“Take care of yourself, Baby Squanto,” I said. “Don’t let this collection of motherfuckers fool you.”
“You make me want to weep,” she replied.
The next day was Saturday. I woke at four and fed the animals on the back steps, then drove in the coldness of the dawn to Clete’s motor court. I tapped lightly on the door. The oak trees were ticking with water in the darkness, the bayou swirling through the cattails and canebrakes along the bank. Clete opened the door in a strap undershirt and boxer shorts that went almost to his knees.
“Most noble mon,” he said, his eyes full of sleep.
I stepped inside and closed the door behind me. He sat down in a stuffed chair, a blanket humped over his shoulders. A crack of light from the bathroom fell on his face. His cheeks were unshaved, his hair hanging on his forehead like a little boy’s. He tried to act attentive, then his head sank on his chest. I felt sorry for waking him and burdening him with my troubles; however, I knew no one else I could go to. I may have seemed the secular priest in his life, but the truth was otherwise. Yes, Clete was the trickster from medieval folklore, Sancho Panza with a badge, but these attributes were cosmetic and had little to do with the true nature of the man. Clete Purcel was the egalitarian knight, the real deal, his armor rusted, his sword unsheathed, his loyalties unfailing, with a heart as big as the world.
“They’re going to get away with it,” I said.
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“Desmond Cormier and his entourage. They’re going back to Arizona and shutting down the circus while we lick our wounds.”
“I’m not copying, big mon. I need coffee and massive nutrients.”
“Stay where you are.”
I started a pot of chicory coffee and got out a skillet and loaded it with six eggs, eight strips of bacon, and a ring of buttered biscuits.
“Fix some for yourself, too,” he said.
“I did.”
“Oh.”
I broke two more eggs into the skillet, then set the table. I could feel his eyes on me.
“You’re thinking about doing it under a black flag?” he said.
“Call it what you want.”
“I can live with black flags,” he said. “You can’t.”
“The friends of Tillinger you met at the graveyard service told you he was mixed up in arms sales?”
“That’s what the preacher said. He visited Tillinger in jail.”
“That means he didn’t come here just to see Lucinda Arceneaux,” I said.
“Hard to say,” Clete replied. “The preacher said Tillinger wanted to get clean of his past.”
“Okay, think about it. We’ve got all kinds of information that doesn’t seem to connect with itself. Russians building nuclear reactors, money laundering in Malta, greaseballs out of Miami, Nicky Scarfo’s old crowd in Jersey. So what’s the common denominator?”
“Desmond Cormier doesn’t care where he gets his money,” Clete said. “What’s unusual about that? Casino owners and marijuana growers pay millions in taxes. The IRS doesn’t want that kind of money?”
“Except the issue is not the money,” I said. “The issue is about a guy who hates this area and hates the people in it and most of all hates women who are a challenge to him.”
Clete looked into space as though seeing the bodies of Bella Delahoussaye and Hilary Bienville. He came to the table and sat down but didn’t touch his food. “No, it goes deeper than that. The guy put a rose and a chalice in Bella’s hands?”
“That’s right.”
“How’s that fit with the guy who hates this area?”
“He was offering a sacrifice.”
“To what?”
“To himself, although he doesn’t know that.”
“And the only real evidence y’all have is the black gym bag from Cormier’s garage?”
“Yeah, with Lucinda Arceneaux’s shoe and blouse inside.”
“And Cormier still says he doesn’t know who owns the bag?”
“Yep.”
Clete started eating, his eyes lidless. “He’s got a Maltese cross tattooed on his ankle?”
I nodded.
“There’s another possibility in all this, Dave. You’re not going to like it.”
“What?”
“Smiley Wimple. This guy kills people like other people change their socks.”
“Wrong guy,” I said.
“A guy who fries people with a flamethrower is the wrong guy?”
“He covered your back a couple of times, and now you feel guilty about it,” I said.
“You think Cormier is really behind all this?”
“I can’t get him out of my head,” I said.
Clete pushed away his plate and drank from his coffee. “How do you want to play it?”
“Dust ’em or bust ’em. The choice is theirs.”
“But that’s not what you’re thinking about, is it?” he said.
“Who wants to get to the barn wearing a drip bag?”
In the distance, somewhere beyond the watery rim of the place where I had been born, I thought I heard horns echoing off canyon walls. Or maybe that was just my grandiose disguise for what we in AA call self-will run riot.
Smiley had used a pair of sterilized tweezers to remove the .25-caliber piece of lead that one of the bad people at the motel had parked in his side. He had also packed the wound with gauze and medicine he had stolen from a pharmacy. The blood had coagulated and no longer leaked through the bandage, but he could see the inflammation around the edges of the tape, and when he touched it, it was as tender as an infected boil.
There was a doctor in Houston and another in New Orleans, both addicts, with malevolent eyes and fingers that were dirty and invasive. Smiley had almost shot one of them for the way he looked at Smiley’s wee-wee. In fact, if Smiley made it out of this one, he might visit the good doctor again, this time with a can of Liquid-Plumr.
The pain pills he had stolen allowed him to sleep and to walk without a limp and, most important, to think clearly. What was there to think about? Getting the people who were responsible for his pain, who had sent Jaime O’Banion after him, who had caused the killing of the innocent colored women and who wanted to kill his friend the fat man named Clete Purcel.
The movie people were part of it. They had to be. O’Banion must have been paid with Jersey or Miami money, the same source used by the movie people.
Outside an Opelousas bar, Smiley had boosted a Ford-150 pickup that a pair of rednecks had left the key in. The dash panel was like a spaceship’s. He loved diving into it and smelling the leather and feeling the power of the engine and the deep-throated rumble of the exhaust. If Smiley straightened out a few people in the next day or so, he could be on his way to Mexico with about thirty thousand in cash that he kept in a backpack, leaving behind his weapons and all the hateful people he had worked for. He’d check into a hospital, maybe in Monterrey, and watch the evening sun turn into a blue melt over the hills while he ate a bucket of ice cream with a spoon that had a head the size of a silver dollar.
On Saturday morning he drove to the movie set outside Morgan City and was told that the film company was shutting down and holding a wrap party at City Park in New Iberia. Everyone was invited as a thank-you and tribute to the city. He checked into a motel on the four-lane south of town, then showered and dressed in a white suit with a glittering blue vest and suede boots and a plum-colored tie and a planter’s straw hat that rested on his ears, his pain in containment. There was only one problem. A flicker was going on behind his eyes, as though someone were clicking a light switch on and off inside his head.
At the park, children were playing on the swings and seesaws and the jungle gym, running through the picnic shelters and the tables loaded with food and drinks. Where did all the children come from? He saw flowers, too, or swirls of color inside the deep greenness of the grass where there should have been no flowers or swirls of color. It was the end of autumn or even the beginning of winter, wasn’t it? Some of the children looked Hispanic, with elongated eyes and badly cropped hair. He was sure he knew them from years ago. Some had died at the orphanage, one of them so small and emaciated that his body was removed in a pillowcase.