and trees that were dripping with rain. A crowd had formed around Lefty Raguza, and I heard a man in a Cajun accent say, “What’s that in his t’roat? Get it out of his t’roat. The guy cain’t get no air.”
There was a pause, then a second man, also with a Cajun accent, replied, “It’s toot’paste. No, it ain’t. It’s a crunched-up tube of bug poison. Holy shit, the guy done this is a cop?”
Chapter 19
CLETE DROVE BECAUSE MY HANDS would not stop shaking in the aftermath of what I had done to Lefty Raguza. The wind had knocked an oak limb down on a power line by Four Corners, darkening part of the city, killing all the traffic lights. Clete sped through the black district, then skirted the university, splashed through the bottom of an underpass, and caught the four-lane to New Iberia. He made it as far as the first drive-by liquor store south of town.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Time for some high-octane liquids. I’m over the hill for this stuff. You want a Dr Pepper?” he said, getting out of the truck.
“Leave the booze alone, Clete.”
“You should have seen your face back there. You scare me sometimes, Dave.”
His words and their content seemed to have been spoken to me by someone else. I watched him walk inside the liquor store and put a six-carton of beer and a pint of Johnnie Walker on the counter. He bought a length of boudin, and while the clerk warmed it in the microwave, he went to the cooler and brought back a king-size bottle of Dr Pepper. I wanted to walk inside and ask him to repeat what he’d said, as though my challenge to him could take the sting out of his remark. Then I realized that my attention was less on Clete than on his purchase-the ice- cold bottles of Dixie, their gold-and-green labels sweating with moisture, the reddish-amber wink inside the Johnnie Walker. I rubbed my hand on my mouth and stared at the trees changing shape in the wind, a yellow ignition of light splintering through the clouds without sound.
Clete pulled open the driver’s door and got inside, wiping the rain out of his eyes with the back of his wrist. He handed me the Dr Pepper and twisted off the cap on the Johnnie Walker. He looked sideways at me before he drank. “This is rude as hell, Dave, but my nervous system is shot,” he said.
Then he took a deep hit and chased it with Dixie. The color bloomed in his face and his chest swelled against his shirt. “Wow, that’s more like it,” he said. “I swear that stuff goes straight into my johnson. Four inches of Scotch or gin and I need to lock my schlong in a vault.”
“What was that crack about my face?” I asked.
“I thought you were going to do the guy.”
“He deserved what he got. I’d do it all over again.”
“You want to lose your badge over a shithead like Raguza? This isn’t Iberia Parish. We got no safety net here, Streak.”
He drank again from the Scotch bottle and out of the corner of his eye saw me watching him. “Drink your Dr Pepper,” he said.
“Tell me that again and see what happens.”
He turned on the radio and began changing the stations. “The Cubs got a game on.”
I turned the radio off. “Where do you get off lecturing me, Clete?” I said.
He put his booze down and rested his big arms across the top of the steering wheel. “Here’s what it is. The problem’s not you, it’s me. I wasn’t kidding about leaving my big-boy in a safe-deposit box. I got myself in a jam with Trish. It’s not just sexual. I really dig her. But I think she and her friends are planning a serious score.”
He was obviously redirecting the subject, protecting me from my own bad mood and the darkness that still lived inside me. But that was Clete Purcel, a man who would always allow himself to be hurt in order to save his friends from themselves.
“A serious score where?” I asked.
“Maybe a takedown on a casino.”
“They pulled off that savings and loan job in Mobile, didn’t they?”
“If they did, they got lucky. They’re all amateurs. They get up each day and pretend they’re country singers or boxers or Hollywood screenwriters. It’s like being in a roomful of schizophrenics. Look, I may have a few bad entries in my jacket, but I’m not a criminal, for Chrissakes.”
“Get away from them.”
“What do I do, just throw Trish over the gunnels because she wants to nail the guy who killed her father?”
“In a word, yes.” When he didn’t answer, I said, “I think they already creeped Bruxal’s house.”
“How you know that?”
“Joe Dupree at Lafayette P.D. told me. A couple of guys impersonated repairmen from the gas company and got free run of the house for a half hour.”
“What for?”
“Who knows? Stop drinking if you’re going to drive.”
“They were actually inside Bruxal’s house?”
“Ask Trish Klein.”
“Dave, you have a talent for making people feel miserable. Every woman I meet turns my life into a nightmare. And all you can say is ‘Stop drinking if you’re going to drive’? Twenty minutes ago you were trying to kill a guy with your bare hands. Why don’t you show a little empathy for a change?”
We were back to normal. He spun gravel under the tires and roared onto the highway, fishtailing on the asphalt, bent over the wheel like a sorrowful behemoth.
I HAD LEFT A NOTE for Molly before I had picked up Clete and gone to Monarch Little’s house. When I got home the note was still on the kitchen table, with an additional message written in Molly’s hand at the bottom: “Got too tired and couldn’t wait up. Pecan pie and milk in the icebox. Love, Molly.”
I checked the message machine and the caller identification on the telephone. No one had called that evening. I stripped in the bathroom, stuffed my bloody shirt and trousers deep in the clothes hamper, and got in the shower. Molly was still asleep when I lay down beside her. Outside, the rain ticked in the trees and occasionally the flasher lights on emergency vehicles passed on the street. But none of them stopped in front of my house.
Lefty Raguza had obviously not dimed me with the Lafayette P.D. Would he come around again and try to square things on his own? I doubted it. His real problem would be with Whitey Bruxal. Men like Whitey want respectability almost as much as they desire power and obscene amounts of money. Raguza had just managed to drag Whitey’s name into a back-of-town barroom brawl resulting from Raguza’s cruelty to an animal. I had a feeling Whitey’s bedside visit to his employee would not be a sympathetic one.
But I had a problem of my own that would not go away, nor would it let me sleep. After four hours, I gave up any hope of escaping the gargoyle that lived within me. I sat on the side of the bed, my hands in my lap, my head filled with images that no power on earth could relieve me of. The digital clock on the nightstand read 4:13 a.m. “What’s wrong, Dave?” I heard Molly say.
“I tried to kill a guy tonight,” I replied.
I felt her weight shift on the mattress, her legs and bottom slide loose from the sheets. She walked around the side of the bed and sat beside me. She picked up my hand and looked hard into my face. “Tried to kill which guy?” she said.
“The man who poisoned Tripod. I kicked his face in, then I shoved that tube of roach paste down his throat. I mean down his throat, too. I wanted him to strangle on it.”
She looked into space, her hand still covering mine. “How bad did you hurt him?”
“Enough so he’ll never poison one of our animals again.”
“Dave, when you say you wanted to kill this man, you’re describing an emotion, not an intention. There’s a big difference. Had you really wanted to kill him, he’d be dead.”
I thought about what she had just said. The implications were not necessarily flattering. “I never shot anyone
