"¶" "¶" "Uhh..." "What happened to your face?" "Pool game the other night." "Called the wrong dude on cheating." "You got to watch that." "What do you want again?" "I'm repping some people." "Yeah." "They want to get to the good cook." "They'll trade you or the IC Brotherhood, however you want to do it, coke for crystal." "Why am I not talking to Miles?" "Oh, me and Ginger go way back, boosted together." "You ain't saying much." "I figure I let my man give you the details." "Look." "This shit I got, you can step on it 5, 6 times." "It'll still kick." "Just means you got to cook a little more for a lot more profit." "Nah." "I ain't go no use for it or your money." "What, money don't spend?" "I can see your soul at the edges of your eyes." "It's corrosive, like acid." "You got a demon, little man, and I don't like your face." "It makes me want to do things to it." "Ginger, you call me again, I'm setting Miles on you." "I see you again," "I'm putting you down." "There's a shadow on you, son." "¶" "Marty, you got him?" "You fucking better, the shit I've been though." "I do." "I got him." "We're on empty roads now." "So I got to drop back, or he'll spot the tail." "OK." "That's Reggie Ledoux's cook partner Dewall." "Birddog him, Marty." "You got it." "What's your location?" "Just south of I-10 along the Creole Nature Trail heading towards Carlyss." "Hurry up, man." "Copy that." "On my way." "How we doing back there, Ginger?" "Fuck you, motherfucker." "Aah!" "Yeah." "How'd you get onto Ledoux?" "One of my old CI's tipped me off to the location of his cook house." "So I came back on the job." "Didn't want anybody else to catch him, bring him in." "Look." "You want my help?" "Just show me the rest of the file." "Why are you so hot to see the new discovery file, man?" "Well, why are y'all... so hot to not give it to me?" "It's supposed to be like a consultation, right?" "Yeah, but you go first." "You take me through it, and I'll let you see what we got." "I'll hold you to that." "Where's Ginger?" "Wrapped up in a ditch." "What you got?" "Well, lost him and then had to double back a few times till I found the exit." "That's his truck there." "We're gonna have to call this in, Rust." "Eh, we don't want to do that." "Troops will come, flood these woods." "They could scatter." "All right." "We ain't gonna find him from here." "You ever been hunting, Marty?" "Uh, yeah... 10-point buck year before last," "50 yards." "I'm not talking about sitting in a treehouse waiting to ambush a buck coming to sniff your gash bait." "Talking about tracking." "Jesus, you're a prick." "Look." "We find the place." "We come back here." "We call it in." "One of us stays surveillance, yeah?" "I can live with that." "Let's go." "Now, you got a tip where Ledoux cooks, and Cohle came back from wherever he was." "You knew it was gonna get here, man." "Just the once, the way you tell it." "I'll tell it the same way that I told the shooting board and every cop bar between Houston and Biloxi, and you know why the story is always the same" "17 years gone?" "Because it only went down the one way." "¶" "Now, Rust's dad taught him bowhunting." "You know, you had to track game till you got within maybe 30 yards of it." "Now, this enabled us to discern the suspect's path while sidestepping various anti-intruder devices they installed." "Tripwires back there." "Clearing is probably mined." "All right." "How you want to do it?" "You go back." "Call it in." "I'll wait here." "You're gonna hold position?" "Yep." "Do it now, Marty." "Fuck you." "You ain't doing this without me." "All right." "Stay low." "We were just about to turn back, call in parish, state, whoever." "I mean, we had the location." "We had our suspects identified at the location, you know?" "Might as well just leave the shit be and hand it off." "That ain't what happened." "Hmm." "No." "As soon as we started to back off, man..." "Blam!" "Bullets cut through right near Rust's head." "We dove opposite ways into the high growth, but they'd already spotted us, and they had something high-velocity." "Boom!" "Blew apart this tree between us." "I mean, it was on." "¶" "Hmm." "Heavy shit..." "Like ferns and whatnot bursting all around us, bark flying off of trees." "I mean we were in a bucket shitstorm." "Shit." "State police." "Put your hands on your head." "Put them on your head now." "Don't even think about it." "Put your hands on your head right now." "Intertwine your fingers." "Do it." "Back up toward me." "Down on your knees." "Go on." "It's time, isn't it?" "The black stars." "Shut the fuck up." "They'd spotted us before we crossed the forest." "So all we could do was duck for cover, dig in, try getting closer." "It was chaos." "The black stars rise." "Why the antlers?" "Freeze, motherfucker." "Put it down." "Hands up." "State police." "Set it down." "I know what happens next." "I saw you in my dream." "You're in Carcosa now with me." "He sees you." "Marty!" "You'll do this again." "Time is a flat circle." "Listen, Nietzsche." "Shut the fuck up." "Put it down." "Marty!" "There you go." "Black star." "Put your hands on your head." "While I was hunkered down behind this old, decrepit boat," "Captain America Marty Hart decides he's gonna run deep into the woods, flank around the back of the house where Ledoux is firing at us, right?" "Well, he sneaks up behind Ledoux and just as Ledoux turns, bam, popped one off in him..." "Head shot, clean..." "Dropped him." "Now, his buddy Dewall, he made a run for it, and his homemade, cracker-ass security system took care of the rest." "¶" "Oh, fuck." "Get the cuffs off him before his blood settles." "We got to make this look right." "Goddamn." "Fuck." "What do we do, Rust?" "Oh, fuck him." "Good to see you commit to something." "Now go see to the kids." "Don't bring them out until I say so." "After we confirmed two deaths and searched the rest of the premises, that's when we found the two children." "I mean, we got very lucky." "We just as easily could've been chewed to pieces by an AK on approach." "I can say that I walked away from the experience with a greater respect for the sanctity of human life." "Yeah." "Thank you, detective." "I believe I speak for the board when I commend you on the heroism displayed by you and Detective Hart." "¶" "No." "We were doing our jobs, sir." "There were the twig sculptures and the LSD on hand matched that in Dora Lange." "Everybody was pretty satisfied that we got our man." "The boy had been missing since January." "He'd been dead less than a day." "The girl, she hadn't been reported yet." "She was from St. Landry, catatonic when we found her." "Why should I live in history, huh?" "Fuck, I don't want to know anything anymore." "This is a world where nothing is solved." "Someone once told me, "Time is a flat circle."" "Everything we've ever done or will do we're gonna do over and over and over again..." "Good job, y'all." "And that little boy and that little girl, they're gonna be in that room again... and again... and again... forever." "Cohle, you couldn't manage to get shot?" "Next time." "Thanks for not doubting us." "Never did." "Here they come." "Marty, our hero." "Way to go, boys." "Little extra pouring while I finish this up with the semicelebrities?" "There's plenty of news stories if you care to find them." "I got promoted to detective sergeant." "Rust got a commendation for bravery, basically because I insisted, and things were pretty good for a while, I guess." "¶" "Come on." "Get your speed up." "Ooh." "All right." "Maggie came around." "Just, you know, a lot of talking, counseling, and maybe being in a shootout kind of opened her up to forgiveness or the possibility." "Right to the wall." "Right to the wall." "Yeah." "Yeah." "Oh!" "Oh, thank God." "All right." "Go take off your skates." "It's time to go." "No, no." "Please, please, Mom?" "One more time." "One more time." "All right." "One more time around, you take them off, OK?" "Is Daddy coming home yet?" "One more time around." "Go on." "One more time." "One more time." "OK." "Thanks." "I needed that." "I think they did, too." "Were there others?" "What?" "Besides her, were there others?" "No." "No..." "and listen." "That was a different person." "I lost it, you know, just a little." "I..." "I'm back." "I'm begging." "I keep begging." "I'll go to my grave begging you." "It's not just the affair." "You used to be a good man." "Cut the booze, 5 weeks now." "I'm in a program..." "Promise Keepers." "You have a long road to climb." "Yes." "I do." "A few years, good ones." "¶" "Down the line, one of those setups" "Maggie was so intent on finally hit, doctor, no less." "Yeah." "She and Rust had a thing, few years." "Ha ha ha!" "He's conflict-oriented." "So when I deny him small arguments, it builds up his energy." "Wow." "Wow." "Yeah." "Are you ever a match for this dude." "Look." "You know about Rust." "During those 7 years, he probably pulled more assists than any other detective in the state." "Word got around quick." "You want a confession, see if State Detective Cohle is available." "Your interview technique." "Sure there isn't some secret you can pass on?" "Look." "Everybody knows there's something wrong with them." "They just don't know what it is." "Everybody wants confession." "Everybody wants some cathartic narrative for it, the guilty especially... oh, but everybody is guilty." "¶" "You know the good years when you're in them, or you just wait for them until you get ass cancer and realize that the good years came and went?" "Because there's a feeling..." "You might notice it sometimes..." "This feeling like life has slipped through your fingers... like the future is behind you, like it's always been behind you." "You know, I cleaned up, but maybe I didn't change, not the way I needed to." "Give it back." "Give it back!" "Remember what I said about the detective's curse?" "Solution to my whole life was right under my nose..." "That woman, those kids..." "And I was watching everything else." "See, infidelity is one kind of sin, but my true failure was inattention." "I understand that now." "Hey, Audrey..." "Audrey..." "Ha ha." "So when do you think things started to, how you put it, change again with Detective Cohle?" "Early on, 2002, but that was his life." "Mine was steady, like I said." "I'm just trying to understand." "What is it you're going for?" "What's the message?" "There is no message." "It's just me." "It's just..." "Well, what's just you..." "Your hair, your clothes, your..." "I mean, I look at Macie..." "Women don't have to look like you want them to, Dad." "No." "Women, but I'm talking about my teenage daughter, and I'm not trying to tell you what to wear or anything." "I'm just trying to understand it." "Well, who told you you had to understand?" "Why would you?" "So..." "I hear you made cheerleader." "Yeah." "There are, like, 10 other girls who didn't get it." "Hmm, I didn't know they had eighth-grade cheerleaders." "Well..." "Same as there's football players." "¶" "Tell us what you know about his girl." "Yeah." "Laurie." "Yeah." "She became chief of something, Lafayette General, I believe." "You know what happened there between them?" "What always happens between men and women?" "Reality." "Dad..." "Tell it to your mother." "Deputy found her parked in a car with two boys." "Come here." "Get over here." "What?" "Yeah, in states of undress, you know... like fucking." "Boys are 19 and 20." "Got them in holding for the night, haven't decided whether to press stat. rape charges." "What?" "You can't do that." "I can do anything I goddamn want to those boys." "You think about that." "Audrey, look at me." "Look at me." "What are you thinking?" "God." "What the fuck is wrong with you, huh, or is this one of those things that I'll never understand, you know, being the captain of the varsity slut team?" "Marty!" "Fuck you." "¶" "Get in your fucking room." "Ow!" "Mom, she hit my head." "Go to bed." "This isn't about you." "Audrey, open the door." "Open the door, Audrey." "Audrey, it's just you and me, honey." "See... you need to tell me what's going on." "Audrey, open the door, please." "Years." "You ever heard of something called the M-brane theory, detectives?" "No." "That's over my head." "It's like in this universe, we process time linearly forward... but outside of our spacetime, from what would be a fourth-dimensional perspective, time wouldn't exist, and from that vantage, could we attain it... we'd see... our spacetime would look flattened," "like a single sculpture with matter in a superposition of every place it ever occupied, our sentience just cycling through our lives like carts on a track." "See, everything outside our dimension... that's eternity, eternity looking down on us." "Now, to us, it's a sphere, but to them... it's a circle." "Mr. Cohle?" "Mr. Cohle, what happened in 2002?" "Guy Leonard Francis." "They say you killed two people in Livingston." "They say you're a drug store robber." "You know they already got a nickname for you?" "Southern Fried Pharmacy Firearm Thief." "You like that?" "Got a nice ring to it, a bit of a mouthful." "Fuck, telling you, man, the shit they got these days..." "Technology, fingerprints, DNA..." "You got to be a fucking genius to get past that shit." "Let's face it, Francis." "You ain't no fucking genius, are you?" "First, you come in and say," ""I got the drugs from somewhere else."" "Then you say, "No." "I don't remember." "I don't remember where I got the drugs."" "You're making it too complicated." "You're creating a maze for yourself that you ain't never gonna get out of." "They got you." "You just got to change your play." "You got to plead impairment." "You know what that means?" "That means that you cannot be held accountable for your actions." "Well, I don't think I ought to be blamed..." "Well, entirely blamed..." "For things I did when I was under the influence of anything." "I don't think you should, either." "That's what I'm saying." "PCP." "Stuff makes a man crazy." "One time, famous case, guy, he cut off his own face on that shit." "For real?" "Hell yeah." "You mix that with meth, that's an insanity defense if I ever heard one." "How you gonna say a man who's not on anything is insane because he did something crazy but a man who's on something that made him crazy is sane?" "You know what I mean?" "Works both ways." "Yeah, exactly." "I mean, I'm not even saying that I remember anything." "I was shit hammered." "There we go." "That's your play right there." "Fuck this amnesia story." "That dirt don't stick, but an insanity defense, that's your ticket." "That's your way out, all right, because you're sobered up now." "You got your mind right." "You back." "You got to show them the difference between that madman in that pharmacy who blew them two people away and the man who's sitting here right now." "You got to show shock, terror, and re-fucking-morse." "I am." "I do." "I'm..." "I'm scared, sir." "Oh, yeah." "You should be, right?" "Yeah." "What'd you say to the pharmacist?" "I said, "Give me everything."" "And then what?" "Boom." "Boom." "Blew that fucker away, didn't you?" "You want forgiveness for that?" "Yeah." "Say it." "I want it." "You want what?" "Forgiveness." "You see what you just did?" "You just copped to a double murder." "They got you now." "But..." "I want to make a deal." "A deal about what?" "I know things." "Oh, what you know now all of a sudden?" "I know..." "I know who you are, and I know about that woman y'all found out in the woods way back, the antlers." "Hmm." "That don't mean shit." "That was in the newspaper." "What you know?" "You don't know shit, do you?" "No." "Y'all never caught the man that did that." "He's been out there killing." "You're talking out your ass, boy." "You don't know a fucking thing." "You're just trying to buy some time, ain't you?" "I met him once." "There's big people who know about him, big people." "Ah, ain't no deal because there ain't no people." "You make me a deal." "You deal with me with these murders." "Ain't no deal." "You ain't got nothing because you're full of shit, and there ain't nobody alive that did none of that killing." "He's dead, boy." "I'll tell you about the Yellow King." "What the fuck you say, boy?" "Give me a name." "Give me a fucking name." "You want to fucking play, boy?" "The Yellow King!" "Oh!" "Aah!" "Get the hell off me!" "Get off me!" "Get off of me!" "Deal with me, you son of a bitch." "You deal with me!" "I want a deal!" "Easy." "Come on, man." "Calm down, dude." "Now take a deep breath, all right?" "You got the confession." "Then you made it inadmissible." "What do you fucking mean?" "He's still talking." "Shucking and jiving." "He knows exactly who you are." "You called me in here, huh?" "You did." "I know, and if we need anything else, we'll let you know." "We appreciate the assist, detective." "What the fuck is going on here?" "We have to salvage a double murder confession, is what's going on." "If he wasn't just running you in there, you'll get anything we get." "You have my word." "Come on." "Ease up, baby." "Calm down." "And I'll be back..." "Oh, I got it." "Tomorrow." "Stay the fuck back." "I got it." "¶" "In eternity, where there is no time, nothing can grow." "Nothing can become." "Nothing changes." "So death created time to grow the things that it would kill... and you are reborn but into the same life that you've always been born into." "I mean, how many times have we had this conversation, detectives?" "Well, who knows?" "When you can't remember your lives, you can't change your lives, and that is the terrible and the secret fate of all life." "You're trapped... by that nightmare you keep waking up into." "You all right?" "We got to go to Abbeville." "Well, I got a deposition this afternoon." "Aw, push it." "I got somebody we need to talk to." "I'll tell you on the way." "Come on." "You really think he's serious about having something, and if so, then what?" "Reggie Ledoux deserved to die, Marty." "That was justice." "I'm not ruling out other agencies." "Mm-hmm." "What does that mean?" "Guy Francis and Charlie Lange both say the Yellow King." "Dora Lange said the Yellow King." "OK." "Look." "If the killer is still out there, why haven't there been more killings?" "Well, maybe there have, Marty, and we just don't know about them, hadn't put them together." "Ever wonder why that task force was so hot to take the case back in '95?" "Ha ha ha!" "Are you telling me you think the task force was in on it?" "¶" "Fuck." "How the fuck does this happen?" "He knew what he was looking at with the double murders." "Guess he thought about it and made a choice." "You got a camera feed?" "Here." "Go back." "Play this." "Took a phone call at 7:15, his lawyer." "You got audio on this, sound?" "Nah, just the vid." "That's it, just 3 hours of nothing... till you see the blood." "We don't know what somebody might have told him on that phone call." "I want to see your incoming call logs now." "All right." "What are the two officers' names?" "Childress and Mahoney." "Give me their files, please." "Yes, sir." "¶" "Terrence, get prints on this." "Yes, sir." "Prints?" "That's a public phone." "No kind of lawyer makes calls from here." "Francis have relatives?" "Yeah... sisters, a few nieces, nephews." "Connects to the suicide how?" "Somebody might have told him something, gave him no choice." "Well, great." "So when he got going on this thing again, did he mention Billy Lee Tuttle?" "You know that he did." "Tuttle died a couple years back, 2010." "Yeah." "Yeah." "What was that, mixed medications?" "So what?" "Right after Cohle showed back up in the state." "Fuck this." "Fuck this bullshit." "You tell me right now why you're all over Cohle, or I'll walk." "¶" "His record, his reports, his stories, they don't add up." "So talk to him about it already." "Stop pissing in my ear." "We did." "Oh, you did?" "What?" "Well, if you two talked to Rust, you weren't getting a read on him." "He was getting a read on you." "¶" "This is all you got?" "Fuck, I already know all this." "That what we have so far." "You hadn't checked old unsolveds." "Maybe you stop dancing with us." "Tell us what you really been up to, how you spend your time." "I already told you how I spend my time." "Except you've been bullshitting us all afternoon." "Excuse us for one minute, please." "¶" "These are from the crime scene in Lake Charles once folks got word." "Recognize anybody in there?" "Lake Charles is a bit out of the way for you, ain't it?" "How did you keep her out of the papers?" "Maybe you got some friends in high places?" "Your truck and a man fitting your description was spotted in the vicinity of our crime scene 5 times by 5 different people over the last month." "Now, besides people seeing him and his truck around the location for weeks, you know he was off the grid after he left in '02, didn't show up anywhere till 2010..." "Louisiana." "Got his driver's license renewed." "Nobody knows what he's been doing in the meantime." "Got a storage shed near Church Point." "He won't let us see what's inside." "How about you let us see what you're keeping in storage?" "Fuck no." "You can't see my storage unit." "Get a warrant." "Christ, try working a case." "We are working it." "Yeah?" "See, how we work it is, we think way back, you put the case on Rianne Olivier, put it on her old boyfriend." "I don't know." "Maybe the Ledoux boys knew you." "Maybe you traveled the same circles, got the same hobbies." "Maybe they had something on you." "You just kept pulling the right old murders, take the case wherever you wanted it to go." "You're a juicer." "Ever black out?" "Ever wake up, don't remember what happened?" "Look." "Y'all want to arrest me, go ahead." "If you want to follow me, come on." "You want to see something, get a warrant." "Thanks for the beer." "Beyond that, you wasted my fucking day, company man." "Now, he bartends 4 days a week, this roadhouse, has a little apartment behind it." "No other accounting of this time." "Says he drinks." "You're wrong." "Nobody could change that much." "You are dead wrong." "Hey, you've been telling us all day about the kind of shit he'd think up, the way he'd talk." "We got a good earful of that, too." "Are you gonna tell me that's a stable individual?" "Left a burnout, junkie rumors." "Do you think 10 years on the sauce has made him more reasonable?" "Think about this." "You said it." "He'd been there 3 months, and you two catch a heater like you've never had before or since, one that he shines on." "You're saying he did such a great job." "Didn't he get you every bit of evidence?" "Didn't he push you where he wanted it to go?" "He brought you Rianne Olivier." "She wasn't one of Ledoux's." "She was one of his." "What'd he say, "Life is a disease"?" "When he heard the Abbeville prisoner Francis knew something, he got on it." "He shut it down." "You ever thought if he made that phone call to the prisoner, like..." "I don't know..." "The guy was trying to blackmail him?" "He got on that, too, didn't he, the idea that the Lange killer was still out there?" "Yeah." "Yeah." "He did." "Looking for a new patsy, maybe." "Y'all given me a lot to absorb." "Goddamn right it's a lot to absorb." "So help us out." "Yeah." "Whatever you can tell us about, you know, from when he got on the Lange killer you up to when you two had your altercation." "Whatever that was about." "¶"