He grinned and scratched at an insect bite high up on his shoulder.
"Is there something wrong with the words I use? Turn around," she said.
He shook his head sadly. "I got witnesses. I ain't done anything."
"You want to add 'resisting' to it?" she said.
"Whoa, mama. Take your hands off me… Hey, enough's enough… Buddy, yeah, you, guy with the mustache, you get this dyke off me."
She grabbed him by the shoulders and put her shoe behind his knee. Then he brought his elbow into her breast, hard, raking it across her as he turned.
She slipped a blackjack from her pants pocket and raised it over her shoulder and swung it down on his collarbone. It was weighted with lead, elongated like a darning sock, the spring handle wrapped with leather. The blow made his shoulder drop as though the tendons had been severed at the neck.
But he flailed at her just the same, trying to grab her around the waist. She whipped the blackjack across his head, again and again, splitting his scalp, wetting the leather cover on the blackjack each time she swung.
I tried to push him to the ground, out of harm's way, but another problem was in the making. The two off-duty sheriffs deputies were pulling their weapons.
I tore my .45 from my belt holster and aimed into their faces.
"Freeze! It's over!… Take your hand off that piece! Do it! Do it! Do it!"
I saw the confusion and the alarm fix in their eyes, their bodies stiffening. Then the moment died in their faces. "That's it… Now, move the crowd back. That's all you've got to do… That's right," I said, my words like wet glass in my throat.
Swede Boxleiter moaned and rolled in the dirt among the power cables, his fingers laced in his hair. Both my hands were still squeezed tight on the .45's grips, my forearms shining with sweat.
The faces of the onlookers were stunned, stupefied. Billy Holtzner pushed his way through the crowd, turned in a circle, his eyebrows climbing on his forehead, and said, "I got to tell you to get back to work?" Then he walked back toward his trailer, blowing his nose on a Kleenex, flicking his eyes sideways briefly as though looking at a minor irritant.
I was left staring into the self-amused gaze of Archer Terrebonne. Lila stood behind him, her mouth open, her face as white as cake flour. The backs of my legs were still trembling.
"Do y'all specialize in being public fools, Mr. Robicheaux?" he asked. He touched at the corner of his mouth, his three-fingered hand like that of an impaired amphibian.
THE SHERIFF PACED IN his office. He pulled up the blinds, then lowered them again. He kept clearing his throat, as though there were an infection in it.
"This isn't a sheriff's department. I'm the supervisor of a mental institution," he said.
He took the top off his teakettle, looked inside it, and set the top down again.
"You know how many faxes I've gotten already on this? The St. Mary sheriff told me not to put my foot in his parish again. That sonofabitch actually threatened me," he said.
"Maybe we should have played it differently, but Boxleiter didn't give us a lot of selection," I said.
"Outside our jurisdiction."
"We told him he wasn't under arrest. There was no misunderstanding about that," I said.
"I should have used their people to take him down," Helen said.
"Ah, a breakthrough in thought. But I'm suspending you just the same, at least until I get an IA finding," the sheriff said.
"He threw sweat on her. He hit her in the chest with his elbow. He got off light," I said.
"A guy with twenty-eight stitches in his head?"
"You told us to pick him up, skipper. That guy would be a loaded gun anyplace we tried to take him down. You know it, too," I said.
He crimped his lips together and breathed through his nose.
"I'm madder than hell about this," he said.