Crusader's Cross (Dave Robicheaux 14)

"He was white. He had a cap on. But I didn't get a good look at him. Is someone after you?"

"Could be."

Her eyes moved over my face. "Are you feeling okay? Our air-conditioning is broken," she said.

"The heat doesn't bother me," I said.

"Would you like a glass of water?"

"No. No thanks," I said. I opened my cell phone and punched in a 911 call.

She stepped away from me, then looked back over her shoulder, waiting for me to follow her down the hall. "I'm glad you came today. The children really enjoyed meeting you. Spend more time with us," she said.

I stared at her, puzzled, unsure what I should say next. "By the way, I helped a little boy go to the restroom. I'm afraid I angered his mother."

"That's Mrs. Poche. You're lucky she didn't club you with her purse. She was angry the day she was born."

In the next five minutes cruisers from both Jeanerette and New Iberia arrived on the drawbridges to the north and south of us. But no one saw any sign of a man in a boat with binoculars and a rifle. I talked to a little black boy who had seen the man in the boat through a canebrake.

"He had a rifle. It looked like he had a tin can stuck on the end of the barrel," the boy said.

A silencer?

But contract killers don't pop you in broad daylight in front of large numbers of witnesses, I told myself.

Tell that to President Kennedy or Jimmy Hoffa, I thought.

Jimmie had gone back to New Orleans and I was alone again. I had never done well with solitude. But I had another enemy, too, one that did not depart with age. I suspect monastic saints tossed in their sleep with it, waking fatigued and throbbing at first light, their fingers knotted in prayer as they tried to extricate themselves from the soft shapes that beckoned to them from their dreams. For that reason alone I always admired them, but my admiration for them did not make my own problem with celibacy any the less, perhaps because I was a drunk as well as one of those for whom the sybaritic life was only a wink of the eye away.

Sometimes I thought I heard Bootsie telling me I should not be alone. Didn't the story in Genesis indicate the same? Was it not a form of pride to set a standard above that of ordinary men?

That evening I went to Clete's cottage at the motor court, where he was waxing his Caddy under a mimosa tree. He was bare-chested and wore a Marine Corps utility cap on the back of his head and a huge pair of electric-blue Everlast boxing trunks that hung to his knees. The shadows of the mimosa branches looked like feathers moving on his skin.

"Where have you been for the last three days?" I said.

"Chasing down a couple of child molesters. They run every time. I don't know why Nig and Willie —"

"Why don't you answer your cell phone?" I said.

"I lost it somewhere. I think maybe a gal rolled me. I can't deal with working for Nig and Willie anymore. It's really affecting my stability. You think I could get on with the department?"

"In Iberia Parish?" I said.

"Something wrong with that?"

"Nothing," I said, my face empty.

"Can you run it by Helen? Salary is not a factor. Long as it's detective grade," he said.

"Sure," I said.

"I'd really like that," he said, rubbing a soft rag along a tailfin on his Cadillac, whistling to himself, as though somehow I had reassured him that people such as ourselves were not out of sync with the rest of the world.

Then I told him about the death of Billy Joe Pitts. "Pitts got hit in the head with his own motorboat?" he said.

"That's what the sheriff says."

Clete opened a Budweiser and drank from it, his throat working, his eyes flat. "You figure somebody took him off the board?" he asked.