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I WENT OUT THE back door just as the headlights of the Humvee came on and shone directly into my eyes. I raised my hand against the glare and saw Lou Wexler by the side of the Humvee. He had a semi-automatic rifle aimed at the center of my face. Desmond Cormier lay on the ground, his hands wrapped with wire behind him and tied to his ankles, a blue rubber ball strapped in his mouth.
“Lay your piece aside or never see your daughter again,” Wexler said.
My eyes were watering in the headlights.
“I’ll pop both her and Des right now,” he said.
I let the AR-15 drop.
“Back away,” he said.
I did as he said. He reached down and picked up the AR-15 by the barrel and flung it into the darkness. “The whore gave me away, did she?”
“Which whore?” I asked.
“The one I had a romp with in City Park,” he said.
“Where’s Alafair?”
“Snug as a bug in a rug.”
“What do you get out of this, Wexler?”
“Tons of fun, and a bit of payback for what you and your ignorant kind did to my uncle in your parish prison.”
“Helen Soileau and our friends and I had no part in that.”
“Oh, yes, you did, laddie. You pretend to be the knight errant, but you’re an ill-bred wog, just like Cormier. I kept his little three-penny opera afloat for years, and bankrupted both myself and that poor sod Butterworth, while the Golden Globes and Academy nominations went to this pitiful puke on the ground.”
“Why did you kill Lucinda Arceneaux?”
“I saved her.”
“What?”
“She could have been my queen bee. She opted for a life of mediocrity. So I eased her into a role no one around here will ever forget. You have to admit, it’s been pretty good theater.”
I had no doubt he was mad. But that didn’t make his cruelty any the less. Desmond twitched on the ground. Wexler placed his foot on Desmond’s neck and squeezed. I could hear the waves starting to hit the cabin cruiser’s hull, a steady slap that threw salt spray higher and higher in the air.
“Alafair isn’t a player in this,” I said. “If you really believe in the ethos of the Templar knight, you have to let her go, Lou.”
“On a first-name basis, are we? Get on your knees.”
“Is she on the boat?”
“Could be. But let’s get back to our biblical lesson. You remember the biblical quotation, don’t you? ‘Before me every knee shall bow’?”
“Can’t do it.”
“Maybe this will help.”
He fired a round through the top of my foot. I felt a moment of intense pain, as though the bones between ankle and toes had been struck with a ballpeen hammer, then nothing, my shoe filling with blood. I wanted to say something brave or clever, but I could not. My best friend was down and maybe dead, and Alafair might have already suffered the same fate as Hilary Bienville. If she and Clete were gone, I was ready to go also.
“Put the next one between my eyes,” I said.
“What was that?”
“Now is your chance. I want you to do it.”
