“Why drive yourself nuts? You were right from the outset. We’re dealing with some big players. But back to this gal Varina. A woman can only be so beautiful. If your twanger doesn’t go on autopilot when a broad like that walks by, you need to get a refund on your equipment. Don’t tell me your flopper doesn’t have a memory bank. When you were loaded, you racked up some heavy mileage. Don’t pretend you didn’t.”
“I can’t believe you. We’re talking about multiple homicides, and you can’t get your mind off your johnson.”
“I was talking about yours, not mine. But okay, let’s talk about mine. I think it has X-ray eyes. It sees through my pants. What am I supposed to do, cover it with concrete?” Clete glanced behind him through the screen door. His scalp constricted and his face turned hot pink, the blood draining out of the scar that ran through his eyebrow. “Hi, Molly,” he said. “I didn’t see you there.”
“Hi, Clete,” she said. “Enjoying the evening?”
“I was going to ask Dave to take a walk.” He stood up. “Would you like to go?”
“Bring me some ice cream,” she said.
“Sure,” he said. “I was going to suggest that. Dave and I were just shooting the breeze. I was talking about myself, not anybody else.”
“We always love having you over, Clete,” she said.
I walked with him down the street, toward the Shadows. He looked back at the house. “How long was she there?” he said.
“Forget it. Who was driving your car?”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about. Gretchen and I were over on East Cote Blanche Bay today. I think I know where the body of Blue Melton was dropped into the water. I think the guys who killed her were on a big yacht and don’t know much about nautical science. How many yacht basins are there along the Louisiana coast, at least the kind that berth boats big enough to accommodate walk-in subzero freezers? Not many. That’s where we need to start, Streak. Looking at people like Ronnie Earl Patin isn’t going to take us to the top.”
“Don’t try to change the subject. You said Gretchen? As in Gretchen Horowitz, your daughter?”
We had walked out on the drawbridge at Burke Street, the water flowing dark and high through the pilings below, the sun descending in a burst of orange flame beneath clouds that resembled piled fruit. “I’m telling you this because I think maybe she’s not Caruso,” Clete said.
“How can you say that? You recognized her when she clipped Bix Golightly.”
“Maybe it wasn’t her. There’s something I didn’t tell you. Since we almost bought it on the bayou, I’ve had all this guilt about everything I ever did wrong in my life. I was obsessing about Gretchen and her mother and the fact that I used her mother like a whore, and the fact that Gretchen grew up in a home where a guy burned her with cigarettes when she was a baby, for Christ’s sake. I had these pictures Candy sent me of Gretchen, and I was always looking at them and wondering where she was and how I could undo all the pain I’d caused her. Then I saw this person in a red windbreaker and ball cap splatter Bix Golightly’s buckwheats, and maybe I transposed Gretchen’s image onto the shooter.”
“Is that likely?”
“Yeah, it’s possible,” he said, undeterred in his attempt to avoid conclusions he could not deal with. “She talks rough, but she’s a sweet girl. The problem I got now is she doesn’t know who I am, and she’s getting a little bit too close to me emotionally, in definitely the wrong way, get my drift, and she doesn’t need any more psychological damage done to her because she’s getting the hots for her own father.”
“You can clear all this up by telling Gretchen who you are. Why haven’t you done that?”
It was a mean question to ask. Saint Augustine once said we should not use the truth to injure. In this case, my best friend was experiencing the kind of angst that no one should have to endure. The truth was not going to set Clete free. Instead, it would force him to choose between aiding and abetting several homicides or sending his daughter to the injection table at Angola. I had become his grand inquisitor, and I hated myself for it.
“What am I going to do, Dave?” he asked.
I said something I didn’t plan to say. I said it out of a frame of reference that had nothing to do with reason, justice, right or wrong, legality, police procedure, or even common sense. I said it in the same way the British writer E. M. Forster once said that if he had to make a choice between his friend and his country, he hoped he would have the courage to choose his friend. I said, “Let it play out.”
“You mean that?”
“It’s another one of those deals where you have to say the short version of the Serenity Prayer. You have to step back and let all the worry and complexities and confusion in your life blow away in the wind. You have to trust that the sun will rise in the east and the race will not be to the swift and the rain will fall upon both the just and the unjust. You have to say fuck it and mean it and let the dice roll out of the cup as they will.”
“We’re both going to end up in Angola.”
“That’s what I mean. Fuck it. Everybody gets to the barn,” I said.
“My liver is screaming. I got to have a beer with a couple of raw eggs in it. A couple of shots of Jack wouldn’t hurt, either.”
“Molly wants some ice cream.”
“Clementine’s sells sorbet to go. ‘Let it play out.’ I totally dig that. I think that also includes seriously stomping some ass and taking names. ‘Let it play out.’ Fuckin’ A.” He began churning his big fists as though hitting a speed bag, his teeth like tombstones when he grinned.
He had sucked me in again.
N O ONE LIKES to be afraid. Fear is the enemy of love and faith and robs us of all serenity. It steals both our sleep and our sunrise and makes us treacherous and venal and dishonorable. It fills our glands with toxins and effaces our identity and gives flight to any vestige of self-respect. If you have ever been afraid, truly afraid, in a way that makes your hair soggy with sweat and turns your skin gray and fouls your blood and spiritually eviscerates you to the point where you cannot pray lest your prayers be a concession to your conviction that you’re about to die, you know what I am talking about. This kind of fear has no remedy except motion, no matter what kind. Every person who has experienced war or natural catastrophe or man-made calamity knows this. The adrenaline surge is so great that you can pick up an automobile with your bare hands, plunge through glass windows in flaming buildings, or attack an enemy whose numbers and weaponry are far superior to yours. No fear of self-injury is as great as the fear that turns your insides to gelatin and shrivels your soul to the size of an amoeba.
If you do not have the option of either fleeing or attacking your adversary, the result is quite different. Your level of fear will grow to the point where you feel like your skin is being stripped off your bones. The degree of torment and hopelessness and, ultimately, despair you will experience is probably as great as it gets this side of the grave.
Seven hours after I had said good night to Clete, I heard dry thunder in the clouds and, in my sleep, thought I saw flashes of heat lightning inside our bedroom. Then I realized I had forgotten to turn off my cell phone and it was vibrating on top of the dresser. I picked it up and walked into the kitchen. The caller ID was blocked. I sat down in a chair at the breakfast table and stared down the back slope at the bayou, where the surface of the water was wrinkling like curdled milk, the flooded elephant ears along the banks bending in the wind. “Who is this?” I said.
At first I heard only a deep breathing sound, like that of a man who was either in pain or whose anxiety was so intense that blood was starting to pop on his brow. “You Dave Robicheaux?” a male voice said.
“That’s right. It’s four in the morning. Who is this, and what do you want?”
“I’m Chad Patin. Ronnie Earl was my brother.”
I thought the caller planned to make an accusation against me, but that was not the case. He must have been using a landline, because his voice was rasping against a larger surface than a cell phone’s. I heard him take a gulp of air, like a man whose head had been held for a long time underwater.
“You still with me, bub?” I said.
“It was me who tried to take you out,” he replied.
“How’d you get my number?”
“They got a file on you. Everything about you is in there.”
“Who is ‘they’?”
I waited and heard liquid being poured into a glass. I heard him drinking from the glass, swallowing sloppily, a man who didn’t care whether Johnnie Walker or brake fluid was sliding down his throat. “I’m jumping out into
