He jerked open the window on the fire escape and climbed outside into rain that was now mixed with hail, closing the window halfway behind him. The icy pellets pounded his head, scalded his face, and slid down his coat collar inside his clothes. And if that wasn't enough, a bolt of lightning crashed into the alley, filling the air with the stench of sulphur and scorched electrical wiring. Jesus God, why was this being visited upon him? Then he looked down below and realized there were no steps below the fire escape, only rusted fastenings in the stone wall where a steel extension had once been in place. He was trapped like a rain-soaked parrot on a perch in an electrical storm, while inside the church Father Dolan's parishioners were dry and warm, passing out hymnals to one another.
Well, maybe it was time to spread the discomfort around a little bit, forget neat and tidy and simply splatter the good father's porridge and be on his way, Max thought. Why not? Click off the safety, burn the whole magazine if need be, then haul ass right through the choir and on downstairs into the street. Father Dolan's singing parishioners would be too busy climbing under the furniture or shaking the crab cakes out of their drawers to worry about describing Max Coll to the authorities.
He knelt down in a shooting position on the fire escape, squinted into the carbine's scope, and saw the priest's magnified face swim into the crosshairs. In fact, the magnification of the priest's head was so great Max could not make out detail but see only hair and skin and perhaps just a touch of beard stubble. The hail clattered and danced like mothballs on the steel mesh of the fire escape, stinging the backs of Max's hands, drumming softly on his cap.
The carbine was loaded with soft-nose rounds and two of them impacting inside the priest's face would undoubtedly blow the back of his head into the wall like pieces from a broken watermelon. Max ground his molars, breathed hard through his nose, and felt his finger tighten inside the trigger guard. Squeeze it off, he told himself. Do it, do it, do it.
But he froze again, his hands trembling, just as they had trembled inside the confessional.
He was disgusted with himself. As he started to get to his feet, the silencer on the muzzle of the carbine scraped against the window glass. Suddenly he was not only looking straight into the priest's face, the priest was actually charging toward him.
There was no place to run. The priest jerked the window open, ripped the carbine from Max's hands, then gripped the stock with both hands and drove the steel-plated butt into Max's mouth. Max felt his lip burst like a grape against his teeth, then the guardrail behind him peeled from its fastenings. In the wink of an eye he was plunging backward through space, his arms outspread, preparing himself for the impact on the brick-paved alley below.
Instead, he crashed into the middle of an opened Dumpster loaded to the gunnels with rotten produce and the leftovers from a parish shrimp boil. He stared upward from the garbage like a crucified man, right into the angry face of Father Dolan, who peered down at him from the edge of the broken fire escape. Max extracted himself from the softness of garbage that seemed to be sucking him into its maw and began pulling himself over the side of the Dumpster.
"Don't forget this," he heard Father Dolan call.
Max looked up in time to see his carbine plummeting through the rain and hail, just before it bounced off his uplifted face.
On Thursday morning I took the four-lane into Franklin, then checked in with the St. Mary Parish Sheriff's Department and was given directions to the home of William Guillot. It was a lovely old Victorian house, located in a tree-covered, residential neighborhood, one of deep green lawns and hydrangeas and impatiens blooming in the shade and wide galleries hung with porch swings. But the gardener told me Guillot wasn't there and I could probably find him at the subdivision he was building not far from the four-lane.
It wasn't hard to find. Five hundred yards from the road, where two tin-roofed farmhouses had once stood amidst cedars and poplar trees, bulldozers had scoured a thirty-acre wound in the earth for the construction of houses that looked as if they had been designed by a man with delirium tremens. At the entrance to the subdivision-in-progress a workman was spreading kerosene on a huge pile of oaks and slash pines that had been recently lopped into segments with chainsaws.
I parked my cruiser in a cul-du-sac flanked by three framed structures that several electricians were wiring. The man I had seen throwing firecrackers in the air by Castille Lejeune's horse barns was talking with a truncated, moon-faced workman in a yellow hard hat.
When the workman saw me, he turned his face away, mounted the steps of a framed structure, and busied himself with a nest of wiring hanging from the back of a breaker box.
William Guillot wore shined cowboy boots and dark blue western slacks with high pockets and a gray snap-button shirt. He seemed to be one of those men to whom age was an asset and maturity a source of power and confidence. His skin was grainy, his profile rugged; in fact, he had all the handsome characteristics of the archetypical western horseman, except for a purple birthmark that was like dye that had leaked from his hairline into the corner of his left eye.
"Help you?" he said.
"My name's Dave Robicheaux. I'm a detective with the Iberia Sheriff's Department. Are you William R. Guillot?" I said, my gaze wandering from him to the electrician in the yellow hard hat.
"Call me Will. What can I do for you?" he said.
"Where were you Monday night, Mr. Guillot?"
"At my fish camp. Down at Pecan Island."
"Anybody with you?"
"Maybe. What is this?"
"We're in possession of a revolver that's registered in your name. It's a single-action Colt .38. You own a weapon like that, sir?"
His hazel eyes fixed on mine and never blinked. "Say that again."
I repeated my statement.
"Yes, I do own one. But it's at my house," he said.
"Not anymore."
"Bullshit," he said, half smiling.
"I think we'd better take a ride to your house and check it out."
"If you haven't noticed, I'm building a subdivision."
"You an architect?"
"No."
"The revolver registered in your name is part of a homicide investigation, Mr. Guillot. If I were you, I'd get my priorities straight."
"Homicide?" he said, genuinely surprised.
"You own a brown pickup truck?"
"I don't. The company does. What about it?"
But I was looking at the back of the electrician who had walked away, and was not listening to William Guillot anymore.
"Did you hear me? What the hell is going on? Why are you staring at my electrician like that?"
"Is he your subcontractor?"
"What about it?"
"He installed defective wiring in the walls of my house. It burned to the ground," I said.
Guillot's eyes narrowed and dropped briefly to my person, as though he were filing away my inventory in a private compartment. "Follow me to my house," he said.
Twenty minutes later I stood in his home office, the sunlight breaking through a pecan tree by the side window, while he searched his desk, a wall safe, and the drawers of a gun cabinet. "It's gone," he said.
"You have a break-in recently?"
"Six or seven months ago."
"You reported it?"
"Yeah, but I didn't miss the .38. Why would somebody steal only the.3 8 and none of my other guns?"
"Write down the names of the person or persons you were with Monday night."
"Maybe I don't want to do that."
"I see. Maybe you can work through that problem in a jail cell."
He wrote a woman's name and address and telephone number on the top page of a scratch pad and handed it to me. "My wife and I are separated. Her lawyer is trying to clean my clock. This isn't information that will help my situation," he said.