But I was all rhetoric. The truth is, the backs of my legs were shaking.
The electric tiger caught up with me at eleven Saturday night. That’s what I used to call the heebie-jeebies. I first got them in Vietnam, along with the malaria I picked up in the Philippines. I came home with a hole in my chest and a punji scar like a flattened worm on my stomach and shrapnel in my hip and thigh that set off alarms when I went through metal sensors. The real damage I carried was one nobody saw. I’d hear the tiger padding around the house at three or four in the morning, then he’d sniff his way into the bedroom, glowing so brightly that the air would glisten and warp and my eyes would sting.
The strange phenomenon about alcoholic abstinence is that while you’re laying off the hooch and working the program, your disease is doing push-ups and waiting for the day you slip. You can ease back into the dirty boogie or hit the floor running, but I promise you, the electric tiger, or your version of it, will come back with a roar.
My truck was in the pound, but I had a rental parked in the driveway. I drove to a liquor store in Lafayette and bought a pint of vodka, a bottle of Collins mix, a jar of cherries, a plastic cup, a small bag of crushed ice, and drove into Girard Park, next to the University of Louisiana campus, and got serious. The vodka went down cold and warm and sweet and hard as ice, all at the same time. When I closed my eyes, a lantern lit up the inside of my head, as if I had punched a hypodermic loaded with morphine into my arm.
It was an easy slide into the basement. The things I did next were not done in a blackout. I knew exactly what I was doing. I had put a sawed-off pool cue on the backseat before I left home, one that was weighted heavily at the base. I started the engine and got on I-10 and headed west, the speedometer maxed out.
Chapter 8
Maybe Penny was sleeping one off. It’s hard to say. I knotted a bandana around my face and set fire to the shed with the dirt bike in it, and tapped on the door and waited by the rear of the trailer. There was no reaction inside. A raincloud burst directly overhead, and the fire went out. I smashed on the door with my fist and was standing directly in front of it when Penny jerked it open.
“What’s the haps?” I said, swinging the pool cue at a forty-five-degree angle across his face.
He stumbled backward, a hand pressed against one eye and the other eye bulging, so his face looked like it had been sawed down the middle. “Who the—”
I stepped inside, pulled the door shut, and caught him with the weighted end of the cue on the ear. He crashed on the breakfast table, his mouth wide with either pain or surprise. I swung the cue on his neck and back and spine as though I were chopping wood. When he tried to stand, I shoved him onto the floor of the toilet cubicle. He was wearing only his socks and Jockey shorts. Blood was leaking from his ear. “Why you doing this? Who the fuck are you, man?”
I kicked him in the face and dropped a full roll of toilet paper in the bowl and drove his head into the water and kept it there. I could feel him struggling, his forehead wedging the roll into the bottom of the commode, the water rising to his shoulders. I pushed down the handle to refill the bowl. Water was sloshing over the sides. My arm and shoulder were trembling with the pressure it took to keep him down.
I began to count the seconds under my breath. One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi. I stepped on his calf so he couldn’t get purchase on the linoleum. Four-Mississippi, five-Mississippi, six-Mississippi. I shoved harder and saw bubbles the size and color of small oranges rise to the surface with a gurgling sound. Thirteen-Mississippi, fourteen-Mississippi, fifteen-Mississippi. His arms had turned as flaccid as noodles and were flipping impotently at his sides.
I pulled him dripping from the bowl and threw him onto the floor. He gasped and made a sound like a sheet of tin being ripped out of a roof. He gagged and cupped his mouth.
“When your son comes home, you’ll act like a decent father. If you hurt him in any way, I’ll be back.”
I stomped on his stomach. His mouth opened, and I shoved a bar of soap into it and mashed it down his throat with my shoe.
I got into my rental and drove away. In the rearview mirror, I could see white smoke rising from the shed, as though the fire I had started wanted to have another go at it.
By six A.M., I was teetering on the edge of delirium tremens. By seven they’d passed and I was sound asleep in my skivvies, facedown on the sheets, as though I had gone through a painless evisceration. Strangely, I felt at peace. I had no explanation. I went to Mass that evening in Lafayette and caught a meeting before returning to New Iberia.
Helen was on my case early the next morning. “You told Labiche to get out of your office?”
“I didn’t know he was a snitch.”
“He was trying to do his job,” she said.
“He’s a street rat.”
“I’m not going to put up with this, Dave.”
“Then don’t.”
We were standing by the water cooler out in the hall.
“Step inside my office,” she said.
I tried to play the role of the gentleman and let her walk ahead of me.
“Get inside!” she said. She slammed the door behind us. “Somebody pounded Kevin Penny into hamburger. The sheriff in Jeff Davis says Penny believes it was you.”
“He ‘believes’ it was me?”
“The assailant had a kerchief on his face.”
“Let’s see: Penny has been in Quentin, Raiford, and Angola. He was in the AB, but his wife was half black. He’s a pimp and a child abuser. Nobody besides a cop would want to hurt him, huh?”
“Where were you early Sunday morning?”
“Helen, I don’t blame you because you have to treat me as a suspect in the Dartez homicide. But Labiche is a bum. You shouldn’t have put him in charge of the investigation.”
“Don’t try to change the subject. Did you bust up Penny?”
“Somebody should have done it years ago. End of statement.”
“You’re going to end up in prison.”
“Not because of Penny,” I said.
She touched at her nose and sniffed. “Maybe you’re right about Labiche.”
“Pardon?”
“I’m not comfortable with Labiche’s history, either. I never knew a guy in vice who didn’t get the wrong kind of rise out of his job. But he caught the case on his own hook, and to give it to somebody else because you don’t like him would be obvious bias.”
“I know.”
“You do?”
“You did the right thing.”
“You’re a poor liar.” She punched me in the chest, hard. “I’m mad at you, Dave.”
At five, I’d left the office and begun walking down the long driveway to East Main, when I saw Levon Broussard turn out of the traffic and park his Jeep under the big live oak by the grotto devoted to the mother of Jesus. He opened the car door and held up his hand. “I need to talk.”
“I’m on my way home,” I said. “Take a walk with me.”
“No, right here.”
“It’s been a long day,” I said.
“It’s fixing to get longer.”
“If it’s business, I’ll see you tomorrow at eight A.M.”
Just then Spade Labiche came up the drive in an unmarked car. He leaned out the window. “Good news, Robicheaux. A dent on your back bumper, but no paint from the Dartez vehicle. You’re clean on the truck. It’s at the pound. Catch!” He threw my keys at me. They landed in a puddle of muddy water. “Sorry,” he said, and drove away.
I picked up the keys and wiped them with my handkerchief.
“What was that about?” Levon said.
“Departmental politics. What did you want to tell me?”
“My wife has been raped.”