in your career, that will always somehow be the misfortune of someone else. Later, you'll attribute it to bad judgment, callousness, inhumanity, bad luck, or simple stupidity, like a safety-minded fool righteously padlocking fire exits, but it remains forever as the moment that left you with the mark of Cain.
The plainclothes who had been interrogating Albert decided to tighten and tamp down the dials a little more and whipped Albert repeatedly across his nappy head with a fedora, yelling at him simultaneously, until another cop stopped it and walked him outside for a cigarette. When they came back in, the plainclothes's face was still flushed and his armpits were.gray with sweat. The thermostat switch was broken, and the room was hot and dry with the electric heat from the wall panels. The plainclothes ripped off his tie, kneaded the thick folds in the back of his neck, then hung his shoulder holster on the back of a wood chair.
Albert was shirtless, his lap soiled with vomit, his face wringing wet. His shoulders trembled, and his teeth clicked in his mouth. He begged to go to the toilet.
The plainclothes walked him into the bathroom, unlocked one cuff, then snipped it on a water pipe and closed the door.
Albert was strung out, delusional, popping loose seam and joint. His body was foul with its own fluids; his pitiful attempt at integrity had been robbed from him; his new identity was that of snitch and street rat. With luck he'd be out of town before his friend Bobby made bail.
But Albert was jail-wise and had been underestimated.
He feverishly lathered his wrist with soap and pulled his thin hand through the cuff like it was bread dough. The plainclothes stared with disbelief as Albert came through the bathroom door and tore the.38 out of the shoulder holster that hung on the chair back, his hand shaking, his eyes blood-flecked and bulging with fear, sweat streaming down his chest.
The plainclothes's face looked like a large, round, white clock that had run out of time.
'Put it down, Albert!' Lucinda shouted, pointing her nickel-plated.357 Magnum straight out with both hands from the doorway.
The plainclothes's chest was heaving; he clutched at his left breast, and his breath rose from his throat like bubbles bursting from an underwater air hose. Lucinda's feet were spread, her midriff winking above her Clorox- faded Levi's. Albert's eyes were half-dollars, his clenched right hand trembling as though it were painted with electricity.
'You don't want to do this, Albert,' she said, fitted her thumb over the knurled spur of the hammer, and cocked it back. The notched grooves and the cylinder locked into place with a sound like a dry stick snapping. 'We can all walk out of this. You'll go downtown. Nobody'll hurt you. I give you my word. Lower the gun, Albert… Wait… Don't do it, don't let those thoughts get in your head… Albert!'
But it was too late. A facsimile of a man, with the soft bones of a child and muscles like jelly, with lint in his navel and a snake feeding at his heart, was imploding inside and looking for his executioner. He gripped the pistol with both hands, squeezed his eyes shut, turned toward Lucinda, and lowered his head between his extended arms as he tightened his finger inside the trigger housing.
She fired only once. The round caught him in the crown of the skull and knocked him back against the wall as though he had been struck by an automobile.
The air was bitter with the smell of gunpowder, dry heat, and a hint of nicotine and copulation in the bed clothing. My ears were ringing from the explosion, then I saw the plainclothes pointing at the red horsetails on the wallpaper while he giggled and wheezed uncontrollably, his left hand clawing at his collar as though it were a garrote about his neck.
Three hours later, after the paperwork, the questions, the suspension from active duty, the surrender of her weapon to Nate Baxter, I drove her home. Or almost home.
'Stop at the corner,' she said.
'What for?'
'I want a drink.'
'Bad day to feed the dragon,' I said.
'Drop me off and I can walk.'
'Lucinda, this is what happens. Tonight, you'll finally fall asleep. You'll have troubling dreams, but not exactly about the shooting. It's like your soul has a headache and can't allow itself to remember something. Then you'll wake up in the morning, and for a few moments it'll all be gone. Then, boom, it'll wash over you like the sun just died in the sky. But each day it gets better, and eventually you come to understand there's no way it could have worked out differently.'
Her eyes had the unnatural sheen of an exhausted person who just bit into some black speed.
'Are you coming in or not?' she said when I pulled to the curb in front of an old wood-front bar with a colonnade on Magazine.
'I guess not.'
'See you around, sport,' she said as she slammed the door and walked into the bar, the tip of a white handkerchief sticking out of the back pocket of her Levi's, her bare ankles chafing against the tops of her dusty tennis shoes.
Bad situation in which to leave a distraught lady, I thought, and followed her inside.
It was dark and cool inside and smelled of the green sawdust on the floor and a caldron of shrimp the black bartender was boiling on a gas stove behind the counter. I used a pay phone by the empty pool table to call home. It was the second time I had called that afternoon and gotten no answer. I left another message.
Lucinda drank a whiskey sour in two swallows. Her eyes widened, then she let out her breath slowly, almost erotically, and ordered another.
'Join me?' she asked.
'No thanks.'
She drank from the glass.
'How many times has it happened to you?' she said.
'Who cares?'
'I don't know if I can go back out there again.'
'When they deal the play and refuse the alternatives, you shut down their game.'
'How many times did you do it? Can't you answer a simple question?' she said.
'Five.'
'God.'
I felt a constriction, like a fish bone, in my throat.
'Who'd you rather have out there, people who do the best they can or a lot of cops cloned from somebody like Nate Baxter or that blimp in the motel room?'
She finished her drink and motioned to the bartender, who refilled her glass from a chrome shaker fogged with moisture. She flattened her hands on the bar top and stared at the tops of her fingers.
'I busted Albert four years ago,' she said. 'For stealing a can of Vienna sausage out of a Winn-Dixie. He lived in the Iberville Project with his grandmother. He cried when I put him in the holding cell. His P.O. sent him up the road.'
'A lot of people wrote that guy's script, but you weren't one of them, Lucinda. Sometimes we just end up being the punctuation mark,' I said, slid the whiskey glass away from the ends of her fingers, and turned her toward the door and the mauve-colored dusk that was gathering outside in the trees.
I drove her to her house and walked with her up on the gallery. The latticework was thick and dark with trumpet vine, and fireflies were lighting in the shadows. The lightbulb above our heads swarmed with bugs in the cool air. She paused with her keys in her hand.
'Do you want me to call later?' I said.
'I'll be all right.'
'Is Zoot here?'
'He plays basketball tonight.'
'It might be good if you ask somebody to come over.'
Her face looked up into mine. Her mouth was red; her breath was soft with the smell of bourbon.
'I'll call when I get back to New Iberia,' I said.
Her face looked wan, empty, her gaze already starting to focus inward on a memory that would hang in the
