"Why do you have that funny look on your face?" she said.
"Sorry."
"You think this is a fuck pad?"
"Hey —" he said.
"If that's what you think, say so."
"Not me," he said, and tried to smile.
"I've got a pitcher of rum punch in the fridge. You want some?" she said.
"I'm good," Clete said.
"I can't find my aspirin. My head is coming off. Somebody is always hiding my aspirin," she said, opening and slamming cabinets all over the kitchen.
"I thought this was your cousin's place."
"It is. I just visit here sometimes."
Clete decided he would have a drink after all. Babette broke apart a tray of ice, dropped cubes in two tall glasses that had been standing straight up in the dry rack, and filled them with rum punch from the pitcher. She took a long drink and the color bloomed in her face. "Oh, that's a lot better," she said.
"You got a pretty heavy jones?" Clete said.
"I got into smoking China white because I didn't want to infect. But I ended up using needles anyway. I've got it down to two balloons a day. They say if you can get it down to one, it's mostly manageable."
Clete drank from the punch, crunching ice between his molars, and tried to look attentive. He put a cigarette in his mouth and asked to borrow her cigarette lighter.
"I didn't think you smoked," she said.
"Just once in a while." He opened and closed his mouth to clear a popping sound from his ears. "You never heard of a hooker name of Ida Durbin?"
"I already told you. You think I'm lying?"
"No, I just feel kind of weird," he replied.
He reached out to take the lighter from her hand, but the gold surface seemed to turn soft and sink in the middle, like a lump of butter inside the warmth of a stove. His fingers went past her hand and knocked over a salt shaker, as though his motors had been snipped in half at the back of his brain. His mouth and throat became instantly dry; the overhead lighting caused his eyes to well with tears.
"What's happening?" he said.
She stared at him mutely, her expression caught between fear and guilt. "I have a little girl. I've got to get clean. Just don't lie to them. It makes them really mad," she said.
"Come here," he said, catching a piece of fabric with one hand.
But she pulled her canvas tote from him, looked back once, and rushed out the back door into the darkness.
Clete felt himself slip from the chair and crash on the linoleum, his drink glass shattering inches from his face.
Both the men who came through the front door carried lengths of chain and looked Hispanic. One wore a formfitting strap undershirt and had shaved armpits and the tapered lats and flat chest of a boxer. The other man was much bigger, his skin slick with black hair. The fingers of his right hand were inserted in the holes of a pair of brass knuckles.
A third man entered the house. He wore white slacks belted high up on his waist and a western shi
rt sewn with chains of purple and red flowers. "We tossed your room and found your P.I. buzzer. Sorry to do this to you, big man, but it's out of my control," Lou Coyne said.
"Yeah, you came here to get fucked, and that's what you got, spermo — fucked," the man in the formfitting undershirt said. Both he and the other Hispanic man laughed.
Lou Coyne squatted down eye-level with Clete. "You working for Robicheaux? You working for some political people? These guys here are serious. Don't underestimate their potential," he said.