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“Enough so he would know it’s important.”
“I’ll get back with you shortly,” I said.
I hung up and went into Labiche’s office. The message light on his phone was blinking. “Got any problem talking with Cormac Watts?” I asked.
“Not as long as he stays off our toilet seats,” he replied.
“How’s it feel?”
“How does what feel?”
“Being you. A full-time shithead.”
“You’re way out of line, Robicheaux.”
“Try this: You’re ignoring forensic evidence in a homicide investigation. You’re queering the prosecution’s case before it ever hits the prosecutor’s desk.”
“Queering?”
“It’s the old term for screwing up or delegitimizing.”
“I’ve got to remember that. You’re a mountain of information, Robo.”
“I’m going to give you five minutes to haul your sorry ass into Helen’s office and tell her what you’ve got.”
“I’ll think about it.”
I walked to his desk and picked up the receiver from his phone. I thunked it into the middle of his forehead and replaced it in the cradle. His cheeks drained; a pink half-moon pulsed under his hairline. “Five minutes,” I said.
* * *
THAT NIGHT I tried to reach into the blackout where I had disappeared from the world of normal people. Experience had taught me that chemically induced amnesia has no cure. Your memory does not return at a convenient time; you do not walk from an airless black cell in Alcatraz’s infamous D block into sunlight and rationality. In all probability, you have permanently destroyed thousands of brain cells, just as though you had struck yourself in the head with a ball-peen hammer. But sometimes the problem is psychological rather than neurological. If so, there is a way you can unspool the nightmare that your conscious mind might not want to accept. Unfortunately, the method is imperfect and dangerous. You can become convinced you have committed horrific acts when in fact you have not.
Your ordinary dreams can contain bits and pieces of a larger event, in my case, an encounter with T. J. Dartez on a narrow two-lane parish road out by Bayou Benoit. The process is like reassembling a sheet of gray and black stained glass fallen from a church window to a flagstone floor. For me, that meant images flashing like a kaleidoscope deep down inside my sleep—the glare of headlights in my rearview mirror, a vehicle gnashing against my bumper, fences and weeds whirling around me, the leering face of an unshaved man with greasy black hair and nails rimmed with dirt, his eyes lit by the fires of stupidity and ignorance and rage.
In none of my dreams, however, was I striking a man with my fists or choking or stomping and kicking him. How could I have killed a man with my bare hands, or with a club, and not have any trace of the crime in my unconscious? I wanted to believe I had set myself free. But I didn’t. Another image remained with me, one that had nothing to do with the event by Bayou Benoit. Instead, I saw him behind the wheel of his truck, his tires squealing around the curve that led to the intersection Molly was entering, his face dilated and drunk with the power the pedal transferred up his leg and into his genitals. I wanted to kill him even worse than I had wanted to kill Mack, the man who helped destroy my family. I wanted to break his bones and destroy his face with my fists. I wanted to do other things I will not describe. I harbored emotions that no Christian should ever have. But they were mine. I owned them. And they still lived within me, even though T. J. Dartez was lying on a slab, as cold and bloodless as stale lunch meat.
Was I capable of the homicide out by Bayou Benoit? You tell me.
SATURDAY MORNING, I put out another can of sardines for our raccoon friend, whom I named Mon Tee Coon. I had not heard Alafair come in from Red’s health club the night before. She walked up behind me, a mug of coffee in her hand. She was wearing white shorts and a long-sleeve denim shirt with the tails hanging out. She told me about her encounter with Emmeline Nightingale. “She’s a little otherworldly.”
“A human icicle?” I said.
“She has dirty eyes.”
“You think she hit the ball in your face deliberately?”
“That’s what I felt like after I talked with her. She’s a controller. She also seems to have an obsession with oil companies. What’s the story on that?”
“Jimmy has a degree in geology. He worked in South America awhile. The Nightingales have their fingers in lots of pies.”
She sat down in a white-painted wooden chair near Tripod’s hutch. The sky was blue and as shiny as silk. Leaves from the live oaks were tumbling on her hair and skin. I couldn’t believe she was the little girl I’d pulled from the cabin of a submerged plane.
“She left me with a disturbing sensation,” Alafair said. “One I couldn’t shake driving home.”
“Like what?”
“Evil.”
