James Burke: The Glass Rainbow

I twisted my head around so I could see the figure silhouetted in the hallway. Kermit Abelard stepped into the light. “Waiting on Mr. Purcel, are you?” he said. “I wouldn’t. This time your friend went way beyond his limits.”

“You think you can create a clusterfuck like this and just walk away from it?” I said.

“Let’s wait and see,” he replied. His expression was serene, his cheeks splotched with color as though he were blushing, his eyes warm. He seemed to be waiting on something, like a man whose prescience is confirmed with each tick of the clock. “Ah, there it is. That guttural, puffing sound, like a man with strep throat trying to cough? That’s Mr. Purcel eating a couple of rounds from a silenced forty-caliber Smith and Wesson. You put him up to killing my grandfather, didn’t you? The quixotic knight-errant, waging war on a crippled old man.”

“That’s really dumb, Kermit,” I said. “I hate to tell you this, but your trained yard bitch in there has put the slide on you. He hung your grandfather up like a side of beef. Think about it. Who else would do something like that? Not me, not Clete Purcel, not anybody you know except the guy you sprung from Huntsville and who paid you back by offing your grandfather.”

“I have no illusions about Robert. But he respected my grandfather. He didn’t kill him. Your fat friend did, and you and your family are going to pay for it.”

The man who had hit me began taping my wrists behind me. “Better talk to your employer, bud,” I said. “You guys are pros. This is Louisiana. You pop a cop, you’re going to the injection table, provided you ever make the jail.”

I could hear the man breathing as he worked, his fingers winding the tape around my wrists, notching it into the bones. Then he taped my ankles. “Who are you guys?” I said. “Mercs? You know the score. Use your head.”

But he made no reply.

“Hundreds of millions, maybe even billions, are hanging in the balance, Mr. Robicheaux,” Kermit said. “Somebody will end up owning that money. It might be the government or the state or plaintiffs in a civil suit or me and Robert and Carolyn. But somebody will own it. And whoever owns and keeps it will have these kinds of men working for them. Are you so naive that you don’t believe the most powerful families in this country aren’t guilty of the same crimes Robert and I might have committed?”

He began to rake through a litany of collective sins that ranged from the Ludlow massacre to support of the Argentine junta to the abandonment of a girl in a submerged car by a famous United States senator. Paradoxically, he seemed oblivious that his grandfather had been friends with some of the very people he was denigrating.

“You had better get done with this, sir,” said the man who had wrapped my wrists.

“See what’s going on in back,” Kermit said.

“We can take care of this, sir. I think you should go.”

Kermit gazed at Alafair through the doorway, his eyes wistful. “Do everybody except her,” he said.

“You’re taking her with you, sir? I wouldn’t advise that.”

“No, Robert will be handling Alafair before we leave.”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Weingart said.

Kermit pulled aside a curtain and looked out front. “By the way, Mr. Robicheaux, one of our team just hooked a wrecker to the cruiser and is hauling it and the driver away. Don’t expect the cavalry anytime soon.”

I was on my face, my heart beating against the floor, the soiled odor of the carpet climbing into my nostrils. Down the bayou, I thought I heard the drawbridge clank open and rise into the air and the engines of a large vessel laboring upstream against the current.

Kermit squatted so he could look directly into my face. “I didn’t want any of this to happen. You forced the situation, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said. “You hate people of my background. You’ve spent a lifetime resenting others for the fact that you were born poor. Admit it.”

“You’re wrong about that, Kermit. The Abelards were a great source of humor for everybody around here. Everyone was laughing at you behind your back, you most of all. You didn’t get screwed at birth, Kermit. Your mother did when her diaphragm slipped.”

Kermit stood erect. “Get it done,” he said to the man who liked to call people “sir.”

CLETE PURCEL CHARGED along the side of the house behind a row of camellia bushes and clumps of bamboo and untrimmed banana plants. But he didn’t stop when he reached the backyard. Instead, he kept running down the slope, deeper into the trees and darkness, until he had a view of both the bayou and the entirety of the house. He could see the back porch and the kitchen and Alafair’s bedroom; he could see Tripod’s chain extending from the hutch up into the tree where Tripod was hiding; he could see the shapes of three men wearing rain hoods of the kind the men at the shoot-out on the river had worn.

Their backs were turned to Clete. They were looking down the driveway and down the walk space between the camellias on the far side of the house. Then one of them began to wander down toward the bayou, pointing the beam of a penlight ahead of him. Clete drew himself against a live oak, one shoulder pressed tightly against the bark, and waited. The hooded man walked within two feet of him, his small hooked nose in profile against the green and red lights on the drawbridge. Clete put away his.38 and stepped quickly from behind the oak tree, wrapping his arms under the hooded man’s chin, snapping upward, all in one motion. For a second, he thought he heard a cracking sound, like someone easing his foot down on a dry stick. He pulled the hooded man deeper into the trees and dropped him in the leaves, then retrieved the penlight and the silenced semiautomatic the man had been carrying.

Clete moved quickly up the slope, threading his way between the trunks of the trees, his feet sinking into the soft pad of pine needles and decayed pecan husks and the leaves from the water oaks that were yellow and black and still lay in sheaves on the ground from the previous winter. The two men who had been looking down the driveway and the walk space on the far side of the house had returned to the center of the backyard and were now gazing down the slope. “You out there, Lou?” one of them said.

Clete stepped behind a big camellia bush strung with Spanish moss. He pointed the penlight toward the neighbor’s house and clicked it on and off three times. Then he stuck the pen between his teeth and said, “Got him.”

“You got him?”

“Yeah,” Clete said, the pen still between his teeth.

“Why didn’t you say something?” the other man said. “This whole gig sucks. These people are out of Gone With the Wind .”

“No, you got it wrong,” the other man said. “They’re out of Suddenly , Last Summer . It’s by Tennessee Williams. It’s about this New Orleans faggot that gets cannibalized on a beach by a bunch of peasants. Lou, quit playing with yourself and get up here.”

The bridge at Burke Street was opening, the surface of the bayou shuddering with the vibration of the machinery. The bow of a large vessel slid between the pilings, the lighted pilothouse shining in the rain. “What the hell is that?” one of the men said.

“I told you, it’s Gone With the Wind . This place is a fresh-air nuthouse.”

The two men had started walking down the slope almost like tourists, confident in their roles, confident in the night that lay ahead of them, unperturbed by considerations of mortality or the suffering of the people inside the house they had invaded.

Clete Purcel moved out of the trees with remarkable agility for a man his size. He lifted the semiautomatic and its suppressor with both hands, aiming with his arms fully extended. The hooded men did not seem to realize how quickly their situation had reversed. Clete shot the first man through the eye and the second one in the throat. They both fell straight to the ground and made no sound that he could hear inside the rain.