“All right. If you want to act like that. I don’t want to make anybody mad.” The man got inside and inhaled. “Icky.”
“What is?”
“Like somebody has been doing something he shouldn’t.”
“Buckle up,” McVane said. He drove down the road until he reached an oak grove. He turned inside it and cut the engine. “I have a feeling you got loose from an institution, Chester.”
“I did no such thing.”
“Let’s see your identification.”
“No.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You’re being impolite and talking to me in a hurtful way.”
“I think you’re from Crazy Town, Chester. Crazy Town people have to be housed and fed and medicated. They also create shit piles of paperwork. Now get rid of the baby talk and show me your fucking ID.”
“I knew people like you in the orphanage. They were bullies and loudmouths and had no manners.”
“You’re really starting to piss me off. Smart-mouth me again and I’ll slap you upside the head, boy.”
“I’m going to walk. You need to clean out this car. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“That’s it, you little geek. You’re under arrest.”
“For what?”
“Deliberately creating a dangerous situation on a state highway.”
“That’s silly.”
McVane got out and came around the front of the cruiser and ripped open the passenger door. Chester was putting on a pair of cotton gloves.
“What are you doing with those gloves?” McVane said.
“I don’t want to touch anything in your nasty car.”
McVane reached for him. Then, for the first time, he saw the absence of light in Chester’s eyes. He’d seen it before, once in a lockdown unit at Miramar in the eyes of a female prisoner who had murdered her children; and once in the eyes of a woman he’d sodomized in the back of a liquor store. The revolver was a .357 Magnum, the bullets in the cylinder fat and round and hollow-pointed. The words he wanted to say were trapped inside a gaseous and foul bubble in his throat, the release of his sphincter like wet newspaper tearing apart, his fear so intense he pulled his weapon crookedly from the holster and fumbled it onto the grass.
He tried to smile at his ineptitude, giving up all pretense at manliness, hoping for mercy. The slug hit him in the upper lip like a sledgehammer, and the back of his skull exploded in a gush of bone and brain matter, similar to a grapefruit bursting.
Chester walked around to the driver’s side and picked up McVane’s hat from the dashboard and put it on, then straightened it in the side mirror. The engine was still running. He climbed in and drove away, remembering the ten-two position on the steering wheel that he had learned in driving school.
My, what a fine morning it was. He hit the whoop-whoop button a couple of times and wondered if he shouldn’t apply for the police force somewhere. He’d probably be pretty good at it, he thought. It was time someone did something about the number of criminals and no-goods overrunning the countryside.
* * *
THE BODY WAS located right by the St. Mary/Iberia Parish line. The cruiser had been driven through New Iberia, past City Hall and my house and out to Spanish Lake, and left half submerged in the water. The wind was blowing at thirty knots; no fishermen were on the lake. A black kid who worked in the bait shop said he’d seen the cruiser drive on top of the levee to the north end of the lake, but he’d paid little attention, because sometimes policemen stopped at the lake to eat lunch or take a smoke. He said he’d seen a man walking past the bait shop a half hour later; the man was pulling a small suitcase, but he didn’t remember what the man looked like.
Helen and I watched the wrecker pull the cruiser from the cattails, the doors gushing water and mud. We had already been to the crime scene on the parish line, but we had gone in separate vehicles and had talked little among ourselves.
“Somebody shoots a deputy, steals the cruiser, drives through town, and dumps it in a lake in broad daylight?” she said.
“We get them all, don’t we?”
I walked down the embankment and looked through the driver’s window. A deputy sheriff’s hat was floating on the floor. The cut-down twelve-gauge pump was still locked in place on the dash. “You ever meet this guy?”