We stood in the street while Minos talked with a collection of Mexican drug agents gathered around the tailgate of an army six-by. The air was shining and cool after the rain, and you could see for miles. Heriberto stared off in the distance at a rambling white ranch house with a blue tile roof on the slope of a hill. His legs were spread slightly, his expression contemplative.
“Big day for the Tejano. We gonna fuck him up good, man,” he said.
“That’s where he lives? You think maybe he’s seen us coming?” I asked.
“We cut his phone. He ain’t going nowhere.”
I took Minos aside.
“What are they expecting to find up there, the Russian Army?” I said.
“A lot of these guys speak English, Dave.”
“They’ve blown the operation.”
“Not in their mind. This is how they say ‘get out of town’ to people they normally can’t touch. Mason should be flattered.”
“You don’t like him?”
“My sister was a flowerchild back in the sixties. She thought this guy was a great man. She got loaded on hash and acid and floated out on the sunset from a ten-story window.”
We followed a caravan of six army trucks down a winding dirt road to the walled compound that surrounded Clay Mason’s ranch. The walls were topped with broken glass and spirals of razor wire, and the wood gates at the entrance were chain-locked and barred with a crossbeam inside. The lead truck, which was fronted with a plow-shaped dozer blade, gained speed, roaring across the potholes, the soldiers in back rocking back and forth, then crashed through the gates and blew them off their hinges.
The soldiers trashed the house, fanned out into the yards and outbuildings, kicked chickens out of their way like exploding sacks of feathers, and for no apparent reason shot a pig running from a barn and threw it down the well.
“Can you put a stop to this bullshit?” I said to Minos.
“You see that fat slob with the Sam Browne belt on? He’s a graduate of the School of the Americas at Fort Benning. He also owns a whorehouse. He knocked the glass eye out of a girl for sassing him. No, thanks.”
While his house was being torn apart, Clay Mason leaned against a cedar post on his front porch and smoked a hand-rolled cigarette, his pixie eyes fixed on me and Minos. His hair extended like white straw from under his domed Stetson hat.
“Karyn warned me you’re a vindictive man,” he said.
“I’m sorry about your place. It’s not my doing,” I said.
“Like hell it isn’t.” Then a yellow tooth glinted behind his lip and he added, “You little pisspot.”
He flipped his cigarette away, walked to the corner of his house on his cane, and urinated in the yard, audibly passing gas with his back turned to us, shaking his penis, a small, hatted, booted man, in a narrow, ratty coat, whose power had touched thousands of young lives.
Helen and I walked behind the ranch house, where the soldiers had forced five field hands to lean spread-eagled against the stone wall of the barn. The field hands were young and frightened and kept turning their heads to see if guns were being pointed at their backs. The soldiers shook them down but kept them leaning on their arms against the wall.
“I don’t like being in on this one, Dave,” Helen said.
“Don’t watch it. We’ll be out of here soon,” I said.
We walked inside the barn. The loft was filled with hay, the horse stalls slatted with light, the dirt floor soft as foam rubber with dried manure. Through the doors at the far end I could see horses belly-deep in grass against a blue mountain.
Hanging from pegs on a wood post, like a set used by only one man, were a pair of leather chaps, a bridle, a yellow rain slicker, a sleeveless knitted riding vest, flared gloves made from deer hide, and two heavy Mexican spurs with rowels as big as half dollars. I rotated one of the rowels with my thumb. The points were sticky and coated with tiny pieces of brown hair.
Behind the post, a silver saddle was splayed atop a sawhorse. I ran my hand across the leather, the cool ridges of metal, the seared brand of a Texas cattle company on one flap. The cantle was incised with roses, and in the back of the cantle was a mother-of-pearl inlay of an opened camellia.
“What is it?” Helen said.
“Remember, the guy named Arana said the bugarron rode a silver saddle carved with flowers? I think Clay Mason’s our man.”
“What can you do about it?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s it?”
“Who knows?” I said.
We walked back into the sun’s glare and the freshness of the day and the wind that smelled of water and grass and horses in the fields.
But the young field hands spreadeagled against the stone wall of the barn were not having a good day at all. The shade was cool in the lee of the barn, but they were sweating heavily, their arms trembling with tension and exertion. One boy had a dark inverted V running down his pants legs, and the soldiers were grinning at his shame.
“School of the Americas?” I said to the fat man in the Sam Browne belt. I tried to smile.
He wore tinted prescription glasses and stood taller than I. His eyes looked at me indolently, then moved to Helen, studying her figure.
“What you want?” he said.
“How about cutting these guys some slack? They’re not traffickers, they’re just campesinos, right?” I said.
“We decide what they are. You go on with the woman . . . Is guapa, huh? Is maybe lesbian but puta is puta.” He held out his palms and cupped them, as though he were holding a pair of cantaloupes.
“What’d you say?” Helen asked.
“He didn’t say anything,” I said.
“Yeah he did. Say it again, you bucket of bean shit, and see what happens.”
The officer turned away, a wry smile on his mouth, a light in the corner of his eye.
She started to step toward him, but I moved in front of her, my eyes fastened on hers. The anger in her gaze shifted to me, like a person breaking glassware indiscriminately, then I saw it die in her face. I walked with her toward the ranch house, the backs of my fingers touching her hand. She widened the space between us.
“Next time don’t interfere,” she said.
“Those kids would have taken our weight.”
“Oh yeah? . . . Well . . . I’m sure you’re right . . . You swinging dicks are always right . . . Let’s close it down here. I’ve had my share of the tomato patch for today.”
She walked ahead of me through the open front door of the house into the living room, where Clay Mason sat in a deep deer-hide chair amid a litter of shattered glass, antique firearms stripped from the walls, splayed books, and overturned furniture. On one stucco wall, pinned inside a broken viewing case, was a sun-faded flag of the Texas republic.
Mason’s hands were folded on top of his cane, his eyes narrow and liquid with resentment.
“Don’t get up . . . I just need to use your john . . . Such a gentleman . . . ,” she said, and continued on into the back of the house, without ever slowing her step.
“Looks like you’re going to skate,” I said.
“My family earned every goddamn inch of this place. We’ll be here when the rest of you are dust.”
An upper corner of the Texas flag had fallen loose from the blue felt backboard it was pinned to. I reached through the broken glass and smoothed the cloth flat and replaced the pin. Faded strips of butternut cloth, inscribed in almost illegible ink with the names of Civil War battles, were sewn around the flag’s borders.
“This flag belonged to the Fourth Texas. Those were John Bell Hood’s boys,” I said.
“My great-grandfather carried that flag.”
“It was your family who lived on the ranch next to the LaRoses’, west of the Pecos, wasn’t it? Jerry Joe Plumb told me how y’all slant drilled and ran wets across the river.”
“Do you read newspapers? There’s a revolution being fought here. Everything you’re doing helps those men out t
here kill Mayan Indians.”
“Men like you always have a banner, Dr. Mason. The truth is, you live vicariously through the suffering of other people.”
“Get out . . .” He flicked at the air with the backs of his fingers, as though he were dispelling a bad odor.
I tried to think of a rejoinder, but I had none. Clay Mason had spent a lifetime floating above the wreckage he had precipitated, seemingly immune to all the Darwinian and moral laws that affected the rest of us, and my rhetoric sounded foolish compared to the invective he had weathered for decades.
I stepped across the broken glass on the oak floor toward the open doorway. Outside, the soldiers were loading up in the six-bys.
“Hold on, Streak,” Helen said behind me. “It looks like our friend flushed the candy store down the commode. Except it backed up on him. Guess what got stuck under the rim?”
She dipped the tip of her little finger into a child’s balloon and held the white powder up in a column of sunlight, then wiped her finger on a piece of tissue paper.
“It’s a little wet. Can you call that fat guy in, see if he wants to do the taste test?” she said.
CHAPTER
36
I should have seen it coming but I didn’t.
The morning after our return from Guadalajara the sheriff opened the door to my office and leaned inside.
“That was Lafayette P.D. You’d better get over there. Sabelle Crown’s pinned inside a car on the Southern Pacific tracks.”
“What happened?”
“She was abducted from the city golf course by this guy Zerrang. What was she doing on a golf course?”
“She feeds the pigeons there.”
“Anyway, Zerrang must have taken her somewhere. Evidently it was pretty bad. When he was finished, he left her unconscious in her car on the train tracks. Why’s Zerrang after Sabelle Crown?”
“He wants her father,” I said.
“I don’t get it.”
“Mookie Zerrang works for Persephone Green and Jimmy Ray Dixon. Jimmy Ray knows sooner or later Aaron’s going to kill him.”
“What for?”
“I think it has to do with Sabelle.”
’To tell you the truth, Dave, I really don’t give a damn about any of these people’s motivations. It’s like figuring out why shit stinks. I just wish they’d stay the hell out of our parish. Get over there, will you?”
The sheriff brushed something out of his eye, then he said, “Except why would this guy torture a woman, then leave her on the train tracks? Why didn’t he just kill her and put her out of her misery?”
“Because he hurts a-lot more people this way,” I said.
Helen Soileau and I drove in a cruiser on the four-lane to Lafayette. Emergency flares burned inside the fog when we arrived at the railroad crossing where the freight locomotive had struck Sabelle’s gas-guzzler broadside and pushed it fifty yards down the rails in a spray of sparks.
We parked on the shoulder of the road and walked through the weeds to the car’s wreckage by the side of the tracks. It lay upside down, the engine block driven through the firewall, the roof mashed against the steering column. Lafayette firemen had covered the outside metal, the engine, and gas tank with foam and were trying to wedge open the driver’s window with a hydraulic jack.
A paramedic had worked his way on his stomach through the inverted passenger’s window, and I could hear him talking inside. A moment later he crawled back out. His shirt and both of his latex gloves were spotted with blood.
He sat in the grass, his hands on his thighs. A fireman put a plug of tobacco in the paramedic’s mouth to bite off, then helped him up by one arm.
“How’s it look?” I said.
“The car didn’t burn. Otherwise, that lady don’t have a whole lot of luck,” he replied. He looked into my eyes and saw the unanswered question still there. He shook his head.
I took off my coat, slipped my clip-on holster off my belt, and squeezed through the passenger’s window into the car’s interior. I could smell gas and the odor of musty cushions and old grease and burnt electrical wires.
Sabelle’s head and upper torso were layered with crumpled metal, so that she had virtually no mobility. I couldn’t see the lower portion of her body at all. She coughed, and I felt the spray touch my face like a warm mist.
“What’d he do to you, kiddo?” I said.
“Everything.”
“Those guys out there are the best. They’ll have you out of here soon.”
“When I close my eyes I can feel the world turning. If I don’t open them quickly, I won’t get back . . . I betrayed Daddy, Dave.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Mookie Zerrang knows where he is.”
“There’s still time to stop it. If you’ll trust me.”
Her eyes went out of focus, then settled on mine again. One cheek was marbled with broken veins. The rent metal around her head looked like an aura fashioned out of warped pewter.
She told me where to look.
“Jimmy Ray Dixon was your pimp in New Orleans, wasn’t he? Then he took you north, to work for him in Chicago.”
“I made my own choices. I got no kick coming.”
“Your father murdered Ely Dixon, didn’t he?”
“Wipe my nose, Streak. My hands are caught inside something.”
I worked my handkerchief from my back pocket and touched at her upper lip with it. She coughed again, long and hard this time, gagging in her throat, and I tried to hold her chin so she wouldn’t cut it on a strip of razored metal that was wrapped across her chest. The handkerchief came away with a bright red flower in the middle of it.
“I have to go now,” I said.
“Tell Daddy I’m sorry,” she said.
“You’re the best daughter a father could have, Sabelle.”
I thought her eyes wrinkled at the corners. But they didn’t. Her eyes were haunted with fear, and my words meant nothing.
I backed out of the passenger window onto the grass. I could smell water in a ditch, the loamy odor of decayed pecan husks in an orchard, taste the fog on my tongue, hear the whirring sound of automobile tires out on the paved road. I walked away just as a team of firemen and uniformed Lafayette cops used the Jaws of Life to wrench open one side of the wrecked car. The sprung metal sounded just like a human scream.
* * *
Helen and I drove down I-10 toward the Atchafalaya River. It was misting, and the fields and oak and palm trees along the roadside were gray and wet-looking, and up ahead I could see the orange and blue glow of a filling station inside the fog that rolled off the river.
“What are you worrying about?” Helen said.
I touched the brake on the cruiser.
“I’ve got to do something,” I said.
“What?”
“Maybe Zerrang didn’t head right for the Basin. Maybe there’s another way to pull his plug.”
“You don’t look too happy about it, whatever it is,” she said.
“How would you like to save Buford LaRose’s career for him?” I said.
I called his house from the filling station pay phone. Through the glass I could see the willows on the banks of the Atchafalaya, where we were to meet two powerboats from the St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Department.
“Buford?” I said.
“What is it?”
“Sabelle Crown’s dead.”
“Oh man, don’t tell me that.”
“She was tortured, then left on a train track in her car by Mookie Zerrang.”
I could hear him take the receiver away from his ear, hear it scrape against a hard surface. Then I heard him breathing in the mouthpiece again.
“You were right about Aaron Crown,” I said. “He killed Ely Dixon. But it was a mistake. He went to the house to kill Jimmy Ray. He didn’t know that Jimmy Ray had moved out and rented it to his brother.”
“Why would he want to kill Jimmy Ray Dixon?”
“Jimmy Ray got
Sabelle started in the life . . . You’re vindicated, Buford. That means you get word to Persephone Green to call Mookie Zerrang off.”
“Are you insane? Do you think I control these people? What in God’s name is the matter with you?”
“No, they control you.”
“Listen, I just had that ghoul beating on my front door. I ran him off my property with a pistol.”
“Which ghoul?”
“Who else, Dock Green. His wife dumped him. He accused me and Karyn of being involved in a ménage à trois with her. I guess that’s her style.”
“It seems late to be righteous,” I said.
“What’s that mean?”
“You treated Sabelle Crown like shit.”
He was silent for what seemed a long time. Then he said, “Yeah, I didn’t do right by her . . . I wish I could change it . . . Good-bye, Dave.”
He quietly hung up the phone.
* * *
Helen and I sat in the cabin of the St. Martin Parish sheriff’s boat. The exhaust pipes idled at the water-line while a uniformed deputy smoked a cigarette in the open hatchway and waited for the boat skipper to return from his truck with a can of gasoline.
I could feel Helen’s eyes on my face.
“What is it?” I said.
“I don’t like the way you look.”
“It hasn’t been a good day.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be in on this one,” she said.
“Is that right?”
“Unless he deals it, Mookie Zerrang comes back alive, Streak.”
“Well, you never know how things are going to work out,” I said.
Her lips were chapped, and she rubbed them with the ball of her finger, her eyes glazed over with hidden thoughts.
* * *
We went down the Atchafalaya, with the spray blowing back across the bow, then we entered a side channel and a bay that was surrounded by flooded woods. Under the sealed sky, the water in the bay was an unnatural, luminous yellow, as though it were the only element in its environment that possessed color. Up ahead, in the mist, I could see the shiny silhouette of an abandoned oil platform, then a canal through the woods and inside the tangle of air vines and cypress and willow trees a shack built on wood pilings.
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