In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (20 page)

      "Yeah, sure."

      "It's not deep there. Just stay on the sandbar, close to the hull."

      "Put on a life jacket, El," Kelly said.

      "I swam across the Trinity River once at flood stage when houses were floating down it," he said.

      She took a life jacket out of a top compartment, picked up his wrist, and slipped his arm through one of the loops. He grinned at me. Then his eyes looked out the glass at the far bank.

      "What's that guy doing?" he said.

      "Which guy?" I said.

      "The guy knocking around in the brush out there."

      "How about we get your boat loose and worry about other people later?" I said.

      "You got it," he said, tied one lace on his jacket, and went out into the rain.

      He held on to the rail on the cabin roof and worked his way forward toward the bow. Kelly watched him through the glass, biting down on the corner of his lip.

      "He waded ashore before," I said, and smiled at her. "He's not in any danger there."

      "El has accidents. Always."

      "A psychologist might say there's a reason for that."

      She turned away from the glass, and her green eyes moved over my face.

      "You don't know him, Mr. Robicheaux. Not the gentle person who gives himself no credit for anything. You're too hard on him."

      "I don't mean to be."

      "You are. You judge him."

      "I'd like to see him get help. But he won't as long as he's on the juice or using."

      "I wish I had those kinds of easy answers."

      "They're not easy. Not at all."

      Elrod eased himself over the gunwale, sinking to his chest, then felt his way through the silt toward the slope on the sandbar.

      "Can you stand in the stern? For the weight," I said to Kelly.

      "Where?"

      "In the back of the boat."

      "Sure."

      "Take my raincoat."

      "I'm already sopped."

      I restarted the engine.

      "Just a minute," I said, and put my rain hat on her head. Her wet blond curls were flattened against her brow. "I don't mean to be personal, but I think you're a special lady, Ms. Drummond, a real soldier."

      She used both her hands to pull the hat's floppy brim down tightly on her hair. She didn't answer, but for the first time since I had met her, she looked directly into my eyes with no defensiveness or anger or fear and in fact with a measure of respect that I felt in all probability was not easily won.

      I waved at Elrod through the front glass, kicked the engine into reverse, and opened the throttle. The exhaust pipes throbbed and blew spray high into the air at the waterline, the windows shook, the boards under my feet hummed with the vibrations from the engine compartment. I looked over my shoulder through the back glass and saw Kelly bent across the gunwale, pushing at the bottom of the bayou with a tarpon gaff; then suddenly the hull scraped backward in the sand, sliding out of a trench in a yellow and brown gush of silt and dead reeds, and popped free in the current.

      Elrod was standing up on the sandbar, his balled fists raised over his head in victory.

      I cut the gas and started out the cabin door to get the anchor.

      Just as the rain struck my bare head and stung my eyes, just as I looked across the bayou and saw the man in the shapeless fedora kneeling hard against an oak tree, his shadowed face aimed along the sights of a bolt-action rifle, the leather sling twisted military style around the forearm, I knew that I was caught in one of those moments that will always remain forever too late, knew this even before I could yell, wave my arms, tell him that the person in the rain hat and Ragin' Cajuns T-shirt with my name on the back was not me. Then the rifle's muzzle flashed in the rain, the report echoing across the water and into the willow islands. The bullet cut a hole like a rose petal in the back of Kelly's shirt and left an exit wound in her throat that made me think of wolves with red mouths running through trees.

Chapter 10

I
t was a strange week, for me as well as the town. Kelly's death brought journalists from all over the country to New Iberia. They filled all the motels, rented every available automobile in Lafayette, and dwarfed in both numbers and technical sophistication our small area news services.

     
Many of them were simply trying to do their jobs. But another kind came among us, too, those who have a voyeuristic glint in their eyes, whose real motivations and potential for callousness are unknown even to themselves.

      I got an unlisted phone number for the house.

      I began to be bothered by an odor, both in my sleep and during the late afternoon when the sun baked down on the collapsed barn at the back of our property. I noticed it the second day after Kelly's death, the day that Elrod escorted her body back to Kentucky for the burial. It smelled like dead rats. I scattered a bag of lime among the weeds and rotted boards and the smell went away. Then the next afternoon it was back, stronger than before, as invasive as a stranger's soiled palm held to your face.

      I put our bedroom fan in the side window so it would draw air from the front of the house, but I would dream of turkey buzzards circling over a corrugated rice field, of sandflecked winds blowing across the formless and decomposing shape of a large animal, of a woman's hair and fingernails wedging against the sides of a metal box.

      On the seventh morning I woke early, walked past the duck pond in the soft blue light, soaked the pile of boards and strips of rusted tin with gasoline, and set it afire. The flames snapped upward in an enormous red-black handkerchief, and a cottonmouth moccasin, with a body as thick as my wrist, slithered out of the boards into the weeds, the hindquarters of an undigested rat protruding from its mouth.

      The shooter left nothing behind, no ejected brass, no recoverable prints from the tree trunk where he had fired. The pocket knife Rosie had found on the levee turned out to be free of prints. Almost all of our work had proved worthless. We had no suspects; our theories about motivation were as potentially myriad as the time we were willing to invest in thinking about them. But one heart-sinking and unalterable conclusion remained in front of my eyes all day long, in my conversations with Rosie, the sheriff, and even the deputies who went out of their way to say good morning through my office door—Kelly Drummond was dead, and she was dead because she had been mistaken for me.

I DIDN'T EVEN SEE MIKEY GOLDMAN WALK INTO MY OFFICE. I looked up and he was standing there, flexing the balls of his feet, his protruding, pale eyes roving about the room, a piece of cartilage working in his jaw like an angry dime.

      "Can I sit down?" he said.

      "Go ahead."

      "How you doing?"

      "I'm fine, thanks. How are you?"

      "I'm all right." His eyes went all over me, as though I were an object he was seeing for the first time.

      "Can I help you with something?" I said.

      "Who's the fucking guy who did this?"

      "When we know that, he'll be in custody."

      "In custody? How about blowing his head off instead?"

      "What's up, Mr. Goldman?"

      "How you handling it?"

      "I beg your pardon?"

      "How you handling it? I'm talking about you. I've been there, my friend. First Marine Division, Chosin Reservoir. Don't try to bullshit me."

      I put down my fountain pen on the desk blotter, folded my hands, and stared at him.

      "I'm afraid we're operating on two different wavelengths here," I said.

      "Yeah? The guy next to you takes a round, and then maybe you start wondering if you aren't secretly glad it was him instead of you. Am I wrong?"

      "What do you want?"

      He rubbed the curly locks of salt-and-pepper hair on his neck and rolled his eyes around the room. The skin around his mouth was taut, his chin and jaw hooked in a peculiar martial way like a drill instructor's.

      "Elrod's going to go crazy on me. I know it, I've seen him there before. He's a good kid, but he traded off some of his frontal lobes for magic mushrooms a long time ago. He likes you, he'll listen to you. Are you following me?"

      "No."

      "You keep him at your place, you stay out at his place, I don't care how you do it. I'm going to finish this picture."

      "You're an incredible man, Mr. Goldman."

      "What?" He began curling his fingers backward, as though he wanted to pull words from my chest. "You heard I got no feelings, I don't care about my actors, movie people are callous dipshits?"

      "I never heard your name before you came to New Iberia. It seems to me, though, you have only one thing on your mind—getting what you want. Anyway, I'm not interested in taking care of Elrod Sykes."

      "If I get my hands on the fuckhead who shot Kelly, you're going to have to wipe him off the wallpaper."

      "Eventually we're going to get this guy, Mr. Goldman. But in the meantime, the vigilante histrionics don't float too well in a sheriff's department. Frankly, they're not too convincing, either."

      "What?"

      "Ask yourself a question: How many professional killers, and the guy who did this is a professional killer, could a rural parish like this have? Next question: Who comprises the one well-known group of professional criminals currently with us in New Iberia? Answer: Julie Balboni and his entourage of hired cretins. Next question: Who's in a movie partnership with these characters?"

      He leaned back in his chair, bouncing his wrists lightly on the chair's arms, glancing about the room, his eyes mercurial, one moment almost amused, then suddenly focused on some festering inner concern.

      "Mr. Goldman?" I said.

      "Yeah? You got something else to say?"

      "No, sir, not a thing."

      "Good. That's good. You're not a bad guy. You've just got your head up your hole with your own problems. It's just human."

      "I see. I'm going down the hall for a cup of coffee now," I said. "I suspect you'll be gone when I get back."

      He rose to his feet and flexed a kink out of his back. He unwrapped a short length of peppermint candy and stuck it in his jaw.

      "You want one?" he said.

      "No, thanks."

      "Don't pretend to be a Rotary man. I checked out your background before I asked you to babysit Elrod. You're as crazy as any of us. You're always just one step away from blowing up somebody's shit."

      He cocked his finger, pointed it at me, and made a hollow popping sound with his mouth.

THAT NIGHT I DREAMED THAT I WAS TRYING TO SAVE A WOMAN from drowning way out on the Gulf of Mexico. We were sliding down a deep trough, the froth whipping across her blond curls and bloodless face, her eyes sealed against the cobalt sky. Our heads protruded from the water as though they had been severed and placed on a plate. Then her body turned to stone, heavier than a marble statue, and there was no way I could keep her afloat. She sank from my arms, plummeting downward into a vortex of spinning green light, down into a canyon hundreds of feet below, a gush of air bubbles rising from a pale wound in her throat.

ROSIE CAME THROUGH THE DOOR, CLUNKED HER PURSE LOUDLY on her desk, and began rummaging through the file cabinet. She had to stand on her toes to see down into the top drawer.

      "You want to have lunch today?" she asked.

      "What?"

      "Lunch . . . do you want to have lunch? Come in, Earth."

      "Thanks, I'll probably go home." Then as an afterthought I said, "You're welcome to join us."

      "That's all right. Another time." She sat down behind her desk and began shifting papers around in a couple of file folders. But her eyes kept glancing up into my face.

      "Have you got something on your mind?" I asked.

      "Yeah, you."

      "You must be having an uneventful day."

      "I worked late last night. The dispatcher and I had a cup of coffee together. He asked me how I was getting along here, and I told him real good, no complaints. Then he asked me if I'd experienced any more smart-aleck behavior from some of the resident clowns in the department. I told him they'd been perfect gentlemen. I bet you can't guess what he said next."

      "You got me."

      She imitated a Cajun accent. " 'Them guys give you any mo' trouble, you just tell Dave, Miz Rosie. He done tole 'em what's gonna happen the next time they bother you.' "

      "He was probably exaggerating a little bit."

      "You didn't need to do that for me, Dave."

      "I apologize."

      "Don't be a wise-ass, either."

      "Boy, you're a pistol."

      "How should I take that?"

      "I don't know. How about easing up?"

      "Don't count on it."

      She rested one small hand on top of the other. She had the same solid posture behind her desk that I remembered in the nuns at the elementary school I attended.

      "You look tired," she said.

      "I have bouts of insomnia."

      "You want to talk about what happened out on the bayou?"

      "No."

      "Do you feel guilty about it?"

      "What do you think I feel? I feel angry about it."

      "Why?"

      "What kind of question is that?"

      "Do you feel angry because you couldn't control what happened? Do you think somehow you're to blame for her death?"

      "What if I said 'yes to all the above'? What difference would it make? She's dead."

      "I think beating up on yourself has about as much merit as masturbation."

      "You're a friend, Rosie, but let it go."