“No, sir. He wet his pants. Literally.” He glanced at the water by the lily pads. “There’s something on your line.”
The bobber traveled across the surface in a straight line, without sinking, making a V, then sank out of sight. I lifted the pole and pulled a sunfish out of the water and swung it flopping into the boat. I wet my hand and unhooked the fish and lowered it below the surface and watched it disappear into the murk like a gold and red bubble. I turned around on the seat and looked at Sean. He was too good a kid to get mixed up with men who never should have been given a gun or a badge.
“Talk to Helen,” I said.
“I ain’t a snitch.”
“You don’t want a guy like Devereaux as an enemy.”
“Him and his friends will let me go through a door and get shot, won’t they?”
“That’s the way his kind work.”
“If you was in the cafeteria, what would you have done?”
“Probably the same thing.”
“Somehow that don’t make me feel any better.”
“You’re stand-up, Sean. Nobody can take that from you. Secretly, Devereaux fears you.”
“You should have been a preacher.”
“If you have any more trouble with these guys, let me know.”
“Nope.”
“Nope, what?”
“My old man always said you got to carry your own canteen. I only told you because I thought you had a right to know what Devereaux and them others is up to.”
He lifted his line and dropped it in a different spot, his forehead pink with sunburn.
• • •
TWO DAYS PASSED with no progress in the bizarre murders of Lucinda Arceneaux and Joe Molinari. In fact, there was no evidence to link the two. Arceneaux’s death obviously had been committed by someone driven by ritualistic obsession, but the upside-down positioning of Molinari’s body in the fish net and the configuration of his legs could have been coincidental and not necessarily related to the tarot. Maybe the victim simply owed somebody money or slept with another man’s wife or ran into someone loaded on hallucinogens.
On Friday night Clete Purcel was knocking back shots with a beer chaser in a ramshackle black dump that offered blues from the Spheres and barbecue chicken that could break your heart, when a white man he didn’t want to see again came through the door and tried to pick up a black woman at the end of the bar. The man was unshaved and drunk, his face greasy with booze and presumption and a level of lust he didn’t try to disguise.
The bartender leaned in to Clete. “You know that guy down there?”
“Yeah.”
“Do him a favor.”
“He’s on his own,” Clete said.
“On his own is gonna get him facedown on a cooling board.” The bartender tipped a bottle of Jack into Clete’s glass. “On the house.”
Clete folded a five-spot and tucked it between the bartender’s fingers. “Maybe I’ll get time off from purgatory.”
He walked to the end of the plank bar and rested his hand on the drunk man’s shoulder. There were two blue stars tattooed on the back of his neck and a line of green tears dripping from one eye.
“Time to get some fresh air, Travis,” Clete said.
Travis’s bottom lip hung from his teeth; he resembled a fish with its mouth open. “You look like Clete Purcel.”
“I don’t believe this,” Clete said.