Cadillac Jukebox

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 waterline 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.

"That's it," I said to the boat pilot.

He cut back on the throttle, stared through the glass at the woods, then reversed the engine so we didn't drift into the shore.

"You want to go head-on in there?" he asked.

"You know another way to do it?" I said.

"Bring in some SWAT guys on a chopper and blow that shack into toothpicks," he replied.

A St. Martin Parish plainclothes homicide investigator who was on the other boat walked out on the bow and used a bullhorn, addressing the shack as though he did not know who its occupants were.

"We want to talk to y'all that's inside. You need to work your way down that ladder with one hand on your head. There won't nobody get hurt," he said.

But there was no sound, except the idling boat engines and the rain that had started falling in large drops on the bay's surface. The plain-clothes wiped his face with his hand and tried again.

"Aaron, we know you in there. We afraid somebody's come out here to hurt you, podna. Ain't it time to give it up?" he said.

Again, there was silence. The plainclothes' coat was dark with rain and his tie was blown back across his shirt. He looked toward our boat, shrugged his shoulders, and went inside the cabin.

"Let's do it, skipper," I said to the pilot.

He pushed the throttle forward and took our boat into the canal. The wake from our boat receded back through the trees, gathering with it sticks and dead hyacinths, washing over logs and finally disappearing into the flooded undergrowth. The second boat eased into the shallows behind us until its hull scraped on the silt.

Helen and I dropped off the bow into the water and immediately sank to our thighs, clouds of gray mud ballooning around us. She carried a twelve-gauge Remington shotgun, with the barrel sawed off an inch above the pump. I pulled back the slide on my.45, chambered the top round in the magazine, and set the safety.

A flat-bottom aluminum boat with an outboard engine was tied to a piling under the shack. Helen and I waded through the water, ten yards apart, not speaking, our eyes fixed on the shack's shuttered windows and the ladder that extended upward to an open door with a gunny sack curtain blowing in the door frame.

On my left, the St. Martin plainclothes and three uniformed deputies were spread out in a line, breaking their way through a stand of willows.

Helen and I walked under the shack and listened. I cupped my hand on a piling to feel for movement above.

Nothing.

Helen held the twelve-gauge at port arms, her knuckles white on the stock and pump. Her faded blue jeans were drenched up to her rump. The air was cold and felt like damp flannel against the skin, and I could smell an odor like beached gars and gas from a sewer main.

Then I felt something tick against my face, like a mild irritant, a wet leaf, a blowfly. Unconsciously, I wiped at it with my hand, then I felt it again, harder this time, against my eyebrow, my forehead, in my hair, directly in my face as I stared upward at the plank floor of the shack.

Helen's mouth was parted wide, her face white.

I wiped my face on my coat sleeve and stared at the long red smear across the cloth.

I felt a revulsion go through my body as though I had been spat upon. I tore off my coat, soaked it in the water at my knees, and wiped my face and hair with it, my hand trembling.

Above me, strings of congealed blood hung from the planks and lifted and fell in the wind.

I moved out from under the shack, slipped the safety off the.45, and began climbing the ladder, which was set at a gradual angle, almost like stairs. Helen moved out into the water, away from the shack, and aimed the twelve gauge at the door above my head, then, just before I went inside, swung the barrel away and followed me.

I reached the top rung and paused, my hand on the doorjamb. The gunny sack curtain billowed back on the nails it hung from, exposing a rusted icebox without power, a table and chair, a solitary wood bunk, a coon hide that someone had been fleshing with a spoon.

I pulled myself up and went inside, tearing away the curtain, kicking back the door against the wall.

Except it did not fly back against the wall.

I felt the wood knock into meat and bone, a massive and dense weight that did not surrender space.

I clenched the.45 in both hands and pointed it at the enormous black shape behind the door, my finger slick with sweat inside the trigger guard.

My eyes wouldn't assimilate the naked man in front of me. Nor the fact that he was upside down. Nor what had been done to him.

The fence wire that had been looped around his ankles and notched into the roof beam was buried so deeply in his ankles that it was nearly invisible.

Helen lumbered into the room, her shotgun pointed in front of her. She lowered it to her side and looked at the hanging man.

"Oh boy," she said. She propped open the shutter on a window and cleared her throat and spit. She looked back at me, then blew out her breath. Her face was discolored, as though she had been staring into a cold wind. "I guess he got his," she said. Then she went to the window again, with the back of her wrist to her mouth. But this time she collected herself, and when she looked at me again her face was composed.

"Come on, we can still nail him," I said.

The plainclothes homicide investigator and two of the uniformed deputies were waiting for us at the bottom of the ladder.

"What's up there?" the plainclothes said. His eyes tried to peel meaning out of our faces. "What, it's some kind of company secret?"

"Go look for yourself. Be careful what you step in," Helen said.

"Crown killed Mookie Zerrang. He couldn't have gone far," I said.

"He ain't gone far at all," the third deputy said, sloshing toward us from the opposite side of the woods. "Look up yonder through that high spot."

We all stared through the evenly spaced tree trunks at a dry stretch of compacted silt that humped out of the water like the back of a black whale. It was covered with palmettos and crisscrossed with the webbed tracks of nutria, and in the middle of the palmettos, squatting on his haunches, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, was Aaron Crown.

We waded toward him, our guns still drawn. If he heard or saw us, or even cared if we were in his proximity, he showed no sign.

His body and clothes were painted with blood from his pate to the mud-encrusted basketball shoes he wore. His eyes, which were finally drained of all the heat and energy that had defined his life, seemed to look out of a scarlet mask. We stood in a circle around him, our weapons pointed at the ground. In the damp air, smoke hung at the corner of his mouth like wisps of cotton.

"You know about Sabelle?" I asked.

"That 'un in yonder couldn't talk about nothing else before he died," he replied.

"You're an evil man, Aaron Crown," I said.

"I reckon it otherwise." He rubbed the cigarette's hot ash between his fingers until it was dead. "If them TV people is out there, I need to wash up."

He looked up at our faces, his lidless eyes waiting for an answer.