“Envelope?” Clete said.
“It’s Saturday. You got to pay the vig,” Maximo said.
“I think I hit you too hard in the head with the rubber machine.”
“The vig is the vig, man. It’s due on Saturday. If you got to sell your body parts online, you pay the vig.”
“You put a Taser on me, Max. But I’m letting that slide. You got to do the same. That means you and JuJu pack up your shit and go back to New Orleans.”
Maximo turned his head with the stiffness of a ventriloquist’s dummy and let his eyes settle on Clete’s. “Tony will hang you on a hook by your asshole. Or maybe somebody else will have to pay the price for what you ain’t taken care of.”
“You want to clarify that?”
“Nobody can be all places at once,” Maximo said. He started the engine. “Step back. I don’t want to run over your foot.”
Clete felt a sensation like stitches popping loose inside his head. He opened the driver’s door and tore Maximo out of the seat, lifting him high in the air, then crashing him on the hood. Maximo rolled off on the asphalt. “Son of a beech, what the fuck, man?”
Clete threw him against the fender and told him to take the position. When Maximo tried to turn around, Clete kicked the man’s feet apart and drove his face against the hood, then smashed it down a second time for good measure.
“I ain’t carrying, man!” Maximo said.
“What do you call this?” Clete said, holding up a switchblade knife.
“See what I use it for later. I’ll be back, man.”
Clete turned him upside down and shook him like a rag doll, spilling coins, keys, a rabbit’s foot, a pair of dice, a box of condoms, a cell phone, credit cards, and a wallet in the gutter.
“You leave that man alone!” someone called from across the street.
Clete dropped Maximo on the asphalt, then picked him up and threw him back into the driver’s seat. He looked up and down the street. No cops yet. He put Maximo’s belongings into his cap and tossed it to JuJu. Maximo’s eyes were crossed, blood running in two scarlet strings from his nostrils. He was trying to speak. Clete smashed his face into the horn button.
“You got a brain, JuJu,” he said. “Tell Tony what happened. Also tell him if he sends you guys after me again, he’s going off the board, oxygen bottle and colostomy bag included. That goes for you, too, JuJu.”
“It don’t work that way, Clete,” JuJu said. “Why you making it hard on everybody?”
“Me?”
“It’s you went to the shylocks. Not us.”
“Get out of here,” Clete said.
He slammed the driver’s door and walked to the Caddy, burning with shame, eyes straight ahead, trying to ignore the stares of people around him and the knowledge that he had involved a gentle lady in a world she could not have imagined in her worst nightmares.
* * *
CLETE CAME BY my house that night. It was raining hard, and he ran from the Caddy through the puddles in the yard to the gallery. I could smell weed on him through the screen. “What happened?” I asked.
“Who said anything happened?” he replied, brushing past me into the living room, his face oily and dilated. He blew his nose into a handkerchief.
“You just get in from Juárez?” I said.
“Cut it out, Dav
e. I feel bad enough.” He told me about Maximo and JuJu.
“Maximo was threatening Miss Carolyn?” I said.
“That’s the gist.”