File against him and we'll bust his wheels.'
Bilotti's head shifted slightly on the pillow so that he could look directly at me. His eyes possessed the luminosity of obsidian, but they were also marked by an uncertain glimmer, a conclusion or perhaps a new knowledge about himself that would plague him the rest of his days.
'You scared of this guy, Sonny?' I said.
His eyes went to Zerelda.
'You're done here,' she said to me.
'If that's the way you want it,' I said, and walked outside.
She followed me to the front door of the hospital, then out into the parking lot under the trees. The air was warm, golden, smelling of smoke from Saturday-afternoon leaf fires.
'I did some checking on you. You were in this same hospital. Somebody made you count your bones. Maybe with a blackjack I have a feeling it was Legion Guidry,' she said.
'So?' I replied, my eyes focused across the street on the bayou.
'You didn't bring charges against him. You're trying to use Sonny to get even. Because you're too gutless to do it head-on,' she said.
I turned from her and walked to my truck. But she wasn't finished with me yet. She stepped between me and the door.
'Guidry did something to you that makes you feel ashamed, didn't he?' she said.
'I'd appreciate your moving out of the way.'
'I bet you would. Here's another flash. You got a beef with Legion Guidry, take it to Perry LaSalle. He got Guidry his job at the casino. Then ask yourself why Perry has influence at the casino.'
'Is there any particular reason I've earned your anger?' I asked.
'Yeah, Sonny Bilotti is my cousin and you're an asshole,' she replied.
CHAPTER 20
I awoke early Sunday morning and drove 241 miles to Houston, then got lost in a rainstorm somewhere around Hermann Park and Rice University. When I finally found the Texas Medical Center and the hospital where the sheriff's wife had just undergone a double mastectomy the previous week, the rain had flooded the streets and was thundering on the tops of cars that had pulled to the curb because their drivers could not see through the windshields. I parked in an elevated garage, then splashed across a street and entered the hospital soaking wet.
She was asleep. So was the sheriff, his body curled up on two chairs he had pushed together, a blanket pulled up to his chin. I walked back to the nurses' station. No one was there except for a physician in scrubs. He was a tall, graying man, and he was writing on a clipboard. I asked him if he knew how the sheriff's wife was doing.
'You a friend of the family?' he asked.
'Yes, sir.'
'She's a sweetheart,' he said, and let his eyes slip off mine so I could read no meaning in them.
'Is the flower shop open downstairs?' I asked.
'I believe it is,' he said.
On the way out of the hospital I paid for a mixed bouquet and had it sent up to the sheriffs wife. I signed the card 'Your friends in the department' and drove back to New Iberia.
The next morning, Monday, the sheriff and I were both back at work I knocked on his office door and went inside.
'Got a minute?' I said.
He sat behind his desk in a pinstripe suit and turquoise western shirt, his eyes tired, trying not to yawn. 'You sound like you have a cold,' he said.
'Just some sniffles.'
'You get caught in the rain?'
'Not really.'
'What's up?' he asked.
I closed the door behind me.
'It was Legion Guidry who worked me over with a blackjack. When he finished, he held my head up by the hair and put his tongue in my mouth and called me his bitch,' I said.
It was quiet in the room. The sheriff rubbed his fingers on the back of one hand.
'You were ashamed to tell me this?' he said.
'Maybe.'
He nodded. 'Write it up and get a warrant,' he said.
'It won't stick. Not after all this time,' I said.
'If it doesn't, it's because you tore up Jimmy Dean Styles.'
'Run that by me again?'
'You do everything in your power to convince people you're a violent, unstable, and dangerous man. Get a warrant. Nobody assaults an officer in my department. I want that son of a bitch in custody.'
I started to speak, then decided I'd said enough.
'I think you had another reason for not reporting this,' the sheriff said. 'I think you planned to pop Guidry yourself.'
'I was never big on self-analysis.'
'Right,' he said.
I got up to leave.
'Hold on,' the sheriff said.
'Sir?'
He touched the bald spot in the center of his head, then looked at me for what seemed to be a long time. 'My wife and I appreciated the flowers,' he said.
I paused in the doorway, my face blank
'I saw you leaving the flower shop at the hospital. I'll never figure you out, Dave. That's not necessarily a compliment,' he said.
I guess I should have felt liberated from the deceit I had practiced on the sheriff. In fact, it should have been a fine day. But I stayed restless, discontented, and irritable, without cause or remedy, and the five miles I jogged that evening and the push-ups and bench presses and sets of curls I did with free weights in my backyard did little to relieve the pressure band along one side of my head and the electricity that seemed to jump off the ends of my fingers. That night I thought I heard caterpillars eating inside a pile of wet mulberry leaves under the window, and I pressed the pillow down on my head so I would not have to hear the sound they made.
I dreamed I was teaching a class of police cadets at a community college in north Miami. In my dream I was part of an exchange program with NOPD and Florida law enforcement, and what should have been a vacation in the sun was for me a long drunk in the bars adjacent to Hialeah and Gulfstream Park racetracks. I entered the classroom stinking of cigarette smoke and booze, unshaved, my mouth like cotton, sure that somehow I could get through the hour, with no notes or lesson plan, then find a morning bar in Opa-Locka, where a vodka collins would sweep all the snakes back into their wicker baskets.
Then I realized, as I stood at the lectern, that I had become incoherent and foolish, an object of pity and shame, and the cadets, who had always treated me with respect, had dropped their eyes to the desks in embarrassment for me.
The dream wasn't a fabrication of the unconscious, just an accurate replication of what had actually taken place, and when I woke from it just before dawn, I could not shake the feeling that I was still drunk, still drinking, still caught in the alcoholic web that had made my nights and days a misery for years.
