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I thought about the members of my platoon, deep in Indian country, blade faced, stinking of funk and rotted socks and mosquito repellant their skin twitching as they worked their way down a night trail strung with toe-poppers and booby-trapped 105 duds. I thought about my dead wives, Annie and Bootsie, who were always my stead fast friends as well as spouse and lover, and I thought about Alafair, my adopted daughter, studying at Reed College in Portland, and wondered if I would ever see her again.
I thought about the country in which I had grown up and which I had served as a soldier and police officer. It was the best country on earth, the most noble, egalitarian, democratic experiment in human history. It was a grand and wonderful place to live, well worth the fighting for, as Ernest Hemingway would. say. Thomas Jefferson knew that, and so did Woody Guthrie, Dorothy Day, Joe Hill, Molly Brown, and the IWW.
To hell with the likes of my warders, who I was sure were Tito and Caesar Dellacroce. Let them do their worst, I told myself. And to hell with all the politicians on the take and the princes of industry who lionized Third World bedbugs in order to carry out their agenda of inculcating fear in the electorate at home. America was still America, the country everyone in the world wanted to emulate, where rock 'n' roll and the Beat lyrics of Jack Kerouac would outlive all the venal interests that threatened her.
Dying wasn't so bad, not if you faced it bravely, with a clear conscience and your principles still intact. But maybe it wouldn't come to that, I told myself. The tape was still on my eyes, my tormentors ostensibly still unidentifiable.
At least that is what I told myself.
Then I heard movement in a room beyond the door of the room in which I lay, and the muffled voices of at least three men talking, and I felt my sense of personal resolve begin to drain like water from the bottom of a gunnysack.
The door opened and two sets of hands lifted me into a chair. The room was silent, the tin roof creaking from the cooling of the day. Someone wrapped tape both around my waist and the back of the chair.
"I don't know where Max Coll is. What purpose would I have in concealing his whereabouts?" I said, although no one had spoken to me.
"See, he knows what we want. He don't even wait to be asked the question. That shows us he's a smart guy who can look into the minds of other people. That shows us he's smart and we're dumb," said the voice of the man who had applied a pair of pliers to my thumb.
"How you want this to play out, 'cause we got a flight to catch?" said the voice of the other man, who I now believed to be Tito Del-lacroce, also known as the Heap. But he was speaking to someone else, and not to his brother, either.
Whoever he asked the question of did not respond. Instead, I heard the soft sound of a clothing zipper sliding on its track, followed by a pause, just before a warm stream of urine splashed in my face and ran down inside the tape that bound my eyes. I twisted my head from side to side, but the person urinating on me painted my mouth, hair, and neck and drenched my shirt before he zipped up his fly again.
"We're naming this place Yellow Springs, Louisiana, in your honor, Robicheaux," said the voice of the man with the pliers.
They left the room and closed the door behind them. I leaned forward and spit, then sucked saliva out of my jaws and spit again. I heard a car door slam and the car drive away. Two men reentered the room and one of them grabbed a corner of the tape and ripped it loose from my eyes and the back of my head.
"You're shit out of luck," said the man with the tape hanging from his fingers. He was short, with a pointed face, and small, energized, deep-set eyes, his hair scalped above his ears like bowl-cut animal fur.
Next to him was his brother, Tito the Heap. His hair was braided in dreadlocks that hung to his shoulders, which sloped away from his thick neck like the sides on a tent. One jawbone kept flexing like a roll of pennies.
The room was bare, except for a table on which a tool box and a camcorder rested. The walls and floor were constructed of rough planks, and through the screen window I could see a woods strung with air vines and dotted with palmettos and beyond the tree trunks a bay and the red sun low on the horizon. In the distance somebody was firing a shotgun, perhaps popping skeet over the water.
"Are you listening, asshole? The man says the whack goes down an inch at a time. You get to be in your own movie," said the short man, whom I recognized from his mug shot as Caesar Dellacroce.
"Get it over with," I said.
"I think if you knew what was coming, you wouldn't say that," Caesar said.
I looked into space, my eyes slightly out of focus with fatigue and hopelessness and now resignation.
"I'm talking to you," Caesar said. He popped my cheek with his hand.
"I figure I'm done, so what I'm about to tell you is the truth. I didn't smoke Frank Dellacroce, but I wish I had. He was a punk and a bully and somebody should have put the electrodes on him and blown out his grits a long time ago. When you get finished with me, Clete Purcel is going to turn over every rock in New Orleans and Fort Lauderdale until he finds you, then make you wish your mother had flushed you down the toilet with the afterbirth."
Caesar stared at me, his mouth parted slightly, his jaws slack. "Say that again?"
"Go fuck yourself," I said.
"You believe this guy?" Caesar said to his brother. But he was clearly distracted now, not quite in charge anymore.
"We wasted too much time on this," Tito said reflectively. His eyes, like his brother's, were inset deeply in the skull, his nostrils flaring when he breathed, as though the plates of muscle on his chest and shoulders were squeezing the air from his lungs. "Here's what it is, ace. You rolled the dice with the wrong guy and lost. We ain't responsible for this. So take your medicine like a man. I'll make it short and sweet as possible. You want to say anything?"
"No," I replied, and fixed my gaze out the window on a watery, red sunset barely showing behind the thin trunks of trees that had already turned dark with the gloaming of the day. Tito Dellacroce pushed a sponge into my mouth with the heel of his hand, then began winding tape around my head.
"Hang on," Caesar said, staring out the same window but at a different angle.
"What?" Tito said.
"There's a priest out there," Caesar said.
