“What are you trying to say?”
“There ain’t no good stories in that building, Purcel. After tonight, I’m gonna pray every day God don’t let me die in bed.”
Clete took the stairs to the third floor. The temperature was stifling, like steam from cooked vegetables that had flattened against the ceilings, and broken glass crunched under his shoes. He entered a ward where the elderly had been rolled into the corridors to catch a meager breeze puffing from the windows that had been blown out on the south side of the building. The people on the gurneys wore gowns that were stiff with dried food and their own feces. Their skin seemed to glow with a putrescent shine that he associated with fish that had been stranded by waves on a hot beach. A woman’s fingers caught Clete’s shirt as he passed her. Her face was bloodless, her eyes the liquid milky-blue of a newly born infant looking upon the world for the first time.
“Is my son coming?” she said.
“Ma’am?” Clete said.
“Are you he? Are you my son?”
“I think he’ll be here any minute now,” Clete said, and moved quickly down the corridor, a lump in his throat.
The intensive care area looked like a charnel house. Pockets of water had formed in the ceiling and were dripping like giant paint blisters on the patients, most of whom still wore their street clothes. The patients who had been brought up from the ER had been shot, stabbed, cut, beaten, electrocuted, hit by automobiles, and pulled half-dead from storm drains. Some had broken bones that were still unset. A woman with burns on eighty percent of her body was wrapped in a sheet that had become glued to her wounds. A man who had been struck by the propeller of an airboat made sounds that Clete had not heard since he lay in a battalion aid station in the Central Highlands. Almost all of the patients were thirsty. Most of them needed morphine. All of those who were immobile had to relieve themselves inside their clothes.
Clete grabbed an intern by the arm. The intern had the wirelike physique of a long-distance runner, his eyes jittering, his pate glistening with moisture. “Get your hand off me,” he said.
Clete raised his palms in the air. “I’m a licensed bail agent. I’m looking for a fugitive by the name of Eddy Melancon. An informant said his brother dropped him off at this hospital.”
“Who cares?”
“The victims of his crimes do.”
The intern seemed to think it over. “Yeah, Melancon, I worked on him. Third bed over. I don’t think you’ll find him too talkative.”
“Is he alive?”
“If you want to call it that.”
“Hey, Doc, I know y’all are having a rough go of it up here, but I’m not exactly having the best day of my life, either. How about getting the mashed potatoes out of your mouth?”
“His spinal cord is cut. If he lives, he’ll be a sack of mush the rest of his life. You want to talk to his brother?”
“He’s here?” Clete said, dumbfounded.
“Five minutes ago he was.” The intern shined his flashlight down the corridor at a man sitting in an open window. “See? Enjoy.”
Clete threaded his way between the gurneys and tapped Bertrand Melancon on the shoulder with his flashlight. “Hello, asshole. Remember me? The last time you saw me it was through the front windshield of your car,” he said.
“I know who you are. You work for them Jews at the bail bonds office,” Bertrand said.
“I also happen to be the guy you ran your car over.”
“I don’t own a car. Say, you’re blocking my breeze, you mind?”
Clete could feel his mouth drying out and tiny stitches beginning to pop loose inside his head. “How would you like to go the rest of the way out that window?”
“Do what you gonna do, man.”
For Clete, Bertrand Melancon seemed to personify what he hated most in the clientele he dealt with on a daily basis. They were raised by their grandmothers and didn’t have a clue who their fathers were. They got turned out in jail and thought of sexual roles in terms of prey or predator. They lied instinctively, even when there was no reason to. Trying to find a handle on them was impossible. They were inured to insult, indifferent to their own fate, and devoid of guilt or shame. What bothered Clete most about them was his belief that anyone from their background would probably turn out the same.
“Turn around. We going to meet a black cop named Tee Boy Pellerin,” Clete said, pulling his cuffs loose from the back of his belt. “You’ll dig this guy. He grew up in the Lower Nine himself. He’s got a soft spot for gangbangers who strong-arm rob their own people and sell meth to their children. Just don’t step on his shoeshine. He hates guys who step on his shoeshine.”
Clete crimped the cuffs tight on both of Bertrand’s wrists and spun him back around so he could look him squarely in the face. “Did I hear you laugh?”
“I ain’t laughed, man.”
“Yeah, you did. I heard you.”