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Then the road entered a corridor of oaks, and through the trunks I saw four white horses galloping in circles in a mist-streaked pasture, spooking against the barbed-wire fences, mud flying from their hooves, their nostrils dilated, their eyes bright with fear against a backdrop of dry lightning, their muscles rippling under their skin like silvery water sliding over stone. Then I was sure I saw a figure by the side of the road, the palmetto shadows waving behind him, his steel-gray tunic buttoned at his throat, a floppy campaign hat pulled over his eyes.
I hit my bright lights, and for just a moment I saw his elongated milk-white face as though a flashbulb had exploded in front of it. "What are you doing here?" I said.
"Don't use those whom you love to justify a dishonorable cause."
"That's rhetoric."
"You gave the same counsel to the Sykes boy."
"It was you who told me to do it under a black flag. Remember? We blow up their shit big time, general."
"Then you will do it on your own, suh, and without me."
The truck's front springs bounced in a chuckhole and splashed a sheet of dirty water across the window; then I was beyond the pasture and the horses that wheeled and raced in the moonlight, traveling deep into the tip of the wetlands, with flooded woods on each side of me, blue herons lifting on extended wings out of the canals, the moist air whipped with the smell of salt and natural gas from the oil platforms out in the swamp.
The road bent out of the trees, and I saw the long expanses of sawgrass and mudflats that spread out into the bay, and the network of channels that had been cut by the oil companies and that were slowly poisoning the marshes with salt water. Rosie was awake now, rubbing her eyes with one knuckle, her face stiff with fatigue.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to fall asleep," she said.
"It's been a long day."
"Where's the camp?"
"There's some shacks down by the flats, but they look deserted."
I pulled the truck to the side of the road and cut the lights. The tide was out, and the bay looked flat and gray and seabirds were pecking shellfish out of the wet sand in the moonlight. Then a wind gusted out of the south and bent a stand of willow trees that stood on a small knoll between the marsh and the bay.
"Dave, there's a light back in those trees," Rosie said.
Then I saw it, too, at the end of a two-lane sandy track that wound through the willows and over the knoll.
"All right, let's do it," I said, and pushed down on the door handle.
"Dave, before we go in there, I want you to hear something. If we find the wrong thing, if Alafair's not all right, it's not because of anything you did. It's important for you to accept that now. If I had been in your place, I'd have done everything the same way you have."
I squeezed her hand.
"A cop couldn't have a better partner than Rosie Gomez," I said.
We got out of the truck and left the doors open to avoid making any unnecessary sound, and walked up the sandy track toward the trees. I could hear gulls cawing and wheeling overhead and the solitary scream of a nutria deep in the marsh. Humps of garbage stood by the sides of the track, and then I realized that it was medical waste—bandages, hypodermic vials, congealed bags of gelatin, sheets that were stiff with dried fluids.
We moved away from the side of the road and into the trees. I walked with a shotgun at port arms, the .45 heavy in the right-hand pocket of my raincoat. Rosie had her chrome-plated .357 magnum gripped with both hands at an upward angle, just to the right of her cheek. Then the wind bent the trees again and blew a shower of wet leaves into a clearing, where we could see a tin-roofed cabin with a small gallery littered with cane poles, crab traps, and hand-thrown fishnets, and a Coleman lantern hissing whitely on a wood table in the front room. In the back were an outhouse and a pirogue set up on sawhorses, and behind the outhouse was Murphy Doucet's blue Mercury.
A shadow moved across the window, then a man with his back to us sat down at the table with a coffee pot and a thick white mug in his hands. Even through the rusted screen I could see his stiff, gray military haircut and the deeply tanned skin of his neck whose tone and texture reminded me of a c
ured tobacco leaf.
We should have been home free. But then I saw the moonlight glint on the wire that was stretched across the two-lane track, three inches above the sand. I propped the shotgun against a tree, knelt down in the wet leaves, and ran my fingers along the wire until I touched two empty Spam cans that were tied with string to the wire, then two more, then two more after that. Through the underbrush, against the glow of moonlight in the clearing, I could make out a whole network of nylon fishing line strung between tree trunks, branches, roots, and underbrush, and festooned with tin cans, pie plates, and even a cow bell.
I was sweating heavily inside my raincoat now. I wiped the salt out of my eyes with my hand.
One lung-bursting rush across the clearing, I thought. Clear the gallery in one step, bust the door out of the jamb, then park a big one in his brisket and it's over.
But I knew better. I would sound like a traveling junkyard before I ever made the gallery, and if Alafair was still alive, in all probability he would be holding a pistol at her head.
"We have to wait until it's light or until he comes out," I whispered to Rosie.
We knelt down in the trees, in the damp air, in the layered mat of black and yellow willow leaves, in the mosquitoes that rose in clouds from around our knees and perched on our faces and the backs of our hands and necks. I saw him get up once, walk to a shelf, then return to the table and read a magazine while he ate soda crackers out of a box. My thighs burned and a band of pain that I couldn't relieve began to spread slowly across my back. Rosie sat with her rump resting on her heels, wiping the mosquitoes off her forearms, her pink skirt hiked up on her thighs, her .357 propped in the fork of a tree. Her neck was shiny with sweat.
