Light of the World (70 page)

“I got sinus problems.” Terry gazed into the shadows behind the boiler. “Jesus Christ, there’re some kids in a cage back there.”

“Get with the program, Terry. Surrette has his own universe. One day he’ll disappear inside it. In the meantime, keep the lines simple.”

Terry lowered his voice and hunched his shoulders, as stupid people do when they don’t want others to hear them. “He told me to get the electric saw out of the closet.”

“Why don’t you say it a little louder so everybody can hear?”

“If I wanted to join the meat cutters’ union, I’d move to Chicago.”

“You bounce a woman off the gravel on her face and all of a sudden you have standards?”

Terry poked a finger into Jack Boyd’s back. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey, what?”

“Watch your mouth.”

Boyd replaced the cap on the empty jug and set it on the floor. “I know your concerns. I’m about to bail myself. Right now we got to do the smart thing. What happens here is on these other people. It might make your stomach churn, but you got to man up sometimes and do what’s necessary and then let it go. Got it?”

“He said the woman on the bed is his. He’s gonna put her in ice?”

“He’s a little weird about Ms. Louviere.”

“Ms.?”

“She’s a class act.”

“Were you on a pad for the Youngers? That’s how you ended up working for a geek?”

“I got fired for doing my job. Now it’s time for you to do yours,” Boyd said.

“They inject in this state.”

“It’s ten grand a pop for the adults.”

“What about the kids?”

“They’re not our business.”

“My end is ten large for each?”

“You heard me.”

Terry rubbed the back of his neck, looking sideways at Molly and Albert. “When do I get paid?” he said.

“No later than noon.”

Terry opened a closet door and clicked on the light. Molly saw at least three semi-automatic weapons propped in the corner. She also saw what appeared to be an armored vest hanging on a wood peg. Terry stood on his tiptoes and removed something from the top shelf. Then he clicked off the light so she could not see what was in his hand.

C
LETE AND I
drove from the marina to the two-lane, then south to the next driveway, the one that led down to the auto repair shed and
through an orchard to the yellowish-gray house that, in the moonlight and the enhancement of the shadows, seemed to contain the bulk and imperial mystery of an ancient castle. Alafair and Gretchen were right behind us. Our headlights were off. The sky had cleared, and the stars were sharply white above the jagged ridge of the mountains to the north. I felt an ominous sense that I couldn’t define, as though all of us were sliding off a precipice. It was not unlike the dream that psychiatrists refer to as a world destruction fantasy, a dream that I had over and over as a child. Clete was bent forward in the passenger seat, staring through the windshield at the house, his jaw flexing.

“I thought I saw a light on the first floor,” he said. “It was on, then it went off. Maybe it was a reflection off the lake.”

“You see any vehicles?” I asked.

“I can’t tell. The cherry trees are in the way. How do you want to play it?”

It was a good question. “We need to confirm we’ve got the right house,” I said.

“He’s in there, Dave. I can smell that guy through the walls.”

I stopped the truck and cut the engine. Gretchen did the same. The wind was out of the west, and I could hear it rustling loudly through the cherry trees. I could also hear waves lapping on the shore, and I could almost hear the echoes of migrant farmworkers singing an ode about a legendary engineer taking his train through the Blue Ridge and Smoky mountains to a place beyond the stars. All the clues to Surrette’s location fitted the place. The only question was whether we should call the sheriff’s department.

Clete read my thoughts. “Don’t do it,” he said. “It will take them two hours or more to pull a team together. They’ll either get here too late or screw it up.”

Both of us knew that was not the reason for his objection. Clete had decided that Surrette and anyone working with him were DOA. In case I doubted that, he added, “You cut their motors and they go straight down, dead before their knees hit the ground. Bad guys lose; hostages come home. End of story. Listen to me on this, Streak. Molly’s and Albert’s lives depend on us, not on anyone else.”

I heard a popping sound and realized someone was firing bottle rockets over the lake. Alafair walked up to my window. “What’s the holdup?” she said.

“This is one we can’t make a mistake on,” I said. I dropped my eyes to her right hand. “Where’d you get the Beretta?”

“It’s Gretchen’s. Let’s get on it, Dave. You’ve never met this guy. I have. He needs ten seconds to ruin the life of a human being. Think about that.”

I got out of the pickup with Albert’s M-1 rifle and the bandolier stuffed full of .30-06 clips. Clete stepped out on the other side, bareheaded, his hair blowing on his forehead. There was an innocence in his face that made me think of the little boy going to the rich lady’s house in the Garden District, expecting ice cream and cake and discovering he had been invited there as an object of pity, one of many tattered children whom in reality the rich lady would not touch unless she were wearing dress gloves. He opened the cast-iron toolbox welded to the bed of my pickup and removed a pair of wire cutters and a crowbar. Gretchen came up behind us, an AR-15 slung over her shoulder, a pair of binoculars in her right hand.

“Did you all see a light inside?” she asked.

“A few minutes ago,” Clete said.

“Where?”

“On the first floor, maybe in the living room.”

“For just an instant I saw a light at ground level, like somebody had pulled back a curtain on a basement window,” she said. “Hear me out before we start busting down doors. I think Felicity Louviere is dead. Maybe the girls, too. With luck, Molly and Albert are still alive. This is what I think will happen when we go in: Surrette will kill everybody in his proximity, then himself. He’s a coward, and he’ll die a coward’s death at the expense of everyone else.”

“What’s the alternative?” I asked.

“There isn’t one,” she said. “I just thought you might like to know what we’re looking at.”

We walked four abreast down the driveway while someone on a boat or an island in the middle of the lake continued to fire rockets
into the sky, all of them bursting into giant tentacles of pink foam high above the vastness of the lake.

I spoke earlier of advice that I had received from others and always remembered. Now I heard a nameless voice repeating an admonition that I had pushed aside, a premise that almost all investigative law enforcement officers never forget.
Crime is about money, sex, or power. If you have the money, you can buy the sex and power. So follow the money.

The other admonition I had forgotten was from my old friend the line sergeant:
Don’t let them get behind you.

T
HE COMBINATION OF
fear and fatigue and the bruises and cuts on her face had worked like a cancer on Molly’s spirit. No matter how hard she tried to hold her head erect, her eyes kept closing and her chin sinking to her chest. She could feel herself slipping away, as though she were dissolving inside warm water, the breakdown of her body becoming its own anodyne, as though a voice were whispering that it was no sin to let the soul depart from the body and be on its way.

Asa Surrette had gone back upstairs, leaving Jack Boyd and Terry in charge.

“Do you fellows know what a fall partner is?” Molly heard Albert say.

“Queer bait on the stroll in October?” Boyd said.

“The guy you get pinched with,” Terry said.

“Surrette never had a fall partner,” Albert said.

“Meaning he works alone?” Terry said. “What else is new?”

“He’s not that smart,” Albert said. “But when it’s over, he’s the only guy left standing. What’s that tell you?”

“I know where you’re going with that,” Terry said. “Look, go out with some dignity, old-timer. Don’t start turning dials on the wrong guy and treating other people like they’re simpletons.”

There was a popping sound, high in the sky. Terry climbed on a
chair below the window that was taped over with a black leaf bag. He peeled the bag from the corner of the glass and peered out.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Boyd said.

“That noise. It’s people shooting off fireworks over the lake.”

“Tape up that window!” Boyd said.

“All right, don’t shit your pants. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Jack, but I think you’re out of your depth. You should stick to taking bribes.”

Surrette opened the upstairs door and came down the steps. “What’s going on down here? What were you doing on that chair?”

“People are shooting fireworks on the lake,” Terry said. “I’m a little tired of the way I’m being talked to, here. I’d like to finish this up and get paid and be on my way, if you don’t mind too much. I don’t like that stuff with the kids, either.”

Surrette approached, his formless suit loose on his body, his Roman sandals scudding on the concrete floor, a malevolent glow in his face. He took a coil of clothesline from his coat pocket. It seemed to drop like a white snake from his palm as he pressed it into Terry’s hand. “So show me what you can do,” he said.

“The broad and the old guy?”

“Yeah, you up to it?” Surrette said.

“I’ll handle my end.”

“Sure you will,” Surrette said. “Go ahead, get started.”

“The woman on the bed? She keeps moaning,” Terry said.

“That’s about to end. You dropped the rope. Pick it up.”

Terry shook his head. “I’m going back to Reno.”

“Walking, are you?” Surrette said.

“I’m saying include me out. I’m DDD on this. Deaf, dumb, and don’t know. I got no issue with you. I got no issue with these people. You don’t owe me anything. I’m gone. Okay?”

“No, not okay,” Surrette said. “Let me show you how it’s done. You might develop a taste for it.” He walked to the bed and took a switchblade from his coat pocket. He pushed the release button. The blade, seven inches long with the wavy blue-and-white glimmer of an icicle, sprang to life in his hand. Felicity opened her eyes.

“It’s time, is it?” she said.

“Maybe,” he said.

“Go ahead.”

“You really want me to?”

“I do. Untie my hand, please.”

“What?”

“I’ll help you. You mustn’t be afraid.”

“
I
shouldn’t be afraid?”

“Please. Just release my right hand.”

“So you can do what?”

“Touch you.”

His mouth moved as though he wanted to smile. “You have things a little turned around.”

Her right wrist pulled against the rope. “Please,” she said.

“All right, your highness,” he said. He gripped the rope and sliced it in half. “Now what?”

She fitted her fingers around his wrist and guided the blade to her breast. “Push it in,” she said. “Make it quick.”

“Asa! Listen to that noise out there!” Boyd said.

“What noise?” Surrette said.

“Like thousands of people roaring in a stadium,” Boyd said.

“That’s the wind,” Surrette said. “Storms come off the lake almost every night here. The wind makes a roaring sound through the orchards.”

“You hear
that
? You call it wind? What the fuck is it, man?” Terry said.

“I don’t hear anything,” Surrette said.

“I’m out of here,” Terry said.

Surrette started to reply. Then somebody began tapping on the window glass, the one he had blacked out with a leaf bag.

“Can you hear me, Mr. Surrette?” a voice said. “It’s Alafair Robicheaux. How have you been? We’ve surrounded your house and cut your phone line. No police are on their way. The people with me plan to do you great physical injury, but we will not bother your friends. If you release your prisoners, you can live. Otherwise you will die, and probably not at once. Tell us what you want to do.”

Surrette’s face went white, like a prune that had never seen light, his eyes brightening, his nostrils swelling like a feral animal’s.

A
LAFAIR REMAINED CROUCHED
on one side of the basement window, listening for a response. She stood up and stepped away from the window.

“Could you hear anything?” I asked.

“I think I heard Surrette talking. Maybe Jack Boyd, too. There may be another guy down there, too.”

“Did you hear Molly or Albert?” I asked.

She shook her head, her eyes not meeting mine.

Clete had positioned himself at the rear of the house; Gretchen was in the front yard. I signaled to both of them. Clete picked up a scrolled-iron chair from the patio and threw it through the French doors, then broke two windows in back with stones the size of grapefruit that he had picked up from the rock garden. Seconds later, Gretchen flung a flowerpot through the picture window in the living room. Alafair and I moved around to the back of the house, staying close to the walls so no one on the second floor would have an easy shot. There was no sound or sign of movement inside the house.

“I hate to admit this, Dave, but this one has me creeped out,” Clete said.