James Burke: The Glass Rainbow

WHILE KERMIT HELD a pistol on me, the man who had duct-taped my wrists went into the kitchen. I heard the dry sound of a metal cap being unscrewed from a metal container, then a sloshing sound, and a moment later I smelled the bright stench of gasoline. Robert Weingart pushed Alafair on the floor next to me, then bound her wrists and ankles. He removed his belt and looped it around her throat but did not tighten it. He checked to see if I was watching him work.

“You guys can’t be this stupid,” I said. “You think anybody is going to buy it as anything except arson?”

“You’re going to die from a gas explosion, Mr. Robicheaux,” Weingart said. “A big yellow fireball that will go poof up through the treetops. When it’s done, you’ll all be nothing but ashes.”

“Listen to me, Kermit,” I said. “You can get out of this. You have money and power on your side. You can claim diminished capacity. There are always alternatives. What do you think Weingart is going to do when this is over? He’ll bleed you the rest of your life.”

Weingart raised his shoe just slightly, then pressed the tip into my ear, twisting the sole back and forth, gradually coming down harder and harder, crushing my face flat into the carpet.

“That’s enough, Robert,” Kermit said.

“Signing off now, Mr. Robicheaux,” Weingart said. He raised his foot and drove it into my forehead just above the eyebrow, bringing the heel into the bone.

“Don’t say any more to them, Dave,” Alafair said. “They’re not worth it. They’re both cowards. Kermit told me when he was little and did something bad, his mother would make him put on a dress and sit all day in the front yard. That’s why he’s so cruel. He’s been a frightened, shame-faced little boy all his life.”

“You’d better keep your mouth shut, Alafair,” Kermit said.

“You’re pathetic. That won’t change. We’ll be dead, and you’ll be alive and pathetic and an object of ridicule the rest of your life. Your lover is known in publishing as a piece of shit. That’s what you sleep with every night-a piece of shit. I suspect eventually he’ll dose you with clap or AIDS, if he hasn’t already.”

“Are you going to put a stop to this, or do you want me to?” Weingart said to Kermit.

“Let them talk. Maybe you’ll be able to pick up some good dialogue,” Kermit said.

“I thought that’s what you were working on underground, there by the river,” Weingart said. “What did you call it? The flowers of evil having their final say. Remember what you said? They always beg.”

The front door opened and Carolyn Blanchet came inside, wiping the rain off her head. “I thought you were going to take them somewhere,” she said.

CLETE PURCEL GRABBED one of the hooded dead men by the wrists and pulled him away from the house and dropped him behind the toolshed. Then he went back and got the second man and did the same. He went through their pockets, looking for a cell phone. But neither man carried one. Nor did either man carry a wallet or wear jewelry other than a wristwatch. Apart from coins that might have been used for parking meters, the dead men’s pockets contained only keys, each of a kind that might have fit the ignition of a car or SUV or boat. Their wristwatches were identical, the bands made of black leather, the titanium cases and faces black also, the numerals fluorescent. One man wore a tattoo of Bugs Bunny eating a carrot; the other man had one of the Tasmanian Devil. The figures were overly round, the coloration bright and festive, the singularity of the cartoon on an otherwise bare piece of skin like a cynical theft from one’s childhood.

The neighbor’s house was dark, and there was no sound of traffic on the street. The rain was pattering on the tree limbs above Clete’s head, the fog spreading thicker on the ground, rising like smoke around the bodies of the men he had killed. Out on the bayou, he thought he heard the sound of a large boat straining upstream, the draft too deep for the channel, the keel scouring huge clouds of mud from the bottom. But when he looked over his shoulder, he could see nothing in the fog except the lights across the water in City Park.

Clete stripped the raincoat off the body of one of the dead men and put it on. It smelled of wet leaves and humus and tobacco and wood smoke, like the smell of a man who had been sitting in a winter deer camp. Clete removed his.38 from his holster and looked down at the face of the man he had killed. The man’s eyes were blue and seemed to have no pupils. His mouth was parted slightly, as though he had been interrupted in midspeech. “Hang tight,” Clete said. “I’m about to send you some company.”

“SEE WHAT’S KEEPING those guys out there,” Kermit said.

The man who had been sloshing gasoline through the kitchen and back bedroom set down the can in the hallway. “They’re probably bringing up the boat,” he said.

“‘Probably’ isn’t a good word in a situation like this,” Kermit said.

The man who had knocked me down and taped my wrists walked to the glass in the back door and rubbed it with his forearm. A cartoon of Goofy was tattooed just above the inside of his wrist. He wore a black T-shirt and bleached chinos and half-topped boots. He was one of those men who seemed ageless, wrapped too tight for his own skin, the modulation in his voice disconnected from the visceral energy in his eyes. He had pushed my.45 down into the back of his belt. He was having trouble seeing into the backyard, and he rubbed the glass again. “I think that’s Lou,” he said.

“Think?” Kermit said. He went into the kitchen. Weingart walked into the hallway also, unable to contain his curiosity or perhaps his fear, glancing back at us briefly.

Alafair’s face was inches from mine. “Molly’s got the scissors,” she whispered.

Through the bedroom doorway, I could see Molly’s eyes bulging and the indentation of her lips behind the tape stretched across her mouth. Her upper arms were ridging with tubes of muscle as she tried to work the pair of scissors from the sewing box between the strands of tape wrapped around her wrists. Then I saw her blink unexpectedly, saw her shoulders expand slightly as she severed the tape.

Carolyn Blanchet walked past me and Alafair into the kitchen. “I’m going now,” she said to the others.

“No, you’re not,” Kermit said.

“I did what you asked, and I’m no longer connected with anything that happens here. So I’ll say ta-ta now, with just one request: Kermit, please don’t call me for a very long time.”

“Do you believe this crap?” Weingart said.

I could see the man in the black T-shirt looking out a window, kneading the back of his neck.

“You’re not leaving,” Kermit said.

“That’s what you think, love,” Carolyn replied.

“I wouldn’t provoke Kermit,” Weingart said. “He has a penchant for certain kinds of female situations I don’t think you want to enter into.”

“Mr. Abelard, I think we need to concentrate on priorities,” the man in the black T-shirt said.

“What’s the problem?” Kermit asked.

“My friends and I didn’t sign on for a catfight, sir.”

“Really? Then why don’t you take care of your bloody job and mind your own fucking business?” Kermit said.

The man in the black T-shirt seemed to process Kermit’s remark, his shoulders slightly rounded, his chest flat as a prizefighter’s, his face uplifted, his incisors exposed with his grin. “I’ll be outside taking care of my fucking business, sir,” he said. “I think this will be our last assignment, though. The boys and I have been a unit a long time, Senegal to South Africa, Uzbekistan to the Argentine. I can’t say this one has been a pleasure.”