“You’ve got that right.”
“Then why you come in here making t’ings hard for people who ain’t done you nothing?”
In reality, her question was not an unreasonable one. But wars are not reasonable, and neither is most law enforcement. In Vietnam, we killed an estimated five civilians for every enemy KIA. Law enforcement is not much different. The people who occupy the underside of society are dog food. Slumlords, zoning board members on a pad, porn vendors, and industrial polluters usually skate. Rich men don’t go to the injection table, and nobody worries when worker ants get stepped on.
I picked up a loose chair from a table and carried it and my drink to the booth where the man named Ron was sitting with a young white woman and one black woman and one Hispanic girl who probably wasn’t over seventeen. “What’s the haps, Ronnie Earl?” I said, setting down the chair hard.
“You’ve mistaken me for somebody else. My name is Ron Prudhomme,” the man said. He was smiling, his cheekbones and chin forming a V in his lower face, his eyes warm with alcohol.
“No, I think you and I go back, Ron. Remember when you bashed that old man with a hammer for his veteran’s check? You put a hole in his skull. I don’t think he was ever right again.”
“I don’t know who you are,” he said.
“I’m Dave Robicheaux,” I said to the two women and the girl. “I think Ronnie put a load of buckshot through my windshield.”
The man who called himself Ron Prudhomme picked up a shot glass and drank it slowly to the bottom, savoring each swallow, his expression sleepy. He took a sip from his beer mug, a sliver of ice sliding across his thumb. “If I’d done something like that, would I be hanging around town?” he asked.
“Yeah, I have to admit that one doesn’t fit,” I replied.
“It doesn’t fit because I’m not your guy.”
“Oh, you’re my huckleberry, all right. I just haven’t figured out if you’re doing contract hits now or if you’re a minor player in a group that includes Jesse Leboeuf, a retired homicide roach. You know Jesse Leboeuf? He used to put the fear of God in guys like you.”
He eased one of his full shot glasses toward me. “You want a beer back on that? If I remember, you got the same kind of taste buds I do. I think we got eighty-sixed from the same joints. The only reason you were allowed in some of the clubs was because you carried a shield.”
“I think I figured out why you’re hanging around, Ronnie. You didn’t blow town because you weren’t the hitter in the freezer truck. But you boosted the truck at the motel where you were staying. Which means you boosted it for somebody else. It seems to me you had a brother, but y’all didn’t look alike. You looked like a helium balloon with stubs for arms and legs, but your brother was trim. The way you look now. Have I got my hand on it?”
“This is all Greek to me. Unless you’re that cop who lied on the stand and sent me up the road for a ten-bit I didn’t deserve.”
“No, I’m the cop who made sure there was a short-eyes notation in your jacket,” I said. “Ladies, y’all should be especially careful about this man. His weight loss is huge, and it occurred in a very short amount of time. I suggest you make him use industrial-strength condoms, or you stay completely away from him and spread the word to your sisters. He was both a predator and a cell-house bitch in Angola and stayed in lockdown for years because he was involved in at least two gang rapes. Do y’all get tested regularly for AIDS?”
The white woman and the black woman looked at each other, then at the Hispanic girl. The three of them rose from the booth and, without speaking a word, went out the front door of the club.
“I guess this means we’re not gonna be drinking buddies,” Ronnie Earl said.
“I can hook you up now and take you to the Lafayette PD. Or I can call them and have them pick you up. Or you can give up the hitter in the freezer truck. I think the hitter was your brother.”
“I haven’t seen my brother since I went inside. I heard he was dead or living in western Kansas. I cain’t remember which it was.”
“Stand up and put your hands behind you.”
“No problem. I’ll be out in two hours. I read about that shooting. I was playing bridge in Lake Charles the day it happened. I’ve got twenty witnesses you can call.”
“I’ve got a flash for you, Ronnie Earl. It’s not me who wants to hang you out to dry. It’s Lafayette PD. They’ve got a special hard-on for child molesters around here. They don’t care how they put you away. What you’re doing is five-star dumb,” I said.
“So is everything in my life. Do what you’re gonna do, but one thing I want to clear up: I never harmed a child. The other stuff I did. The short-eyes charge was a bum beef. Y’all sent me up wit’ a bad jacket. I paid a big price for that, man.”
“That’s the breaks, Ronnie.”
“How’d you know I got AIDS?”
“I didn’t.”
“I got a cut on my wrist. When a cut doesn’t heal, does that mean something?”
My hands froze.
“Got you, motherfucker,” he said.
Sometimes the perps, even the worst of them, have their moments.
A strange phenomenon occurred while I was hooking up Ronnie Earl Patin and patting him down for weapons and jailhouse contraband. I saw the entirety of the club as though it had been freeze-framed inside a camera lens. I saw my friend Harvey, beetle-browed and head-shaved, his big arms propped on the bar, looking wanly at an Iberia cop he had picked up from a greasy pool of water, a cop who might now cost him his job; I saw the prostitute in the low-cut blouse and short skirt talking on her cell phone as she went out a side exit; I saw a handicapped man whose arms were too short for his truncated body trying to push coins into the jukebox, his fingers as inept as Vienna sausages; I saw all the sad burnt-out ends of the days and nights I had spent in bars from Saigon’s Bring Cash Alley to the backstreets of Manila to a poacher’s community in the Atchafalaya Basin, where I traded my army-issue wristwatch, one that survived the detonation of a Bouncing Betty, for a half-pint bottle of bourbon and a six-pack of hot beer. I saw all the detritus and waste and wreckage of my misspent life laid out before me, like a man flipping through his check stubs and realizing that the reminders of one’s moral and psychological bankruptcy never go away.
“You gonna bust me or not?” Patin said.
“Right now I’m not sure what I’m going to do with you,” I said. “It’s not a time for you to shoot off your mouth.”
“I’ve still got two full shot glasses on the table. You drink one, I’ll drink the other. Who’s the wiser? Come on, you know you want it. You’re just like me. I’ve cut my intake in half by getting laid every day. What do you do? And don’t lie to me. You’re one thirsty son of a bitch.”
I pushed him through the front door into the parking lot and took out my cell phone. The battery was dead. “Is your cell phone in your car?”
“I walked here. And I don’t have a cell phone. I think they’re for people who need to beat off more. I cain’t believe this is happening. You got to bum a phone off the guy you’re busting?” He started laughing uncontrollably, tears running down his cheeks.
I unlocked the manacle on one of his wrists. The sun was red and as big as a planet and starting to set behind the trees on the western side of the highway that led to Opelousas. I threaded the loose manacle through the rear bumper on my unmarked car and relocked it on Ronnie Earl Patin’s wrist, forcing him to kneel on the asphalt. “I’m going to use the phone inside. I’ll be back in a few minutes,” I said.
“You’re leaving me out here?”
“What does it look like?”
“Take me in.”
“You did eight years in Camp J, Ronnie. You probably could have snitched your way out, but you didn’t. Not many guys can say that. You’re a stand-up guy, but for me that means you’re probably a dead end. So now you’re Lafayette PD’s problem.”
“I got bad knees. I used to do floor work without pads,” he said.
“I believe it,” I said. I got my raincoat off the back floor and folded it into a square and squatted down and slipped it under his shins.
He looked up at me, his mouth twisted with discomfort. “You gonna drink my booze?”
