James Burke - Light of the World

“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.”