After he had gone I turned off the outside lights so no late customers would come by, then began mopping the floor. The rain on the roof was deafening and I didn't hear the door open behind me, but I felt the cold blow across my back.
"Put your mop up. I got other work for you," the voice said.
I straightened up and looked into the seamed, rain-streaked face of Harpo Scruggs.
* * *
THIRTY-TWO
HIS FACE WAS BLOODLESS, SHRIVELED like a prune, glistening under the drenched brim of his hat. His raincoat dripped water in a circle on the floor. A blue-black .22 Ruger revolver, with ivory grips, on full cock, hung from his right hand.
"I got a magnum cylinder in it. The round will go through both sides of your skull," he said.
"What do you want, Scruggs?"
"Fix me some coffee and milk in one of them big glasses yonder." He pointed with one finger. "Put about four spoons of honey in it."
"Have you lost your mind?"
He propped the heel of his hand against the counter for support. The movement caused him to pucker his mouth and exhale his breath. It touched my face, like the raw odor from a broken drain line.
"You're listing," I said.
"Fix the coffee like I told you."
A moment later he picked up the glass with his left hand and drank from it steadily until it was almost empty. He set the glass on the counter and wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. His whiskers made a scraping sound against his skin.
"We're going to Opelousas. You're gonna drive. You try to hurt me, I'll kill you. Then I'll come back and kill your wife and child. A man like me don't give it no thought," he said.
"Why me, Scruggs?"
"'Cause you got an obsession over the man we stretched out on that barn wall. You gonna do right, no matter who you got to mess up. It ain't a compliment."
WE TOOK HIS PICKUP truck to the four-lane and headed north toward Lafayette and Opelousas. He didn't use the passenger seat belt but instead sat canted sideways with his right leg pushed out in front of him. His raincoat was unbuttoned and I could see the folds of a dark towel that were tied with rope across his side.
"You leaking pretty bad?" I said.
"Hope that I ain't. I'll pop one into your brisket 'fore I go under."
"I'm not your problem. We both know that."
With his left hand he took a candy bar from the dashboard and tore the paper with his dentures and began to eat the candy, swallowing as though he hadn't eaten in days. He held the revolver with his other hand, the barrel and cylinder resting across his thigh, pointed at my kidney.
The rain swept in sheets against the windshield. We passed through north Lafayette, the small, wood, galleried houses on each side of us whipped by the rain. Outside the city the country was dark green and sodden and there were thick stands of hardwoods on both sides of the four-lane and by the exit to Grand Coteau I saw emergency flares burning on the road and the flashers of emergency vehic
les. A state trooper stood by an overturned semi, waving the traffic on with his flashlight.
"Was you ever a street cop?" Scruggs said.
"NOPD," I said.
"I was a gun bull at Angola, city cop, and road-gang hack, too. I done it all. I got no quarrel with you, Robicheaux."
"You want me to bring down Archer Terrebonne, don't you?"
"When I was a gun bull at Angola? That was in the days of the Red Hat House. The lights would go down all over the system and ole Sparky would make fire jump off their tailbone. There was this white boy from Mississippi put a piece of glass in my food once. A year later he cut up two other convicts for stealing a deck of cards from his cell. Guess who got to walk him into the Red Hat House?
"Lightning was crawling all over the sky that night and the current didn't work right. That boy was jolting in the straps for two minutes. The smell made them reporters hold handkerchiefs to their mouths. They was falling over themselves to get outside. I laughed till I couldn't hardly stand up."