The New Iberia Blues

Chapter Forty-Three

I went out the back door just as the headlights of the Humvee came on and shone directly into my eyes. I raised my hand against the glare and saw Lou Wexler by the side of the Humvee. He had a semi-automatic rifle aimed at the center of my face. Desmond Cormier lay on the ground, his hands wrapped with wire behind him and tied to his ankles, a blue rubber ball strapped in his mouth.

“Lay your piece aside or never see your daughter again,” Wexler said.

My eyes were watering in the headlights.

“I’ll pop both her and Des right now,” he said.

I let the AR-15 drop.

“Back away,” he said.

I did as he said. He reached down and picked up the AR-15 by the barrel and flung it into the darkness. “The whore gave me away, did she?”

“Which whore?” I asked.

“The one I had a romp with in City Park,” he said.

“Where’s Alafair?”

“Snug as a bug in a rug.”

“What do you get out of this, Wexler?”

“Tons of fun, and a bit of payback for what you and your ignorant kind did to my uncle in your parish prison.”

“Helen Soileau and our friends and I had no part in that.”

“Oh, yes, you did, laddie. You pretend to be the knight errant, but you’re an ill-bred wog, just like Cormier. I kept his little three-penny opera afloat for years, and bankrupted both myself and that poor sod Butterworth, while the Golden Globes and Academy nominations went to this pitiful puke on the ground.”

“Why did you kill Lucinda Arceneaux?”

“I saved her.”

“What?”

“She could have been my queen bee. She opted for a life of mediocrity. So I eased her into a role no one around here will ever forget. You have to admit, it’s been pretty good theater.”

I had no doubt he was mad. But that didn’t make his cruelty any the less. Desmond twitched on the ground. Wexler placed his foot on Desmond’s neck and squeezed. I could hear the waves starting to hit the cabin cruiser’s hull, a steady slap that threw salt spray higher and higher in the air.

“Alafair isn’t a player in this,” I said. “If you really believe in the ethos of the Templar knight, you have to let her go, Lou.”

“On a first-name basis, are we? Get on your knees.”

“Is she on the boat?”

“Could be. But let’s get back to our biblical lesson. You remember the biblical quotation, don’t you? ‘Before me every knee shall bow’?”

“Can’t do it.”

“Maybe this will help.”

He fired a round through the top of my foot. I felt a moment of intense pain, as though the bones between ankle and toes had been struck with a ballpeen hammer, then nothing, my shoe filling with blood. I wanted to say something brave or clever, but I could not. My best friend was down and maybe dead, and Alafair might have already suffered the same fate as Hilary Bienville. If she and Clete were gone, I was ready to go also.

“Put the next one between my eyes,” I said.

“What was that?”

“Now is your chance. I want you to do it.”

“Don’t tempt the devil.”

“The devil wouldn’t let you clean his chamber pot.”

He butt-stroked me with his rifle, knocking me to the ground. He pointed the muzzle into my face. “Kiss it.”

“Fuck you.”

I had to keep him talking. Once he was gone, Alafair would be gone also, probably forever. Where are you, Bailey? Where are you, Helen? I held my holy medal, my eyes shut. I was completely powerless and knew that whatever happened next was out of my hands.

I heard Wexler walk away. When I opened my eyes, I saw him step off a small dock onto a boarding plank that hung from the entry port of the cabin cruiser. The hull was dipping deeply into the waves, rocking and hitting the dock and the cypress knees along the bank. He clicked on the cabin light and pulled Alafair from the deck and held her so I could see her face. Blood was leaking from her hair.

I got up from the ground and began limping toward the dock as though half of me had melted. I thought I heard a helicopter droning over water, and I wondered if I had gone back in time to Southeast Asia and the sounds and images from which I had never freed myself. The thropping of the blades was unmistakable.

“You’re not going anywhere, bub,” I said.

“I’m honoring your war record,” he said. “Be humble enough to recognize and accept an act of clemency by a brother-in-arms.”

“You taped Bella Delahoussaye’s eyes because you couldn’t look her in the face while you killed her, you yellow-bellied, sorry sack of shit.”

He knotted Alafair’s hair in his fist. Her wrists were handcuffed behind her back. I was within fifteen feet of the cruiser now. The waves were bursting against the dock, drenching my hat and face. I saw lights coming in low over the surf in the distance.

“Hear that sound?” I said. “That’s the cavalry. They’re going to spike your cannon, Wexler. And after they do that, I’m going to kick it up your ass.”

“You won’t be here to see it. Neither will she.”

Alafair’s face was white with exhaustion or shock or blood loss; she looked like she had been beaten. Her bottom lip was cut and puffed, her hair matted with blood. I bet she had fought back. No, I knew she had fought back. And I was determined to be no less brave than she. Then, just to the south of the cabin cruiser, I saw a shadow moving through the trees, humped, off balance, leviathan, and unstoppable in its course and purpose.

“Pop me if you want,” I said. “I’m no big loss. But before I check out, tell me one thing, will you?”

“I’d be delighted,” he replied.

“How’d you get the information about Bailey Ribbons’s background?”

“I worked for three government intelligence agencies. But maybe I porked her a couple of times, too. Take your pick.”

I came closer and closer to him. He was standing just outside the cabin hatch, holding Alafair by the hair, his rifle butt propped on his hip, the waves swelling under the hull. The boarding plank was hooked to the stern, pulling loose from the bank, half underwater.

“Look at me,” I said.

“What for?”

“Sheriff Soileau is in that chopper. She doesn’t take prisoners. Make the smart choice. Give me back my daughter and beat feet.”

He pulled her to him and kissed the top of her hair. “I might do that. Not tonight. But some night. She’ll come around. You’ll see. The victors write the history books.”

He dropped her and pulled the anchor, sliding it covered with mud over the bow, dropping it hard on the deck. He went back into the cabin and started the engine, looking at me through the glass. My left leg was giving out, my foot squishing inside my shoe. I started toward the boarding plank, although I knew I would not make it. Then I saw Clete Purcel come lumbering out of the trees, the holes in his shoulders or chest draining down his shirt, my cut-down twelve-gauge pump in one hand.

Wexler either didn’t care about the boarding plank or had forgotten about it; he was concentrating on backing the cruiser at an angle that prevented the waves from smacking it into the dock or onto the cypress knees.

The aluminum plank bent under Clete’s weight, and his shoes clanked on the metal, and the waves sloshed over his ankles as he stumbled up the plank and through the entry port onto the stern.

Wexler turned, at first shocked, then smiling. “You still hanging around? How about another one in the brisket?”

I had seen the two bloody holes in Clete’s windbreaker, but I had not realized how badly he was hurt. His left arm hung from the socket like a twisted water-soaked towel. He was trying to lift the cut-down with his right, and having no luck, as though his gyroscope were broken, his mojo gone, his motors in full meltdown. But he kept coming, like a dedicated drunk careening toward the bar, seeking one final sip of his nemesis.

Wexler raised his rifle. “Good try, blimpo. I hope you find a shady place.”

Then something happened that was perhaps coincidental, perhaps not. A large bubble of light seemed to surround us all. A tremendous black swell dipped under the cruiser and raised it atop a wave that tilted it at least thirty degrees. Maybe someone in the helicopter had shone a searchlight on us. Maybe a tidal surge from the Gulf was about to strike the coast. Or maybe the ghost of the pilot who’d nailed that Nazi sub wanted to score one more for the good guys.

Wexler was thrown off balance, the wheel spinning as he tried to get his weapon in Clete’s face. Clete crashed into him with his full weight, pressing him against the instrument panel. Wexler had his finger inside the trigger guard and was trying to push the barrel down on Clete’s feet to get off a crippling shot. Clete shoved my cut-down inside Wexler’s trousers.

“This is for Smiley Wimple and Hilary Bienville, asshole,” he said. He pulled the trigger.

The number of rents in the cloth left no doubt that the shell in the chamber had been loaded with buckshot. Wexler seemed to be looking straight at me when he realized what had just happened to him. His mouth was puckered like a guppy’s, his face shrinking as though it had been miniaturized, his voice locked in his throat as if no sound could adequately express what he was experiencing.

The Plexiglas-like bubble disappeared, and the cruiser settled against the dock, and the waves that had rocked it so violently turned to foam and trailed away in the darkness.

It’s funny how your anger goes away when you see a man die, even one who was demonically evil. I adjusted the boarding plank and walked onto the stern and picked up Alafair. I held her against me, and the heat in her body radiated through her clothes. I smelled her hair and the salt on her skin and felt her heart beating when I pressed my hands against her back. Her face was buried in my chest. She didn’t speak. She was the same five-year-old Salvadoran girl I had pulled from a submerged plane many years ago. The years between then and now meant absolutely nothing, and I knew that she was my little girl and I was her father and that was the way it would always be, and that Clete Purcel would remain our guardian angel forever, and that we would never change the world, but by the same token, the world would never change us.