boiled shrimp,” Clete said.
“You were gonna put an albino in a tanning bed, but you’re lecturing us on abusing people?” the woman said.
“Get her out of here, Eddy,” Clete said.
“You weren’t so choosy that New Year’s Eve when you tried to grab my ass in the elevator at the Monteleone,” the woman said.
Clete tried to think straight, but he couldn’t. Lamont Woolsey was looking at him from under his brow, his face sweaty, his body starting to stink, his slacks streaked with grease and dirt from the car trunk.
“What’s your fucking problem?” Eddy said.
“You don’t hurt people when you don’t have to,” Clete said.
“The guy’s a geek,” Eddy said.
“Beat feet, Eddy, and take her with you,” Clete said. “I’ll lock up.”
“If you haven’t noticed, this is my salon, my office, my girlfriend.”
“You forget what happened here tonight, and with luck, you won’t get melted into soap,” Clete said.
“You don’t throw me out of my own place.”
“What did you say? Melted into soap?” the woman said.
“Did you frisk this guy?” Clete asked.
“What do you think?” the woman said. “I told Eddy to leave this shit alone. I also told him you were a masher. What was that about the soap?”
“I’m going to bet Woolsey here had a fob on a key ring that looked like a dolphin,” Clete said.
The woman and Ozone Eddy glanced at each other. “What about it?” she said.
“That fob means Woolsey has ties to a Nazi war criminal,” Clete said. “I’ve been in a dungeon operated either by him or by his friends. There were chains and steel hooks in that room that had pieces of hair and human tissue on them.”
“Are you drunk?” the woman said.
“Tell her,” Clete said to Woolsey.
A blue vein pulsed in Woolsey’s scalp. His lifted his eyes to the woman’s. They were electric, the pupils as tiny as pinheads. A solitary drop of sweat rolled off the tip of his nose and formed a dark star on his slacks. “I was a dance instructor at an Arthur Murray dance studio. I’d like to take you dining and dancing some night,” he said. “You have a nice mouth. Your lipstick is too bright, but your mouth is nice just the same.”
The certainty had gone out of the woman’s face.
“Where’s the bag for his head?” Clete said.
“I threw it in the trash. I told you. It had puke on it,” Eddy said.
“It’s not important,” Clete said. “Come on, Lamont. We’re going to take a ride.”
“That stuff about the steel hooks, that was a put-on, right?” the woman said.
“Keep telling yourself that,” Clete said.
He pulled Woolsey from the chair and walked him through the back door to the Caddy. Woolsey’s arms felt as hard as fence posts. “You lift?” Clete said.
“Occasionally.”
“Impressive. The credit card you used in Lafayette was only three weeks old. Otherwise, you’re off the computer.”
“That’s not hard to do. But you’re definitely in the computer, Mr. Purcel. We know everything about you and everything about your family and everything about your friends. Think about that.”
Clete shoved him into the backseat and handcuffed him to the D-ring inset in the floor. “Open your mouth again, and you’ll have that bag full of puke pulled over your head.”
“You’re a stupid man,” Woolsey said.
“You’re right about that,” Clete said. “But check out our situation. I’m driving the car and you’re hooked up like a street pimp. I know where we’re going and you don’t. Your face is fried and you don’t have a shirt to wear and your slacks look like you took a dump in them. You’re not in Shitsville because of bad luck, Mr. Woolsey. You’re in Shitsville because you got taken down by a guy who has hair like Bozo the Clown and a brain the size of a walnut. How’s it feel?”
Clete drove up the I-10 corridor toward Baton Rouge, then took an exit that accessed a dirt road and a levee bordering a long canal and a flooded woods thick with cypress and gum and persimmon trees. In the moonlight he could see three fishing camps farther up the canal, all of them dark. Clete pulled into a flat spot below the levee and cut the engine. In the quiet he could hear the hood ticking with heat, the frogs croaking in the flooded trees. He went to the back of the Caddy and popped the trunk and pulled a long-sleeve dress shirt from an overnight bag.
“I’m going to unhook you, Mr. Woolsey,” he said. “I want you to put on this shirt. If you get cute with me, I’ll pull your plug.”
“Where are we going?”
“Who said we’re going anywhere? See that cypress swamp? That’s where the Giacano family used to plant the bodies of people they considered a nuisance.”
“I’m not awed by any of this, Mr. Purcel.”
“You should be. When the Giacanos clipped somebody, they did it themselves, up-front and personal. Or they did it up front and impersonal. But they did it themselves. You use the telephone. Like the hit you put on me and Dave Robicheaux.”
Woolsey was slipping on the shirt in the backseat, working it over his shoulders, one cuff hanging from his wrist. “Somebody has been telling you fairy tales.”
Clete cleared his throat. “This gun I’m holding is called a ‘drop’ or a ‘throw-down.’ When cops accidentally cap an unarmed man, the throw-down gets put on his body. Because the throw-down has its numbers burned off and no ballistics history associated with the cop, it’s a convenient weapon to carry when dealing with troublesome people who need a bullet in the mouth. Are you getting the picture?”
“I think so. But speak more slowly, please. You’re probably too intelligent for a man like me.”
“Here’s the rest of it. I wasn’t going to put you in a tanning bed. Why? Because, number one, it doesn’t work. People who are scared shitless tell any lie they think their tormentor wants to hear. Number two, I don’t take advantage of somebody’s handicap. So what does that mean for you? It means you take the contract off me and Dave, and you stay the fuck away from us. If you don’t, I’ll visit you at your pad and break your teeth out with a ball-peen hammer. Then I’ll stuff my drop down your throat and blow one into your bowels. That’s not a threat; it’s a fact.” Clete took a breath. “One other thing, Mr. Woolsey. No payback on Bozo the Clown and his girlfriend. They’re gumballs and are not accountable.”
“I look like a vengeful man?”
“Hook yourself up.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“You don’t have to. Just don’t fuck with me or Dave Robicheaux again,” Clete said.
Lamont Woolsey seemed to think about it in a self-amused fashion, then slipped the tongue of the loose manacle through the D-ring and squeezed it into the locking mechanism.
Clete stuck a green-and-white peppermint stick in his mouth, glanced once at Woolsey in the rearview mirror, and floored the Caddy back onto the levee, his tires sprinkling dirt and gravel into the canal.
The traffic was thin as Clete drove down I-10 along the edge of Lake Pontchartrain and passed the airport and the cutoff that led to New Iberia. Woolsey was staring out the window like a hairless white ape being transported back to the zoo. Thinking derogatory thoughts about Woolsey brought Clete no consolation. His mockery of Woolsey was, in reality, a bitter admission of his own failure. Woolsey had been taken down by a moral imbecile, but Clete had willingly formed a partnership with one. And Eddy being Eddy, he had immediately factored in his girlfriend, who had almost blinded Woolsey with oven cleaner. On top of that, the two of them had probably told Woolsey he was going to be baked alive in a tanning bed, which Clete had never planned to do.
