Last Car to Elysian Fields (Dave Robicheaux 13)

He turned around, half smiling. "You following me?" he said.

"Nope."

"Then we got no problem here. Right?"

"Yeah'Ithinkwedo,"Isaid.

"No, no, man," he said, wagging his finger. "I ain't done nothing wrong."

"That's a matter of definition, Frank," I said.

"We talking about a racial issue here?"

"You're going back to your motel, Frank. You're going back alone. Got the drift?"

"I checked you out, Robicheaux. You're an AA. rum-dum people around here feel sorry for. But that don't mean you get to beat up on guys like me 'cause I'm Italian or from New Orleans or whatever the fuck it is about me that bothers you."

I looked at my watch. "Your coach is about to turn into a pumpkin," I said.

He stepped toward me. "This is a free country. You don't like what me and the lady are doing, I say suck my dick. Now, you get out of my face and out of my space 'cause I really fucking don't like you, man."

"At this point I'm placing you under arrest. Put your hands behind you and turn around, please," I said.

"Arrest? For what?" he said, his face incredulous.

"Disturbing the peace, creating a public nuisance, using profanity in public, that sort of thing. I'll think of some more charges on the way down to the jail," I said.

"This ain't even your jurisdiction," he said.

But I wasn't listening now. I turned him toward the wall and hooked him up, then pushed him out the door into the parking lot. It had stopped raining, and the air was cold and wet, and fog was rolling out of the trees across the road. Sugar Bee and several other patrons of the cafe and bar had walked outside and were watching us.

"You armed, Frank?" I said.

"Want to search my crotch? Be my guest," he replied.

I fitted my hand under his arm and moved him toward the hood of my truck. That's when he hawked phlegm out of his throat and spat it in my face.

I felt it in my eyelashes, on my mouth, in my hair, like a skein of obscene thread clinging to my person. I picked him up by his belt and slammed him into the fender of the truck, then drove his head down on the hood. But Frank Dellacroce was not one to give up easily;

though his wrists were cuffed behind him, he brought one hand up and clenched it into my scrotum.

I smashed his head into the hood again, then got my handcuff key out of my pocket and unhooked him. I spun him around and drove my fist into his mouth, throwing all my weight into the blow, snapping his head back as though it were on a spring. I saw his lip burst against his teeth, and I hooked him in the eye with a left, caught him on the jaw and in the throat and on the nose as he went down.

He was whipped, but I couldn't stop. I picked him up by his shirt and hit him again, rolled him off a car fender and drove my fist repeatedly into his kidneys. He collapsed in a mud puddle and tried to drag himself away from me. But I knelt beside him and twisted his shirt in my left hand and drew back my fist to hit him again. He tried to speak, his ruined face pleading. I heard people screaming and felt Sugar Bee slapping at my head with a shoe, her voice keening in the damp air.

A light on a pole burned overhead. I stared at the circle of faces around me, like a drunkard coming out of a blackout. Their eyes were filled with fear and pity, as though they were watching a wild animal tear his prey apart inside a cage. But there was one man in the crowd who did not belong there. He was white and had narrow shoulders and wore a seersucker suit with a pink tie. His ears were small, convoluted, hardly more than stubs on the sides of his head. His face and expression made me think of the bleached hide on a baseball.

As I looked up into his eyes I had no doubt in the world who he was, no more than you can doubt the presence of death when it suddenly steps into your path. I got to my feet and helped Frank Del-lacroce up, then propped him against the grill of an ancient gas guzzler, no more than five feet from the man in the seersucker suit.

"Frank, meet a guy you've probably been looking for all your life," I said.

Then I walked off balance to my truck and drove away.

Chapter 10.

Early the next morning I soaked my hands until the swelling had gone out of my fingers, then I put Mercurochrome on the cuts in my knuckles and tried to cover them unobtrusively with flesh-colored Band-Aids. I picked up the morning paper off the gallery and went through it page by page, just as I had done for years when I was coming off a drunk, wondering what kind of carnage I may have left in an alley or on a rain-swept highway.

But this morning the paper seemed filled with cartoons and sports and wire-service and local feature stories that had nothing to do with events in front of a cafe-and-bar on the St. Martin Parish line. Snuggs, my newly adopted cat, followed me back inside and I opened a can of food for him and put it in his bowl and sat with him on the back porch while he ate. The wind was cool and damp and sweet smelling through the trees, but each time I closed my eyes I saw the terrified, blood-streaked face of Frank Dellacroce and wondered who lived inside my skin.