The floor was littered with movie and wrestling and UFO magazines, hamburger containers, empty Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets, dozens of beer and soda cans.
Helen came through the door with Clete’s cardboard box hanging from her hand. She looked around the room.
“I think it needs a trough inset in the floor,” she said.
“This my get-out-of-Shitsville roust?” he said.
Helen gathered up his basketball, bounced it on the linoleum floor twice — bing, bing — then two-handed it off his forehead and caught the rebound between her palms. His head jerked, as though a thin wire had snapped behind his eyes, then he stared at her, with that bemused, inverted grin, the mouth turned downward at the corners, the teeth barely showing in a wet line above the lip.
“Your place got creeped, Patsy. We’re returning your goods,” I said. I replaced my .45 in my clip-on holster and one at a time removed the Tec-9, the handcuffs, and the blowtorch from the cardboard box and set them on his breakfast table. He fingered the half-moon scars and divots on his face, watched me as though I were a strange shadow moving about on a surreal landscape that only he saw.
“The contract you took from Johnny is already sour, Patsy,” I said. “There’s a guy willing to give you up.”
“It must have been lard-ass that got in my place. He helped himself to the beer and potato salad in my icebox,” Patsy said. There was a red spot, like a small apple, in the middle of his forehead.
“You going to do me?” I said.
He picked at the calluses on his palm, looked up at me, breathed over the top of his teeth, his eyes smiling.
Helen caromed the ball off his head again.
“Hey!” he said, swatting the air, his face knotting. “Lay off that!”
I reached back down in the cardboard box and retrieved a manila folder that was almost three inches thick. I pulled out a chair and sat in it, spread the folder on one thigh.
“You did a nickel on Camp J, you’ve gone out max-time twice, we’re not going to insult you by treating you like a fish. I’m talking about the consequences of harming a police officer,” I said.
He crinkled his nose, looked at a spot three inches in front of his eyes. The shape of his head reminded me of a darning sock.
“But there’s some weird stuff in your jacket, Patsy,” I said. “You got picked up in a porno theater in New York once. The owner was connected to a child prostitution ring. You remember that gig?”
His eyes lifted into mine.
“When you were thirty-eight you went down for statutory rape. She was fourteen, Patsy. Then way back here...” I turned to the front of the folder, looked down at a page. “It” says here you got busted for abducting a little girl from a playground. The father wouldn’t stand up so you walked. You see a pattern here?”
His hands shifted into his lap, his fingers netting together. Helen and I stared at him silently. His eyes blinked, looked back and forth between us, his nostrils whitening, as though he were breathing air off a block of ice.
“What?” he said. “What?”
“You’re a button man, all right, but you’re a pedophile first,” I said.
He churned the edges of his tennis shoes on the floor, his ankles bent sideways, his shoulders pinched forward, his neck hunched. I could hear him breathing, smell an odor like soiled cat litter that rose from his armpits. He started to speak.
“Here’s the rest of it, Patsy. Your mother set fire to you in your crib,” I said.
His pale eyes stared back at me as though they had no lids. His mouth looked like a deformed keyhole in his face.
“You try to do me, all this becomes public knowledge,” I said. “Anytime you’re around Four Corners, you’ll be picked up as a sex predator. We’ll put you with every open molestation case we have, we’ll make sure NOPD Vice gets in on it, too.”
“They’ll have your picture in the T and A joints on Bourbon, Patsy,” Helen said.
“They made that up about my mother. There was a fire in the project,” he said.
“Yeah, she set it. That’s why she died in the insane asylum,” I said.
“The message is, you’re a geek. You start some shit, we’ll finish it. You still think this is just a roust in Bumfuck?” Helen said, stepping toward him, her arms pumped.
When we left him, he was still seated in the chair, his head canted to one side, his mouth indented like a collapsed football bladder, his ankles folded almost flat with the floor, his eyes staring into tunnels and secret rooms that only Patsy Dapolito knew about.
Smoke “em or bust ‘em, make their puds shrivel up and hide, Clete used to say. But how do you take pride in wrapping razor wire around the soul of a man who in all probability was detested before he left the womb?
It rained after sunset, and the mist floated like smoke out of the cypress in the swamp. The air was cool when I closed up the bait shop, and I could hear bass flopping back in the bays. Through the screen I saw Alafair walking Tripod on his chain down the dock, while his nose sniffed at the dried blood and fish scales baked into the planks.
She came through the door, eased it back on the spring so it wouldn’t slam, sat on a counter stool, and lifted Tripod into her lap. She had put on a fresh pair of blue jeans, a flowered cowboy shirt, and had tied her hair in back with a blue ribbon. But her face looked empty, her brown eyes remote with thoughts she couldn’t resolve.
“What’s the trouble, Alf?” I said.
“It’s gonna make you mad.”
“Let’s find out.”
“A bunch of us were up by the bar, you know, Goula’s, the other side of the drawbridge.”
“A bunch of you?”
“We were in Danny Bordelon’s pickup truck. They wanted to get some beer.” She watched my face. “Danny had his brother’s ID card. He went inside the bar and got it.”
“ I see.”
“They were going to drink it down the road.”
“What happened?”
“Are you going to be mad at Danny?”
“He shouldn’t be buying beer for you guys.”
“I got out of the truck and walked. I was scared. They were mixing it with something called “Ever Clear,” it’s like pure grain alcohol or something.”
“Danny didn’t try to take you home?”
“No.” She dropped her eyes to the floor.
“So we leave Danny alone in the future. You did the right thing, Alafair.”
“That’s not all that happened, Dave... It started to rain and the wind was blowing real hard out of the swamp. A car came up the road with its lights on. The man who got Tripod out of the coulee, the man you handcuffed, he rolled down his window and said he’d take me home...”
“Did you get in the—”
“No. The way he looked at me, it was sickening. His eyes went all over me, like they were full of dirty thoughts and he didn’t care if I knew it or not.”
I sat on the stool next to her, put my hand on her back.
“Tell me what happened, Alf,” I said.
“I told him I didn’t want a ride. I kept walking toward the house. The rain was stinging my face and he kept backing up with me, telling me to get in, he was a friend of yours, I was gonna catch cold if I didn’t get in.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Alf. Do you understand me?”
“He started to open his door, Dave. Then this other man came out of nowhere. He had red hair and a black rain hat on with rain pouring off it, and he walked like he was hurt. He said, “I don’t want it to go down in front of a kid, Emile. Time for you to boogie.”
“The man in the car turned white, Dave. He stepped on the gas and threw mud and water all over us. You could see sparks gashing off his bumper when he crossed the drawbridge.”
I looked out the window into the darkness, tried to clear an obstruction, like a fish bone, in my throat.