Light of the World

by James Lee Burke

  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.

  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 before 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.

  “Everything,” she said.

  “Do you know where he might have gone?”

  “He’s here,” she replied. “He won’t leave. He thinks he’ll prevail over all of you. That’s what he calls it, ‘prevailing.’ He thinks that’s his destiny.”

  Alafair and Gretchen had walked up behind Clete. “Why are we his enemies?” Gretchen asked.

  “He’s psychotic. He says the earth must be conquered by prevailing over its ordinary people. He says the leaders aren’t important. They can always be bought.”

  “Watch Felicity for me,” Clete said.

  “Where are you going?” Gretchen said.

  “To break every bone in this guy’s body,” he replied.

  I FOUND A PIECE of pipe on the floor behind the boiler and pried the lock off the cage where the girls were held. Both of them had the haunted expression that I have seen only twice in my life, once in army footage taken of the Dachau inmates on the day of their liberation, and a second time in Vietnam, when I looked into the faces of people who had survived the snake-and-nape bombing of their village.

  I slung the M-1 on my shoulder and climbed the ladder that Surrette and Jack Boyd had used to escape the basement. It protruded through a trapdoor into a pantry just off the kitchen; the trapdoor looked like it had been sawed and hinged recently. I went through the first floor of the house, then climbed the stairs and searched the same rooms Clete had searched. Surrette and Boyd were gone. But where? We hadn’t heard a vehicle drive away or any sound of a motorized boat on the lake.

  I went out on a balcony that allowed a fine view of the grounds and the work sheds and the cherry trees, heavy with fruit. I realized a surreal phenomenon had taken place while we were in the basement, one that seemed to have no cause. I had heard about the northern lights, although I was never sure what they were. I also had been in parts of the world—the Bermuda Triangle and a similar nautical area off the coast of Japan—where the laws of physics didn’t always apply and electromagnetic influences seemed to have their way with compasses and gyroscopes and radar and even the creation of whirlpools and tidal waves.

  This was different. The moon had disappeared, either behind a mountain peak or in a bank of thunderheads pushing down from British Columbia. By all odds, the lake and the mountains that surrounded it should have been submerged in darkness. That was not what happened. There was a ubiquitous glow from the other side of the mountains. It was cobalt blue and seemed to emanate from the land into the sky, rather than the other way around. The lake itself, which was vast and deep and, even in July, cold enough to pucker your skin, was absolutely black and yet brimming with nocturnal radiance.

  I wondered if my fatigue and adrenaline and revulsion had impaired both my senses and my ability to think. I was convinced that was not the case. I’m also convinced that all the events I was about to see and participate in happened just as I will describe them. I have never set much store in psychological stability or what we refer to as normalcy. I don’t believe the world is a rational place; nor do I believe that either science or the study of metaphysics can explain any of the great mysteries. I have always fled the presence of those who claim they know the truth about anything. I agree with George Bernard Shaw’s statement that we learn little or nothing from rational people, because rational people adapt themselves to the world and, consequently, are seldom visionary.

  I went downstairs holding the M-1 at port arms and walked through the French doors into the yard. The lights were off at the marina, but the hulls of the sailboats in their slips were white and sleek in the chop, rocking softly against the rubber tires hung from the mooring posts. Had not at least one person inside a cabin on one of those boats been alarmed by the gunfire and used a landline to call in a 911? Perhaps they had. Or perhaps no one was in the boats. Or perhaps they couldn’t have cared less.

  I saw Clete walking toward me, Gretchen’s jungle-clipped AR-15 slung over his ri
ght shoulder. “Where are Molly and Albert?” he asked.

  “With the girls on the back steps. Molly was opening up some canned food,” I replied.

  He nodded and looked around, his eyes sweeping the lakeshore and the shadows by the work sheds and the cherry trees puffing in the wind. “It’s cold,” he said. “None of them have wraps.”

  “You want to pack it in?”

  “Surrette is still out here. If we leave, he skates. Let Molly and Albert take Felicity and the girls to the hospital in Polson.”

  “I don’t like them being on the highway by themselves,” I said.

  “You’ve got a point.”

  “Let’s search the sheds and the orchards and the cottage where the wrecker is parked,” I said.

  He nodded again, then I saw his expression change as he gazed up the slope toward the two-lane. “Fuck,” he said.

  Three sets of headlights were coming down the grade from the southern end of the lake. The first vehicle slowed and turned into the driveway that led down to the two-story stone house. The other two turned with it. None of the vehicles had emergency flashers. The drivers cut their headlights before they reached the stone house. In seconds, the three vehicles had disappeared among the work sheds and orchards.

  “You were right,” Clete said. “It’s Caspian Younger. He’s about to inherit billions, and we’re the only thing standing in his way. How did we let these motherfuckers get behind us?”

  Because I didn’t listen to my old friend the line sergeant, I thought.

  “What do you want to do, Streak?”

  “Like you said.”

  “What did I say?”

  “Blow up their shit,” I replied.

  CLETE AND I began walking toward the work sheds that were located on the far side of two cherry orchards that sloped from the two-lane down to the water’s edge. The bandolier of .30-06 clips clinked softly against my back. He was carrying the AR-15 with his right hand wrapped in the pistol grip, the butt against his hip. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this place, Streak.”