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We were almost disappointed when a stray gunship caught him under a full moon, running across a rice paddy, and arbitrarily took him out.
A predictable enemy is a valuable one.
I knew Remeta would be back. And I knew where he would come from.
He returned three nights after the sheriff put me on departmental suspension.
I heard the outboard deep in the swamp, then the engine went dead. I slipped on my khakis and shoes and lifted the AR-15 from under the bed and went outside and crossed the lawn. The trees were dripping with night damp, and I could barely see the bait shop in the fog.
But I could hear a boat paddle dipping into the water, knocking against a cypress root, scudding softly against the worn gunnel of a pirogue.
I walked down the concrete boat ramp into the water and stepped under the dock and waited. The bayou was moving northward, rising with the tide, and I saw a dead nutria in the current with a bluepoint crab hooked onto its side.
It was airless under the dock, the water warm inside my clothes, and I could smell dead fish among the pilings. Then the breeze came up and I saw the fog roll like puffs of cotton on the bayou’s surface and the bow of a pirogue emerge out of the swamp twenty yards down from the bait shop.
I had inserted a thirty-round magazine in the rifle. The bow of the pirogue moved into the bayou and now I could see the outline of a kneeling man, drawing the paddle through the water in silent J-strokes. Farther down the bayou, at the four corners, the owner of the general store had left on a porch light, and the man in the pirogue was now lighted from behind, his features distorting like a figure moving about under the phosphorescent glow of a pistol flare.
I steadied the rifle against a piling and sighted along the barrel, no longer seeing a silhouette but in my mind’s eye a human face, one with teeth, a hinged jawbone, an eye glinting in profile, a skull with skin stretched over its bladed surfaces.
A line of sweat ran through my eyebrow. You just squeeze off and not think about it, I told myself. How many times did you do it before, to people you didn’t even know? You just step across the line into E-major rock ‘n’ roll and the concerns of conscience quickly disappear in the adrenaline rush of letting off one round after another. The only reality becomes the muzzle flashes in the darkness, the clean smell of smokeless powder, the deadness in the ears that allows you to disconnect from the crumpling figure in the distance.
But I hadn’t yet actually seen the face of Johnny Remeta.
I clicked on the electric switch mounted on the dock piling. Suddenly the bayou was flooded with light.
“You must get mighty tired if you stay out here in the mosquitoes every night,” he said. He was grinning, his face bathed with white light, his mouth strangely discolored in the brilliance of the flood lamps, as though it were painted with purple lipstick.
I could feel my finger tightening inside the trigger guard.
“You’re a pisspot, Johnny,” I said.
“I’ve heard it all before, Mr. Robicheaux. My father said my mother would have gotten rid of me when I was in the womb but she didn’t want to waste a coat hanger,” he replied.
Then he opened his palms, as though accepting grace from above, his head tilted, taking my measure.
“Use your left hand and drop your weapon overboard,” I said.
“I don’t have one.”
I waded out from under the dock so he could see me.
“You’re under arrest. Pull the pirogue into shore,” I said.
“You couldn’t pop me, could you?”
I could hear myself breathing and feel the oil and moisture on my finger inside the trigger guard. He stood up in the pirogue, balancing himself, his hands extended outward. He stared at the muzzle of the rifle, his lips pursed, waiting.
“So long, Mr. Robicheaux. Tell Alafair I said hello.”
He hit the water in a long, flat dive, his weight flipping the pirogue over. With two strokes he was inside the cypress trees, running across sandspits and through the sloughs, cobwebs and air vines swinging behind him.
I was trembling all over, as though I had malaria. My head thundered and my palms were wet on the plastic stock of the rifle. I leaned over and vomited into the water.
I walked up the boat ramp, then onto the dock, and pulled off my T-shirt and sat down on the planks and pulled my knees up in front of me and rested my face on top of them.
I stayed there until the sun rose, then got up and slung the AR-15 muzzle-down on my shoulder and walked up the slope through the trees with the knowledge I had deliberately set out to murder another human being and had simultaneously failed as both assassin and police officer.
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