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“I don’t know. Belowdecks, maybe.”
“Does he still have the Kalashnikov?”
“The what?” he said.
“The AK-47,” I said.
“You’re going to get Isolde killed.”
“We are?” Clete said, touching his chest. “I feel like flinging you over the rail, Johnny.”
“Then do it,” Johnny said. “If I lose Isolde, I lose everything.”
“Where’s Penelope?” I said.
“On the bridge,” he said. “With Adonis.”
I rested my hand on his shoulder. “Take care of Father Julian and Leslie and Elizabeth and Detective LeBlanc. We’ll do everything we can to protect Isolde.”
“I already went down there,” he said. “Leslie and her daughter are gone. So is that LeBlanc guy. Father Julian is real sick.”
“Leslie is gone?” I said.
“Yeah, what did I just say?”
“You’re really starting to piss me off, Johnny,” Clete said. “How would you like me to dribble your head on the deck?”
“I said she’s gone. Maybe with Gideon. Now Gideon is screwing up everything, and y’all are doing everything you can to help him.”
“Get lost,” Clete said, and shoved him in the back.
“Don’t do that,” Johnny said.
Clete shoved him again, this time along the rail. “I’ll count to three, then you’re going over the rail.”
“Fuck you, Mr. Clete.”
“?‘Fuck you, Mr. Clete’? I just love that,” Clete said. “I’m about to knock you down.”
“Johnny, there are lifeboats on both sides of the ship,” I said. “Get one ready and put Father Julian in it. We’re not going to let your uncle destroy us.”
“What are you going to do about Gideon?” he said.
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” I said.
“Sell that when Uncle Mark’s yacht blows up and Isolde is dead,” he said.
* * *
IN JOHNNY’S WAY, he was right. In my vanity, I had thought I could find the origins of human cruelty. The upshot was the discovery of a time dimension that perhaps existed simultaneously with our own. I knew no more about the nature of man than when I’d visited Marcel LaForchette in Huntsville Pen, a man who turned out to be my half brother and who killed himself in my living room. In my search for the origins of human cruelty, I had come to the same dead end as the psychiatrists who look into the heart of darkness and are so frightened they thank God for the clinical term “pathological,” because it allows them to cleanse the images planted in their minds by the patients they tried to cure.
What’s the lesson? That’s another easy one: Don’t be taken in by bullshit from people who have no idea what evil is about.
* * *
JOHNNY LEFT US, perhaps to launch a lifeboat, perhaps to help Father Julian, perhaps to betray us. Clete and I had few choices. We had the .25 semi-auto and the duffel bag and the Molotov cocktails and the emergency flares. We could try to take the bridge or launch a lifeboat with Johnny and Julian. If we chose the latter without putting Shondell out of business, we would probably be machine-gunned in the water. Clete seemed to read my mind. “Worried about Penelope?”
“What do you think?”
