I don’t want Joe Bones trying to even up scores if this turns bad. Handle the cops whatever way you think is best.”
He nodded, exchanged a look with Louis, and went back into the Flaisance. Louis put an Isaac Hayes tape into the stereo and we rolled out of New Orleans to the strains of “Walk On By.”
“Dramatic,” I said.
He nodded. “We the men.”
? ? ?
Leon lounged by a gnarled oak, its trunk knotted and worn, as we reached the Starhill intersection. Louis’s left hand was hanging loosely by his side, the butt of the SIG jutting from beneath the passenger seat. I had slipped the Smith & Wesson into the map compartment on the driver’s door as we approached the meeting place. Seeing Leon alone against the tree didn’t make me feel any better.
We slowed and turned onto a small side road that ran past the oak tree. Leon didn’t seem to register our presence. I killed the engine and we sat in the car, waiting for him to make a move. Louis had his hand on the SIG now and drew it up so that it lay along his thigh.
We looked at each other. I shrugged and got out of the car, leaning against the open door with the Smith & Wesson within reach. Louis climbed from the passenger side, stretched slightly to show Leon that his hands were empty, and then rested against the side of the car, the SIG now on the seat beside him.
Leon hauled himself from the tree and walked toward us. Other figures emerged from the trees around us. Five men, H&Ks hanging from their shoulders, long–bladed hunting knives at their belts, surrounded the car.
“Up against the car,” said Leon. I didn’t move. From around us came the sound of safeties clicking.
“Don’t move, you die now,” he said. I held his gaze, then turned and put my hands on the roof of the car. Louis did the same. As he stood behind me, Leon must have seen the SIG on the passenger seat but he didn’t seem concerned. He patted my chest, beneath my arms, and checked my ankles and thighs. When he was satisfied that I wasn’t wearing a wire, he did a similar check on Louis, then stepped back.
“Leave the car,” he instructed. Headlights shone as engines started up around us. A brown Dodge sedan and a green Nissan Patrol burst through from behind the treeline, followed by a flatbed Ford pickup with three pirogues lashed down on the bed. If the Fontenot compound was under surveillance, then whoever was responsible needed his eyesight tested.
“We got some stuff in the car,” I said to Leon. “We’re gonna take it out.” He nodded and watched as I removed the minisubs from behind the door panels. Louis took two magazines and handed one to me. The long cylinder stretched over the rear end of the receiver as I checked the safety at the front edge of the trigger guard. Louis placed a second magazine inside his jacket and tossed me a spare.
As we climbed into the back of the Dodge, two men drove our car out of sight and then jumped into the Nissan. Leon sat in the passenger seat of the Dodge beside the driver, a man in his fifties with long gray hair tied back in a ponytail, and indicated to him to move off. The other vehicles followed at a distance, so that we wouldn’t look like a convoy to any passing cops.
We drove along the border of East and West Feliciana, Thompson Creek to our right, until we came to a turnoff that led down to the riverbank. Two more cars, an ancient Plymouth and what looked like an even older Volkswagen Beetle, were pulled up at the bank, and two more pirogues lay beside them. Lionel Fontenot, dressed in blue jeans and a blue work shirt, stood by the Edsel. He cast an eye over the Calicos but didn’t say anything.
There were fourteen of us in all, most armed with H&Ks, two carrying M16 rifles, and we split three to a pirogue, with Lionel and the driver of the Dodge taking the lead in a smaller boat. Louis and I were separated and each handed a paddle, then we moved off upriver.
We rowed for twenty minutes, staying close to the western bank, before a darker shape appeared against the night sky. I could see lights flickering in windows and then, through a stand of trees, a small jetty against which a motorboat lay moored. The grounds of Joe Bones’s house were dark.
There was a low whistle from in front of us and hands were raised in the pirogues to indicate that we should stop rowing. Sheltered by the trees, which hung out over the water, we waited in silence. A light flashed on the jetty, and briefly, the face of a guard was illuminated as he lit a cigarette. I heard a low splash somewhere in front of me, and high on the bank, an owl hooted. I could see the guard moving against the moon–haunted water, could hear the sound of his boots scuffing against the wooden jetty. Then a dark shape rose up beside him and the pattern of the moonlight on the water was disturbed. A knife flashed and the red ember of the cigarette tumbled through the night air like a signal of distress as the guard crumpled to the ground. He made hardly a sound as he was lowered into the water.
The ponytailed man stood waiting at the jetty as we paddled by, moving as close as we could to the grass bank beyond before we climbed from the pirogues and dragged them onto dry land. The bank rose up to join an expanse of green lawn, undisturbed by flowers or trees. It rolled uphill to the back of the house, where steps led up to a patio overlooked by two French windows at ground level and a gallery on the second floor, which mirrored the one on the front of the house. I caught a movement on the gallery and heard voices from the patio. Three guards at least, probably more at the front.
Lionel raised two fingers and singled out two men to my left. They moved forward cautiously, keeping low against the ground as they moved toward the house. They were about twenty yards in front of us when the house and grounds were suddenly illuminated with bright white light. The two men were caught like rabbits in headlights as shouts came from the house and automatic fire burst from the gallery. One of them spun like an ice skater who has missed his jump, blood bursting forth from his shirt like red flowers opening. He fell to the ground, his legs twisting, as his partner dived for the cover of a metal table, part of a lawn set that stood, semiobscured, by the riverbank.
The French windows opened and dark figures spilled out onto the patio. On the gallery, the guard was joined by two or three others, who raked the grass in front of us with heavy fire. From the sides of the house, muzzles flashed as more of Joe Bones’s men inched their way around.
Close to where I lay, Lionel Fontenot swore. We were partly protected by the slope of the lawn as it curved down to meet the river, but the guards on the gallery were angling for clear shots at us. Some of Fontenot’s men returned fire, but each time they did so, they exposed themselves to the guards at the house. One, a sharp–faced man in his forties with a mouth like a paper cut, grunted as a bullet hit him in the shoulder. He kept firing, even as the blood turned his shirt red.
“It’s fifty yards from here to the house,” I said. “There are guards moving in from the sides to cut us off. We don’t move now, we’re dead.” A spray of earth kicked up by Fontenot’s left hand. One of Joe Bones’s men had progressed almost to the bank by approaching from the front of the house. Two bursts of M16 fire came from behind the metal lawn table and he tumbled sideways, rolling along the grass into the river.
“Tell your men to get ready,” I hissed. “We’ll cover you.” The message was passed down the line.
“Louis!” I shouted. “You ready to try these things out?” A figure two men down from me responded with a wave and then the Calicos burst into life. One of the guards on the gallery bucked and danced as the 9 millimeter bullets from Louis’s gun tore into him. I pushed the selector on the trigger guard fully forward and sent a burst of automatic fire across the patio. The French windows exploded in a shower of glass and a guard tumbled down the steps and lay unmoving on the lawn. Lionel Fontenot’s men sprang from their cover and raced across the lawn, firing as they did so. I switched to single shot firing and concentrated on the eastern end of the house, sending wood splinters shooting into the air as I forced the men there to take cover.
Fontenot’s men were almost at the patio when two fell, hit by fire from behind the ruined French windows. Louis sent a burst into the room beyond and Fontenot’s men moved to the patio and entered the house. Exchanges of fire were coming from within as Louis and I rose and ran across the lawn.
To my left, the guy behind the lawn table abandoned his cover to join us. As he did so, something huge and dark appeared out of the shadows and launched itself from the grass with a deep, ferocious growl. The boerbul struck him on the chest, knocking him to the ground with its enormous weight. He shouted once, his hands pounding at the creature’s head, and then the huge jaws closed on his neck and the boerbul’s head shook as he tore the man’s throat apart.
The animal lifted its head and its eyes gleamed in the darkness as it found Louis. He was turning the Calico in its direction when it bounded from the dead body and sprang into the air. Its speed was astonishing. As it moved toward us, its dark form blotted out the stars in the sky above. It was at the apex of its jump when Louis’s Calico sang and bullets ripped into it, causing it to spasm in midair and land with a crunch on the grass not two feet from us. Its paws scrambled for purchase and its mouth worked in biting motions, even as blood and froth spilled from between its teeth. Louis pumped more rounds into it until it lay still.
My eye caught movement at the western corner of the house as we neared the steps. A muzzle flashed and Louis yelled in pain. The Calico dropped to the ground as he leaped for the steps, cradling his injured hand. I fired three shots and the guard dropped. Behind me, one of Fontenot’s men fired single shots from his M16 as he advanced toward the house, then let the gun hang from its shoulder strap as he reached the corner. I saw moonlight catch the blade of his knife as he stood waiting. The short muzzle of a Steyr appeared, followed by the face of one of Joe Bones’s men. I recognized him as the one who had driven the golf cart to the plantation gates on our first visit here, but the flash of recognition became one with the flash of the knife as it struck across his neck. A crimson jet flew into the air from his severed artery, but even as he fell Fontenot’s man raised the M16 once again and fired past him as he moved toward the front of the house.
Louis was examining his right hand as I reached him. The bullet had torn across the back of the hand, leaving a bad gash and damaging the knuckle of his forefinger. I tore a strip from the shirt of a dead guard who lay sprawled across the patio and wrapped it around Louis’s hand. I handed him the Calico and he worked the strap over his head, then fitted his middle finger into the trigger guard. With his left hand he freed his SIG, then nodded to me as he rose. “We better find Joe Bones.”
Through the patio doors lay a formal dining room. The dining table, which could seat at least eighteen people comfortably, was splintered and pitted by shots. On the wall, a portrait of a Southern gentleman standing by his horse had sustained a large hole through the horse’s belly and a selection of antique china plates lay shattered in the remains of their glass–fronted display cabinet. There were two bodies in the room. One of them was the ponytailed man who had driven the Dodge.
The dining room led out into a large carpeted hallway and a white chandeliered reception area, from which a staircase wound up to the next floor. The other doors at ground level stood open, but there were no sounds coming from inside. There was sustained firing on the upper levels as we made our way to the stairs. At their base, one of Joe Bones’s men lay in a pair of striped pajama bottoms, blood pooling from an ugly head wound.
From the top of the stairs, a series of doors stretched left and right. Fontenot’s men seemed to have cleared most of the rooms, but they had been pinned down in the alcoves and doorways by gunfire from the rooms at the western end of the house, one on the river side to the right, its panels already pockmarked by bullets, and the other facing out to the front of the house. As we watched, a man in blue overalls carrying a short–handled axe in one hand and a captured Steyr in the other moved quickly from his hiding place to within one doorway of the front–facing room. Shots came through the door on the right and he fell to the ground, clutching his leg.
I leaned into an alcove in which the remains of long–stemmed roses lay in a pool of water and shattered pottery and fired a sustained burst at the door on the front–facing side. Two of Fontenot’s men moved forward at the same time, keeping low on the ground as they did so. Across from me, Louis fired shots at the semiclosed river–side door. I stopped firing as Fontenot’s men reached the room and rushed the occupant. There were two more shots, then one of them emerged wiping his knife on his trousers. It was Lionel Fontenot. Behind him was Leon.
The two men took up positions at either side of the last room. Six more of his men moved forward to join him.
“Joe, it’s over now,” said Lionel. “We gon’ finish this thing.”
Two shots burst through the door. Leon raised his H&K and appeared to be about to fire, but Lionel raised his hand, looking past Leon to where I stood. I advanced forward and waited behind Leon’s back as Lionel pushed open the door with his foot, then pressed himself flat against the wall as two more shots rang out, followed by the click of a hammer on an empty chamber, a sound as final as the closing of a tomb.
Leon entered the room first, the H&K now replaced by his knives. I followed him, with Lionel behind me. The walls of Joe Bones’s bedroom were marked with holes and the night air entered through the shattered window and sent the white curtains swirling in the air like angry ghosts. The blonde who had lunched with Joe on his lawn earlier in the week lay dead against the far wall, a red stain on the left breast of her silk nightgown.
Joe Bones stood before the window in a red silk dressing gown. The Colt in his hand hung uselessly at his side but his eyes glowed with anger and the scar on his lip seemed painfully pinched and white against his skin. He dropped the gun.
“Do it, you fuck,” he hissed at Lionel. “Kill me, you got the fucking guts.”
Lionel closed the bedroom door behind us as Joe Bones turned to look at the woman.
“Ask him,” said Lionel.
Joe Bones didn’t seem to hear. His face seemed consumed with a look of terrible grief as his eyes traced the contours of the dead woman’s face. “Eight years,” he said softly. “Eight years she was with me.”
“Ask him,” repeated Lionel Fontenot.
I stepped forward and Joe Bones sneered as he turned, that look of sadness now gone. “The fucking grieving widower. You bring your trained nigger with you?”
I slapped him hard and he took a step back.
“I can’t save you, Joe, but if you help me maybe I can make it quicker for you. Tell me what Remarr saw the night the Aguillards died.”
He wiped blood from the corner of his mouth, smearing it across his cheek. “You have no idea what you’re dealing with, no fucking idea in the world. You’re so out of your fucking depth, the fucking pressure should be making your nose bleed.”
“He kills women and children, Joe. He’s going to kill again.”
Joe Bones twisted his mouth into the semblance of a grin, the scar distorting his full lips like a crack in a mirror. “You killed my woman and now you’re gonna kill me, no matter what I say. You got nothing to bargain with,” he said.
I glanced at Lionel Fontenot. He shook his head almost imperceptibly, but Joe Bones caught it. “See, nothing. All you can offer is a little less pain, and pain don’t hold no surprises for me.”
“He killed one of your own men. He killed Tony Remarr.”
“Tony left a print at the nigger’s house. He was careless and he paid the price. Your guy, he saved me the trouble of killing the old bitch and her brood myself. I meet him, I’ll shake his hand.”
Joe Bones smiled a broad smile like a flash of sunshine through dark, acrid smoke. Haunted by visions of tainted blood flowing through his veins, he had moved beyond ordinary notions of humanity and empathy, love and grief. In his shimmering red robe, he looked like a wound in the fabric of space and time.
“You’ll meet him in Hell,” I said.
“I see your bitch there, I’ll fuck her for you.” His eyes were bland and cold now. The smell of death hung around him like old cigar fumes. Behind me, Lionel Fontenot opened the door and the rest of his men walked quietly into the room. It was only now, seeing them all together in the ruined bedroom, that the resemblance between them became clear. Lionel held the door open for me.
“It’s a family thing,” he said as I left. Behind me, the door closed with a soft click like the knocking of bones.
After Joe Bones died, we gathered the bodies of the Fontenot dead on the lawn in front of the house. The five men lay side by side, crumpled and torn as only the dead can be. The gates to the plantation were opened and the Dodge, the VW and the pickup sped in. The bodies were loaded gently but quickly into the trunks of the cars, the injured helped into the rear seats. The pirogues were doused in gasoline, set on fire, and left to float down the river.
We drove from the plantation and kept driving until we reached the rendezvous point at Starhill. The three black Explorers I had seen at the Delacroix compound stood waiting, their motors idling, their lights dimmed. As Leon sprayed gasoline into the cars and the pickup, the bodies of the dead were removed, wrapped in tarps, and placed in the backs of two of the jeeps. Louis and I watched it all in silence.
As the jeeps roared into life and Leon threw lighted rags into the discarded vehicles, Lionel Fontenot walked over to us and stood with us as they burned. He took a small green notebook from his pocket, scribbled a number on a sheet, and tore it out.
“This guy will look after your friend’s hand. He’s discreet.”
“He knew who killed Lutice, Lionel,” I said.
He nodded. “Maybe. He wouldn’t tell, not even at the end.” He rubbed his index finger along a raw cut on the palm of his right hand, picking dirt from the wound. “I hear the feds are looking for someone around Baton Rouge, used to work in a hospital in New York.”
I stayed silent and he smiled. “We know his name. Man could hide out in the bayou for a long time, he knew his way around. Feds might not find him, but we will.” He gestured with his hand, like a king displaying his finest troops to his worried subjects. “We’re looking. We find him, it’ll end there.”
Then he turned and climbed into the driver’s seat of the lead jeep, Leon beside him, and they disappeared into the night, the red taillights like falling cigarettes in the darkness, like burning boats floating on black water.
I called Angel as we drove back to New Orleans. At an all–night drugstore I picked up antiseptic and a first–aid kit so we could work on Louis’s hand. There was a sheen of sweat on his face as I drove and the white rags binding his fingers were stained a deep red. When we arrived back at the Flaisance, Angel cleansed the wound with the antiseptic and tried to stitch it with some surgical thread. The knuckle looked bad and Louis’s mouth was stretched tight with pain. Despite his protests, I called the number we had been given. The bleary voice that answered the phone on the fourth ring shook the sleep from its tones when I mentioned Lionel’s name.
Angel drove Louis to the doctor’s office. When they had gone, I stood outside Rachel’s door and debated whether or not to knock. I knew she wasn’t asleep: Angel had spoken to her after I called, and I could sense her wakefulness. Still, I didn’t knock, but as I walked back toward my own room her door opened. She stood in the gap, a white T–shirt reaching almost to her knees, and waited for me. She stood carefully aside to let me enter.
“You’re still in one piece, I see,” she said. She didn’t sound particularly pleased.
I felt tired and sick from the sight of blood. I wanted to plunge my face into a sink of ice–cold water. I wanted a drink so badly my tongue felt swollen inside my mouth and only a bottle of Abita, ice frosting on its rim, and a shot of Redbreast whiskey could restore it to its normal size. My voice sounded like the croak of an old man on his deathbed when I spoke.
“I’m in one piece,” I said. “A lot of others aren’t. Louis took a bullet across the hand and too many people died out at the house. Joe Bones, most of his crew, his woman.”
Rachel turned her back and walked to the balcony window. Only the bedside lamp lit the room, casting shadows over the illustrations that she had kept from Woolrich and that were now restored to their places on the walls. Flayed arms and the face of a woman and a young man emerged from the semidarkness.
“What did you find out, for all that killing?”
It was a good question. As usual with good questions, the answer didn’t live up to it.
“Nothing, except that Joe Bones was happier to die painfully than to tell us what he knew.”
She turned then. “What are you going to do now?”
I was getting tired of questions, especially questions as difficult as these. I knew she was right and I felt disgusted at myself. It felt as if Rachel had become tainted through her contact with me. Maybe I should have told her all of those things then, but I was too tired and too sick and I could smell blood in my nostrils; and, anyway, I think she already knew most of it.
“I’m going to bed,” I said. “After that, I’m winging it.” Then I left her.