Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

Helen removed her handcuffs from the leather case on her belt, her eyes never leaving Clete’s, and threw them on the bar.

“Hook yourself up, handsome,” she said.

“Nope,” he said, and smiled at her with his eyes and lifted his beer can to his mouth.

I stepped beyond Clete’s angle of vision and made a motion with my head toward the front of the building. Helen walked with me across the broken glass until we were at the door. Clete salted his beer can, the shotgun still resting between his legs, as though the events taking place around him had no application in his life.

“When you hear it start, come running. Tell the locals we swarm him. If one of them draws a weapon, I’m going to stuff it sideways down his throat,” I said.

I walked behind the bar, across the duckboards, and opened a bottle of carbonated water and sat down next to Clete. I glanced at the biker who lay unconscious in the corner.

“You didn’t kill him, did you?” I said.

“They were eating reds in the john. It was like beating up on cripples. I don’t see the big deal here,” Clete said.

“The big deal is I think you want to go to jail. You’re trying to fix it so you won’t get bail, either.”

There was a self-amused light in his face. “Save the psychobabble for meetings,” he said.

“You’ll be in lockup. Which means no trip up to the Death House tomorrow night.”

He lowered his head and combed his hair back with his nails.

“I’ve already been. This weekend. I took Passion. Letty got to have a dinner with some of her relatives,” he said.

The whites of his eyes looked yellow, as though he had jaundice. I waited for him to go on. He picked up his beer can, but it was empty.

“I need some whiskey,” he said.

“Get it yourself.”

He got up and tripped, stumbling with the shotgun against the stool. Unconsciously he started to hand me the gun, then he grinned sleepily and took it with him behind the bar.

“Up on the top shelf. You broke everything down below,” I said.

He dragged a chair onto the duckboards. When he mounted the chair, he propped the shotgun against a tin sink. I leaned over the bar and grabbed the barrel and jerked the shotgun up over the sink. He looked down curiously at me.

“What do you think you’re doing, Dave?” he asked.

I broke open the breech, pulled out the twenty-gauge shell, and tossed the shotgun out the front door onto the sidewalk.

Helen came through the door with one city cop and two sheriff’s deputies. I went over the top of the bar just as Clete was climbing down from the chair and locked my arms around his rib cage. I could smell the sweat and beer in his clothes and the oily heat in his skin and the blood in his hair. I wrestled with him the length of the duckboards, then we both fell to the floor and the others swarmed over him. Even drunk and dissipated, his strength was enormous. Helen kept her knee across the back of his neck, while the rest of us bent his arms into the center of his back. But I had the feeling that, had he chosen, he could have shaken all five of us off him like an elephant in musth.

Twenty minutes later I sat with him in a holding cell at the city police station. His shirt was ripped down the back, and one shoe was gone, but he looked strangely serene.

Then I said, “It’s not just the execution, is it?”

“No,” he said.

“What is it?”

“I’m a drunk. I have malarial dreams. I still get night visits from a mamasan I killed by accident. What’s a guy with my record know about anything?” he answered.

I woke before dawn on Wednesday, the last scheduled day of Letty Labiche’s life, and walked down the slope through the trees to help Batist open up the shop. A Lincoln was parked by the boat ramp in the fog, its doors locked.

“Whose car is that up there?” I asked Batist.

“It was here when I come to work,” he said.