Rosie put her hands on the girl's shoulders and turned her toward the door.
'You can go now,' she said. 'Listen to what Detective Robicheaux tells you. This man won't put you in the movies, not unless you want to work in pornographic films. Are you okay?'
'Yes, ma'am.'
'Here's your purse. Don't worry about what's happening here. It doesn't have anything to do with you. Just stay away from this man. He's in a lot of trouble,' Rosie said.
The girl looked again at Julie, then went quickly out the door and into the dark. Julie was putting on his trousers now, with his back to us. The walls were covered with felt paintings of red-mouthed tigers and boa constrictors wrapped around the bodies of struggling unicorns. By the door was the canvas bag filled with baseballs, gloves, and metal bats. Julie's skin looked brown and rubbed with oil in the glow from a bedside lava lamp.
'It looks like you did a real number on Mikey Goldman's trailer,' I said.
He zipped his fly. 'Like most of the time, you're wrong,' he said. 'I don't go around setting fires on my own movie set. That's Cholo Manelli's work.'
'Why does he want to hurt Mikey Goldman?'
'He don't. He thought it was my trailer. He's got his nose bent out of joint about some imaginary wrong I done to him. The first thing Cholo does in the morning is stick his head up his hole. You guys ought to hang out together.'
'Why do you think I'm here, Julie?'
'How the fuck should I know? Nothing you do makes sense to me anymore, Dave. You want to toss the place, see if that little chippy left a couple of 'ludes in the sheets?'
'You think this is some chickenshit roust, Julie?'
He combed his curls back over his head with his fingers. His navel looked like a black ball of hair above his trousers.
'You take yourself too serious,' he said.
'Murphy Doucet has my daughter.' I watched his face. He put his thumbnail into a molar and picked out a piece of food with it. 'Did you hear what I said?'
He poured three fingers of Scotch into his glass, then dropped a lemon rind into the ice, his face composed, his eyes glancing out the window at a distant flicker of lightning.
'Too bad,' he said.
'Too bad, huh?'
'Yeah. I don't like to hear stuff like that. It upsets me.'
'Upsets you, does it?'
'Yeah. That's why I don't watch that show Unsolved Mysteries. It upsets me. Hey, maybe you can get her face on one of those milk cartons.'
As he drank from his highball, I could see the slight tug at the corner of his mouth, the smile in his eyes. He picked up his flowered shirt from the back of a chair and began putting it on in front of a bathroom door mirror as though we were not there.
I handed Rosie the shotgun, put my hands on my hips, and studied the tips of my shoes. Then I slipped an aluminum bat out of the canvas bag, choked up on the taped handle, and ripped it down across his neck and shoulders. His forehead bounced off the mirror, pocking and spider-webbing the glass like it had been struck with a ball bearing. He turned back toward me, his eyes and mouth wide with disbelief, and I hit him again, hard, this time across the middle of the face. He crashed headlong into the toilet tank, his nose roaring blood, one side of his mouth drooping as though all the muscle endings in it had been severed.
I leaned over and cuffed both of his wrists around the bottom of the stool. His eyes were receded and out of focus, close-set like a pig's. The water in the bowl under his chin was filling with drops of dark color like pieces of disintegrating scarlet cotton.
I nudged his arm with the bat. His eyes clicked up into my face.
'Where is she, Julie?' I said.
'I cut Doucet loose. I don't have nothing to do with what he does. You get off my fucking case or I'm gonna square this, Dave. It don't matter if you're a cop or not, I'll put out an open contract, I'll cowboy your whole fucking family. I'll-'
I turned around and took the shotgun out of Rosie's hands. I could see words forming in her face, but I didn't wait for her to speak. I bent down on the edge of Julie's vision.
'Your window of opportunity is shutting down, Feet.'
He blew air out of his nose and tried to wipe his face on his shoulder.
'I'm telling you the truth. I don't know nothing about what that guy does,' he said. 'He's a geek… I don't hire geeks, I run them off… I got enough grief without crazy people working for me.'
'You're lying again, Julie,' I said, stepped back, leveled the shotgun barrel above his head, and fired at an angle into the toilet tank. The double-ought buckshot blew water and splintered ceramic all over the wall. I pumped the spent casing out on the floor. Julie jerked the handcuffs against the base of the stool, like an animal trying to twist itself out of a metal trap.
I touched the warm tip of the barrel against his eyebrow.
'Last chance, Feet.'
His eyes closed; he broke wind uncontrollably in his pants; water and small chips of ceramic dripped out of his hair.
'He's got a camp south of Bayou Vista,' he said. 'It's almost to Atchafalaya Bay. The deed ain't in his name, nobody knows about it, it's like where he does all his weird stuff. It's right where the dirt road ends at the salt marsh. I seen it once when we were out on my boat.'
'Is my daughter there?' I said quietly.
'I just told you, it's where he goes to be weird. You figure it out.'
'We'll be back later, Feet. You can make a lot of noise, if you like, but your gumballs are gone and the security guard is watching war movies. If I get my daughter back, I'll have somebody from the department come out and pick you up. You can file charges against me then or do whatever you want. If you've lied to me, that's another matter.'
Then I saw a secret concern working in his eyes, a worry, a fear that had nothing to do with me or the pain and humiliation that I had inflicted upon him. It was the fear that you inevitably see in the eyes of men like Julie and his kind when they realize that through an ironic accident they are now dealing with forces that are as cruel and unchecked by morality as the energies they'd awakened with every morning of their lives.
'Cholo-' he said.
'What about him?' I said.
'He's out there somewhere.'
'I doubt it.'
'You don't know him. He carries a barber's razor. He's got fixations. He don't forget things. He tied parts of a guy all over a ceiling fan once.'
His chest moved up and down with his breathing against the rim of the toilet bowl. His brow was kneaded with lines, his nose a wet red smear against his face, his eyes twitching with a phlegmy light.
I shut off the valve that was spewing water upward into the shattered tank, then found a quilt and a pile of towels in a linen closet and placed the towels under Julie's forearms and the quilt between his knees and the bottom of the stool.
'That's about all I can do for you, Feet. Maybe it's the bottom of the ninth for both of us,' I said.
The front wheels of the truck shimmied on the cement as I wound up the transmission on Highway 90 southeast of town. It had stopped raining, the oaks and palm trees by the road's edge were coated with mist, and the moon was rising in the east like a pale white and mottled-blue wafer trailing streamers of cloud torn loose from the Gulf's horizon.
'I think I'm beyond all my parameters now, Dave,' Rosie said.
'What would you do differently? I'd like for you to tell me that, Rosie.'
'I believe we should have Balboni picked up-suspicion for involvement in a kidnapping.'
