"When you hear it start, come running. Tell the locals we swarm him. If one of them draws a weapon, I'm going to stuff it sideways down his throat," I said.
I walked behind the bar, across the duckboards, and opened a bottle of carbonated water and sat down next to Clete. I glanced at the biker who lay unconscious in the corner.
"You didn't kill him, did you?" I said.
"They were eating reds in the John. It was like beating up on cripples. I don't see the big deal here," Clete said.
"The big deal is I think you want to go to jail. You're trying to fix it so you won't get bail, either."
There was a self-amused light in his face. "Save the psychobabble for meetings," he said.
"You'll be in lockup. Which means no trip up to the Death House tomorrow night."
He lowered his head and combed his hair back with his nails.
"I've already been. This weekend. I took Passion. Letty got to have a dinner with some of her relatives," he said.
The whites of his eyes looked yellow, as though he had jaundice. I waited for him to go on. He picked up his beer can, but it was empty.
"I need some whiskey," he said.
"Get it yourself."
He got up and tripped, stumbling with the shotgun against the stool. Unconsciously he started to hand me the gun, then he grinned sleepily and took it with him behind the bar.
"Up on the top shelf. You broke everything down below," I said.
He dragged a chair onto the duckboards. When he mounted the chair, he propped the shotgun against a tin sink. I leaned over the bar and grabbed the barrel and jerked the shotgun up over the sink. He looked down curiously at me.
"What do you think you're doing, Dave?" he asked.
I broke open the breech, pulled out the twenty-gauge shell, and tossed the shotgun out the front door onto the sidewalk.
Helen came through the door with one city cop and two sheriff's deputies. I went over the top of the bar just as Clete was climbing down from the chair and locked my arms around his rib cage. I could smell the sweat and beer in his clothes and the oily heat in his skin and the blood in his hair. I wrestled with him the length of the duckboards, then we both fell to the floor and the others swarmed over him. Even drunk and dissipated, his strength was enormous. Helen kept her knee across the back of his neck, while the rest of us bent his arms into the center of his back. But I had the feeling that, had he chosen, he could have shaken all five of us off him like an elephant in musth.
Twenty minutes later I sat with him in a holding cell at the city police station. His shirt was ripped down the back, and one shoe was gone, but he looked strangely serene.
Then I said, "It's not just the execution, is it?"
"No," he said.
"What is it?"
"I'm a drunk. I have malarial dreams. I still get night visits from a mamasan I killed by accident. What's a guy with my record know about anything?" he answered.
I woke before dawn on Wednesday, the last scheduled day of Letty Labiche's life, and walked down the slope through the trees to help Batist open up the shop. A Lincoln was parked by the boat ramp in the fog, its doors locked.
"Whose car is that up there?" I asked Batist.
"It was here when I come to work," he said.
I unchained our rental boats and hosed down the dock and started the fire in the barbecue pit. The sunlight broke through the trees and turned the Lincoln the color of an overly ripe plum. Water had begun streaming from the trunk. I touched the water, which felt like it had come from a refrigerator, and smelled my hand. At 8 a.m. I called the department and asked Helen Soileau to run the tag.
She called back ten minutes later.
"It was stolen out of a parking lot in Metairie two days ago," she said.
"Get ahold of the locksmith, would you, and ask the sheriff if he'd mind coming out to my house," I said.
"Has this got something to do with Remeta?" she asked.
The sun was hot and bright by the time the sheriff and the locksmith and a tow truck got to the dock. The sheriff and I stood at the trunk of the Lincoln while the locksmith worked on it. Then the sheriff blew his nose and turned his face into the wind.
"I hope we'll be laughing about a string of bigmouth bass," he said.
The locksmith popped the hatch but didn't raise it.
"Y'all be my guests," he said, and walked toward his vehicle.
I flipped the hatch up in the air.
Jim Gable rested on his hip inside a clear-plastic wardrobe bag that was pooled at the bottom with water and pieces of melting ice the size of dimes. His ankles and arms were pulled behind him, laced to a strand of piano wire that was looped around his throat. He had inhaled the bag into his mouth, so that he looked like a guppy trying to breathe air at the top of an aquarium.
"Why'd Remeta leave him here?" the sheriff asked.
"To show me up."
"Gable was one of the cops who killed your mother?"
"He told me I didn't know what was going on. He knew Johnny had cut a deal with somebody."
"With who?"
When I didn't reply, the sheriff said, "What a day. A molested and raped girl is going to be executed, and it takes a psychopath to get rid of a bad cop. Does any of that make sense to you?"
I slammed the hatch on the trunk.
"Yeah, if you think of the planet as a big blue mental asylum," I said.
34
AS A POLICE OFFICER I had learned years ago a basic truth about all aberrant people: They're predictable. Their nemesis is not a lack of intelligence or creativity. Like the moth that wishes to live inside flame, the obsession that drives them is never satiated, the revenge against the world never adequate.
Johnny Remeta called the office at two o'clock that afternoon.
"How'd you like your boy?" he asked.
"You've killed three cops, Johnny. I don't think you're going to make the jail."
"They all had it coming. Tell me I'm wrong."
"You've been set up, kid."
After a beat, he said, "Alafair wants to be a screen writer. Tell her to write better lines for you."
"You cut a deal. You thought you were going to pop Gable and have it all," I said.
"Good try," he said. But the confidence had slipped in his voice.
"Yeah? The same person who sent you to kill Gable gave orders to the Louisiana State Police to shoot you on sight. There are two Texas Rangers sitting outside my office right now. Why is that? you ask yourself. Because you whacked a couple of people in Houston, and these two Rangers are mean-spirited peckerwoods who can't wait to blow up your shit. You wonder why your mother dumped you? It's no mystery. You're a born loser, kid."
"You listen-" he said, his voice starting to shake.
"Think I'm lying? Ask yourself how I know all this stuff. I'm just not that smart."
He began to curse and threaten me, but the transmission was breaking up and his voice sounded like that of a man trying to shout down an electric storm.
I hung up the receiver and looked out the glass partition in my office at the empty corridor, then began filling out some of the endless paperwork that found its way to my basket on an hourly basis.
I tried TO KEEP my head empty the rest of the afternoon, or to occupy myself with any task that kept my mind off the fate of Letty Labiche or the razor wire I had deliberately wrapped around Johnny Remeta's soul. I called the jail in St. Martinville and was told Clete Purcel had thrown his food tray in a hack's face and had been moved into an isolation cell.
"Has he been arraigned yet?" I asked.
"Arraigned?" the deputy said. "We had to Mace and cuff and leg-chain him to do a body search. You want this prick? We'll transfer him to Iberia Prison."
At 4:30 I went outside and walked through St. Peter's Cemetery. My head was thundering, the veins tightening in my scalp. The sky was like a bronze bowl, and dark, broad-winged birds that made no sound drifted across it. I wanted this day to be over; I wanted to look at the rain-worn grave markers of Eighth and Eighteenth Louisiana Infantry who had fought at Shiloh Church; I wanted to stay in a vacuum until Letty Labiche was executed; I wanted to slay my conscience.