Crusader's Cross

In the summer of 1958, Dave Robicheaux and his half-brother Jimmie are just out of high school. Jimmie and Dave get work laying out rubber cables in the bays and mosquito-infested swamps all along the Louisiana-Texas coastline. But change approaches in the form of Ida Durbin, a sweet-faced young woman. Jimmie falls instantly in love with her. But Ida's not free to love - she's a prostitute, in hock to a brutal man. Jimmie agrees to meet Ida at the bus depot, ready for the road to Mexico. But Ida never shows. That was many years ago. Now, an older Dave walks into Baptist Hospital to visit a man who wants to free himself of a dark secret before he dies. A bully and a sadist, he has a lot to confess to - but he chooses to talk about a prostitute who he glimpsed briefly as a kid, bloodied and beaten, tied to a chair in his uncle's house...