"You gave Jim Gable a concussion Friday night. Now you take a vacation day and don't even have the courtesy to call me?" he said.
"Johnny Remeta is stalking my daughter and leaving notes at my house. I don't care what happens with Gable," I replied.
"Everything's personal with you, Dave. You use the department the way a prizefighter uses a rosin box. You're an employee of the parish. Which means I'm your supervisor, not a guy who follows you around with a dustpan and whisk broom. I don't like coming out here to explain that."
"Did Gable press charges?"
"No."
"Then it's a private matter."
"As of this moment you're on suspension."
"That's the breaks."
"That casual, huh?"
"How'd you like Remeta creeping your place?"
"Do what you're thinking and I've got your cell already waiting for you."
"I didn't call you because I can't prove what Gable was doing behind my wife's person in that pavilion. It would only bring her embarrassment."
"Behind her person? What the hell does that mean?"
"End of conversation."
"You're right. It does no good to talk to you. I wish I hadn't come here," he said. He tapped his Stetson against his leg and walked out into the mist, his mouth a tight seam.
I worked with Batist at the dock all day, then drove to the Winn-Dixie in town, filled the back of the pickup with soda pop and loaded the ice chest with lunch meat for the bait shop cooler. Right down the street was the ancient motel where Clete was living. I had not seen him since Saturday afternoon, when I had left him bleary-eyed and alcne with a scrap of paper in his hand that could have been torn from the Doomsday Book.
I pulled into the motel entrance and drove under the canopy of oaks to the stucco cottage he rented at the end of the row. Leaves were drifting out of the oak branches overhead and he was dusting the exterior of his Cadillac with a rag, flicking the leaves off the finish as though no others would drop out of the tree, the hair on his bare shoulders glowing like a blond ape's in a column of sunlight.
"What's the haps, Streak?" he said without looking up from his work.
"You doing all right?" I said.
"I used the medical dictionary at the City Library. From what it says, that stuff's like going to hell without dying."
"There're treatments."
"The victims look like they're wrapped in sheets of plastic?"
"How's Passion?"
"She doesn't talk about it. At least not to me." His voice was without tone or inflection. "It's true, you tore up Jim Gable at the Shrimp Festival?"
"I guess I have to lose it about every six months to remind myself I'm still a drunk."
"Save the dish rinse. You didn't lose it. He took it from you."
"What?"
"Gable never does anything without a reason. You're trying to bring him down. Now nobody will believe anything you say about him."
I stared at him. I felt like the confidence game mark who realizes his gullibility has no bottom. Clete threw his dust rag through the open front window of the Cadillac onto the front seat and walked over to my truck.
"You're just like me, Streak. You never left the free-fire zone. You think aspirin and meetings and cold showers are going to clean out your head. What you want is God's permission to paint the trees with the bad guys. That won't happen, big mon," he said.
"I'm sorry about Passion."
"Life's a bitch and then you die," he replied.
27
BED CHECK CHARLEY still visited me in my dreams, crawling on his stomach through the rice fields, his black pajamas twisted like liquid silk on his dehydrated body. He used a French bolt-action rifle with iron sights, and Japanese potato mashers that he whacked on a banyan root, igniting the impact fuse prematurely, before he flung one into our midst. But even though his ordnance was antiquated, Bed Check was punctual and did his job well. We used him in our day as we would a clock.
We were almost disappointed when a stray gunship caught him under a full moon, running across a rice paddy, and arbitrarily took him out.
A predictable enemy is a valuable one.
I knew Remeta would be back. And I knew where he would come from.
He returned three nights after the sheriff put me on departmental suspension.
I heard the outboard deep in the swamp, then the engine went dead. I slipped on my khakis and shoes and lifted the AR-15 from under the bed and went outside and crossed the lawn. The trees were dripping with night damp, and I could barely see the bait shop in the fog.
But I could hear a boat paddle dipping into the water, knocking against a cypress root, scudding softly against the worn gunnel of a pirogue.
I walked down the concrete boat ramp into the water and stepped under the dock and waited. The bayou was moving northward, rising with the tide, and I saw a dead nutria in the current with a bluepoint crab hooked onto its side.
It was airless under the dock, the water warm inside my clothes, and I could smell dead fish among the pilings. Then the breeze came up and I saw the fog roll like puffs of cotton on the bayou's surface and the bow of a pirogue emerge out of the swamp twenty yards down from the bait shop.
I had inserted a thirty-round magazine in the rifle. The bow of the pirogue moved into the bayou and now I could see the outline of a kneeling man, drawing the paddle through the water in silent J-strokes. Farther down the bayou, at the four corners, the owner of the general store had left on a porch light, and the man in the pirogue was now lighted from behind, his features distorting like a figure moving about under the phosphorescent glow of a pistol flare.
I steadied the rifle against a piling and sighted along the barrel, no longer seeing a silhouette but in my mind's eye a human face, one with teeth, a hinged jawbone, an eye glinting in profile, a skull with skin stretched over its bladed surfaces.
A line of sweat ran through my eyebrow. You just squeeze off and not think about it, I told myself. How many times did you do it before, to people you didn't even know? You just step across the line into E-major rock 'n' roll and the concerns of conscience quickly disappear in the adrenaline rush of letting off one round after another. The only reality becomes the muzzle flashes in the darkness, the clean smell of smokeless powder, the deadness in the ears that allows you to disconnect from the crumpling figure in the distance.
But I hadn't yet actually seen the face of Johnny Remeta.
I clicked on the electric switch mounted on the dock piling. Suddenly the bayou was flooded with light.
"You must get mighty tired if you stay out here in the mosquitoes every night," he said. He was grinning, his face bathed with white light, his mouth strangely discolored in the brilliance of the flood lamps, as though it were painted with purple lipstick.
I could feel my finger tightening inside the trigger guard.
"You're a pisspot, Johnny," I said.
"I've heard it all before, Mr. Robicheaux. My father said my mother would have gotten rid of me when I was in the womb but she didn't want to waste a coat hanger," he replied.
Then he opened his palms, as though accepting grace from above, his head tilted, taking my measure.
"Use your left hand and drop your weapon overboard," I said.
"I don't have one."
I waded out from under the dock so he could see me.
"You're under arrest. Pull the pirogue into shore," I said.
"You couldn't pop me, could you?"
I could hear myself breathing and feel the oil and moisture on my finger inside the trigger guard. He stood up in the pirogue, balancing himself, his hands extended outward. He stared at the muzzle of the rifle, his lips pursed, waiting.
"So long, Mr. Robicheaux. Tell Alafair I said hello."
He hit the water in a long, flat dive, his weight flipping the pirogue over. With two strokes he was inside the cypress trees, running across sandspits and through the sloughs, cobwebs and air vines swinging behind him.
<
br /> I was trembling all over, as though I had malaria. My head thundered and my palms were wet on the plastic stock of the rifle. I leaned over and vomited into the water.
I walked up the boat ramp, then onto the dock, and pulled off my T-shirt and sat down on the planks and pulled my knees up in front of me and rested my face on top of them.
I stayed there until the sun rose, then got up and slung the AR-15 muzzle-down on my shoulder and walked up the slope through the trees with the knowledge I had deliberately set out to murder another human being and had simultaneously failed as both assassin and police officer.
28
THAT AFTERNOON I got a call from Wally, our departmental comedian.
"Enjoying your days off?" he asked.
"I'm cleaning the grease trap right now. Come on over.
"I got a little problem. I'd like to finish my shift without being taken out of here in a box. My systolic is 190. I don't need race riots. I don't need black people shouting into the phone at me. I don't need no white lesbian crazy woman firing up a mob over on Hopkins."
"You're talking about Helen Soileau?"
"I knew you could think it out. Way to go, Dave."
I drove into town, then over to the west side to Hopkins Street, which, along with Railroad, used to comprise New Iberia's red-light district. Helen Soileau had just handcuffed two black kids, about age fifteen, through the cap chain on a fire hydrant.
I parked the pickup in front of a liquor store and walked through the crowd that had formed on the sidewalk and the lawn of two houses. Helen was bent over at the waist, her hands on her hips, venting her spleen at the two kids sitting on the cement. A city cop in a uniform was looking nervously up and down the street.
Helen raised up and stared at me, her face still heated. Her slacks were torn at the thigh and mud was smeared on her white shirt. "What are you doing here?" she said.
"I just happened by. What'd these guys do?"
"Not much. One shot a BB into a passing car and hit a six-week-old baby. This other little fuck put an M-80 under an old woman's bedroom floor."
"I think we need to turn the butane down."
"They're going to tell me where that BB gun is or stay here till they have to eat the paint on that hydrant. You hear that, you little pukes?"
"Walk over here with me, Helen," I said.
"You got no business telling me what to do," she replied.
"I can't argue with that. But we're on city turf. Let them handle it."
She lifted her face into mine. Her eyes were blazing, her thick arms pumped.
"I'd like to punch you out, Dave. All the skipper needs is an apology and you're back on the clock," she said.
"So let the city guy do his job and take the kids down."
"Yeah, I give a shit," she said, and bent over and unlocked the handcuffs on the boys' wrists, then cuffed them again and walked them to the city cruiser and shoved them inside and slammed the door behind them. Then she walked back to me and said, "Buy me coffee, Pops."
I expected ONE of Helen's harangues, but I was wrong. We went to the McDonald's on East Main and sat by the window. The sky had turned green and the wind was
blowing the oaks on the street, and leaves were rising out of the crown of the trees high in the air.
"I was in Lafayette this morning. You know that tattoo and fortune-telling place right off the four-lane?" she said.
"An old cypress cabin with beads and colored lights hanging all over the gallery?"
"I saw Passion Labiche go in there. That girl bothers me."
"How?"
"Vachel Carmouche was a shithead and everybody knew it. That whole trial sucked. I get pissed off every time somebody tells me Carmouche was a lawman . . . Why the face?"
"I found evidence she didn't do it by herself."
"You're telling me Passion helped her?"
"Yeah, I am."
"Big revelation," Helen said. "What else is bothering you today?"
"I set up an ambush on Johnny Remeta last night."
"You did what?"
"I was going to flush his grits. I couldn't pull the trigger."
She cleaned up our mess from the table and walked to the trash basket and stuffed it inside and came back to the table.
"This is a noisy place full of teenagers and echoes and cooks yelling and I couldn't quite make out what you were saying. See you around, bwana," she said.
She walked out to her cruiser and drove away.
I SLEPT THAT night with the remote phone under the bed. It rang just after 11 P.M. I picked it up and went into the kitchen before I clicked it on.
"You're in it for the long haul," I said without waiting for him to speak.
"I figured you wrong last night. I thought honor required I tell you that, Mr. Robicheaux."
"Honor?"
"I said you didn't have in it you to drop the hammer on me. I know who popped your mother. That's why you let me live."
"You're not even close, partner."
I could hear him breathing on the mouth of the receiver. "We're alike. I've seen it in your eyes," he said.
"I always thought my mother betrayed me, Johnny. But I learned to forgive her. I did that so I don't have to be a drunk anymore."
"You saying something about my mother now?"
"You're smart. Read Chaucer's story about the three guys who set out to find Death and slay him once and for all. They found him, all right. But things didn't work out as they expected."
"Let me tell you what real revenge is. I'm gonna shake down the people who did your mother, then I'm gonna leave the country and have them killed by somebody else. But you'll never know for sure who they were."
"Pull on your own pud, Johnny. This stuff is a real drag," I said, and clicked off the phone. Then I walked through the house and pulled the phone connections from all the wall jacks.
The sheriff lived up Bayou Teche in a yellow and gray frame house with a wide gallery, set back under huge cedar and oak trees. When I drove out there Saturday afternoon, he was trimming back the climbing roses in his flower bed while his grandchildren played in the side yard. He wore a tattered straw hat to protect his head from the thorns, and his stomach hung heavily over his belt. In his home setting, cupping flowers and placing them gingerly in a bowl of water, his clothes stained with fungicide and house paint, the sheriff looked much older than he did at the department and nothing like a law officer.
I sat down on the front steps and picked up some pieces of bark from a bag of mulch and flicked them out into the grass.
"I made an ass out of myself when I attacked Jim Gable. I also brought shame on the department. I want to apologize," I said.
"You got to rein it in, Dave."
"I believe you."
"Five-day suspension without pay, effective last Monday. A letter of reprimand in your jacket. Is that fair?"
"There's something else I have to tell you," I said. "Passion Labiche told me she helped her sister kill Vachel Carmouche." I waited for him to speak but he didn't. "Number two, I had the chance to plant one in Johnny Remeta's cauliflower and didn't do it."
He paused in his work but his face showed no expression.
"You froze?" he asked.
"I had him set up. I was going to cut all his motors."
A mosquito buzzed at his face and he rubbed his cheek with the back of his wrist.
"I'm going to retire soon. I'm glad you told me what you did."
"Sir?"
"I'd like you to be my successor," he said.
"Come again?"
"What are you going to do with Passion's confession?" he asked, ignoring my incredulity.
"It'll be dismissed as an eleventh-hour attempt to stop Letty's execution," I said.
"Maybe that's just what it is. You think of that? Where's Remeta now?"
"He inasmuch told me my mother's killers are the same people who tried to have him killed on the Atchafalaya. He says he's going to extort them, then hire a button man
to take them out."
"You actually had that guy locked down in your sights? Then didn't say anything about it till today?"
"That's it, more or less."