James Burke - The Glass Rainbow

The only sound in the yard was the ticking of the rain on the canopy. Weingart had manipulated the system all his life. Why should he either fear or heed it now? The same with Kermit Abelard. He had been born into wealth and privilege and had managed to convince others and probably himself as well that he was an egalitarian rebel. In reality, he had created an inextricable bond with another dysfunctional man, each finding in the other what he lacked, the two of them probably creating a third personality that was subhuman and genuinely monstrous.

I didn’t care to dwell on the psychological complexities of evil men. Whether their kind possesses the wingspread of a Lucifer or a moth is a question better left to theologians. Clete needed me. If I could be certain I had established a safe perimeter, I could return to Clete and let my colleagues take care of Kermit Abelard and Robert Weingart. But that was not the way things would work out.

The fog was like steam on my skin. My eyes were stinging and I couldn’t trust my vision. Across the bayou, I thought I saw lights burning in City Park. But I realized the luminosity inside the fog came from another source. The vessel was a double-decker, its passenger windows lamplit, its beam big enough to withstand ten-foot seas. I could hear the engines throbbing through the decks and the sound of water cascading off a paddle wheel on the stern.

“Look what you have wrought, Mr. Robicheaux,” Kermit’s voice said from the darkness. “You’re a controller. You poisoned my relationship with your daughter. You tormented my grandfather. Hubris is your bane. You’re like most alcoholics. You’ve superimposed all your character defects onto others and brought down your house.”

“If I harmed you in any way, Kermit, I regret not doing a whole lot more of it,” I said.

“If you’re so brave, Mr. Robicheaux, walk out here and face me man-to-man.”

In the darkness I could see little more than the shapes of the trees and the camellia bushes and the air vines and Spanish moss that dripped with rain. I doubted that Kermit Abelard wanted to duel under the oaks. He was a creature of guile, and I suspected he was trying to distract me until Robert Weingart could position himself and get a clear shot at me.

I knelt on one knee in the leaves and pine needles, the cut-down twelve-gauge tilted at a forty-five-degree angle. I heard footsteps to my right. As a parasite and a narcissist, Weingart had made a career out of earning the trust of others, making them dependent upon him, flattering them when need be, then quickly deflating them and injecting feelings of failure and guilt in them, and finally sucking the lifeblood from their veins. As with all his ilk, he didn’t do well on a level playing field. When I heard a rotted branch break under his foot, he was still forty feet from me, not close enough for an unskilled shooter to take out a target in the dark.

The wind gusted down the slope when I saw him. He was standing between a camellia bush and the bamboo border between my property and the neighbor’s. The bamboo swayed and rattled in the wind; the leaves and flowers on the camellia bush filled with air and motion. Weingart remained frozen, the only unmoving object in his immediate environment.

I snugged the stock of the shotgun against my shoulder and aimed at the silhouette. “I win, you lose. Throw your piece down. Make sure I hear it hit the ground,” I said.

But he chose otherwise. That was when I pulled the trigger. My shells were loaded with double-aught buckshot. My guess was he took most of the pattern in the face.

I ejected the empty casing and moved farther down the slope. Weingart was on his back, still alive, strangling on his own blood. I picked up his.25 auto and dropped it in my pocket.

“Robert?” I heard Kermit call. When there was no reply, he said, “Robbie, where are you? Are you hurt?”

I remained motionless by a slash pine and waited. My palms were sweating on the twelve-gauge. I thought I heard a siren coming down Main. The moon moved out from behind a cloud; a solitary band of cold light broke through the canopy and I saw Kermit standing three feet from an enormous live oak, one in whose heart the rusted mooring chains of a slave ship were encased in the wood.

“Last chance, Kermit,” I said.

He held both hands straight out by his sides, like a man surrendering himself for crucifixion. He was holding my.45 in his right hand. “Do it. I want you to,” he said.

“That’s a job for the state of Louisiana. Bend down slowly, your left hand on your head, and place my weapon on the ground.”

“Sure,” he said. But he made no move.

“You told Alafair this is your crucifixion year. Sorry, Kermit, but you just don’t make the cut.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really. You couldn’t even get a job as the Good Thief.”

I thought I heard the back door of the house slam behind me. But I couldn’t look away from Kermit. I saw him spread his feet in a shooter’s position and fold his hands in front of him, and I knew my.45 was aimed directly at my face.

The blast from the shotgun knocked him through a camellia bush. I think he cried out, but I can’t be sure. My ears were ringing, the air tannic with the smell of burnt gunpowder. My shoulder ached and my face was swollen out of shape from the blows I had taken in the house, the skin electric to the touch. I ejected the empty casing from the shotgun and watched it roll smoking down the embankment. Then I heard feet running behind me as Clete yelled from the back steps, “Dave, look out, she had a piece in her purse!”

I started to turn around, my left hand working the pump on the twelve-gauge, but it was too late. Carolyn Blanchet had slowed to a brisk walk, slow enough to aim with one outstretched arm, her face twisted like a harridan’s. “You thought you could talk to me like that? Who do you think you are?” she said.

And she shot me in the back.

Strangely, I felt little pain. The blow was like a smack from a fist between the shoulder blades, just enough to knock the breath out of me, to buckle my knees for a second or two, to make the trees and the bayou lose shape, to make me drop the shotgun and stumble down the slope to the place I knew I was now going.

I could see the paddle wheeler in the fog, a gangway lowered in the shallows. Behind me, Clete was lumbering off balance down the incline, calling my name. Maybe he shot Carolyn Blanchet, but I couldn’t be sure. The sounds inside my head were impossible to separate. I saw Molly and Alafair saying good-bye to me, and Tripod and Snuggs walking back up the slope to the house. I saw a black medic from my platoon pressing a cellophane cigarette wrapper on a hole in my lung, saying, Sucking chest wound, motherfucker. Breathe through your mouth. Chuck got to breathe. I heard steam engines roaring and hissing so loudly they seemed to be tearing the paddle wheeler apart. I heard the blades of the dust-off coming in over the canopy, the downdraft flattening the elephant grass, the twirling smoke of marker grenades sucking away into the sky. I felt a syrette of morphine go into my thigh and radiate through my body like an erotic kiss. I felt people gathering me up by my arms and legs and lifting me above their heads, but not onto the Huey. They were helping me to my feet, steadying me between them, leading up the gangway onto the deck of the paddle wheeler, a place I did not want to go.

I saw my father, Big Al, in his tin hard hat and my mother, Alafair Mae Guillory, in the pillbox hat she was so proud of, both of them on the bow, smiling, coming toward me. I saw men from my platoon, their rent fatigues laundered, their wounds glowing with a white radiance, and I saw boys in sun-bleached butternut and tattered gray, and I saw Golden Glove boxers from the state finals of 1956 and black musicians from Sharkey Bonano’s Dream Room on Bourbon. I saw grifters and martyred Maryknollers and strippers and saints and street people of every kind, and until that moment, I never realized how loving and beautiful human beings could be.