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“We’re in a box,” I said. “That’s the long and short of it. Our advantage is that they have to come to us. We’ve also put a dent in their numbers.”
“How many of them are there?” Alafair asked.
“No more than a handful,” I said.
Clete was sitting on the bumper of Gretchen’s truck, bent forward, his head down. “Wrong,” he said without looking up.
“Clete saw more men than I did,” I said.
“Dave, look!” Alafair said, pointing up the slope.
I don’t know where they came from. I could see flashlights moving down the slope on either side of the property. I had no idea who they were or how they got there, if they worked for Caspian Younger or not. I was no longer sure that anything I saw was there.
“Give me the AR-15,” Clete said, his head on his chest. “I dropped my piece on the lawn.”
Gretchen squeezed my arm tightly, her face close to mine. “Time to bust some caps, Dave. We’ll figure all this out later,” she said. She picked up the AR-15 and left Clete the Mauser.
She was right. We were outnumbered, cut off from the highway, and flanked, with the lake at our back.
“Come on, Dave, call it,” Gretchen said.
I could see Molly and Albert and the two girls on the back steps of the house, and I could see Felicity Louviere sleeping in the front seat of Gretchen’s pickup. Clete could hardly move. Blood had run from his side all the way to the knee of his trousers. I felt at a total loss.
“Take it to them,” I said.
“Do what?” Alafair said.
“We go right down the middle,” I said. “If Caspian Younger wants a fight, let’s give it to him.”
By anyone’s reckoning, it was a foolish idea, perhaps one that had its origins in medieval romance or Henry V’s address to his troops before the siege at Agincourt. But there are times when the probability of death in your life is so great that you step across a line and no longer fear it. I believe that was what happened to us as we stood close by a glacial lake where dinosaurs and mastodons once fed and played among the buttercups and ice lilies.
We left Clete with Felicity Louviere and walked three abreast across the lawn, Alafair and Gretchen and I, each of us bearing down on Caspian Younger, who had just emerged with his men from the cherry orchard.
Like most cowards, he had not anticipated our response. He could have opened fire on us or ordered his men to do so, but he knew they were all watching him, expecting him to be more than the posturing figure who wore the quilted vest of the hunter and used the martial rhetoric of a drill instructor. He stood awkwardly in front of his men, the breeze tousling his hair. A blue-black revolver with white handles hung from his right hand. It was probably a collectible, the kind a publicity-oriented army officer with political aspirations might wear in a shoulder holster.
“Well, what do we have here?” he said.
“Keep working on it. You’ll figure it out,” I replied.
“Is this the defining moment for you and your little team, Mr. Robicheaux?”
“You tell me, Mr. Younger. You’re the guy who turned his wife over to the tender mercies of a sadist like Asa Surrette, the same man who murdered your daughter,” I said.
“Like always, you’ve got it wrong,” he said.
“He suffocated her with a plastic bag and ejaculated on her legs,” I said. “She was seventeen. Maybe she called out your name when she begged for help.”
His whiskers looked like dirty smudges on his cheeks and chin. His eyes shifted sideways when he saw that he was caught between allowing me to speak and ordering his men to shoot in order to stop me from revealing his failure as a father and husband and finally as a human being. I held the M-1 at port arms, the safety off; no matter how things played out, I was determined to spike his cannon before I went down.
“I get it,” he said. “This is your finest hour. The egalitarian philosopher delivering his grand speech to the multitudes. Unfortunately, the role doesn’t serve you well. We’ve researched every aspect of your life, Mr. Robicheaux. We have your psychiatric records, your pitiful statements about your dependency on your whore of a mother, your sexual history in Manila and Yokohama, the possibility of a homoerotic relationship with your fat friend, your constant whining about all the injustices visited on the miserable piece of swamp you grew up in. The fact that you take others to task for their mistakes has established new standards in hypocrisy.”
“The problem for you, Mr. Younger, is that after I’m dead and gone, you’ll still be you,” I said. “You’ll wake up every morning knowing that your half brother is Wyatt Dixon, and on his worst day, he could stuff you in a matchbox with his thumb. By the way, how’d a loser like you convince all these guys to work for you? Do they know you had your daughter killed so you could inherit her estate? If you’d do that to her, what will you do to them?”
“You’re looking at your executioner, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said. “Want to add anything to your final words?”
“Yeah, you’re going with me,” I said.
“No matter what happens, I’m instructing my men to enjoy themselves with Horowitz and your daughter one piece at a time. They’re going to be busy girls. Let that be your last thought, Mr. Robicheaux. I think we should get the festivities started now, so you can watch what you’ve wrought. I understand Horowitz has already pulled a train or two, so she might enjoy it.”
