Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

She lay back down on the pillow, then turned her head and looked out the window at the pecan and oak trees in the yard, as though fearing that whatever she said next would be wrong.

“You know why I don’t believe in capital punishment?” she said. “It empowers the people we execute. We allow them to remake us in their image.”

“Gable’s a degenerate. You didn’t see him. I hope I ruptured his spleen.”

“I can’t take this shit. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” she said, and sat on the side of the bed, her back stiff with anger.

• • •

I found Clete that afternoon, drinking beer, half in the bag, in a St. Martinville bar. The bar had lath walls and a high, stamped ceiling, and because it was raining outside, someone had opened the back door to let in the cool air, and I could see the rain dripping on a banana tree that grew by a brick wall. A group of bikers and their girlfriends were shooting pool in back, yelling each time one of them made a difficult shot, slamming the butts of their cues on the floor.

“Passion tell you I was here?” Clete said. His lap and the area around his stool were littered with popcorn.

“Yeah. Y’all on the outs?”

“She’s wrapped up in her own head all the time. I’m tired of guessing at what’s going on. I mean who needs it, right?”

“If I wanted to have somebody capped, who would I call?”

“A couple of the asswipes at that pool table would do it for a hand job.”

“I’m serious.”

“The major talent is still out of Miami. You’re actually talking about having somebody smoked? You must have had a bad day, Streak.”

“It’s getting worse, too.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Nothing. I want to throw a steel net over Johnny Remeta. Most button men know each other.”

“I already tried. A stone killer in Little Havana, a guy who goes back to the days of Johnny Roselli? He hung up on me as soon as I mentioned Remeta’s name. What’s Remeta done now?”

“He’s got a death wish. I think he wants to take Alafair with him.”

Clete’s face was flushed and he wiped the heat and oil out of his eyes with a paper napkin. The pool players yelled at another extraordinary shot.

“How about putting it under a glass bell, Jack?” Clete said to them, then looked back at me, a half-smile on his face, his eyes slightly out of focus. “Say all that again?”

“I’ll catch you another time, Cletus.”

He removed a slip of paper from his shirt pocket and stared at it.

“What’s scareoderm mean? I couldn’t find it in the dictionary,” he said.

“I don’t know. Why?”

“I took Passion to the doctor yesterday. I heard the nurses talking about her. I wrote that word down.”

“You mean scleroderma?” I asked.

“That’s it. That’s what she has. What is it?”

His mouth was parted expectantly, his green eyes bleary with alcohol, while he waited for me to reply.

It continued to rain through the afternoon into the night. Little Face Dautrieve put her baby to bed in his crib and watched television until midnight in the front room of her cabin in the Loreauville Quarters. Then she undressed and put on a pajama top and lay down on top of her bed under the fan and listened to the rain on the tin roof. The wind was blowing hard against the slat walls and she knew the storm would be a long one. The occasional headlights on the state road looked like spiderwebs flaring on

the windowpane.