Light of the World dr-20

by James Lee Burke

  “Don’t listen to what he says!” Jack Boyd shouted at the stairs. “Ask Caspian! I was trying to help!”

  “You lying little shit, get in the fight or die now,” Surrette said.

  Jack Boyd crouched lower behind the box spring, his mouth trembling, his flared sideburns powdered with pieces of brick mortar. “Ask her,” he said. “I tried to be kind to her. I respected her. She’ll tell you that. I’m going to come out now. Don’t shoot.”

  Surrette was on one knee. He began firing at the stairs while Terry reloaded, the rounds splintering wood out of the ceiling, caroming off the stone walls and whanging against the boiler. Surrette rose to his feet and bolted across the basement, smashing the bulbs in their sockets, dropping the room into darkness. “Thought it would be easy, did you?” he said. “You have no idea of the power that lives within me.”

  Molly would have sworn that the voice she heard was not Surrette’s, that it was disembodied and had no human source and rose out of a fetid well that had no bottom.

  “Defy me, will you?” Surrette said. “See how you feel one hour from now about the choices you’ve made. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

  * * *

  Gretchen backed out of the staircase. The bolt on her AR-15 had locked open on an empty chamber. She dropped the jungle-clipped magazine from the frame and inverted it and reloaded with the second magazine. She snapped the bolt shut. “Did you hear that guy?” she said.

  “Don’t be taken in. It’s his death song,” I said.

  Down below, we could hear someone moving about and shell casings rolling across the concrete.

  “I’m going outside to get a shot through the window,” she said.

  “Did you hear that?” Alafair said.

  “Hear what?” I asked.

  “Upstairs,” she replied. She shone a penlight on the ceiling. “Somebody’s up there.”

  “I heard it, too,” Clete said. “I’m going up there. Alafair, go down to the marina and use the landline to call the sheriff’s department.”

  “The marina’s closed,” she said.

  Clete went into the living room. The floor was bare, and I could hear his shoes on the hardwood, then the creak of a banister when he mounted the stairs.

  “Can you hear me, Mr. Boyd?” I called into the basement.

  There was no answer.

  “You can walk out of this, partner,” I said. “Maybe it’s as you say — you were trying to bring in Surrette and get your badge back. Don’t take his fall.”

  “Dave!” Molly said. “Somebody else is in the house! Asa Surrette is a fiend. Kill him!”

  “When this is over, I’m going to take my time with you, bitch,” Surrette said.

  * * *

  When Clete reached the landing, he saw two doors on either side, a third directly before him, and an alcove that gave onto a balcony overlooking the lake. He paused, not moving, listening, pointing his .38 snub-nosed revolver in front of him with both hands. He opened the door on his right and let it swing back toward the wall while he aimed into the gloom. There was nothing inside except an exercise machine. He stepped back onto the landing, a board squeaking under his weight, and opened the second door. He could see a toilet bowl, a sink, and a bathtub with a shower curtain. He peeled back the curtain, looking over his shoulder through the open door.

  There was water in the bottom of the tub and a layer of grit on the sides. He went back on the landing and eased his way along the wall until he could reach the third door without stepping in front of it. He twisted the knob and gently pushed the door open.

  “My name is Clete Purcel. I’m a PI from New Orleans,” he said. “I don’t know who you are, but our issue is with Asa Surrette, not anybody else. If you’ve got a piece on you, slide it out here and let me know who you are.”

  An odor that was like body grease and moldy towels and unwashed hair and sewage struck Clete’s face with such force that he gagged and had to cover his mouth with his hand.

  “Are you a prisoner here?” he asked.

  He heard a voice that sounded like someone forming words in his throat without being able to hold the syllables together.

  “Who are you, buddy?” Clete said. “Are you hurt?”

  There was no answer. Clete eased closer to the doorframe, his .38 lowered, his shoulder and arm pressed flat against the wall. Inside the room, he could hear someone breathing with a clotted hoarseness that made him think of a wounded animal cornered in its lair.

  “You heard all that shooting down below,” he said. “That means other people will be here soon, including paramedics. Everything is going to be okay. Come on out, podjo.”

  He counted to ten, his throat drying up, his eyes stinging with perspiration. “You want a flash grenade in there? They can really mess up your ears. Come on, bud, this is a pain in the ass for both of us.”

  Whoever was in the room was not going to cooperate. Was this how it was going to end, confronting a barricaded suspect, someone he had never seen or against whom he held no grievance? Clete took a breath and gripped the .38 with both hands, his back and massive shoulders pressed tightly against the wall. Showtime, motherfucker, he thought. Then he swung himself into the doorway, his arms stretched straight out in front of him, his snub-nose aimed in the face of a man who had the physical proportions of a steroid addict, whose wide-set eyes and long upper lip were the classic signs of fetal alcohol syndrome, whose cheeks were covered with a soft simian pad of hair, whose mouth was twisted out of shape as though made of rubber.

  “Throw it away,” Clete said. “You’ve got no reason to be afraid. We can help you. Surrette has killed lots of people, and he has to pay for it. Guys like you and me are just doing our job. Whatever your problem is, we can fix it. Put down your weapon and back away from it.”

  He knew how it was going to play out, no different from a filmstrip that had snapped in half and was spinning out of control on the reel. He saw himself and the impaired man caught forever in a series of black-and-white fragments that Clete would never be able to scrub from his dreams. The impaired man pointed a single-barrel .410 shotgun pistol at Clete’s chest.

  Clete began firing, not counting the number of rounds he squeezed off, his ears ringing, the man going straight down on his knees, looking up at Clete. Clete kept pulling the trigger, the cylinder turning, the hammer snapping dryly on spent cartridges, both hands shaking even after his target had slumped sideways on the floor.

  Clete hit the light switch. The dead man’s mouth was hanging open, the overhead light shining into it. “Good God,” he said, his stomach turning.

  He leaned against the wall, his eyes shut, his head exploding with sound and color, wondering who he was or who he had become and at the lengths he would go in order to stay alive.

  * * *

  Clete came downstairs; his green eyes were the only color in his face. He paused and dumped his spent cartridges in his palm, then clinked them into his coat pocket, as though walking around inside a dream.

  “What happened up there?” I said.

  “I killed a guy. He had a four-ten pistol,” he replied. “I tried to make him put it down. He was making sounds like he was trying to talk, and I shot him.”

  “Who was he?” I said.

  “I never saw him before. Dave, his tongue was cut out. I smoked a guy who couldn’t talk. Maybe he was retarded. I don’t know what he was.”

  “Slow it down. Are you sure what you saw?”

  “You think I could make something like that up? He must be some guy who works for Surrette. Maybe there are more like him on the property, like some kind of cult.”

  “You’ve got to keep it together, partner,” I said. “There’s nothing supernatural about Surrette. Psychopaths network.”

  But Clete’s mind was obviously concentrated on the image of the man who had died in front of his revolver, and he was not interested in hearing anything I had to say.

  “I tried to go down in the basement twice but
got kicked back up the stairs,” I said. “Someone is in the corner with a semi-auto and a high-capacity magazine.”

  “Where’s Alafair?” he asked.

  “Outside with Gretchen.”

  “What are they waiting on?”

  “I don’t know, Clete. What are they supposed to do? Spray the basement through the window?”

  “Maybe the guy upstairs was trying to tell me something. Maybe he didn’t understand what I said to him. I started shooting and couldn’t stop.”

  “Listen to me. The program is simple. We get all the innocent people out of here, and we dust the rest. That’s it.”

  “I think we blew it. I think this one is coming apart on us.”

  “Wrong.”

  Either Alafair or Gretchen broke the glass and the taped vinyl leaf bag out of the basement window, sending all of it crashing to the floor.

  “I’m going down,” Clete said. “I’m going to take out these fuckers or lose it here.”

  And that’s what he did.

  Chapter 39

  I followed him down the steps into the darkness. The air was damp and smelled of burned gunpowder and water that had stagnated in a drain. There was another odor, too, the one I had smelled outside the cave behind Albert’s house. Again and again, even moments ago, I had denied to others the possibility that Asa Surrette was larger than the sum of his parts. His grandiose rhetoric was pirated from the Bible and even from Percy Shelley. His arrogance and narcissism reminded me of Freud’s statement about the practicing alcoholic: “Ah, yes, his highness the child.” Yet I could not explain the fecal stench exuding from his glands; the level of cruelty he imposed on others; the fact that he murdered children in cold blood and felt no remorse; and finally, his ability to recruit others to his cause, convincing them they could profit by the association and walk away from it unscathed.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville and André Schwarz-Bart, the French-Jewish writer who lost his family at Auschwitz, had all asked the same question and never found an answer, or at least one I knew of. Could I expect more of myself? I wanted to forget Surrette and think of Shakespeare’s famous words in The Tempest. How does the passage go? We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. The poignancy of the line calls up compassion and humility. The words of Surrette suggest a dark complexity that befouls the mind as soon as we try to address it. I think that is where his power came from. We undid ourselves in trying to fathom a mystery that was not a mystery at all.

  As I descended into the basement, into its rank odor of sweat and urine and human torment, I realized that the die was cast for all of us, and speculation was of little value in dealing with evil. We try to protect the innocent and punish the wicked and don’t do a very good job of either. Ultimately, we adopt the methods of our adversaries and grease them off the earth and change nothing.

  These were the same thoughts I had when I went down a night trail salted with Chinese toe-poppers almost fifty years ago. If my old friend the line sergeant were still alive, I wondered what he would have to say. I suspected he would tell me that the biggest illusion in our lives is the belief that we have control over anything.

  We reached the bottom of the stairs without a shot being fired. Clete and I were crouched low, shell casings and powdered brick and concrete and broken glass from the lightbulbs crunching under our shoes. I could make out a stooped figure to our right, close to the wall. “Albert, is that you?” I whispered.

  He didn’t answer. He was working the wire loose from Molly’s wrists. He waved one hand at me, gesturing for me to approach. I worked my way across the basement and propped the M-1 against the wall, then got down on my knees and unwrapped the rest of the wire from Molly’s wrists. I hugged her head against my chest and pressed my face against her hair. Both of her hands were squeezed tight on my forearm. I could feel the heat in her body and the hardness in her back and the hum of her blood when I touched the nape of her neck.

  “At least one of them went up a ladder,” Albert whispered. “Maybe two of them did.”

  “How many were down here?” I asked.

  “Surrette, Boyd, and a guy named Terry,” he said. “Boyd is the weak sister. Terry is the guy who opened up on y’all.”

  “You saw no one else?”

  “We heard Surrette talking to somebody upstairs, somebody whose voice was impaired,” Albert said. “Surrette was yelling at him.”

  “What about Caspian?” I said.

  “He’s not here,” Albert said.

  “The girls are in a cage, Dave,” Molly said. “The ladder is on the other side of the cage.”

  “Where’s Felicity Louviere?”

  “On a bed against the far wall,” Albert said.

  “Is she alive?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “She was in a lot of pain.”

  “He did terrible things to her, Dave,” Molly said. “This man isn’t human.”

  I got to my feet and picked up the M-1. I tried to think what Surrette would do under the present circumstances. He was a survivor of the most cynical kind. If a plane were going down and there was only one parachute on board, Surrette would have it strapped on his back. I suspected that Boyd and Terry and the impaired man Clete killed had never guessed that Surrette probably used countless people just like them, flicking them away as he would a hangnail once they served their purpose.

  From what Albert had said, at least one man was still in the basement. Who would it be? Certainly not Surrette and probably not Jack Boyd.

  I moved away from the wall and tapped Clete on the shoulder, then pointed toward the concrete pillar. He began inching toward the far side of the basement and the bed where Felicity Louviere was tied.

  “Hey, Terry,” I said. “This is Dave Robicheaux. I’m a sheriff’s detective in Louisiana. Let’s talk about your prospects.”

  There was a pause. Then he surprised me. “Go ahead,” he said.

  “You can give it up and cooperate with us or become potted meat here and now. What did you do to my wife’s face?”

  “That was an accident,” he replied.

  “Beating up women is an accident?”

  “She fell. What the fuck, man? Am I my sister’s keeper or what?”

  “Slide your piece out here and live to fight another day.”

  “I sprung a leak. I don’t think I’ve got another day.”

  “You’re hit?”

  I could make out his shadow and hear him moving, his shoes scraping on the concrete, as though he were pushing himself into a more comfortable position against the wall.

  “An ambulance will be out here soon,” I said.

  “Spare me the crap, slick. There’s no cell service, and you cut the telephone line. Nobody’s coming. In case you haven’t been listening, somebody has been setting off fireworks on the lake for the last half hour. We’re just part of the fun.”

  “You sound like a smart guy,” I said. “Why not do the smart thing now? The sunrise can be pretty nice. Why throw it away?”

  “I was a jigger on the biggest armored-car score in the history of Boston. I didn’t do scut work for people like Surrette. I’m not going down on a kidnapping and sexual assault beef.” The finality in his tone was unmistakable.

  I tried again. “It’s always the first inning,” I said. “Ask yourself what’s the better choice, a hospital bed at St. Pat’s or the DOA club.”

  “My full name is Terry McCarthy. Thanks for the dance, slick,” he said. “My family lives in Haverhill, Mass. I’d like to get shipped back there.”

  He worked his back up the wall until he was standing, a Bushmaster semi-auto propped on his hip. His thigh and one arm were wet with blood, his teeth white in the glow through the broken window. He started toward me, dragging one foot, hefting up the Bushmaster so he could level it at me and Molly and Albert. I aimed the M-1 at the middle of his face so the round would destroy his motor control and send him straight to the floor b
efore he could squeeze off a round. Terry McCarthy was grinning, as though he had demonstrated a victory of will over the powers of his executioner. I did not want to shoot him. Like many of his kind, he showed a degree of dignity at the end of the line that made you wonder if things could have been different for him. I squinted through the M-1’s peep sight and tightened my finger inside the trigger guard.

  That was when Gretchen Horowitz snapped off three rounds through the window, just like that, and blew his skullcap all over the floor.

  * * *

  Clete used his pocketknife to cut the ropes binding Felicity’s hands and feet. Then he wrapped her in the sheet on her body and picked her up and carried her up the stairs and through the smashed French doors into the night. Her left arm was around his neck, her head on his shoulder. He could feel her breathing on his chest. “We’re getting you out of here, kid,” he said. “But I got to know who else is on the grounds.”

  “I don’t know,” she whispered.

  “Dave thinks Caspian is a player.”

  “No, he’s afraid of his father. Caspian deserted me, but he won’t do anything to me.”

  “Caspian’s father is dead,” Clete said.

  “Love is dead?” she said.

  “That’s safe to say. Wyatt Dixon or his girlfriend or both of them cut off his head.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “You think a guy like that can’t die? He was a bum, just like his son.” Clete set her down inside Gretchen’s pickup truck and brushed her hair away from her eyes. “You know the difference between rich guys and people like us? They get to make the rules, and we don’t. They screw down and marry up, and the rest of us just get fucked.”

  Even in her pain, he saw her smile. He reclined the seat slightly so she could be more comfortable. There were smudges of blood and grease on the sheet wherever it made contact with her skin. “What did Surrette do to you, Felicity?” he asked.