Creole Belle (69 page)

“What did you do to her?” I asked.

“She was chloroformed, that’s all,” he replied. He took a small walkie-talkie from his pocket and pushed a button and spoke into it. “Put her inside, fellows.” Then he turned to me. “Watch now. You should enjoy this, since I suspect she’s a pain in the ass to work for. It’s oopsy-daisy time for the lady from Lesbos.”

Helen was bound hand and foot and lying on her side, and I couldn’t see her face. Two men walked in front of the camera and lifted her into the air and opened the top of a deep-freeze chest and set her inside. One of them looked back at the camera, then shut the lid.

“I give her about fifteen minutes,” Pierre said. “How much did you tell her about us, Mr. Robicheaux?”

“She never believed what I said about you,” I replied. “No one will. You’re killing people for no reason.”

“It’s getting late,” Alexis said. “Start with the girls, Mickey. Be fast about it, too. I’m tired.”

“I want to do the one called Gretchen,” the fleshy man said.

“Oh, that’s right, Harold, she broke out your front teeth, didn’t she?” Alexis said. “By all means.”

“Look, you guys, it’s obvious you make use of people inside the system,” Clete said. “That’s me and Dave. Maybe we can work something out. Look at our record. I don’t know how many guys we’ve cowboyed. You don’t believe me, check my jacket.”

“You’re not in a seller’s market, Mr. Purcel,” Alexis said.

“Dave already said it,” Clete replied. “What’s the percentage in snuffing people nobody believes?”

“And Sheriff Soileau?” Alexis said, an amused gleam in his eye.

“That’s the breaks, I guess,” Clete said.

“I knew others like you,” Alexis said. “When we locked them inside the showers, we told them we were creating a special dispensation for those who could prove their mettle. They beat and strangled one another while we watched through a peephole, and after a few minutes we dropped the gas containers through the air vents in the roof.”

“Shut up and get this over with,” Varina said.

“Maybe you’ll be part of the entertainment. That would be quite a surprise, wouldn’t it?” Alexis said to her. “Did you know that Caligula did that to his dinner guests?”

“What?”
she said angrily.

“I wanted to see if you were paying attention,” Alexis said.

The fat man and the man with greased hair were putting on rubber boots and long rubber gloves. The fat man was looking with anticipation at the cell where Alafair and Gretchen lay bound in the corner.

“Pierre?” said the man with the greased hair.

“What is it?”

“I got a problem. I ate some garlic shrimp for supper. I’m about to download in my pants.”

“Then go to the bathroom. We’ll wait.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The man with the greased hair lumbered toward a bathroom in the rear of the building, duck-footed, clutching his stomach.

“Make sure you close the door and turn on the ventilator,” said the man with the Bugs Bunny tattoo.

“That isn’t funny, Mickey,” Pierre said.

“Sorry, sir.”

It was Clete Purcel who seemed to reveal a side that no one had ever seen in him. “I can’t take this, Dave. I’d thought I’d be up to it, but I’m not. I got to sit down.”

“Act with some dignity, Mr. Purcel,” Pierre said.

“It’s my chest. I’ve got some lead in there. I think it’s next to my heart. I need a chair. I can’t stand up.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Varina said.

Clete gagged and spat blood on his hand. “I’m going to hit the deck if I don’t sit down.”

“Get him a chair,” Alexis said.

“Don’t get near him! Don’t trust this man!” Varina said.

Clete swayed from side to side, then fell against the wall. Mickey held him up and slapped his cheek. “Hang on, big man,” he said. “You were in the Crotch, right? Time to man up.”

Clete bent over, his hands on his thighs, as though about to be sick. “I’m going down, Dave. You’ll be on your own. I’m sorry,” he said.

He crumpled to one knee, his shirt splitting down his spine, his love-handles hanging over his belt, his giant buttocks spreading like an elephant’s.

“This man is pitiful,” Alexis said.

“I didn’t sign on for this,” Clete replied, shaking his head.

“This is the legendary New Orleans badass who capped our guys in the shootout on the bayou?” Mickey said. “What a joke.”

With his left hand, Clete pulled his trouser leg up and unsnapped the KA-BAR strapped on his calf. He pulled the blade from its scabbard. “Chug on this, bubba,” he said.

C
LETE CLENCHED ONE
arm around the throat of the man who had Bugs Bunny on his forearm, and drove the knife into his chest not once but twice, holding him up, using him as a shield. “Dave! The AK!”

He didn’t have to tell me. I was already running for it. It was propped against the wall by the stairwell, painted with green and black tiger stripes, the banana-shaped magazine dull gray, nicked silver on the edges with wear. As I ran toward the stairwell, I was trying to count inside my head the number of men in the room. How many were there?

There was a fat man who wanted to personally crush Gretchen Horowitz inside the iron maiden because she had broken his teeth. There was the man whose hair was scalped around the ears and layered with grease on top, and another man who had found the AK-47 in Clete’s convertible and brought it inside. There was the man who had Tasered Clete, although he was already a casualty, his feet kicking uselessly, his mouth trying to suck oxygen into his lungs after both of them had already been punctured by Clete’s knife.

In the kitchen were two men who had lowered Helen Soileau into the deep freezer.

How many others were on the property, either inside or above-ground? I couldn’t remember the number I had seen. Was Pierre Dupree armed? Or Alexis? Or Varina?

I had no way of knowing.

I would like to describe the next few minutes in a precise fashion, but I cannot. There are experiences in your life that you never quite sort out. You relive them many times in your dreams but always through a broken lens. Think of the syndrome in this way, and tell me if any of it sounds familiar. You are a man or woman who never uses profanity, but you remember yourself screaming obscenities, none of it with any syntax and none of it making any sense. You remember the buck of a weapon in your hands, but you do not remember aiming it; instead, you remember with a sinking of the heart that you did not care who was in front of it, that you would have shot your father or your brother or your son if he had been in your line of fire. You gloried in the fact that you were alive while others died and that your enemy seemed to deconstruct in a bloody mist before your eyes.

I know I pulled back and released the bolt on the AK-47 and prayed that the magazine was loaded. I know I pulled the trigger as soon as the round chambered, and I saw a man in overalls—I think the man who found the AK—grab his stomach and bend over as though someone had punched him in the solar plexus inside a crowded elevator. I saw Clete drop the man he had stabbed and pick up the Taser and use it on Pierre Dupree, or try to use it, I couldn’t be sure. I saw the kitchen door open and a man’s face appear briefly against a backdrop of pots and pans hanging from a wall, and I know I started firing at him and saw the door close again and the rounds pock through a metal surface that had been oversprayed with black paint.

I saw the fat man whose name was Harold unlock the door to Gretchen and Alafair’s cell and go inside. I saw the man with the intestinal problem emerge from the bathroom, his fly unzipped, his belt unbuckled, a nickel-plated .357 in his hand. I lifted the AK-47 and fired two or perhaps three rounds at him and saw a spurt of blood fly from his shoulder and whip across the doorjamb. He righted himself with one hand propped behind him and began firing at me as fast as he could pull the trigger of his revolver. I saw Clete fall back against the wall and couldn’t tell if he was hit. Pierre
Dupree was crouched in a ball, trembling from either fear or the shock of the Taser or both. I had no idea where Alexis Dupree or Varina had gone.

I crouched behind a divan and tried to calculate how many rounds I had fired, but I couldn’t. The plasma screens in the walls were exploding, the tropical sunsets and the iridescent spray of waves and the groves of coconut palms cascading in sheets of glass on the terrazzo floor.

I had hit the man in the bathroom at least once, but he had gotten behind the protection of the wall, where he had probably used a speed loader, because all at once he was back on rock and roll.

I saw Clete crawl on his hands and knees through the broken glass, the handle of his KA-BAR clenched in his right palm. He reached the far wall and inched his way to the bathroom door, looking in my direction. I saw him mouth,
Now
. I raised up above the divan and fired two rounds at the bathroom, blowing splinters out of the doorjamb, shattering the lavatory and a mirror. The man with the greased hair ducked back behind the wall, and Clete reached around the side of the door and drove the blade of the KA-BAR into his thigh, then grabbed him by his necktie and dragged him to the floor and fastened one hand under his chin and the other on the back of his head and broke his neck.

The shooter’s revolver had fallen into the toilet. Clete retrieved it, shaking water from his hand, and began searching the dead man’s pockets for bullets, growing more frantic as he pulled each pocket inside out. He was saying something to me, but the gunfire had taken its toll; my ears felt like they were stuffed with cotton, and I couldn’t make out his words. “What is it?” I shouted.

He pointed to the cylinder of the nickel-plated revolver, then held up his index finger and silently formed the words
One fucking round
. One of the cabinet doors under the lavatory had swung open. I saw Clete pick up a plastic bottle and stick it in his trouser pocket. Then he wiped his knife clean on a towel and eased out of the bathroom door, his eyes fastened on the entrance to the kitchen, where at least two men were barricaded. My hearing had started to clear.

We had forgotten about Pierre Dupree. He had gotten to his feet and was trying to steady himself by holding on to a chair. I also realized I had misjudged him. He had not been frightened, just temporarily traumatized by the shock of the Taser. There was glass in his hair and on his shoulders, and blood was running from his right ear. “Give it up,” he said. “This property is sealed. Even if you get to the yard, you’ll be killed. I’ll make a deal with you. We can work this out so everyone wins.”

“Tell the fat guy to come out of the cell,” I said.

“All these men are trained never to surrender their weapons. Just like police officers,” Dupree replied.

“Except they’re not police officers. They’re hired dipshits,” I said.

Clete stumbled through the furniture, looking backward over his shoulder at the bullet-pocked doors to the kitchen. He inserted the blade of the KA-BAR between Dupree’s thighs and raised the sharpened side into his scrotum. “Tell the blob in there to throw his piece out of the cell and to walk after it with his hands on his head.”

“Or you’re going to castrate me?” Pierre said.

“More like split you in half,” Clete replied.

“No, you won’t, Mr. Purcel. Do you know why? You don’t have the courage. You’re like most people who admire comic-book heroes. You think courage is about showing mercy. It’s the other way around. It takes courage to give no mercy, to face life as it is, to accept that the weak wish to be ruled by the strong, that the weak would not have it any other way.”

“Tell that to yourself while you’re holding your guts in your hands,” Clete said.

“Then do it. I’ve had a good life. Outside of marrying a woman who is probably the worst cunt in the history of this state, I have few regrets.”

“You shouldn’t use that word,” Clete said.

“I shouldn’t use that word? One man is dead and two others are dying, but I shouldn’t use a word that perfectly describes the most hypocritical creature I’ve ever known? I don’t think either one of you understands the culture you live in. Varina was queen of the Carnival at Mardi Gras, cheered and loved by hundreds of thousands.
How about my grandfather? He gassed whole families and used children in medical experiments. He shared a mistress with Josef Mengele. But no one will ever believe your story about him. Even if people do, he’ll never be punished. He’s old and kindly and charming, and people will say, ‘Oh, Mr. Robicheaux, all that was
so
long ago.’”

Clete looked at me. “I think he’s probably right. We should cool Pierre out now and get the rest as we go.”

I didn’t think he meant it, but I wasn’t going to take the chance. Also, we were running out of time. Helen Soileau was probably close to death from hypothermia. I hit Pierre Dupree across the face with the AK-47. His bottom lip split, and the back of his head hit the wall. I watched him slide down on the floor.

“You should have let me wax him,” Clete said. He began going through Dupree’s pockets. “He’s not carrying.”

Pierre Dupree’s lack of a weapon on him wasn’t the issue. We knew we had to make a choice. Did we get Helen out of the deep freeze first or deal with the fat man in Gretchen and Alafair’s cell?