“I saw a marker left by the graves detail. Except it was in Louisiana, not ’Nam. My tags were wrapped around my steel pot.”

He let the stone drop from his hand onto the bank. He walked up the slope and fitted his big hand around the back of his neck. I could smell the piece of peppermint candy in his jaw. I could see the texture in his facial skin and the lidless intensity of his green eyes. I could also see pity and love in them, and the terrible knowledge that for some situations there are no words that can help, no anodyne that will make facing our greatest ordeal less than it is.

I rubbed the back of my wrist against my mouth. I knew at that moment I would have swallowed a razor blade for four fingers of Jack on cracked ice, and that realization filled me with shame. When I saw a caravan coming through the trees, I was glad for the danger it represented.

CHAPTER 25

CLETE PURCEL HAD descended from a Celtic ancestry that was more pagan than Christian. His forebears had ridden the coffin ships in the 1840s and had been reviled by Nativists and consigned to urban sewers like Five Points in New York and the Irish Channel in New Orleans. Arguably, they had been treated as subhuman. The upshot was they developed the ethos of people like Clete, whose admonition in dealing with skells and other people who give you trouble was always the same: “Dust ’em or bust ’em, noble mon” or “Take it to them with tongs.”

Maybe that isn’t a bad way to go. But sometimes when you disengage from your adversaries and isolate them and leave them to deal with their own hostilities and fears, sealing the worst elements in their personalities inside their skins, with no form of release, you condemn them to a nongeographical form of solitary confinement that is like steel blades whirling inside the viscera. Better yet, sometimes you accomplish this without even trying.

Three waxed and buffed new vehicles came down the winding access road through the trees and stopped up the slope from where Clete and I stood on the water’s edge. The sun was in the west, the sky ribbed with blue-black clouds that gave no offer of rain, and shadows had pooled on the front windshields of the three vehicles so we couldn’t see inside them. The moment reminded me of Clete’s original encounter with the Wellstones’ minions.

The vehicle in the lead was a black Mercedes. Lyle Hobbs opened the back door for Leslie Wellstone. When Wellstone stepped out on the edge of the beach, the windows of the other two vehicles rolled down on their electric motors. I could see the humped shapes of men inside, all of them watching us, two or three of them wearing shades although the vehicles were parked in shadow.

“You got your piece?” Clete said.

“Nope,” I said.

Leslie Wellstone approached us, a flash of white teeth showing at the corner of his mouth, his eyes never quite resting on ours, as though he wished to be deferential and courteous. “On a fishing trip, are we?” he said.

“It’s the place for it,” I said.

“Mr. Hobbs said you wanted to see me.”

“Mr. Hobbs told us to beat it,” I said.

“The door is always open for you gentlemen. Particularly for Mr. Purcel,” Wellstone said.

“Let’s get something straight, Jack,” Clete said. “I got on your marital turf. I’m sorry that happened. But it’s on me, not on your wife, not on Dave here. So fuck me. If you got issues with that, let’s get it out on the table now.”

“You’re a direct man,” Wellstone said.

“I get that way when a psychopath soaks me in gasoline,” Clete said.

“I see. But you didn’t get to have the complete experience, did you? Did you know that at a certain point your sensory system dumps into your blood and your nerve endings go dead? You feel as though you’re inside a blue tongue of flame that gives no heat.”

Clete cupped his hands on his lighter and lit a cigarette. I took the cigarette from his mouth and threw it in the water. Wellstone watched this as though he were a spectator at a Guignol.

“Somebody locked you down in an oven and cooked you alive,” Clete said. “But sometimes that happens when you join the shake-and-bake brigade. Most of the original members in my platoon didn’t come back, at least not with all their parts. Most of the ones who came home wake up every day with their heads in the Mixmaster. So how about getting off other people’s backs?”

The rise in the pitch of Clete’s voice caused two of Wellstone’s employees to step out of their vehicles.

“Mr. Wellstone, we didn’t ask to get involved in your family’s business affairs or your personal lives,” I said. “You brought the trouble to us. In the meantime, two college kids died terrible deaths. I think your house is about to come down on your head. But Clete and I didn’t do it to you. Quince Whitley was a federal informant. I suspect he screwed you good with the feds before he cashed in.”

I could see the attention grow in Wellstone’s eyes. “Who was Whitley’s best friend?” I asked. “None other than Mr. Hobbs over there. You taking good care of Mr. Hobbs?”

“Questioning the altruism of my employees, are you?” Wellstone said.

“No, I’m questioning the loyalty of everybody around you, including your wife,” I said. “How about Sonny Click, man of the cloth that he was? Guys like Click don’t bounce themselves off a rafter. I think he was about to do some serious damage to your reputation, and he got taken off the board. I think it’s got something to do with sex.”

“You have a nasty tongue on you, Mr. Robicheaux,” Wellstone said.

Clete just had to do it. “We also know your entourage of gumballs here isn’t entirely about us,” he said. “You think Jimmy Dale Greenwood is out there climbing your old lady. If that’s true, it’s because you made her life purely awful. I think you’ve got the same problem I have, Mr. Wellstone. It’s called the reverse King Midas touch. Everything we put our hands on turns to shit.”

Leslie Wellstone stepped closer to me. I could feel his breath on my skin and smell an odor, perhaps imagined, perhaps not, that was like the afterburn of kerosene. His eyes stared like a lizard’s out of his encrusted face. They were liquid, as though fluid from a systemic malignancy had pooled inside them. His voice became a hiss. “You read Shakespeare, Mr. Robicheaux? The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman. But don’t underestimate his power.”

Involuntarily I stepped back from him, the lip of the lake touching my shoe.

He turned and walked away, his men falling in beside him.

“Keep your wick dry, Sally,” Clete said at his back.

But if Leslie Wellstone was Sally Dio, he didn’t take the bait. Instead, he kept walking toward his Mercedes, his gaze lifted to the hooded blue jays in the tree branches overhead.

Then I gave it a try. “Comment va votre famille à Galveston?”

This time Wellstone turned around. “Bien, merci,” he replied.

Got you, motherfucker, I thought.

But Leslie Wellstone wasn’t one to be easily undone. “We have relatives in Galveston, Mr. Robicheaux. I’m sure that’s whom you were referring to,” he said.

WE DROVE BACK to Albert’s ranch, west of Lolo, and I made another call to Sheriff Helen Soileau, my boss down in New Iberia. “I think some heavy stuff is about to go down here,” I said.

“Why now?”

“This escaped convict, Jimmy Dale Greenwood, is probably planning to run off with Leslie Wellstone’s wife.”

“What do you need?” she said, barely able to hide the fatigue in her voice.

“We’re looking at four open homicide cases and one questionable suicide,” I replied. “I think they’re all related, but I can’t fit one net over all five of them. I think the motivation has to do with sex, but I’m not sure.”

“Money buys sex. It also buys power. I’d follow the money, Streak.”