Light of the World

by James Lee Burke

  “You were right about Jack Boyd, Gretchen,” I said. “He’s got them. How bad did you work him over?”

  “I did as much damage to him as I could in the time that I had,” she answered, holding her eyes on mine.

  And Molly will pay the price, I thought.

  “Did you say something?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “They can’t be far away, Dave,” Alafair said.

  I wasn’t so sure. Maybe Boyd or Surrette had a boat. Maybe Boyd had gotten past us on a dirt road up the hill. Maybe he had changed vehicles. We needed the state authorities. We needed roadblocks. We needed a police helicopter with a searchlight. We needed all the things I would have had access to as a police officer in the state of Louisiana. Our credibility with the locals was zero.

  I had more information in my head than I could think about. Surrette was holed up in a place that had a basement. It was within earshot of a bay where amphibians landed and took off. Someone had held a revival or prayer meeting not far away. But where? The area was full of fruit pickers in the summertime, and they brought their hymnbooks and open-air churches and came and went with the wind.

  “The marina,” I said.

  “Yeah?” Clete said, flexing his right hand at his side.

  “Rich guys own sailboats. They also own amphibians.”

  “They don’t necessarily own both,” he replied.

  “The marina has a bar. It’s a small one. But it stays open until two,” I said.

  “How do you know?” he asked.

  Because it’s what I think about all the time. “I saw it when Alafair and I were waterskiing once,” I replied.

  It didn’t take us long to get to the marina, but we were running out of options and time. I wished I hadn’t alienated Sheriff Elvis Bisbee. I wished I had not contended with Alafair when she said Surrette had survived the collision of the jail van and the gasoline truck. I wished I had accepted Wyatt Dixon’s belief that Surrette represented a mindless form of evil that seemed to have neither genetic nor environmental origins. I wished I were not so powerless with adversaries like the Youngers and others whose imperious vision of the earth is seldom challenged.

  Did I learn anything from sorting through the history of our relationship with Asa Surrette? No, not at all. At a certain point, I would come to a personal conclusion about who he was or who he wasn’t, but it would not be one that I would share. Why is that? Because some things are unknowable, such as the origins of evil.

  In the meantime, I wanted to see Surrette and his minions body-bagged and dumped ignominiously in a potter’s field.

  There were light poles on the docks at the marina, and moths swarmed around them and sometimes dropped in the water. Most of the sailboats in the slips were dark, their hulls rocking, their mooring ropes tensing against the chop. The bar had a counter with six stools, and a table where a chessboard had been set up. The bartender looked at his watch when we walked in. He was young and tan, wearing a yellow muscle shirt, probably a swimmer rather than a weight lifter. MYSTERIOUS GALAXY BOOKSTORE, SAN DIEGO, CA was printed on the back of his shirt. “I was going to close a little early tonight,” he said.

  “Know a guy named Jack Boyd?” I said.

  “He keeps a boat here?” he said.

  “I doubt it.”

  “I don’t think I know him. What’s the deal?”

  “Any pontoon planes land around here?” Clete said.

  “Some Hollywood guys flew in for the weekend. They left this morning.”

  “You know about the guy who got dragged down the Eastside Highway?” Clete asked.

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “We’re looking for the guy who did it.”

  The bartender looked past us at Gretchen and Alafair. “I don’t want to be rude, but I don’t think you guys are cops, and I don’t know why you’re asking me questions.”

  I opened my shield. “My name is Dave Robicheaux. I’m a sheriff’s detective in New Iberia, Louisiana. This is Clete Purcel. He’s a private investigator there. This is my daughter, Alafair, and her friend Gretchen. We’d appreciate any information you can give us.”

  There are two pieces of advice I’ve received in my life that I have never forgotten. The first came from a line sergeant who had been at Heartbreak Ridge. My third day in Vietnam, I was ordered to go down a night trail deep inside Indian country and set up an ambush. It was a night trail that was probably salted with Chinese toe-poppers or 105 duds strung with trip wires. The sergeant read the fear and uncertainty in my face the way you read contour lines on a topography map. “Here’s the key, Loot,” he said. “You never think or talk about it before you do it, and you don’t think or talk about it after it’s over.”

  The other piece of advice came from a corrupt and thoroughly worthless Teamster official in Baton Rouge, a man whose voice box had been eaten away by cigarettes and whiskey. He said, “It ain’t about money, Robicheaux. It’s about respect. That’s what every workingman and -woman on this planet wants. Anybody don’t know that should have a telephone pole kicked up his ass.”

  I gazed up the slope at the orchards blowing in the wind and the two-story house constructed of yellowish-gray stone slabs and the mechanic’s shed and several concrete trailer pads that seemed to be no longer in use.

  “Who lives in the stone house?” I asked.

  “A lady from Malibu,” the bartender said. “Or she did own it. She used to come in here and stay late, know what I mean?”

  “Where is she now?”

  “I heard she went back to her husband or something. A lot of California people come out here but don’t stay. We call it the Banana Belt of Montana, but ten-below weather is a hard sell.”

  “This isn’t ten-below weather,” Clete said.

  “The lady had problems. She’d go off with guys I wouldn’t want to hang with.”

  “Which guys?”

  “Guys on the make, guys trolling for older women,” he said. “Anybody who’s in a bar at two A.M. has a problem. Know what the problem is?”

  “He doesn’t have a home or family to go to,” I said.

  Outside the window, I could see the moths fluttering in the electric glow of the light poles and dropping into the water, their paperlike wings dissolving in the black shine of the waves. I could feel my energies draining, my concentration slipping.

  “Can I fix you guys something?” the bartender said.

  “Do you ever have any revivals or outdoor prayer meetings hereabouts?” I said.

  “Funny you ask,” he said. “Some of the migrants have gatherings at that old trailer park there.”

  “They’re Hispanic?” I said.

  “Maybe the ones who have Saturday-night vespers are. But there’s a bluegrass bunch that really rocks. In winter, I play in a band in La Jolla. I’d like to take a couple of those guys with me.”

  I waited, giving him no lead, avoiding any hint of what I wanted to hear him say. I heard Alafair and Gretchen step closer to the counter. “They’re pretty good, huh?” I said.

  “When they sing ‘The Old Rugged Cross,’ it’d make an atheist weep.”

  I nodded.

  “You know the old union song ‘A Miner’s Life Is Like a Sailor’s’?”

  “I do,” I said.

  “It comes from a song titled ‘Life Is Like a Mountain Railway.’ These guys can really do it.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Clete said.

  “What did you say?” the bartender asked.

  “Not you, buddy,” Clete said. He jabbed his finger at the air, indicating the darkened two-story house down the shore. “That’s got to be it, Streak,” he said. “We take these motherfuckers off at the neck, and we do it now. No thinking about it, no looking back. Full-throttle and fuck it, right?”

  “Roger that,” I said.

  “Who are you guys?” the bartender said.

  “The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide,” Clete said. “You didn’t know that?”

  “The
what?” the bartender said.

  “Hey, handsome?” Gretchen said.

  “What?” the bartender said.

  “You’re a nice guy,” she said. “You’ve done your part. We’ve got it covered. We’ll take care of the phone calls. Okay?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” he said.

  “I like your muscle tone. Maybe I’ll check back with you later. Keep a good thought,” she said. She winked at him.

  He looked at her with his mouth open.

  MOLLY AND ALBERT were sitting on the basement floor, their wrists tied behind them with wire twisted around a water pipe. Against the far wall, Molly could see a woman spread-eagled on a box spring, a sheet draped over her body. Behind a boiler, two girls were sitting in a wire cage. They were huddled against each other, their knees drawn up before them. Next to the cage was a ladder extending through a trapdoor in the ceiling. In another corner, she could hear Jack Boyd pouring liquid from a big white plastic jug into one of two washtubs set side by side. When he finished, he set the empty jug on the floor and took another one from a wall shelf. Boyd appeared to be holding his breath while he poured, his face pinched against the acidic stench.

  Asa Surrette had come down the stairs twice to look at the woman on the box spring, placing his fingers on her throat to feel her pulse, staring into her face for a long time before returning to the first floor.

  Terry came down the wood steps and watched Jack Boyd filling the second washtub. He glanced over his shoulder at Molly and Albert, then looked at Boyd. “Your man up there has a frontal lobe missing,” he said.

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” Boyd replied.

  “He just told me what we’re doing.”

  “You want to give me a hand here?”

  “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.

  CLETE 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.

  THE 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.”