“We were in the neighborhood,” I said. “Is Isolde home?”
Chapter Thirty-six
Johnny was frozen at the mantel, his face sick. “Dave, you’re such a fool,” Penelope said. “And damn you to hell for it.”
“Where’s your daughter, Penelope?” I said.
“Don’t address my wife by her first name,” Adonis said.
“Hey, Adonis, time to keep your mouth shut,” Clete said.
“Let’s not have unpleasant words,” Shondell said. “Do you have a warrant of some kind, Dave?”
“We don’t need one,” I said. “We’re not here to arrest anyone or to search your dwelling.”
“Dave, I don’t appreciate your being here,” Shondell said. “You struck me in the face. In an earlier era, you would have been called out. Under the Dueling Oaks. Do you understand what I am saying to you?”
“I’m trying to grab a noun or adverb here and there,” I replied.
“Our situation is not a humorous one, sir,” he said. “You are meddling in things you know nothing about. I am going to ask you once, and once only, to leave the premises.”
“Listen to him, Dave,” Penelope said.
“Where’s your daughter?” I said.
“She’ll be here soon,” Penelope said.
“Good. We’ll wait,” Clete said.
“Did y’all see the galleon?” I asked.
“What?” Shondell said.
“I just saw Gideon’s galleon,” I said. I pointed at the window. “Take a look. To the southeast, perhaps fifty yards from where we’re standing.”
Shondell walked to the window. “The wind and the waves have played a trick on you.”
“Dave?” Carroll said behind me.
I did not want to hear any more from Carroll LeBlanc. “What is it?”
“I’ve really messed up.”
“In what way?” I said.
He looked deathly ill. “I didn’t pass on some information I got from Helen.”
“What information?”
“Somebody scooped up Father Julian from the hospital,” he said.
I turned around. “Say that again?”
“People went into Iberia General and grabbed him.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because he’s on a pad,” Clete said.
“Dave, I’ve been trying to tell you,” Carroll said. “My daughter was gonna be on the street. I didn’t know Shondell was gonna do all this.”
“You didn’t have a clue, huh?” I said.
“You wouldn’t listen to anyone, Dave,” Adonis said. “You were too busy bedding my wife.”
Clete stuck his finger in Adonis’s face. “You open your mouth one more time, and I’ll paste you all over this room.”
“Apparently, we have a little problem,” Shondell said. “Mr. Bell, would you step out here, please?”
A large man in a fedora and a rumpled suit came out of the kitchen. He had a dissolute, fleshy face, small eyes, and bad teeth. He was holding a pistol-grip AK-47 with a thirty-round banana magazine. He grinned, exposing the gaps in his teeth. “Put your hands on your heads or we’ll have a great deal of mop-and-bucket work to do.”
“Dave, this is the cocksucker who sapped me in Key West,” Clete said.
“Pleased to meet you,” Bell said.
“Take their weapons, Adonis,” Shondell said.
Adonis didn’t move. “Did you hear me?” Shondell said to him.
“You don’t take out cops,” Adonis said.
“Do you want to see black or white sails tonight?” Shondell said.
Clete and I didn’t know the significance of the black sails we had seen, but obviously, Adonis did. He peeled back Clete’s raincoat and pulled the cut-down twelve-gauge from his shoulder, then disarmed both me and Carroll. Penelope’s eyes were shiny with shame.
“How about you, Johnny?” I said. “Whose side are you on? Where is Isolde?”
He stared at the floor. Carroll could not look me in the face.
“People know where we are,” I said.
“Afraid not,” Shondell said. “Your airboat pilot no longer exists. Your colleagues have no idea where you are, courtesy of Detective LeBlanc. You slapped me in public, Mr. Robicheaux. You cannot imagine the ordeal that awaits you and Mr. Purcel.”
“What about LeBlanc?” Clete said.
Shondell studied Carroll’s face. “Maybe we’ll make up some games. A behavioral study of sorts.”
Two men from the tugboat came heavily up the steps and hooked up our wrists behind our backs with plastic ligatures, then pulled black cloth bags with drawstrings over our heads. One of the men soaked our faces with a spray can. I smelled an odor like ether, then my knees caved as though I had been dropped through the trapdoor on a scaffold.
I woke on a hard surface, wrists bound, hood secured tightly under my chin, surrounded by a humming sound like a ship’s engine. I realized my ankles were bound as well, and my Velcro-strapped hideaway was gone. I felt a pain like I had been kicked in the back, and I groaned when I moved.
“Is that you, Dave?” I heard Clete say.
“Yeah.”
“Glad you’re awake,” he said, perhaps three feet from me. “I can’t see anything.”
“Where’s Carroll?”
“There’s a third guy in here. I can hear him breathing. Maybe that’s him.”
“Where are we?”
“I think next to the engine room. I heard somebody slamming a hatch and clanging down a ladder.”
“I can’t remember what happened,” I said.
“No mystery. Carroll LeBlanc is a Judas. If we get out of this, I’m feeding him to the shrimp.”
I tried to twist the ligatures off my wrists. Instead, they cut into my veins. “Did you tell your receptionist where you were going?”
“No. After I fired those rounds at Shondell, I thought I’d keep my location unknown.”
“Tell me the truth, Cletus. Did you try to take Shondell out?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I still had a buzz on from the night before.”
“Maybe you’ll get him next time,” I said. But I knew there would be no next time, and so did he.
“I think we’re fucked, Streak,” he said. “Shondell is nuts, isn’t he?”
“I don’t think he’s crazy at all. I think he has evil powers.”
“Don’t talk like that. We’ve had these shitheads around us all our lives. They’re just coming out of the woodwork now.”
I heard a groan. “Is that you, Carroll?”
“Yeah,” he answered, his voice thin, hardly more than a gasp. “That’s you, Dave?”
“Sure,” I said. “Clete is here, too.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Yeah, you’re always sorry,” Clete said. “Where are we?”
“Probably on his yacht,” Carroll said.
“What’s this ordeal he’s got planned for us?” Clete said.
“I heard something once. From a pimp Shondell uses. He’s got a collection.”
“A collection of what?” Clete said.
“Shit from the Middle Ages. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“What kind of shit?” Clete said.
“Sick stuff, man,” Carroll said.
We heard people coming down a ladder and someone opening the hatch on the compartment we were in. The person stepped inside but didn’t speak. I was breathing through my mouth, sucking in the cloth of the hood, my heart thudding; I could hear the welt on my shoe scrape the deck when I moved. My breath was foul, my face itching and sweating as though it were encased in dried mud. “Who are you?” I said.
“Having fears in the silence?” Shondell said. “The imagination is a powerful engine, isn’t it?”
He went silent again. I tried to measure time by counting the seconds. But I couldn’t concentrate and I lost count, and I desperately needed to go to the head. Five minutes must have passed. I tried to pretend he was no longer in the compartment. I also tried to convince myself that the coolness in the steel deck was absorbing me into its molecular protection, taking me somewhere else in the universe, freeing me from the impotence and vulnerability that now constituted my life. I was totally under the control of an evil and sadistic man. What a fool I had been.