Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

Clete stuck his wrist down at my face.

“Feel my pulse,” he said. “I’m calm, I’m copacetic, I’m fucking in control of my emotions. I don’t have a hard-on. I’m extremely tranquil. I saved your fucking ass this morning. How about a little gratitude for a change?”

“You unlock me, Clete, or I’m going to square this. I swear it.”

“You’ll never change, Streak. You’re unteachable.”

Clete picked up the roll of pipe tape and the survival knife from the floor and knelt next to the unconscious man. He ripped off a ten-inch length of tape, sliced through it with the knife, and wrapped the man’s mouth. Then he pulled his arms behind him, wrapped each wrist individually, made a thick figure eight between both wrists, and sliced the tape again. The knife was honed as sharp as a barber’s razor. He wrapped the man’s ankles just as he had done the wrists.

“I don’t know what your plan is, but I think it’s a bad one,” I said.

“I’m not the one up on a murder charge in Louisiana. I’m not the guy cuffed to a drainpipe. I don’t have a knot on my head. Maybe I do something right once in a while. Try some humility along with the gratitude.”

He went into the front of the house, and I heard him pushing furniture around, tumbling a chair or a table to the floor. A moment later he came back into the kitchen, dragging my living room rug behind him. His face was flushed, and sweat ran out of the band of his porkpie hat. He ripped off his windbreaker and used it to wipe the sweat out of his eyes. The powder-blue sleeves were flecked with blood.

“Sorry to fuck up your house. See if you can write it off on the IRS as part of Neighborhood Watch,” he said.

He kicked the rug out flat on the floor and began rolling the man up in it.

“Clete, we can bring Dio down with this guy.”

But he wasn’t listening. He breathed hard while he worked, and there was a mean bead in his eye.

“You got out of that murder beef in New Orleans. You want them to stick you with another one?” I said.

Again he didn’t answer. He went out the back door, then I heard his jeep grinding in reverse across the lawn to the steps. Clete came back into the kitchen, unhooked the spring from the screen door, lifted up the man inside the rolled rug, and dragged him outside to the jeep. When he came back inside his face was dusty from the rug and running with sweat and his big chest heaved up and down for air. He put a cigarette in his mouth, lit it from a book of matches, and flipped the burnt match out through the open screen into the sunlight.

“You got a hacksaw?” he said.

“In my toolbox. Behind the driver’s seat.”

He went back outside, and I heard him clattering around in my truck. Then he walked back up the wood steps with the saw hanging from his hand.

“You can cut through the chain in about fifteen minutes,” he said. “If you want to call the locals then, ask yourself how much of this they’ll believe. Also ask yourself how much trouble you want over a shitbag like that guy out there.”

“What are you going to do with him?”

“It’s up to him. Are you really worried about a guy who’d kill a fourteen-year-old girl? The guy’s a genetic accident.” He pulled up a chair, sat down, and leaned toward me while he puffed on his cigarette and tried to get his breath back at the same time. “Did you ever think about it this way, Streak? You know how the real world works, just like I do. But half the time you act like you don’t. But it lets you feel good around guys like me. What do your AA pals call it—‘drinking down’?”

“That’s not the way it is, Cletus.”

“Why’d you keep partnering with me at the First District after you saw me bend a couple of guys out of shape?” He grinned at me. “Maybe because I’d do the things you really wanted to. Just maybe. Think about it.”

“Don’t kill this guy.”

“Hey, I got to be on the road. You want anything before I split? A glass of water or something?” He put the hacksaw in my hand.

“It’s never too late to turn it around.”

“That’s solid gold, Dave. I wonder if ole Charlie out there thinks of something like that while he’s doing a job on somebody. Man, that’s fucking noble. I got to remember that.”

He hooked the spring on the screen door again, worked it back and forth a couple of times, then looked at me and said, “After you cut through the chain, the cuff key’s there on the table. You want to take down Sal and that other fart that framed you in Louisiana, get real or buy yourself some Mouseketeer ears. In an hour I’ll have Charlie’s life story. You want in on it, call me at the Eastgate Lounge at six o’clock.”

Then he was gone.

CHAPTER

9