Pegasus Descending (Dave Robicheaux 15)

“How would you like it if somebody talked about her like you talk about my boy? How would you like it if my lawyers came after you through your family?”

“We’re not like you, Whitey. Dallas Klein’s blood is on your soul. On the day you die, I believe his specter will stand by your bedside. Nothing you do from now until then will change that fact. Your son is a monster. I have a feeling you know it, too.”

For a moment I saw a look in Whitey’s eyes that made me believe there

are some people who are truly damned. Then the moment passed and he squinted into the haze and pinched the humidity out of his eyes. “I went to school under the Catholic nuns,” he said. “They taught us after we pissed not to shake off more than two times. Know what we did? We all ran down to the john and shook it off three times to see what would happen. Good try, Robicheaux, but you and your friend belong here. Like you say, it’s a place for jerk-offs.”

Upstairs, Slim Bruxal pushed open a window and leaned outside, his upper torso naked. “Hey, Dad, can somebody give Carmen a ride back to the dorm? I’ve got a softball game,” he said.

MY LIFE IS NOT GIVEN to prescient moments. But occasionally I have them, particularly with the advance of age. When they occur, they leave behind a sensation like a cold burn on the heart.

The sky was painted with horsetails, the trees blowing hard along the highway as I followed Clete out of Lafayette. Then he pulled into a truck stop and went inside, not glancing back to see if I was behind him.

When Clete made choices, even minuscule ones, that geographically separated him from his friends, he was usually embarking on an odyssey that invariably brought harm to only one person—himself.

I pushed open the door in the café area and saw him at the end of the counter, his aviator glasses in his pocket, the lines at the corners of his eyes like pieces of white thread, a bottle of beer and a foaming glass and a saltshaker in front of him. I cupped my hand on his shoulder.

“It’s twenty minutes after one,” I said. “You haven’t eaten, either.”

“I’m on a diet,” he replied.

I sat down on the stool next to him and asked the waitress for coffee. “You did great back there, Cletus.”

“Remember when we caught Augie Giacano jackrolling an old lady and threw him down a fire escape? Then we dimed him with Didi Gee so he’d get in trouble with his own people?”

“When you threw Augie down the fire escape.”

“Whatever. We didn’t get pushed around by Brooklyn skells like Whitey Bruxal.” He salted his beer and drank from it. He touched at his mouth with a paper napkin, then put the napkin aside, finished the glass in one swallow, and filled it again.

“Eat a hamburger with me,” I said.

“Everything is muy copacetico, Streakus. No problemas here.” His eyes drifted to the television anchored on the café wall. “Check out those tropical storms in the Atlantic. The Florida Straits are starting to look like a turnstile.”

“I’ve got to get back to the department.”

“See you later.”

“I’m not leaving you here alone.”

“What? I’m supposed to feel like the walking wounded?”

“Maybe.”

“You don’t get it, Dave. You never did. We’re dinosaurs. This isn’t the same country we grew up in. The scumbags own it, from top to bottom. Except they’re legal now and have college degrees and wear two-thousand-dollar suits. Back in our First District days, we would have fed these motherfuckers into an airplane propeller.”

A truck driver down the counter wearing a greasy bill cap looked at us, and the waitress studied the television screen with undue attention, then turned up the volume. A CNN announcer was talking about a hurricane that was strengthening off the Bahamas.

“The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are forever,” I said.

“Keep telling yourself that.”

“Snap out of it, Clete.”

This time he didn’t argue with me. But reticence in Clete Purcel was rarely a sign of acquiescence. Instead, it was the exact opposite. He put on his yellow-tinted shades and looked at the television screen, his face composed.

“You’re going to see Trish today?” I said.

“What about it?”