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“It’s what they want, Clete. We’ll never get out of the field. Nobody will know what happened to us, and these guys will be around to piss on our graves.”
He gazed at me for a long time, fighting with conclusions he didn’t want to accept, steering with one hand. Then he angled toward the south, exhaling, depressing the accelerator. In the silence I could hear the grass raking under the Caddy’s frame. “How’d you know where I was?” I asked.
“I went to that filling station at the crossroads. The clerk in there said he’d talked to you.” The Caddy thumped onto the asphalt. Clete floored the accelerator, glancing in the rearview mirror at the same time. “Try the cell again.”
“No service.”
The flooded fields on either side of the road were flying past us. “We’re gonna get these guys, we’re gonna get these guys, we’re gonna get these guys,” he said.
I was used up and too tired to offer any support for his fantasies about revenge. My adrenaline-fed high had gone the way all dry drunks come and go, like a brief revisit to the psychological and moral insanity that had constituted my life when the cathedral I entered every afternoon was an empty New Orleans saloon with a long mahogany bar at the end of which a solitary corked bottle of charcoal-filter whiskey and a shot glass and a longneck Jax waited for me. Inside the amber radiance filtering through the oak trees o
utside, I was a faithful acolyte and was always respectful of the spirits that lived in the corked bottle and the power and the light I could acquire by simply tilting a small glass to my lips.
For me, unslaked bloodlust was no easier to deal with than unslaked sexual desire or a thirst for whiskey that at one time was so great I would swallow a razor blade to satisfy it. My skin was hot, my palms as stiff and dry as cardboard. I wanted to return to the field with as much ordnance as I could get my hands on and blow our hooded adversaries into a bloody mist. But I knew how things were going to play out. The men who had killed Vidor Perkins and who had tried to kill me had sanction. Perhaps it didn’t come from local or state officials, but a group as well organized and trained and financed as this one was not born in a vacuum. The question was whom did they serve.
We pulled into the filling station at the crossroads and called the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Department. My report on the gun battle up the road and the death of Vidor Perkins obviously seemed surreal and was probably more than the dispatcher could assimilate. I had to keep repeating who and where I was. In the background I could hear a half-dozen dispatchers trying to talk over one another. There were obviously power outages and downed electrical wires in people’s yards and automobile accidents all over the parish. A large-scale shots-fired called in by a police officer from another parish who said he’d just killed a man and wanted backup at the scene he had fled probably sounded like the ravings of a lunatic.
Clete was staring at me as I hung up. “So?” he said.
“They’ll probably put us in straitjackets,” I replied.
Clete and I drove back up the road, wondering how long the response would take. Surprisingly, two cruisers showed up at the field at the same time we did, their spotlights piercing deep into the darkness, sweeping over the Acadian cottage and the rusted tractor and the acres of grass and weeds that stretched all the way back to the line of trees along the riverbank. I could still see swaths of tire tracks in the grass. I could see the coulee that I had raced down and hidden inside. I could even see the two slash pines where I had exited the tree line. But all the vehicles, including my pickup truck, were gone.
“Do you believe this?” Clete said.
“No, I don’t,” I said.
A plainclothes detective named Huffinton walked with us through the field. The rain had slackened, and the sky was turning pale at the edges. He was a big man whose clothes fit him badly, and he wore a felt hat with a wide wilted brim and a necktie that was twisted in a knot. Halfway across the field, I pointed out the spot where Vidor Perkins had died.
“There’s nothing there but dirt,” Huffinton said.
“That’s the point. Somebody spaded out the grass,” I said.
He walked a few feet from me and swept a flashlight over the ground. “This is about where you took cover behind your truck and started firing at the van? Because if it is, I don’t see any brass.”
“You’re not supposed to. If they’d take my truck, they’d take everything else.”
He nodded. Then he lit a cigarette. He puffed on it in the breeze, the smoke damp and smelling of chemicals and blowing back into my face. I knew any serious investigation of the crime scene was over. Huffinton stared at a golden flood of sunlight under the cloud layer in the west. “Let’s take a look down by the river,” he said.
We walked along the coulee and stood on the spot where I had shot the hooded man. My .45 shell casings were nowhere to be found. The body of the man I had killed was gone. There was no visible trace of blood on the ground. Nor did we find any ejected shells inside the stand of trees that grew along the river embankment. There were boot and shoe marks in the dirt, but none of a defined nature. The only tactile evidence of the gun battle were the gouges in the tree trunks from the AR-15 and a thin spray of blood on a persimmon branch at the spot where I had taken off the man’s fingers with the twelve-gauge.
“Come on down to the department and we’ll write it up,” Huffinton said.
“This isn’t our parish. Dave’s job is not to ‘write it up.’ Dave’s truck is probably on a semi headed for a compactor,” Clete said. “Call the state police.”
“Why don’t you do it?” Huffinton said.
Clete looked away at a distant spot, hiding the angry light in his eyes. “There was a crop duster flying around. Where’s the closest airport?” he said.
“Anywhere there’s a flat space. You have someplace else you need to be?” Huffinton said.
“I’ll be back tomorrow and take care of the paperwork,” I said.
“Yeah, I’d appreciate it,” Huffinton said. “No offense meant, but somebody might say you were back on the sauce when this one happened.”
“Tell me which it is: Streak is delusional or I’m a liar,” Clete said.
“Say again?”
