He wore his tall-crown cowboy hat, the same one he was wearing when I interviewed Elmore Latiolais on the brush gang. Perhaps it was the diminished nature of the sunlight, but one side of Thigpin’s face seemed even more shriveled from skin cancer than the last time I had seen him, to the extent that his grin looked like a surgical wound in the corrupted tissue.
When he shook hands, his grip was too strong, biting into mine like that of a man whose energies are not quite under control. “I cain’t crack you a cold one?” he said.
“No, thanks.”
“You in one of them twelve-step programs?” he said.
“That pretty well sums it up.”
He released my hand. “Nobody is looking. I got some Johnnie Walker, too.”
“You said you had a heads-up for me.”
“Come on in the kitchen. I got to get me a fresh beer. I’ll set out some plates for us.”
“I need to get on it, Cap.”
“Too bad. I was looking forward to dining with you.”
His eyebrows and sideburns were freshly clipped, his jaw shaved. I thought I could smell cologne on his skin. He didn’t strike me as a man who had spent much time at his fish camp. The only vehicle in the yard was a pristine Dodge Ram, the tires clean and thick-treaded, the dealer’s tag still in the back window. There was no boat in the water. I glanced at the barbecue pit. The chicken on it was black except for a pink slash where a drumstick had been torn off. “You coming?” he said over his shoulder.
I followed him inside and let the screen door slam shut behind me. The linoleum floor was cracked and wedged upward in places, spiderwebs feathering in the breeze along the jambs of the open windows. I waited for him to speak. Instead, he began clattering around in a cabinet, pulling out coffee cups and a coffeepot, fiddling with the feed on the propane stove. I stepped into his line of sight. “You said you had a problem of conscience of some kind. You want to tell me what this is about, or should I leave?”
He clanked the coffeepot down on the stove and released it as though the handle were burning his fingers. “I think Elmore Latiolais was aiming to kill me. I had it on good authority. He walked to the truck and reached inside. I told him to put his hands where I could see them and to back the hell off. He didn’t do it. So I punched his ticket.”
“From what ‘good authority’ did you get your information?” I asked.
“I got to be friends with a powerful man in Jackson. I invested my money with his bank. A lot of people lost their money in that bank. But I didn’t. I took this man hunting and fishing, and he treated me as a friend.” He was breathing audibly, the way ignorant and defensive people do when no one has challenged their statement.
“I think you’re talking about Layton Blanchet,” I said. “I think you were paid to kill Elmore Latiolais because he was bringing down too much heat on a coalition of lowlifes who are responsible for the deaths of two innocent girls. Is that the problem of conscience we’re talking about, Cap?”
“If you’re saying I was bribed, you’re a goddamn liar.” He still wore his hat; his profile was as chiseled as an Indian’s, his eyes as clear as glass. But even while he denied his guilt, his thoughts seemed elsewhere, as though he had already moved on in the conversation.
“What’s the heads-up?” I asked.
“People like us do what we’re told. You go along, you get along.”
“Until you start killing people for hire.”
He was motionless, one hand resting on the corner of the stove, the other on a chopping table that had a single drawer. “The government is attaching the money I got from that failed bank. I worked over forty years for what I have. Now I’m supposed to live on a piss-pot state pension ’cause of what other people done? What would you do in that situation?”
I saw two fingers on his right hand jerk involuntarily, just inches above the metal handle on the drawer. I said, “I think I wouldn’t fault myself for a situation I didn’t create. I wouldn’t try to correct the past by serving the interests of the same people who cheated me out of my life savings.”
His jaw flexed, the skin on half his face wrinkling as coarsely as sandpaper. “You reckon hell is hot?”
“Since I don’t plan on going there, I haven’t speculated on it.”
“This ain’t my way. But they didn’t give me no choice, Mr. Robicheaux.”
“You open that drawer, I’m going to smoke your sausage.”
“No, sir, you’re not. You’re a trusting man, which makes you a fool. Sorry to do this to you.”
With his left hand, he lifted up a double-barrel chrome-plated.32-caliber Derringer that he had probably slipped from his back pocket. It was aimed at a spot between my chin and breastbone.
“People know where I am. They know I talked with you,” I said.
“Don’t matter. Twelve hours from now, I’ll be fishing off the Yucatan coast. Turn around. Don’t make this no harder than it is.”
I could feel my mouth going dry, my scalp tightening. When I tried to swallow, my breath caught like a fish bone in my throat. In my mind’s eye, I saw a nocturnal landscape and the flicker of artillery on the horizon, and seconds later, I heard the rushing sound of a 105 round that was coming in short.
I forced myself to look at the Derringer, its two chrome-plated barrels set one on top of the other. The muzzles were black, the handles yellow, lost inside Thigpin’s grip. My head felt like a balloon about to burst. “You’re typical white trash, Thigpin. You’re a gutless thrall who’s spent his life abusing people who have no power. Go on and do it, you motherfucker. I’ll be standing by your deathbed.”
“Good-bye, Mr. Robicheaux. When you get down below with the Kennedys and all the other nigger lovers, give them my regards.”
My vision went out of focus. I raised my hand to my holster, but I knew my gesture was in vain, that my life was over, that I was going to be executed by a brutal, mindless human being whose pathological cruelty was so natural to him, he did not even recognize its existence. Then, through the distortion in my vision, I saw a man standing thirty feet from the kitchen window, aiming down the barrel of an AR-15, his huge shoulders almost tearing the seams of his Hawaiian shirt. He seemed frozen in time and space, his breath slowing, the squeeze of his trigger pull as slow and deliberate as the tiny serrated wheels of a watch meshing together. The report was dulled by the wind gusting in the trees, but the muzzle flash was as bright and sharp and beautiful as an electric arc. The round popped a hole in the screen and blew through one side of Thigpin’s neck and out the other, whipping a jet of blood across the stove’s enamel.
I suspect the round destroyed his trachea, because I heard a gasp deep down in his throat as if he were trying to suck air through a ruptured tube. But there was no mistaking the look in his eyes. He knew he was dying and he was determined to take me with him. Blood welled over his bottom lip as he lifted the Derringer toward my chin. That was when Clete Purcel squeezed off again and caught Jimmy Dale Thigpin just above the ear and sent him crashing to the floor. The top of the coffeepot rolled past his head like a coin, devolving into a tinny clatter on the linoleum.
CHAPTER 22
I HAD MY CELL phone open and was about to dial 911 when Clete came through the back door, the AR-15 held at an upper angle, his gaze fastened on Thigpin’s body. Until I had seen him through the kitchen window, just before he fired, I’d had no idea he followed me to the camp. “You calling it in?” he said.
I waited. A pool of blood was spreading outward from Thigpin’s head. I stepped aside.
“Bag him as a John Doe,” Clete said. “Let the guys who sent him wonder what happened to him. Weingart already seems to be coming apart. Let the Abelards or Weingart or Carolyn Blanchet or whoever is behind this think Thigpin is about to rat-fuck them.”
I closed my cell phone. “You warned me about Thigpin. I should have listened.”
“Think of it this way. What happens when I listen to my own advice?” He laughed without making any sound, his shirt shaking on his chest. “I need a drink.” He opened a cabinet and found Thigpin’s bottle of Johnnie Walker and poured four inches in a jelly glass. He saw me watching him. “I shouldn’t do this in front of you,” he said. “But I need a drink. I’m not like you. I don’t have your control or discipline. I don’t have your faith, either. So I’m going
