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“No, sir, it don’t go nowhere,” Marvin said.
“Y’all been fucking?” the man said.
“What?” Marvin said.
“I ain’t caught y’all fucking, huh?” he said.
Both Marvin and Zerelda looked at the man, stupefied.
“You t’ink you bad, you?” the man said to Marvin.
He reached out, his cigarette still in his mouth, and grabbed Marvin by his shirt and ripped him away from Zerelda, the Beretta tangling under her blouse, falling to the ground. Almost simultaneously the man removed a blackjack from his side pocket and whipped it down between Marvin’s eyes, then across the side and back of his skull as though he were driving nails in wood.
Marvin was unconscious before he hit the ground.
Zerelda’s mouth hung open.
“You with Vermilion Parish? The sheriff’s department?” she said.
“Ain’t none of your bidness who I am, bitch. Where’s Barbara Shanahan at?”
“Shanahan?” she said.
His fist seemed to explode in the center of her face.
The rain had stopped altogether when I came around the curve and saw the wood-frame church, the boughs of the persimmon tree, still in leaf, protruding from its crushed roof. I parked on the side of the road and cut the headlights. There were no vehicles in the yard or out in the trees, at least none that I could see, but the wooden bridge over the rain ditch was stenciled with fresh tire tracks. I rolled down the window and listened.
“What’s that noise?” Sal, the ex-soldier, asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied.
It was an irregular, cacophonous sound, like a tractor-mower idling and misfiring, perhaps without a muffler.
I slipped my .45 out of its holster and opened the door of my truck.
“What you gonna do, Loot?” Sal asked.
“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” I said.
“That don’t sound too good. I think I’d better come along,” he said.
“Wrong,” I said.
He got out of the truck and grinned. “You gonna arrest me?” he said.
“I might,” I said.
But he wasn’t impressed with my attempt at sternness, and we crossed the bridge and saw two sets of vehicle tracks, one overlapping the other, both leading past the frame house filled with baled hay. Sal stooped down and picked up a Beretta nine-millimeter lying by a puddle of water. He tapped the mud out of the barrel and used his shirttail to wipe the mud off the grips and hammer and trigger guard, then pulled the slide far back enough to see the bright brass glint of a round already seated in the chamber.
I extended my hand for him to give me the gun, but he only grinned again and shook his head.
The moon looked like a piece of burnt pewter inside the clouds now, and in the pale light it gave off I could see hogs rooting at the edge of a flooded woods. I walked on ahead of Sal, past the church and the house where the preacher must have once lived, the sound of a gasoline- or diesel-powered engine growing louder. On the far side of a three-sided tin shed, someone turned on a lantern of some kind, one that exuded a dull white luminescence.
Out in the trees I could see Clete’s Cadillac convertible and Legion’s red pickup truck. The hatch to the Cadillac was open, gaping, the trunk empty. I
bent down, the .45 gripped in two hands, and got closer to the shed and looked through the back window at the collection of tar cookers and road graders and bulldozers that had been stored there by a parish maintenance crew. A battery-powered Coleman lantern burned on the ground, the humidity in the air almost iridescent in the glow of the neon tubing.
Legion Guidry was filling a bucket from a water tap. Marvin Oates lay unconscious on the ground, his hair matted with straw and mud. Close by, Zerelda sat against a wood post. Her wrists were bound behind the post with electrician’s tape. But it was Clete Purcel who was obviously in the most serious jeopardy. He was slumped over by the lantern, his head hanging down, his eyes half shut with trauma and blood loss, the back of his shirt a dark red.
