Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

“What’s up?”

“Nothing much. Your man Purcel is trying to destroy St. Martinville. They use animal darts on people?” he replied.

Inside, I stopped by my mailbox. It was filled with pink message slips. Three of them were from the St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Department. Two others were from Dana Magelli. Another simply stated, in capital letters, “SEE ME!” The sheriff’s initials were at the bottom. I walked down to his office and opened the door.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“I don’t quite know where to start. Where’s your beeper?”

“Wally sat on it. That’s not a joke.”

“Dana Magelli called. Remeta got into Jim Gable’s house, locked the wife in the garage, and kidnapped Gable.”

“Too bad. What’s the deal with Purcel?”

“I knew you’d be torn up over Gable.”

“Come on, skipper. What’s Clete done?”

“He’s in a bar in St. Martinville. Three bikers are already in the hospital.” I started to speak, but he held his hand up. “He broke a pool cue across a city cop’s face. It’s not the barroom follies anymore, Dave. He might get his light blown out. Everybody around here, including me, is sick of this guy.”

Helen Soileau and I drove the nine miles to St. Martinville in under ten minutes. The square by the old French church and the Evangeline Oak was filled with emergency vehicles, and the feeder streets were blocked to keep out traffic. We parked the cruiser a hundred feet from the bar where Clete was barricaded and walked up to a black police lieutenant with a thin mustache who stood with a bullhorn behind the open door of his vehicle. The windows of the bar were shattered, and the wall above one of them was scorched black and dripping with fire retardant.

I fanned the reek of tear gas out of my face.

“The shell hit the windowsill and started a fire. You’re friends with this character?” the lieutenant said.

“Yeah. He’s generally harmless,” I said.

“Oh, I can see that,” the lieutenant said. His name was Picard and he was a Vietnam veteran who had gone away to school on the GI Bill and earned a degree in criminal justice. “I’ve got an officer in the hospital. The inside of that bar is totally de

stroyed. He beat those bikers till they cried and got down on their knees. You either get your friend out of there, and I mean in cuffs, or we cool him out.”

“I think we’re overreacting to the situation, Loot,” I said.

“Are you hearing anything I say? He has the bartender’s shotgun,” Picard replied.

“Bullshit,” Helen said, and pulled the bullhorn from Picard’s hand. “Hey, Clete. It’s Helen Soileau. Dave and I are coming in,” she said into the horn, its echo resonating under the bar’s colonnade. Then she threw the horn back into Picard’s hands.

We pushed open the front door and went inside. Chairs and tables were broken; glass littered the floor; the liquor bottles on the counter behind the bar had been smashed into jagged shells. In one corner, by the pool table, was the unconscious form of a head-shaved and tattooed man dressed in jeans and a leather vest with no shirt underneath.

Clete sat at the end of the bar, grinning, his scalp bleeding on his face, his slacks and tropical shirt stained with tobacco juice and talc, a can of Budweiser by his fingers. A twenty-gauge, single-load shotgun rested against the inside of his thigh, the barrel pointed toward his chest.

“Is there a safety on that thing?”

I asked. “I haven’t checked,” he replied.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” Helen said, glass snapping under her shoes.

“It’s just been that kind of morning,” he said.

“We need to hook you up,” I said. “Bad idea, Streak.”

“Beats being dead. That’s the itinerary outside,” Helen said.

He touched the corner of his mouth with the ball of one finger and looked at the wet spot on his skin. His eyes were lighted, his cheeks filled with color.

“The cop I took down with the cue? He tried to rip my head off with a baton,” he said.