“I can’t believe I let that asswipe get behind us,” he said.
“I love you, Cletus, but you’re not using my shop to get drunk in tonight,” I said.
“I’ve got local leper status now?”
“Your skin’s crawling because a shithead had you in his crosshairs. Booze only tattoos the fear into your sleep. You know that.”
“You’re pissed off because you think I put your daughter at risk.”
“You didn’t have anything to do with it.”
I used the pressure nozzle on the hose to blow the dock and railing clean. When I released the handle I could hear the water draining between the boards into the darkness below. Clete stood silently and waited, his booze in each hand, the hurt barely concealed in his face.
“Let me hold that for you,” I said, and eased the pint bottle from his hand.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he said.
“I’ve got a couple of steaks in the cooler. You’re going to eat one and I’m going to eat the other,” I said.
“I don’t get to vote about my own life?” he asked.
“I’ll do it for you.”
I lit the gas stove inside the bait shop, seasoned the T-bone steaks, and lay them on the grill. Clete sat at the counter and drank from his beer and watched me. He kept touching at his forehead, as though an insect were on his skin.
“What’s with this kid Remeta?” he asked, forcing his concentration on a subject other than his self-perceived failure.
“You were right the first time. He’s nuts.”
“He was putting moves on Alafair?”
“Who knows?”
The phone on the counter rang. I picked it up impatiently, waiting once again to hear the voice of Johnny Remeta. But it was the sheriff.
“I thought this shouldn’t wait till tomorrow,” he said. “Levy and Badeaux tore apart Axel Jennings’ station wagon. There was fourteen thousand dollars in new bills hidden in the trunk. He also had a passport and an Iberia Parish map with an inked line from I-10 to just about where your house is.”
“My house?” I said.
“Your picture and an article about the shoot-out on the Atchafalaya were in a newspaper on the floor. He’d drawn a circle around your head. Purcel wasn’t the target.”
I could feel the heat and moisture trapped between my palm and the phone receiver. A drop of sweat ran from my armpit down my side.
Clete lowered his beer can from his mouth and looked curiously at my expression.
Later I lay in the dark next to Bootsie, the window fan blowing across us, and tried to put together the events of the day. A rogue cop doing a hit for hire on another police officer? It happened sometimes, but usually the victim was dirty and shared a corrupt enterprise with the shooter. Who would be behind it, anyway? Jim Gable was obnoxious and, in my view, a sexual degenerate, but why would he want me killed?
The contract could have been put out by a perpetrator with a grudge, but most perpetrators thought of cops, prosecutors, and judges as functionaries of the system who were not personally to blame for their grief; their real anger was usually directed at fall partners who sold them out and defense attorneys who pled them into double-digit sentences.
The only other person with whom I was currently having trouble was Connie Deshotel. The attorney general putting a whack on a cop?
But all the
syllogisms I ran through my head were only a means of avoiding a nightmarish image that I couldn’t shake from my mind. I saw Alafair seated next to me at the plank table, petting a cat in the glow of the candle Clete had just lighted. Then, in my imagination, I saw a muzzle flash across the bayou, a brief tongue of yellow flame against the bamboo, and an instant later I heard the sound a soft-nosed round makes when it strikes bone and I knew I had just entered a landscape of remorse and sorrow from which there is no exit.
I picked up my pillow and went into Alafair’s room. She wore a cotton nightgown and was sleeping on her stomach, her face turned toward the wall, her black hair fanned out on the pillow. The moon had broken out of the clouds, and I could see the screen hanging ajar and Tripod curled in a ball on Alafair’s rump. He raised his nose and sniffed at the air, then yawned and went back to sleep.
I lay down on the floor, on top of Alafair’s Navaho rug, and put my pillow under my head. Her shelves were lined with books, stuffed animals, and framed photographs and certificates of membership in Madrigals and Girls State and the school honor society. Inside a trunk I had made from restored cypress wood were all her possessions we had saved over the years: a Baby Orca T-shirt, red tennis shoes embossed with the words “Left” and “Right” on the appropriate shoe, a Donald Duck cap with a quacking bill, her Curious George and Baby Squanto Indian books, a brown, cloth Sodality scapular, the mystery stories she wrote in elementary school, with titles like “The Case of the Hungry Caterpillar,” “The Worm That Lost Its Wiggle,” and, most chilling of all, “The Roller Rink Murders.”