Light of the World

by James Lee Burke

  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.

  ALAFAIR 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.

  “Why?”

  “None of it makes sense. It’s like a story written for us by somebody else. Felicity turns herself over to this sick fuck, and now Molly and Albert and those girls are in his hands. One guy can’t have this much power and do this much damage.”

  “Hitler did.”

  “Bad comparison. They were just waiting for the right guy to come along and tell them it was okay to turn people into bars of soap. Let’s call for backup.”

  “Do it,” I said.

  He opened his cell phone. “No service,” he said.

  “Good. He doesn’t have any, either,” I said. “I don’t think Surrette will do too well on his own. You want the M-1?”

  He pulled his .38 from his shoulder holster. “No,” he said. “Streak, even if he puts a bullet through my brain, I’m going to kill him. But if this is my last gig, I want you to make me a promise. Take care of Gretchen. She doesn’t realize how talented and smart she is. She got a crummy deal from the day she came out of the womb, and it’s because her old man was a drunk and a bum.”

  “Don’t ever say that, Clete. At least not around me,” I said. I could see the pain in his eyes, and I knew he didn’t understand what I was telling him. “You’re one of the best people on earth,” I said. “No daughter could have a better father. You saved Gretchen’s life, and you saved my life and Molly’s. You changed the lives of dozens of people, maybe hundreds. Don’t you ever speak badly of yourself.”

  His eyes were shiny, his face dilated. “Let’s blow up their shit.”

  “A big ten-four on that,” I replied.

  Clete kicked the back door once, twice, and on the third try, he splintered the wood from the hinges and the dead bolt and knocked the door in on the kitchen floor. Alafair came in behind us. In the living room I could hear Gretchen raking the glass out of a window frame with a hard object before she stepped inside.

  The first floor was completely dark. Through the window, I could see the shadows of the trees moving on the lawn, and waves from the lake sliding up on the lighted sand by the marina. I kept hearing the sergeant’s voice inside my head: Their sappers are the best, Loot. They beat the French with the shovel, not the gun. They’re behind you, Loot. They’re coming through the grass.

  I felt like someone was pulling off my skin, the way you feel when someone is pointing a gun at you and you’re unarmed. Clete was in front of me. He froze and cocked one fist in the air. He turned and pointed two fingers at his eyes, then at a hallway door that was partially ajar.

  I couldn’t concentrate on what he was telling me. I knew our vulnerability did not lie in the basement; it was behind us. You follow the money, I thought. It’s been about money
from the beginning. Surrette got rid of Caspian Younger’s daughter so Caspian could appropriate the oil lands she would inherit from a trust fund left by her parents. Surrette got rich by killing Angel Deer Heart, and Caspian got free of his father’s control.

  I had no doubt that Asa Surrette and Caspian Younger were joined at the hip. I placed my hand on Clete’s shoulder. He turned and stared into my face, the lines at the corners of his eyes stretched flat. “We have to take them now,” I whispered. “Our back door’s open.”

  Wrong choice of words. He shook his head, indicating that he didn’t understand.

  “Caspian Younger just inherited his father’s empire,” I whispered. “He’s coming. Maybe he wants to cool out Surrette, too.”

  “Caspian is a punk. I don’t buy it,” Clete said.

  “He’s a greedy punk,” I replied.

  Gretchen approached the door in the hallway from the opposite direction, the AR-15 at port arms, a thirty-round and twenty-round magazine jungle-clipped together and inserted in the rifle’s frame. She moved between us and the door. She cupped one hand on the back of Clete’s neck and pulled his ear close to her mouth. “I think I heard something upstairs. I’m not sure,” she said. “Watch your ass. I’m going down. If I get hit, don’t stop. Go over me and clear the basement.”

  “No,” I said to her.

  She smiled at me, then opened the door wider with her foot and eased her way down the stairs—fearless, beautiful—a warm odor like flowers brushing past me in the dark.

  In only one or two instances have I seen a firefight portrayed realistically in a motion picture. The reason for that artistic failure is simple. The experience is chaotic and terrifying, and the sequence of events is irrational and has no order that you can remember with any degree of clarity. There is nothing dignified about it. The participants leap around like the shadows of stick figures dancing on a cave wall. The instinct to live often overrides morality and humanity, and any sense of the former self disappears into a vortex of fear, pain, and sometimes explosions akin in volume and heat to train engines colliding and blowing apart.

  Later, images will come aborning in your sleep that you cannot deal with during your waking hours: shooting a man who is trying to surrender; firing an automatic weapon until the barrel is almost translucent and your hands are shaking so badly you can’t reload; lying paralyzed on your back in the mud while a medic straddles your hips as a lover might, trying to close a sucking chest wound with a cellophane wrapper from a package of cigarettes.

  It’s that intense and that fast, all of it irreversibly installed in your unconscious. To relive it and try to reason your way out of it is like trying to reason yourself out of sexual desire or an addiction to opiates.

  The first bursts came from somewhere in the corner of the basement and chewed away part of the wall and the ceiling. Then I saw Gretchen begin firing, squeezing off the magazine of .223 rounds at a rate of three or four rounds a second, the brass shell casings jacking into the light, bouncing on the concrete floor.

  FOR MOLLY, THE gunfire within the confines of the basement was deafening and impacted on her skull like a jackhammer. Terry had armed himself first and started shooting at the top of the stairs from behind a concrete pillar. Molly thought she saw Gretchen Horowitz on the steps, firing a semi-automatic rifle, her upper body in shadow, the rounds ricocheting off the pillar, the air filling with dust from the chipped concrete. Albert was trying to raise himself to his knees, the wire rimming his wrists with blood.

  Jack Boyd had hidden behind the bedstead, his fingers hooked into the box spring; he was peering over Felicity Louviere’s prone body, his face terrified. “I’m unarmed! I’m not part of this!” he cried. “I was working undercover! You’re gonna hurt innocent people down here!”

  Albert tore one hand from the wire, then began freeing his other wrist. The air was thick with smoke and dust, the bare bulbs on the ceiling jiggling in their sockets. Asa Surrette crawled on his hands and knees to the closet and pulled a semi-automatic rifle with a short barrel and a black stock out on the floor. He reached inside again and pulled out an armored vest and a box of rounds and another rifle and two banana-shaped magazines. He still wore his suit coat and sandals and a pale yellow shirt with long-tailed birds on it, like a man who had just gotten off a plane from Hawaii. “Shut your mouth, Jack, and get in the fight,” he said. He slid one of the rifles across the floor.

  “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 P
urcel. 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.”