The Marauders (18 page)

They left Hanson’s truck in the harbor parking lot and crossed the road to the twins’ house. It was half past midnight and the mud-and-fish
stench of the bayou was thick in the air. Every so often the wind switched directions and a chemical stink, of petroleum or oil, swept over them.

The house was just where they’d heard. A tidy, mint-green place on pilings across the street from the wharf, a light on in one of the windows. The kitchen: they could see the dark-wood cabinetry, the hanging ceiling light of varicolored glass.

“Wouldn’t mind living in a place like this,” Hanson said.

Cosgrove grunted, scratched his beard. He was wondering how Hanson had talked him into this madness. He wanted money and he wanted more of the marijuana, but many people wanted those things and didn’t go breaking into houses.

They climbed the stairs and Hanson knocked on the door. No answer. Then Hanson went down the stairs and found a tomato-sized rock in the yard and came back up, hurled it through one of the sidelight windows.

The alarm shrilled.

Hanson reached carefully through the broken glass and unlocked the door and went inside. Cosgrove followed. Hanson picked up the rock from the foyer floor and stepped back and hurled it at the alarm code box. The rock smashed the plastic and pieces flew but still the alarm shrieked deafeningly.

Cosgrove saw Hanson’s mouth working crazily but he couldn’t hear a word.

Hanson picked up the rock again. Hurled it.

The alarm screamed on.

“Holy shit,” Cosgrove said, but he couldn’t hear himself.

Hanson held up three fingers: three minutes.

Hanson went into the kitchen and flung open cabinets. In the bedroom down the hall, Cosgrove eviscerated drawers, flinging socks and underwear and T-shirts. He went into another bedroom and did the same. Nothing. In the hallway bathroom he looked through the medicine cabinet and saw only the usual sundries: toothpaste, dental floss, aspirin.

Cosgrove and Hanson met in the foyer. Hanson was shouting soundlessly, pantomiming wildly. Cosgrove screamed back and shook his head.
They went out of the house and thudded down the stairs. Then they sprinted through the yard and across the street.

In the truck they could still hear the house alarm.

They sat catching their breath, Cosgrove glaring at Hanson.

“Fuck you want from me?” he said.

“Unbelievable,” Cosgrove said.

Hanson reached into his pocket and gave Cosgrove a paper towel with numbers written on it in ballpoint pen.

“Coordinates,” Hanson said, stroking his ponytail, still breathing roughly. “Off a GPS on the kitchen counter. Somewhere in the bay.”

Grimes was not, as townsfolk first assumed, a wayward stranger who’d taken a wrong turn off the highway. Actually? His face was familiar, the eyes and mouth. Maybe he was a relative of someone they once knew. And after word spread through town that he was here for business, an oil man, the looks from people in Jeanette grew sharp and threatening. In the café, in the general store, in Sully’s bar.

Even the kids around the Barataria, switch-skinny children with old-soul eyes, sensed something about him. Something off. Loitering in the convenience store parking lot, playing videogames in trawlers’ living rooms, hacky-sacking in the motel roundabout, they beheld him with frank apprehension. Like he was some kind of bogeyman in white button-down shirt and tie.

His whole life, people treated him this way. With suspicion. Even when he was a kid. Especially when he was a kid. Grimes’s classmates said he was spooky, said he stared like a serial killer. They called him Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, Crazy Eyes.

In football during gym class the boys hit him harder than anyone else, power-driving him so hard into the dirt that once he was knocked cold. And in his gym locker they left obscene pictures, of humongous dicks, cut out from pornographic magazines.

One time in the cafeteria line a group of kids behind Grimes broke out in jackal-like laughter. He started toward his table with his face burning, clutching his tray, and the laughter grew. When he sat down at the table with the other outcasts—the Dungeons & Dragons freaks, the deformed goths—he reached and felt his back.

Sure enough: a purple Post-it that said
MARSHMALLOW FAGGOT
in big block letters.

Whatever that meant.

There was just something about him that people never liked.

“People hate me here,” Grimes said to Ingram one night on the phone.

“They’d hate Mother Teresa. People shoot the messenger.”

Grimes lay in bed with a motel cup of scotch balanced one-handed on his chest. His pillow was thin and smelled dank. Tomorrow he would talk to the maid about the pillows. If there was a maid. Maybe go to the department store and buy his own pillow. If there was a department store within fifty square miles of this godforsaken shit-hole.

“I don’t feel right. I’ve been having these nosebleeds.”

“Allergies.”

“Something in the air, I think.”

“Don’t say that. Don’t say that to anyone. Ever.”

“Feels like I’m dying.”

“Last time I went to Louisiana I couldn’t shit right for a month. Something in the water. Don’t drink the water. You drinking the water?”

Grimes felt sick and exhausted and missed the cool gray days of the city, the polychrome electric nights. The glowing signs of Chinese and French and Spanish. He missed the shark-like limousines and the kamikaze taxis and the restaurants and bars open all night, the smoked glass and submarine lighting. The panoply of strange faces, never the same. He missed the noise. God he missed the noise, the deep drone of the city, the crying sirens, the lunatics proselytizing on street corners, the bass and treble of traffic. Most of all he missed anonymity. In a city you could be anyone. In a city your past didn’t have to matter. You could have any past you liked as long as you could imagine it and tell someone with a straight face. Sometimes you could even manage to deceive yourself.

“You been back to Tench’s?” Ingram asked. “Is that the guy?”

“Trench,” Grimes said. “No.”

“Go.”

“I know.”

“Tomorrow.”

Grimes was silent.

“Let’s make a deal.”

“I’m listening.”

“How about a paid vacation when you get back? Two weeks. November, December, whenever you want.”

“How about that promotion?”

“We can talk. If everything goes right.”

Thoughtfully Grimes sipped his scotch.

Next day Grimes went to Trench’s house but he wasn’t there so he went to the harbor. It was late afternoon, the smothering heat almost un-breathable. Grimes found Trench blasting fish guts off the deck of his boat with a spray hose. The runoff piddled into the water where frenzied baitfish pecked at the gore.

Four signatures so far today, Grimes thought. If he was lucky, Trench would make five. Maybe he’d have time left over to get six or seven. “Seven signatures today,” he’d tell Ingram on the phone.

“Where’s the kid?” Grimes said. Because he had to say something. A half-eaten Granny Smith apple in his hand, he stood on the rickety dock, the wood so weather-worn it looked like bleached bone. Sunstruck water flickered through the cracks in the wood.

Trench didn’t answer. He tucked the spray nozzle into the armpit of his lemon-colored polo shirt and rummaged in his front jeans pocket and pulled out a cigarette. A Virginia Slim. As usual.

Trench lit the cigarette and impaled Grimes with his eyes.

“I’m just a middleman, Mr. Trench.”
Five
, Grimes thought. “You know Chris Grimes?”

Trench thumbed the side of his nose, blew smoke.

“That’s my mother,” said Grimes. He smiled and took a bite from the apple.

Trench absorbed this. “Good lady. Great lady. But the apple fell far from the tree. Apple rolled down the gutter and right the shit out of town.”

“I’m trying to be civil, Mr. Trench.”

Trench hissed through his teeth.

“I’m trying to help.” Grimes looked around for a trash can to put his apple in but didn’t see one so plopped the core in the water.

“Help? A hundred thousand in fishing gear just sitting there. You paying for this?”

“You’ll be using that gear again. Before you know it.”

“Fuck my ass I will. Mississippi icehouses ain’t even buying.”

“You’re upset, Mr. Trench. I would be too.”

“Upset? Is that what I am?”

Now Trench was hosing off a contraption that looked half giant monocle and half sieve. “Yeah, how about this? Paying for this too? Forty grand, this fucking thing.”

Grimes wiped his sopping brow with the back of his hand.

“Helps save turtles we never used to catch anyway. The government planted them. Call it Black Sunday round here. Some guy got it on videotape. On his phone or what-the-fuck-ever. Helicopters dropping shit on a Sunday. Monday, people are catching a fuck-ton of turtles. Turtles we’d never seen before. You got a turtle? I got twenty. You got a turtle? I got thirty. Before that? Not one. Day my hair went fucking gray.”

Grimes stood speechless in the smiting sun. He wondered if there wasn’t a soul in the Barataria who wasn’t cracked.

God, to be done with this man once and for all.

“You’re wondering why I’m telling you all this,” Trench said. He went to the gunwale and leaned over the water and spat out the nub of his cigarette. Then he went back to spraying the turtle sorter. “I’m sick of getting fucked. So I ain’t signing.”

“Mr. Trench,” said Grimes.

“Mr. Trench, Mr. Trench. I asked you a million times to leave me alone. You’re stalking me.”

Grimes shaped his eyes sincerely. “You know, Mr. Trench, sometimes people want to help. Help. Even people who work for companies. It’s been known to happen.”

His face kneading, Trench hesitated, let this soak in. Then he threw up his hands. “All right,” he said, “I’ll look at your papers. For a minute. That’s it. Show me the number.”

Incredulous, Grimes didn’t move.

“What you waiting for? Better come before I change my crazy-ass mind.”

Grimes stepped onto the gangplank and when he was halfway to the boat Trench pointed the spray nozzle and blasted him with water so cold that Grimes felt his heart clench. He shrieked and turned and tottered and almost toppled into the water. Then he jumped back onto the dock.

Trench kept spraying.

“Fuckin’ coon-ass,” Grimes said.

“Oh, the truth comes out,” Trench said, laughing now. “Mr. Coon-ass. Mr. Coon-ass.”

Grimes turned away, making himself stroll as still the water hammered at his back. “Big mistake,” he said.

Trench was still cackling and spraying.

Their house was ravaged, broken glass in the foyer and drawers eviscerated in the rooms, boxes and cans tossed about the kitchen floor. Reginald went quickly through the house as if the culprit might be hiding somewhere. Victor squatted and studied the shoeprints on the foyer floor, cursing under his breath. Two different pairs skewed back and forth, one big and the other small. When Reginald returned to the foyer Victor showed him the tracks.

“Lindquist,” Victor said.

“Could’ve been anyone,” said Reginald.

“Bullshit,” Victor said, his face red and clenching like a fist. “Lindquist.”

“Somebody older and maybe a kid looks like,” Reginald said.

“I’ve seen a kid with Lindquist.”

“He’s regular-sized.”

“Who else would it be?”

“Anybody.”

“Bullshit.”

“Better not leap to any wild conclusions,” Reginald said.

“Somebody’s gonna get killed.”

“No they aren’t either.”

“Somebody’s gonna get hurt,” Victor said.