Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

She unfastened his belt and unbuttoned the top of his trousers and pulled his zipper partway down. She placed one hand inside his underwear and looked into his eyes. They were black, then suddenly apprehensive in the flashes of light through the window, as though he were watching his own behavior from outside himself and was not sure which person he was.

Her hand moved mechanically, as though it were disconnected from her. She watched the side of his face.

She took her hand away and let it rest by his thigh.

“It ain’t me you want,” she said.

“Yes, it is.”

“The one you want is the one you cain’t have.”

He got up from the bed and stood in front of her, his legs slightly spread, his unbuttoned trousers exposing the top of his Jockey underwear. His stomach was as flat as a swimmer’s, smooth as tallow in the flashes of lightning through the window.

“Take off your clothes,” he said.

“Won’t do no good, Rain Man. Can kill me and my baby, both. But it ain’t gonna get you no satisfaction.”

He made a sound that she could not interpret, like someone who knew his anger must always be called upon in increments and never allowed to have complete expression.

He tucked in his shirt and worked the zipper up on his trousers and fastened the button at the top and began buckling his belt. But his fingers started shaking and he could not line up the hole in the leather with the metal tongue in the buckle.

She reached out to help him. That’s when his fist exploded on the side of her face.

She found Bootsie and me that Sunday evening at Jefferson Island while we were eating supper in the restaurant by the lake, the sun glowing through the oak trees and Spanish moss. I watched her come up the winding walkway through the flower gardens and groups of tourists, her diapered baby mounted on her arm, her blue-jeans shorts rolled up high on her thighs, her face bruised like an overripe eggplant.

She marched into the restaurant and stopped in front of our table.

“Somebody shit in that white boy’s brain. It ain’t me done it, either. You better get him out of our lives, Sad Man. I mean now. ’Cause he come back around, I got me a gun now and I’m gonna blow his fucking head off,” she said.

I walked outside with her into the gardens and we sat down on a scrolled-iron bench. Through the restaurant windows I could see Bootsie by herself at our table, staring out at the lake, her coffee cold and her dessert uneaten.

“Did you file a report at the department?” I asked.

“They was real hepful. Man kept looking down my top to make sure Johnny Remeta wasn’t hiding there.”

“I doubt Remeta will bother you again.”

“Where Fat Man at?”

“Why?” I asked.

“ ’Cause he ain’t like you. ’Cause he don’t fool hisself. ’Cause people mess wit’ him only once.”

“Remeta might try to kill my daughter, Little Face. I’m sorry about what happened to you. But I’m tired of your anger,” I said.

I left her on the bench with her baby. When I went back inside the restaurant, Bootsie was gone.

The sheriff was at the bait shop before dawn Monday morning, but he did not come inside the building right away. He propped his hands on the dock railing and stared across the bayou at the cypress trees inside the fog. In his cowboy boots and pinstripe suit and Stetson hat, he looked like a cattleman who had just watched his whole herd run off by dry lightning. He took off his hat and walked through the cone of light over the screen door and entered the shop.

“You gave Jim Gable a concussion Friday night. Now you take a vacation day and don’t even have the courtesy to call me?” he said.

“Johnny Remeta is stalking my daughter and leaving notes at my house. I don’t care what happens with Gable,” I replied.

“Everything’s personal with you, Dave. You use the department the way a prizefighter uses a rosin box. You’re an employee of the parish. Which means I’m your supervisor, not a guy who follows you around with a dustpan and whisk broom. I don’t like coming out here to explain that.”

“Did Gable press charges?”

“No.”