Tuesday afternoon, Clete showered and shaved and put on fresh sport clothes and had his hair cut and drove to the Nightingale plantation outside Franklin. He carried the drop in an ankle holster and a scoped 1903 Springfield rifle in the trunk. The azaleas were still in bloom when he turned in to the driveway, the St. Augustine grass a deep blue-green, the four-o’clocks open in the shade of the oak trees. He could feel a surge of adrenaline come alive in his chest and wrists and hands, not unlike the high of going up the Mekong in a swift boat behind twin fifty-calibers, the stern dipping and swaying in the trough.
He didn’t get far. Security came out of the carriage house, from the patio, and a state police car and a parked SUV with tinted windows. The men in suits were wearing shades. As Clete slowed the Caddy, he unstrapped the ankle holster and let it fall to the floor, then braked and lowered the window. A close-cropped man wearing shades stared into his face. “This is a security area.”
“Y’all got the nuclear codes inside?” Clete said, the corners of his eyes crinkling.
“Is there someone in particular you’re looking for?”
“Jimmy Nightingale. I’m Clete Purcel. I’m a PI out of New Orleans and New Iberia.”
“I’m afraid you’re not on our visitors list for today.”
“How about telling Mr. Nightingale I’m here, and then we’ll take it from there?”
The man at Clete’s window looked over his shoulder. “You can turn your vehicle around in front of the house. Then get back on the road, please.”
“That doesn’t sound too cool,” Clete said.
“Is that a firearm inside your jacket?”
“I’m licensed to carry.”
“You need to leave, sir.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Step out of your vehicle, please.”
With the back of his foot, Clete pushed the drop under the seat. “I’m at your service.” He got out of the Caddy and lifted his hands and smiled. He towered over most of the security personnel. “What’s next?”
“I’m going to reach inside your jacket for your piece,” the man in the suit said. “Are you comfortable with that?”
“As long as you give it back.”
The man in shades removed the snub-nose from Clete’s shoulder holster and handed it to a St. Mary’s Parish sheriff’s deputy. “Could I have your keys?”
Clete pulled the keys from the ignition and dropped them into the security man’s palm. The St. Mary deputy popped the trunk with them. “He’s got a scoped rifle and an M1 in here.”
“They’re legal,” Clete said. “I shoot at a target range. How about giving this stuff a rest?”
“Stop dancing around with this guy,” a voice in the background said.
The voice belonged to a tall man wearing western-cut pants and a tight cowboy shirt and mirror-shined, needle-nosed Tony Lamas and a straw cowboy hat with a thin black bejeweled band around the crown. His gray mustache was clipped and as stiff as a toothbrush. “Remember me?”
“No,” Clete said.
“Angola in the eighties. I herded some of the Big Stripes.”
Clete saw a hazy image in his mind, a gunbull mounted on horseback atop the Mississippi levee, silhouetted against a dull red sun, his expression lost in the shadow of his hat. A sweat-soaked black convict was mule-jerking a stump from the silt, ripping it loose in a shower of dirt.
“Wooster,” Clete said.
“Good memory.”
“You shot a kid.”
“I made a Christian out of a nigger.”
“You went to work for Tony Squid,” Clete said.
“Who?” Wooster said.
“Is Nightingale here or not?” Clete said.
“It’s none of your goddamn business,” Wooster said.
Clete blew air out of one nostril and looked sideways. “How y’all think this is going to play out?”
“With you hauling your ass out of here,” Wooster said.
Clete opened and closed his hands at his sides. They felt stiff and thick, the veins in his forearms cording. “You guys deal the play.”
Then Jimmy Nightingale came around the side of the house in tennis clothes, a racquet over his shoulder, his skin shiny, not a strand of his bronze-colored hair out of place. “Hey, slow down out there.”
“We’ve got it under control, Mr. Nightingale,” Wooster said.
“Clete’s my friend. What are you doing out here, big fellow?”
“Long time no see. Not since I ran into you and Bobby Earl at the casino.”
“How could I forget? You took a drain in poor Bobby’s car.”
“I called you a cunt, and you had me taken out in handcuffs.”
“We all have our off nights,” Nightingale said.
“You’ve got quite a place here.”
“Why don’t you join us out back for a drink?”
Clete wondered how the buried images of the Indians dying in the explosions of the satchel charges did not crack through the perfection of Nightingale’s perfect egg-shaped face, and leave it like pieces of porcelain at his feet.
“Somebody tried to blow up my shit,” Clete said.
“I didn’t know about that.”
“If he’d pulled it off, he would have killed a young boy I take care of. That’s a big problem for me.”
“Let me know if I can help. A little influence never hurts.”
“The authorities usually see me as the problem. They’re often right. See, I’m going to square this on my own.”
“Give ’em heck,” Nightingale said.
“I love that kind of language. ‘Give ’em heck.’ ‘You betcha.’ It’s folksy.”
“Let me take him out of here, Mr. Nightingale,” Wooster said.
“I want to be your friend, Clete,” Nightingale said.
“You know that old expression ‘I don’t have an enemy in the world’? As long as I’m alive, you’ll always have one.”
Nightingale laughed. “God, you’ve got the guts of a beer-glass brawl, Purcel. Come work for me.”
“I need my piece back.”
“Give it to him,” Nightingale said to the security man.
“Mr. Nightingale, I think you should let us handle this.”
“There will be none of that,” Nightingale said.
The security man handed Clete his snub-nose. Clete dropped it into his shoulder holster. A freshly waxed purple Lincoln with chrome-spoked whitewalls came out of the carriage house with Emmeline Nightingale in the back and Swede Jensen in livery behind the wheel.
“You’re behind that geek from Florida, Jimmy,” Clete said.
“Which geek is that?”
“Goes by the tag Smiley. You’re dirty. You know it and I know it, and I’m going to prove it.”
“The peace of the Lord be with you.”
“Stay indoors during lightning storms,” Clete said. He got into the Caddy.
Nightingale leaned down to the window. “I always liked you, Clete.”
“Watch your foot,” Clete said. He backed in a semicircle, breaking the flowers off the camellia bushes, and drove toward the highway, the sunlight splintering in the oak limbs above his head.
How do you get to a guy like Nightingale? he wondered. More important, who was he? A master of illusion or a guy with a genius IQ who was brain-dead when it came to morality?
Clete looked in the rearview mirror. The security men had gone back to their posts, but Nightingale still stood in the middle of the driveway, one hand lifted in farewell, as though he were saying good-bye to a friend from a previous life.
Clete called me and told me to meet him at Clementine’s at seven.
“What for?” I said.
“I think Nightingale got inside my head.”
“Come by the house.”
“It might be bugged,” he said.
“You’ve been thinking too much.”
“Yeah, I imagined the mercury tilt switch I found by my automobile.”