“Who’s this ‘we’ you’re talking about? What the hell are you doing with Dixie Lee?” I said.
“He’s got a friend. I work for the friend. The friend doesn’t like to see Dixie Lee suffering a lot of bullshit he doesn’t deserve. You don’t deserve it, either, Dave.”
“You work for this character Dio?”
“He’s not such a bad guy. Look, there’s not a lot of jobs around for a cop who had to blow the country, uh, with a few loose ends lying around.”
“How’d you get out of it? I thought there was still a warrant on you.”
“You’ve never learned, partner. First, they didn’t have dog-doo to go on. Second, and this is what you don’t understand, nobody cares about a guy like that. The best part of that guy ran down his daddy’s leg. He met a bad fate. He should have met it earlier. The world goes on.”
“Do you know what he’s talking about?” I said to Dixie Lee.
“It’s his business,” he said quietly, and took a cigarette out of his pocket so that his eyes avoided mine.
“Forget the past, Dave. It’s a decaying memory. That’s what you used to tell me, right? Great fucking line. Let’s look at the problem we got now, namely, getting your butt out of here. I hear they’ve got you in a special place with the lovelies.”
I didn’t answer. Both of them looked at my face, then Dixie’s eyes wandered around the room.
“Come on, Streak, be my mellow man for a few minutes,” Clete said.
When Dixie Lee’s eyes lighted on mine again, I said, “To tell you the truth, Dixie, I feel like killing you.”
“So he feels bad. What the fuck’s he supposed to do? Go to prison?” Clete said. “Look, I was coming here on my own, anyway, but as soon as I got him kicked loose he told me we got to get your ass out, too. That’s a fact.”
“You got the right to be mad,” Dixie Lee said to me. “I got a way of pissing in the soup, and then everybody’s got to drink out of it. I just didn’t know you were going to—”
“What?” I said.
“Hell, I don’t know. Whatever it was you did in that motel room. Lord, Dave, I heard a cop say they stuck Vidrine’s guts back in his stomach with a trowel.”
“That was Mapes’s work, not mine.”
I could see the amusement in Clete’s face.
“Sorry,” he said. Then he laughed. “But let’s face it. I remember a couple of occasions when you really decorated the walls.”
“This wasn’t one of them.”
“Whatever you say. Who cares anyway? The guy was a bucket of shit,” Clete said. “Let’s talk about getting you out of the zoo.”
“Wait a minute. You knew Vidrine?”
“Montana’s a small community in a lot of ways. You’d like it there. I rent a place from Sally Dee right on Flathead Lake.”
“You used to hate those guys, Clete.”
“Yeah… well,” he said, and sucked his teeth. “The CIA deals dope, guys in the White House run guns. You used to say it yourself—we keep the lowlifes around so we can have a dartboard we can hit.”
“Where’d you hook up with this guy?”
“Sal?” He scraped a piece of paint on the table with his fingernail. “I’ve got a brother-in-law who’s connected in Galveston. He got me a job dealing blackjack in one of Sal’s places in Vegas. After a month they moved me up into house security. Most of the rent-a-cops in Vegas have chewing gum for brains. It’s like running for president against Harpo Marx. In six months I was in charge of security for the whole casino. Now I do whatever needs doing—Vegas, Tahoe, Flathead.” He looked up at me. “It beats cleaning up puke in a john, which is what I was doing in a dump over in Algiers. Look, you want out of here?”
“Hell, no, Clete. The ambience really grows on you.”
“I can do it in twenty minutes.”
“You’re going to put up fifteen thousand?”