“He’s muffing his new partner?”
“Didn’t quite hear that,” Clete said.
“Tell him not to let his mustache get in the way. Or maybe he wants to smell it all day.”
Clete stepped backward, blood thudding in his wrists. He gazed at the bayou; wind wrinkled the surface. “I’m going to walk back inside.”
“I say something wrong?” Axel said. “We’re all ears.”
“I’ll follow y’all to the booking room,” Clete said. “My friend Travis better not have any alterations on him.”
“I heard you took juice when you worked vice,” Axel said. “You also chugged pud for the Mob in Vegas.”
“You probably heard right,” Clete said.
“You’re the great Clete Purcel, huh?” Axel said. “I’d better watch out for you.”
He and his partner cuffed Travis and put him into an unmarked car, hitting his head as they pushed him in the back seat. The rain was falling harder now, ticking on Clete’s porkpie hat. He thought he heard an electrical short buzzing inside his head. He watched the three men drive away, his viscera turning to water.
He went back inside and sat at the bar. He blotted the rain off his face with his sleeve. “Give the singer whatever she’s having. Same with the lady down the bar.”
“What happened out there?” the bartender said.
“Nothing. Who’s running the action?”
“What action?”
Clete nodded toward the end of the bar.
“Ain’t nobody running it. It runs itself. Don’t get your necktie in it, man. You’ll have your face in the garbage grinder.”
Chapter Seven
CLETE DIDN’T TELL me about it until Monday, in my office.
“Did Travis file charges?” I said.
“For what?” he said.
“Axel Devereaux putting a baton up his colon.”
“A guy with a sheet like his thinks he’s going to get justice?” he said.
“I need to tell Helen about this.”
“I just saw Axel Devereaux outside. He looked right through me.”
“Get away from these guys, Clete.”
“It wasn’t me who started it.”
He had a point. Cops like Devereaux were part of the system. We created and nurtured and protected them, always to our detriment and never learning from the experience. “Where’s Travis?”
“I went his bail.”
“So you think we’ve got a deputy who’s a part-time pimp?”
“Who knows? We got black kids selling dope in front of their houses at three-thirty in the afternoon.”