'What's the problem?'
The man in sunglasses looked at the photo on the license, then at Micah's face.
'You see what it says over your picture? 'Don't drink and drive… Don't litter Louisiana,'' he said. 'Every driver's license in Louisiana has that on it. We're trying to keep drunks off the road and the highways clean. You threw a beer can out the window back there.'
'No, I didn't.'
'Step out of the car, please.'
'You guys are from New Orleans. You don't have authority here,' Micah said.
'Walk around the far side of the car, please, and we'll discuss that with you.'
They braced him against the roof, kicked his ankles apart, ran their hands up and down his legs, and pulled his pockets inside out, spilling his change and wallet onto the shale.
A car passed with its lights on. The two cops watched it disappear between the cane fields. Then one of them swung a baton into the back of Micah's thigh, crumpling it as though the tendon had been cut in half. He fell to one knee, his fingers trying to find purchase against the side of the limo.
The second blow was ineffective, across his shoulders, but the third was whipped with two hands into his tail-bone, driving a red shard of pain into his bowels. Micah rolled in the dirt, shuttering, trying to control his sphincter muscle.
The cop who had taken his license dropped it like a playing card into his face, then kicked him in the kidney.
'You got a sheet in New Mexico, Micah. Go back there. Don't make us find you again,' he said.
'I didn't do anything,' he said.
The cop with the baton leaned over and inserted the round, wooden end into Micah’s mouth, pushing hard, until Micah gagged and choked on his own blood.
'What's that? Say again?' the cop said, bending down solicitously toward Micah's deformed face.
Clete called me the next afternoon and asked me to meet him in Armand's on Main Street. It was cool and dark inside, and Clete sat at the antique, mirrored bar, a julep glass in his hand, an electric fan blowing across his face.
But there was nothing cool or relaxed about his demeanor. His tropical shirt was damp against his skin, his face flushed as though he had a fever. One foot was propped on the runner of the barstool; his knee kept jiggling-
'What is it, Clete?'
'I don't know. I probably shouldn't have called you. Maybe I should just drive up the stock price on Jack Daniel's by three or four points.'
'I got a call from Cora Gable. A couple of NOPD goons beat up her driver. She says they scared him so bad he won't press charges.'
'Jim Gable wants him out of town?'
'The driver had just delivered a petition for Letty to Belmont Pugh. Maybe the message is for Cora.'
'What's Gable's interest in Letty Labiche?'
'I don't know. You going to tell me why you called me down here?'
The affair had started casually enough. Clete had gone to her house at evening time and had found her working in back, carrying buckets of water in both hands from the house faucet to her garden. 'Where's your hose?' he asked.
'The boy who cuts the grass ran the lawn mower over it,' she replied.
They carried the water together, sloshing it on their clothes, pouring it along the rows of watermelons and strawberries, the sky aflame behind them. Her face was hot with her work, her dress blowing loosely on her body as she stooped over in the row. He walked back to the house and filled a glass of water for her and carried it to her in the garden.
She watched his face over the top of the glass as she drank. Her skin was dusty, the tops of her breasts golden and filmed with perspiration in the dying light. She lifted her hair off her neck and pulled it on top of her head.
He touched the roundness of her upper arm with his fingertips.
'You're a strong 'woman,' he said.
'Overweight.'
'Not to me,' he replied.
She kept brushing her hair back from the corner of her mouth, not speaking, letting her eyes meet his as though she knew his thoughts.
'I drink too much. I lost my badge in a bad shooting. I did security for Sally Dio in Reno,' he said.
'I don't care.'
She tilted up her face and looked sideways with her eyes, the wind blowing her hair back from her face.
'My ex said she could have done better at the Humane Society,' he said.
'What somebody else say got nothing to do wit' me.'
'You smell like strawberries.'
'That's 'cause we standing in them, Clete.'
She pushed the soft curve of her sandal across the hardness of his shoe.
They went upstairs to the third story of the house and made love in an oversized brass bed that was surrounded by three electric fans. She came before he did, then mounted him and came a second time, her hands caressing his face simultaneously. Later she lay close to him and traced his body with her fingertips, touching his sex as though it were a source of power, in a way that almost embarrassed him and made him look at her quizzically.
She wanted to hear stories about the Marine Corps and Vietnam, about his pouring a container of liquid soap down a hood's mouth in the men's room of the Greyhound bus depot, about growing up in the Irish Channel, how he smashed a woman's greenhouse with rocks after he found out her invitation for ice cream had been an act of charity she extended at her back door to raggedy street children.
'I'm a professional screwup, Passion. That's not humility, it's fact. Dave's the guy with the history,' he said.
She pulled him against her and kissed his chest. He stayed away for two days, then returned to her house at sunrise, his heart beating with anticipation before she opened the door. She made love with him as though her need were insatiable, her thighs fastened hard around him, the small cry she made in his ear like a moment of exorcism.
Two weeks later he sat in her kitchen, a blue and white coffeepot by his empty plate, while Passion rinsed a steak tray under the faucet.
He ran his nails through his hair.
'I think you're looking for an answer in a guy who doesn't have any,' he said.
When she didn't reply, he smiled wanly. 'I'm lucky to have a P.I. license, Passion. New Orleans cops cross the street rather than talk to me. I've had the kind of jobs people do when they're turned down by the foreign legion.'
She stood behind him, kneading his shoulders with her large hands, her breasts touching the back of his head.
'I have to go to the doctor in the morning. Then I want to visit my sister,' she said.
Clete drank out of his julep and stirred the ice in the bottom of the glass.
'She told me all the details about what Carmouche did to her and Letty. Somebody should dig that guy up and chain-drag the corpse through Baton Rouge,' he said. Then he seemed to look at a thought inside his head and his face went out of focus. 'Passion would let him exhaust himself on her so he'd go easier on her sister.'
'Get this stuff out of your mind, Clete.'
'You think she's playing me?'
'I don't know.'
