“Evil men are there.”
“You’re talking about evil? The guy who tried to light up my best friend?”
Suddenly, the transmission was filled with static. “You’re breaking up,” I said.
“Don’t underestimate what you’re dealing with, Mr. Robicheaux.”
“You mean you or these evil guys you’re talking about?”
“It’s not my choice to be what I am,” he said.
“That’s a hard sell. You have free will, right?” All I could hear was the wind in my other ear. “Still there?” I said.
“Yes, I have free will, and I misused it.”
“That takes us to the heart of the matter. What exactly are you, sir?”
He cleared his throat with a sound like scrofulous matter breaking loose inside a clogged sewer pipe. Then Clete grabbed the cell phone out of my hand and put it to his ear. “If this is who I think it is, be advised that I’m going to kick a telephone pole up your ass.” Clete waited for a response, his eyes on mine. He took the phone away from his ear and looked at it. “He must have hung up.”
“Do you realize what you just did?” I said.
A vein was pulsing in his temple; his eyes were cups of sorrow. “I want to blow up somebody’s shit.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
WE WENT BACK inside and stood at the bar. Clete ordered a lemonade. Johnny and Isolde were singing “The Wild Side of Life.” It wasn’t Swamp Pop, but nonetheless it was the flagship of every honky-tonk ballad ever written.
Clete drank half his lemonade in one long tilt of the glass. I had the feeling he had spiked it with his flask. “Sorry I blew it with Richetti,” he said.
“He’ll be back.”
“Think so?”
“Unto the grave, if he has his way.”
Clete gazed at the bandstand and the multicolored lights playing on Isolde’s sequined dress. “Jesus, I love that song. It’s like a hymn.”
“It was. The melody is from ‘The Great Speckled Bird.’?”
He finished his drink and this time ordered a whiskey sour; he gazed across the dance floor. “Adonis is pinning us.”
“Let him.”
“I don’t know how I defended that guy,” Clete said. “Maybe because he was in the 173rd. How could he sell out his stepdaughter like that?”
“A fraud is a fraud, a bum is a bum. There’s no mystery about human behavior.”
“I’m going to have a talk with Adonis.”
“I thought you wanted to leave him alone,” I said.
“That was before Richetti called. Something’s about to go down. I think Adonis knows what it is. Otherwise he wouldn’t have those two button men with him.”
“It’s your call,” I said.
I followed him across the dance floor to Adonis’s table. Both his people had the dark, lean faces of men who work in extreme heat; neither one looked directly at us.
“How’s it going, Adonis?” I said.