Sunset Limited (Dave Robicheaux 10)

He leaned back in the chair and rubbed his mouth, saying something in disgust against his hand at the same time.

"Say that again," Helen said.

"I said you damn queer, you leave me alone," he replied.

I placed my hand on top of Helen's before she could rise from the table. "You were in the sack with Cool Breeze's wife. I think you contributed to her suicide and helped ruin her husband's life. Does it give you any sense of shame at all, sir?" I said.

"It's called changing your luck. You're notorious for it, so lose the attitude, fucko," Helen said.

"I tell you what, when you're dead from AIDS or some other disease you people pass around, I'm going to dig up your grave and piss in your mouth," he said to her.

Helen stood up and massaged the back of her neck. "Dave, would you leave me and Mr. Guidry alone a minute?" she said.

BUT WHATEVER SHE DID or said after I left the room, it didn't work. Guidry walked past the dispatcher, used the phone to call a friend for a ride, and calmly sipped from a can of Coca-Cola until a yellow Cadillac with tinted windows pulled to the curb in front.

Helen and I watched him get in on the passenger side, roll down the window, and toss the empty can on our lawn.

"What bwana say now?" Helen said.

"Time to use local resources."

THAT EVENING CLETE PICKED me up in his convertible in front of the house and we headed up the road toward St. Martinville.

"You call Swede Boxleiter a 'local resource'?" he said.

"Why not?"

"That's like calling shit a bathroom ornament."

"You want to go or not?"

"The guy's got electrodes in his temples. Even Holtzner walks around him. Are you listening?"

"You think he did the number on this accountant, Anthony Pollock?"

He thought about it. The wind blew a crooked part in his sandy hair.

"Could he do it? In a blink. Did he have motive? You got me, 'cause I don't know what these dudes are up to," he said. "Megan told me something about Cisco having a fine career ahead of him, then taking money from some guys in the Orient."

"Have you seen her?"

He turned his face toward me. It was flat and red in the sun's last light, his green eyes as bold as a slap. He looked at the road again.

"We're friends. I mean, she's got her own life. We're different kinds of people, you know. I'm cool about it." He inserted a Lucky Strike in his mouth.

"Clete, I'm—"

He pulled the cigarette off his lip without lighting it and threw it into the wind.

"What'd the Dodgers do last night?" he said.

WE PULLED INTO THE driveway of the cinder-block triplex where Swede Boxleiter lived and found him in back, stripped to the waist, shooting marbles with a slingshot at the squirrels in a pecan tree.

He pointed his finger at me.

"I got a bone to pick with you," he said.

"Oh?"