Voodoo River (1995) (25 page)

Pike was watching him through a fine pair of Zeiss binoculars. "He's not reading. He's just looking at the pictures."

I nodded. "Geniuses rarely go into crime."

We sat on plastic poncho liners amid the sumac and the small plants of the forest's floor and let the day unfold. The heat rose, and with the heat the air grew heavy and damp, and a thick gray buildup of rain clouds appeared overhead. The woods were alive with the sounds of bees and lizards and squirrels and swamp martins, and only occasionally did we catch the voices of the people before us, moving through their labors in the ponds and pools of the fish farm. It was ordinary business and none of it appeared illegal or suspicious, but maybe all of it was.

About midmorning Milt Rossier came out of his house, and he and Bennett strolled down past the ponds to the processing sheds. Milt stopped and spoke with each of the foremen, nodding as they spoke and once taking off his hat and mopping his brow, but that was probably not an actionable offense. Ren+! La-Borde came out of the processing shed and lurched his way over to them and followed them around, but no one spoke to him. I hadn't seen him arrive, and Pike hadn't mentioned him, so maybe he had been in the processing shed all along. Maybe he lived there.

The guy who bossed the processing shed came out when Rossier and Bennett got down there, and the three of them spoke. Ren+! stood outside their circle for a time, then walked to the turtle pond and waded in up to his knees. The straw boss saw him first, and everybody got excited as LeRoy ran over to the edge of the pool, yelling, "Goddammit, Ren+!, get outta there! C'mon, 'fore Luther bites you!" Ren+! came back to the shore but stared down at the murky water, his shoes and pants muddy and dripping. He didn't seem to know what he had done or to understand why he'd been made to stop. Pike shook his head. "Man."

After a while, Rossier and LeRoy started back to the main house and everyone went back to work. Ren+! continued staring down at the water, his large body giving the occasional lurch as if his synapses had misfired. Halfway up to the house, Rossier saw that Ren+! wasn't following, slapped at LeRoy, and LeRoy trotted back for Ren+!. Ren+! followed LeRoy back to the main house, and the two of them sat in the white chairs, passing the day, the water and mud drying on Ren+!'s pants, LeRoy looking at the pictures in his magazine.

The clouds continued to build, and by three o'clock the sky was dark. Lightning arced somewhere in the trees behind us, producing a deep-throated rumble, and it rained, slowly at first but with increasing intensity. LeRoy and Ren+! went into the main house and, one by one, the people working the ponds sought shelter in the processing sheds. Pike and I pulled on ponchos and made our way out to the car. We were leaving earlier than we had planned, but with everyone hiding from the rain the possibility of crime seemed remote. We stopped at an AM/PM Minimart on the state road to Reddell, and I used a pay phone to call Lucy at her office. She was with a client, and Darlene asked if I wanted to leave a message. I said to tell her that I had called and would call her again when I had the chance. Darlene said that that wasn't much of a message, considering. I said considering what? Darlene laughed and hung up. Do women always tell each other everything?

The sky was the color of sun-bright tarmac, and forks of lightning were dancing along the horizon when Pike and I again moved into the bait shop across from the Bayou Lounge. The rain hammered down in a steady, thunderous assault, and leaked in tap-water streams through the roof, but it was better than standing in the woods. By seven that night, the only people in the place were a couple of old codgers who'd come in a white Bronco. By eight they were gone, and by nine the same green wagon once more came around for the Hispanic couple. By 9:30 the Bayou Lounge was closed. Maybe the rain had kept people away. Maybe if it rained all year round, the crime rate would be zero.

Pike and I went through it again the next day and the day after, with no great variety of pattern. Every morning I would wait for LeRoy Bennett outside his house, and every morning he would beeline first to the Dunkin' Donuts and then to the crawfish farm where he would sit and wait and page through his magazines. Working off the sugar high, no doubt. Once Milt Rossier came out at midday and said something to LeRoy, and LeRoy hopped into his Polara and brodied away. I ran back through the woods to the car in time to see LeRoy hauling ass up the road toward town. I followed him directly to the Ville Platte MacDonald's where he loaded up on a couple of bags worth of stuff, then hauled ass back to Rossier's. I guess even criminals like Big Macs.

If the days were bad, the nights were worse. We would sit in the dust on the bait shop floor, watching the cars come and go, and noting the people within them, but the people within them were never LeRoy Bennett or Milt Rossier, nor did anything happen to point to or indicate illegal activity. Once, a fat man in a cheap suit and a thin woman with Dolly Parton hair had sex in the backseat of a Buick Regal, and two nights later the same woman had sex with a skinny guy with a straw Stetson in the back of an Isuzu Trooper, but you probably couldn't indict Milt Rossier for that. Another time, three guys staggered out of the bar, laughing and hooting, while a fourth guy in a white ball cap stumbled out into the center of the road, dropped his pants, and took a dump. He lost his balance about midway .through and fell in it, and the other three guys laughed louder and threw a beer can at him. Nothing like a night out with the boys.

Over the next three days I had exactly two opportunities to call Lucy, and missed her both times, once leaving a message on her home answering machine and once again speaking with her assistant. Darlene said that Lucy very much wanted to speak with me and asked if couldn't we prearrange a time when I might call. I told her that that would be impossible, and Darlene said, "Oh, you poor thing." Maybe Darlene wasn't so bad after all.

We had two dry days and then another day of rain, and all the watching without getting anywhere was making me cranky and depressed. Maybe we were wasting our time. Maybe the only illegal stuff was the stuff behind closed doors, and we could sit in the woods and the bait shop until the bayous froze and we'd never quite make the link. Pike and I took turns exercising.

At 8:22 on the fourth night in the bait shop, the rain was tapping the roof and I was doing yoga when Pike said, "Here we go."

LeRoy Bennett and Ren+! LaBorde pulled in and parked next to the blue Ford. Six cars were already in the lot, four of them regulars and none of them suspicious. LeRoy climbed out of the Polara and swaggered into the bar. Ren+! stayed in the car. Pike said, "I'll get the car."

He slipped out into the rain.

At 8:28, a dark gray Cadillac Eldorado with New Orleans plates pulled in beside the Polara. A Hispanic man in a silver raincoat got out and went into the bar. At 8:31, Pike reappeared beside me, hair wet with sweat and rain. Maybe two minutes later, the Hispanic man came out again with LeRoy Bennett. The Hispanic man got into his Eldo and LeRoy got into his Polara, and then the Polara moved out with the Eldo following.

Pike and I hustled out to our car and then eased onto the road after them. As I drove, Pike unscrewed the bulb in the ceiling lamp. Be prepared.

No one went fast and no one made a big deal out of where they were going, as if they had made the drive before and were comfortable with it, just a couple of guys going about their business. Traffic was nonexistent, and it would have been better if we'd had a car or two between us, but the steady rain made the following easier. We drove without lights, and twice oncoming cars flicked their headlights, trying to warn us, the second time some cowboy going crazy with it and calling us assholes as he roared by. If the guy in the Eldo was watching the rear he might have seen all the headlight switching and wondered about it, but if he was he gave no sign. Why watch the rear when you own the cops and you know they're not looking for you?

We turned onto the highway leading to Milt Rossier's crawfish farm, and I thought that was where we were going, only we came to the gate and passed it, continuing on. I dropped farther back, and Pike leaned forward in his seat, squinting against the rain and the windshield wipers to keep the red lights in sight. Maybe a mile past Rossier's gate, the Eldo's tail-lights flared and Pike said, "They're turning."

The Polara grew bright in the Eldorado's headlights as it turned onto a gravel feeder road forking off into the marsh through a heavy thatch of wild sugarcane and bramble. We waited until their lights disappeared, then closed the distance and turned across a cow bridge. An overgrown cement culvert thrust up from the earth by the cow bridge, ringed by chain link to protect pipes and fittings and what looked in the darkness to be pressure gauges. Abandoned oil company gear. I said, "If this was anymore nowhere, we'd be on the dark side of the melon."

The little road narrowed and followed the top of a berm across the marsh, moving in and out of cane thickets and sawgrass and cattails, occasionally crossing other little gravel roads even more overgrown. We had gone maybe half a mile when a wide waterway appeared on the left, its banks overgrown but precise and straight and clearly manmade. I said, "Looks like an industrial canal."

Pike said, "They turn and head back on us, we've got a problem."

"Yeah." When we came to the next crossing road, we stopped and backed off the main road, far enough under the sawgrass to hide the car, then went on at a jog. Once we were out of the car we could hear the rain slapping the grass and the water with the steady sound of frying bacon. We followed the little road for maybe another quarter mile and then an enormous, corrugated tin building bathed in light rose up from the swamp like some incredible lost city. It stood on the edge of the canal, a huge metal shed, maybe three stories tall, lit with industrial floodlamps powered by a diesel generator. Rusted pipes ran in and out of the building, and some of the corrugated metal panels were hanging askew. The isolation and the technology lent a creepy air to the place, as if we had stumbled upon an abandoned government installation, once forbidden and now best forgotten.

The Polara and the Cadillac were at the foot of the building, along with a couple of two-and-a-half-ton trucks. Both of the trucks were idling, their exhausts breathing white plumes into the damp air like waiting beasts. Pike and I slipped off the road and into the sawgrass. I said, "Pod people."

Pike looked at me.

"It's like the nursery Kevin McCarthy discovers in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The one where the pod people are growing more pods and loading them onto trucks to be shipped all over the country."

Pike shook his head and turned back to the building. "You're something."

A huge, hangarlike door was set into the side of the building. Three guys in rain parkas climbed out of the trucks, opened it, then climbed back into the trucks, and drove them inside. A couple of minutes later, the steady burping of a diesel grew out of the rain and a towboat came up the canal, running without lights and pushing a small barge. It reduced speed maybe a hundred meters from the mouth of the big shed, and the Hispanic guy walked to the water's edge and waved a red lantern. The towboat revved its engines, then came forward under power and slipped inside the building. LeRoy and Ren+! and the guy from the Cadillac hurried in after it. Pike and I skirted the edge of the lighted area until we could see through the truck door. I had thought that we'd see people loading bales of marijuana onto the barge or maybe forklifting huge bricks of cocaine off the barge, but we didn't. Inside, maybe three dozen people were climbing off the towboat and into the trucks. Many of them looked scruffy, but not all. Many of them were well dressed, but not all. Most of them were Hispanic, but two were black, three were white, and maybe half a dozen were Asian. All of them looked tired and ill and frightened, and all of them were carrying suitcases and duffel bags and things of a personal nature. Pike said, "Sonofabitch. It's people."

When the trucks were full, the guys in the parkas pulled down canvas flaps to hide their cargo, climbed back into the cabs, pulled out of the building, and drove away into the rain. When the trucks were gone, a couple of hard-looking guys came up out of the barge dragging a skinny old man and carrying something that looked like a rag doll. The old man was crying and pulling at the hard guys, but they didn't pay a lot of attention to him. The old guy went over to the guy from the Eldorado with a lot of hand-waving, and then fell to the ground, pulling at the Eldorado's legs. The guy from the Eldorado kicked at the old man, then pulled out a small revolver, put it to the old man's head, and we heard a single, small pop.

My breath caught and I felt Pike tense.

The guy from the Eldo kicked the old man's body away, then said something to LeRoy Bennett, and Bennett nodded. The guys from the towboat climbed back aboard, and LeRoy and the guy with the gun walked out to the Eldo. The shooter opened the Eldo's trunk, took out a small handbag, and gave it to LeRoy. LeRoy brought it to his Polara. The towboat's engines revved, it backed from the shed, spun slowly into the canal, then eased back the way it had come, still without lights, the low gurgle of its engines fading into the mist. The shooter got into his Eldo and followed after the trucks. Now there were only four of us.

Pike said, "Too late for the old man. What do you want to do?"

"Let's see what happens."

LeRoy took a shovel from the Polara, then he and Ren+! dragged the old man and the rag doll along a little trail into the weeds. Pike and I crept after them, moving closer. Ren+! dug a small depression in the wet earth, dumped in the bodies, covered them, then went back to their car. LeRoy turned off the generator, and the swamp was suddenly dark. He and Ren+! got into their car, and then they, too, were gone.