I called in sick Monday and spent the early-morning hours raking leaves in the backyard. I piled them in stacks by the water’s edge and soaked them with kerosene and set them ablaze and watched the curds of smoke rise through the trees and break apart in the wind. I felt like a man coming off a bender, wanting to invest the rest of his life in garden chores and fixing his roof and oiling his fishing tackle and sanding the barnacles off a boat he left half filled with rainwater for the last year. I wanted to take every misadventure and wrong choice in my life and set it on fire with the leaves and watch it burn into a pile of harmless ash.
I wanted to be rid forever of martial thoughts and the faces of the men I had killed and the images of dead children and animals in third-world villages. I wanted to slip through the dimension into a place where moth and rust did not have their way, where thieves did not break in and steal. I felt sickened by my own life and the evil that seemed to pervade the earth. I wanted to find a gray-green tree-dotted tropical stretch of land on the watery rim of creation that had not been stained by war and the poisons of the Industrial Age. I was convinced that Eden was not a metaphor or a legend and that somehow it still lay within our grasp if only we could find the path that led back into it. If it had existed once, it could exist again, I told myself. I wondered if the dead who seemed to wander the earth were not seeking it, too, over and over, feeling their way through the darkness, searching for the place that lay somewhere between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers.
I guess these were strange thoughts to have on the cusp of winter, inside the smoke of a leaf fire that contained both the fecund smell of the earth and a petrochemical accelerant, but could there be a more appropriate season and moment?
I did not hear the footsteps of the person standing behind me while I heaped layer upon layer of blackened leaves onto the flames, my face hot, my eyes stinging with humidity.
“I hear you’re looking for me,” Gretchen said.
I stepped back from the fire and turned around and propped the bottom of the rake on the ground. “That’s one way to put it.”
“I’m not staying with Clete. I’ve got my own place. What do you want?”
“Did you have to pop somebody when you rescued your mother?”
“I scared a couple of guys, but no, I didn’t hurt them. You can check out my mother. She’s holed up in Key Largo, coked to the eyes. Something else you want to know?”
“Yeah, after you put two rounds into Jesse Leboeuf, he said something to you in French. Remember what it was?”
“I’m here about Clete, Mr. Robicheaux. He has to choose between me and you, and it’s tearing him up. I don’t want him taking my weight.”
“Then tell me what Leboeuf said before he died.”
Her eyes followed a speedboat that had just roared past us, splitting the bayou with a frothy yellow trough, the wake sliding through the cypress roots.
“They’re going to send people after you,” she said.
“Answer the question. Why not get your old man off the hook? The Leboeuf shooting was probably justified. You stopped a rape in progress. Leboeuf was armed and a threat to both you and Catin Segura. You can skate.”
She was breathing through her nose, her nostrils white around the edges. “You want me to confess to snuffing a cop in a place like this?”
“You probably saved Catin’s life. If you’d wanted to summarily execute Leboeuf, you would have parked a third round in him while he was lying in the bathtub. That means you have a conscience.”
“Roust me if you want. Tell my landlord I have AIDS. Do all the dog shit you guys do when you can’t make your case, but lay off Clete.”
“You’ve got it turned around, Miss Gretchen. Clete saw you put three rounds in Bix Golightly’s face. You made him a witness to a homicide and an accessory after the fact. You’ve done a major clusterfuck on your father. You just haven’t figured that out yet.”
Her breathing had grown louder, the blood draining from around her mouth. “The guys who kidnapped my mother are pretty dumb, but they were smart enough to know the difference between cooperation and going over a gunwale with cinder blocks wired around their necks. The contract came down from a guy who talks like he has a speech defect, like he can’t pronounce an R. Did you see Lawrence of Arabia? Remember how Peter O’Toole dressed? The guy who sounds like Elmer Fudd wraps himself up like Peter O’Toole because he’s afraid of the sunlight. Know anybody like that?”
“The albino, Lamont Woolsey?”
“God, you’re smart,” she said.
Clete Purcel was not a fan of complexities. Or rules. Or concerns about moral restraint when it came to dealing with child molesters, misogynists, rapists, and strong-arm robbers who jackrolled old people. Clete wasn’t sure which category Lamont Woolsey fit into, but he didn’t care. The chains and hooks and manacles and piranha tank and dried blood in the room we found on the island southeast of the Chandeleurs gave Lamont Woolsey the status of crab bait.
Woolsey had used a credit card to pay for his stay in a hotel on Pinhook Road in Lafayette. It took Clete’s secretary, Alice Werenhaus, ten minutes to get the billing address. It was uptown in New Orleans, right off Camp Street, one block from the old home of the Confederate general John Bell Hood. Clete called me from his cottage. “I’m going to dial him up, Dave. He’s going to know it’s our ring, too,” he said.
“Be careful. Dana Magelli doesn’t want us wiping our feet on his turf anymore,” I said.
“Dana’s okay. People give him a bad time because he’s Italian. That’s the advantage of being Irish. Nobody expects much from a pagan race.”
“Who told you that?”
“I did. You don’t think I read? You don’t think I have a brain? Listen, I wasn’t fair to you on the island. I didn’t mean what I said about going our separate ways. That’s never going to happen. Diggez-vous, big mon? The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are forever. You copy that?”
“You got it, bud.”
“We wrote our names on the wall, didn’t we?”
“Five feet high.”
“You ever miss the greaseballs?”
“That’s like missing bubonic plague.”
“Be honest. It was like being in the middle of a Dick Tracy comic strip. Who could invent guys like Didi Gee and No Duh Dolowitz? How about the broads? I used to think getting laid on the ceiling was a physical impossibility. After every Mardi Gras, I’d have to send my flopper to rehab.”
“Watch out for Woolsey, Clete. Most of the greaseballs were family men and had parameters. These guys don’t.”
“That’s the point. These cocksuckers ran up the black flag. Not us,” he said.
Clete had a working relationship with skells of every stripe. One of the most resourceful was a totally worthless human being by the name of Ozone Eddy Mouton, who had cooked his head by shooting up with paint thinner and sniffing gas tanks and airplane glue and drinking dry-cleaning fluid in Angola. For a long time Ozone Eddy worked as a stall for a bunch of street dips in the Quarter, then upgraded as a money washer at the track, which cost him an ice pick through both kneecaps. On his last bust, the judge took mercy on him and gave him probation, contingent on his attendance at twelve-step meetings.
The lowest of the low-bottom groups in Jefferson and Orleans parishes was the Work the Steps or Die, Motherfucker meeting, a collection of outlaw bikers, prostitutes, street bums, wet-brains, and violent offenders known in Angola as “big stripes.” After six weeks of dealing with Ozone Eddy, the Work the Steps or Die, Motherfuckers held what is called a group-conscience meeting, and Eddy was told to hit the bricks and never come back unless he wanted his head shoved up a Harley-Davidson exhaust pipe.
That was when he teamed up with No Duh Dolowitz, the Merry Prankster of the Mafia. No Duh and Ozone Eddy became legendary as architects of mayhem from Camden to Miami. They shot a paintball into the mouth of a right-to-work politician at a Knights of Columbus dinner. At a tar roofers’ convention in Atlantic City, they put cat turds among the breakfast sausages and flushed twenty-five M-80s down the plumbing and blew water out of the commodes all over the hotel. They freeze-wrapped the severed parts of a stolen cadaver and submerged them in the punch bowls at a bridal shower for the daughter of a Houston button man. They arranged for a busload of dancing transvestites to show up on a middle-school stage at a charitable event in Mississippi. I always thought their masterpiece was the night they hauled away a corrupt judge’s sports car from his driveway and returned it to the same spot before dawn, compacted into a gleaming block of crushed metal not much larger than a footlocker.
Ozone Eddy was to New Orleans what mustard gas was to trench warfare; you tried to stay upwind from him, but it was not an easy task.
Monday evening Eddy drove his car down a narrow street a couple of blocks from Audubon Park, the air as dense as a bruise, the trees throbbing with birds. He backed his vehicle into the driveway of a white one-story Victorian home that was elevated high above the lawn and had square pillars on the gallery, then he got out and mounted the steps and tapped on the door. The man who answered had a face that looked like it had been poured out of a pitcher of cream, the eyes the most brilliant blue Ozone Eddy had ever seen. The man was holding a book in one hand; behind him, a reading lamp burned inside a flowery shade. “Glad I caught you. I’m returning your tire,” Eddy said.
“What tire?”
“The one I borrowed. I got mine fixed, and I’m returning yours. I’m about to put it back on. I thought I’d tell you so you’d know what was going on.”
“Who are you? What are you talking about?”
“I ran over a nail and didn’t have a spare tire. I saw you had the same size tire as me. So I took yours and got mine fixed. Now I’m putting yours back on. Why are you making that face?”
“Your hair. It’s orange. Say that about my tire again.”
“I hate to tell you this, but you look like you haven’t seen sunlight in five hundred years. You got a vampire coffin in there? What’s with this about my hair? I just told you about your tire. You want it back or not?”
Lamont Woolsey walked down the steps and stared at his SUV. One corner of the frame was almost flush with the concrete. “You left it on the rim?”
“What if a neighborhood kid came by and pushed your SUV on top of himself? Besides, I needed the jack to change my own tire. Want to give me a hand? I’m late for my bridge club.”
“I told you what would happen,” a woman said from the passenger seat of the car. “Leave him his tire and forget it.”
“Who’s that?” Lamont asked.
“That’s Connie Rizzo, my cousin. She lives in your neighborhood. I was trying to do the right thing. Instead, how about you jam your bad manners up your nose?”
Lamont pushed Eddy in the chest with one finger. Eddy was surprised by the force and power in the man’s thrust. “You want trouble?” Lamont said, and speared him in the sternum again.
The woman got out of the van. She was dark-haired and lovely and had youthful skin and a bright red mouth. She wore a beige T-shirt and baggy strap overalls spotted with paint. “Keep your hands to yourself, you freak,” she said.
“Did you people get loose from an asylum?” Lamont said.
“No, but I think you escaped from the circus,” she said. “You lay off Eddy. You want to push people around, try me.”
“You’re cute,” Lamont said.
“Think so? Try this,” she said. She pulled a can of oven cleaner from her overalls and squirted it in his eyes and nose and mouth, stepping back as he flailed his arms, a steady stream flowing into his face.
In under thirty seconds, Lamont Woolsey was in the trunk of Eddy’s car, his wrists tied behind him with plastic ligatures, a black bag pulled down over his head, snugged tight with a drawstring under the chin.
The stars were out when Clete parked his Caddy behind Ozone Eddy’s tanning parlor on Airline. He went through the back door into the cluttered room that Eddy called his office. Eddy and a woman Clete didn’t know were drinking coffee at a desk while the albino sat shirtless in a heavy chair, his arms secured behind him, his forehead knurled, his skin like white rubber. “What kept you?” Eddy said.
“What kept me? What happened to him?” Clete said.
“You wanted him brought here. So we brought him here,” Eddy said.
“I didn’t tell you to boil his face off. Who’s she?”
“Connie. I pieced off the job. You got any weed on you?”
“Where’s his shirt?” Clete said.
“He puked on it,” Eddy replied. “Actually, he puked inside the bag we put over his head, and it drained on his shirt. What’s with the attitude?”
“I said get him in here. That I’d talk to him when you got him here. That doesn’t mean you turn him into a boiled shrimp,” Clete said.
“You were gonna put an albino in a tanning bed, but you’re lecturing us on abusing people?” the woman said.
“Get her out of here, Eddy,” Clete said.
“You weren’t so choosy that New Year’s Eve when you tried to grab my ass in the elevator at the Monteleone,” the woman said.
Clete tried to think straight, but he couldn’t. Lamont Woolsey was looking at him from under his brow, his face sweaty, his body starting to stink, his slacks streaked with grease and dirt from the car trunk.
“What’s your fucking problem?” Eddy said.
“You don’t hurt people when you don’t have to,” Clete said.
“The guy’s a geek,” Eddy said.
“Beat feet, Eddy, and take her with you,” Clete said. “I’ll lock up.”
“If you haven’t noticed, this is my salon, my office, my girlfriend.”
“You forget what happened here tonight, and with luck, you won’t get melted into soap,” Clete said.
“You don’t throw me out of my own place.”
“What did you say? Melted into soap?” the woman said.
“Did you frisk this guy?” Clete asked.
“What do you think?” the woman said. “I told Eddy to leave this shit alone. I also told him you were a masher. What was that about the soap?”
“I’m going to bet Woolsey here had a fob on a key ring that looked like a dolphin,” Clete said.
The woman and Ozone Eddy glanced at each other. “What about it?” she said.
“That fob means Woolsey has ties to a Nazi war criminal,” Clete said. “I’ve been in a dungeon operated either by him or by his friends. There were chains and steel hooks in that room that had pieces of hair and human tissue on them.”
“Are you drunk?” the woman said.
“Tell her,” Clete said to Woolsey.
A blue vein pulsed in Woolsey’s scalp. His lifted his eyes to the woman’s. They were electric, the pupils as tiny as pinheads. A solitary drop of sweat rolled off the tip of his nose and formed a dark star on his slacks. “I was a dance instructor at an Arthur Murray dance studio. I’d like to take you dining and dancing some night,” he said. “You have a nice mouth. Your lipstick is too bright, but your mouth is nice just the same.”
The certainty had gone out of the woman’s face.
“Where’s the bag for his head?” Clete said.
“I threw it in the trash. I told you. It had puke on it,” Eddy said.
“It’s not important,” Clete said. “Come on, Lamont. We’re going to take a ride.”
“That stuff about the steel hooks, that was a put-on, right?” the woman said.
“Keep telling yourself that,” Clete said.
He pulled Woolsey from the chair and walked him through the back door to the Caddy. Woolsey’s arms felt as hard as fence posts. “You lift?” Clete said.
“Occasionally.”
“Impressive. The credit card you used in Lafayette was only three weeks old. Otherwise, you’re off the computer.”
“That’s not hard to do. But you’re definitely in the computer, Mr. Purcel. We know everything about you and everything about your family and everything about your friends. Think about that.”
Clete shoved him into the backseat and handcuffed him to the D-ring inset in the floor. “Open your mouth again, and you’ll have that bag full of puke pulled over your head.”
“You’re a stupid man,” Woolsey said.
“You’re right about that,” Clete said. “But check out our situation. I’m driving the car and you’re hooked up like a street pimp. I know where we’re going and you don’t. Your face is fried and you don’t have a shirt to wear and your slacks look like you took a dump in them. You’re not in Shitsville because of bad luck, Mr. Woolsey. You’re in Shitsville because you got taken down by a guy who has hair like Bozo the Clown and a brain the size of a walnut. How’s it feel?”
Clete drove up the I-10 corridor toward Baton Rouge, then took an exit that accessed a dirt road and a levee bordering a long canal and a flooded woods thick with cypress and gum and persimmon trees. In the moonlight he could see three fishing camps farther up the canal, all of them dark. Clete pulled into a flat spot below the levee and cut the engine. In the quiet he could hear the hood ticking with heat, the frogs croaking in the flooded trees. He went to the back of the Caddy and popped the trunk and pulled a long-sleeve dress shirt from an overnight bag.
“I’m going to unhook you, Mr. Woolsey,” he said. “I want you to put on this shirt. If you get cute with me, I’ll pull your plug.”
“Where are we going?”
“Who said we’re going anywhere? See that cypress swamp? That’s where the Giacano family used to plant the bodies of people they considered a nuisance.”
“I’m not awed by any of this, Mr. Purcel.”
“You should be. When the Giacanos clipped somebody, they did it themselves, up-front and personal. Or they did it up front and impersonal. But they did it themselves. You use the telephone. Like the hit you put on me and Dave Robicheaux.”
Woolsey was slipping on the shirt in the backseat, working it over his shoulders, one cuff hanging from his wrist. “Somebody has been telling you fairy tales.”
Clete cleared his throat. “This gun I’m holding is called a ‘drop’ or a ‘throw-down.’ When cops accidentally cap an unarmed man, the throw-down gets put on his body. Because the throw-down has its numbers burned off and no ballistics history associated with the cop, it’s a convenient weapon to carry when dealing with troublesome people who need a bullet in the mouth. Are you getting the picture?”
“I think so. But speak more slowly, please. You’re probably too intelligent for a man like me.”
“Here’s the rest of it. I wasn’t going to put you in a tanning bed. Why? Because, number one, it doesn’t work. People who are scared shitless tell any lie they think their tormentor wants to hear. Number two, I don’t take advantage of somebody’s handicap. So what does that mean for you? It means you take the contract off me and Dave, and you stay the fuck away from us. If you don’t, I’ll visit you at your pad and break your teeth out with a ball-peen hammer. Then I’ll stuff my drop down your throat and blow one into your bowels. That’s not a threat; it’s a fact.” Clete took a breath. “One other thing, Mr. Woolsey. No payback on Bozo the Clown and his girlfriend. They’re gumballs and are not accountable.”
“I look like a vengeful man?”
“Hook yourself up.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“You don’t have to. Just don’t fuck with me or Dave Robicheaux again,” Clete said.
Lamont Woolsey seemed to think about it in a self-amused fashion, then slipped the tongue of the loose manacle through the D-ring and squeezed it into the locking mechanism.
Clete stuck a green-and-white peppermint stick in his mouth, glanced once at Woolsey in the rearview mirror, and floored the Caddy back onto the levee, his tires sprinkling dirt and gravel into the canal.
The traffic was thin as Clete drove down I-10 along the edge of Lake Pontchartrain and passed the airport and the cutoff that led to New Iberia. Woolsey was staring out the window like a hairless white ape being transported back to the zoo. Thinking derogatory thoughts about Woolsey brought Clete no consolation. His mockery of Woolsey was, in reality, a bitter admission of his own failure. Woolsey had been taken down by a moral imbecile, but Clete had willingly formed a partnership with one. And Eddy being Eddy, he had immediately factored in his girlfriend, who had almost blinded Woolsey with oven cleaner. On top of that, the two of them had probably told Woolsey he was going to be baked alive in a tanning bed, which Clete had never planned to do.
The shorter version was Clete had empowered Ozone Eddy and his girlfriend to torture a man in Clete’s name. Now he was operating a jitney service for the man who had put a hit on him and his best friend. How bad could one guy screw up?
He looked at his passenger in the rearview mirror. “What do you get out of all this, Mr. Woolsey?”
“Enormous sums of money. Want some?”
“You connected to the oil spill?”
“Not me. I’m an export-import man. One of our biggest clients is Vietnam. Some people say it’s the next China. Want to get in on it?”
“I already did. Two tours.”
“Shooting gook and dreaming of nook? Boys will be boys and all that? I bet y’all had some fun.”
“Take a nap. I’ll tell you when you’re home,” Clete said.
“Touch a nerve?”
“Not a chance,” Clete said.
He turned off I-10 and drove up St. Charles Avenue into the Garden District and pulled into Lamont Woolsey’s driveway. Woolsey’s SUV still rested lopsidedly on one of the back rims. The light was burning on the elevated gallery. An Asian girl in a print sundress was standing under it.
“There’s our loyal Maelee,” Woolsey said.
“What’d you say?” Clete asked.
“My sweet young Vietnamese girl. They’re a loyal bunch. And Maelee is as lovely and fragrant as they come.”
“Her name is Maelee?”
“That’s what I said. Do you know her?”
Clete didn’t answer. For a moment he saw a young woman swimming next to a sampan on the edge of the China Sea, her face dipping into a wave.
But the person on the gallery was not a woman. She was a girl, her bare shoulders brown and warm-looking in the light, the flowers on her dress as vibrant as flowers in a tropical garden.
“Is that you, Mr. Lamont?” the girl said. “I was worried. You were gone so long without telling me.”
“See, they’re loyal,” Woolsey said. “The French taught them manners.”
“Why don’t you show some appreciation and answer her?”
“Unlock my handcuffs.”
“I’ve seen her before,” Clete said. “She was the one who waited on Amidee Broussard after his speech at the Cajundome in Lafayette. He sent his steak back.”
“Correct-o. You must have had your eye on her.”
“What’s she doing here?”
“Amidee knew I needed a maid and drove her over. I’ve given her the cottage in back. She seems quite happy with her new situation. Something wrong?”
Clete pulled back the seat in the Caddy and fitted the handcuff key into the lock on Woolsey’s wrist. He could smell onions on Woolsey’s breath and the dried talcum around his armpits. He stepped back while Woolsey got out of the car. Woolsey’s lips looked purple in the gloom, his eyes dancing with light.
“Yeah, there is something wrong,” Clete said. “Neither of you guys has any business around a young girl like that.”
“What’s really bothering you, Mr. Purcel? You still dream about the little flower girls? It’s no fun keeping one’s wick dry, is it? You said you knew a woman named Maelee. She was Vietnamese?”
“She was Eurasian.”
“A taste of two worlds in one package? Yum-yum.”
The crow’s-feet at the corners of Clete’s eyes had gone flat, but his eyes remained placid and bright green and showed no emotion. “I know a couple of Quaker ladies who work with refugees. They’ll be here tomorrow to talk with the girl and take her somewhere else if she wants to go.”
“What is it you’re really after, Mr. Purcel? Your history with women is well known. You can’t keep your eyes off Maelee, can you? Would you like to go in the cottage with her? She won’t mind. She was very accommodating with Amidee. Last night I tried her myself. I highly recommend her.”
“I think we’re square on the damage Ozone Eddy and his girlfriend did to your face,” Clete said. “That means we’re starting with a clean slate. Is that okay with you?”
“Whatever you say. I’m going to go inside now and have a shower and a hot dinner. Then I’m going to bed down Maelee. I’ve earned that, and she knows it. We’re a colonial empire, Mr. Purcel, although you don’t seem to know that. Everyone benefits. The dominant nation takes the things it needs. Our subjects are only too happy to receive what we give them. It’s win-win for everyone.”
“A fresh slate also means all bets are off. For you, that’s not good, Mr. Woolsey,” Clete said.
“Time for you to be gone. Unless I missed something. Are you thinking of sloppy seconds?”
Clete huffed an obstruction out of his nostrils and brushed at his nose with the back of his wrist. “I didn’t want to do this.”
“Do what?”
“I mean in front of the girl I didn’t want to do it. I feel bad about that. She probably feels sorry for you and doesn’t understand that you’re a piece of shit out of choice, not because your mother thought she’d given birth to a sack of Martha White’s self-rising flour. By the way, I want my shirt back.” He paused. “Look, my real problem is I can’t get anyone over here tonight to look in on the girl, so that means we have to work things out right now, here, in your driveway. Are you hearing me? I said take off my shirt. Don’t make me ask you again. I’m sorry I sicced Ozone Eddy and his broad on you. Nobody deserves that, not even you. We’re straight on that, right? I’m glad we have that out of the way. Now give me back my threads. That’s not up for debate. You’re starting to upset me, Mr. Woolsey.”
“You’re a ridiculous man.”
“I know,” Clete said. “What’s a fellow going to do?”
Clete put his entire shoulder into his punch and sent Woolsey crashing into the side of his SUV. He thought it was over and hesitated and eased up when he swung again. But his estimation of Woolsey was wrong. Woolsey righted himself and slipped the second blow and caught Clete squarely on the jaw, snapping his head sideways. Then he hooked his arm behind Clete’s neck and drove his fist into Clete’s rib cage and heart again and again, his phallus pressed against Clete’s thigh, his smell rising into Clete’s face. “How do you like it, laddie? How does it feel to have your ass kicked by a freak?” he said.
Clete brought his knee up into Woolsey’s groin and saw the man’s mouth open like that of a fish slammed on a hard surface. Clete hit him in the side of the head and managed to hook him once in the eye, but Woolsey wouldn’t go down. He lowered his head, turning his left shoulder forward as a classic open-style fighter would. He slammed his fist into Clete’s heart, then hit him in the same spot a second time, and glazed Clete’s head with a blow that almost tore his ear loose.
Clete stepped back and set himself, crouching slightly, raising his left hand to absorb Woolsey’s next punch, then drove his fist straight into Woolsey’s mouth. Woolsey’s head hit the SUV, and he went down as though his ankles had been kicked from under him.
But the engines that drove the rage and violence living inside Clete Purcel were not easily turned off. Like all of his addictions-weed and pills and booze and gambling and Cadillac convertibles and fried food and rock and roll and Dixieland music and women who moaned under his weight as though it only added to their pleasure-bloodlust and the wild release of confronting the monsters that waited for him nightly in his dreams were a drug that he could never have too much of.
He stomped Woolsey in the head, then grabbed the outside mirror and the roof of the SUV for support and brought the flat of his shoe down on Woolsey’s face, over and over, hammering Woolsey’s head into the door, reshaping his nose and mouth and eyes, whipping strings of blood across the side of the SUV. At that moment Clete genuinely believed that a helicopter was hovering immediately overhead, flattening all the flowers and banana fronds and elephant ears and caladiums and windmill palms that grew in Woolsey’s yard.
Then the flame that had consumed him shrank into a bright red dot in the center of his mind and died. For just a moment he saw nothing but darkness around him. The thropping sounds of the helicopter blades rose into the sky and disappeared. He felt a sharp pain in his chest, like a shard of glass working its way through the tissue around his lungs. His hands throbbed and seemed too large for his wrists, but he had no awareness at all of his surroundings. He blinked several times and saw Woolsey lying at his feet and the girl standing on the gallery, her hands trembling with shock.
Clete bent over and tore his shirt from Woolsey’s torso and threw it in the flower bed. “Okay,” he said, trying to catch his breath. “We got that issue off the table. Next time I tell you to take off my threads, take off my threads. That shows a definite lack of class and a definite lack of mutual respect.”
“Oh, sir, why have you done this?” the Vietnamese girl said.
“It’s a problem I’ve got, Maelee. I don’t like guys like Woolsey pretending that they’re Americans and they speak for the rest of us. You’re a nice kid, and you don’t have to put up with the Michelin man here. Some nice ladies are coming to see you tomorrow. In the meantime, stay away from Woolsey. This is my business card. If he lays a hand on you or tries to make you do something you don’t want to, you call that cell phone number.”
He started up the Caddy and headed down St. Charles, coughing blood on the steering column and dashboard, the streetcar clanging down the neutral ground toward him, the conductor’s eyes cavernous, his face skeletal under the lacquered-billed black cap he wore.