Where was Clete?
I fell asleep briefly and had a troubling dream that later I couldn't remember. When I woke I heard my truck coming up the shell road, the boat trailer bouncing through the depressions. I sat on the side of the bunk and rubbed the sleep out on my face, resolving not to be angry or impatient with Cletus. The side window of the cabin had fogged in the rain, and I wiped it clean and looked out at the parking spot by the boat ramp. Clete had somebody with him and they were both drunk.
I opened the door onto the small gallery and watched them gather up two bags of groceries and a case of beer and head through the rain. The man with Clete was dressed western – in tight jeans, cowboy boots, chrome belt buckle the size of a car tag, a snap-button shirt that glittered like tin, and a short-brim Stetson tilted on the side of his head. His teeth were long, his face as lined as a tobacco leaf.
"Hey, Streak, look who I ran into – Bob Cobb. Remember Stomp-ass Bad Texas Bob?" Clete said.
They clomped inside the cabin, shaking off the rain, blowing out their breath, sorting out the beer and snacks on the kitchen table. Bad Texas Bob sat down in a chair, removed his hat, and wiped the water out of his hair onto the floor. "You guys got any chippies down here?" he said.
"Not a good question, Bob," Clete said.
"I was pulling Dave's joint," Bob said. "How's it danglin', Streak?"
"We're just about to head out," I said, giving Clete a look.
Bob's face wrinkled with hundreds of little lines when he grinned, but his eyes contained a steady, forced brightness, the kind you see in people who claim to be born again or wish to sell you something. I had not shaken hands with him, although I wasn't sure why not. In fact, I had stepped backward, toward my rucksack, which lay against the wall, the flap open.
"I didn't know you were a fisherman," I said.
"It beats spending your days at the OTB parlor," he replied. He bent over and began slipping off his boots. "Y'all got a towel? I'm soaked to my socks."
His back was to us as he worked the sock off his right foot with his fingers. I could see the whiteness of his ankle, the hair along the bone, the dark yellow, shell-like thickness of his toenails. But more than anything else I could see the liquid glimmer in the corner of his eye.
"Sorry about this, boys," he said.
But even before Bad Texas Bob spoke or turned toward us, I was reaching down into the pouch of my rucksack.
"What the hell you doing, Bob?" Clete said, lowering a can of beer he was about to drink from.
Bob had pulled a blue-black.25 auto from a Velcro ankle holster. But Clete kicked the table against him, knocking off his aim, and his first shot went wild and broke out the window behind me.
I pointed my.45 in front of me with both hands, pulling back the hammer to full cock. When I fired, the room roared with sound and a hollow-point round cored through the top of Bob's left shoulder. He should have gone down, but he didn't, perhaps because he was standing up against the wall now, shooting wildly, one palm held up in front of his face, as though it could protect him from the impact of a.45 fired at close range.
I think it was my second or third round that punched through his hand and sheared off three of his fingers and part of his palm, but I cannot be sure. My ears were ringing, my heart pounding with fear, my wrists bucking upwards with the recoil of my weapon. Then I saw Bad Texas Bob's face come apart, jaw and teeth and brain matter dissolving like wax held too close to a flame.
Bob crashed across the table and rolled dead-up in the center of the floor, while Clete stared at him, openmouthed, his beer splattered on his pants leg.
I kicked open the front door and walked outside, my weapon hanging from my hand, the rain driving into my eyes. I could smell ozone and fish spawn and the salty odor of dead animals in the marsh, but I could hear no sound, as though both earth and sky had been struck dumb. Clete was shaking me, lifting my weapon from my hand, saying words that were lost in the wind. The marsh was flat and long and green in the mist, and it made me think of elephant grass in a distant country, denting and swirling under helicopters that were painted with shark's teeth and flown by boys who only last season had played American Legion baseball.
chapter TWELVE
I was on the desk a week while Internal Affairs investigated the shooting death of Robert Cobb. During that time my colleagues stopped by to shake hands and chat,, perhaps about baseball or fishing, or they'd inquire about Alafair and her life in Portland, then they'd go away.
The same was true at Victor's Cafeteria and at the Winn-Dixie store up the street, the golf course where I sometimes bought a bucket of balls and hacked them into trees, and at my church down the bayou in Jeanerette. People went out of their way to show both respect and goodwill toward me. They shook hands and patted me on the shoulder or back, as they would do to a family member of the deceased at a funeral.
But if you have ever been seriously ill or have received life-threatening injuries in a war, you know what I am about to say is true. People may be kind to you, but they also fear you because you remind them of their own mortality. The insularity they seem to create around themselves is not in your imagination. We have an atavistic sense about death, and we can smell it on others as surely as a carrion bird can.
The same applies to those who shed blood on our behalf. We collectively absolve them and, if they wear uniforms, we may even give them medals, because, after all, they took human life while defending us, didn't they? But we do not, under any circumstances, want to know the details of what they did or how they did it; nor do we want to know about the images that will come aborning forever in their dreams.
On a Wednesday in July I was cleared by I.A. But I could not shake a pall of depression that seemed to have descended upon me. There were too many shootings and too many dead people in my jacket. With age I had come to believe that each of us is diminished by the death of another. No one is God and no one should have the power of life or death over his brother. Those who say otherwise may have their point of view, but I just don't share it anymore.
But I also knew enough about depression and Sigmund Freud to understand that insomnia, guilt, and night sweats are forms of impotent rage aimed at the self.
Time to change the target, I thought.
Somebody had contracted Bad Texas Bob Cobb to take me and, if necessary, Clete Purcel off the board. Why should I carry Cain's mark because of what others had wrought? There was no mystery about where all this started. One way or another, the Chalonses were connected with the story of Ida Durbin, and that connection was one they did not want the world to know about.
On the day IA. cleared me I checked out a cruiser and headed to Lafayette and the television station and offices of Valentine Chalons. I kept it at eighty all the way up the four-lane, my flasher on, my chest and arms pumped with an adrenal-like energy, a martial band playing in my head. In AA it's called a dry drunk. Some just call it terminal assholeitis. The bottom line is it bodes well for no one.
I hung my badge holder on my belt and went past Valentine's secretary into his office, thrusting back the door without knocking. His office was huge, done with white furniture and a lustrous black floor and a full glass wall that looked onto an atrium containing a live oak tree circled by a bed of pink and gray caladiums. Several men and women in business suits were sitting in plastic chairs, listening to Valentine Chalons speak to them from behind his desk. Their faces made me think of ceramic that had been painted with flesh tones.
"I've got a story you can put your investigative reporters on, Val," I said. "The guy I dusted, Robert Cobb? He was a disgraced state police officer who killed eight escaped convicts and used to get free blow jobs at Vicki Rochon's cathouse in Baton Rouge. Then he ended up doing security work at a casino your family has money in. Is that just coincidence? What do you think about doing a human interest story on ole Bob?"