“Next time you say that to me, I’ll knock your teeth down your throat.”
I walked to my truck. I saw Alafair watching me by the commissary trailer. She mouthed the Clete Purcel mantra Take names and stomp ass, big mon.
• • •
LATE SATURDAY NIGHT Smiley turned his rental car in to a lonely motel on a two-lane asphalt road that dead-ended in a bog far south of Lake Charles. The moon was up, the Gulf the color of pewter, the waves sliding through sand dunes and salt grass and a shrimp dock that had been wrecked by Hurricane Rita. The motel sign was off, the office dark; a panel truck was parked midway down the line of rooms. Smiley cut his headlights and engine and got out of his car with a black physician’s bag and stepped up on the concrete walkway, his skin marbled with the orange and yellow neon that circumscribed the motel. The window and the red metal door of his target were pasted with insects. He slipped a screwdriver into the doorjamb and wedged the lock loose, then eased back the door and stepped inside.
A compact unshaved man was sleeping on his side in his underclothes on top of the covers, snoring spasmodically. Smiley removed a hypodermic needle from his bag and inserted it into the man’s carotid and pushed down the plunger. The sleeping man made one startled gasp, his eyes springing open, then he dropped into a well.
Twenty minutes later, the man awoke and discovered the ligatures binding him leg and arm to the bedframe. A Brillo pad had been stuffed into his mouth, which was sealed with pipe tape. When he tried to talk, his face looked like a grape about to burst. Smiley sat in a chair by the bed, eating ice cream from the carton he had taken from the icebox. A container of Liquid-Plumr sat on the nightstand.
“My friends call me Smiley,” he said. “You’re Hugo Tillinger, and you have been very bad. I do not like people who do what you have done. Can I use your bathroom. Blink your eyes for ‘yes.’?”
Tillinger stared at him like a statue. Smiley dropped his ice cream carton into the wastebasket and went to the bathroom to relieve himself and flushed the toilet and washed his hands and pulled on latex gloves, then returned to the bedside and gazed down at Tillinger. “This might hurt a little.” He peeled the tape loose from Tillinger’s face and lifted the steel wool from his mouth. “That wasn’t so bad, was it? Comfy now?”
Tillinger twisted his head and spat soap and pieces of steel wool on the sheets. “What are you doing in my room?”
“You killed your family.”
“I did not.”
“Lying will not help you.”
“How’d you know I was here?”
“You called an uncle in Denver. Somebody was listening. You should have run far away and not made that call. Why do you remain in this area?”
“Because I wanted to find a black woman who tried to help me. But somebody killed her. You’re a hit man?”
“No. You’d better not call me that, either.”
“Then what are you?”
“I get rid of people who hurt children or who hurt me. You burned up your family. I saw pictures of their bodies.”
“You some kind of ghoul?”
Smiley removed a funnel from his black bag and unscrewed the cap on the Liquid-Plumr. Tillinger pulled against the ligatures, his brow oily with sweat. “I don’t know who you are or why you’re after me, but I didn’t kill my family,” Tillinger said. “No matter what happens here, you get that straight, you little shit.”
“You’re making me mad.”
“See what happens if I catch up with you later, gerbil boy,” Tillinger said.
Smiley stuffed the Brillo pad back into Tillinger’s mouth and stretched a strip of tape across his cheeks, letting the roll dangle on the pillow. He took a ballpoint from his shirt pocket and clenched it like a dagger. He stared down into Tillinger’s face. In his mind’s eye, he saw a female caretaker in a Mexico City orphanage strike him full across the face. He disconnected from the image in his head and went to the window and looked outside. The Gulf was black and roiling and strung with foam and moonlight. The waves on the jetty made a sound like someone shuffling a deck of cards. He felt tired, his sense of mission gone, his arms as flaccid and useless as rolls of dough. The release he sought in his work was becoming more and more elusive. Why couldn’t he be free?
He walked back to the bed and ripped the tape loose from Tillinger’s mouth. “Call me names again and you’ll wish you were dead. You’re a cruel man. I want to do horrible things to you.”
“It was an electrical short,” Tillinger said. “I tried to save them. You seem like you got a brain. Why do you think you turned out the way you did?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I was on death row with guys like you. They all got a bad story. Here’s the funny part. Their stories are true. That’s how they ended up freaks like you. It’s not y’all’s fault.”
“You need a lesson.” Smiley removed an electric drill from his bag and hunted for the wall socket. He could hear Tillinger fighting against the ligatures. He inserted the plug into the wall and squeezed the trigger on the drill. It whined and vibrated in his palm. “Open wide.”
“Don’t,” Tillinger said.
“You killed the deputy sheriff, didn’t you?”