Her eyes went past me to a photo on the wall. In it were her grandfather with his crew in front of a B-17. “I ended up serving them at the table under the tent. Outside, Randy said, ‘Glad you put it behind you, little lady. Truth is, Boyd owed me eighty dollars, not the other way around. I guess I figured Boyd still owed me. Sorry about that.’ ”
“What’d you say to him?”
“Nothing. I went back to the trailer and cried.”
I sat on the side of the bed. I was in my skivvies. Maxwell Gato jumped on the bed and got between us and flipped on her back. I picked her up and set her on the floor. “You did something, Bailey. What was it?”
“It happened that night,” Bailey said. “The rides and fairways had all shut down. I went to their trailer and knocked. I don’t know why. Maybe I wanted them to hurt me so somebody would call the police and arrest them. Or maybe I simply wanted them to look me in the face. If I’d had a gun, I would have scared them. There was no sound inside. I think they were stoned. It’s funny how I felt. I wasn’t thinking about them. I kept an empty spot in my head, like I didn’t want to know what I was planning to do. Snow was blowing off the tops of the mountains in the moonlight, and I thought about how beautiful the earth was.”
She sat on the side of the bed and took her shirt off the bedpost and began putting it on.
“Tell me what happened,” I said.
She buttoned her shirt slowly, staring at the wall as though it were a movie screen. Her back was cold when I touched it. “I don’t want to do this to you, Dave.”
“You’re not doing anything to me.”
“There was an orange crate full of butcher paper by a Dumpster not far away, and a five-gallon can of diesel in the back of their pickup truck. I put the crate under the propane tank on the trailer and poured the diesel on it and set it on fire.”
I stared at her. She had been right. I wasn’t ready for it. “Tell me the rest.”
“The fire was very fast. I could feel the heat on my skin, even while I was running away. They died. All of them. I didn’t see them die, but I heard them. I put my fingers in my ears.”
“This didn’t happen from a burning propane tank.”
“The trailer was a meth lab.”
“Nobody questioned you?”
“No one had reason to. I started to tell Greta. She put her hand over my mouth. So now you know.”
There are moments when you realize that our greatest vanity lies in the belief that we have control of our lives and that reason holds sway in human affairs. Hugo Tillinger was probably wrongly convicted for the arson murder of his family and now lay in a coma, put there by a young deputy consumed by guilt. My homicide partner had burned three men to death, and no one knew about it except me and an Indian woman who was probably dead. As Stephen Crane suggested long ago, most of us are adverbs, never nouns, not even the pitiful degenerates who gang-raped a trusting seventeen-year-old girl.
“Those guys dealt it,” I said. “You didn’t intend to kill them. I think they got what they deserved. That’s it.”
“That’s it?”
“They wrote their fate before they ever met you. How many lives did they destroy with meth? How many other girls would they have raped? Don’t stack the time of evil people, Bailey.”
She sat down next to me and rested her head on my shoulder. “Have I made a burden for you?”
“Want to know the truth? When guys like that buy it, I’m glad.”
“Don’t say that.”
“My mother and my second wife died at the hands of guys like that. I say fuck all of them.”
I felt her body jerk with the coarseness of my language. “I’m sorry,” I said. But my words were gibberish. There are images you never get out of your head, and we both knew it.
Chapter Thirty
Thursday had been a long day for Clete. He had to pry a bail skip out of a chimney in Abbeville. The skip’s hysterical girlfriend tore Clete’s new sport coat with a butcher knife. A disbarred lawyer stuck him with a bad check for a two-month investigation, and his Caddy got towed from a yellow zone. That evening he ate downtown and took a walk onto the drawbridge by Burke Street. He leaned on the rail and looked down at the long bronze ribbon of Bayou Teche unspooling beneath his feet, its banks lined with live oaks and lily pads. It seemed to dip off the edge of the earth.
He could see the fireflies in the trees and smell gas on the wind, and he felt a sense of mortality that was as cold and damp as the grave. The light was shrinking on the horizon, and an island of dead leaves was floating under the bridge, undulating with the current. He had a package of cigarettes in his pocket and wanted to light one up. He tore up the package and dropped the pieces down a sewer drain.
It was almost dark when he got back to the motor court. He parked the Caddy in the cul-de-sac and went inside his cottage and turned on the television, not caring which channel came on. He cracked a Budweiser and was tempted to pour a shot in it but instead sat down in his stuffed chair and tried to concentrate on the television and forget the morbid sensations that had flooded him on the drawbridge. Then he realized he was watching Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.
He turned off the set, returned his unfinished beer to the refrigerator, chain-locked the door, showered, and put on his pajamas. The time was 9:17. The rest of the world might have its troubles, but Clete Purcel was going to bed early, safe and sound in his cottage that was always squared away and meticulously clean. If he was lucky, he would sleep through the night without dreaming and rise to a better day, one in which he did not feel the pull of the earth.
An hour later, deep inside his sleep, he felt a squeeze on his wrist. He opened his eyes in the blackness. His right hand jerked tight against a handcuff that was hooked to the bed frame. Four feet away, a diminutive man with the complexion and muscle tone of liquid soap was seated in a chair, illuminated by the glow of the bathroom night-light.
“Hi, hi,” the man said. “Guess who came to see you.”
Clete pinched his eyes and waited for them to adjust. “How’d you get in?”
“The cleaning lady left the door open,” the man said. “I’ve been under your bed since this afternoon. Your carpet is smelly.”
The man wore pink tennis shoes and tight shorts and a boxlike white hat with a starched brim and had a smile that made Clete think of red licorice. A small semi-automatic rested on his thigh.
“You hooked me up with my own cuffs,” Clete said. “Pretty impressive.”
“I could have done something else to you. I have the chemicals to do it.”
“Listen, Wimple—”
“No! No! No! It is rude to call people by their last names. Do. Not. Do. That.”
“Sorry,” Clete said. “Let me start over. Listen. Guy. Who. Burns. People. Alive. With. A. Flamethrower, what the fuck are you doing in my cottage?”
“The people I used to work for are after me.”
“Just because you lit up a couple of their guys? I’m shocked.”
“They violated me. With a tree branch.”
“How about unhooking me and we’ll talk about it? You want some ice cream? That’s a big favorite of yours, right?”
“Don’t try to trick me.”
“You know my daughter is Gretchen Horowitz, don’t you?”
“She kills for hire.”
“That’s what she did, past tense. She’s a documentary filmmaker now. But don’t get her pissed off, know what I mean?”
“You mean, don’t hurt you?”
“What I’m saying to you is don’t fuck with the wrong people, Smiley whatever-the-fuck-your-last-name-is.”
“I didn’t give you permission to call me Smiley.”
“Then shove it up your ass.”