All the Devil's Creatures (35 page)

The deputy fought his way through with his lights and sirens. He parked in a loading zone and shoved his way toward a parking garage where a phalanx of Rangers kept the crowd at bay. Yelling
sheriff’s department
as he walked, he held his badge high to part the sea of strange humanity. Then he felt his hat lifted from his head. He glanced back into the crowd and saw a girl of maybe eighteen in a flowing skirt placing it atop her blonde braids. She swayed as if to a pulsating rhythm and they made brief eye contact. She flashed a wry grin and Bobby kept walking.

At the line of guards he showed his badge and they let him into the garage. He said: “Who’s in charge?” Up close, the men did not look like Texas Rangers. They looked scared and younger than Bobby himself. Like the soft-faced sons of cattlemen not yet matriculated. They wore jeans and khaki shirts that bore no insignia. But one of them gestured to a rough man in Western clothes bearing the silver star of that storied company of lawmen. He stood facing a set of double doors into the hospital with his hands on hips.

“Who ordered this?”

“Stand back son. We’ve got it covered.”

Then two Rangers emerged from the building, the Speaker shackled between them. He did not wear an orange jumpsuit but rather baggy sweat pants and a loose white t-shirt, stained and torn at the sleeve. He looked far removed from the polished politician he once was—his face covered in stubble, his hooded eyes rimmed in red. His mouth hung agape and he made no attempt to shield his face from the cameras.

Bobby saw in his periphery a youngish black man in a crisp blue suit and narrow tie snake past the child guards. He would later swear he saw the Ranger beside him grin.

The well-dressed man stepped to Duchamp unimpeded as he and his captors approached a van. When the man was inches from the Speaker, he pulled a weapon and emptied three shots into the prisoner’s abdomen and chest. The Rangers holding Duchamp jumped back, but they betrayed no surprise.

As the lawmen wrestled the assassin to the oil-stained ground, Bobby heard him say: “That’s for Dalia.”

G
eoff sat back and took a sip of his pint. Tony and Marisol looked back at him. He had felt secure with these two back here at this neighborhood dive, but they gaped at him now with an incredulity verging on despair, as if he had disclosed to them a dark intention to commit murder or suicide. And maybe his plan would lead to the former. Or, effectively, the latter.

But he felt a determination like nothing he had felt in two years. So he awaited the responses of his pair of allies. Two days had passed since his conversation with Willie Kincaid, two days since the killing of Robert Duchamp.

Marisol said, “I thought we were done.”

Geoff half-smiled. “Are you ready to be done with me?”

“Hey, no way. It was a blast almost getting burned alive in a storage container and all.”

Geoff took a quick gulp of beer to mask the melting of his grin. They took that first trip to New Orleans—the drink in Pirates Alley, dinner in the Marigny, meeting T-Jacques—barely three weeks before, but it seemed like a million years. And then the return, that incredible passion. Just a one night stand, sure—but it had left a feeling Geoff could not shake. Had he seen a glimmer of that same feeling in Marisol’s eyes that night on the runway as paramedics carried Duchamp away? No matter—she gave him now only cold sarcasm. Geoff did not judge her to be one whose spirit mere physical danger could crush. He thought it was more—some dark thing she had seen that had pushed her from him.

“Well Geoffy,” Tony said. “You really could be done. The judge might lift the stay on your environmental lawsuit, but she already found that Texronco’s polluting the lake. With Duchamp murdered, it throws everything into flux. She’ll give you thirty days to supplement an expert report, to make your case. Then you’ll win, get your fees—”

“You’re not listening. This is about more than a little pollution and attorney’s fees.”

Tony raised his hands as if in surrender. “Fine. Assume you’re right. But the lawsuit you have now isn’t about any of that. It’s just a simple pollution case. So wrap it up. You may never know what Duchamp was up to at that refinery, if anything. But he’s dead. Cut your losses and move on.”

Marisol nodded along with Tony. “And there’s still Kathleen. Once you’re done with this lawsuit, start a new investigation with her. Maybe she’ll give you enough for a new case against Texronco if you think the company’s really doing more than it seems—”

Geoff brought his empty pint glass down on the table with a loud rap. Marisol went quiet and looked at him. Tony leaned back and grinned and folded his arms across his expansive belly. “Kathleen doesn’t know her own boozy head from a hole in the ground. And anyway she’s decamped to her summer ranch in Wyoming and she’s not talking. She knows there’ll be no further investigation since they killed her husband—”

“Wait,
they?
T-Jacques Rubell killed Duchamp. Revenge for Dalia. There’s no conspiracy—”

“No conspiracy? Some squad of so-called Texas Rangers that no one now has any record of moves Duchamp in broad daylight and stands around while he gets gunned down in a fucking parking garage? T-Jacques just shows up at the right place and time, three hundred miles from home? Someone put the gun in his hand, told him where Duchamp would be. And anyway I saw it in Willie’s eyes. Whatever evil’s going on at that lake—the evil you sensed Marisol; hell, held in your hands—it’s going to continue without Duchamp. And our window to stop it is closing.”

Marisol rubbed her temples. “I’m not sure what I saw anymore, Waltz. Not sure what I held.”

“What you saw jibes with what Willie told me—or, at least, with the fear I sensed on him. And the Prince. And we’ve both seen the animals down there—”

“You always said those stories were bunk, Geoff.” Tony said. His voice had grown soft, as if trying to sooth a petulant child. “Willie Kincaid—I know the rule, thou shalt not speak ill of your client—but really, he’s got a screw loose, right?”

Geoff hung his head and breathed for several seconds, the irony of his trying to convince this pair not lost on him. Willie had tried to push him in this same direction, and he had refused to go. But that was before they killed Duchamp.

And before Joey had severed the last of his lazy resistance, a resistance that for too long had masqueraded as rational skepticism. He fingered the folded napkins in his pocket, his trump card exhibit.

“Willie knows something—I should have been listening to him all along.”
And he’s taking the boy.
Geoff was not ready to bring up his feelings about—his fear for
(of)
—Joey; he was still not convinced those feelings did not amount to his own damaged mind’s transference. But he could no longer deny the boy was key to this thing. Nor could he any longer deny that Joey was somehow special. He took the paper napkins from his pocket and spread them out for Tony and Marisol.

“Joey Kincaid drew this, in a diner, right in front of me. It took him no more than twenty minutes.”

Unfolded and pieced together, the napkins formed a mosaic that nearly covered the table. Marisol and Tony looked down at the drawing in silence. Geoff heard Marisol swallow.

Tony said, “The boy’s got talent. But what …”

He did not finish the thought. The scene was of the bayou—each cypress frond, every dogwood blossom and water lily, sketched in intricate detail. The foliage formed a pattern too complex, too strange, for nature. Amid the trees and the water plants, Joey had drawn the pump jack of an oil well. Beneath all that he had captured the murky water in shades of green and gray. And at the bottom, far below the surface, resided a man. The man was scarlet, his eyes terrible and empty.

Geoff saw Marisol bite her lip as she stared down as if mesmerized. Tony fumbled for a cigarette. “Wait,” Geoff said as he revealed a hand mirror, which he had brought for this purpose. He angled it so Tony and Marisol could bend down and see a part of Joey’s drawing reflected. He did not prompt them as they looked into the glass; he could tell by Marisol’s gasp when the message had come into focus. He could tell also by that gasp that she could not walk away now. He had felt the same when he had gathered up the napkins after Willie and Joey left the diner
(Joey had made them leave, but another part of him had wanted to give me this message—a mind divided)
, once he discovered the words Joey had left there, amid that odd and beautiful pattern of leaves.

Save Me.

T
he town square was littered and quiet and strange, as if a thousand people had thrown a party there before a starship carried them away. The campsites on the courthouse lawn were gone, in their place trodden earth and plastic water bottles and protest banners and signs already faded in the damp East Texas air. In the wake of the shooting, they had all returned home to Austin or Chicago, Portland or Atlanta. Some may have decided that the story ended with the guilty pleas of the twins who murdered Dalia Bordelon and the shooting of the man accused of ordering that ugly crime. Others may have felt some chagrin at the perception that their movement had ended in more killing before the justice system could run its cathartic course.

Sheriff Seastrunk pulled away from the courthouse annex and drove west, into the neighborhood of Sunset. The lawns were lush and green and the flower beds flared with variegated blossoms. Children played in the yards. Two boys smiled and waved from the low-hanging bough of a massive chinaberry tree. The sheriff smiled and waved back. It was the first of May.

Mose Carter came to the door with a limp. Carrying mason jars of ice tea, they went to sit on the patio in the early evening light.

“How’re you feeling, Mose?”

The Reverend did not answer for a moment and when he spoke, he stretched out the words until they ended in a low growl. “John, I feel
old
.”

Seastrunk only nodded.

“We’ve survived another round of trials and tribulations, though. We should be thankful for that.”

“Yup.” But as Seastrunk looked into the gloom, he did not feel that the ordeal had ended. He had lied to Waltz; he remembered clearly what he had seen in his mind’s eye as he lay on the gurney—Joey Kincaid, in that swamp, crying alone. Frightened, being pulled somewhere he did not want to go. And since Duchamp had died, every time Seastrunk closed his eyes it was as if the boy called out to him.

He could no longer deny what he had seen in the boy’s eyes that day on the lake as he cringed from the defiled body of Dalia Bordelon. He could no longer deny the broken bough. Perhaps this meant he had gone insane.

Seastrunk knew that Bobby had been in touch with Waltz since Duchamp’s killing. That Bobby wanted to continue an investigation that to all the world was closed and moot. He would let his deputy believe that his own trepidation stemmed as always from his political considerations. He could not speak of the vague summons, the cry of the boy, he sensed emanating from the bayou. He did not want to admit his fear. He did not want to be crazy.

A mental problem or a spiritual problem, the sheriff could not determine. To the holy man sitting beside him, it was all he could do to say: “But I can’t help thinking I’m being … asked to do something more.”

“What, John?” Seastrunk thought he heard a hint of mirth in that old voice. “And by whom?”

“I … I don’t know. Like you, I feel old. And so tired. I don’t know.”

“Then I suggest you pray on it. Or meditate. Whatever it is you do.”

“Okay.”

“Beyond that, I can’t help you.”

“Okay.”

“I may be old, but I’ve still got my flock to tend to. And there’ll still be plenty of injustice for me to call out till my dying day. But you—only you know what you want, need.”

“I know it.”

“I can advise you in my faith but I’ve got the feeling that’s not what you want. I’ve got my own flock. I’m not some Hollywood Negro guru here to impart new age wisdom to white folks.”

“Okay.”

“I’m not Morgan Freeman sitting over here.”

The sheriff half-smiled. “I know it.”

The Reverend looked him over in the dying, purplish light. “But John. You
do
look tired. You need some rest.”

“I know it.”
Lord, do I know it.

G
eoff drove east out of Dallas at dawn on a bright May morning, sipping coffee, Marisol in the passenger seat. They would get to the lake by ten. Geoff could not know what they were traveling to. He only knew what Willie had told him (
I’ll get you inside, beneath; you need to see
), and what the Prince had said. Picturing a labyrinthine network of subterranean laboratories of mid-century vintage—green institutional tile, flickering fluorescents—he developed theories.

Marisol said, “Tell me what you want to find.”

“I want to find what you had, what you found in Eileen’s storage unit.”

The P.I. shuddered. Geoff continued: “Based on what we’ve learned from the Prince, and what we’ve seen, maybe we’re looking at some sort of black box genetic engineering program. Operation Moth Wing. Used to be government-run, maybe. Or quasi-governmental. And somehow it’s connected to the Duchamp family and their associates and I guess the Texronco Corporation.” He fiddled with the air conditioner. “Why don’t you tell me what your research found.”

“Sure.” She pulled out a binder from the bag at her feet—printouts of official-looking documents, her own hand-written notes. “There’s not much to go on, but it’s consistent with what the Prince told you. Of course, a lot of this is based on leaked documents I’ve found on conspiracy theorists’ clearinghouse databases on the web. You know, the black helicopter, tin-foil hat crowd. Crazies. But we know the U.S. Government brought Nazi scientists to America to put their expertise to use in the Cold War—the Soviets, too, for that matter. You already knew that. But the name Moth Wing does come up a lot in connection with genetic engineering and bio-weapons research—”