James Burke - In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead

Rosie's teeth made white marks on her bottom lip.

"Dave, I want to bring in the Bureau as soon as we have evidence that it's a kidnapping," she said.

"So far nothing official we do to this guy works. It's time both of us hear that, Rosie," I said, and went out the screen door and started up the dock.

I hadn't gone ten yards when I heard the telephone ring behind me. I ran back through the rain and jerked the receiver out of the cradle.

"You sound out of breath," the voice said.

Don't blow this one.

"Turn her loose, Doucet. You don't want to do this," I said. I looked into Rosie's face and pointed toward the house.

"I'll make it simple for both of us. You take the utility knife and the photo out of the evidence locker. You put them in a Ziploc bag. At eight o'clock tomorrow morning you leave the bag in the trash can on the corner of Royal and St. Ann in New Orleans. I don't guess you ought to plan on getting a lot of sleep tonight."

Rosie had eased the screen door shut behind her and was walking fast up the incline toward the house in the fading light.

"The photo's a bluff. It's out of focus," I said. "You can't be identified in it."

"Then you won't mind parting with it."

"You can walk, Doucet. We can't make the case on you."

"You lying sonofabitch. You tore up my house. Your tow truck scratched up my car. You won't rest till you fuck me up in every way you can."

"You're doing this because your property was damaged?"

"I'll tell you what else I'm going to do if you decide to get clever on me. No, that's not right. It won't be me, because I never hurt a child in my life. You got that?"

He stopped speaking and waited for me. Then he said it again: "You got that, Dave?"

"Yes," I said.

"But there's a guy who used to work in Balboni's movies, a guy who spent eleven years in Parchman for killing a little nigger girl. You want to know how it went down?"

Then he told me. I stared out the screen door at my neighbor's dark green lawn, at his enormous roses that had burst in the rain and were now scattered in the grass like pink tear drops. A dog began barking, and then I heard it cry out sharply as though it had been whipped across the ribs with a chain.

"Doucet-" I broke in. My voice was wet, as though my vocal cords were covered with membrane.

"You don't like my description? You think I'm just trying to scare you? Get a hold of one of his snuff films. You'll agree he's an artist."

"Listen to me carefully. If you hurt my daughter, I'll get to you one way or another, in or out of jail, in the witness protection program, it won't matter, I'll take you down in pieces, Doucet."

"You've said only one thing right today. I'm going to walk, and you're going to help me, unless you've let that affirmative-action bitch fuck most of your brains out. By the way, forget the trace. I'm at a phone booth and you've got shit on your nose."

The line went dead.

I was trembling as I walked up the slope to the house.

Rosie opened the screen door and came out on the gallery with Bootsie behind her. The skin of Bootsie's face was drawn back against the bone, her throat ruddy with color as though she had a windburn.

"He hung up too soon. We couldn't get it," Rosie said.

"Dave, my God. What-" Bootsie said. Her pulse was jumping in her neck.

"Let's go inside," I said, and put my arm around her shoulder. "Rosie, I'll be out in just a minute."

"No, talk to me right here," Bootsie said.

"Murphy Doucet has her. He wants the evidence that he thinks can put him in jail."

"What for?" she said. "You told me yesterday that he'll probably get out of it."

"He doesn't know that. He's not going to believe anybody who tells him that, either."

"Where is she?"

"I don't know, Boots. But we're going to get her back. If the sheriff calls, don't tell him anything. At least not right now."

I felt Rosie's eyes on the side of my face.

"What are you doing, Dave?" Bootsie said.

"I'll call you in a little while," I said. "Stay with Elrod, okay?"

"What if that man calls back?"

"He won't. He'll figure the line's open."

Before she could speak again, I went inside and opened the closet door in the bedroom. From under some folded blankets on the top shelf I took out a box of twelve-gauge shells and the Remington pump shotgun whose barrel I had sawed off in front of the pump handle and whose sportsman's plug I had removed years ago. I shook the shells, a mixture of deer slugs and double-ought buckshot, out on the bed and pressed them one by one into the magazine until I felt the spring come snug against the fifth shell. I dropped the rest of the shells into my raincoat pockets.

"Call the FBI, Dave," Bootsie said behind me.

"No," I said.

"Then I'll do it."

"Boots, if they screw it up, he'll kill her. We'll never even find the body."

Her face was white. I set the shotgun down and pulled her against me. She felt small, her back rounded, inside my arms.

"We've got a few hours," I said. "If we can't get her back in that time, I'm going to do what he wants and hope that he turns her loose. I'll bring the sheriff and the FBI in on it, too."

She stepped back from me and looked up into my face.

"Hope that he-" she said.

"Doucet's never left witnesses."

She wanted to come with us, but I left her on the gallery with Elrod, staring after us with her hands clenching and unclenching at her sides.

It was almost dark when we turned off the old two-lane highway onto the dirt road that led to Spanish Lake. The rain was falling in the trees and out on the lake and I could see the lights burning in one trailer under the hanging moss by the water's edge. All the way out to the lake Rosie had barely spoken, her small hands folded on top of her purse, the shadows washing across her face like rivulets of rain.

"I have to be honest with you, Dave. I don't know how far I can go along with this," she said.

"Call in your people now and I'll stonewall them."

"Do you think that little of us?"

"Not you I don't. But the people you work for are pencil pushers. They'll cover their butts, they'll do it by the numbers, and I'll end up losing Alafair."

"What are you going to do if you catch Doucet?"

"That's up to him."

"Is that straight, Dave?"

I didn't answer.

"I saw you put something in your raincoat pocket when you were coming out of the bedroom," she said. "I got the impression you were concealing it from Bootsie. Maybe it was just my imagination."

"Maybe you're thinking too much about the wrong things, Rosie."

"I want your word this isn't a vigilante mission."

"You're worried about procedure.… In dealing with a man like this? What's the matter with you?"

"Maybe you're forgetting who your real friends are, Dave."

I stopped the truck at the security building, rolled down my window, and held up my badge for the man inside, who was leaned back in his chair in front of a portable television set. He put on his hat, came outside, and dropped the chain for me. I could hear the sounds of a war movie through the open door.

"I'll just leave it down for you," he said.

"Thanks. Is that Julie Balboni's trailer with the lights on?" I said.

"Yeah, that's it."

"Who's with him?"

The security guard's eyes went past me to Rosie.

"His reg'lar people, I guess," he said. "I don't pay it much mind."

"Who else?"

"He brings out guests from town." His eyes looked directly into mine.

I rolled up the window, thumped across the chain, and drove into the oak grove by the lake. Twenty yards from Balboni's lighted trailer was the collapsed and blackened shell of a second trailer, its empty windows blowing with rain, its buckled floor leaking cinders into pools of water, the tree limbs above it scrolled with scorched leaves. To one side of Balboni's trailer a Volkswagon and the purple Cadillac with the tinted black windows were parked between two trees. I saw someone light a cigarette inside the Cadillac.